Cyborg 01 - Cyborg

by Martin Caidin

  Goldman tapped his pocket. “I have it with me, Dr. Killian.”

  “And the equipment?”

  “It’s here.”

  “Very good. You’re getting more efficient, I see. Now, how much time do we have?”

  “We’d like to do it in three days, sir.”

  “Let me see the list.” Goldman handed it to the doctor, who scanned it quickly. “Is all this really necessary?”

  “It is, Dr. Killian,” Goldman said. “It’s a rough job. And we’d like to have him back.”

  She wore tight-fitting khaki shorts and halter. Her deep-brown legs carried her with a lithe movement that captured his eye. Her deep hue was a result of exposure to a burning sun. He stood absolutely still, watching her leave the room, and despite her back to him he couldn’t shake the angular beauty of her face, the high cheekbones and startling red lips, the short, raven hair. She was incredibly alive. Energy seemed to coil within her like an electrical charge building for explosive release.

  Marty Schiller had brought her into the room. Steve was finishing his familiarization tests with automatic weapons, firing a stubby submachine gun with a forty-round clip. He held the weapon in a firm but free grip, holding down the trigger and rotating the barrel slightly for a spreading field of fire. The chattering roar of the gun was deafening in the enclosed space, and for several moments he couldn’t make out Schiller’s words. Finally he turned from Schiller to the girl standing perhaps twenty feet away. Marty Schiller motioned her forward. “This is Tamara Zigon,” he said. “Tamara, Colonel Steve Austin.” She extended her hand and he took it gently, startled by the cool touch of her skin.

  “It is my pleasure, Colonel,” she told him, a slight but definite accent catching his attention. She glanced at the targets at the other end of the firing room. “May I make a suggestion, Colonel?” Her teeth showed brilliant white against her deeply tanned features. He nodded, not knowing what she meant. She walked past him, picked up the submachine gun, turned to the range officer. “A full clip, please.” That man glanced at Schiller, who nodded. She slapped the clip into place, threw a round into the chamber, kept the barrel pointing at the targets as she turned to Steve. “This particular weapon, Colonel, is a Czechoslovakian improvement on a piece developed for partisan work. Originally it was Russian. You will find it fires better, there is an angular motion to the recoil, if you hold it with the clip horizontal to the ground, like this, rather than the way you held it.” She turned sharply, dropped to one knee, and fired off the clip in short, stuttering bursts. Three targets were cut almost in two. She cleared the gun, handed it to the range officer. “I will see you later,” she said, and walked from the firing room.

  Steve stared until she was gone, then turned to Schiller. “Who the hell,” he said firmly, “is that?”

  “Tamara?” Schiller looked at him closely. “She’s your partner,” he said.

  “My what?”

  “On your new assignment. You and Tamara. Starting the day after tomorrow.”

  “But she’s—”

  “A girl. I know,” Schiller said. “She is also a captain in the Israeli army, and one of their best secret agents.” He clapped Steve on the shoulder. “C’mon, we need a final session with Fanier. I’ll tell you all about her on the plane tomorrow.”

  CHAPTER 21

  He eyed the ugly beast carefully, and the big, humped animal swung its long neck about, a matted stovepipe with a lumpy head and snickering, drooling lips on the end. The stovepipe extended suddenly and big yellow teeth clicked barely an inch from his arm as Steve leaped nimbly out of the way. He glared at the camel as it shivered its matted hide to shake off a horde of buzzing insects. “Tamara, I’m warning you,” he said to the girl standing at his side, convulsed with laughter, “if this monster tries that again, I’ll—” He let the threat hang as he and the camel exchanged malevolent stares.

  “What will you do? You cannot even ride him. Here is a man who has been to the moon and he cannot even ride a camel! Any little Arab boy can do what you cannot!”

  “I’ll ride him, just as soon as I figure how to climb up—”

  “Use the saddle, my hero.” She moved to the side.

  “You call that thing,” he said with a gesture of contempt, “a saddle? That’s a piece of wood with some wool over it, for God’s sake. And what about the stirrups? Where—?”

  “That’s a Tuareg saddle. Didn’t they ever teach you anything useful? And a real saddle for a camel doesn’t have stirrups.”

  “Why not?”

  “I told you before. You use your toes to ride a camel. Get rid of your sandals,” she ordered. He glared at her, did as she told him. “Now, surely you can remember what else to do!”

  He turned back to the grotesque thing, determined to show the camel who was boss. She’d told him, all right. He’d watched the others do it and now he’d show this splay-footed nightmare—Tamara ran past him, brought the camel to the ground with its legs crossed crazily beneath the body. The animal lifted its head with mild curiosity. “Come on, now,” Tamara urged him.

  Steve grabbed the reins from her. He put his left foot on the left knee of the camel and quickly swung his right leg across the back of the saddle. Tamara stepped back as Steve wriggled his body to seat himself more comfortably, an impossible goal with the Tuareg saddle. He pulled on the reins. “All right, you miserable dromedary, let’s go,” he growled. And forgot, of course, that the riding camel doesn’t follow the habits of other animals in climbing to its feet. The camel stays on its knees and heaves its rear end up first. Steve’s butt slammed into the seat and his body pitched forward. He clung to the cross at the front of the saddle, trying for balance and then felt himself moving backward as the front end of the camel lurched upward. Swaying wildly, Steve tried to find a place to secure his feet, now flapping out from each side of the animal. He remembered what Tamara had shown him and swung his left foot upward to the camel’s neck. The trick was to secure the skin of the neck between the big and the second toe, clamp the toes tightly, and use the hold for balancing on the neck ridge. He congratulated himself on his success, and then wondered what the hell to do with the other foot. He had no time to find out. He moved his foot along the neck for better leverage, but to a camel this means “move out,” and the beast lurched forward. Ten feet above the ground, Steve found the horizon swaying and bucking. He clamped harder with his toes, and discovered immediately that the digits of a bionics foot require careful control. His toes came together with the clamping bite of a pair of pliers, the camel let out a scream of outrage and took off with a wild lunge. Steve went up in the air and came down again as the saddle lifted to meet him with breath-shaking impact. The camel turned in a circle, its head twisting as it tried to bite Steve, who was already in midair, connected to the camel only by the pincers of his toes. The beast jerked to a halt and fell to its knees. Steve flew over the saddle to hit the ground with a crash. The camel stood again on all fours and eyed him disdainfully.

  Steve walked away, looking neither left nor right.

  He slammed the door shut, stripped off his clothes, and moved quickly into the shower.

  “Give me the soap and turn around. I will do your back for you.” She stood just behind him. He had no need to turn around to know she was naked in the shower with him. Without a word he handed her the soap, felt her take it, then her hands scrubbing his back, working at his broad shoulders.

  He stood quietly as she worked her strong fingers into his muscles. When she was through she held out the soap to him, still standing behind him. “Leave the water running,” she said. “I will shower as soon as you are out.”

  He didn’t reply, but moved under the spray, turning it to the highest temperature he could endure. Finally he had enough, moved from the shower stall to pick up his towel. “It’s all yours,” he called to her.

  She moved past him into the shower and he heard a gasp as the hot water hit her body. “Tell me next time when you intend to scald me.�
�� He didn’t answer as he went into the bedroom, drying himself vigorously. He sat on the edge of the bed, not bothering to dress, taking the moment to think. He felt the heat stirring, and angrily drew on his shorts and trousers.

  He had never known a woman remotely like Tamara, and he’d never known a week like the days that had just passed. She had him wildly off balance and he didn’t know how to cope with her or this, to say the least, remarkable situation: sharing a house, a small bungalow, really, on the edge of a secret airfield in the midst of desert hills. This living together, sleeping in beds close to one another, Tamara casually naked but never flaunting or provoking him.

  They had flown from Colorado to the complex of OSO buildings, the group assembling for his briefings and training. This time Jackson McKay and Oscar Goldman got down to cases immediately. They considered Steve Austin a full member of the OSO team, eliminating his previous special and to him, irritating status. At OSO he would work, as before, with Marty Schiller and Ricardo Carpentier. There were also some new faces.

  Tamara Zigon, for one. And a short man with a tremendous, barrel chest, muscled from head to toe, head set directly atop his shoulders with no discernible neck in between. Walid Howrani was a Jew from Turkey who had vowed to return to his native land only behind a gun. No one explained to Steve the reason for the fierce hatred, nor did he ask. His interest in Howrani was appropriately restricted to the role he would play in Steve’s new assignment. Howrani had spent much time in the Arab countries as a trader. He knew the languages and the customs and above all he had an uncanny memory for the land, its terrain, and characteristic landmarks. Especially the land between the Nile River and the Red Sea, between Qena on the Nile and the port town of Quseir to the east on the shores of the Red Sea. Howrani had personally traveled this area several times, and his knowledge would be combined with aerial reconnaissance photography.

  There was also Major Mietek Chuen, a startling contrast to the thick mass of Howrani. Sandy-haired, with deep blue eyes and a slim and neatly muscled body, Mietek Chuen turned out to be much more than just another fellow pilot. In the war of six days in 1967, Chuen had led the first wave of French-built Mirage fighters into Egypt. Before the fourth day ended, with the Arab air forces battered, Mietek Chuen had personally shot twelve MiG-21 fighters out of the air. He was Israel’s leading jet ace, and he had added another six kills since then in the brief disputes over the Suez Canal area.

  Jackson McKay assembled them for the first full briefing. Steve noted that McKay would direct the briefings; a measure of the importance OSO placed on this operation.

  “You’ll get to know the face of Afsir as well as your own.” McKay stood before a large wall map of the eastern half of Egypt. He turned and ran a pointer along the map to follow a curving dotted line. “Afsir is a bastard offspring of political convenience,” he continued. “It’s really not a country at all. Actually it’s a territory the Egyptians carved out of their own land and arbitrarily declared a political entity to be regarded as an independent sovereign state within the muddled customs and conventions of international law. The Russians and their allies, including, of course, Egypt, immediately gave it recognition—although their diplomatic representation was on the minor consular level. Militarily, it was something else. Afsir, as it’s called, begins here,” the pointer touched at the Egyptian coast line of the Red Sea, just to the north of the port town of Hurghada. “They picked a good point,” McKay acknowledged. “As you can see, just to the west of Hurghada is the peak Gebel Shayib Al Banat, with a height of over seven thousand feet. They’ve got radar plastered all over the sides of that mountain, as well as along the peaks running down to the shore of the Red Sea.” The pointer moved south until it stopped at twenty-five degrees north and thirty-five degrees east. “You’ll notice the so-called boundary of Afsir is directly south of Elath, the Israeli port on the north end of the Gulf of Aqaba. Now, the interior border runs slightly west northwest from here”—the pointer traced the dotted line as McKay continued—“until we reach Isna on the Nile River. It follows the Nile northward to Qena, then works its way roughly northeast until we’re back at a point just north of Hurghada.” McKay dropped the pointer on his desk and resumed his seat.

  “Except for the area bordering the Nile, it’s rough country, mostly mountains, arid and relatively hostile to life. But it’s perfect for what the Russians and the Egyptians have wanted for a long time.” McKay paused, then went on. “It amounts to a kept state, an outlaw country, where the Russians can, by invitation, move in their latest weapons for checkout and training without being exposed to the threat from the Israelis farther to the north, as well as the international community favorable to the United States, over directly provocative military operations in a tinder box such as Egypt. It’s a thin deception, and fools hardly anybody, really, but it’s a sop to world opinion—which the Russians do care about more and more these days. The so-called government of Afsir is serving them in much the same way Franco served the Nazis in 1939, when they used a whole country to test weapons and tactics before World War Two. Same idea, updated, is all. There’s also been heat from elements of the Egyptian government who feel the Russians are crowding them, treating them like a kept state. They don’t mind the Soviets pouring in billions of dollars worth of ordnance, but they’re annoyed when the Russians insist on operating the equipment the Egyptians only manage to foul up.”

  “Typical of them,” muttered Howrani, who held Egyptians in disdain.

  McKay ignored the comment. “The point is the Russians have been given their own little enclave from which to operate. They figured, of course, that by establishing the sovereignty of Afsir it would keep the Israelis out, while they could test their latest equipment from a modern airstrip they put up in the valley—here.” McKay turned and tapped the map with his finger. “That’s almost due west of Quseir. High hills. Treacherous country, but it’s got a twelve-thousand-foot strip. Which is infested, I should add, with antiaircraft, missile, and extensive ground fortifications. The guards are Arab, by the way. Sadat wouldn’t give everything away.”

  McKay toyed with a letter opener. “The single most important reason for the airstrip in Afsir and Afsir’s makeshift international status is for the Russians to test their new MiG-27 fighter. Are you familiar with it?”

  Steve shook his head slowly. “No, I know about the MiG-23, their Mach Three hardware. But I never heard of the ’27.”

  “Not surprising, it’s still that new. As you well know, the Russians tried out their MiG-21 against us in Vietnam. On paper its performance is considerably better than the F-105 and slightly superior to the F-4, but they consistently come out second best in combat. No need for me to detail what you already know from your own experience. But just for the record, the Israelis, led by men such as Major Chuen, here, also managed to do in the MiG-21 fighters while flying the Mirage.”

  Steve looked at Chuen and nodded. “I know. They taught all of us something.” The major made no comment.

  “Israel’s pilots in the F-4,” McKay continued, “have also managed to clobber the MiG-21 in almost every battle that’s taken place. The Russian fighter is faster, has some other advantages, but the combination of excellent pilots and air discipline—again, I know I’m saying what you know, but I need to set the stage for this carefully—has kept the Israelis on top. Until now, that is,” he added.

  “To get right to the point, Colonel Austin,” Major Chuen said in a clipped, almost British accent, “the MiG-27 has wiped out our advantage. And to be blunt about the matter, we are very worried about the situation. We have managed to destroy no more than one of the new Russian machines. One of our pilots fired his entire complement of missiles—four Sidewinders, to be exact. One of them managed to contact the MiG, and the airplane exploded. Unfortunately it went down over the Red Sea and we have not had the opportunity to recover the wreckage. That way, we had hoped we might learn something about the machine.”

  “But what’s it got?
” Steve asked. “No matter what they’ve come up with, Major, it doesn’t add up to sixteen for one.”

  “Nevertheless, we have been unable to destroy more than one MiG-27 while losing sixteen of the F-4 fighters.”

  “What’s the speed?”

  Chuen startled him with the answer. “The Russian airplane can do better than Mach Two—” he hesitated, then went on, “—at sea level. At altitude our radar has tracked it at better than Mach Three Point Four.”

  “That’s over twenty-four hundred miles an hour,” Steve murmured.

  “Precisely.” Chuen looked grim. “We cannot touch the airplane in speed. Or climb, for that matter. Its speed is great enough, especially its acceleration, to render our missile attacks almost worthless.” Chuen moved his shoulder in a shrug. “Of course, we have tried to get in close where we might use the cannon of the F-4. But every time we try, well, the acceleration. The MiG leaves us flat.”

  “From what the Israelis have told us, the MiG-27 is far ahead of our new F-15 fighter, and that ship won’t go into operational service for another two or three years,” McKay broke in. “Hell of a note; we’re building what we hope is the best air superiority fighter in the world and it will be obsolete before it rolls off the production line.”

  “There’s another problem,” Chuen added. “The Russians have not flown this new machine over any territory we control. Not even over the Sinai Peninsula. They are staying strictly over the area bordering the Red Sea. They seem eager to test the airplane, but are taking every precaution that we do not get our hands on one.”

  “The Pentagon thinks it has some of the answers,” McKay said. “Obviously they’ve got a remarkable engine in that thing. They may also be using something new in the way of fuel. We don’t know. Major Chuen, and some of the Israeli intelligence people, believe they’ve equipped their new fighter with advanced electronics gear. Somehow they seem to have known each time the Israeli fighters have been behind them.”