by Paul Kenyon
Annotation
Turns On the Heat.
Baroness Penelope St. John-Orsini uses every torrid inch of her death-dealing, pleasure-loving body on her latest mission. She must determine the nature of a secret weapon controlled by a savage Arab oil potentate with plans to conquer the world. Only her surefire knowledge of horse breeding and male flesh gives her the killing edge in her hottest assignment yet!
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Paul Kenyon
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Paul Kenyon
Sonic Slave
OCR Mysuli: [email protected]
1
There were no dogs. That was the first thing he noticed. There should have been a dozen snarling curs, raising the alarm, running out to snap at the camel's legs.
The man in the black burnoose stirred uneasily in the saddle and peered at the mud-brick walls of the settlement ahead. From here it looked no different from any other oasis village: a collection of sun-baked hovels grown up around some precious desert spring, surrounded by groves of neatly-spaced date palms.
He was dressed in the robes of a Jeballi tribesman, a lean, hawklike man whose skin was burned to dark leather by the cruel Arabian sun. With his looped cartridge belts and antique rifle, the inevitable curve-bladed khanjar at his waist, he might have passed inspection in any Bedouin camp. But his features were not quite Jeballi. Neither was the stainless-steel chronometer which he now removed from his wrist and hid beneath his burnoose.
The camel loped forward, swaying precariously. He hugged its hump with strong, practiced knees and fingered his rifle for comfort.
The camel was nervous. It snorted and tossed its head. It smelled something, and now the man in the Jeballi robes could smell it too — a faint, sour odor that made him frown.
Then he saw why no dog had barked. He topped a low ridge and there were five of them, lying in the drifted sand. For a moment he didn't recognize the shapes.
The animals were like stuffed toys that had been packed almost to bursting. They lay stiff-legged, the skin so tightly stretched that it showed shiny beneath the mangy fur.
But it wasn't the bloat of decomposition. There was no stench of decay. And the vultures hadn't even arrived yet. That meant that the dogs must have died bare minutes ago — perhaps as they were running out to meet him.
He leaned way over in the saddle and prodded one of the carcasses with the point of his khanjar. The skin split like an overripe fruit and a quivering pink jelly spilled out.
The camel shied and bolted, almost unseating him. He hauled himself upright by the pommel and kicked the reluctant beast back on course.
A donkey was next — or what once had been a donkey. It too was shiny and bloated, its legs like plump bolsters. There were no external marks.
The donkey's master was lying beyond, still holding the halter rope in a hand that looked like a blown-up rubber glove. As the man in Jeballi garb lurched past, he had time to see a face like a swollen balloon.
Then he was through the gate, and a scene of unutterable horror hit him in the face like a physical blow.
The inhabitants of the village were scattered everywhere, lying among the blank-faced houses like so many inflated bladders. Forty or fifty of the nightmare shapes were visible outdoors: puffed-out starfishes that were obscene caricatures of the human form.
The camel screamed in fear and refused to move. The black-robed man slid from the saddle and tethered the beast to the gatepost.
Nervously he levered a cartridge into the rifle's chamber, scanning the rooftops, the walls, the palm groves. There was nothing; no clue as to what might have slaughtered an entire village.
He'd come upon massacres before — the Bedouin encampment in the Rub al Khali, filled with rotting corpses that had had their genitals sliced off. He'd left quickly then, aware of the hidden eyes that were watching him from afar.
But this was different. The bodies had not been molested. There wasn't even an external mark on them to show how they'd died. The buildings and all the property were intact — he could see the silver gleam of the men's daggers, the brass and copper vessels scattered about the well where the women had died.
And it had happened recently. There was no smell of putrefaction. Just that pervading sour odor he'd noticed as he approached, and which he now identified as released esophageal gases.
He steeled himself to bend over the nearest corpse. From the gray beard it must have been an older man; that was all you could tell from the face, which was round and distended and smooth. He made himself touch the body's hand. The fingers were fat bladders.
Where had he seen something like it before? There had been that frogman. He'd been killed by an underwater explosion. When they'd peeled the rubber suit off him, the unbroken skin had stretched sausagelike over the ruptured mess inside.
But there had been no explosion here. An explosion that killed fifty people would have left some mark on the buildings, and it would have mangled the corpses.
Flies! Why weren't there any flies? They should have been buzzing around the bodies, around his own face. Had whatever killed the village killed even its flies?
Conquering his revulsion, he tore open the dead man's nightgownlike dish-dasha from throat to groin. What he saw looked like a bulging red inner tube; the undersurface of the skin must be one vast hemorrhage. He inserted the point of his dagger into what he thought was the lower belly and ripped it open all the way up to the rib cage.
A glistening mass of red jelly burst forth. There were no recognizable internal organs. Everything under the skin had been… homogenized.
What could do that? It needed better brains than his. The man in Jeballi robes got to his feet and picked his way through the scattered corpses to his camel.
He unfastened the saddlebags and took out the radio. It was one of the Mark VII models, a flat heavy box not much bigger than a brick, but it had enough power to reach the CIA station in Baghdad. He adjusted the frequency and pulled out the antenna to a six-foot length.
There was no time to wait for an acknowledgment from Baghdad. He had to send his message and get out fast, hoping that no one was eavesdropping on that wave band, gambling that he could transmit all his code groups before anyone triangulated his position.
He was doing very well when there was a piercing whine from the sky, and a needle-sharp F-4 Phantom jet screamed overhead. He lifted his eyes for a look. It was painted with the green scimitar-and-star emblem of the sheikdom of Ghazal, just across the border. It circled once, then headed back where it had come from. It was a couple of miles away, a dwindling metallic gnat, when he saw it waggle its wings. A signal to someone out in the desert?
He was still punching out code groups on the miniature Morse key when his camel began to act strangely. The beast became skitterish, pawing the sand and arching its long serpentlike neck. It bared its teeth and rolled its eyes, making a hysterical bleating sound.
The man in Jeballi robes looked up from his work and tried to soothe the animal with a few soft words in Arabic. But the camel didn't respond. Its unreasoning panic grew. It pulled blindly at its tether, screaming in fear.
And now the man could feel it too — a sense of apprehension that he couldn't account for. His pulse was racing, and his hand on the key trembled.
And then he was crying aloud in terror. He bolted, leaving the radio where it was; his only thought was to get out of there.
Before he reached the ca
mel, the terrified beast broke free. He caught the end of the rope as it stampeded past, hanging on desperately while it dragged him, sobbing in his panic.
His entire body began to feel warm, as though he had a fever. He opened his mouth and screamed, his bladder and bowels out of control. Everything seemed to dissolve in a pinkish blur. He wasn't aware of it when the camel collapsed, or when his nerveless fingers let go of the rope. He wasn't aware of it when his brain oozed to mush and stopped thinking.
A minute or two later, the black Jeballi robes were draped around a jellied mass in the vague shape of a man, lying next to a larger mound of jelly that could have been called a camel.
That was how the patrol found them.
They rolled into the village in a convoy of jeeps equipped with fat desert tires. There were about fifty of them, fit, hard-bodied young soldiers carrying submachine guns and wearing the checkered green headcloths of the household troops of the Emir of Ghazal.
They spread out efficiently, searching the houses and calling out to their squad leaders the numbers of dead bodies they found inside. There were white-coated medics among them, taking tissue samples from-the bodies lying in the streets.
At the approximate center of the convoy was the kind of vehicle the oil companies use for desert prospecting — a huge sand truck with a body consisting of a wide, flat platform resting on six enormous cylindrical wheels that were taller than a man. There was a peculiar-looking device mounted on the platform — a long tube whose end blossomed into a cluster of metallic horns, with a motorized housing that allowed the entire contraption to swivel like a cannon. There was a saddle for the operator, and a panel of complicated-looking controls, including a computer-type CRT screen.
The leader of the task force swung himself down from the truck bed. He was a slender man in his thirties, with European features, bareheaded despite the pounding sun, wearing neatly pressed khakis and shiny oiled boots.
"Mon Dieu!" he said, looking around at the bodies. "It went better than I hoped!"
He smiled delightedly, showing small, even, white teeth. He had a handsome, boyish face that looked somewhat faunlike with its pointed chin and wide forehead. His eyes were a deep violet, fringed with long, silky-brown lashes, and his hair was a mass of chestnut curls, with two careless tufts standing up at the sides. His good looks were marred by one tragic detail: the hearing aids he wore in both ears, with their wires trailing into his unbuttoned shirt pockets.
"I'm worried about the movement the pilot thought he saw, Monsieur le Professeur," said the aide, a young Arab with an Algerian accent. "A man and a camel, he said over the radio."
"There's nothing moving now," said the man with the hearing aids. "If there was anything left alive, our second broadcast took care of it."
He began strolling through the carnage, pausing now and then to inspect a body more closely. The swollen shapes were growing flatter now, as their jellied contents settled. A sticky pool of pinkish stuff was beginning to form around some of them — serum from the ruptured cells seeping through the pores of the skin. The Professeur was careful not to step in any of them with his shiny boots. From time to time he made a comment out loud, speaking in a soft voice that was almost a whisper. His aide, following closely at his elbow, took notes.
A soldier ran up to them, gesturing with excitement. "A radio!" he shouted. "We have found a radio!"
The man with the hearing aids winced. Involuntarily he clapped his hands over his ears.
"Mustapha!" the aide said severely. "You have been told not to shout near the Professeur."
"A thousand pardons," Mustapha said, lowering his voice. "But we have found a radio. Near a man who looks like a Jeballi…"
"Don't forget yourself again, or it will go hard for you," the aide said. "All right, let's have a look at your radio."
They walked over to the body. It was dressed in black robes, lying next to the remains of a camel. Both man and camel were still puffier than the rest of the bodies, and no serum had yet seeped through the tightly stretched skin. A small group of soldiers was standing around the bodies, jabbering away. They fell silent when the man with the hearing aids approached.
The radio was a small, flat, gunmetal box of sophisticated manufacture. There was a little brass key and a telescoping antenna. The Professeur bent to look, careful not to touch it.
"American," he pronounced "The Mark VII model, very new. This man's no Jeballi. He probably works for the CIA."
It was too much for Mustapha. "American dog!" he shouted. "Dirty spy!" He unslung his submachine gun and fired a burst into the body.
The man with the hearing aids staggered and turned pale. He looked as if he were going to faint. The aide and a couple of the soldiers sprang to support him.
After a minute he recovered. His handsome face was waxen, drained of blood. One of the tufts of hair on his head stirred, though there was no breeze. The soldiers looked uneasy.
"Mustapha," he said in a whisper, "come here."
Mustapha took a reluctant step forward, looking frightened.
"Take his gun," the man with the hearing aids said.
Quickly as striking snakes, two of the soldiers relieved Mustapha of his weapons before he could move.
"Please, effendi," Mustapha said in a small voice.
"I'll be deaf for hours," the other said. "You were warned."
"Please, I won't forget again," Mustapha whispered.
"Silence him," the Professeur said. "Permanently."
"And no noise," the aide said.
They stuffed a rag into Mustapha's mouth before he could scream. Then they pushed him to a kneeling position and strapped his hands behind him. One of the soldiers, a big strapping fellow with brawny forearms, drew his curved khanjar. With a quick, deft slice of the blade, he lopped the kneeling man's head off. There was a gout of blood from the stump of the neck, and the body toppled forward into the dust. The head bounced once on the hard-packed street and rolled to a stop, a horrified expression on its face.
The man with the twin hearing aids glared at the body, the cords of his neck working with emotion. One of the tufts of hair on his head moved, and a small brown bat flew out. It fluttered around his head for a moment, bewildered by the bright sunlight, then went back to its nest in his hair.
"Bien," he said. "Get ready to move out. Bury Mustapha and the American in the desert. And get rid of the radio. Leave the rest. By the time anybody discovers them, there won't be anything left to show what happened."
The aide and the soldiers followed his gaze upward. The vultures had arrived, making slow, lazy circles in the sky.
* * *
"Hold it!" said the Marine guard at the door.
"Stand aside, you damned fool," said the director of the Central Intelligence Agency. "Don't you know who I am?"
"Yes, sir," the guard said doggedly. "But I've got to see your pass anyway, sir." He was a rawboned kid who still had a faint golden down on his cheeks instead of whiskers, but his hand already was straying toward the .45 caliber automatic holstered at his waist.
"Having some trouble?" an amused voice said.
The CIA director spun around to face the rangy man in civilian clothes who had appeared so suddenly. "Damned right," he said. "Will you tell your man here to let me through? Good Lord, he sees me go through that door every week!"
The general who headed the National Security Agency smiled patiently at his chief rival. "He's got his orders. Don't you, son?"
"Yes, sir," the kid said.
Grumbling, the CIA chief dug out a small plastic square imprinted with a meaningless herringbone pattern that made you dizzy if you stared at it too long. The Marine sentry pushed it into the slot of a holographic readout device next to the door. There was a buzzing sound and a flashing light. A computer punch card dropped into a tray. The Marine put it into a lockbox without looking at it.
"Thank you, sir," he said. "You can go in now."
"I have to hand it to you, Sam," CIA said
. "I'm chairman of the U.S. Intelligence Board. I'm the one who reports to the National Security Council. It's my missing spooks we've come here to discuss today. And we have these meetings in your bailiwick. Fort Meade."
The general took a long, satisfied look around him. They were standing at one end of a corridor that was almost a thousand feet long. It was wider than a football field. It was bustling with people on errands, all of them wearing the iridescent green or red badges that got them past the armed Marines who lined the corridor. More than thirty-thousand people worked here — twice as many as were employed by the CIA at Langley. The general had a bigger budget than the CIA, too — a fact which he was too gentlemanly to rub in.
"That's because our security is tight," he said pleasantly. "By the way, you can leave that miniature tape recorder with the guard. We don't want a tape of this meeting in anybody's files. Anywhere."
CIA shot him a glance of pure poison and surrendered his recorder, a matchbox-size Nagra SN with the microphone disguised as a button on his jacket. He had to rip the button off to do it.
"That's a fellow," the general said. He took CIA by the elbow and began ushering him toward the steel door.
The Marine stopped him. "Just a moment, sir," he said. "I've got to see your pass too."
The general handed it over. CIA allowed himself a tight smile. When the holographic pattern had been verified, the Marine unlocked the door to the conference room.
Everybody was there except the President's man. He was always late, especially now that he'd been given a highly visible public position in addition to his duties as security advisor and chairman of the Special Group.
The other members of the Special Group looked up as CIA and NSA entered. They were sitting around the massive oak table, doodling, sipping coffee.
"Hello, Samuel," said the admiral in charge of the Defense Intelligence Agency. He was in full uniform, with all the braid. "What's up?"
"We'd better wait for the good doctor," the general said. He sat down. The man from State pushed the silver coffee pot over to him and he helped himself to a cup.
