by The Cool War
They did not have time to turn around. He heard the clatter of the canisters, the puff of their explosion, a few grunts and gasps, and then the sound of bodies falling.
When he was sure they were all out cold for at least an hour, Hake reclimbed the ladder, picked up the rubbery wads of plastic and the fitted box of detonators and pushed them into the sea, along with as many machine-pistols as he could collect. Then he descended the ladder again, stepping on a thigh here, a spine there, and stumbled through the black tunnel to the control dugout. What he would do when he got to the dugout he was not sure, but at least he could dump the problem on whoever was there. He tripped over a body just before the end—how had anyone managed to get that far?—and reached for the door.
Just as Yosper’s voice said softly behind him, muffled through a mask, “You know, Hake, I thought you might try something. Now open the door real easy. What you feel in your back isn’t sleepy gas.”
Hake stopped still. “You can’t blame me for trying,” he said.
“Wrong, boy,” sighed Yosper. “I can kill you for trying.”
Even as Hake started to move, one part of his mind was assessing what Yosper had said: how true it was, but also how irrelevant. If he had a choice, he could not find it.
Three weeks Under the Wire are not much to change the pacific habits of a lifetime, but they had been hard weeks.
The lessons stuck. Fall forward, kick back; twist around, grab for a leg. Hake executed the maneuver flawlessly. His heel caught Yosper just where it was supposed to, lifting the old man off the ground. Yosper brayed sharply, and something rattled away down the corridor as Hake jerked at the leg nearest his flailing arms. The training paid off. The gun was gone, they were hand to hand and Hake had every advantage of youth and size and strength.
But Yosper had been through the same course, more than once, over years. Yosper’s skinny knee caught Hake on the side of the jaw, wrenching his head around on his neck and knocking the nose-mask free.
There was a maneuver for that, too. Stop breathing. Find the enemy’s nearest vital point, any of the dozen quick and dirty vital points, put him out, get the mask—it was all very clear in Hake’s mind, and his body did its best to carry it out. Yosper was before him. The frail old man was incredibly resilient. He could not win against Hake in a one-on-one, but he didn’t have to. He only had to delay a decision until Hake was forced to breathe. Hake was straining with every muscle to claw at Yosper’s throat, and then, without transition, he was dazedly aware that he was being dragged by the collar into the control room. I did my best, he thought clearly. But what was the good of that, when his best had failed?
Yosper dropped him, and there was silence.
Why silence?
Hake tried to slow the spinning of his head to see what was going on, but nothing was going on. No one was in the room. The monitors were untended, the seats empty. He heard the distant whir of ventilators and the dusty faint crackle of electronics and nothing else, and over him Yosper was standing in a gunfighter crouch.
But there seemed to be no target for his gun; and then a voice, a familiar voice, the voice of one of the Reddis, said, “Put your gun down, Medina,” and all around the room men and women were standing up from behind the monitors and desks, and each one held a gun and every gun was pointed precisely at Yosper’s head.
*
It seemed to Hake that he had been hurting, one way or another, for half his life—had in fact been, most of the time, all the days and weeks since March. The tussle with Yosper had reawakened all of the left-over aches and bruises from Rome and Capri, and his nose was bleeding again. But someone gentle and sweet-smelling was cradling his head and soothing away his pains.
He made the effort to get his head together. “Hello, Leota,” he managed.
“Oh, Horny,” she crooned, rocking him. It was a pleasant place to be and gave him little incentive to want to move, but he struggled up anyway, breathing deeply to try to get the last of the sleep gas out of his blood. The room was full of people, not only Leota and both the Reddis, but the man from the employment office, Robling, and eight or ten others. Not counting Yosper, who was sullenly spread-eagled against a wall while one of the women pulled articles of armament out of every pocket and crevice.
“You mean we made it?” he demanded fuzzily.
“Well, so far,” said Leota, dabbing at the blood on his lip. “Somebody’s collecting all the casualties in the corridor; if we can take care of the yacht… and then clear up some of the other loose ends…” But all the ends were loose in Hake’s gassy brain. He concentrated on trying to follow what she was telling him. The Reddis had set most of it up, somehow assisted by the personnel man, Robling; they had faked a fire at the hotel and got everyone evacuated, and in the confusion Leota and Alys had been liberated. They were all very pleased with Hake, who had apparently done his part superbly, even if he hadn’t quite known what it was.
But Subirama Reddi snarled shrilly, “We waste time! The yacht is still out there. It must be decoyed in just now.”
Across the room the mask of fury on Yosper’s face cleared. He nodded agreeably to the woman guarding him and stepped forward to the radio. Hake managed to get there before him. “Not you, Yosper,” he said. “You’re a staunch old spook and I don’t trust what you’d say. I’ll do it.”
“Then do it!” snapped Rama Reddi. “Let us complete this and get to the matter of payment!”
Leota cut in. “Absolutely. Go ahead, Horny. Tell them the control room’s secure.” She squeezed his shoulder warningly.
Someone handed him a microphone. He cleared his throat, looked around and then shrugged. “Curmudgeon?” he called. “Sheik Hassabou? Somebody! Come on in, Curmudgeon. We’re all buttoned up and waiting for you.”
The radio op clicked off the microphone. “Don’t answer anything they say,” she warned. “Tell them your receiver’s bad. Tell them—”
She was interrupted by Curmudgeon’s voice from the speaker overhead. “Is that you, Hake?” he demanded. “What’s going on? Where’s Jasper Medina?”
“Don’t answer,” snapped the radio op, but Hake had no intention of answering. They waited, while Curmudgeon vainly tried to raise them and Yosper snarled and fumed from the wall. With Leota’s hand clutching his, Hake could believe that all this was real. Reasonable, no. What strange charades they were playing! But all his life had become such a series of charades since the Team had drafted him into their world of outrageous fantasy. It was no more incredible that this patchwork operation should succeed than that spooks and spies should be playing such wretched pranks to begin with.
“Now do it again,” Leota ordered. “Talk him in!”
The operator thumbed the switch and Hake took a deep breath. “This is Hake,” he said steadily, over the shrill complaints from the radio. “I can’t get an answer out of you, but Yosper ordered me to tell you we’re all ready. The control dugout is secure, so is the thermal tower. We’re waiting.”
For a minute or more there was no sound at all. Then Leota sighed, her breath tickling Hake’s ear as they both bent over the radar tube. “I think the silly fool is going to do it,” she whispered.
On the display they could see the green shadow of the tower, the headlands, the barges waiting with their globular tanks for their cargoes of LHa… and, yes, cautiously nosing around the headland, the sharp, slim shape of Hassabou’s yacht.
“He’s coming in!” Robling exulted. “Okay now, you tower operators, do your stuff!”
The dark woman at the hologram monitor reached for her controls. Out of the heavily screened slit at the front of the dugout Hake could see the violet target hologram skid across the sky. Behind, through the clear-glass clerestory panes on the dune side, the sunplants began to nod toward a new focus. Their response time was slow. It would take several minutes, at least, for perfect collimation. But they were moving.
It all happened very slowly. The sunplants could throw ninety-nine percent of
the solar flux onto a target—but not all at once. For the next little while they would be tracking in. First they would create a wide patch of warmth, then a swath hundreds of yards wide of discomfort, then a spot smaller than the side of the yacht in which no unprotected thing could survive.
The brilliant star of white at the top of the tower began to blur and darken.
The one-legged man and the controller whispered anxiously to each other. This was a critical time. The cavity receptor was designed to handle intense heat. The structure around it was not. As the spot defocused, thousands, then millions, of watts of heat struck at the polished Fresnel shapes of reflecting steel. The energy of ten thousand horses assaulted each metal vane. But the defocusing was fast enough, barely. By the time the temperature monitor began to redline, the spot had spread. The warning trace wobbled, held steady, then began to decline.
And the yacht stopped and dropped its anchors. The woman at the hologram nodded to Hake.
“Go ahead, Horny,” said Leota. “You can be the one to tell them what’s happening.”
“My pleasure,” Hake grinned as he began to understand. Then, into the transmitter, “Curmudgeon! Put your sun glasses on!”
A startled grunt from the radio. Then silence. Then Curmudgeon’s voice, thick and nasty, “Hake, your last chance. What the hell’s going on?”
“We’re zeroing in on you, Curmudgeon. You have one minute to abandon ship.” The yacht was growing brighter every second, as if stagehands were switching kliegs on it from some invisible rafters. “Jump off on the far side,” Hake added. “Our aim might not be too good.”
The one-legged man scowled and motioned fiercely for Hake to turn off the transmitter. “Watch what you say to them!” he snapped. “They might still get away from the beam—” He stared anxiously out the darkened slit, then began to smile. “I think they missed their chance,” he said. “That ship’s as good as sunk.”
The receiver was rattling with Curmudgeon’s voice. “Hake, I don’t know what you think you’re doing, but if you think you’re going to—”
“Not going to, Curmudgeon. It’s already done. You have maybe thirty seconds, then I think your hydrogen tank may blow.” The sunbeam was contracting and brightening now. Individual shafts of merged beams dipped and wobbled across the surface of the sea, and a palest plume of steam shimmered off some wave-tops. “Fifteen seconds!”
From the corner where he was roped to a chair came Yosper’s voice, turgid with rage, “Hake, you little bastard, you’re going to wish you were never born.”
There was a confused babble of voices from the radio, and then it clicked off again. Even through the grayed glass it was becoming painful to look at the ship. Smoke rose from its side. The paint scorched away. Glass was shattering in the portholes, and the gay line of flags at its masts blew away as ash. The ninety-percent concentration disk shrank to a thousand milliradians, five hundred, three hundred—
The globe of liquid hydrogen on the afterdeck never did blow. It did not have time. Before the heat of its shell boiled off enough of the LH2 within to shatter the valves, the ninety-percent disk had shrunk away from it, narrowing in on the center of the hull, just above the waterline. Hake could not see that the metal was glowing. The reflectance from the dot of light far overpowered the mere incandescence of steel. But suddenly a dollop of softened metal slid away and splashed into the sea, with an immense production of steam. The vessel rocked wildly and began to settle in the water.
Standing at the darkened window, Hake had a sudden stab of concern. “When it sinks, what’ll happen to the people in the water?”
Robling grinned and pointed to the hologram monitor. Already the purple crosshairs were climbing the sky, up and away from the ship itself, and the spot was defocusing again. “Anyway, they’re in the shadow. It won’t go down for half an hour,” he said.
The woman at the control board snapped, “And about time! Do you know what this little game is costing? We do fifteen million dollars a day, and we’ve already lost an hour’s production—”
“Cheap at the price,” said the one-legged man. “Let’s call the cavalry in.”
“I already have,” she said. The long-range screen picked them up first, but as soon as Hake’s eyes recovered from staring at the bright spot on the side of the dying ship he could see them. A destroyer and two gunboats of the A1 Halwani “navy”—probably they were the A1 Halwani navy —coming in over the horizon, with white bow-waves to show their racing speed.
Hake put his arm around Leota, beside him at the window, and said wonderingly, “We’ve done it.”
“Not quite,” said Rama Reddi, cradling a machine-pistol in his arm; and from the other side of the control room, his brother said: “That is so, Hake. You have still to settle with us.”
There was more happening than Hake understood. It was not a new situation; he had been living under those conditions for months, but familiarity did not make it easier. Leota rescued him. “Of course,” she said, pressing against his arm. “Horny knows. We promised to give you the codes and the keys, and we wilL”
Yosper yelped venomously, “Slut! You’re fooling around with the most muscle in the world!”
“We’ll just have to take that chance,” said Leota, “although your friends don’t really look that dangerous right now.” And they were not. They were doing the best they could, and even in rubber boats or struggling in the water itself they were far from toothless. There were half a dozen separate struggles going on in the tiny view of the CRT display. A1 Halwani’s naval might was up to the challenge. They lobbed vomit-gas grenades at the Team members in the water, and power launches fished them out, one by one, some still struggling, some without fight, scooped out of the water like guppies in a breeding tank.
“We are still waiting,” hissed Rama Reddi, meaning that they did not want to wait at all.
“As soon as we get this nailed down,” Leota promised. One of the launches was coming in to beach itself before them, and a group of sloppy-looking, but quite efficient, A1 Halwani sailors dragged two bound figures into the dugout.
“Now we’re getting somewhere,” said Leota with satisfaction. “This one I know—” she touched the contemptuously angry Sheik Hassabou with the toe of her shoe—“but who’s this other creep?”
“Why, that is one of our leading American sabotage specialists,” Hake said. “Good to see you again, Curmudgeon.”
The spy was in no position to act, lying on his belly, hands cuffed behind him, one side of his bristly beard slicked down with his own blood. But he could talk. “Every one of you,” he said, “is dead. You won’t see another sun rise.”
Estimating the odds, Hake was not very sure Curmudgeon was wrong. Tied and helpless as he was, there was behind him the immense mastodon strength of the Team, and if Curmudgeon thought it capable of squashing all these impromptu opponents Hake could see no good reason to disagree.
Robling and the hologram operator were trying to get everyone out of the way while they got to the serious business of getting the thermal tower back into production. The Reddis did not want to be out of the way. They had not relinquished their machine-pistols, and they were whispering to each other in their own language, eyes taking in everything that was going on. It would not be possible to stall them very long. But then what?
Hake’s head was beginning to clear. It didn’t help. He was playing in a game whose rules had never been explained; worse, he couldn’t tell which team the players were on. Once upon a time he had thought his life as a clergyman was unbearably complex. Here in this strange-looking room on the Persian Gulf complexity was cubed, muddle was confounded, a simple soul like himself could not tell friend from foe. Ranting Yosper, blustering Curmudgeon, silent and deadly Hassabou were easy to diagnose as enemies. But were the Reddis friends? Unthinkable! Robling, the hologram operator Omaya, the other strangers? Apparently they were. And Leota, encouraging him to fulfill his bargain with the Reddis, surely she was a friend? Of cour
se she was, Hake assured himself firmly, at least a friend; but that was the only “of course” he could find.
Leota, at least, seemed to know exactly what to do. “Let’s get on with it,” she said, smiling cheerfully at the Hydro Fuels crew.
“About time,” grunted Robling, his eyes on the screen where the purple hologram was sliding back to where it belonged. “I think we’re okay now. As far as I’m concerned, you people can get on with your private business.”
“Here? At this place, with all these witnesses?” Subirama Reddi demanded. “Are you trying to cheat us?”
Leota said firmly, “The deal was that Hake would give you the information, that’s all. Said nothing about when or where.”
“But—these men are from the Team! In one minute they can change all the codes, and it will be worthless!”
Leota shook her head. “Tell you what. As soon as you’ve got what you want you can take off. Nobody else will leave here for an hour. Anyway, the prisoners aren’t going to be talking to anyone for a while—they’ll be in jail in A1 Halwani, and I don’t think they’ll have any visitors.”
“Not for twenty-four hours,” the one-legged man said, grinning. “I can promise that.”
The brothers looked at each other, then shrugged. ‘Twenty-four hours. No less. In that case he may proceed,” Rama Reddi said grudgingly.
“How come nobody asks me if I want to proceed?” Hake demanded, anger spilling out.
Leota put her hand on his arm. “Because we made a deal,” she said. “Go ahead, Horny. The whole thing. Even tell them about your thumbprint, I promise that part’s going to be all right.”
Hake took a deep breath. Everybody was looking at him. For the center of attention, he seemed to have very little free will about what he did, and very little time to decide what he wanted. Trading with the Reddis was not the kind of thing he could take pride in. Thwarting one little plan of the Team’s was too tiny a victory to last, and the future beyond this moment looked unpromising— “Do it, Hake!” snarled Leota, and her eyes were urgent.