The Mirror Maze

by James P. Hogan

  “I wish a UFO would drop some girls here. Think of what it would do for the place.”

  “Listen to him. One day out and he’s horny already.”

  “The girls in Marseilles are supposed to be good, I’m told.”

  “What good is that to me? I don’t have a dick that will reach to Marseilles.”

  “You don’t? Really? Listening to you, I always thought you had.”

  “He told me that when they circumcised him it weighed two kilograms.”

  “That was because they threw the wrong piece away.”

  “I met an American girl in Tel Aviv in October. Did I ever tell you about her?”

  “Only a hundred and twenty-seven times, I think.”

  “She was a nurse…”

  Ehud Rachmin came over and squatted down by Mel. “How is it going?”

  “Pretty good.”

  “How are the feet?”

  “I taped them up. They should be okay now.”

  “We have seven hours of march tonight, and the same back again tomorrow night. Do you think you’re up to it?”

  “I’ll manage.”

  “You know, it wouldn’t be too late to change the roster. You could remain here with Rafael’s squad if you wish. Nobody would think any the less of you. You’ve done very well, especially getting up the cliff.”

  “Is that a polite order?”

  “No. Just an offer.”

  Mel looked up and shook his head. “I was included because I might be useful to have around when you collect Mustapha, and especially if there’s any problem getting him out. If I’m here at all, that’s where I need to be. I’ll be okay.”

  Ehud clapped him lightly on the shoulder and nodded. “Good man.” He got up and moved away to join Zvi, who was checking the radio reception.

  Meanwhile the talk had turned to America and its recent election.

  “How do you feel about the Constitutionals, Mohican?” Jacob asked. “Are you for them?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “So Henry Newell will do a lot of good, you think?” Meir said.

  Dave Fenner, who was checking magazine clips nearby, saw no reason not to give Mel’s image another boost. “Mohican has met him,” he threw in. “I mean personally.”

  “Really?” Haim said. Everyone looked impressed.

  “How was that?” Jacob asked.

  Mel thought for a second, perplexed, and then said, “He was the one who sent me over here.” The others smiled and accepted it as a polite way of telling them to mind their own business.

  “I hear so much about prices and taxes and wages, but I’m still not sure what they’re trying to do,” Haim said. “How would you sum it up, so that someone like me understands it?”

  “It’s actually very simple,” Mel answered. “People are better qualified to run their own lives than governments are. And if they’re not, they soon will be if they’re allowed to get some practice. In other words, individual freedom and free enterprise.”

  “I thought that leads to capitalist monopolies.”

  “If it does, then you don’t have free enterprise. But the answer to too much private power isn’t to have too much state power. Too much power concentrated anywhere is bad. Period. People don’t want their lives planned and regulated to be efficient as if they were parts of machines. They want to feel they’ve done well by their own efforts. They might not have everything or be everything, but they like to be able to say, 7 did it.’ ”

  “You sound like a professional talker,” Meir said. “You’re in the wrong place here.”

  Mel shrugged. “I’ve already told you that. I live behind a desk.”

  Meir grinned at what had become a standard joke. “Oh yes, of course. And what do you do behind your desk?”

  “I’m a lawyer.”

  “Right,” Jacob said. “And you bring them to trial, and then you’re the judge, and after that you’re the executioner too, yes?”

  Everyone laughed.

  • • •

  They moved out shortly after dusk, seven of them now, and descended the reverse slope of the ridge. Then came another ascent, not steep, but long and tiring. At first Mel’s stiffness was worse than he had realized, and for a while his anxiety increased that perhaps his optimism had been misplaced. But after a couple of miles his muscles loosened up, and he fell into the rhythm again. The sore spots on his feet continued to nag, but at least he no longer had the sensation of them being rubbed raw and sticky in his socks. If he’d thought about it, he could have taped the vulnerable areas before leaving base, he reflected ruefully.

  Now that the notion had had time to sink in, he could accept that Mustapha might be Brett. For over two months, ever since Stephanie had told him her story in Boston in early November, although they’d had immediate doubts that what had happened to Brett could have been accidental, they had accepted that he was dead. The brutal murder of Eva hadn’t been a figment of anyone’s imagination. It had brought home to them that they were dealing with people who didn’t hesitate to kill, and the knowledge had skewed their thinking.

  If it did turn out to be Brett, then another belief that Mel had been clinging to would have been vindicated, too. He had been unable to reconcile what he knew of Brett with a deliberate betrayal of the nation, and had remained convinced that Brett must have been tricked into it somehow. And that appeared to be the case, for if Brett were a knowing ally of the Soviets, why would they have needed to kidnap him? This raised the further question of why they should have chosen to keep him at a remote Palestinian guerrilla base, when they presumably had plenty of more secure and convenient places of their own. The only thing Mel could think of was to make sure that he remained invisible, at least for a while, since he was supposed to be dead. But that would all be resolved shortly.

  They stopped to rest for five minutes, silently, all senses alert now they were nearing the objective. When they resumed the march, the terrain became less broken, the hills bleaker and more rounded. The ground took on a more desertlike quality of stone embedded in hard-packed sand, making the going easier. An endless procession of scattered scrub and thorn plants passed by in the starlight. Then they began climbing again, toward a saddle between two hills rising away ahead into the darkness. Mel found that his mind detached and lost itself in its own thoughts while his body continued to probe ahead, move, and listen under its own reflexes. He lost his sense of time, and was surprised that so little of it seemed to have passed when Ehud called another halt in a small depression beneath a clump of boulders. There was a whispered exchange between him, Zvi, and Rafael, over the map, and then Ehud came over to where Mel was crouching with Dave Fenner and Haim. He informed them that Domino was in the valley that lay on the far side of the saddle.

  They moved on for another twenty minutes, halting again when they reached the saddle crest. The far side of the saddle looked down from a line of low hills over shallow slopes receding to the south. There were lights in the darkness below. Beyond the lights was the black outline of another ridgeline, and to the left, just gloom. Mel found it impossible to judge the distance. Ehud said that the camp was a little over three miles away, and six hundred feet below them. The airstrip was located beyond the camp, on the far side of the ridge. That was where he and C Squad would have to get to by daybreak.

  They set off again, moving westward to the right, following the hill line and maintaining their height. After about thirty minutes they found a suitable place for “Point Purple,” which was where B Squad—Zvi, Haim, Dave, and Mel—who would meet Pierrot and Mustapha, would lie up for the day. It was a small hollow with a reverse slope fringed by a natural parapet of rocks to conceal it from direction of the camp, with the mass of the hill rising to a summit behind. A rock slab that had fallen against another formed a natural recess at the back of the hollow, promising shade as the day warmed up, and cover from above, in the event that anything from the airstrip passed too close.

  There was a final conference t
o run through the procedure one last time, confirm map references and passwords, and synchronize watches. Then Ehud and his two men slipped away into the darkness. According to the plan they would not be seen again until the predawn hours of the next morning, at the rendezvous with Rafael’s group for the helicopter pickup.

  The rest of them stayed awake until dawn to get an early view of the surroundings. As the first light crept down from the ridgelines and across the valley, it uncovered the camp, lying at the bottom of gentle, undulating slopes of scattered rocks and withering thornbushes below them. The ridge behind it, which in the dark and been just an indistinct black mass, was revealed as an abrupt insurrection of red rocky crags and crumbling cliff faces, marching down and nearer from hills away to the left to form a backdrop to the camp. Past the camp to the right, the ridge ended in a spur, jutting out onto a plain carved into irregular blocks by deep, dried-up watercourses.

  Through binoculars, Mel could see the camp buildings and huts behind the wire perimeter fence, guards at the gate, and a truck bumping its way along a dusty road that followed the foot of the ridge away into the distance. There was another track, too, leaving the camp in the opposite direction to go around the spur, into the valley behind, where the end of the airstrip itself was visible. He followed one of the deeper gullies and found the point where the track disappeared down into a fold in the ground, with a glimpse of the first couple of oil drums painted white to mark the bends. Down there would be the bridge underneath which they were to meet Pierrot and Mustapha.

  Mel didn’t do any musing over nature and mysticism in his spell of watch that morning. Now he had seen the objective, he was tensed up and restless to go. He had the feeling that today was going to be a long one.

  CHAPTER 63

  Lying prone in a rock crevice high on the spur overlooking the airstrip from the north, Captain Ehud Rachmin murmured into a tiny, voice-activated tape recorder clipped to his collar in front of his mouth. “The large structure at the far end of the strip is an aircraft hangar. It’s bigger than was previously thought, because the back is dug into the hillside. The doors are partly open, and the nose of an aircraft is visible inside. Estimated size of doors, sixty meters wide, fifteen meters high. There is a tractor outside, and two trucks. The huts immediately to the north appear to be workshops. The constructions five hundred meters to the east consist of pipes and machinery underneath camouflage nets. My guess is that it is a pumping point for fuel tanks buried underground.”

  He lowered the binoculars from his eyes, while beside him, Jacob completed the series of pictures that he had been snapping. “Seventeen through thirty-eight,” Jacob murmured.

  Rachmin turned his mouth toward the recorder again. “Series two, frames seventeen through thirty-eight refer, taken from approximately one and a half kilometers. Reference alpha-romeo-six-two-five, oh-eight-oh-nine hours, January twenty. Now moving down the slope and closer, to view from point Echo Three.” He flipped it off. “Ready?”

  “Just a couple of seconds.” Jacob added a few final details and notes to the map he had sketched and returned the pad to the chest pocket of his smock. “Okay.”

  Rachmin turned on his side and looked over his shoulder at the scarp above and behind them, where Moshe was positioned with an Armalite. Moshe signaled frantically for them to stay down. Ehud tapped Jacob sharply on the shoulder. “Don’t move.”

  “What?”

  “Moshe has seen something.” Ehud read the hand signals: seventy degrees to their left, a little below them, three hundred meters. He raised his head cautiously behind a rock and scanned through his binoculars in the direction indicated. It was no good. Whatever Moshe was indicating was in dead ground from where they were, hidden by a rib of rock. He would have to get onto the rib to see down the other side of it. He signaled his intention up to Moshe. “Stay here,” he muttered to Jacob. “There’s something over those rocks. Cover me while I take a look.”

  Lodging the binoculars inside the neck of his smock and taking up his Uzi, he rolled over the lip of the crevice into the cover of a sand gully, and from there wormed his way on his stomach across to the rib. Then, very carefully, he moved up to a gap between two rocks from where he could look down the other side, and raised his head. They were not alone, it appeared. There were two other figures down there, also armed, and observing the airstrip from behind cover. Ehud brought his binoculars out for a better view of them.

  Their weapons were AKS74 assault rifles, the Soviet replacement for the AK47M. The caps with ear flaps were standard Soviet pattern, and so were the parkas. He identified details of the packs, boots, webbing, and a patch just visible on the shoulder tab of one of them. He watched them for a while, then retraced his path cautiously to where Jacob had been watching.

  “What is it?” Jacob asked as Ehud rolled noiselessly back into the crevice.

  “We have company, two of them.”

  “Who?”

  Ehud frowned to himself for a moment before answering. “I’m certain they’re Russians.”

  “What are they doing?”

  “From the look of it, the same as us.” Ehud’s face took on a puzzled, faraway look.

  “What are you thinking?” Jacob asked.

  Ehud looked at him. “Doesn’t something strike you as very odd?”

  “What?”

  “This is supposed to be a PALP base. The Soviets back and train PALP. Why should they be hiding from them?”

  Jacob chewed his lip, then nodded. “I see what you mean. Yes, it is very odd… What do you make of it?”

  “I don’t know,” Ehud confessed.

  There was a silence. Eventually Jacob said, “There’s only one person around here who seems to know what’s really going on.”

  “You mean Mohican?”

  “Yes.” Jacob waited for a few seconds. When Ehud didn’t respond, he went on. “One of us could go back to Purple and tell him the situation. Let’s see what he makes of it.”

  Ehud considered the possibility but didn’t seem to like it. “It’s an hour away. Then it would be another hour at the least before anyone could get back here.” He indicated the direction of the rib with a nod of his head. “And I can’t believe that those two aren’t part of a larger force. They won’t sit there obligingly for two hours and wait for us.”

  Jacob looked at him suspiciously. “What do you mean, Ehud? What’s going through your mind?”

  Ehud shrugged. “Those Russians are who ought to be talking to Mohican. They could make a lot more sense about why they’re out here than I could right now. So let’s grab them and take them back to him.”

  “Grab them?”

  “Why not? It’s three to two right now, and surprise is with us. But that could change at any time. I say we do it now, while we’ve got the odds.”

  • • •

  The introduction of unducted-fan engines in the midnineties had reduced the fuel costs of commercial flying by almost 30 percent. One result was an increase in the number of nonstop flights being offered over longer ranges. This had been particularly true among the nations aligned with the Soviet bloc, who had taken advantage of the improved economics to establish more direct links between them.

  “Good morning ladies and gentlemen. We’d now like to begin boarding Syrian Arab Airlines Flight twenty-eight, nonstop service to Havana. Would anyone who needs extra time to board the aircraft come to the gate now, please…”

  A stir rippled through the departure lounge at Damascus Airport as the passengers who had been waiting closed books and magazines, stood up to put on coats, and collected together cabin bags and children. Among the first-class passengers at the gate was a tall, middle-aged, sophisticated-looking man with white hair, wearing a navy blazer, who was accompanied by a fashionably dressed woman in a white hat. The man smiled at the attendant as he presented their boarding passes, and wished her a cordial good morning. The attendant returned the smile, and they passed through.

  Sitting out in the lounge
, waiting their turn, were two men in their late twenties, both swarthy-skinned, dark-haired, and wearing light, waist-length jackets and blue jeans.

  Back at the security checkpoint, a man with a mustache, wearing a tan cord jacket and open-neck maroon shirt, was stopped at the machine where carry-on bags were being X-rayed. “I’m sorry, sir, but there’s something in there that we can’t see through at all. Would you open the bag, please?”

  The man smiled sheepishly. “Oh, of course, my disk. I forgot.” He unzipped the bag and exposed a large, gray metal object, about the size of a shoe box, with electrical connectors and a power cord.

  The security guard stared at it nonplussed. “What’s that?”

  “It’s a computer hard-disk—pretty ancient, but it works. There’s delicate machinery inside. I didn’t want to risk it being thrown around.”

  “What does it do?”

  “You connect it to a computer. It stores data, like a tape… I’m an author. That’s what I write my material into.”

  “Can you open it?”

  “Open it? I wouldn’t know how to. Look, it’s all screwed together. You’d ruin it.”

  The guard made a sign, and a supervisor ambled across. “He says it connects to a computer. It’s bolted everywhere.”

  The man in the cord jacket was starting to look worried. “Hey, look, I mean, I’ve got almost a year’s work inside that thing. If you—”

  “That’s all right,” the supervisor said. “Those are standard.” He nodded and waved the man on.

  “Gee, thanks. I think my flight’s boarding.”

  “Have a good trip.”

  Two girls were giggling over something as they waited to pass through the metal-detector frame. “Next please,” the guard said to hurry them.

  The first of them handed a ring of keys and a belt with a heavy metal buckle to the guard, then walked through without incident. The guard returned the items. The second girl handed the guard a large, sealed tin of dates and passed through also. They walked on to the gate, still laughing and giggling.

  As the boarding process continued, the passengers who had shopped in the duty-free store stopped to pick up their purchases, which had been brought out for collection at the jetway in stapled plastic bags. The bags had not passed through a security check between the store and the aircraft. One of the passengers picking up the bags was a man wearing an Iraqi Air Force uniform. The bag that he picked up was different from the others, however. It didn’t contain anything that had been bought at the duty-free store.