Peacekeepers (1988)

by Ben Bova

  They cleared the food and cups from the table when Alexander came into the wardroom, each person taking his or her own dirty dishes to a slot set into the aft bulkhead.

  Pavel followed Kelly and did what she did. By the time he turned around, Alexander had removed the cloth table cover, revealing that the tabletop was actually a large display screen.

  "It is Libya," said Kelly, studying the map shown on the screen as she sat down again.

  "It is Libya," Alexander confirmed.

  Pavel sat next to Kelly. He noticed that this time Mavroulis sat on his other side.

  "Qumar al-Rayyid is one of the world's leading pains in the ass," said Alexander. He touched a keypad set into the table's edge and a photo of the Libyan strong man appeared in the upper comer of the map, a sun-browned face half hidden by dark glasses and a military cap heavy with gold braid.

  "Several of his neighbors, who shall remain nameless" - Alexander glanced at Pavel — "have hired us to get rid of him. Paid good money for it."

  "You plan to assassinate him," Pavel said.

  Kelly looked surprised, almost shocked. Mavroulis gave a disgusted snort. "The Russians—first thing they think of is murder."

  Pavel felt sudden anger flushing his cheeks.

  Smiling his crooked smile, Alexander said, "No, my red-faced friend, we are not assassins. We are not even mercenary soldiers, in the old sense. Like the Peacekeepers, we deal in minimum violence."

  Out of the comer of his eye Pavel saw Kelly flinch slightly at the word "Peacekeepers." Why? I must find out.

  Aloud, he said, "Minimum violence? Such as bombing Tripoli while Rayyid is making a speech there?"

  "And killing everybody in the crowd?" Alexander shook his head. "What good would that do? Rayyid would probably be in a blastproof shelter by the time the first bomb fell. And besides, we want to destroy his power, not make a martyr out of him."

  "Then what . . . ?" Pavel gestured at the electronic map.

  Alexander spelled it out. For more than ten years the Libyan government had been working on a grand project to tap the vast aquifer deep beneath the Sahara and bring the water to the coast, where it would provide irrigation for farming.

  "Qaddafi talked about doing it," Alexander said.

  "Rayyid is making it happen."

  Barker arched his brows in a very English way. "What of it? It's entirely an internal Libyan operation. That's no threat to any other nation."

  "Isn't it?" Alexander scratched lazily at his jaw. "My sainted old Uncle Max was a dedicated Greenpeacer. Got himself arrested by the Russkies once, trying to save whales from their hunting fleets. He always told me, 'Son, it just ain't smart to tamper with Mother Nature.'"

  "You are against the Libyan project for ecological reasons?"

  Pavel could not believe it.

  Alexander considered him for a long moment, locking his wintry-gray eyes on Pavel. Finally he answered, "Of course. Why else? If it's not good ecologically, then it's bad politically, as far as I'm concerned."

  Pavel said nothing, but he thought to himself. This Alexander is either a liar or a fool.

  The aquifer beneath the Sahara had been created more than one hundred thousand years ago, Alexander explained, when glaciers covered Europe and northern Africa was a fertile grassland teeming with game and the earliest bands of human hunting tribes.

  "We just don't know what the ecological effects of draining off that water will be," he went on. "Certainly the nations along the Sahel region don't want their underground water sources tampered with. It could wipe them out—cattle and people both."

  "The Libyans would use up the underground water in a few decades," Kelly added. "It would be entirely gone: water that took a thousand centuries to accumulate could be used up in less than one generation."

  "And when the water is gone?" Barker asked.

  "Millions will die," said Mavroulis angrily. "Maybe tens of millions, all across the Sahel, Algeria, Libya itself."

  "But while they're using that water," Alexander said, "Libya's economic and political power will grow enormously. Libya will become the leading nation of the region—for a while. Long enough to make her neighbors extremely uncomfortable at the prospect."

  "Which is why they've hired us," said Barker.

  "Right."

  Pavel shook his head. "You are going to kill this man over water. Water that legally he has a right to."

  Alexander regarded him with a pitying smile. "You keep talking about killing. We don't kill—we cure."

  Puzzled, Pavel asked, "What do you mean?"

  Alexander's cold gray eyes shifted away from Pavel.

  "We're working on a plan that will stop the aquifer project. That's our goal and that's what we're going to do. I have no intention of harming a hair on Rayyid's armpits."

  Barker leaned back and said to no one in particular, "The man has the Mediterranean at his doorstep. Why doesn't he buy fusion generators and desalt the seawater? Fusion may be new, but it works well and it would be cheaper than this aquifer scheme. And less damaging ecologically."

  Alexander smiled his cynical smile. "That's what you would do, Chris. It's what I would do, or Kelly or Nicco or even our Russian friend, here. But Rayyid wants something big, something impressive, something that's never been done before."

  "He's not looking for the best way to help his people," said Kelly. "He's looking for headlines for himself."

  "And power," added Alexander. "Power is always at the root of it."

  For the next week Pavel and all the others were kept quite busy. The plane landed in Naples' beautiful harbor, then flew up briefly to Marseille and after that spent two days anchored in an unnamed inlet on the west coast of Corsica.

  Pavel began to understand that this plane and the eight men and one woman aboard it were only a part of Alexander's operation. How large a part, he had no inkling.

  Obviously the man had tentacles that extended far.

  None of them left the plane for very long. Alexander stayed aboard constantly. Pavel was allowed to walk the length of the dock in Marseille, but no farther. Kelly watched him from the hatch, and Mavroulis or one of the others was always at the end of the pier. Each night they slept aboard the plane, which always taxied far out from the shore before anchoring. It was like sleeping on a yacht.

  Pavel enjoyed it, even though he felt somewhat confined.

  Now and again the name of Jabal Shamar popped up in conversations. Pavel asked indirect questions, spoke little and listened a lot. Apparently Alexander had a personal hatred for the elusive former leader of the Pan-Arab armies. His parents had been killed in the nuclear exchange of the Final War.

  "Is it true that Shamar has his own nuclear bombs?"

  Pavel asked Mavroulis one afternoon, while they worked side by side loading crates of foodstuffs into the plane's refrigerated cargo bay.

  The Greek nodded sourly. "Why do you think Alexander accepted this Libyan job? Shamar might be there, under Rayyid's protection."

  "With the bombs?"

  Mavroulis grunted as he heaved a crate marked as oranges. "He doesn't care about the bombs. He wants Shamar."

  But Moscow must care about the bombs, Pavel thought.

  Do they want Rayyid to have access to nuclear weapons?

  He wished he could contact the director for clarification.

  Wherever he went, the Kelly woman stayed beside him.

  She was cool, friendly—up to a point—and extremely intelligent. Pavel saw that she could program computers and use other electronic gear with impressive facility.

  The second morning at Corsica she approached Pavel in the wardroom shortly after breakfast and asked, "Uh, you want to go for a swim?" She seemed somewhat reluctant, almost troubled, as if someone had forced her to ask him.

  Pavel was too surprised to be wary. Kelly provided him with a pair of abbreviated trunks, then ducked into her own compartment to change.

  In a bathing suit she revealed what Pavel had guessed earli
er: her figure was practically nonexistent. Yet her round, plain face had a kind of prettiness to it. She was not beautiful, by any means. But that did not matter so much.

  The prospect of pumping information from her in bed began to seem not merely possible, but attractive. Yet, although Kelly smiled at him, her brown eyes were always cautious. Pavel thought there was something very sad in her eyes, something that he should strive to find out.

  They used the plane's main cargo hatch as a diving platform and plunged into the sun-warmed waters. Pavel had swum only in Moscow pools; he was surprised at the lack of chlorine in the water, and its saltiness.

  After nearly an hour, they climbed up onto the wing and stretched out on giant towels to let the sun dry them. The sky arching overhead was brilliant blue, cloudless and achingly bright. Pavel squeezed his eyes shut, but still the glow of the fierce Mediterranean sun blazed against his closed eyelids.

  "You swim very well," Kelly said. There was real admiration in her voice. The earlier reluctance had washed away.

  He opened his eyes and turned toward her.

  "Not as well as you," he replied, noticing how the sunlight glinted off the water droplets in her hair. It was a bright Irish red, the kind of coloring that the Vikings had brought with them down the long rivers of Russia to eventually give the country its name.

  She was a trained athlete, he found out. Gently leading her on to tell her life story, Pavel learned that she had been a skater but had failed to make Canada's Olympic team.

  "The competition must have been very strong in a nation like Canada," he sympathized.

  She still seemed saddened by that failure. Then she had joined the International Peacekeeping Force, and had served for almost a year as a teleoperator. She had been involved in stopping the abortive war between Eritrea and the Sudan.

  "Why did you leave the Peacekeepers?" he asked.

  Kelly's freckled face almost pouted. "I had some trouble with my superiors. Not following orders exactly. Exceeding my mission goals."

  "But exceeding one's goals is a good thing!" Pavel felt truly surprised.

  "Maybe for you. For me, it just got me in trouble."

  "And because of that you were cashiered from the IPF?"

  "I wasn't thrown out. I quit."

  "Because of that?"

  "Not really," she said. "That helped, but it wasn't the real reason."

  "Then why?"

  She turned her head to look at him, lying beside her.

  Pavel saw pain and anger in her eyes. And something else, something he could not identify. Suddenly uneasy with her this close to him, he lay back again and closed his eyes against the sun.

  "A man," she said. "I thought he was in love with me. I thought I was in love with him."

  "Were you?"

  "I guess I was," she said, almost in a whisper. "But he wasn't."

  "Couldn't you have transferred to another part of the IPF?"

  She shrugged her bare shoulders. "Maybe. But Cole Alexander asked me to join his group."

  "Alexander offered you better pay?"

  He heard Kelly chuckle. "I wish. You don't know him very well yet."

  "I don't understand."

  "I joined his group because he asked me to. Cole Alexander is my father."

  Pavel felt stunned. "Your father? But your name is not ..." He stopped short, suddenly realizing that he now was treading on very sensitive, dangerous ground.

  "He never married my mother," Kelly said matter-of-factly.

  "And she . . . ?"

  "She loved him 'til the day she died. And so will I."

  They left Corsica, after Alexander had a top secret meeting in his private quarters just aft of the flight deck with six men who wore expensive suits and dark glasses.

  They arrived in six different yachts, and for a few hours the lonely unnamed inlet on the rugged Corsican coast looked like a holiday playground for millionaires.

  He serves the rich, Pavel remembered the director's words. He helps them to oppress the poor.

  The yachts departed and the seaplane took off, landed and refueled at Gibraltar, then flew out over the Atlantic and down the curving bulk of the African coast. Pavel slept poorly that night. The plane flew steadily, with hardly a noticeable vibration. The sound of the engines was muffled to a background purr. But still something in that deepest part of his brain that was always alert kept warning him that he was in danger, that he was surrounded by enemies, and that there was nothing between him and a screaming fall to his death except several miles of thin air.

  He breakfasted with Kelly and the others, then was summoned on the plane's intercom to the flight deck. Kelly accompanied him along the passageway that led through the sleeping compartments and her father's private quarters.

  "His bedroom is on this side"—she gestured to an unmarked door in the passageway—"and his office is here on the starboard side."

  A flight of three steps marked the end of the passageway.

  "Flight deck's up there," Kelly said.

  "You are not coming?"

  "I haven't been invited. He wants to see you. Alone."

  She seemed more guarded than ever this morning, as if she regretted having revealed so much about herself. Pavel went up the metal steps and rapped on the door with the back of his knuckles. Nothing happened. He glanced back at Kelly, who motioned for him to open the door and go through. With a shrug, he did.

  Strong sunlight poured through the wide windows of the flight deck. Pavel winced and, squinting, saw that the stations for the navigator and electronics operator were unmanned, their chairs empty even though the display screens of their consoles glowed with data. He had expected the noise from the engines to be louder up here, but if it was, it was so marginal that Pavel could discern no real difference from the rest of the plane.

  "Come on up here. Red," came Alexander's voice. From the pilot's seat.

  Making his way past the unoccupied crew stations, Pavel saw that Alexander was indeed piloting the plane. He was smiling happily in the pilot's seat, wearing aviator's polarized sunglasses tinted a light blue.

  "Don't look so surprised, kid," Alexander said, grinning at him. "Flying this beautiful lady is most of the fun of having her. Sit down, make yourself comfortable."

  Pavel slid into the copilot's chair.

  "Want to try the controls?"

  He knew he was wide-eyed with astonishment, despite his efforts to rein in his emotions. All that Pavel could reply was a half-strangled "Yes" and a vigorous bobbing of his head.

  "Take 'em!" Alexander removed his hands from the U-shaped control yoke. The plane ploughed along steadily.

  Pavel gripped the yoke in front of him and felt the enormous solidity of this huge plane. Alexander began explaining the instruments on the bewildering panels that surrounded Pavel's chair on three sides: altimeter, air speed indicator, radios, throttles, trim tabs, radar display, turn-and-bank indicator, artificial horizon, compass, fuel gauges . . . there were hundreds of displays that could be called up through the plane's flight computer.

  "In about ten seconds we have to make a twelve-degree turn southward. That's to our left. Ready?"

  "Me?" Pavel heard his voice squeak excitedly.

  "You're the man with his hands on the controls, aren't you?"

  His mouth suddenly dry, Pavel swallowed once, then nodded. "I am ready."

  "Okay . . . now."

  Both of them watched the compass as Pavel started to turn the yoke leftward.

  "Rudder!" Alexander yelled. "The pedal beneath your left foot. Easy!"

  The plane responded smoothly, although Pavel overcontrolled and had to turn slightly back toward the right before the compass heading satisfied Alexander. He was sweating by the time he took his hands off the yoke and let Alexander resume control.

  "Not bad for the first time," Alexander said, smiling his sardonic smile. Pavel could not tell if he was being honest or sarcastic.

  Alexander flicked his fingers across a few bu
ttons, then let go of the controls.

  "Okay, she's on autopilot now until we reach Cape Verde airspace."

  Wiping his palms on his jeans, Pavel said, "I have never flown an airplane before."

  "Uh-huh." Alexander studied his face for a moment, then asked, "Okay, Red, what have you learned about us so far?"

  Pavel searched for the older man's eyes, saw only the blue-tinted glasses. "You mean, what will I report back to Moscow?" he asked, stalling for time to think.

  Alexander nodded. His grin was gone. He was completely serious now.

  "You are planning to attack Libya, a nation that has friendly ties to the Soviet Union. Your plan involves destroying the Libyan aquifer project, a project that could bring precious water to farmers and herders along the Mediterranean coast—water that legally belongs to Libya, since it now lies under Libyan soil."

  "Go on," Alexander said.

  "You are conducting this attack for money paid to you by those six men who came aboard this plane in Corsica. One of them I recognized as an Egyptian; two of them were blacks, presumably from Chad and Niger, two neighbors with whom Libya has been at war, off and on, for many years."

  "Not bad," Alexander said. "The other three were from Algeria, Tunisia and France."

  "France?"

  "The Frogs have had their troubles with Libyan terrorists, over the years."

  "So they are paying you to get rid of Rayyid."

  "Not exactly."

  Pavel snorted. "Not exactly? Come, now."

  Alexander laughed. "Ah, the righteous defender of the poor."

  "Well, is it not so?" Pavel shot back. "Aren't you taking money from the rich? Won't your schemes hurt the poor farmers and herdsmen of Libya?"

  Tapping a finger against his lips for a moment, Alexander seemed to be debating how much he should tell. Finally he said, "Chad is a helluva lot poorer than Libya. And the Chadian you saw at our little conference represented several nations of the Sahel area. They're damned worried about Libya draining that aquifer."

  "Then let them dig their own irrigation systems."

  "With what? They don't have oil money. They don't have any money."

  "Except a few millions to pay you."