Blown Circuit

by Lars Guignard

  Then I saw Meryem glance up at the castle wall. It was just a quick glance, and her eyes fell quickly back to Azad. I briefly wondered whether their impending marriage was real. If every one of her moves all along had been calculated, tactical. I heard Azad say, “Akdeniz,” again, this time with finality, and Meryem hit a key on the laptop.

  The screen on the laptop cycled to blue, but there was no sound, no countdown, no indication of anything. I glanced around the castle, dropping my phone into the front pocket of my T-shirt. The soldier on the courtyard floor a hundred feet to our right lit a cigarette, the orange ember glowing in the night. I saw nothing to my left but the steep stone staircase leading down from the rampart. All the action was down with Meryem and Azad at the triggers. Then everything changed.

  It started with a great groaning sound, a sibilant yawn like everything was winding down. The floodlights at the base of the tower dimmed, the lights of the surrounding city dimmed, everything went black, and it stayed that way for three…four...five seconds, and then boom!

  The sonic boom didn’t actually come first. First was the blinding light. The southern sky twenty miles beyond the castle lit up. I knew that there was a peninsula out there because we had sailed around it. What I wasn’t sure of was whether it was there anymore because the white light gave way to an orange fireball. Then, finally, an incredible percussive boom echoed over the sea. There was fire, but no waterspout, which suggested that the Tesla Device’s beam had hit land, not the sea. The tiny hairs on my arms stood up as a result of the static electricity in the dry air and I smelled the sharp odor of ozone, but other than that there was no information at all. Just the searing white light which then gave way to a yellow and orange conflagration on the land beyond.

  After that I heard Meryem's voice, but not from a distance. It was right behind us.

  “Raise your hands slowly,” she said.

  Chapter 59

  I DID AS I was told, so did Kate, because Meryem hadn’t just snuck up behind us, she’d alerted the others, soldiers from the crane’s base now covering us with their machine guns. I raised my hands slowly, surreptitiously snagging my phone from the front pocket of my T-shirt as I did so.

  “Drop your weapon,” Meryem said.

  Kate dropped her Glock.

  “Now kick it down.”

  Kate kicked the gun aside. I heard a thump as it hit the courtyard floor below.

  “Hands on your head,” Meryem said.

  I put my hands on my head, Kate following my lead. A soldier patted us down from behind. He did a thorough job too. Patted my torso, my groin, my legs. However, he did miss the phone that I held carefully concealed under my palm on the top of my head. It wasn’t exactly a lethal weapon, of course, but it was what I had.

  “Good to see you again, Meryem,” I said.

  “You too, Michael. I see that you are well.”

  “Yeah. Thanks for the dirt bath.”

  “The dirt bath, as you call it, was not something I wished to do. I had no choice.”

  “You always have a choice,” I said.

  “Not always. Now, for instance, you have no choice. Now, please, walk.”

  The soldiers below had us well covered. Meryem might have been right about me having no choice. At least not a desirable one.

  “I said walk,” Meryem said.

  I didn’t walk. Instead, I turned to look at Meryem. But not before I put my hands down, dropping the phone back into my front pocket. Luckily it was dark, or I’m not sure I would have been able to get away with pocketing the phone. Meryem held her SIG pistol aimed squarely at my head. She had learned her lesson. She was careful not to get so close as to be in danger of me disarming her, or too far away as to be in danger of missing. In short, she was the consummate pro, cool, calculated, deliberate.

  “I am sorry that things between us ended as they did,” Meryem said.

  “Really?” I said. “Why be sorry? You got what you wanted.”

  “I’m sorry, because you have value, Michael Chase.”

  “Is that your way of saying you like me?”

  I smiled, but Meryem was in no mood for games.

  “No, Michael. It is my way of saying that sometimes the wind changes direction. My superiors, once again, see your value.”

  She was right about the wind. It was picking up. I tilted my head toward the conflagration burning on the horizon. I could smell smoke now. Smoke and ionized air. Like a woodstove burning after a thunderstorm.

  “What do you want, Meryem?”

  “The only thing that matters. Peace for my people. Between Faruk and me, we represent the security forces and the army. How long do you think your country will let the current Turkish government stand after forces within destroy their Sixth Fleet?”

  “They’ll never believe it was the government,” I said.

  “The entire Corlu Regiment is here in Bodrum. They will believe.”

  “They’ll know it was a terrorist attack.”

  Meryem smiled. A close, tight-lipped smile.

  “You use that word terrorist. You use it like it is all that is evil. But what is evil, Michael? Is evil merely what the other side wants?”

  “Evil is killing the innocent,” I said.

  “You think men on a warship are innocent?”

  “I think their families are,” I said. “And their children. And most of the rest of the Navy, a lot of whom just signed up to see the world, a lot of whom are a whole lot younger than I.”

  “They are still soldiers,” Meryem said. “Call it a terrorist attack. Call it an act of war by the Turkish Army on the United States. Six thousand of your sailors will be dead. The United States of America will not allow our government to remain after this. The real terrorists, our esteemed prime minister and his cabinet will be gone and a better group will follow. But only if we make them. Only if we do the difficult things.”

  “Doing this won’t help your people, Meryem. It will only hurt others.”

  “I am a Kurd, Michael. My father was a Kurd, and his father before him. We will do as we have always done. That which is necessary to survive.”

  “Killing six thousand people is equal to survival?”

  “Killing six thousand people is equal to change.”

  Finally, she had said it. She had reduced the issue to its simplest terms. And there was an appeal to her logic. An appeal that made me consider it. Was six thousand people a reasonable cost for change? Or sixty thousand? Or six hundred thousand? Because the cost would be less than the benefit. But only if you weren’t one of the six, or the sixty, or the six hundred. If you were, it wouldn’t be worth it. Because the problem with paying for a result, even a good result, with other peoples lives, was just that. The lives you were paying with weren’t your own. They weren’t even borrowed. They were stolen. And you can’t buy honesty with a lie. It just can’t be done. The legal profession calls it fruit of the poisonous tree. Everything that follows is tainted.

  “You buried me once. What do you want with me now?” I said.

  “A change of plan,” Meryem said. “We know about your work with technology,” Meryem said. “We require your expertise.”

  I was staring down the barrel of her SIG. It was a 9mm. It was probably loaded with a soft-nose round with enough power to blow a cauliflower-sized hole in the back of my head. But I didn’t care. I just laughed.

  “You’re not going to get it,” I said.

  “No? What about now?”

  Meryem pointed the barrel of the SIG down. Then she shot Kate clean through the foot. One casual pull of the trigger. Kate grimaced. She bit her lip. But she didn't scream. And I admired Kate at that moment. I admired her grit. Kate had a lot of questionable qualities, but being a whiner wasn’t one of them. No, she could take as good as she could put out. I saw that she was now favoring her good foot, blood staining the cream-colored fabric of her shoe.

  “You think that’s going to convince me?” I said.

  “Perhaps not,”
Meryem said, “But I know what will.”

  Meryem raised her arm and waved a soldier over to guard Kate. Then she pushed me forward with the barrel of the gun toward the parapet. I looked down on the town square from the castle wall. I saw military vehicles, big transport trucks and Jeeps, lots of them. I also saw people. Regular people, tourists, backpackers, all gathered in the square. I even saw the Irish family whose photo I had snapped. I recognized the freckled little kids from their lit-up shoes, dancing around their tall, backpack-wearing parents. The kids were still happy enough, but there was a growing sense of unease, a sense of panic in the crowd. Everybody had seen the light in the sky, but the square was very crowded and there were only two exit points. Those exit points had men in uniform stationed at either one of them.

  Meryem spoke into a radio and Azad ambled up the stairs and over. He held a machine gun. Then, when he was five feet away from us, he turned and pointed the gun into the crowd. The gun was another of the HK33 assault rifles. It fired 5.56 mm NATO rounds. Almost thirteen of them per second. Azad smiled at me and placed his finger on the trigger. The square was his kill box. The setup was even better than a clock tower. He could run back and forth for maximum dispersal, and the best part was he didn’t even have to aim. Everybody, including the freckled children, would die.

  “I’ll do what you want,” I said.

  Meryem smiled and Azad eased up on the trigger.

  “Good choice, Michael. Now we kill some sailors, instead, yes?”

  I bit my tongue and followed Meryem down the steps, the guard with the machine gun on my heels.

  Chapter 60

  I DIDN’T WANT to help. But I didn’t want Azad to open fire on a crowd of civilians either. And I still had my phone. So I made an imperfect decision. I bought time. Meryem held me at gunpoint in front of the trigger assembly while I made some quick observations. Up close, their silver cams rotating, tooled parts spinning like gyroscopes, the triggers were beautiful in their complexity. But I still thought it was a shame that they were haphazardly propped up on two crates. Then it struck me. Something so obvious that I was surprised that I hadn’t thought of it before.

  “I’m going to need my backpack,” I said.

  “You will fix the trigger with our equipment,” Meryem replied.

  “I’m going to need my backpack, I’m going to need to move this whole assembly, and I’m going to need you to get the hell out of my way.”

  “Why?” Meryem said. “The triggers are here. You are here. Fix them.”

  I looked at her. I was treading a dangerous line, but it had to be done.

  “They aren’t triggers,” I replied.

  Meryem took a step back and conferred with the three tech guys. They didn’t look happy. There was some heated discussion in Turkish. She turned back to me.

  “They are triggers. Our intel tells us they are triggers. The journal says they are triggers. Even you have said they are triggers,” she said.

  “That’s what I thought, too, but not anymore.”

  “So what are they?” she said.

  “They’re a gyroscopic targeting mechanism,” I replied.

  I was going out on a limb, but if the best lies contained a grain of truth, this one contained a bucket of it. If I was going to sell what I needed to do next, I was going to have to play it as close to the truth as I dared. And given my predicament, I was daring pretty big.

  “It’s a gyroscopic mechanism and it fits inside the sphere. Not outside of it. You want this thing to shoot straight, lower the Device.”

  “Why inside?” Meryem asked.

  “See the crosshatching? It matches the skin of the sphere. The sketch of the triggers in the journal? That’s just your grandfather ensuring that the Device isn’t used by the wrong people. This Device was Tesla’s crowning achievement, but look at these things. I can guarantee you that Tesla would have demanded a far more elegant solution than having these components sit outside the sphere like so much lost luggage.”

  I was taking a big risk and I knew it. I was telling Meryem how to blow up six thousand sailors. Meryem smiled. She didn’t argue. She didn’t protest. Instead, she picked up a walkie-talkie from the orange fender of one of the generators. I noticed that since the test firing they had stopped working. Maybe they had shorted out. I didn’t know.

  “Lower the sphere,” Meryem said into the walkie-talkie.

  Clearly, the crane operator spoke English. Or maybe he didn’t, because there was no movement. The crane didn’t budge.

  “Lower the sphere,” Meryem said again.

  This time, I heard a crackle of static and a brusque voice.

  “Technical problem. The crane is not operating,” the voice on the other end of the walkie-talkie replied.

  The crane was electric and the generators may not have been up to the task. They could have easily blown a breaker.

  “Then I’m going up,” I said. “It’s the only way if you want this thing done.”

  Meryem thought about it.

  “I am coming with you,” she said.

  THE CRANE MUST have been twenty stories high. There were a series of ladders, each canted at an eighty-degree angle, up the middle of the metal superstructure of the mast. I climbed, Meryem following directly below me with her gun. Below her, Faruk and another soldier each carried one of the triggers in rucksacks on their backs. What was more important was who wasn’t there—Azad. She had left him and his machine gun on the rampart as a deterrent.

  I wondered who was in charge of their operation, and I was beginning to think that Meryem was at the head of it all. Above Azad. Above everybody. But whoever was ultimately in charge, the very clear message was that if anything untoward happened, Azad would start shooting into the crowd. There was no need to waste words on the matter. I believed them.

  I counted two hundred and fifteen rungs to the top. The cab of the crane was mounted immediately above the enormous slewing mechanism that the big jib arm rotated on. But that wasn’t my focus. My sights were set on the crane operator in the cab. It took only a moment for me to see that, besides being armed, he balanced a second blue-screened laptop on his knee. Four against one. Plus the guys below. What I had in mind wasn’t going to be easy.

  We reached a metal walkway. To my right ran the main jib, the sphere hanging from the trolley on its far end. To my left ran the counter jib, which wasn’t as long as its partner, but made up for its lack of length with big concrete weights to keep the crane balanced. The sphere’s position, hanging from the far end of the jib, gave me room to work, but I wasn’t going to have a lot of room for error. First things first. I needed to sell it.

  I stood on the metal walkway of the main jib and began walking forward, toward the sphere. Being up there was like walking the plank. If the rungs of the ladder had been spaced at about a foot, I guessed it was two hundred and fifteen feet to the castle floor below. Add another two hundred or so feet to the ground below that and we were over four hundred feet in the air. Good thing I wasn’t afraid of heights. On the contrary, it was an excellent operational environment for me because it gave me a lethal weapon just as deadly as any bullet—gravity. Not thinking that through was Meryem's first mistake.

  “Hand me my backpack,” I said.

  “Why do you want it?”

  “This is going to take all night if I need to explain every move,” I said.

  “We have searched your backpack. You have one flashlight. Clothes. One Swiss Army knife. A very poor weapon if I may say. I ask you again, how does that help?”

  “Never underestimate a Swiss Army knife,” I replied.

  She passed me the pack and I slung it over my shoulder.

  “You did not look for the knife.”

  “I already know you took it out.”

  “Then I say, once more, why the backpack?”

  A gust of wind blew in over the Mediterranean. There was smoke in the air from the massive fire still burning on the horizon.

  “Do you want
to blow up the Sixth Fleet or do you want to putz around worrying about my methods?”

  “I do not trust you, Michael Chase.”

  “I don’t care. Now pass me the knife.”

  Meryem looked uncertain, but she reached into the pocket of her khakis and tossed me the knife. Bold move that high in the air, but I caught it.

  “Thank you. Now pass the triggers here. Lay them on the walkway directly behind me. I have work to do.”

  I paced a few more steps ahead until the trolley hung directly below me from its rails on the bottom of the jib. A large metal hook hung from the trolley, and from the hook hung the sphere. Up close I could see that the sphere was held in a net. It looked like one of those foam mesh things that they sometimes sold fruit in, but I think that it was a nylon fishing net. Whatever its composition, it seemed to be strong enough to hold the ten-foot focusing array. Wind gusting, I lowered myself over the edge of the trolley and down onto the surface of the sphere.

  Chapter 61

  I CROUCHED THERE, dangling hundreds of feet in the air on top of what amounted to an oversize Christmas bauble, swinging in the wind. It was tough to stay balanced, perched up there like that, but it was doable. The first thing I did was transfer my phone to my hip pocket. The generators running the crane may have shorted out, but I was sure that there was still power to the sphere. I actually felt the big ball resonating below me, the fat electric cable tapped into its upper pole.

  Now I needed to confirm my hunch. I had seen the crosshatching on the surface of the sphere while it was in its crate but I wasn’t sure whether it amounted to anything. I pulled the LED flashlight out of the side pocket of my pack and held it between my teeth, lowering myself onto my stomach. I felt the magnetized sphere pulling at the metal casing of the flashlight. Below the sphere, I could see everything: the lights glistening off the Mediterranean in front of me, Azad on the castle floor below, the fat electric cable hanging down like a long tail. I could even see the engraved crosshatching running up and down the sphere, like lines of latitude and longitude. What I couldn’t see was a way in.