The Cobweb

by Neal Stephenson

  “They probably know something’s up already,” Fazoul said, “but they know they will have plenty of time to kill us in the air.”

  The whine of a hydraulic pump could be felt through the structure of the plane and the stack of fuel containers. The cargo door was closing, even as the crew members were securing the tank and the tractor in place. Either they had brought the little tractor with them, or else they were simply ripping it off from the Forks County Regional Airport.

  One by one, they heard the engines start up. The crescent of blue light coming in from outside grew narrower and narrower, like a moon in eclipse, and finally vanished, leaving nothing but yellow indoor light. The cargo door was sealed.

  “I am angry with you, Khalid,” Fazoul said. “The correct thing would be for me to kill you. Because your plan is much less certain to work.”

  Now that the nose of the plane was horizontal again, there was space up there for the passengers—padded seats in a partially noise-proofed compartment sandwiched between the cockpit and the cargo hold. Three of the Iraqis went there immediately. Al-Turki stayed behind for a minute, fiddling with some connections on the outside of the tank. Clyde and Fazoul clambered to a slightly different position so that they could see what he was doing. Al-Turki began to back away from the red tank, paying out wire from a reel, wrapping it around the occasional fixed object. He backed all the way into the passenger compartment and then shut the door.

  Clyde looked questioningly at Fazoul, who shrugged. “Maybe they are afraid that if they continue to rely on the radio detonator, perhaps your clever electronic-warfare specialists will figure out how to trigger the bomb in midair by beaming a signal into the plane. This is what I would be afraid of. So they turn off the radio and hook up a hardwired detonator instead.”

  Sheets of something cold and wind driven were flailing against the metal skin of the Antonov, sounding like wet concrete sprayed out of a pressure hose. The engines throttled up, but the plane didn’t move; the wheels were iced up. Up in the cockpit Vitaly began to alternate the thrusts on the engines violently. Finally the wheels cracked loose and the ship jerked forward. Tons of fuel sloshed back and forth in all of the tank containers, causing the whole jungle gym to strain against its moorings, and yanking the Antonov back and forth on its suspension in a slow oscillation that took a minute or two to die away. But the plane was moving—plowing and skidding to the southeastern extreme of the airport, where the twelve-thousand-foot runway began.

  Vitaly turned the plane around very, very slowly, trying not to get that fuel sloshing. When he had it aimed in the right direction, he sat for a minute or two, perhaps running through a checklist, perhaps just screwing up his courage. Clyde hoped foolishly that they would call the whole thing off and that he would get to stay home today.

  Then Vitaly released the brakes and racked the engines up as high as they would go. The combination of the engine noise, which must have been breaking windows in town, and the wind and ice and sleet sliding off the skin of the plane overwhelmed Clyde’s hearing and made it impossible to think.

  The Antonov accelerated weakly but steadily, its tires pounding through snowdrifts. The takeoff run lasted forever; Clyde could not believe that they were still in the airport. The runway could not possibly be long enough for this. But then the noise of the tires diminished and went away entirely. The ride was still rough, but now it was the roughness of an airplane in turbulence, no longer that of a four-wheel-drive vehicle speeding across rough ground. Hydraulics whined and the doors over the landing gear slammed shut like the gates of hell. The Antonov hit an air pocket the size of a city block and seemed to lose about half its altitude; tremendous sloshing noises came from all the fuel tanks, and the whole jungle gym began to creak and pop and bend out of shape. Clyde could not see outside, but he knew the territory and calculated that they must be about to crash headlong into the bluffs of University Heights.

  The right wing dipped as Vitaly banked the ship northward, which would be necessary to avoid the bluffs. Clyde counted to ten, then twenty, then a hundred. They didn’t hit anything. The ride got smoother. Clyde’s ears popped, then popped again.

  They had cleared the twin cities.

  Maggie wasn’t going to die today.

  And Clyde was going far, far away from home.

  Clyde checked his watch. It was just past one in the afternoon. “How far to Iceland?” he said to Fazoul.

  Fazoul had wedged himself underneath one of the fuel tanks and was busy working on something. Clyde clambered down for a better look. “How far to Iceland? You have any idea?”

  Fazoul rolled his eyes. “It is not a place frequently visited by Vakhan Turks.” He had taken some items from a belt pack that he had been wearing under his Twisters sweatshirt and was deeply involved in a project of some sort.

  “Just off the top of my head,” Clyde said, “I figure that by the time we’ve gone a thousand miles, we’ve cleared most of the parts of Canada where people are living. Two thousand probably gets us way up into the Arctic. Three thousand, and we’re over the ocean. Four thousand is too late—getting close to Europe. Does that sound good to you?”

  “Yes,” Fazoul said absently, snipping a couple of small wires.

  “How fast you figure this crate flies? Five hundred?”

  “Something like that.”

  “So in six hours we jump the Iraqis, and if we screw it up, the only thing that dies is a lot of fish.”

  “Fine,” Fazoul said. He began pushing buttons on a small electronic box he had just lashed to the fuel tank with some black electrician’s tape. “And in seven hours this brick of plastique explodes.” He pointed to a lump of translucent clay jammed between a fuel tank and a reinforcing gusset. “Unless one of us lives long enough to disconnect it.”

  “And how is that done?”

  “By cutting these wires. Or jerking them out, if you are in a hurry. And if you want to detonate it immediately, just turn on this red switch.” He gently fingered a small red toggle switch wired into the circuit.

  Clyde sat there for a minute or so, looking at the timer, counting down the digits from 07:00:00. The sight of it filled him with a strange feeling of peace. Maggie had not died, and because of this device, Desiree wouldn’t die either. At least not from botulin poisoning.

  The climb to cruising altitude seemed to last about an hour. Then the engines throttled back and the plane settled into a steady attitude. The skies must be clear up there, Clyde thought, because the flight was smooth, and when the door leading to the passenger deck was opened, he was startled and disoriented to see bright sunlight shining down the stairway from the windows above.

  Al-Turki came down with one of the crew members and walked around the red tank a couple of times, checking its moorings, his breath steaming out of his mouth as he asked questions. Then he retreated to the warmth and quiet of the passenger compartment.

  About an hour later a crew member came back into the main cargo area carrying a stainless-steel thermos and staring up into the jungle gym, trying to catch sight of them. Finally Clyde stuck one hand out and waved to him.

  The crew member climbed to their level and handed off the thermos, threw them a mock salute, and then climbed back down. Clyde opened it up and gave it a sniff; it was hot tea, and no beverage was ever more welcome.

  There seemed to be no more point in hiding high up in the reeking stack of fuel tanks, so they climbed down to the deck and retreated toward the tail section of the plane, where they could not be observed, and sat down on some duffel bags. Clyde poured some tea into the lid of the thermos, and he and Fazoul passed it back and forth for a while. It was made in the Russian style, almost too bitter to drink. But the trudge through the blizzard, and two hours in the cargo hold of the Antonov, had left them dehydrated and chilled to the bone. This was perfect.

  Which made it all the more disappointing when Fazoul dropped the last third of it, a full cup, onto the floor. The steel lid bounced down the tread pl
ates for some distance, and Clyde had to run it down. When he came back, Fazoul was leaning against a duffel bag, breathing raggedly. Clyde aimed his flashlight at Fazoul’s face and saw that his lips had gone purple.

  “We have always avoided religious discussions,” Fazoul said in a thick, slurred voice. “Now, at the risk of being rude, I would like to recommend that you accept Islam here and now. We have only a few minutes to live. It is unfortunate. But our wives and children are safe.”

  “What’s going on?” Clyde said. He was afraid Fazoul was having a heart attack or something.

  “The tea,” Fazoul said, now stopping after almost every word to fight for breath. “Iraqis—know that—we are here. Russians told. Cockroaches.Couldn’t shoot us—because of fuel tanks—so—the tea—with botulin.”

  Clyde knew that Fazoul was right. He recognized the symptoms now; Fazoul’s eyelids were drooping just as Hal Karst’s had done.

  “Red switch. Now! You—have—poison—too,” Fazoul said.

  “Fazoul,” Clyde said, “you can count on me to blow this plane up if that’s what it takes. And if I ever see Farida and little Khalid, I’ll tell them you went straight to heaven like a jihad man, and that you were thinking of them the whole way.”

  “Red—switch,” Fazoul said. His body went into convulsions, racked by oxygen deficiency, and Clyde threw his arms around him and held him so he wouldn’t batter himself against the cold metal of the deckplates. The convulsions grew weaker over a minute or so, and then Fazoul’s body went entirely limp.

  Clyde arranged Fazoul on the deckplates and closed his eyes. He said a prayer over him, trying to make it something ecumenical that would not offend the dead Vakhan. Then he took a few deep breaths, stretched his arms, and wiggled his fingers, checking for any signs of numbness. His fingers felt a little stiff, but that could have been due to the bitter cold.

  Dr. Folkes had been taken aback when Clyde had shown up on his doorstep a couple of weeks before Thanksgiving and started asking a lot of pointed questions about botulin immunization. The torrent of phone calls coming into the old professor’s kitchen from the Pentagon had, if anything, only increased during the weeks since his first encounter with Clyde, and he knew that Clyde’s interest in the subject must have some kind of deep significance. At some length he had dragged the whole story out of Clyde.

  “So you’re afraid of being exposed to the stuff right here in Nishnabotna?” Dr. Folkes had said. “I see. That’s remarkable.”

  “And normal civilians can’t get their hands on the vaccine—even during peacetime,” Clyde had said. “But I know you and all your lab workers are immunized. So. How about it?”

  Folkes had given him the first shot then and there and had been building up his resistance with twice-weekly injections ever since. Last week he had proclaimed Clyde Banks to be the most botulin-resistant human being on the face of the earth, unless the Iraqis were up to similar tricks.

  The incredible noise of the engines and the wind and the creaking and sloshing jungle gym of fuel overwhelmed all other sounds. Clyde did not realize until almost too late that someone was approaching, picking his way between the fuel containers and the inside curve of the fuselage with a flashlight. The Iraqis had sent someone back to make sure they were dead.

  Clyde had almost no time. He didn’t know how many of them were coming. And he was trapped in the tail of the aircraft. So he did the only thing he could think of. He rolled Fazoul’s body over on its side and pushed its arms and legs this way and that, so that the body no longer looked composed, and then flung himself facedown on a duffel bag next to the empty thermos and played dead. He had barely come to rest when the insides of his eyelids glowed red in the beam of the flashlight.

  He could almost feel the light traveling up and down his body, like a groping hand looking for signs of life.

  The ambient noise was his enemy now. He had not heard the man, or men, with the flashlight approach. He could not now hear whether he, or they, had departed. He counted to a thousand and then allowed one of his eyelids to come open just a crack. Dim light was scattering back into this space from some lamps hanging near the toxin tank, and by that light he could not see anyone. He opened his eyes all the way and tried to count to a thousand. But the cold was too much for him in his thin clothes, and he had to move. So he moved decisively, rolling to his feet as rapidly as his frozen joints and muscles would allow, and looking all around for anyone who might have been lurking. But there was no one there.

  He turned once more and looked at Fazoul’s body. His friend’s death was just beginning to hit him. He tried not to think about it; it would just make him scared and despondent, which he could not afford right now.

  He had no training for this, no real idea what to do. For some reason he remembered his survival training from Boy Scouts. When you realize you are lost in the wilderness, STOP: Sit, Think, Organize, Plan. So he sat down in a position where he could not see Fazoul and moved on to the Thinking. Clyde did a lot of thinking; he reckoned he could handle this part.

  It was a terrible situation. But he shouldn’t get emotional about it. It had been a stupid and crazy chance to begin with, climbing on board this plane, and he had no right to expect better. It would be childish to whine about the way things had turned out. Ebenezer would be disgusted with him: You made your bed, you have to lie in it.

  It was best to think of it like a cop, he finally decided. He was in a plane with a bunch of perpetrators. He just had to make the proper arrests and bring the situation in hand. They were a couple of thousand miles out of his jurisdiction at the moment, but these men had, after all, stolen a tractor from the Forks County Airport, and he felt a certain justification in playing the role of Long Arm of the Law.

  He had faced much worse odds at the Barge On Inn, against men who were in some respects more formidable than these, and had prevailed just by the force of his uniform and badge.

  Clyde Banks stood up and stretched, which felt good. He did some toe-touches and windmills, getting the blood flowing, the internal furnace fired up. Then he began to make his way forward between the tanks and the fuselage, following the gentle curve of the Antonov’s body.

  The stack of fuel containers ended ten or fifteen yards aft of the bulkhead that walled off the insulated, heated passenger compartments in the nose. The toxin tank rested in the middle of this space, strapped and chained to floor rings. The stolen tractor was still hitched to it, pointed aft, its Iowa license plates now looking bizarrely out of place. As out of place as Clyde.

  A tremendous weight knocked Clyde forward. Someone had tackled him; but the tackler had failed to wrap his arms firmly around Clyde’s body. Clyde came close to falling down face first on the cold, steel floor plates. But a reflex took over. As he had been trained by various wrestling coaches starting in elementary school, he took the weight on his upper right arm and rolled through to a standing position. He turned and found himself looking at al-Turki from a distance of perhaps six feet.

  Al-Turki had not been fooled by Clyde’s playing possum in the back of the plane. Judging from the look on his mashed-in wrestler’s face, he was surprised by the way Clyde had rolled through his attack. And it was not an entirely unpleasant surprise. He advanced, and Clyde instinctively fell into the traditional match opening position, then dropped his right leg back half a step and went into the stutter-step stance, extending his baseline for the charge he knew al-Turki would make.

  Al-Turki grinned. He squared off and bent his knees, patiently regarding his prey, readying an attack. He started talking to Clyde about something. Clyde couldn’t hear him. It was probably some kind of chatter about wrestling.

  Clyde knew he would have to move quickly and decisively. His opponent probably outweighed him by a few pounds and was a late-model hard body. In wrestling, weight and strength were the ultimate trump cards and would eventually win out, even over the vastly superior wrestling skills that Clyde had learned from wrestling against Dhonts his whole li
fe. Time was on al-Turki’s side. Even if it wasn’t, he presumably had a gun, and though Clyde hoped the man would not be stupid enough to fire it in a cargo hold full of jet fuel and botulin toxin, he did not want to tempt him.

  Clyde launched his attack first, wanting desperately to look like a blur, but knowing that, suffering from the combined effects of age and cold, he moved at freeze-frame speed. He feinted toward al-Turki’s right and then ducked under the Iraqi’s left arm, spun behind him, and, with his right leg, kicked the inside of the man’s left knee. His momentum combined with al-Turki’s surprise at the move allowed him to complete the motion and take the other down. Clyde, no featherweight, fell fully and hard on top of al-Turki, but feeling the muscles underneath his opponent’s suit, he instantly sensed that he would have little chance of holding him down. He thought about trying a judo chop—he had practiced them once—but he had as much chance of penetrating the muscles of al-Turki’s neck as he did of biting through the airplane’s deckplates with his incisors.

  Al-Turki tried to reestablish his base on hands and knees, but Clyde kicked out his right leg. Then al-Turki executed an escape maneuver called a Granby roll, which worked more or less perfectly; he was almost out of Clyde’s control when Clyde, in desperation, laid a cross face on the Iraqi, putting his full weight behind the blow, slamming the bone of his forearm across the Iraqi’s nose and shattering it. Blood spurted out. Al-Turki’s lips moved, and Clyde could barely hear him uttering some kind of exclamation of pain and surprise in Arabic. While the Iraqi was in shock, Clyde reached around his body and jerked the gun out of his shoulder holster, then flung it back into the darkness of the cargo hold; it spun off into the jungle gym and disappeared. One less thing to worry about.

  Al-Turki inhaled deeply and shouted for help as loudly as he could. Both he and Clyde knew that this was hopeless, but only al-Turki knew that the shouting was just a cover for another maneuver: with his free hand he reached around and got a grip on Clyde’s testicles. Clyde felt it coming at the last moment and twisted away, losing his grip on al-Turki, who was quick to capitalize on the situation with a chicken wing on Clyde’s left arm. Clyde hollered. The pain from the testicles was bad enough. Al-Turki twisted, trying to wrench Clyde’s arm out of his socket.