"Rruh—?" He worked his jaw and moved his tongue around his mouth. "What now?"
"The sleeper awakes! Excellent!" the cultured voice said. "Welcome, sir. Bienvenu. And a thousand apologies. Were it not for the limitations of my countrymen, I had hoped to prepare a proper chamber, perhaps with a bed, for your return to awareness."
"How ... long was I out?"
"Who is it that speaks?"
"Tom Gurden—as you ought to know."
"Alas, then it was not long. We prepared a dose for six hours—of real time, that is. This is the same day, Tom Gurden, and barely into evening."
"What—?" Gurden sat up and rubbed the bridge of his nose. "Never mind. Where are we?"
He looked around and found a small, square window in his compartment's forward bulkhead. Whatever light there was, came through there. As did the voices.
"Mays Landing, Tom." That was Sandy. "Still in the District of New Jersey."
"Don't know it—Mays Wherever, that is. New Jersey I'm beginning to know all to well."
"A sense of humor!" the man exclaimed. "That will make the coming encounters all the more enjoyable."
Gurden crawled over to the little window, got a grip on its frame with his fingers, and pulled himself up until his eyes were level with it. Beyond he saw the van's dashboard; the backs of Sandy's head and a black-haired man's; then, beyond the windshield, a sea of green reeds. The sunlight was low and golden on those reeds, the end of a perfect afternoon. In the distance was a line of white cliffs, or maybe the ridgeline of a salt mountain.
"What are we waiting for?" Gurden asked.
The man's head turned, and Tom could see olive-toned skin, an arched Levantine nose, a curve of artfully shaved mustache.
"For nightfall. And for your returning strength. Don't try to hold yourself erect. Relax, Tom Gurden. Let us decide for you."
As the man said this, Gurden's over-tired fingers gave out. He slid sideways down the metal wall, hitting his head on one of the compartment's side-benches.
* * *
The gate was more ornate than it had to be. Its art deco scrollwork cut into the faux-granite surface of the concrete piers, its lion-headed latch plate, its showy layering of nickel-steel with black iron in the bars and cross pieces—all of this offended Hasan as-Sabah's well-honed sensibilities.
A long lifetime, twelve long lifetimes, could make any man a connoisseur of simplicity, of elegant economy, and of smooth-working efficiency. This gate, with its mock pretensions, was a gaudy atavism, throwback to a time when the Europeans had thought they really meant something in the world. It was all hollow now, of course.
Hasan sat in his yellow Porsche a hundred meters down the road from the gate. Two hundred meters in the other direction was a covered truck, which held his primary strike force. To any casual watcher, they were just two vehicles stopped along the road. Each faced in opposite directions, with the gate to the Mays Landing Fusion Power Plant between them.
The dog was not a casual watcher, however.
It sat just inside the gate, with its attention fixed on the Porsche. What intelligence looked through those blue-filmed eyes? What could it tell about the couple in the sportscar? Hasan knew that his license plates would be angled out of the dog's plane of vision and cast in shadow by the setting sun. Anyway, the license number was perfectly valid, relating to a fictitious person whose movements matched Hasan's own within the tolerances of computer and credit surveillance.
Alexandra stirred in the seat beside him.
"What is it?" he asked.
"I will follow you, of course, Hasan."
"After three hundred years, my dear, you have no other choice."
"No, not really... But, even after all this time, there are things I do not understand."
"And these are—?"
"Why do you want to take this plant? You can't hold it for long. And you can't safely give it back."
"As to the last, we will bargain for passage off the site and transportation to somewhere in the world without U.S. extradition. The grid's owners and the authorities who back them will gladly offer us the exchange."
"But why take it in the first place?" she insisted. "For a money ransom? That has never been your interest."
"I am a teacher, Alexandra."
"Yes, you teach a form of chaos."
"Is that all you think of the Hashishiyun?"
"Well ..."
"I teach practical wisdom. It's time the Americans learned to live without the things they think they need.
"Once, for a barest minute in the last century, we of the jihad owned a lever to move them, to hurt them. The Wahabis and Shiites who controlled the oil held a powerful lever against the Europeans' energy-hungry society. In time, however, other fossil fuel sources—and those not of Allah—could provide for the westerners. And then this fusion thing was discovered and harnessed to their will.
"But, if the Wind of God is strong in heart and spirit," he continued, "then we may have a lever again. We can take that plant, stop it, destroy it, and darken a section of their eastern shore, from Connecticut to Delaware. That will teach them the meaning of power. In many senses."
"And Gurden? What of him?"
"He will teach me the meaning of power."
"If he knows at all."
"If he is the man you say, then he knows."
"But why bring him here?"
"Is there a better place to put him under pressure? Ithnain will take him through the assault on this plant. We will place him at the point of maximum vulnerability. And then we shall see."
"He may still defeat you."
"Not for long. I beat him once, and I am now his elder by many lifetimes. While he has had to—what is that game called?—'hopscotch' through the centuries, I have come the long way. Much I have learned since Thomas and I last met."
"You still haven't learned how to use the Stone."
"I know more than you suppose."
"Oh? And what may that be, My Lord?"
"It is subject to electromagnetic fields. And it has a dimension of—"
Beyond the gate, the dog swung its head toward the west, as if called by its master. It rose off its haunches, took a step in that direction, turned back to look at the car. Somewhere a decision was made. The dog whirled and dashed off along the fence.
"We can begin," Hasan said, swinging up his door.
He reached down for the lever that popped the trunk of the car—which was in the front end.
"What are you going to do?"
"Open the gate." He removed the launcher and extended its tripod legs. Down the road, Hasan's men—alerted by his own activity—began climbing down from the truck.
He took one of the special loads from the trunk and fitted it into the launcher's modified breech.
"Don't you want to move closer to the gate?" she asked.
"No."
He took aim, at an angle to the central pier, lining up the sight's cross hairs on the lion-headed plate's blunt steel nose, which was thrown into high relief by the sun's last amber-red rays.
Pfuutt! The launcher shot off a trail of yellow-white smoke.
Seeing it, his men dropped flat onto the roadway, covering the backs of their necks with their hands.
Hasan kept his eye in the sight.
The lion's head disappeared.
* * *
When Gurden awoke again, his arms and legs had more feeling, although the muscles were still stiff from sleeping in a strange position. His mouth had a metallic taste in it, probably an after-effect of the drug, but his head was clear.
The van's insides were totally dark; so it must be night. At least eighteen hours had passed since he was abducted from the pool in the Holiday Hull. In that time he had ridden up the coast in a jetboat, climbed around the rafters of an abandoned building, hidden in the sand dunes under the midday sun, fought a woman of skill and power nearly to the death, and rolled around on
the floor of a van. He'd had nothing to eat, no chance to wash, and scant opportunity to relieve himself. His body felt gritty and gummy and hollow. His once new and well-made clothing stuck to his skin with dried perspiration. He could even smell himself... And what could he do about it now?
Put it aside.
He stood up, remembering quickly to crouch under the low headroom. He went directly to the tiny window in the front bulkhead and looked out.
The front compartment was empty. The only light was coming through the windshield from distant clusters of lights like a small town that was perhaps three kilometers away. No, after a minute he could see that the lights were brighter and more purposeful: they reflected off the sides of a complex of low, industrial-type buildings.
With nothing else to look at, Gurden studied the complex.
It was enormous. It took his eyes and mind a moment to assemble the patterns of its lighting—sodium-yellow area floodlights, windows opening on the greenish hollows of fluorescent-lighted rooms, blinking red aircraft warning beacons, white strings of walkway and gantry lighting—into a coherent whole.
To start with, he could assume that similar colors would represent lights used for similar purposes, and probably at the same lumen levels. Then he could equate brightness with distance, as an astronomer does with stars. The nearest pinpoints were only about a kilometer away, and equally spaced across his field of view. They brightened and dimmed at regular intervals. Those would be photo-floodlights, panning back and forth along a perimeter fence to assist the plant's video surveillance. Even at their dimmest, those lights all outshone or occluded the other, farther lights. By estimating the distance to that line of floodlights, and measuring the length of the fence with his eye, he estimated the entire complex was more than three kilometers wide. From the strength of the most distant lamps, he guessed it was at least four kilometers across to the far side.
What industry would be here, out in the marshlands of central New Jersey? The refineries and chemical plants for which this Boswash division was infamous were farther north. And these plain white walls—he recalled seeing that "salt mountain" when he was awake earlier—did not look like a refinery.
Mays Landing. The name was ringing faint bells. Something from video? Something to do with nuclear power—no, fusion power! This was the Inter-tidal Electric plant which supplied all of Central Boswash, from the Department of New Canaan down to the Wilmington Municipality. And Tom Gurden was sitting just beyond its fence in a van driven by a foreign-speaking gentleman who was supported by capable men who dressed rough... Didn't that just paint a picture.
The doors in the end of the van opened with a bump and a hiss of badly adjusted hydraulics. A flashlight beam probed the interior and tangled in Gurden's legs.
He turned with a hand up to shield his eyes.
"You can come out now," said the team leader, Ithnain.
"What are you going to do to me?" But Gurden had already worked out the answer: he was not to be hurt, not by men who had used a timed drug to put him under. So he walked to the rear of the compartment and let himself down.
"My Lord Hasan would have you watch the assault."
"Are you going to take the power plant?"
"Yes. Come."
"Where is Sandy?"
"You have not time for her now. Come."
Gurden shrugged and followed the man across the road. The Palestinian's steps clumped on the asphalt. By the few stars that broke through the rising mist and a fingernail's width of moon low in the west, Gurden could see that Ithnain was dressed in combat boots and military-style fatigues. He had an efficient-looking gun suspended horizontally just under his elbow by a long strap that went over his shoulder. The gun had a smooth, carbon-fiber body around its stubby barrel and short stock. In front of the trigger guard and behind the molded handgrip was a cylindrical cartridge holder. It was some kind of machine gun.
A knot of men, perhaps six or ten, waited on the other side of the road. The road was on a raised causeway, with an embankment about a meter high sloping down into the reeds. The tide was in, as Gurden could tell from the musical splash of the stones they occasionally kicked loose and which rolled down the bank.
"Are we going to swim for it?" he asked.
"This is a diversion merely. The main assault is by another way, under My Lord's personal direction."
"Hasan?"
"Yes."
"Hasan al Shabbat? Harry Sunday?"
"Please!" The man beside him stiffened. "You must not use that vulgar name. Especially among these, his followers. The name you have spoken is a corruption from the tongues of stupid western journalists. My Lord's true name is Hasan as-Sabah. His is an ancient name, originally Persian."
"Yeah, sure. But he is the same Harry Sunday, isn't he? The man who led the Settlers' Uprising at Haifa and later smuggled an H-bomb into Khan Yunis?"
Ithnain paused. "Yes. But those were achievements of My Lord's earlier years—by your accounting."
"And now he's operating in the States."
"So are we all."
"And he wants me for some reason."
"For some reason," Ithnain agreed.
Then the man turned and gave rapid orders in Arabic using many slang terms and military jargon, of which Gurden could follow only a little. He caught the words "missile" and "range," but he would have figured out the gist of the orders anyway, as soon as the men unpacked the long case—the size of a big man's coffin—which lay at their feet.
The white-epoxy skin of a Sea Sparrow missile gleamed in the mist. The darkness of the case hid the blunt tube of the manual launcher.
Gurden understood about these missiles. The warhead contained a high-voltage capacitor, an argon-neon laser tube pre-excited to an elevated energy state, a beam splitter, and a glass pellet the size of a rice grain. Inside the pellet was a mixture of deuterium and tritium. On contact with its target, the capacitor fired; the laser charged and fired a beam of high-energy coherent photons; the splitter redirected the beam so that it bathed the pellet from three sides; the glass skin of the pellet vaporized instantly. The outward surface of the glass flew away in a mist; the inward surface compressed and heated the mixture of hydrogen isotopes until it fused into helium. The result was a tiny hydrogen bomb.
The explosive force of a Sea Sparrow's inertial-fusion warhead was almost nothing: about equal to a tactical hand grenade, barely enough to shatter the front end of the missile casing. But explosive force wasn't the point. The electromagnetic pulse from this nuclear explosion would create an induced voltage that burned out electronics within a specified range, usually about 1,000 meters. All but hard-shielded sensors and electronics would light up like an Atlantic City slot machine on a jackpot—and then die.
In tests, one Sea Sparrow which fell a hundred meters short of its objective had sent an old Ohio-class missile submarine of 15,000 tonnes steaming in ever-narrower circles, with the hatches of its launch tubes popped ajar and its reactor running in uncontrollable melt-down mode. The observing admirals had voted on the spot to evacuate the hull and finish her with nuclear-tipped torpedoes. All that from a six-kilogram missile which had been hand-fired from a rubber boat.
"What are you going to do with them?" Gurden asked.
"Take out the guard dogs."
"Of course, the dogs... What about the electronic circuitry inside that plant?"
Ithnain shrugged, "It should not be in range. And if it is, it is probably well shielded, for similar discharges go on there."
"Probably ..." Gurden repeated.
The man Ithnain had spoken to lifted the missile gently out of its case. He pulled off the black-colored streamer flag—which might be red in daylight—that was attached to the safety pin on the arming lever. While another held the launcher vertical, he lowered it down the tube; this action depressed the lever and armed the warhead. Then the two men raised the launcher onto the shoulders of the first man and extended its inertia
l braces.
The man keyed a switch on the panel beside his cheek, lighting its red and green diodes. He swung the working end toward the fence, screwed his eye into the laser-imaging sight, and wrapped a brown finger around the trigger on the tube's pistol grip.
Tom Gurden tried to imagine what the launcher might be seeing. The fence would not offer much of a target. Maybe he was sighting on a dog.
When the man fired the rocket, Gurden was ready. He ducked and covered his eyes so that the silver-yellow glare of burning solid fuel would not destroy his night vision. A wash of acrid smoke rolled across him. So he never saw the warhead's detonation. He wondered if the electromagnetic pulse would bollix the magnetically coded data on his new identity and debit cards.
Not that it mattered. If he were arrested as an accomplice in the capture of a sector fusion plant, he didn't think he would have much need for a functioning magnetic persona.
While the others waited for their vision to clear, Gurden glided sideways, toward the truck. If its ignition system was beyond the warhead's range—and Ithnain would be smart enough, probably, to park his vehicles out of reach of the missile's effects—then Gurden might drive off while his captors were still night-blind.
He slid the driver's-side door open quietly and slipped into the seat. He felt beside the control stalk for the keypad.
Birr-burr, birr-burr.
It was the cellular phone on the dashboard. Gurden ignored it.
The keypad was under his fingers. He started to enter a single digit repeated seven times. That was the socially agreed-on access code, such as most people would use when more than one driver has use of a vehicle, or to get around a drunk-lock.
Birr-burr, birr-burr.
Something in the back of Tom Gurden's head told him to pick it up.
* * *
The Mask of Loki Page 25
