The Best of Bova

by Ben Bova

  Rollo took the gizmo off me and tucked it under one arm. I followed him down the ladder. Down at the bottom there were three other guys waitin’. Guys like I had never seen before. Foreigners. Dark skin, eyes like coals. One of them had a big, dark, droopy moustache, but his long hair was streaked with gray. They were all kind of short, my height, but very solid. Their suits looked funny, like they had been made by tailors who didn’t know the right way to cut a suit.

  The two clean-shaven ones were carryin’ automatic rifles, mean-looking things with curved magazines. Their jackets bulged; extra ammunition clips, I figured. They looked younger than the guy with the moustache; tough, hard, all business.

  “This is the device?” asked the one with the moustache. He said “thees” instead of “this.”

  Lou nodded. “We’re gonna test it, make sure it works right.”

  “Bueno.”

  We were in a kind of—whattaya call it, an alcove?— yeah, an alcove cut into the side of the train tunnel. The kind where work crews could stay when a train comes past. This wasn’t one of the old city subways; it was the tunnel that the trains from other cities used, back when there had been trains runnin’. The Chairman was cornin’ in on a train the next morning, and these guys wanted to blow it up. Or so I thought.

  Rollo carried the gizmo down to the side of the tracks. For an instant I almost panicked; I realized that we needed a power pack. Then I saw that there was one already sittin’ there on the filthy bricks of the tunnel floor. I hooked it up, takin’ my time; no sense lettin’ them know how easy this all was.

  “Snap it up,” Lou hissed at me. “The train’s cornin’.”

  “Okay, okay,” I said.

  The guy with the moustache knelt beside me and took a little metal box from his pocket. “This is the detonator,” he said. His voice sounded sad, almost like he was about to cry. “Your device must make its relay click at the proper moment. Do you know how to connect the two of them together?”

  I nodded and took the detonator from him.

  “Tomorrow, the detonator will be placed some distance from your triggering device.”

  “How’ll they be connected then?” I asked.

  “By a wire.”

  “That’s okay, then.” I figured that if they had tried somethin’ fancy like a radio link, in this old tunnel they might get all kinds of interference or echoes. A hard-wire connection was a helluva lot surer. And safer.

  It only took me a couple minutes to connect his detonator to my radar gizmo, but Lou was fidgetin’ every second of the time 1 never seen him lookin’ nervous or flustercd before. He was always the coolest of the cool, never a hair out of place. Now he was half jumpin’ up and down, lookin’ up the tunnel and grumblin’ that the train was cornin’ and 1 was gonna miss it. I had to work real hard to keep a straight face. Little Lou uptight; that was somethin’ to grin about.

  Okay, so I had everything ready in plenty time. The maintenance train musta been doin’ two miles an hour, max, scrapin’ down the tracks and scoopin’ up most of the garbage in the tunnel as it dragged along. 1 turned on my gizmo. The readout numbers on the little red window started tickin’ down slowly. When they reached the number already set on the other window beside it, the relay on the detonator clicked.

  “Bueno, ” said the moustache, still kneeling beside me. He didn’t sound happy or nuthin. Just, “Bueno. ” Flat as a pancake.

  I looked over at Jade, standin’ with Rollo and the other strangers off by the tunnel wall, and I smiled at her.

  “Does that means it works okay?” I asked. I knew the answer but I wanted him to say it so Little Lou could hear it. Lou was bendin’ down between the two of us.

  “Yes,” he said, in that sad heavy voice of his. “It works perfectly.” He said each word carefully, like he wasn’t sure he had his English right.

  I got to my feet and said to Lou, “Okay. I done my part. Now Jade and me can go, right?”

  “No one leaves this tunnel,” said the moustache. Still sad, but real strong, like he meant it. He had unbuttoned his suit jacket and I could see the butt of a heavy black revolver stickin’ out of a shoulder holster. [Deleted], it would’ve taken my both hands just to hold that pistol up, let alone fire it off.

  “Hey, now wait a minute—” I started to say.

  Lou grabbed me by the shoulder and spun me around, his fist raised to smack me a good one. The moustache grabbed his upraised arm and held it in midair. Just held it there. He must’ve been pretty strong to do that.

  “There is no need for that,” he said to Lou, low and firm. “There will be enough violence in the morning.” Lou pulled his arm away, his face red and nasty. The moustache turned to me and almost smiled. Kind of apologetic, he said, “It is necessary for you and your lady to remain here until the operation is concluded. For security reasons. Do you understand?”

  I nodded. Sure I understood. What I was startin’ to wonder about, though, was whether these guys would let us live after their “operation” was finished. I knew Lou was goin’ to want to take Jade with him. If these foreigners didn’t whack me tomorrow, probably Lou would. Then he’d have Jade all to himself for as long as he wanted her.

  So we sat on the crummy tunnel floor alongside the tracks and waited. The foreigners had some sandwiches and coffee with them. Moustache offered a sandwich to Jade, real polite, and one to me. It was greasy and spiced hot enough to scorch my mouth. They all laughed at me when I grabbed for the coffee and burned my mouth even more ’cause it was so hot.

  I tried to sleep but couldn’t. I saw that the two younger guys had curled up right there on the floor, sleepin’ like babies with their rifles in their arms. Lou took Jade off down the tunnel a ways, where it was dark, far enough so I couldn’t see them or even hear them. I sat and watched Rollo, hopin’ he’d nod off long enough for me to follow Lou down the tunnel and slice his throat open. But Rollo just sat a few feet away from me, his chin on his knees and his eyes on me. Big as a [deleted] elephant.

  Moustache wasn’t sleepin’, either. I went over to where he was sittin’ with his back against the wall.

  “Why’s the Chairman cornin’ in on a train?” I asked him, hunkering down beside him. “There ain’t been a train through here since before 1 was born.”

  Moustache gave me his sad smile. “It is a gesture. He is a man given to gestures.”

  I couldn’t figure out what the hell he meant by that.

  “Why do you want to whack him?” I asked.

  “Whack?” He looked puzzled.

  “Kill him.”

  His eyes went wide, a little. “Kill him? We do not intend to assassinate the Chairman.” He shook his head. “No, it is not so simple as that.”

  “Then what?”

  He shook his head again. “It is none of your affair. The less you know about it the better off you will be.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Until this thing is over and Lou whacks me.”

  He shrugged. “That is your problem. Not mine.”

  A lot of help he was.

  My wristwatch said seven twenty-seven A.M. when Lou came walkin’ back up the track toward us. His hair was mussed and he had his suit jacket thrown over one shoulder. He grinned at me. Jade came followin’ behind him, her face absolutely blank, starin’ straight ahead. I figured she was tryin’ not to see me.

  What the hell, I thought. Why don’t I kill the mother- [deleted] [deleted] right now. Stick my blade in his nuts and twist it hard before Rollo gets a chance to move. They was gonna whack me afterward anyway. I knew it.

  I was even startin’ to pull up my pants leg when I felt Moustache’s hand on my shoulder. “No,” he whispered.

  I must have looked pretty sore to him. He said, low and soft, “I am a man of honor. I will see to it that you and the girl go free after our operation is concluded. You can trust me.”

  Lou had already passed me by then. Rollo got up on his feet, towerin’ over us all like a mountain. I let my pants leg slide down
to my ankle again. I just hoped Lou and Rollo didn’t notice what I had started to do.

  A little while later three more guys came down the same ladder we had used, two of them carryin’ big leather suitcases, the third carryin’ a little metal case and climbin’ down so careful that I figured he had the bomb in it. They were foreigners too, but they looked different from Moustache and his men. They had dark skins, all right, but a different kind of dark. And they were taller, slimmer, with big hooked noses like eagle’s beaks. Like Moustache and his men, they were wearin’ regular suits. But they looked like they were uncomfortable in them, like these weren’t the kind of clothes they usually wore.

  Anyway, after talkin’ a few minutes with Moustache they went up the tracks with the little metal case. They came back again without it, but trailin’ a spool of wire. Which they connected to my radar gizmo. I noticed that the detonator was gone; they had taken it with the bomb, I figured. Then they set the gizmo right in the middle of the tracks and waited.

  “Won’t the oinks see it there?” I asked Moustache. “The police,” I added before he could ask what oinks meant.

  In that sad way of his he said, “Your Mr. Lou has been well paid to see to it that the security guards do not come down the tunnel this far.” He kind of sighed. “It always surprises me to see how well bribery works on little men.”

  Bought off the security guards? I wondered if even Big Lou could cover all the Federal oinks that must be coverin’ the Chairman. I mean, this guy was the Chairman of the World Council. They must be protectin’ him like they protect the president or some of those video stars.

  Moustache must’ve understood the puzzled look on my face. “There is a full security guard on the train itself, and entire platoons of soldiers at the station. The responsibility for checking the security of the tunnel was given to your city police force. That is why we decided to do our work here. This is the weak link in their preparations.”

  He talked like a general. Or at least, the way I thought a general would talk. No, I never did get his name. Nobody spoke to him by his name; nobody I could understand, at least. I did find out later on that he had another half dozen men farther down the tunnel, also waitin’ for the train. Twelve guys altogether. Fourteen, if you count Little Lou and Rollo.

  Okay, so the time finally comes. Little Lou is almost hoppin’ outta his skin he’s so wired up. Jade was sittin’ as far back in the alcove as she could, legs tucked up under her, still starin’ off into space and seeing nuthin. I started to wonder what Lou had done to her, then tried to stop thinkin’ about it. Didn’t work.

  Moustache is as calm as a guy can be, talkin’ in his own language to his two men. The other three strangers are bendin’ over their suitcases, and I see they’re takin’ out all kinds of stuff. I’m not sure what most of it was, but they had little round gray things about the size of baseballs, weird-lookin’ kinds of guns—I guess they were guns, they looked kind of like pistols—and finally they pulled out some rubbery gas masks and handed two of ’em to Moustache’s men.

  Lou and Rollo both are lookin’ down the track toward the station, and I see they both have pistols in their hands. Rollo’s hands are so big his pistol looks like a toy. Little Lou is sweatin’, I can see the beads cornin’ down his face, he’s so [deleted] scared. I keep myself from laughin’ at him out loud. He’s worried that the oinks he bought off won’t stay bought. Be just like them to take his money and then double-cross him by doin’ their job right anyway.

  But then I figured that maybe Big Lou was the one who paid off the oinks. Screwin’ Little Lou is one thing; if they mess around with Big Lou they’d regret it for as long as they lived. And so would their families.

  Moustache sends off all five of the strangers up the track. I wonder how close to the bomb they can get without bein’ blown up themselves. I wonder if the bomb will bring down the roof of the whole [deleted] tunnel and bury all of us right where we are. I wonder about Moustache sayin’ they ain’t tryin’ to whack the Chairman. What’re they gonna do, then?

  I didn’t have to wait long to find out.

  Moustache is starin’ hard at his wristwatch, that big pistol in his other hand. I hear a dull whump kind of noise. He looks up, runs out to the middle of the tracks. I go to Jade, who’s gotten to her feet. Lou and Rollo are still starin’ down the track toward the station, Moustache is lookin’ the other way, toward where the train is cornin’ from. Nobody’s watchin’ us.

  “Come on,” I whisper to Jade. “Now’s our chance.”

  But she won’t move from where she’s standing.

  “Come on!” I say.

  “I can’t,” she tells me.

  “It’s now or never!”

  “Vic, I can’t,” she says. I see tears in her eyes. “I promised him.”

  “[Deleted] Lou!” I say. “I love you and you’re cornin’ with me.”

  But she pulls back. “I love you too, Vic. But if I go with you Lou will hunt us down and kill you.”

  “He’s gonna kill me anyway!” I’m tryin’ to keep whispering. It’s makin’ my throat raw.

  “No, he told me he’d let you alone if I stayed with him. He swore it.”

  “And you believe that mother-|deleted] lying [deleted]?”

  Just then we hear gunfire and guys yelling. Sounds like a little war goin’ on up the track: automatic rifles goin’ pop-pop-pop. Heavier sounds. Somebody screamin’ like his guts’ve been shot out.

  Moustache yells to Lou and Rollo, “Quickly! Follow me!” Then he waves at me and Jade with that big pistol. “You too! Come!”

  So with Moustache in front of us and Lou and Rollo behind, we go runnin’ up the track. There’s a train stopped up there, a train like I never seen before. Like it’s from Mars or someplace: all shinin’ and smooth with curves more like an airplane than any train I ever saw. Not that I ever saw any, except in pictures or videos, y’know.

  I see a hole in the ground that’s still smokin’. The track is tore up. That was where the bomb was. It was just a little bomb, after all. Just enough to tear up the track and make the train stop.

  We run past that and past the shining engine. Even in the shadows of the tunnel it seemed to shine, like it was brand new. Not a scratch or a mark on it. No graffiti, even. Where I come from, we don’t see much that’s new. It was beautiful, all right.

  Anyway, there are three cars behind the engine. They all look spiffy too, but a couple windows on the first car were busted out, shattered. The car in the middle had a blue flag painted on its side, a flag I never seen before.

  Moustache climbs up onto the first car and we’re right behind him. We push through the doors. There’s a bunch of dead bodies inside. Flopped on the floor, twisted across the seats. Not regular seats, like rows. These seats were more like big easy chairs that could swivel around, one next to each window. You could see there’d been plenty of bullets flyin’ around; the bodies was tore up pretty bad, lots of blood. I heard Jade suck in her breath like she was gonna scream, but then she got control of herself. I almost wanted to scream myself; some of those bodies looked pretty damned bad.

  One of the tall guys came through the door up at the other end of the car. He had his gas mask pushed up on top of his head. His rifle was slung over his shoulder, makin’ his suit jacket bunch up so I could see a pistol stuck in the belt of his pants. He looked kind of sick, or maybe that was the way he looked when he was mad.

  Moustache went up and talked with him for a minute, lookin’ kind of pale himself. Lou told Rollo to pick up all the loose hardware lyin’ around the car. What? Hardware. Guns. Must’ve been six or eight of ’em on the floor or still in the grip of the dead guys. Oh yeah, two of the dead ones were women, by the way. Far as I remember, neither one of ’em had a gun in her hand.

  We got through the connecting doors and into the middle car. Not everybody in there is dead. Only a couple guys in blue suits that Moustache’s men are already draggin’ down into the third car, at the end of the train
.

  There was one guy alive in there, a little guy no bigger than me with eyes like Jade’s. Otherwise he looked like a regular American. I mean his skin wasn’t dark even though it wasn’t exactly light like mine. And the suit he was wearin’ was a regular suit, light gray. Right away I figured he was the Chairman of the World Council.

  C. C. Lee.

  He was sittin’ there, his face frozen with no expression on it, almost like Jade’s when Little Lou had been pawin’ her. I looked at him real close and saw his eyes weren’t exactly like Jade’s; they were real oriental eyes, I guess. Hard to tell how old he was; his hair was all dark, not a speck of gray in it, but he didn’t look young, y’know what I mean? Straight hair, combed straight back from his forehead. Kinda high forehead, come to think of it. Maybe he was startin’ to go bald.

  Anyway, Moustache sat down in the chair next to his and swiveled it around so they were facin’ each other. Jade and I stood in the aisle between the rows of chairs. The others moved out to the other two cars.

  “This is not what I wanted,” Moustache said. He talked in English, with that accent of his.

  “It is what you should have expected,” said the Chairman. His English was perfect, just like a newscaster on TV.

  “I regret the killing.”

  “Of course you do.”

  “But it was necessary.”

  The Chairman looked at Moustache, really looked at him, right into his eyes like he was tryin’ to bore through his skull.

  “Necessary? To kill sixteen men and women? How many of your own have been killed?”

  “Four,” said Moustache. “Including my brother.”

  The Chairman blinked. “I am sorry for that,” he said, almost in a whisper.

  “He knew the risks. Our cause is desperate.”

  “Your cause is doomed. What can you possibly hope to achieve by this action?”