The Spy I Loved

by Dusty Miller

  He got out, tying the boat off temporarily and lugging the big bags into the underbrush. Next it was the motor. By this time Liam was sweating, possibly even swearing. The bank was higher and steeper than his last landing.

  He quickly undid his special knot and dragged the boat, battering it up and over the heap of boulders that made up the shoreline, the thing squeaking and thumping over every single blasted one of them.

  The bushes were all smashed down. He had taken the precaution of picking a spot twenty metres from his first landing. He did his best to prop them all up again. Where the grey bark had been peeled from white wood there wasn’t much he could do about it. After another long listen, he decided on taking a break down in amongst the boulders. Pulling out a powerful and lightweight pair of binoculars, he swept the hillsides and the adjacent forest, what he could see of it from his low position.

  A minute or two of that and he knew it was fruitless. If there was somebody out there, he’d never spot them if they had even half a brain. The odds of hearing them were somewhat greater. He tried the headphones and an amplified digital microphone. Liam got nothing but a cacophony of birds, insects, and the miscellaneous noises of the forest at midday. The longer he stayed there, the greater the chances were that someone would come along in a boat. Even the most innocent of people would pick the worst possible time.

  He had eaten and he didn’t have to go to the bathroom.

  Liam Kimball uttered a sigh. He reached for the nearest duffel. The whole problem with sneaking around and avoiding observation was that it rubbed off on the psyche. A man began to feel guilty, furtive. A creeping kind of paranoia set in.

  A person spent too much time alone, looking over their shoulder, not accepting anything or anyone at face value.

  If the average bear in the street walked up and asked what he was doing, and if he told them he was searching for a satellite, they would probably just laugh. They would turn around and walk away. One tended to forget that, but their subjects were an entirely different sort. One tended to obsess about the subject.

  It isolated you, and that reinforced the problem. In the end, there was only the work and that great divide between you and regular people.

  He did the work so that people like Lindsey could be safe, and live peaceful lives, for the most part without worry or knowledge of that other world, that darker, harder world where things weren’t nearly so rational.

  Sure.

  Sure we do.

  He felt pretty low for a moment, then shook it off.

  This was no way to be.

  He might as well get suited up and into the water. The sled, outwardly a copy of a popular sport model, needed assembly and checking before he would trust it any distance. Once assembled, he had some ideas on hiding the sled for future convenience. Of necessity, this would be a remote location, as far from here as possible. This would entail the underwater tow of an unmanned sled, which was always fun. His machine had ten times the power of the civilian model, which meant he could net a heavy object and bring it to the surface. He could go all day on a charge and still have something left in reserve. Completely programmable, it was a complete weapons system in its own right. There were one or two tools aboard, the kind that civilian sled designers could only dream about and drool over.

  He’d had one of the older sleds break down in a frozen fjord in Norway a few years back. The thing was based on available naval torpedoes of its day and weighed a tonne—literally.

  He’d nearly caught his death of cold that time.

  ***

  Liam was using the latest, most experimental model of a tried and true concept. The problem, as he had explained to Q-Branch in London, the quartermaster people, was that the more vital bits of the satellite, scattered from here to hell and gone, were fairly heavy. The Ministry was good in that it did consult with field agents on development of new systems and new ways of doing business.

  The EMERALD satellite before re-entry had massed well over four hundred kilograms. The sensitivity of its surveillance systems relied on size, number of sensors, and overall power. On initial impact with the upper atmosphere, the satellite had broken up into partes tres, (as Caesar would have said, once again showing the benefit of a public-school education), plus several hundred smaller bits. Then there was a lot of what could best be described as alloy cornflakes for the remainder, going down to the size, not of the head of the pin, but the other end—the point of the pin. Then there were the more esoteric, forensic traces, radiation, smudges of insulator and plastic, rubber and silicone. There were heavier metals and rare earth elements—all of which could be traced on the ground using relatively simply instrumentation. There were two positively identified impact points, hard rocks under a little soil contributing to the satellite’s destruction as well as the impressive bounce effect of the remainder. Dogs had been trained to search for such debris, and were at least as effective as other methods. Hence their map of the impact debris field.

  It was the sort of instrumentation that any self-respecting rogue nation or paranoid raving lunatic with a bit of money and desperate to rule the world would be likely to have.

  They took him by surprise. He was cruising at two knots, three metres below the surface, heading for the GPS coordinates of his primary target. The ominous shadows coming up from behind elongated, the coruscating light-beams showing shapes against the pale backdrop of the bottom. The wavering feet kicked, revealing forms that could only be enemy frogmen.

  They were above and behind him. The sun had given them away, in a complete reversal of aerial combat doctrine.

  Cranking the throttle hand-grip to the max, he pushed down on the handlebars. The nose came up under full power. The machine pulled up and around. Twisting his upper torso, Liam rolled out in an underwater Immelmann turn that made his lower spine crack as he rotated. He didn’t reach for his own knife just yet. To go one-handed at this speed was to lose control. There was no chance to arm, aim and launch any of the onboard weapons. It was all he could do to hang on.

  He must have startled them with his quick reflex action. The first dart missed, flying over his shoulder a good two feet up. The other hit the poly-glass windscreen with a loud snap and sprang off into the brilliant glare of the water’s surface.

  Damn the torpedoes.

  Always turn into the threat. That part of doctrine still held good.

  ***

  Sending the sled straight at the assailant on the left, Liam let go and kicked hard, drawing the Ka-Bar knife out of its ankle scabbard. He closed and quickly grappled with the one on the right. The fellow was above him, desperately trying to reload his weapon when he should have been pulling a blade. Going around in a slow spiral, the low whine of the sled receded in the direction of the deep water and the shoreline along the far side of the bay. The other guy was still kicking. He was swimming on his back and going backwards, ten metres away, busy trying to reload and watch Liam at the same time.

  Liam had his man by the regulator. The diver dropped the spear-gun, panicked at the close proximity. Liam pulled the rig out of the man’s mouth and stabbed him hard in the belly.

  With a left-handed punch, a kick of the fins, and a sudden hundred-eighty degree rotation, Liam grabbed the struggling man. There was still a trail of small bubbles coming up from where the spear-gun had hit mud. Liam held the man down in spite of his contortions, in an agony of pain and desperately trying to get to the surface now. He dragged Liam upwards, and there was only one thing to do. Liam pulled him in close, stabbing again and again. The other diver was still out there in the murk. Liam had to let him go. There was a silver flash a foot to his right and he knew the second shot from the other diver had missed by just that much.

  He dropped the knife when a sudden smash of the dying man’s knee caught him in the funny bone, paralyzing his arm. He fought his way back in close, the man contorting in a paroxysm of pain, panic and fear. Liam would choke him to death if he had to, and there was the knife on the guy’s
ankle.

  The body went limp in his hands.

  Mercifully, it was over.

  Liam pulled a dart from the pouch on the dead guy’s hip, his hand still buzzing and half numb. The man hung vertically. His face was tilted down in the water, arms floating upwards like a seagull. Liam didn’t have time for a good look. Blood clouded the water. There were clicks from not far away.

  That would be a spear-gun being reloaded.

  Liam bent double, stuck his head between his feet and kicked hard for the bottom.

  The gleam of the weapon beckoned from between the ubiquitous sunken trees and logs on the lake bottom. It was dead simple. Gas-charged, the CO2 cylinder was clearly visible. He was familiar with the type. He jammed in the dart, cocked it with a quick push and found his target. Straightening, he kicked forwards, down low in the weeds. He was just lined up with the figure, floating in the darkness. The guy was down low and down-sun, having learned the harsh lesson. The arm raised and the man tried to steady himself in spite of the fear. He had the better shot with the light behind Liam.

  Liam fired first. The guy flinched and then tried to run. It had caught him just above the hip. The other fellow tried, but it was futile. He couldn’t line up the shot and he knew it. He was kicking and clutching and screaming into his flooding mouthpiece. He was desperately trying to swim backwards and shoot. He pulled the trigger. Liam looked around for the dead body in case he needed another dart. The projectile passed a few metres to his left and disappeared into the lightening depths nearer to shore. The man dropped the spear-gun and cleared his regulator with a quick tap on the purge button.

  Liam’s knife was still down there. He felt naked and lost without it. Seek and you shall find, for there it was, a bare metre and a half from where he’d recovered the gun.

  The other fellow was swimming away. Liam forgot about finding another dart for the gun on the dead one’s belt. He swam after him, the knife out in front and with the benefit of not being wounded.

  The dark face turned and the eyes were big and round inside the mask.

  Liam, still swimming, jerked a thumb at the surface, holding up for half a second to see if the guy would surrender.

  No such luck.

  The man put his head down and thrashed his fins in renewed desperation.

  The enemy diver still had a knife on his ankle. To reach and pull it would be to slow him down.

  The other guy knew that, of course.

  Liam kicked strongly, cursing in a small corner of his mind. The sound of at least one boat motor, a big one, was getting louder and louder. His breathing was something else. The other guy was loud in his ears, trailing massive clouds of bubbles. For a man with a spear sticking out of his lower abdomen, he swam very well. His left hand clung to the aluminum shaft, and Liam could imagine the pain as it worked away against muscle, expanding and contracting. The man took another look back.

  Liam was five metres away and closing. Three metres.

  Two.

  One.

  Hard rubber fins were right in his face. If Liam wasn’t careful, it would knock his mask off and then he’d be in trouble. This guy wasn’t dead yet, and Liam pulled up, losing a welcome bit of ground as he did. He could take him, but it had its risks. Better to follow and let him bleed out. Off in the distance, there came the sound of a thin soda can being crushed underfoot—probably his very expensive sled hitting the rocky shoreline. The bottom tended to be a lot softer. That would make more of a whump. Hopefully the taxpayers were getting their money’s worth. One kill, a hundred a fifty thousand. Might as well go for the deuce.

  Cut the price in half…amortization.

  It was all in a day’s work.

  Liam, pulling strongly on his breathing apparatus, settled in for a cruise of whatever duration.

  The guy was tiring, and his head went left and right. In sheer panic, he had gone straight out, into the deepest part of the bay. The water was getting darker and darker. If he wanted land he was going to have to turn. He risked a look behind and didn’t see Liam anywhere. Liam was very cool in the head at that moment. He had to be. There were little trickles of blood still coming out in short, sharp spurts, blurring off into nothing as it diluted, mixing with the lake water.

  You, sir, are going to die. The only question was the exact moment.

  The water was so deep any shadows from having the sun up there were gone.

  The man looked left, right, left again, almost sure that his pursuer wouldn’t have just stopped, and that was when Liam Kimball pounced.

  If the boat entering the end of their little arm of the lake was more of the enemy, a backup or a recovery team perhaps, there was not a moment to waste.

  Chapter Ten

  When in doubt, go for the jugular.

  What goes around comes around.

  He shuddered in a kind of professional empathy.

  The sound of the new threat was much closer. They were just chugging in on idle. He hovered in a fog of blood, then went to work.

  Wrestling the convulsing body of the second diver to the bottom, he weighted it with a length of decades-waterlogged cedar. It took but seconds. Liam dropped low, hopefully well camouflaged by the changing light and cloud patterns on the dappled bottom. It was damnably shallow, and he checked the gauge.

  Seven and a half metres, maybe eight.

  The sun went in again. He prayed that it would stay in.

  Here the bottom was half sand, half weeds, much of it criss-crossed by a seemingly endless array of short, small but dense logs.

  He stuck to the bottom like glue, kicking like mad to get back there. He’d been so intent on diver number two that he had no idea of the actual distance traveled. There was a dark ridge as the bottom sloped up, then it was sand, pale and greenish yellow. Trailing lengths of long leafy weeds reached out, seeking to entangle. They were surprisingly tough in spite of being constantly waterlogged, with little air bladders strung along their tendrils. It was terribly bright to his left, where the sun was out again.

  If diver number one was floating, and he’d been headed upwards when last seen, even the most self-absorbed angler would be bound to spot him. Imagine snagging something like that. A dark vertical slash, black neoprene, caught his attention. He kicked as hard as he could, counting off seconds. He grabbed the dead diver, pulling him down into some blessedly thick weeds. The fellow had drifted on wind and waves in the few minutes he’d been gone. They were in three or four metres of water. It was unfortunately crystal clear, with the marsh across the head of the bay a sign that it was fed by its own small river. Otherwise the shore tended to be all rock, but the map (which he was getting to know pretty well) showed a dotted blue line up there. It was an escape route of sorts. He’d belly crawl if he had to. It was a valuable skill.

  The creeks and streams he’d noted were clean, cold and with a fairly good-tasting water in them.

  At least I won’t have to go thirsty,

  Liam sat on the man, sticking him to the bottom. Any rocks around were buried in silt or under weeds and dead leaves from the season before. The logs were heavily grown-over. To disturb them would be to create a smokescreen of silt. There was a nice thought.

  A smokescreen. It was a bit late for that.

  He straddled the dead man, watching in a kind of disbelief as the bottom of a boat approached. The visibility was easily fifty metres, more even. It was like he could almost see the lures trailing out behind on the outriggers, but it couldn’t be. This bay was too shallow, it was all in the imagination. The motor stopped, an anchor was cast out, and the boat rocked with someone moving around on board. It couldn’t be twenty metres away. Liam was confronted with the reality of someone standing on the prow. They were shielding their eyes from the sun, which picked this exact moment to come out from the clouds. Somebody up there with a good hunting rifle could pick him off if they could see him. His breath was very loud in his ears. The body under him was warm, still leaking blood, and attracting a small school o
f curious fish. Waves and small currents were enough to make the body come alive with movements that were spooky when you were riding him around the waist.

  There was this feeling that he would come back to life, perhaps being merely stunned or in shock.

  Whoever it was up there, they were staring fixedly in his direction. Ripples on the surface went glass-like one second and maddeningly opaque the next as the angles changed and the surface heaved. It was surreal when something moved in his peripheral vision, causing his heart to flutter and then he saw any number of fish.

  It gave him a whole new perspective on the yellow perch; their life, their environment. The knife was in the scabbard where it wouldn’t flash in the sun.

  With his hand on the hilt, wishing he’d paid more attention and had the sense to recover one of the spear-guns, he waited.

  He wasn’t making bubbles and he could turn on the heat if necessary. He’d cool off quick now that he’d stopped swimming. His gear was state of the art, not that a grenade couldn’t take him out in a heartbeat.

  He was on a totally different system. Cold as it was, he’d stay down there all day. He’d been hungry before and could relieve himself inside the suit if he had to. It was better to retreat into the bulrushes while he still had a minute. The water was deep enough, and the fellow was sure as shooting going to fire up that little battery-powered electric trolling motor and come in for a better look.

  They had the smell of someone wary of ambush.

  ***

  “Jenkins. Siss-Boom, Bah.”

  Liam spoke softly into his device, watching the woman on the boat through dense reeds. The lady had heard him, no doubt of that, but no shots, no grenades had come.

  “Rock the Casbah.”

  A smile of relief crossed his features. Liam nodded. Only so many people knew that.