by Jim DeFelice
“I could never keep up with you, Foma.”
The Russian smiled, as if this was a great compliment.
“You are going south?”
Kharon shrugged.
“I assume that is necessary, no?” said Foma. “But being on both sides is difficult for you.”
“No more difficult for me than you,” said Kharon.
Kharon saw his contact coming through the door. Their eyes met briefly. Then the man saw Foma and slipped to the left, going over to the other end of the bar.
“So, we will meet again very soon?” asked Foma, putting down his glass.
“I’ll call.”
“I must go. Much business today.”
“Naturally.”
“Enjoy your meeting.”
Kharon smiled tightly. Foma left a pair of large bills on the counter to cover his drinks, then left.
* * *
Fezzan barely looked up when Kharon came over and sat down at his table. Though he was Muslim, Fezzan had two beers in front of him, both German Holstens.
“What did the fat Russian want?” asked Fezzan in Arabic as Kharon pulled the chair in. Between the local accent and Libyan idioms, Kharon sometimes had difficulty deciphering what the man said, but his disdain for Foma had always been obvious.
“He wanted to say hello,” Kharon told him.
“You talked long for people exchanging greetings.”
“It’s polite to spend time with people who buy me drinks,” he told the Libyan. “Including you, Ahmed.”
Fezzan had used the name Ahmed when they first met. Kharon knew it was not his real name, but it was convenient to continue the fiction. In fact, it felt almost delicious to do so, a kind of proof to himself that he was far superior to the people he was dealing with.
Hubris is a killer, he reminded himself.
“You wish transport south again?” asked Fezzan.
“Yes.”
“When?”
“As soon as it can be arranged.”
“Tomorrow then. At four.”
“In the morning?”
“Afternoon.”
Kharon shook his head. “Too late. I want to be there before noon.”
“Noon.” Fezzan made a dismissive sound and picked up one of the beer bottles. He emptied it into his glass. “Who would even be awake then?”
“If you can’t do it, I can find someone else.”
Fezzan scowled at him. “I have other business.”
“That’s not my problem.” Kharon started to get up. He noticed a young woman in a silk dress eyeing him at the end of the bar. She might be useful.
“All right.” Fezzan thumped the empty bottle on the table. “You know, you are not always a welcome person behind the lines.”
“No?” Kharon glanced over at the woman, studying her. It was difficult to tell her age in the bar. She could be anywhere from fourteen to thirty.
Most likely on the younger end of the scale, he decided.
Fezzan followed his gaze.
“You should be careful,” warned the Libyan. “Some fruit has terrible surprises inside.”
“Best pick it before it rots, then.”
* * *
The girl was gone by the time Kharon finished with Fezzan, but that was just as well; he had much work to do. He went upstairs and caught a taxi to the Tula, a tourist-class hotel on the ocean about a half mile away. The hotel had a spectacular view of the ocean, and a restaurant on the roof some thirty-five stories high. But for Kharon, the attraction was the computer in the alcove just off the lobby.
There were two there, generally used by patrons to confirm airline reservations and print out boarding passes. But the Internet connection was not limited to this, and within a few moments Kharon had disabled the timer as well.
He went to Yahoo News and did a quick recap of the stories on the bombing attacks on the government city.
Two hundred thirty-eight stories had been published in the past twelve hours. But none included the video he had uploaded the night before.
All of that work — not to mention expense — for nothing?
That was not true. The same man who procured the video had also introduced the worm; it was a package deal. But still, it was disappointing that the video had not been used.
Most of the stories were vague about what had happened. Kharon decided he would have to help things along. Choosing one at random, he went to the comments section. He created an account and then began typing:
THE VICIOUS ATTAK ON THE TOWN IN LIBYA WAS CONDUCTD BY A AMERICAN DRONE…
He liked the typos. They would stay.
Kharon wrote a few more lines, then posted it. After repeating the process on a dozen other news sites, he turned to his real work.
Opening the text editor, he began pounding the keys:
THE ATTACK THAT WENT WRONG IN THE LIBYAN CITY YESTERDAY WAS LAUNCHED BY AN AMERICAN UAV USING AUTONOMOUS SOFTWARE TO MAKE WAR DECISIONS. IT WAS DESIGNED BY RAY RUBEO, A PROMINENT AMERICAN SCIENTIST WHO CREATED DREAMLAND…
Kharon added the slight inaccuracies in Rubeo’s biography — he did not create Dreamland, nor did he profit there, as Kharon wrote further down in his missive — out of design rather than spite; they would provoke questions about the scientist. The fact that Rubeo was no longer associated with Dreamland — the project was now under another arm of the Department of Defense — was immaterial. The press knew what Dreamland was. Saying the name gave them a bit of red meat to chew on.
Kharon signed the e-mail with the letter F, then sent it to the address of the New York Times national security reporter. He retrieved the text, made a few small changes, and sent it to the Washington Post.
He sent it three other newspapers, and to reporters at several blogs. Then he backed out, erased all of the local memory, and rebooted the computer.
Work done for the day, Kharon looked at his watch. It was well past midnight — too late to bother trying to sleep. He thought of the girl he had spotted earlier in the bar. Perhaps she would have returned by now.
He made sure the computer screen was back to the hotel’s front page, then went out to find a taxi.
16
Sicily
Turk’s fourth beer of the night finally got him off to sleep. He dozed fitfully, curled up at the side of the king-size mattress, huddled around one of his pillows. His dreams were gnarled images that made no sense — an A–10, an F/A–18, Ginella, Zen, buildings, and endless sky.
His phone woke him up, buzzing incessantly.
He had no idea where it was, or where he was. He pushed around in the bed, disoriented. His head hurt and his legs were stiff.
The phone continued to ring. Its face blinked red.
“Turk,” he said, finally grabbing it.
“Captain Mako, I’m sorry I woke you.”
It was Ginella. Her voice was officious, almost quiet.
“Not a problem,” Turk managed.
“I’m down two pilots, Grizzly and Turner. I’m told you’re available, if you choose to volunteer.”
“Yeah, uh, well uh—”
“I just spoke both with your Colonel Freah and Operations. It’s entirely voluntary.”
“When do you, uh — when do you need me there?”
“We’ll be briefing the mission at 0600,” she told him.
“Um, sure. I guess.”
“That’s a half hour from now, Captain. Can you make it?”
“Yeah, um, I’m at the hotel,” he said.
Her voice softened a little. “I realize that, Captain. Would you like me to send a driver?”
“Man, if you could do that, it would be super.”
“Be in the lobby in ten minutes,” she told him. “He’ll have coffee.”
“Ten minutes?”
“He’s already on the way. I knew you’d say yes.”
17
Sicily
It was absurd and ridiculous to think that he was responsible in any way for the dozen deaths and t
he other casualties at al-Hayat. And yet Ray Rubeo couldn’t help it.
The images he had seen of the strike tortured him. The fact that his people had no luck finding what went wrong bothered him even more. Surely it wasn’t just a mistake — the enemy must have done this for propaganda purposes. And yet his people found no evidence of that.
Something had gone wrong. But what?
Working over his secure laptop in his hotel room, Rubeo worked as he had never worked before. He pulled up schematics and data dumps, looked at past accidents and systems failures, reviewed the different aspects of the mission until he practically had it memorized. And still the cause remained as much a mystery to him as it did to his people.
There was nothing wrong with the system that he could tell. The systems in the Sabre that had made the attack were exactly the same as those in the others.
So the attack hadn’t happened. It was all a bad dream.
Rubeo had presided over disasters before. He had stood in the Dreamland control center as the entire world fell apart. He’d never felt a twinge of guilt. Fear, yes — he worried that his people would be hurt, or perhaps that his ideas and inventions would fall short. But he never felt guilty about what he did.
And he didn’t feel guilty now. Not exactly. He saw wars as a very regrettable but unfortunately necessary aspect of reality. This war was a righteous one, to stop the abuse of the people who were being persecuted by Gaddafi’s heirs. It was justifiable.
Accidents happened in wars.
He knew all this. He had thought about these things, lived with all of these things, for his entire life. And yet now, for the first time, he was upended by them.
Rubeo worked for hours. If he could just figure out what had happened, then he would be able to deal with it. He could fix the machines — his people would fix the machines — and this sort of thing wouldn’t happen again.
If it was a virus, how would it have worked? It would have had to be extremely sophisticated to erase itself.
Not necessarily, he thought. The aircraft recycled its memory when it transitioned off the mission. It had to do that so it had enough space for data.
But where would it be before you took off?
The only empty positions were the video memory.
Actually, you could easily slot it there — it would be erased naturally, as the aircraft engaged its targets and recorded what happened.
Impossible, though — who among his people would do this?
So interference from outside? A radar signal they couldn’t track?
That NATO couldn’t track. He could easily believe that. Certainly.
But it could interfere with just one aircraft, not the others? Did that make sense?
Need to know more about the source.
Need to know more…
I have to have this checked out. This and a dozen other things. A hundred…
Twelve lives. Was that all it took to unhinge him?
Weren’t his contributions greater than that? Without being boastful, couldn’t he say that he had done more for mankind than all of the people killed?
But it didn’t work that way, did it? And guilt — or responsibility — were concepts that went beyond addition and subtraction.
He was focused on a virus because he didn’t want to take responsibility. He didn’t want it to be a mistake he had made.
Same with the interference.
Maybe he had just screwed up somewhere.
Rubeo pounded the keys furiously.
It might be possible to throw the mapping unit off by varying the current induced in the system…
Hitting another stone wall as his theory was shot down by the data, Rubeo slammed the cover of the computer down in disgust.
He was a fool, tired and empty.
But he had to solve this. More — he had to know why it bothered him so badly. It paralyzed him. He couldn’t do anything else but this…
Rising from the hotel desk, the scientist paced the room anxiously. Finally, he took out his sat phone and called a number he dialed only two or three times a year, but one he knew by heart.
The phone was answered by the second ring.
“Yes?” said a deep voice. It was hollow and far away, the voice of a hermit, of a man deeply wounded.
“I am stumped,” said Rubeo, trusting his listener would know what he was talking about. “It’s just impossible.”
“Someone once told me nothing is impossible.”
“Using my words against me. Fair game, I suppose.”
“There was a beautiful sunset tonight.”
“It’s night there,” said Rubeo. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to wake you up.”
“You know I seldom sleep, Ray. I wasn’t sleeping.”
“The problem is… I… the thing is that I feel responsible. That something we overlooked — that I overlooked — caused this. And I have to fix it. But I don’t know how.”
“Maybe it wasn’t anything you did. I don’t really have many details, just what I saw on the news. I don’t trust those lies.”
“What they’ve reported was true enough, Colonel.”
“They made me a general before they kicked me out.”
“One day I’ll get it right.”
“I think it would sound strange coming from you, Ray.” The other man laughed. “Besides, they did take that away. Along with everything else.”
“I don’t know what to do,” confessed Rubeo.
“Go there. Go there and see it with your own eyes.”
“I don’t know about that.”
“What other choice do you have?”
“It’s not going to tell me what happened. The failure — or accident or attack, whatever it was — happened in the aircraft. Not on the ground. There may have been interference. It’s possible — it is possible — but it’s a real long shot. I think—”
“Ray, you’re not going there to find out why it happened. You’re going there to see. For yourself. So you can understand it, and deal with it. Otherwise, it will haunt you forever. Trust me.”
Rubeo said nothing.
“You saw my daughter recently?” asked the other man.
“I spoke to her yesterday. She’s in Washington. You should call her. Or better yet, visit. Let her visit.”
“Thanks.”
“You’re very good at giving advice. If you were in my position—” Rubeo stopped, realizing he was wasting his breath. Dog — the former Colonel Tecumseh “Dog” Bastian — was in fact excellent at giving advice, perhaps the only person in the world that Ray Rubeo respected enough to take advice from. But Dog was terrible at following it, and there was no sense trying to push him; they had been over this ground many times.
“Your son-in-law is over here,” Rubeo told him instead. “He’s looking as fit as ever.”
“Good,” said Bastian, with evident affection. “Take care of yourself, Ray.”
“I will.”
“Take my advice.”
“I wouldn’t have called if I didn’t intend to.”
18
Over Libya
Visor up, Turk leaned against his restraints, peering through the A–10E’s bubble canopy toward the ground. Dirty brown desert stretched before him, soft folds of a blanket thrown hastily over a bed. He could hear his own breathing in his oxygen mask, louder and faster than he wanted. Chatter from another flight played in the background of his radio, a distant distraction.
The target was a government tank depot near Murzuq. Eight tanks were concealed there beneath desert camouflage, netting and brown tarps. Shooter Squadron would take them out.
“Ten minutes,” said Ginella in Shooter One. Paulson was her wingman, flying in Shooter Two.
“Roger that,” said Beast in Shooter Three.
Turk acknowledged in turn. The planes were flying in a loose trail, slightly offset and strung out more or less behind one another. Turk was at the rear, flying wing for Beast.
He swiveled his head to
check his six, then pulled the visor down, automatically activating his smart helmet.
Ginella directed them to take a course correction and then split into twos for the final run to the target. The first element — Shooter One and Two — would make their attack first. Beast and Turk would move to the north, watching for any signs of resistance from another camp about two miles in that direction. Depending on how well the initial attack on the tanks went, they would either finish the job or look for targets of opportunity before saddling up to go home.
Turk found the new heading, checked his six, then nudged his Warthog a little closer to Shooter Three as the lead plane ran through a cluster of clouds.
“Shooter Four, let’s bring it below the clouds,” said Beast. All laughs on the ground, he was nothing but business in the sky. “We need to be low enough to get an ID on anything we hit.”
“You see something?” Turk asked.
“Negative. I just want to be ready.”
Turk slid his hand forward on the stick. The threat radar began bleeping.
“We have an SA–6 battery,” said Ginella calmly. “Beast, you see that?”
“Looking for it,” said the pilot.
The detector had spotted the radar associated with the mobile missile launchers, and gave an approximate direction — south, just off the nose of Shooter Three. The radar had been switched on and off quickly — most likely to avoid being detected.
Turk hunted for the launcher, zooming the optical sensors. The center crosshair hovered over a gray and very empty desert.
“I see it,” said Beast. He pushed his nose ten degrees east, cutting in Turk’s direction as he gave him the location. Turk, nearly two miles behind Beast and a little higher, couldn’t see it.
“Two launchers. One up farther east just getting into position,” said Beast. “I’ll take the one with the van — Turk, take the missiles.”
“Roger that.”
Turk didn’t see the truck. In the Tigershark it would be labeled neatly for him, and the computer would prompt him if directed. But adapting wasn’t a hardship — he took his cue from Beast’s course and pushed toward the closer target.
