The Messiah Choice

by Jack L. Chalker

  “The captain is getting very upset and a little bit nasty,” Garcia told him. “National pride is at stake now. He has threatened to call for air support if they do not break off immediately and vacate the area.”

  For a few more anxious seconds, the blips continued to close, and were now almost certainly within sight of the trawler. Then they peeled off and took a wide circle, and reformed heading back towards the mother ship. The relief and jubilation on the bridge was a tangible thing.

  Now they had only the destroyer to worry about.

  11. PAST AND FUTURE

  Getting off the boat was tricky, but was a well rehearsed routine by now. All along the gulf coastal area were oil platforms, many in this region no longer staffed or supported but run automatically. A few were shut down entirely, either because they had played out or gotten to a low point where they were more economically kept in reserve. They stood in the water like odd prehistoric sentinels, and the trawler entered their silent domain on its way to link up with the destroyer. In the confusion of blips on any observer’s radar screen, it was possible to actually stop briefly by one of the derelicts, if only for a minute or two, allowing anyone aboard to jump off. Maria was still in no shape for this sort of thing, but she knew she had to see it out, and she explained to Angelique what had to be done.

  As they came up to the small metal dock of a rusting platform, MacDonald shook hands with Garcia and then jumped over to the structure. Angelique did the same, and together they were able to pull Maria across. As soon as they did so. the trawler accelerated and swung away, still keeping close to the line of platforms though and taking it slow and easy.

  “What will happen to them now?” Maria asked him.

  “They’ll be all right. They’re a legitimate operation whose main job really is fishing—shrimp trawling, mostly—and they’ll link up with the destroyer, be taken into a Venezuelan port, searched, and interrogated, then finally released. They’ll head east from here along the coast to Panama, so they should be safe from retribution. Speaking of safe, we ought to get up and in. That thick cloud cover is already starting to break up, and we’ll be naked to satellite photography after that.”

  It was a long, desolate climb up to the top of the platform on a network of ladders and scaffolding, and the thing was covered with rust and not very inviting nor really all that safe. The superstructure had been mostly dismantled and taken away for use elsewhere, leaving only a flat top of rusting metal, but just below, between the platform and the supports, was a small area that still offered some shelter. The corridors and tiny rooms looked like those in a submarine, but a couple still had serviceable cots in them and the tiny galley obviously had been upgraded and cleaned and stocked with a limited amount of canned and dry goods and one small sink actually had water.

  “Go easy on that water. It’s a little rusty because of the pipes but it’s good. Mostly collected rain water and hard as a rock, but it’ll do until we can get off this can,” MacDonald told Maria.

  The place was hot enough to be almost an oven in itself, yet Angelique shivered inside it. It felt cold, dead, lifeless, and the only sign of life were the massive amounts of bird droppings that covered much of the area exposed to the outside.

  “What do we do now?” Maria asked him, feeling the desolation of the place herself.

  “We wait. I don’t know how long. Considering the welcome, they’ll be cautious in coming for us, that’s for sure. We could probably go a week or ten days with the stuff that’s here, but I’m afraid there’s no showers and no change of clothing so it can get pretty raunchy. There’s also no electricity, I’m afraid, so except for a couple of flashlights here that we’ll have to be real careful using and a few camping style lanterns that are located so they won’t show from the outside, that’s about it. There are a few navigation lights on the platform connected to a master electrical cable running under the water, but we weren’t able to find a good way of tapping them without being detected.”

  Angelique said something to Maria, and she translated. “She wishes to know if we must stay inside this thing all the time. It bothers her.”

  “No, just keep to the bottom catwalks, and get back in at the first sign of a boat or plane. After dark is best, but be careful. No lights outside, and none until you’re well in here and away from any windows.”

  It was not a comfortable time for any of them, and least of all for Angelique, who took to spending almost all her time outside, walking the catwalks and just sitting and staring out to sea. She felt very mixed up inside as well as out, and she tried to sort it out as best as possible.

  Somehow, she’d always retained the romantic feeling towards Greg, always thought of him as her savior and perhaps eventually her lover, but she’d seen his face when he’d first laid eyes on her as she now was and she’d felt his fear of her, a fear that had only partly diminished. He was still the handsome and confident agent, it was true, but she was no longer of his people, his color, his customs and understanding. She had changed radically, and for the first time now she was feeling what that change really meant.

  To make matters worse, it was clear that he and Maria were at least physically attracted to one another, a condition made worse by their close quarters and by the fact that they really had little choice but to go around nude. She felt, somehow, betrayed by both of them, the only two people she really had in the world. It was Greg whose affection, whose love, she craved, yet oddly, she knew that even had he been and done what she dreamed of she did not dare go far with him. Her power, her one edge over this modern world, was dependent on her remaining chaste from the pleasures of all men. And in that loneliness and jealousy she cast a spell, without ever really consciously realizing she had done so.

  It was a dark, moonless night, their third on the platform, and Maria came to her at the far catwalk. Greg, as he did much of the time, was up listening to the small short wave receiver, getting the news and listening for a pickup cue at one and the same time. They conversed in Hapharsi.

  “It hurts me to feel you so troubled, my mother.”

  Angelique stared out into the darkness, watching the lights of the other platforms and an occasional ship’s light in the distance. “I ache with the knowledge that I am the only one of my kind,” she responded. “Until now, I had not thought of this truly as a curse.”

  Maria, unbidden, began to rub Angelique’s shoulders and back, and it felt good. “You must not think so. You are whole, and you feel, and you are attractive.”

  “I repulse the sight. Even the men of the boat reacted to me not as a woman but as some sort of strange thing, an animal.”

  “You are beautiful to me,” Maria whispered, and with that and the sensation of the fingers massaging and caressing the energy flowed from Angelique into Maria, an energy born of tension and desire and feelings she did not understand.

  Angelique did not stop it; in fact, she encouraged it, and allowed it to go quite far. But she did stop it, at last, using willpower to stop it short and dampen down the artificially raised ardor, and afterwards she felt even more unclean. It felt—unnatural somehow. Deep down, she was still the innocent small town Catholic girl and it just didn’t seem right and proper to her, somehow. Perhaps worse than that, it had been artificially induced, not arising out of genuine love or even attraction. It was, however, the shock to her system that she needed.

  From here on in, she would be totally chaste. The desires would be there, but those were perhaps God’s price for her power and mobility. She would wait, at least until this terrible curse would be broken and she was restored to herself once more. She was certain that such a thing would happen; either that, or she would die in the assault on evil and join the spirit realm herself, beyond such things.

  They came for them on the fourth night, shortly after midnight. It was a low profile jet helicopter with security-type engine mufflers that really damped, although they did not eliminate, the telltale sound of the whirlybird. The pilot was good; he lande
d atop the platform without lights. He was also apparently part of the organization, for although Greg and Maria had re-donned their clothes, such as they were, he didn’t bat an eyelash at the sight of Angelique.

  Maria in particular had worried that the helicopter might not be in friendly hands, but Greg had no problems. He apparently knew the pilot and the timing was right on the dot.

  The only problem they found was in getting Angelique comfortable. The seats were upholstered in fabric, and it stung her after a while. Greg finally figured out a solution by taking a fair number of papers from the cabin—some old newspapers, sheets from the pilot’s clipboard, anything— and lining the seat. It seemed to work, and then they were away as fast as possible, the pilot skimming the surface of the sea at or below the level of the oil rigs to avoid any hostile radar.

  Greg took the seat next to the pilot, and as he flew they talked.

  “Sorry it took so long, but it’s been damned complicated, or so they tell me,” the pilot told him. “You all are hotter’n a firecracker in this part of the world. Then they had to figure out a meeting place everybody could get to that was far enough away from here that they’d find it hard to figure, and still met the little lady’s special needs.”

  They were soon over the Venezuelan mainland but still flying, in just about pitch darkness, at close to treetop level.

  “How are they going to get us out of here?” Greg asked him.

  “Old private airstrip up ahead a few miles. It ain’t much and it’s mostly dirt. These days it’s used for smuggling. Drugs, that kind of thing, you know. The local authorities can be persuaded to look the other way on it once in a while, if you know what I mean. We got an old crate in there waiting. No seven forty-seven, mind, just a hunk of junk, but it’ll get you where you got to go.”

  Within minutes, they set down at the field, a dark and forbidding strip hacked out of the jungle and lying between nasty looking hills.

  The plane waiting was what some folks would call an antique flying boat. A war surplus HU-16 seaplane, it was impossible to say during just which war it had seen active duty. Able to land on both land and sea and get in and out of places with short, tight runways, it had the large boat-like body and overhead wings with pontoons so familiar to navy war movies, and its two great prop-driven engines were almost as loud inside the plane as outside, but it was surprisingly roomy inside, if militarily spartan.

  The two pilots were both middle aged and looked like retired military, but they were long enough out of it and jaded enough to look like they slept in their clothes and peeled them off anually for showers.

  The older and grayer of the two shook hands with Greg. “I’m Mitch Corwin, and that’s Bob Romeriz. Welcome aboard Air Nowhere.”

  “Glad to see anybody,” MacDonald assured them. “You know the score?”

  “All the way. That her? Wow… O.K., no more comments now. Pile in and let’s get the hell out of here. We’re cleared from Caracas to Kingston, where we’ll take on fuel but nothing else. Then we go up the coast with fuel stops every six hours. There’s water in the cask in back and Dixie cups next to it, and there’s cold box lunches and beer in the coolers there, and if you got to go there’s a porta-potty in the back. Assuming no problems, the whole thing should take forty-four hours give or take, allowing for the fuel stops. These babies don’t go real fast and they’re not designed for comfort but they’ll get you there in one piece.”

  They got in, but the old fabric seats proved impossible for Angelique, and she wound up sitting on the floor of the aircraft, simply hanging on to the metal seat bases as they took off.

  There was, in fact, a great deal of noise and vibration, but the ride itself was fairly smooth and stable. They munched cold chicken, drank a little beer, and mostly otherwise kept to themselves during the trip.

  They landed at a general aviation strip outside Kingston while it was still dark, but aside from staying down low inside the plane there was no trouble. The plane had a manifest and flight plan that was proper and provided a stop for refueling but no other purpose in Jamaica. The lone, bored looking customs man was there only to make certain nothing unauthorized got in or out of the plane; he couldn’t have cared less what it carried and did not try to look inside.

  It was past dawn on a gray, overcast day when they made their second stop, this one in Cancun, on the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico. Again, with just a refueling and a refiling of some paperwork, there was no hassle. From that point they used small, private airfields, heading northwest across Mexico. For something planned in a hurry, it was certainly well organized.

  “Oh, we do this all the time,” Corwin told them. “It’s the way you make money with a small outfit like this. You prepay the bribes and have a lot of options to move.”

  “What do you usually carry?” Greg asked him.

  “A little bit of everything. Dope of all types, of course, and sometimes wetbacks and other times it might be political refugees from Latin America. We had two trips getting phar-maceuticals to Cuba, if you believe that. Those are hairier than the drug stuff but they pay best of all.”

  “I’m surprised you haven’t gotten caught and strung up by now no matter what your contacts,” Greg noted. “You’re not in a long-life type of trade here.”

  “Well, hell, we’re equal opportunity, see? I mean, we’ve run stuff for the CIA, so the U.S. stays off our back or covers for us. We’ve run stuff for the Reds, so we don’t get no flack from the Cubans or Nicaraguans or anybody like that. Almost every government’s used us at one time or another, and we’re a special favorite of certain Mexican politicians.”

  “Seems to me you could afford better airplanes,” Maria noted.

  “Oh, hell, honey, we got any kind of plane you want for anything, and old pilots to fly ’em. This was the best overall for this job, considering that turkey airstrip we started at and where we got to wind up.”

  “Just where are we winding up?” MacDonald asked.

  “Well, sir, near as I can tell, they got to thinking. They needed a place with a big international airport so’s everybody who needed could get in and out, and they wanted a kind of place folks might go anyway. Now, add to that someplace where they wouldn’t give a second glance to your little tattooed lady there, beg pardon—no offense meant. If she was dressed at all, that is.”

  They flew the entire distance up the California coast well out from shore and low enough to be out of most of the air traffic control radar. They landed on the water for the first time over a hundred and fifty miles out in the Pacific off the California coast, but near a small chartered tanker that was there to give them more gas. From that point, they disappeared from anyone’s clear trace, landing in the water again, this time about twenty miles off the coast and in daylight. There they unstowed and assembled and inflated a large orange life raft complete with outboard motor, and all, including the pilots, transferred into it.

  Away about a mile, Romeriz took out a small metal box, raised an antenna, then flipped up a cover to reveal a single contact switch. He pulled it down, and two very small muffled explosions could be heard in the distance, panicking some gulls.

  “I hate to lose her, but we can’t afford to keep her any more,” Corwin told them. “She’ll be on her way to the bottom now with any luck, if those explosive boys were right, and nobody’ll ever know we were here.”

  They put in at a small, deserted beach of black sand, then deflated the raft and took it back out into the water, letting the motor’s weight sink it to the bottom.

  Air Nowhere certainly knew its business. They walked over a huge amount of driftwood piled up in back of the beach and then up an almost overgrown trail to a small turnout near a two-lane road. A small camper truck was parked there, but it didn’t seem to bother the pilots, and Romeriz went up, selected a key off his key ring, and unlocked the thing. They waited for some general traffic to pass, then got Angelique and the others inside.

  “This we will not sink or blow up,” Co
rwin told them. “It was rented fair and square in Astoria for a week and it’s going back there when we’re through. Settle back—we’ve still got quite a drive. Either of you want to take the wheel, you’re welcome to do it. After we drop you off, this gets turned over to an innocent and unsuspecting family that wants to drive north along the coast road in a camper, and they’ll check it back in. It’s rented in their name, so anybody who wants to trace this will have one hell of a time proving anybody was ever in it that they want.” And that was how they got Angelique to San Francisco.

  “Outside of theaters and espionage circles I don’t think there’d be much of a call for this stuff, eh?” MacDonald commented, applying another batch of a seemingly clear liquid to his hair and beard and then showering it off. It had the effect, over a period of time, of turning dark hair gray and doing so convincingly. Applied to both hair and beard, it had the effect of adding twenty years to his apparent age.

  “Rather simple stuff, old boy,” replied a tall, distinguished-looking man in his sixties or early seventies. He wore an aloha shirt and brown slacks, but somehow he still looked quite the British civil servant which he used to be.

  Lord Clarence Frawley, who insisted on being called “Pip” by everyone unless under formal circumstances, had quite a lot of experience in that end, being, for some eleven years, the real-life counterpart of James Bond’s legendary “Q”, the master of gadgetry for spies. His own Ph.D. was in chemistry, but he knew an incredible amount about almost everything in the sciences. He had not, of course, been the one man show of the cinema, but rather the administrative head of a research-and-development wing that employed only the best and the brightest and the most secure. A staunch materialist and top scientist, he’d been one of Sir Reginald’s bosses at one time when the renegade computer genius had worked for the British government and he was also familiar, as a prior Fellow of the Institute, with the actual layout of Allenby Island.