The Far Side (91 page)

“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 seconds 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.

“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.”

“We’d appreciate -- I’d appreciate -- any help you can give us,” Ezra told her steadily.  “Andie will appreciate your help in the form of spendable gold and Kris will just grin ear-to-ear.”

She nodded, and motioned to one of the others who spoke into a radio of his own.

“I am, Sergeant, Colonel Irina Levi, of the IDF, on detached duty with Mossad.  You wouldn’t want to spread that around.”

“I never talk about business.”

“I don’t either.  A few years ago I reached a crossroads in my career.  I was told I could become the first Israeli astronaut -- a dream my father had for me since I was a toddler -- or I could go in the direction I have.  My pilot colleagues were -- contemptuous -- of my choice.  Do you know what happened to the man who went in my stead into space?”

Ezra shook his head.

“He was aboard
Columbia
when the space shuttle broke up on reentry.  I, on the other hand, have killed more than a hundred Palestinians who were been raining rockets and mortars on my country.  I never regretted my decision before the accident and I don’t regret it now.”

“Will it affect your decision if I tell you that I couldn’t do that?  I stopped being able to put a target designator on them, either.”

“Have you ever seen the movie ‘Twelve o’Clock High?’” she asked and Ezra shook his head.

“Look it up and watch it.  There is nothing wrong, Sergeant, in getting tired of the killing.  It is inhuman not to.”

“But you haven’t,” Ezra told her.

“That is because my husband and my two baby daughters were under one of those rockets when it came down, Sergeant.  I am no longer human.”

* * *

Charles spent his waking hours trying to make himself understood to Melea, and she worked with him to help him learn their language.  It was clear that the only reason she did it was fear; she was lethargic and downtrodden.  More brow-beaten than he’d ever seen another person.

At first it was agonizingly slow.  He was lucky to come up with one word an hour, and those were usually some of the simple ones.  Still, he pressed and she tried her best.

Meals were infrequent -- beatings were much more frequent.  More than once a meal for Melea including being fondled and once the man simply took her in front of Charles.

Charles had had his attitude change totally when he had realized what had happened to Denise.  He was no longer shocked by the brutality of his captors and finally understood the underlying apathy of the woman.  There was no hope -- there was this, each and every day, with no hope of escape except death.  Once she mimed strangling herself, but he saw that chain she had wasn’t long enough to do the job.