Blown Circuit

by Lars Guignard

  It was hidden in a brass can light that protruded below the others. I motioned Kate down, behind the couch, but I suspected that we were too late. The screen cycled again. A satellite map with a target on it came into view. The target was exactly as Meryem had promised—the United States Sixth Fleet. The view zoomed over an open-water image of the ships before cutting to a low-angle, live video feed of the USS Mount Whitney command ship taken from sea level. The feed was captioned with GPS coordinates of the Mount Whitney’s vector. I didn’t know where Meryem's people had gotten the satellite imagery or the live video from, but I couldn’t ask for better verification of the target than that.

  I heard footfalls on the bridge above. Boots, and lots of them. Clearly, we had been seen. I motioned Kate out, but she shook her head and marched forward. She reached behind the bar and threw me my backpack, and then strode forward several more steps and swung open a hinged leather ottoman. Kate reached inside the ottoman’s storage area and tossed me a crossbow and a coil of rope.

  “New plan,” she said.

  Kate pulled out a similar rig for herself and we slipped unseen onto the deck. There was a ladder on the outer cabin wall that led up, past the enclosed bridge, onto the open flying bridge above. I climbed, arm over arm after Kate, the guards now audible searching the salon below. I could see little but shadows by the time I threw myself over the rail onto the flying bridge—except the crane. The crane standing on the castle above was lit like a Christmas tree. A silver sphere hung from the crane. I recognized it at once. It was the same silver sphere that we had towed through the tunnel, and now it dangled from the crane’s long arm. A cable hung below the sphere like a tail and men were at work on the jib arm of the crane above. Meryem and her crew were preparing to fire the Tesla Device at the Sixth Fleet.

  I heard shouting from below and I closed the gate separating the flybridge from the steep stairwell. It wasn’t much of a defense, but it was better than nothing. Kate rigged the crossbows with two explosive bolts. I had seen that type of equipment before. The bolt would hit its target with a small explosive charge, giving it just enough power to penetrate the surface and deploy a grappling mechanism. After the bolt was set, the user could tighten the rope and zip-line across to the target.

  There was only one problem with Kate’s plan. The castle wall was high, really high. We were moored so close to the base of it that it absolutely towered over us. There was no way we were going zip-line up a two-hundred-foot wall, but Kate didn’t seem concerned. She fired her bow. Not horizontally across to the castle wall, but vertically, almost to the top of it. I heard a little pop when the crossbow bolt hit, and then she pulled the slack out of her line, looping it through her climbing harness.

  “You coming?” she asked.

  “After you.”

  Kate pulled the line tight through her harness, stepped up onto the rail, and let go, swinging across the sea like a pendulum. I didn’t wait for Kate to hit the wall. I aimed my crossbow high, just as she had done and depressed the trigger. The bolt sailed far and true, finding its target with a reassuring pop. But instead of cinching up the line, I ducked because a bullet had just cracked through the night. Then a big crewcut head appeared just above the low half-door that separated the bridge from the stairwell.

  The guy on the stairs took another step up and raised his weapon. He had a perfect shot and he knew it. Even though it was dark, he could see my face just fine. But I wasn’t so sure that he could see my gun. Not from where he was standing. The sight lines were all wrong. I had no intention of dying on that rail so I did something that I had been trying very hard to avoid doing. I shot him. I lifted the H&K and pulled the trigger with my left hand while I cinched up the rope with my right.

  Then I pushed off the rail and swung into the abyss.

  Chapter 57

  MUZZLE FLASH LIT up the night as I swung wildly into the darkness. The good thing was that the guards were shooting at where I had been on the flying bridge, not where I was, swinging somewhere above the sea. The bad thing was that I’d soon be hitting a rock wall on the other side. It happened even faster than I expected. The cliffside snuck up on me like a semitruck. My legs were out to absorb the blow, but I still hit with more force than I anticipated. I bounced once and returned, smashing my shoulder into the cliff. It didn’t feel good, but it was better than a belly full of lead.

  Even though I couldn’t see my pursuers, I could hear them scouring the flying bridge for me. Then they started firing into the water. I was invisible now, but they would get smart eventually, which meant that I needed to climb. The parapet at the top of the castle was angled outward, I hung out about twelve lateral feet from the wall. I couldn’t see Kate on the castle wall above me, but the climbing harness came complete with a simple jumar rig to climb the rope. The rig consisted of two ascenders threaded through the rope, one on top of the other.

  An ascender was basically a one-way cleat that could be moved up the rope, but locked so it wouldn’t travel back down it. The part about this particular jumar rig that wasn’t so great was what was missing. Most jumar rigs also include a pair of foot-loops called aiders, which dangle from either ascender. You put your foot in the loop, and because it’s attached to the rope via the cleat, you can basically stand there. By alternating your weight between one foot-loop and the other, you can effectively walk your way up the rope like a ladder.

  This rig didn’t have the foot-loops. It was just a pair of one-way cleats which meant that I’d have to pull myself up the two hundred or so vertical feet with my upper body. Still, I was impressed that Kate had thought to stash the climbing equipment. I figured I could forgive her the missing parts.

  I depressed the spring and moved the first magnesium-alloy ascender up the rope. Once I got the first ascender where I wanted it, I moved the second one up, and rested on it. After that, I repeated the process. I made my way more than halfway up the castle wall before I ran into any trouble. Then I felt some serious slip.

  I only dropped about twelve inches, but rope-slip is never a good thing, mostly because it means you’re about to fall. For whatever reason, my anchor had failed. Either it hadn’t penetrated the wall properly, or it was making its way down a crack. Regardless, my rope was coming loose. I had maybe fifty feet to go to the top of the castle wall. Not an impossible distance. But it also meant that I had a hundred and fifty feet below me, which was a problem. I didn’t think that the sea splashing around the rocks below was more than a few feet deep.

  I dropped another five feet in an instant. I knew that the rope I was relying on would be next to useless very quickly. What I needed was a plan. I dropped another fifteen feet before I could even complete the thought. I knew the next thing that happened wouldn’t be slippage. No, the anchor would pull right out. I bounced on the rope, looking for a solution. I still hung out at least nine lateral feet from the wall. I needed to get to that wall. So I started to swing. The first swing got me within a foot of the castle wall. Not close enough. I couldn’t touch it. I swung back out and the return swing got me where I needed to go. I just managed to touch the gritty stone.

  Then the rope let go. No final warning. No ceremony. One second it was holding, the next it wasn’t. I slid straight down the wall. Three feet...four feet...five feet. Time seemed to slow. I knew that if I slid much farther, I was going to the bottom. But I didn’t because I got lucky. I slid right past an iron handhold—some kind of rusted spike in the wall. Instead of letting it pass me by, I grabbed ahold of it. All my weight on that one ancient spike. By some miracle, the spike held.

  It was the luck itself that was worrisome. I had already gotten lucky a few times on this mission and I hadn’t expected it to happen again. Because the thing with luck is, sooner or later it runs out. But it hadn’t run out yet, so I found myself dangling off the vertical wall. What had been my top-rope now dangled below me.

  Now all I had to do was free climb back up the wall to the parapet above. Not an ideal situation, but noth
ing I hadn’t done before. I reached out with my leg and found my first foothold in the rough, cracked masonry. My right toe fit right into the deep fissure. That was good. It took some of the strain off my arm. Then I found another crack above for my left hand. Perfect. The old wall was more mottled than it looked. Climbing it wouldn’t be easy, but it could be done. I pushed myself farther up and found another handhold. Real rock climbing is done with the legs. As it turned out, so was castle climbing. I let my arms guide me, but it was my legs that I relied on.

  I did have one problem: the Heckler and Koch. It hung awkwardly off my shoulder, scraping the wall every time I got close. I had managed so far, but it was a liability. The gun had to go. So I dropped it. I waited for a few seconds as it fell. Finally, it landed with an audible plop.

  There was no reaction from the Fox. They were shining flashlights around, but they were still looking for us on the boat. The gun landing in the sea must have sounded like a fish jumping. I found another toehold and reached up the wall, but I hadn’t properly considered the rope dangling below me. It clanged a couple times as the bolt on the end of it tapped the wall. Not loudly, but enough to indicate that I wasn’t a fish.

  At first I heard the tenor of voices aboard the yacht change. Then I heard a shot. After that it was all over. They knew I was on the wall, not on the boat. Their flashlight beams couldn’t quite penetrate the darkness, but it didn’t matter, because their bullets could. They sprayed the castle wall with gunfire, blasting away at the masonry below me.

  I climbed harder and faster, searching and finding the holds with the kind of zen precision that falls on anybody who’s in the zone. My hands and feet located the holds in the cracked wall almost as if they were guided by some kind of prophetic force. Or maybe it was just focus. Gunfire tended to do that to a guy.

  I was making good time and I knew that my decision not to untie the rope that now dangled below me was a good one. The grappling bolt acted like a lure. They kept shooting at it, but the bullets weren’t hitting me, because I wasn’t there. Instead, I was eight feet from the top, the parapet directly above. Then somebody got smart. A spotlight sparked to life.

  In an instant, my world was awash in bright white light. I was lit up like a bug on a movie screen. I found another set of holds and made my way up the wall again, but I knew that I didn’t have long, a second, maybe a second and half, before the bullets hit and I was all out of tricks. The light also revealed something else. The good fortune that I had been relying on for so long was running out.

  The top of the wall was smooth. It might have been because it had been remortared because of its accessibility, but with only a few feet to go, I couldn’t see another handhold to be had. So I pulled myself up with my left hand and reached for the ledge with my right. I grabbed ahold of the ledge, but just barely. Then a bullet hit the wall immediately to the right of me. Took a big chunk right out of the rock. I swung to my left. I didn’t think about it. I just did it. I kicked off the wall and swung up, grabbing the ledge with my other hand, and vaulting over. I was almost horizontal with the top of the wall when I twisted my body. Which is about when the new wave of bullets flew. I felt them hit my backpack before I heard their bark.

  I had been hit.

  Chapter 58

  I WAS FAIRLY certain that the bullet had hit the backpack, but not me. I rolled off the edge of the parapet and down to the walkway three feet below on the other side. Kate was waiting for me.

  “What took you so long?”

  “I stopped for a burger and Coke.”

  The bullets continued to fly, but we were well hidden behind the rock wall. I checked myself over, pulling off my pack. I was unscathed. It was the pack that had taken two bullets. Not into the rear panel, but side to side, clean shots straight through. Better it, than me. I surveyed the courtyard below us. The bullet fire was muted on the rampart, but that was because another noise dominated the darkness—the heavy rumbling of generators.

  There were three of them: big orange boxes on trailers, the type of thing that got pulled to construction sites to provide portable power. The generators sat in the pool of light directly below the crane, but I sensed that there was a problem because I also saw a group of people arguing. I recognized Meryem and Faruk and two of the soldiers from the boat. But they weren’t alone. There was also a guy with a receding hairline wearing a suit. Unfortunately, I recognized him as well. It was Azad, Meryem's irritable groom. I signaled Kate silently and we moved down a stone staircase and through the darkness. Azad was speaking, his lips moving angrily. It sounded like Turkish, but we had to get closer before I could make anything out.

  “Speak English,” Faruk said. “I do not want the men to understand.”

  “You promised me this evening. What is taking so long?” Azad said.

  “The targeting codes. They need to be entered,” Meryem replied.

  “I want this machine working,” Azad said.

  “It would be working if we had flown it back to the tower,” Meryem said. “The Device was to be operated from the minaret in Aphrodisias.”

  “There is no time. It will work here as well. It has an eight-thousand-mile range. That is nearly thirteen thousand kilometers. A few hundred kilometers makes no difference.”

  “You need patience, Azad.”

  “We cannot afford patience,” Azad said. “The fleet is moving. Our observers will not be able to accurately pinpoint the ships’ locations forever.”

  “They are almost done, I promise you,” Faruk said.

  “Show me,” Azad commanded.

  I SIGNALED KATE, indicating that we should return to the castle wall and circle around. We were undetected now, but I knew we wouldn’t be for long. Sooner or later the guards on the boat would report our skirmish. I didn’t think that they would be quick about it because it reflected poorly on them, and they would try to salvage the situation, but eventually they would report it. And at that point security would tighten like a noose.

  We retreated to the castle wall and up another set of stairs, following the rampart around the perimeter of the fortress toward the base of the crane. In the past, the rampart had been used to attack the enemy. Now we were the enemy, using it as a highway into the heart of the castle. We passed a couple guards positioned on the courtyard floor below us and soon reached the base of the construction crane. Being on the rampart, we had a second advantage which was height. The base of the crane was probably eighty feet away and fifteen feet down, but we could see everything. It was a perfect vantage.

  Tesla’s metallic sphere hung from the jib arm of the crane, a fat yellow power cord running out of the top of it and straight down to the courtyard below. Interestingly, the power cord bypassed the generators entirely. Instead, it ran right over the edge of the castle wall as though it was tied into the city supply. Maybe the generators were a backup, or supplemental. Not far from them, the triggers sat on the castle floor.

  Three men I had never seen before huddled over the triggers. The men weren’t in uniform. They looked more like tech guys, Kurdish hackers. The men had daisy-chained the triggers together in a series with a network of wires coming out of one end. Those wires had then been piggybacked up the fat cable to the sphere. But what was more interesting was the input on the other end. They had what looked like a wireless router tied into the rear trigger. One of the men held a laptop computer. Kate bent closer to me.

  “The first real computer wasn’t even built until after Tesla’s death,” Kate whispered. “What are they doing?”

  I didn’t know for certain. But I had a theory.

  “Tesla may not have designed the Device to be used with a computer, but it doesn’t mean the Soviets didn’t build it that way. It would be an add-on to the targeting system. Like a laser scope on an old revolver.”

  “That was still the early fifties,” Kate said.

  “These guys knew they’d be working with very old technology. Bayazidi might have even left them the schematics. They put t
ogether a team that’s figured out how to target this thing,” I replied.

  I watched the cogs in the trigger turn. The triggers were connected to both a router and an external power source, but I could already see a number of issues. For one, the power source looked hacked—they had a common plug-in transformer, like the kind you would use to charge your phone, powering the electric motor in the trigger. For another, the titanium frames of the triggers were not meant to be self-supporting. They would be lying on their sides if not propped up by the crates. From what I knew of him, I was sure that Tesla would have devised a better design than that.

  “Do you know the guy with the balding head?” Kate asked.

  “Azad,” I replied. “He tried to slice my neck open with a bottle.”

  “He’s PKK,” Kate said. “Top of the food chain. Rarely sighted, but when he is, something big happens. Always.”

  Meryem and Azad were arguing. They had reverted to Turkish, presumably because they were angry, and it was loud. I kept picking out a Turkish word—Akdeniz—I had heard the gulet captain use it. It was the Turkish word for the Mediterranean Sea. I pulled off my backpack and took out my iPhone, which I was happy to have in my possession again. It was small enough that the bullets had left it unscathed. I could see their laptop computer operating right there on the wireless network in front of me. I launched a password cracking app, but I wasn’t confident that I could break their encryption locally, so I did what I had been wanting to do for a while. I messaged Langley directly. With any luck, they could tether in.