by Ben Bova
Leaning his back against the flimsy wall, listening to Shamar and the Jakarta traitors bantering about money and taxpayers and bank accounts in Singapore, Alexander felt the sweat pouring from every inch of his body. It was not merely the heat, not only the pain that made him perspire.
It was fear. He knew what he had to do. He knew that he had to do it now. Ten seconds from now might be too late.
They'll kill me, a voice said inside his head.
Sure, he answered himself. But they're going to kill you anyway. At least you've got to try.
Abruptly he pushed himself away from the wall, barged into the lighted room, lurched between the two Indonesians and grabbed for the pistol on the table.
Shamar was faster. His face showed surprise, but his hands moved swiftly and surely. He dropped the wad of money he had been holding, even as the Indonesians staggered away from Alexander and the young guerrilla by the outer doorway dropped his cigarette in shock.
Shamar swept up the pistol in his right hand and with practiced smoothness brought up his left to slide the action back and cock it.
As he did so, Alexander did the only thing he could think of. He grabbed one of the fragmentation grenades and yanked its pin out.
He distinctly heard the pin clatter on the tabletop, and before the sound was gone, the snick-clack of the pistol's action.
The two Indonesians started to babble and the guerrilla whipped his rifle from his shoulder.
"No!" Shamar bellowed, holding out his left hand toward the young guerrilla.
He pointed the pistol at Alexander's gut. But he did not fire. Alexander held the grenade tightly in his right hand, woozy with the agony that his effort had caused, sagging back against the cinder-block wall.
"If I let go," he said, his voice thick with pain, "this grenade goes off. We'll all die."
He could see Shamar's eyes, pale blue and calculating.
"It's a three-second fuse," Alexander added. "For house-to-house fighting. You won't have time to pick it up and throw it away."
Shamar eased his tensed body. He even smiled slightly.
But the gun stayed pointed at Alexander.
"You are more resourceful than I thought."
"And you," Alexander panted, gasping from the pain of talking, "are just as much a murdering son of a bitch as I thought."
The Indonesians seemed petrified with fear. The youngster had lowered his rifle, but kept his hand on the pistol grip; he could swing the muzzle up and fire in an instant.
"We have a stalemate," Shamar said. The scar along his jaw seemed unusually white, almost pulsating.
"Give the order to bring McPherson and his men back here."
"The mercenaries?"
"Bring them back here," Alexander repeated. "Unharmed."
With a shrug that was half amused, half contemptuous, Shamar reached into a chest pocket of his fatigues and brought out a small black radio, the same miniature size that McPherson had used. He spoke into it in Arabic.
"They will be back here in ten minutes," he said to Alexander.
"Tell 'em to make it faster. My hand's getting sweaty. I might drop this egg."
Shamar spoke into the radio again. Alexander knew that they were waiting for him to pass out, to slump down into unconsciousness from the pain. He'll try to grab the grenade before it goes off, it's his only chance. I've got to stay awake. Alert. Got to!
He looked into Shamar's pale blue eyes again. Watching, waiting, calculating, staring at me like a snake stares at a bird. Odd that they should be so light. Wonder who got into whose harem?
A wave of dizziness washed over him and Alexander shook his head to clear it. The movement cost him pain, and a surge of nausea in his guts.
He snapped his eyes open when he realized they had been closed. Shamar had tensed slightly, but he smiled and relaxed once again. None of the others in the room had moved a millimeter.
I couldn't have been out long, Alexander said to himself.
But it won't take long for him to move.
He stared again at the face of Jabal Shamar, his enemy, the man who had killed his parents and millions of others.
"I was in Jerusalem," Alexander muttered.
Shamar lifted an eyebrow slightly. "And you survived."
"My mother didn't. Neither did my father. He was in Tel Aviv when you nuked it."
"We did not strike first with nuclear weapons."
"No. You struck last. After the cease-fire had been arranged."
"Would you like a chair?" Shamar asked, almost solicitously.
He even let the pistol down slightly. Only slightly.
"I'll stay on my feet," replied Alexander.
"For how long?"
"Long enough."
The sound of boots scuffling on the dry ground outside reached Alexander's ears. Someone rapped on the door frame. Shamar said a single word and an older guerrilla, a bandolier of cartridges hanging from his shoulder, stepped into the room.
"Tell him I want McPherson," said Alexander.
Shamar did so.
The big New Zealander took in the situation at a glance.
"Mexican standoff, eh?"
"You cannot get out of this village unless I allow it," said Shamar.
Alexander asked McPherson, "Mac, can you fly one of those choppers out there?"
"Sure. So can Alfie or Rodríguez."
"All right." Turning back to Shamar, he said, "Let's go."
"To the helicopters?"
"Right."
"If I refuse?"
Without thinking, Alexander tried to take a deep breath.
The pain flared, and he felt his knees turn watery. Bile surged up his throat. He put out his free hand to steady himself against the table.
"Listen to me," he said to Shamar. "If you don't do exactly as I say, I'll open my hand and blow all of us to shreds. Understand? Now, move."
Wordlessly Shamar headed for the door. McPherson pushed past him and wrapped an arm around Alexander's shoulders. Tenderly.
"Ribs?" he asked.
"Yeah. Broken, I think."
"Come on, mate. Maybe you ought to give the pineapple to me."
Alexander shook his head. "I'll hold it."
Turning to Shamar, McPherson wordlessly took the pistol from his hand.
Outside it was night. In the dim shadows, Alexander made out only eight men in jungle fatigues, and three of them wore bloodied bandages. Eight out of twenty-nine. It was a shambles, all right, he accused himself.
Slowly they made their way toward the helicopters, a strange procession with Alexander supported by McPherson, Shamar walking beside him, and the two Indonesian government officials two paces in front. The surviving mercenaries trudged on either side. They were completely disarmed; the only weapons in the entire group were the pistol McPherson now held and the grenade Alexander clutched in his cramped, sweaty hand.
But out in the shadows they were escorted by a ghostly convoy of guerrilla men and women, armed and waiting for a chance, a word, a stumble that might allow them to spring. Shamar kept up a steady flow of words, mostly in English, warning them to keep their distance and remain calm.
He doesn't want to die, Alexander realized. He's no more prepared to die than I was to kill.
Yet he sensed the terrifying presence of dozens of guns waiting in the darkness to cut him down. If he felt back in the hut like a bird being hypnotized by a snake, now it was like a small herd of antelope being stalked by a pack of ravenous wolves.
They reached the helicopters. Under McPherson's direction, the mercenaries dismantled the engines on all but one of them. Rodríguez, his white teeth flashing in the darkness, clambered up into the cockpit of the largest chopper and started up its engine. It whined to life, and the big rotor blade began revolving slowly.
Supported by one of the unwounded mercenaries, Alexander made a feeble gesture toward the helicopter.
"Up you go," he said to Shamar.
The man shook his head.
<
br /> "Into the chopper," Alexander insisted.
"No."
"You'll go or else."
"Or else you'll release the grenade? Go ahead and do it."
In the dim flashing red of the helicopter's safety light, Shamar's face looked coppery, lurid like a devil's lit by the fires of hell. He was no longer sneering, no longer contemptuous.
"You want to take me to your kind of justice, to put me in a jail cell and put me on trial before the world and execute me as a criminal."
"Damned right! Murderer. Genocidal bastard."
Shamar shook his head. "Then kill me here and now. Let the grenade go."
Alexander was trembling with a mixture of rage and fear.
"You better get the fuck up that ladder . . ."
"No. And if you try to force me, the guerrillas will open fire and kill you all."
McPherson came out of the shadows to Alexander's side.
"Let him go," he said over the rising thunder of the helicopter's engine.
"I won't! I want him dead!"
"Then kill me," Shamar shouted, his face grim, his voice flat and hard.
"You'll get us all killed," said McPherson.
Alexander said nothing. He could not move, could not speak, could not act.
"Come on, boss. Into the heli. Be glad we're getting away with our lives. That's the important thing."
Gently McPherson coaxed him up the metal ladder and into the helicopter. Shamar stood rooted out on the dusty blowing ground, the flashing red light outlining him against the night.
Over the whining roar of the chopper's engine, Shamar shouted, "We will meet again, Yankee! We will meet again!"
Alexander tried to turn and answer, but McPherson had him wrapped in his strong arms. "Never mind him. He's just putting on a show for the wogs."
He sat Alexander down on the bench at the rear of the chopper's passenger compartment. "Better let me have it now," McPherson said. "Wouldn't want it loose in here."
Alexander felt his strong fingers prying the grenade from his hand.
The other men filed in and slumped onto the remaining seats. McPherson gave a command and the engine roared louder. The helicopter jerked free of the ground and lifted into the darkness.
McPherson went to the hatch, opened it, and tossed the grenade away. Its explosion was barely noticeable. The big New Zealander came back and sat beside Alexander once again.
"I couldn't do it," Alexander said, fighting back sobs. "I couldn't kill the son of a bitch. I had the chance and I couldn't do it."
"You saved us," McPherson pointed out. "That's something."
"I walked you into a trap. I couldn't even fire a shot."
"Some men are not meant for combat. It's just not in their makeup."
"I'm not meant for anything," Alexander groaned. "Useless. A goddamned fucking useless coward."
McPherson was silent for a moment. Then, "Well, at the least you've got enough video in here"—he unhitched the electronic binoculars from his belt—"to blow away the traitors in the Jakarta government."
"Where'd you get that?"
"Took it off the table in the hut back there," said the New Zealander. "Thought the video stuff would look good on global telly."
Despite the pain still flaring in his chest, Alexander laughed. Shakily. "We can expose Shamar's connection with the guerrillas."
"And the blokes who're selling out their own government to him."
"That'll stop him. It'll force him to get out of Indonesia altogether."
"Not a bad day's work, all things considered," said McPherson. "You don't always have to kill a man to defeat him."
Alexander leaned his head back against the padded bench. "I should have killed him. He'll just pop up again somewhere else, cause more trouble. Kill more people."
The New Zealander shook his head. "You're not the killing type, Cole. These men of mine—they can kill. But you can't. It isn't in you."
"I make a helluva mercenary, don't I?"
Mac grinned at him. "Oh, I dunno. You're learning. There's more than one way to skin a rat."
Cole Alexander closed his eyes. The Peacekeepers have the right idea, he realized. Destroy the weapons, not the soldiers. Maybe I can do that, too. Work where the Peacekeepers can't go. Use smarts instead of guns. Maybe it can work like that. It's worth a try.
It's worth a try.
McPherson got up and went forward to check with the pilot. He came back to report that Surabaya was less than an hour away, and a medical team would be waiting for them.
But Alexander was stretched out on the bench, sound asleep, a crooked grin on his grimy, sweaty face.
Cole Alexander recovered from his wounds.
The psychic trauma, the injury to his
confidence and self-esteem, took longer to
heal. Strangely it was his only child who
performed the therapeutic process—quite
without realizing what she was doing.
Transcript of a conversation between them,
recorded as they strolled along the grounds
of the IPF facility in Ottawa, where he
visited his daughter, S. A. Kelly.
Kelly: It's good to see you again, Daddy.
Alexander: You sounded pretty damned miserable on the phone. What's the matter?
Kelly: I shouldn't bother you with it. It's my problem.
Alexander: Listen, kid, I may not be much of a father, but I do care about you, you know.
Kelly: I know.
Alexander: And I don't have much of anything else to do right now. At least let me act like a father, give you some sage advice and all that crap.
Kelly (laughing a little): Oh, I've just got a heart problem.
Alexander (alarmed): Heart?
Kelly: Not medical! Romantic. I fell for a guy, and I thought he fell for me. But now he's getting married to somebody else.
Alexander: The son of a bitch.
Kelly: No, he's not. He's a very fine man. It was my mistake.
Alexander (slowly): We all make mistakes, little lady. I backed off from marrying your mother . . . that was the worst mistake of my life.
Kelly: She really loved you. Her last words were about you.
Alexander (after a long pause): Listen, kid, why don't you chuck this Peacekeeper job and come with me?
Kelly: Leave the IPF?
Alexander: Why not? You've been stuck in the same grade for two years now. They should have promoted you for what you did in Eritrea.
Kelly: The review board . . .
Alexander: Screw the review board! Come with me. I'm doing things that the IPF can't do.
Kelly: What do you mean?
Alexander (lowering his voice): Not here. Come into town with me tonight. We'll have dinner together and I'll lay it all out for you.
Kelly soon did resign from the
Peacekeepers to help her father build the
tightly knit mercenary force that eventually
brought him to the massacred village of
Misericordia and his confrontation shortly
afterward with Jabal Shamar.
In the meantime, however, the cabal of
officers from several nations sprang their
coup to take over the International
Peacekeeping Force. To understand what
happened in orbit, where the main struggle
took place, it is instructive to cite two
twentieth-century strategic thinkers who
strongly disagreed with one another.
Ashton Carter: We should avoid a
dependence on satellites for wartime
purposes that is out of proportion to our
ability to protect them. If we make
ourselves dependent upon vulnerable
spacecraft for military support, we will have
built an Achilles' heel into our forces.
Maxwell W. Hunter II: The key issue then
becomes, is our def
ense capable of
defending itself . . .?
As I said, they strongly disagreed with
one another. Yet both of them were right.
BATTLE STATION HUNTER
Year 5
THE first laser beam caught them unaware, slicing through the station's thin aluminum skin exactly where the main power trunk and air lines fed into the bridge.
A sputtering fizz of sparks, a moment of heart-wrenching darkness, and then the emergency dims came on. The electronics consoles switched to their internal batteries with barely a microsecond's hesitation, but the air fans sighed to a stop and fell silent. The four men and two women on duty in the bridge had about a second to realize they were under attack. Enough time for the breath to catch in your throat, for the sudden terror to hollow out your guts.
The second laser hit was a high-energy pulse deliberately aimed at the bridge's observation port. It cracked the impact-resistant plastic as easily as a hammer smashes an egg; the air pressure inside the bridge blew the port open.
The six men and women became six exploding bodies spewing blood. There was not even time enough to scream.
The station was named Hunter, although only three of its crew knew why. It was not one of the missile-killing satellites, nor one of the sensor-laden observation birds. It was a command-and-control station, manned by a crew of twenty, orbiting some one thousand kilometers high, just below the densest radiation zone of the inner Van Allen belt. It circled the Earth in about 105 minutes. By deliberate design, the station was not hardened against laser attack. The attackers knew this perfectly well.
Commander Hazard was almost asleep when the bridge was destroyed. He had just finished his daily inspection of the battle station. Satisfied that the youngsters of his crew were reasonably sharp, he had returned to his coffin-sized personal cabin and wormed out of his sweaty fatigues. He was angry with himself.
Two months aboard the station and he still felt the nausea and unease of space adaptation syndrome. It was like the captain of an ocean vessel having seasickness all the time. Hazard fumed inwardly as he stuck another timed-release medication plaster on his neck, slightly behind his left ear. The old one had fallen off. Not that they did much good. His neck was faintly spotted with the rings left by the medication patches. Still, his stomach felt fluttery, his palms slippery with perspiration.
