The Spy I Loved (35 page)

“
The military are in shock. The bad guys apparently have some
kind of small drone aircraft. It’s not unlike a missile. That’s
what took out the Predators.”

“
Ah. Yes. Smuggling missiles into the country would be
difficult. Building something from plans, launching it from behind
a rental cottage…shit.”

Enough
wreckage of the Predators and their attackers had been located to
suppose that the big and expensive drones had been taken out by
remote-control ramming attack. Liam digested this information as
best he could.

“
We’re watching all major roads and intersections. If anything
with a smidgeon of radioactivity turns up, we’ll be taking a close
look at it.”

Liam
nodded, head hanging in a kind of moral defeat. Ian studied him.
This wasn’t quite the reaction he had come to expect from
Kimball.

“
What about some kind of miniature submarine?” Ian was
thinking about the ramp, sloping down into the water at the end of
the McKerlie mill.

“
Argh.”

Ian was
silent. It was best not to push sometimes.

Finally,
Liam dragged himself up from the table and headed for the bedroom
which hopefully wasn’t already occupied.

***

A week
had passed. Technicians sat in their control room watching their
screens.

It was time. A young man used a mouse to put a cursor on an
icon. He clicked twice and it opened up the program for the
recovery of
Fandango.

Fandango
had been built by the same
small electronics firm that had built
Barracuda
and
Shrike.
These were small, unmanned,
delta-wing turbojet aircraft with hardened noses and leading edges
on all flying surfaces. Their purpose was to provide aerial
security in an era when manned interceptors were pricing themselves
out of the business. There would always be stateless customers,
rebels, insurgents of all kinds, who simply did not have the
physical resources to provide either training or bases—technical
services of all kinds.

Fandango
went from amber to green on
his screen. The batteries were fully charged. The featureless
torpedo that was
Fandango
lifted from the bottom a hundred metres offshore
from the McKerlie mill. The mission was underway. In terms of
detection,
Fandango
might as well have been on the far side of the moon. Hugging
the bottom, carefully camouflaged and shielded for heat and sound
signatures, it was undetectable to anything on the Great Lakes. At
sea, it would be a different story. It would be detectable to
hunter-killer submarines and frigates from any number of different
nations. The mission profile was such, that this was not a concern.
It was designed for a specialized mission, and had proven itself
smuggling arms into Gaza and other restricted places. Once in the
Gulf of St. Lawrence, the machine would rise to the surface and be
recovered by an outbound vessel. While weather-dependent to some
extent, recovery would take five minutes to ten minutes.

Technicians watched in very near real-time through the video
feed from the nose of
Fandango.
They were ready to override and drive it manually
if necessary. If it took a month, travelling by night and lying up
by day, EMERALD was theirs and they wouldn’t let that slip from
their fingers.

Victory
was sweet.

***

Aubrey
Herschel was a people person. It’s not that he loved them or even
liked them, but he had always felt that he understood
them.

It was no
big surprise when he got the call from the Mahdi. He’d been
sweating it out for some days now.

He was
cordially invited to attend the palace, this evening at seven p.m.
if that was agreeable.

Aubrey
knew better than to say it wasn’t. He had no appointments to cancel
these days.

They had
what they wanted, or something of value. They had EMERALD and
surely the Mahdi must have never expected that. The long shot had
paid off. It would be a boost to the Mahdi’s own nascent and not
particularly competent space program.

Aubrey’s
guts fluttered, he had to admit. It had been a huge gamble, to use
the latest offerings in drone, robotic and remote-control
technology, taking a page out of the evil Western and Israeli
powers’ book.

Using weapons built by companies owned by Speck, Jackson and
himself, all offshore in third-world countries with their own
reasons for research into the future, had been a stroke of pure
genius. The fact that he had avoided the use of his own
network,
hiring all
contractors on a one-job, task-oriented basis was a business coup
and icing on the cake. As far as the weapons were concerned, that
was the end-user’s problem and he had plausible deniability in all
things.

Admittedly, the privilege of staying in the country wasn’t
exactly what he had in mind when first starting out. But he was, to
some degree, a victim of his own success in that now the U.S. and
other countries were talking a little more firmly about sanctions
against El Mahdi.

They were sure pissed off about
something,
(a remark which might
once have been funny), and Aubrey Herschel was a handy
pressure-point: give him up and all of this might go
away.

Leave the bitch at home.

Sigrid
was passed out in her bed anyways.

One could
hardly blame the Mahdi. They had all been friends once. It was
indicative of mood, but there was more good news in that he’d
finally managed to acquire a dozen Puma helicopters from a
rapidly-collapsing African dictator who was going out of the
business and just wanted a nice, clean, professionally-managed,
quiet little retirement in Switzerland. With a quick refurbishment,
fresh motors, gearboxes and the like, the Mahdi would be happy
enough. One of Speck’s subsidiaries in Indonesia would do the work.
They could be in the air by the next Liberation Day parade. The
Mahdi would get a nice birthday present from a grateful people, and
it would be plastered all over the front pages. Aubrey also had a
line on some old Stinger missiles, almost antiques these days, but
one of his suppliers was perfectly competent to refurbish
those—after a time, the batteries went and the heat-seeker
acquisition head lost the argon gas and chemical charge that bathed
it upon launch. There were also some interesting solid-fuel rocket
motor upgrades, both ejection and booster, the newest units
designed to fit perfectly into the mounts.

It was a
miracle, really. Aubrey’s supplier was saying he could line up
eighty, maybe even a few more, of the basic units. The launchers
were one thing, although easy enough to copy. The missiles were
worth their weight in gold.

With
reprogrammable microprocessor technology, the Mahdi would have the
finest in man-portable low-level air defence.

Aubrey
studied his face in the mirror. Freshly shaved and powdered, he was
getting ever more flesh in the jowls and ever more puffy about the
eyes. He’d been thinking about a diet, but the real problem was the
habit of constant drinking. It was sheer boredom, a bit of old age
creeping in.

Otherwise.

Life
wasn’t holding much promise these days.

He nodded
in the mirror. There was a glass of scotch there, as it was like
smoking to some other man—he just felt naked without a glass in his
hand or close beside him. It had become a part of him. With a
wrench, he realized he didn’t need to finish it, and this meeting
was important to all concerned.

The limo
was waiting just outside his door. The servants were all shiny eyes
and flashing teeth as they bid him goodbye at the door.

That
should have been his first clue.

***

The
Mahdi’s palace, one of several scattered around the little North
African nation, was a sprawling edifice clad in white marble. The
place had been built in frank imitation of the Al Faw palace in
Baghdad.

Built by
the same architects who had served Saddam Hussein so well, it was
surrounded by an immense pond of sparkling clear water. The
building itself was octagonal, rising up six stories on the towers
at each corner. There was a central dome of the same height, and a
regular progression of three stories for the bulk of the structure.
The first story was the tallest, and the next two diminished in
height, rising up in pleasing proportions.

It loomed
before him, gleaming in the soft evening light. Unusually for the
region, there was a light fog rising and coming in off the sea.
Soldiers clad in khaki uniforms and black berets stepped smartly
out to challenge the car. There was a brief halt while the driver’s
hand-written pass was examined and someone called up to verify.
Security was always tight, but then the Mahdi had become less
popular over the years. Young people quickly discovered that
abstinence, self-abnegation, chastity and compulsory public
service, must usually of the military kind, wasn’t much fun. It
didn’t pay much, didn’t get you much respect and offered little in
the way of skills and training.

It was a
country where there was no real middle class and virtually any form
of viable employment was already being done by western specialists
or unskilled workers from all over the region.

The car
eased forward. The machine drove right into the building through
the sally port and squeaked to a halt as vertical multi-leaf
door-slabs slid down their tracks and shut out the night. Tile
floors glowed, and just to their right sat a blindingly red Scarab,
an exotic car from a little-known Swiss contractor. With a thousand
kilowatts of electrical power, the machine was the fastest
street-legal production car being made today. The Mahdi’s son Beyni
had taken him for a ride in it one night, the Interior Police
closing the highway all the way into Siberta for the run. The
speedometer was hovering around the two-forty mark (and
surprisingly quiet and smooth at that speed) when Aubrey politely
mentioned that he had to pee and if Beyni wouldn’t mind, would he
please maybe slow down a bit and pull off at the next
interchange…?

It was
just what the boy, barely seventeen and insufferably spoiled, had
been looking for.

He had
frightened the ugly American, which Aubrey surely was these days
with the sweat pouring down from what the high-priced doctors were
saying was a genuine ailment, if exceedingly rare. At that point
Beyni backed off and became almost solicitous.

Like he
didn’t have enough afflictions already.

The door
was opened and a full colonel stood there at the door.

“
Please.” His hand was extended. “Thank you for being
prompt.”

It not so
much a welcome as a command.

The Mahdi
did not like to be kept waiting.

***

The great
conference room was dead silent when it should have been buzzing.
There should have been forty colonels and their aides.

He set
his briefcase down on the mahogany surface of the incredible oval
table, easily thirty metres from end to end and five metres wide.
There were the usual flowers and water carafes, but the air was
dead as if the room hadn’t been used in a while. Aubrey sniffed for
signs of cigar smoke, for the Mahdi was a heavy smoker.

Nothing.

Aubrey took a seat. Now that they had EMERALD, they should be
making plans, putting out feelers to other like-minded governments.
They should be asking him a thousand questions. They should be
doing everything in their power to capitalize on their acquisition.
He had waited patiently enough for the first few days after
delivery. Naturally, they would want to have a look at it. Their
engineers must go over it, assess it, and begin analyzing it,
carefully dismantling it in a process that would take time. That
knowledge, that it would take time, had been his only comfort the
past few days. For the weeks had dragged on—first the weeks spent
getting
Fandango
out of Canadian waters, across the Atlantic and into the
Mediterranean. The triumphant delivery, dockside, with Aubrey and
the cold-eyed security people hustling it away as quickly as
humanly possible under cover of darkness and curfew.

The
Colonel, as anonymous as all the rest of them (although he knew a
few names, and one or two as individuals, on some level) stood
behind his seat. There were two guards looking tired and bored by
the door. Turning his head back to the Colonel, he raised an
eyebrow.

“
What’s going on? Where is everybody?” Aubrey was mindful of
another occasion when he’d been stuck with a couple of low-ranking
officials from the Ministry of Agriculture.

Painful
hours later, the whole damned bunch of them had come in, roaring
with drink and flushed with success from their blasted duck hunt on
the salt marshes lining the curve of the Bight of Al
Siberta.

The
fellow looked but ignored him.