Higher Cause

by John Hunt

  “He could have dropped them off on Tahiti, and then gone on to Britain,” Joseph speculated. “But he didn’t even try that.”

  “Of course not. He would have known the Tahitians would want the sphere back. He could never go back there.”

  “So what of the Bounty, and the sphere?”

  “He did something with them, certainly. And he was here on Paradise 1 — of that we are also certain. But as to what actually transpired here, more than two hundred years ago, Joseph — we may never know.”

  Joseph swallowed the last of the beer in his bottle. “I told you, I’m not giving up, Petur. I am determined to find the truth — and to find that sphere.”

  Petur turned again to look out the window over the ocean. “Then what are you going to do next, my friend?”

  “I’m going back to work.”

  “More mapping of the ocean floor?”

  Joseph thought for a moment, also while looking out over the blue-green waters of the Pacific. “No. I think I’ll take a trip. I’m going on a little vacation to Pitcairn’s Island.”

  There was more glee in the room than anyone had witnessed in years. Everyone smiled. Voices were raised; backs were slapped. Complete joy: Joy that a government had been overthrown. A project worked on hard for years. A con, where no one would ever know they had been conned. A perfect sting.

  It was just a step along the path — but the most important step, for they were in control now.

  “Gentlemen, it has been successful — completely successful. I am of the opinion, at this moment, that we can accomplish anything!”

  “Yes, tonight has been tremendous. Never could we have anticipated such success!”

  The revelry went on for some time before the old man calmly interrupted.

  “I am as giddy as you are. But let us not forget why we have done this. When do we close down Onbacher and Bjarnasson?”

  “We must push ahead cautiously, secure the political position. It takes time to change the government. We don’t want to lose everything by rushing ahead.

  The old man said patiently, “Lose what? Mexico? Mexico has never been the goal.”

  The leader spoke up. “You are right. We have lost sight of our mission.”

  “Forgivable, given the magnitude of the project we have just completed.” The old man smiled.

  “Yes.”

  “In fact, we may be too late. Onbacher could already have found her.”

  “Not likely. He’s looking in entirely the wrong place. The longer he spends doing that, the more likely he’ll give up and decide it’s just a wild goose chase.”

  The old man scratched his chin. “But he may find the lantern. That has always been a grave concern.”

  “Then we’ll have lost.”

  “Perhaps,” the old man replied thoughtfully. “Perhaps.”

  “Let’s act immediately. One day may mean the difference between survival and extinction. I will make the call immediately. Are we agreed?”

  There was no dissent. The Mexican government would take over the Paradise Island chain faster than anyone could have anticipated. Once set in motion, there was nothing they could do to reverse it. After all the work that went into this, not one of the men imagined that within days they would all be wishing they could stop it.

  Things were no longer working as smoothly as they once had. Akheem Azid lay on his back on a hard and tiny berth. A decrepit steam pipe, rusty and corroded, hung only a hand’s breadth above his face. He had touched it once, and instantly had been scalded. It took very little time to learn not to roll over in his sleep.

  Sleep was not coming easily tonight, however. His mind was neither rested nor relaxed. Perhaps it was being in the submarine that made him feel off balance, or perhaps it was the place they were heading. Certainly this new man who had joined his team might be a cause for concern. Khamil did not like him. That was unusual, for Khamil rarely had feelings one way or another about anybody.

  This was not the first time that Azid had added a member to his team. Khamil himself had once been the new man. Azid had been uncomfortable then, too. Over time, he hoped, the new man, Baddori, would no longer make him uncomfortable, for Baddori would be very useful. He had many talents, not the least of which was his fluency in several languages. He had proven his hatred of the Americans most convincingly. Azid smiled as he thought about it.

  The aft torpedo room, which doubled as Azid’s quarters, had a watertight door. The wheel that served as a submariner’s doorknob was rusty, as was the rest of the ancient semi-floating casket, and it squeaked as it spun around. The door opened inward and Khamil stepped through.

  The injuries that Khamil had received during the attempt to destroy the OTEC had not healed completely. His right arm would forever hang useless at his side, turned outward grotesquely, with his wrist permanently contracted. He had a limp — more than a limp really — his leg would hardly support him. Although he had avoided it for now, Khamil would soon be using a cane, or more likely, spending most of his time in a wheelchair.

  “Khamil, my friend, are you enjoying this holiday cruise as much as I?”

  “I understand there is a Mariachi band on the promenade deck at midnight,” Khamil replied, stone-faced. “I am ready to dance. Will you join me?”

  Azid grunted with a faint smile. His friend’s unusual sense of humor was fully intact, even though his utility as a warrior was all but gone. “We had best get sleep in preparation for tomorrow. I am ready to get off this decrepit hulk.”

  “As am I. My dangling foot keeps getting stuck in the doors, and half of those doors need two hands to open. I seem to be lacking what it takes to navigate in this thing. But…” Khamil paused.

  “But what, my friend?”

  Khamil looked at the floor. “Even though I despise life on a submarine, I despise more these islands that await us. We have not had much luck in our endeavors on these islands.”

  Azid smiled thinly. “We won one, and lost one — an even record. It is time to improve that record.” Azid scratched his scruffily bearded chin. “You are not afraid — are you, my friend?” He instantly regretted saying this.

  Khamil took it in stride however. He feared nothing, not even his friend questioning his courage. But he looked at the man with stern eyes.

  “I am sorry. The comment is withdrawn,” Azid said, quickly.

  “And stricken. Now, I am ready and eager to do this. But I wished to talk to you about my replacement.”

  “He is not your replacement. He is our new man. No one will replace you.”

  “We have been together for a long time. You are the intelligent one. My talent was strength. I no longer have that. I must be replaced, but not before this one more attack. Do not allow Baddori off this submarine. He is not to be trusted.”

  “I know you do not like him, Khamil, but I do. He can never replace you, but he does have talents.”

  “There is something wrong with him. I do not know what it is. But it is not right.”

  Azid considered this for a moment. “I will keep your intuition close to my heart, and withhold my trust in Baddori for now. But we will need him on the island.”

  Khamil said nothing in reply.

  Azid said again, “We need him.”

  “Yes, Akheem. I am sorry that we do.”

  “It is not your fault that you were wounded.”

  “Fault? Fault does not matter. But nonetheless, it is the fact that I was wounded that has led us to require this man’s assistance.”

  “He will work out well, Khamil. Now, I must sleep. It is the last night I have to enjoy these exquisite accommodations.” Azid cautiously slid back under the steam pipe, closing his eyes as his friend solemnly turned and hobbled out. The door closed and the locking wheel screeched as it turned, like fingernails on a chalkboard.

  Khamil struggled along the narrow companionway, occasionally stopping and resting his large shoulder against the wall. Pain coursed through his hip and shot up his back wit
h every step — a fact that he never revealed to Azid. He gritted his teeth tightly, not to control the pain, but to fight back the frustration and anger. A young seaman was moving down the passageway toward him, eyes at his feet. Khamil straightened up, not willing to appear as weak as he actually was. The boy, dirty and unkempt, was no more than fifteen years old. He belonged on a dark side street in Jakarta, not on board a military vessel. But that is how it was now. Khamil reflected that the boy looked like he himself did when he was younger.

  Out of fear, or maybe respect, the sailor stopped and stood aside as Khamil approached. Khamil smiled slightly after he had moved passed. Apparently he had a reputation on the boat. Good.

  Khamil dragged his foot over the step of another watertight door, and looked down at his leg in distaste. When he looked up again, it was straight into the face of Baddori. The man caught him off guard. He stumbled backward, tripped on his own leg, and fell through the door.

  Baddori moved quickly, and managed to catch Khamil’s good arm, just as he was about to crash solidly into the deck. It took a moment to regain his balance, but Khamil did so, and smiled thinly, in an insincere expression of gratitude.

  “I did not mean to frighten you, Khamil,” Baddori said slyly.

  This was the second time in five minutes that Khamil had been accused of being frightened. But it was not a friend who made the accusations this time. This accusation he took personally. His thin smile transformed into a scowl as he shook his arm loose of Baddori’s tight grasp.

  “You did not frighten me,” Khamil replied. “You threw me off balance, that is all.”

  “It seems to be something I do to many people.” Baddori grinned. “I consider it a special talent.” Baddori was looking him over like a man inspecting a horse before sending it to the glue factory. “I was just coming to see you, Khamil.”

  “An interesting coincidence, then, for I was on my way to talk with you.”

  Baddori nodded. “Well then, what is on your mind?”

  Khamil adjusted his shirttail, which had pulled out of his pants. He looked up at the other man, his eyes narrowed and suspicious. “I wanted you to teach me some things.”

  “I doubt there is anything I can teach you, Khamil,” replied Baddori. “Shall we step out of the passageway?”

  The two men moved through the narrow corridor to a small compartment that had once served as a decoding room. There was no equipment with which to decode, and no codes to translate, so the little chamber lay empty.

  “The British certainly love their secret codes,” Baddori commented idly. “Wish they could have left their communications equipment when they sold this sub. It might have been helpful. Damn thing was stripped clean. I am amazed they left the engines in it.”

  Khamil grunted in reply. He wanted to get on with his questions. He sat down on a small metal bench, indicating the one opposite for Baddori. Knees almost touching, the two men faced each other.

  “Tell me about your life.”

  “That’s not a question. That’s an interview. What is your question?”

  “I want to know where you call home, and what you are about.”

  Baddori’s green eyes stared piercingly. “I have told you this before. I was born on the Gaza strip, and spent many of my younger years living in what I did not recognize at the time was misery. I dislike westerners. In fact I despise everything about them. Yet their influence is beginning to dominate the world. In two hundred years, everyone will speak English and be Christian. I want to be sure that such a thing does not come to pass. That is what I am about.”

  “You are an idealist, then, are you?”

  “You could say that.”

  Khamil pondered for a moment. “How is it that you speak so many languages?”

  The man across from him nodded to consent to the interrogation. “I learned Hebrew because my father taught me it was important to know my enemy. I spent years in the United States for the same reason — thus my skill in English. French was my mother’s tongue, and so that came easily.”

  “But you speak even more languages, do you not?”

  “Yes. I trained in Russia when they were in the business of training ‘foreign’ agents. Spanish I learned when I was stuck in an Israeli prison for a year, terribly bored, but with a Spanish cellmate. I speak a bit of Armenian and struggle with Japanese.”

  “Japan — I enjoyed Japan.”

  “Akheem mentioned that you had been there together.”

  “Yes.”

  There was silence for a moment. Baddori offered, “What else do you wish to know about me?”

  Khamil was losing his head of steam. He knew that there was something wrong with this man in front of him, something sinister. And he suspected that Baddori was toying with him, as he had done on several occasions before. But he could never put his finger on the problem, and recognized that he would fail this time as well. Without saying anything, Khamil struggled to his feet, stepped into the passageway, and limped toward the center of the boat. He promised himself that, somehow, he would keep an eye on Baddori. Later, he would again try to convince his friend not to let Baddori off the sub. But if he failed, he swore an oath to not even once let Baddori out of his sight.

  38. Kidnap

  SOPHIA LAY ON her back on the cold floor, staring up at a confusing snarl of multicolored wires. Cold condensation dripped off the frigid tubing nearby, pooling in a faint shallow in the cement floor under the small of her back. Her nose was inches from the high-voltage power cables, and, lying in a pool of water, she fervently hoped that the electrical insulation was adequate. With a flashlight in one hand, she squirmed in the narrow space, trying to angle the beam to better see the source of her consternation.

  Week after week she had been working to tune the sensitive instruments that, if in perfect alignment, should initiate a controlled fusion reaction. The supercooled magnets, the particle-beam source, and the power and frequency of the laser all had to be intricately orchestrated by the sovereign computer that governed all. This computer was a small desktop model that for two years had been underutilized as a word processor in an administrative office. Now it sat silently on a small table in the middle of Sophia’s laboratory, proudly reigning over its domain.

  It was not the computer’s fault that the gargantuan machine was not yet fulfilling its promise. Sophia had gone through the program more than a dozen times without finding a flaw. As far as she could ascertain, everything should be synchronized harmoniously. Yet the machine was not working.

  She had started the day by tearing apart the particle beam, which was designed to impel small atomic nuclei at almost the speed of light through the near-vacuum environment of the supercollider piping. The superconducting electromagnets forced the particles to follow the gradual curve of the collider around its two-kilometer circumference repeatedly until they were hurled into a commanding laser burst. Everything was to be in order — or at least it seemed that way prior to her having taken it apart. But if she broke something, it didn’t matter; for the darn thing wasn’t working anyway.

  Soon, she would have to turn her attention to the magnets that needed to be aligned in a highly precise manner. One magnet not perfectly positioned would foul up the whole flow of particles. She hated that she would have to do it, but each magnet of the two-thousand-meter collider ring had to be examined, measured, and repositioned. It would be a month-long process — a month of hell. There was only one hope left for a way to avoid it — the hope that she would find something wrong in the last curve of the collider, where the particles zooming around at incredible speeds were freed to travel in a straight line to the onslaught of the powerful X-ray laser. The direction of that line needed to be just right — but maybe it wasn’t.

  And so Sophia worked with her elbows brushing against the frigid metal, with frostbite just a second away. Now and again, some exposed skin would contact a spot on the metal. It felt as if she were being burned with a branding iron. Several times she reflexive
ly pulled her arm away so quickly that she smashed her elbow on a protruding piece of the machine. In the morning, no doubt, she would look as if she had been beaten. She found no humor in her funny bone today.

  She heard the familiar squeak as the door to the lab opened: one of her assistants was coming in for some late-night work, she suspected. Everyone worked odd hours. Up to her armpits in the bowels of the collider, she did not feel the urge to greet them just now. They would not even know that she was there, and she could finish this job in a few minutes anyway, if she were not interrupted.

  She moved the flashlight around in a nearly futile attempt to follow each wire from its origin to its insertion point on the complex electromagnets. She had to track over sixty wires and their like-colored connections. Plain wires, colored wires, and striped wires were mixed up like spaghetti. Each piece of vermicelli had to be inserted at the correct connector. She tracked the wires through the maze above with her fingers and eyes: yellow to yellow, green to green, red to red, blue to red, white to white. She paused, and moved her light back. Blue to red. The blue wire from the control panel behind her continued on to the wire that she now examined. It should attach to a metal screw with a blue label above it. But instead the end was screwed in place one connector over, with the free wire ends mingling with ends from the red wire in a beautiful example of how not to run electrical wiring. She grimaced as she recalled that she had wired this herself six months earlier.

  She remembered that well. She had been working late in order to put the job behind her. Her flashlight had been dimming and she had almost fallen asleep. It was no wonder why she had made a mistake. Since then, she and others had worked under here, never spotting the miswiring.

  But that little error probably explained a lot of the problems they had been having. She hoped that the simple correction would solve everything.

  Sophia twisted her arm out from the tangled wires and felt around on the floor for a Phillips-head screwdriver. Since she was unable to find it by feel alone, she craned her neck around to view the floor beside her.