The Far Side

by Wylie, Gina Marie

  Charles heard the man bark a couple of words as a question. Odds were that meant, “Do you understand?” Arbitrarily he picked the longest word and repeated it as best as he could as a statement instead of a question. Hopefully he’d told the man that he understood.

  He was tied securely again, and then hauled from the room. It was mid-day, he learned, and there was land a couple of miles away to his right as he faced forward. He was hustled into a small, stinking hole and tied securely in place. One of them men mimed eating and pointed in the direction that was west.

  Charles grimaced. Dinner at sunset! How wonderful! His stomach growled in protest, and the guard kicked him painfully in the shin, laughing.

  It was, Charles thought, absurd. How was he going to learn to speak a language if none of the bastards spoke to him?

  The answer to that was the second worst thing that had ever happened to him in his life. Maybe a half hour later a man came in with a tool box. He took a metal device from the box and measured it against Charles’ neck, shook his head and tried another.

  Charles realized it was an iron collar. There was a heavy ring on it and in one crystal instant all of Kris Boyle’s talk of slavery came crashing down on him. The second collar fit, and the man closed it around Charles’ neck, and then hammered a pin into it. Charles saw that the pin was heavy iron and tapered.

  When the man finished, he undid Charles’ bonds and stepped back, grinning. He kicked Charles, laughed, and then went back to the tool box. He pulled out a short piece of chain, perhaps three feet long. One link was hammered into place on the collar, and the other end looped through a ring on the floor of the compartment, and then something like a padlock was used to lock him in place.

  The man kicked Charles hard once again, reached into the tool box and took out a rag, tossed it to Charles, laughed and walked out.

  Charles spent a minute or two exploring the collar and chain, but he was pretty sure that these people knew exactly what they were doing. The rag was actually a minimalist pair of shorts.

  A moment later the leader appeared in the doorway to the compartment, walked over to Charles and made the talking sign. Charles nodded. Then the man made some odd motions with his hips, laughed and left.

  A second later a woman about thirty years old or so, he thought, was brought in. She was chained about six feet away from him, and looked at him with fear. The leader came back and spoke to her, putting his knife to her throat as well. He made the hip gesture to her, laughed and turned to Charles, made the talking motion, then at the woman, then the hip gesture. Then he laughed so hard he seemed to be having a fit.

  With casual violence, he hauled the woman to her feet and raped her right in front of Charles. He laughed one more time and left.

  My God, Charles thought! He was miming I should make love to the woman! That was never going to happen! Belatedly he realized what the laughter was about. He had about two feet of movement and she had about two feet of movement. The might be able to brush their fingertips together, but there wasn’t going to be any sex.

  Still, the leader’s orders were clear -- learn the language or they would both die. He touched his chest. “Charles.”

  Her eyes were cast down, her voice dull. “Melea.”

  Well, mighty oaks from tiny acorns grow, he thought.

  * * *

  Ezra had been stunned when less than two hours after they’d taken position, he’d seen the sail to the east.

  He called for the others to take cover and found a convenient rock to obscure him. Jake had arrived only a few minutes before, and he’d bellied down next to Ezra. “Deja vu,” Jake said. “Too bad we didn’t bring the mortars.”

  “They’re too far offshore. I think they heard about that. They’re about an hour from rounding the headland and it’ll be dark by then.”

  “That’s a pisser,” his cousin told Ezra. “Unless they show a light, we’re not going to have a clue which way they go from here. And if they’re going to do it in the dark, why would they show a light?”

  Ezra nodded abstractedly. “I’ve seen pictures of frigates, ships of the line and schooners,” he told Jake. “This doesn’t look like any of them. It looks more like the bastard rig Andie put together for the Golden Bough.”

  “Melek said that they’d learned that Rangar had been a fisherman who had figured out how to sail upwind. The man they questioned only knew that Rangar had a base to the south, and that’s a lot of territory. The man had no idea how far, which direction or how large,” Jake reported.

  “Yeah, I heard that too,” Ezra told his cousin. “And they were pretty sure the guy was telling all he knew.” The man had been tortured within an inch of his life.

  The Arvalans were smarter about such things than Americans. They didn’t like torture and it was forbidden -- unless ordered by the King. The King, Collum, had ordered it for the man, because they were sure he was a confederate of Rangar or whoever it was who was using the title these days.

  The light slowly faded, and the ship stayed well offshore. It made no attempt to turn north, instead it barely turned, Ezra thought. It was hard to tell in the fading light.

  Then, a spark appeared towards the stern of the ship just as the ship vanished into the sea-haze. After a few seconds, Ezra laughed. “The light twinkles!” he exclaimed.

  “I see that,” Jake told him. “Tell me what that means, little cousin?”

  “Take your eyes away from it, and look again.”

  Jake did and exclaimed. “It looks like a star just above the horizon! But it’s moving!”

  “It’s moving slowly,” Ezra corrected him. “That’s probably a special lantern that wiggles so that it looks like it’s twinkling. So the helmsman can see to keep a steady course. Unless you looked close, you wouldn’t see the motion. It’s just one more star out on the horizon.”

  “Bearing a little west of south,” Jake said pragmatically.

  “I figure that too, and I think we’re looking at only two or three knots -- they are running at almost right angles to the wind.”

  There was a series of jerks from the light and Ezra exclaimed. “There, they’ve tacked!”

  “Headed more south, not more west,” Jake observed.

  “Jake, you need to get back to the rookery. Tell them to hustle that UAV. I know it’s supposed to be the short range version, but as I recall it could go out fifty miles and return. With luck we can spot that ship in the morning and figure out the base course.”

  “Ezra, it’s a huge ocean out there. The Pacific is a puddle in comparison.”

  “Maybe, but they rounded this cape. They have to use it as a navigational device. It’s worth it. Get going, Cuz!”

  Jacob got going. He was back a little after midnight. “How long could you see it?”

  “About two more hours. They tacked at least once more. Towards the end I was having a hard time keeping the ship in sight -- the light was just barely above the horizon.”

  “Well, it’s nighttime back home, too. They’ll have the crew for the UAV here by first light, our time. There are four of them, a ground crewman, two mechanics/electricians and the pilot.”

  “Fine,” Ezra said distractedly, hoping that Charles Evans had been on that ship and was still alive.

  “I’ve talked to Captain Milan at the fort and he’ll have a half dozen crossbowmen here at first light, and I’ve assigned Sergeant Feliz to be the site NCOIC for us. We’ll have six more of our men here by dawn as well. There’ll be a guy from the Army Corps of Engineers here by noon; he’ll talk to us and Dick Haines about building the observation post.”

  “Right, thanks.”

  Jacob put his hand on his cousin’s shoulder. “Ezra, don’t kill yourself over this. There was nothing you could have done.”

  “Sure there was. I could have been quicker off the mark. I should have known he didn’t do it -- did you know the stupid son of a bitch went to the party that night without a weapon? In a hostile zone? If I’d thought for two seco
nds I’d have realized he’d never would have fled without a weapon.”

  “The Barrett was missing, you said.”

  “Sure... and he knew as well as I did, that he’d fired off every last round from it. While he was popping away at the last of them with my P90, I went through his empty mags. There wasn’t a single round in one of them. You know me.”

  “You like to have a full mag and you spend an hour after a firefight filling partial mags. Yeah, I know you.”

  “I should have known! I shouldn’t have been distracted!”

  “And if you hadn’t been distracted, what would you have done?”

  “I’d like to think I’d have sent a search party south.”

  “Ezra, old buddy, you had a flock of five hundred dralka to deal with the day before. With you, Cuz, it’s second nature. There are still times I have to think about the aerial dimension here. You’d never have exposed a search party like that.”

  “I exposed myself, bringing Denise Courtland back,” he told his cousin.

  “And that took balls and was a good thing. But sending a search party? You’d have gone yourself. Instead you did the one thing that was most likely to have had an immediate impact, Ezra. Don’t kick yourself.”

  “And there was this,” Ezra waved in the direction of the ocean. “I never figured on this.”

  “Who can? You have to know that the smartest person in the universe is Kris Boyle, no matter what people think about Andie. Andie’s smart; make no bones about it, but she’s simply a close second. You were with Kris in Chicago.”

  Ezra nodded. The flashes of those explosions and the concussion of the bombs had exceeded anything in his experience -- and he routinely directed bombs to their targets. But not bombs like those! Afterwards he’d apologized to Kris, then later to her father. He couldn’t do it -- he just couldn’t do it. So he’d gotten this assignment.

  He snatched a few hours of sleep. He was glad that so far no one had noted a night attack by dralka -- not even twilight or dawn attacks.

  Still, he was up as dawn was breaking. Jake was still gone, but shortly he was back with a dozen ATVs and their cargo.

  The four techs with the UAV were Israeli army soldiers, wearing US Army desert fatigues, which was what everyone wore on Arvala. The woman in charge was thirty and quite pretty and was quite brisk.

  She had Ezra escort her to the place closest to the water. She looked at all of the debris and glanced at Ezra. “A bad shipwreck?”

  “You could say that. We didn’t know what it was -- we thought it was a warship. Jake dropped a mortar round into an open black powder magazine. We killed nearly four hundred and fifty people at a stroke -- mostly women and children -- it was a transport and supply ship.”

  “But they brought the war to you, yes?”

  “Yes. There was one survivor. She’s in Northfield, Vermont these days.”

  “You understand that I can’t guarantee this? The bird was designed to use GPS? It does have a homing capability on a radio signal -- but it’s not something we test often. Fifty miles is the maximum range. If we’re as much as a degree off course on the return trip, the bird will fall into the ocean.”

  “There is a good chance a young man, a Norwich cadet who was kidnapped a few days ago, is aboard the ship we saw last night -- if he’s still alive. If we see the ship, we’ll have a line on where they’re headed.”

  “Just so you know,” she told him. “Give us a half hour to get the electronics set up and warmed up and complete all of our calibrations. Then I’ll launch her.” She waved into the stiff breeze from the ocean. “How long does this breeze blow?”

  “These are the trade latitudes here. For months. The only time I’ve seen the wind blow from a different direction was after a hurricane.”

  “There is no good news about the wind. What we gain on the outbound leg, we’ll lose coming back -- and if I misjudge, we lose the bird.”

  “I don’t care.”

  “It’s a half million dollar bird,” she told him.

  “I don’t care.”

  “It’s a unique prototype,” she said with a laugh. “But I understand -- you don’t care.” She nodded in the general direction of the rookery. “Can I send a message?”

  “Of course.” He handed her one of the radios and she grinned and lifted it to her mouth and connected.

  “Baby Eli?” he asked when she finished.

  “You will not be shocked if I tell you that we are soldiers of the IDF and that the research, unless we find generous patrons such as yourself, is funded by our exceedingly Jewish, penny-pinching government?”

  “Our government is like that too,” he told her. “I think it’s a function of government, not religion.”

  “It could be. My father was a physicist for the Soviets, back in the day. They never stinted on a project that they thought was important. Of course, they ended up bankrupt. He wanted me to be a cosmonaut. Except, Jews need not apply for the glamour jobs in the space program.”

  “Well, do this and I’ll see if I can get you into the American program.”

  She motioned to her three coworkers back on the bluff above them. “A fine and noble thought. Once, I was flying five aircraft. I do not think that being a cosmonaut will let me drop two bombs and fire three missiles in five minutes.”

  “Oh.”

  “We took out three rocket launchers, the pickup truck supplying them and the commander’s vehicle, a Volvo.”

  “I was a forward air controller, when I was in the army. I didn’t drop the bombs -- I lit up the targets.”

  “I had an armored company to guard me. I suspect you didn’t have that luxury.”

  “No.”

  “Come,” she told him and headed back up the bluff.

  In a few minutes she was standing, watching one of the men who held the large-winged aircraft up into the wind. She nodded and he pointed the nose up and let go. The woman goosed the throttle, and at once engine noise increased.

  It flew backwards for a second, steadied, and then surged ahead. In a few moments it was headed south southwest, steadily gaining altitude. She watched it carefully, then did something with the remote control and then walked back to a console that was plugged into a half dozen automobile batteries. Ezra went and stood next to her.

  “Will it bother you if I look over your shoulder?”

  She laughed. “I’ve had captains, majors, colonels, generals, the Minister of Defense and the Prime Minister looking over my shoulder. You were what -- a sergeant?”

  “Yes.”

  “No, you won’t bother me. In fact, once I get in the groove, I won’t even know you’re there.”

  She had a TV screen and a little toggle like on a video game that she could use to move the camera. Mostly she scanned in an arc, looking forward. Now and then, she looked to the side.

  One of the other technicians were monitoring some instruments, while the other two were standing with Jake, shooting the breeze.

  After a half hour the woman spoke out of the blue. woman spoke. “We are seeing an indicated airspeed of 45 knots. That means that we have about another ten minutes of hang time left.”

  “That was quick,” Ezra said.

  “The wind is about twenty knots, at our operational altitude. I estimate, so that 45 knots means about seventy miles an hour ground speed. But, there is something else.” She grinned at Ezra. “You are about to see a state secret of the Republic of Israel. Reveal it and the Mossad will hunt you down.”

  She laughed again, and flipped a switch. A circular instrument lit up, and a radar sweep starting painting a picture of the UAV’s area.

  “Ah, Sergeant Lawson! You should be one of us! Less than a degree off course and barely two miles distant.” She consulted her instruments. “I will be able to give you two minutes over the target. Any more and...”

  “Please,” he said.

  The camera swung and then zoomed in on a ship, one that was certainly the one they’d seen the night before.r />
  “The bird has an inertial tracker,” she said abstractedly as the UAV headed towards the ship. “It is rarely accurate, because it doesn’t deal well with wind gusts.” She lined the UAV up better on the ship, and it seemed to slow as the UAV approached. The camera changed again, the detail on the ship becoming exquisite. There was a man at the helm, two more standing a few feet away, and a half dozen others, idling around the deck.

  “The ship is, by my estimate, thirty-five miles away, on a south southwest bearing,” she continued. “It is currently making about four knots, and appears to be on a run to the west southwest. If you assume that they are making ninety-degree tacks that would be consistent with a base course of about 285 degrees magnetic.”

  She did something else and sighed. “There is no land on the horizon in any direction -- I understand that the horizon is a little further away than I’m used to.”

  “Indeed so,” Ezra told her. “The planet’s circumference is about forty thousand miles, we figure.”

  “Eighteen miles, then,” she told Ezra. “Obviously, if there were mountains, we could see them further away.”

  “I’m amazed you could put radar on something that small,” Ezra told her.

  She smiled politely at him. “You must have misunderstood. I said, ‘Really dear, we have to stop meeting like this.’”

  She had been watching the scene on the video screen that changed hardly at all. “Anything more and we risk the bird. I don’t think it’s likely we’ll get more intel that what we’ve got.”

  “Bring it back, then,” Ezra told her.

  She nodded, and one of the others did something with the other console as the view spun beneath the UAV. The camera turned and focused back on the ship, already further away.

  “Sergeant,” the woman told him. Ezra turned to her.

  “The IDF loses people to kidnappings every year or two. We don’t like it even a little bit. Sometimes we get our people back; all too frequently we get only pieces of them. It is a sore point with us, you understand.”

  “Yes, we don’t leave people behind, either. Not if we can help it.”

  She nodded. “And we all know that sometimes we can’t help it. I was told to use my own judgment. That ship out there is moving very slowly, Sergeant. We have another bird -- a very much more secret bird -- that we can employ. Baby Eli.”