Peacekeepers (1988)

by Ben Bova

  Pavel grunted and nodded, thinking that it was an unlikely alliance: a Moslem fundamentalist and a Soviet atheist.

  The bedouin went as silently as a wraith back toward the embers of the campfire. Pavel stayed on his feet, wide awake, and forgot the stars that hung above. Even after Mavroulis came out and took the gun from him, Pavel went inside the tent and stretched out in his sleeping bag but found that he could not keep his eyes closed.

  Tense as a hunted mountain lion, eyes burning from lack of sleep, Pavel rolled out of his sleeping bag with the first glint of dawn. He had spent the night debating where his loyalties lay: assassinating Alexander did not mean that he should stand aside and let these desert savages slaughter his companions. He could not let them harm Kelly. Never.

  Besides, it would make his assignment more difficult if Kelly and the others were killed or even held hostage.

  Who is this Hassan? What game is he playing? Is Alexander's plan already known and countered? Are we already in a trap, our necks in nooses?

  Kelly and the others gave no sign of apprehension. They shared a quick breakfast of yogurt and honey with the three bedouins, who smilingly assured them that Hassan would soon arrive. Pavel tried to identify which of the three had spoken to him during the night. He could not.

  Kelly broke out tubes of dark cream makeup. "We've got to look more like Arabs," she said.

  "A red-haired Arab," Mavroulis joked, taking a tube from her.

  "I won't be red-haired for long," Kelly shot back, grinning.

  Pavel took the tube she handed him.

  "You're already a lot darker than you were when you first came to us," she said. "Your skin is almost golden, like toast."

  "Tartar blood," Pavel said.

  "And those beautiful dark eyes," Kelly added. "You won't need contacts to disguise them."

  Pavel felt himself blush.

  By the time Hassan and his men arrived, in a pair of armored, wide-tracked personnel carriers, Kelly, Mavroulis and Pavel had daubed their skin as dark as their bedouin companions. Barker had declined to disguise himself.

  "I am to remain here with the plane and stay out of the sun,'" he said with an almost smug air of English self-satisfaction.

  Hassan turned out to be a colonel in the Libyan Army.

  He jumped down from the turret of the leading sand-colored crawler, a handsome energetic man in his late forties, wearing a crisply creased green and gold uniform with his cap cocked at a jaunty angle and a pair of mirrored sunglasses that hid his eyes very effectively.

  He looked over the four mercenaries, up and down, as he casually took a flat gold case from his tunic chest pocket and put a slim brown cigar to his lips. Pavel noticed that he sported a pencil-thin mustache.

  One of his aides, dressed in sand-colored battle fatigues, leaped forward to light the colonel's cigar. Hassan blew out a thin cloud of smoke, then nodded as if satisfied.

  "You will do, I suppose." Without turning his head back to the vehicle, he raised one hand and snapped his fingers.

  "Uniforms!"

  Within five minutes Kelly, Mavroulis and Pavel were decked in the green and gold uniforms of the Libyan Army.

  Pavel thought them overly gaudy: uniforms meant for show, not for fighting. They did not fit terribly well; Kelly's in particular sagged on her diminutive frame.

  Hassan disdained to speak to them, but looked them over like a drill sergeant inspecting a trio of recruits, his lip curled slightly in distaste. Kelly had tucked her dyed hair inside her cap. Otherwise she looked properly boyish.

  "That APV will take you to the water facility," Hassan said in British-accented English. "The crew is instructed to wait for you until precisely 1510 hours. Then they will return here, with you or without you. Is that clear?"

  Mavroulis said, "The timetable is understood."

  Hassan took the cigar from his lips and gestured to the personnel carrier. The three of them climbed up the metal rungs of the ladder and in through the hatch. Two soldiers were already inside, dressed in khaki fatigues and wearing sidearms in well-oiled black holsters, sitting on the thinly padded bench that lined one side of the metal compartment.

  The three mercenaries sat along the bench on the opposite side. The metal bulkhead felt hot against Pavel's back; almost as good as the heating pad, he thought.

  Through the forward hatch in the compartment, Pavel could see two more men in the driver's cab, one of them an officer. With a roar of diesel engines and a bone-shaking rattle, the personnel carrier started off across the desert.

  Heat. The armored vehicle was like an oven in the desert morning. Sweat oozed from every pore of Pavel's body.

  The stink of their bodies became almost nauseating as the APV lurched and swayed. Their uniforms turned dark with perspiration, under the armpits, across the back, everywhere.

  "They don't believe in air-conditioning," Kelly said, her voice bleak with misery.

  One of the soldiers wordlessly climbed up into the top turret and popped its hatch open. A hot breeze like the blast from a furnace blew in. Mavroulis grunted and swore in Greek under his breath. Pavel wondered if the soldiers understood English.

  "Tell me about this aquifer facility. How does it work?"

  Pavel said to Kelly, more to forget the heat and cover his growing tension than any desire to learn.

  Kelly seemed glad of the diversion. She was nervous, too, Pavel realized. She recited facts and figures for the remainder of the jouncing trip across the desert. The only thing that stuck in Pavel's mind was that the great underground aquifer was almost three thousand meters deep; nearly three kilometers below the desert sands.

  Could the Libyans actually use up all that water in a single generation? There must be millions of tons of it beneath the Sahara, Pavel realized. Surely Alexander was spouting propaganda. But then he remembered how the vast virgin lands in Siberia had been polluted beyond belief in only a few decades. Exaggerated or not, Alexander was right: sooner or later the aquifer would be drained. Water that had been stored for a hundred thousand years would be sucked away and depleted in the blink of an eye. Kelly believes it, Pavel told himself, and she has no reason to lie to me. She is almost painfully honest.

  "There it is!" announced the soldier up in the turret.

  One by one the three mercenaries climbed up to look.

  Pavel saw an immense building made of poured concrete, gray and low against the gray-brown rocks and sand of the desert. Squat towers stood at each comer. Cooling towers for the gigantic pumps housed inside the building, Kelly told him. But they looked like good defensive posts to Pavel, where a few troops could hold off a small army of attackers. All around the building were smaller concrete complexes of pillboxes, missile launchers, and barracks.

  The place is a fortress, he realized. And it is defended by Rayyid's best troops.

  They drove past an outer fence of electrified wire and along a smooth road flanked by gun emplacements and dozens of similar armored tracked vehicles, all in sandy gray desert camouflage. Pavel heard the thrumming whine of a helicopter. The inner perimeter was a concrete wall lined with troops. They drove past and up to the main gate of the building itself.

  The driver stayed behind the wheel, but the officer who had sat next to him, a captain, ducked into the main compartment of the APV and in Arabic directed the two soldiers there to break out automatic rifles for the three mercenaries. Then he led all five uniformed figures out the rear hatch, past several sets of guards, and finally up a narrow concrete stairway to the roof of the main building.

  The late morning sun poured down on them like molten lead. Not a breath of breeze, even up on the roof. The guards seemed to cower away from the blazing sunlight and seek shelter in whatever shade they could find. Pavel had never seen a sky so cloudless, the sun so powerful; it turned the heavens into an inverted bowl of hammered brass. He squinted out across the desert, shimmering in the heat haze. Not a tree or a blade of grass as far as the eye could see. Only the distant waveri
ng gleam of a mirage, a cruel illusion of water in this utterly barren wasteland.

  Guards lounged in the scant slices of shade offered by the big cooling towers. A pair of helicopters roared by: gunships, Pavel saw, manufactured in Soviet Russia.

  We're in the middle of the Libyan Army, he told himself If anything goes wrong with our operation, we'll never get out alive. Then he recalled that even if they got back to their base camp, Hassan and his zealots were waiting there with sharpened knives.

  Mavroulis spoke briefly with the captain, then turned to Kelly and Pavel.

  "They've done their task," he said in a low gruff rumble.

  "We're here. Now it's up to us. They will wait up here until 1500 hours. The APV will wait ten minutes more."

  "Then let's get moving," Kelly said firmly.

  "One thing," said Mavroulis, patting the rifle slung over his shoulder. "These guns are empty. They don't trust us with live ammunition."

  Kelly glanced at Pavel, then said, "Just as well. We're not here to kill anybody."

  Pavel thought. Kill or be killed.

  They strode out across the roof to a stainless-steel dome, one of many glittering in the high sun.

  "According to the plans, this shaft will lead you to the computer center," said Mavroulis.

  Kelly nodded. No hint of nervousness now. She was all business and anxious to get started.

  "Good luck," said the Greek.

  They both glanced around. No guards could see them.

  Kelly bent over and wormed her lithe body through the gap between the steel dome and the concrete lip on which it was based. Pavel started after her, touched his hand against the metal and flinched with pain.

  "Idiot!" Mavroulis growled. "The metal's been sitting in the sun all morning."

  Wringing his hand, Pavel ducked through the air space and hesitated a moment to let his eyes adjust to the cool shadows. Kelly was already a dozen rungs down the metal ladder set into the shaft's walls. He hurried after her, the useless rifle slapping against his hip with every move he made.

  They reached a horizontal shaft, all cool metal, barely big enough for each of them to crawl through. Mavroulis would never have made it, Pavel thought.

  The shaft widened enough for Pavel to slink up beside Kelly.

  "These guns are in the way," he whispered. "Let's leave them here and pick them up on our way back."

  She nodded and wriggled the rifle off her shoulder. Pavel did the same. Then Kelly took a slim sheet of what looked like microfilm from her tunic pocket. From the other pocket she brought out a miniaturized reader and put it to her eye.

  "Okay," she whispered, tucking them back into the tunic, "we're in the main air-conditioning shaft. Two cross-shafts, and then we take the next left fork."

  Pavel almost grinned at her darkened face. "I thought the Libyans didn't believe in air-conditioning."

  She was totally serious. "This isn't for their people; it's for their computer."

  The shaft got narrower and Pavel had to slide back behind Kelly. He realized that no one bigger than himself or Kelly could possibly use these air shafts. They inched along like two moles in a tunnel. Pavel felt blind and helpless.

  Finally Kelly stopped and motioned with the wiggle of one finger for Pavel to come forward. He had to climb over her body to bring his face next to hers: not altogether unpleasant, he decided.

  Three centimeters in front of their faces was a mesh grille, apparently set high in the wall of a large room filled with humming computer consoles. Several men and women in civilian clothes were sitting at consoles. Two technicians in coveralls had the back of one console off and were installing new circuit boards. All of them looked Asian.

  "Minolta J-300s," Kelly muttered, so low Pavel knew she was talking to herself. "C models. Damn! They told us they'd have A models."

  "Is that a problem?" he whispered into her ear.

  "Maybe. Maybe not."

  Kelly wormed a hand down toward her right boot and pulled out a slim rod. Then she did the same with her left boot.

  "You, too," she whispered to Pavel.

  Sure enough, his boots also carried a pair of concealed rods, about the thickness of normal electrical wire and not more than a dozen centimeters long.

  "Okay," she said, "move back."

  They inched along in reverse to a spot where a small side shaft branched away from the shaft they were in. Wordlessly Kelly took Pavel's two rods and wormed herself into the shaft. It was barely big enough for her shoulders to squeeze into. Pavel watched her slowly disappear into the tunnel, like a creature being swallowed by a snake, until only her booted feet remained outside.

  After several minutes she started wiggling her feet. Pavel grabbed at her ankles and pulled her free.

  Kelly was gasping. "Thanks. I got stuck in there. Damned plans said it was wide enough—but just barely."

  "Those rods . . ."

  "Knockout gas. It's circulating through the air-conditioning vents now. Give it a couple of minutes."

  "But won't we . . ."

  She shook her head. "It's a nerve gas. Dissipates before it reaches us." Then, with a hard grin, "At least, that's what the specs claim."

  They made their way to the grille again and saw that the people tending the computer had slumped over, unconscious.

  It took a few more minutes to remove the grille, but finally Pavel swung it open and lowered himself gingerly to the floor of the computer room.

  He took a deep, testing breath, then reached up to help Kelly down.

  "How long will they remain unconscious?" he asked.

  Heading straight for the central console, Kelly said, "Until we spray them with the antidote."

  She sat at the console, pulled a hand-sized computer from her waistband, and placed it on the desktop beside the keyboard. Unconsciously, Kelly flexed her fingers, like a virtuoso confronting a new piano for the first time.

  Pavel looked around at the bodies strewn across the floor, and the single featureless door that apparently was the only way into or out of this computer center—except for the air shaft they had come through.

  There were no surveillance cameras. Libyan security was concentrating on preventing anyone from penetrating from the outside; they did not think to observe what was going on inside their fortress. In the Soviet Union such laxness would never be tolerated.

  "And what if someone tries to come in here?" he asked.

  Without looking up from the display screen in front of her, Kelly said, "That's why you're here: to discourage interruptions."

  He grunted.

  Kelly's fingers were rapidly tapping across the computer keyboard. "Don't worry, Pavel," she said absently, her mind already absorbed on her task. "According to the information Hassan's people gave us, the routine around here is very strict. The soldiers don't bother the computer technicians. Actually, they're a little afraid of them."

  Hassan again. Pavel paced the floor nervously, stepping around the bodies. They seemed dead. Totally unmoving.

  If they were breathing, it was very hard to detect. He thought about trying the pulse on one of them, but could not bring himself to touch any of the inert bodies. What if they are dead? It's not my fault. What if Hassan's fanatics kill these mercenaries? Kelly and Mavroulis and Barker, waiting for us back at the camp.

  That was a different matter. Pavel could not pass that off so easily. Or at all.

  "I see your reflection in the screen here every time you waltz by," Kelly complained. "Go find a console and sit. I'll put some TV on the screen for you."

  Sighing with impatience and frustration, Pavel took an empty chair at one of the many consoles flanking the central position where Kelly was working. The main screen suddenly lit up with an outdoor scene in some city where the sun blazed down on whitewashed houses and low flat roofs, glittered off towers of glass and steel, danced across waves of the sea far in the background.

  "That's Tripoli," Kelly called to him. "You can watch Rayyid and the ceremonies fo
r the opening of the aquifer facility."

  Pavel fidgeted in the chair.

  "Put on the earphones. I'll pipe you an English-language broadcast."

  Slipping on the lightweight headset, Pavel heard a cultivated BBC voice describing the scene he saw on the display screen. The voice droned on as the camera panned across sun-drenched Tripoli and its harbor, then cut to the outdoor stage where Qumar al-Rayyid, the President of Libya and Commander in Chief of its Army, would press the button that would start the water flowing from the aquifer, hundreds of kilometers away, to the symbolic fountain in the center of the main square of Tripoli's government center.

  "At precisely 1500 hours," the broadcaster's cultured voice explained, "that fountain will begin to flow with water that was put down into the ground a hundred thousand years ago."

  Fifteen hundred hours! The words seared through Pavel's mind. That was when they were supposed to be back on the roof, heading for the tractor that would take them back to the desert camp.

  Pavel tore the headset off and wheeled his chair across the concrete floor to Kelly.

  "Rayyid's going to start the water flowing at 1500!"

  Almost annoyed at his interruption, she shot him a quick glance. "I know."

  "But that means the water must begin flowing hours sooner, doesn't it?"

  Kelly took her hands from the keypad, flexing her fingers as if they had gotten stiff. "The water's already filling the underground aqueduct," she explained. "They've tested the system, for God's sake. When Rayyid punches the button, the pumps here start up again and begin drawing water. The fountain spurts and everybody in Tripoli cheers —if you don't stop getting in my way."

  Pavel pushed his chair back slightly.

  "It takes a lot of time and concentration to reprogram their computer," Kelly said, half apologetically. "We don't want them to know there's been any interference. It's got to look like they screwed it up themselves."

  Pavel could not stand it any longer. "Hassan is a traitor," he blurted.

  With obvious patience, Kelly replied, "We know. When Rayyid's water scheme collapses, Hassan will lead the coup d'etat that topples him. Then the French sell him fusion-powered desalting systems so that Libya can convert Mediterranean water for irrigation and drinking, and leave the aquifer alone." She turned back to the computer.