by The Cool War
As they approached the yacht, it began to look like a battleship. Its sides towered twenty feet over them as they approached the gangplank, the masts far higher still. Curmudgeon was standing at the rail and looking down, his face granite. Hake hesitated and looked back at the waves. These waters had a reputation for sharks. But what was he going to face on the yacht?
“Move him on,” Curmudgeon called testily, and one of the boatmen prodded Hake with his rifle. “You took your time getting here,” he said, as Hake came up level with him. Nothing could be read in his expression as he stood with one hand on the rail, open shirt, yachting cap, white slacks, rope sandals. Behind him two more crewmen stood, representing, with the five behind him, a great deal more overkill than Hake thought necessary. Their presence was a threat. But Curmudgeon didn’t threaten. Or even reproach; all he said was, “The others are waiting for you below.”
Hake had never before been on a centimillionaire’s yacht. There was less opulence than he might have guessed, no swimming pool, not even a shuffleboard court on deck. But he could not see most of the deck, only a small portion, deck-chaired and awninged, at the stern, and the short foredeck with hoists and coiled cables; most of the deck space was out of sight on the levels above him. Inside there were no murals or carved panels, and the rails were only brass. But they passed an open doorway, with a sirocco of engine heat coming out of it, and Hake caught a glimpse of pipes and stacks going down, it seemed, indefinitely. Sword of Islam was a sailing yacht. But its auxiliaries looked big enough to drive an ocean liner.
Curmudgeon had told the truth, the others were waiting for him, in a lounge with windows looking out the stern of the yacht. There was more opulence here than in the passages—potted palms, a wall of tropical fish tanks, beanbag pillows thrown about by the chairs and couches—but it looked more like some Short Hills playroom than a sheik’s tent. Jessie Tunman looked up from a gin-rummy game with one of Yosper’s youths—Mario?—and snapped, “You’ll get yours, Horny. You had no right to take off with that chippy!”
“Hello, Jessie.” There were a dozen people in the lounge, and he recognized most of them—Yosper and his boys, the young Hispanic called Tigrito and Deena Fairless, the instructor from Under the Wire. They did not look welcoming.
Yosper hopped off a chair and advanced, his bright blue eyes regarding Hake steadily. Then the old man laughed. “You always were a ballsy boy, Hake. Remind me of myself, before I discovered our Lord Savior—and the Team.”
Hake nodded and sat down, trying to look relaxed as Yosper studied him. “What’s it going to be, Hake?” the old man demanded. “You part of the operation, or are you going to go on being a pain in the ass?”
“I’ve carried out my assignment,” Hake said.
“Oh, sure, Hake, I expect you have. And we’re going to take your report, and then we’ll know for sure. I was asking about from now on.”
Hake hesitated. “If I complete this operation, can I retire?”
“That what you want, boy? Why,” Yosper said easily, “that’s not up to me, but we all got to retire sometime, so why not? I guess it depends on how good your report is, and what you do over the next couple of days. Where’s your lady friend?”
“Leota’s out of it!”
“No, Hake,” the old man said earnestly, “I have to disagree with you on that. She’s not out of it, unless old Hassabou says she is. Right at the moment I think he considers her a piece of his property that got misplaced, and he’s not too fond of you about it.” _ “Why do you care what he thinks, for God’s sake?”
Yosper said, “Watch your language. We care a lot, dummy. Hassabou used to own this whole country. And after they’re bankrupt he’s going to sell it to us. You going to tell us where she is?”
“No!”
Yosper grinned. “Didn’t actually think you would, but that’s no problem. A1 Halwani’s not that big a place. Jessie? Give us those maps, will you? And now we want your report, Hake, starting with reconnoitering the solar-power plant.”
Jessie picked up the cards and slid the cover off the table, revealing a back-projected screen. As she manipulated the keyboard at the side of the table it displayed a satellite-reconnaissance photograph of the coastline, with map outlines superimposed on it in red. She zoomed it up to a close view of the tower and the ridge of flowering dunes, and then handed Hake a light-pencil.
“Pull back a little,” he said. “It doesn’t show the roads.” Greenish dots flickered and swarmed into a new focus, and he nodded. The squat, rectangular spot in the middle of the bay was the solar tower itself. The crescent beach was a mosaic of green and white, the sunplants half open and facing to an afternoon sunset. The roads were darkened by shadow, but they could be made out.
“That’s the main guard shack,” he said, pointing the arrow of the light-pencil to a blotch atop the dunes. “They were in there all night. I don’t think they patrol—anyway, we didn’t see any signs of them along the road. There’s a path up from the highway. There’s cover most of the way, but not much right around the shack.”
“You listening, Tiger?” Yosper demanded. “That’s your job. Take your position; then when we move, you cut communication and immobilize the guards. What about the beach side of the dunes, Hake?”
“They’re completely covered with the plants, all the way down to water’s edge. There’s something down there that looks like a building—” he pointed with the pencil—“but I don’t know what it is.”
“Control center for the tower. Keep going, Hake.”
“That’s about it, as much as I could see. I don’t know why they’re so important—they could just use mirrors.”
“You don’t know cowflops from custard, boy,” Yosper explained kindly. “You use live plants, you don’t have any problem of guidance for mirrors—the plants aim themselves. Keep themselves clean, too, as you ought to know. Or didn’t I read your 201 file right?”
“I did clean mirrors one year in New Jersey, yes.”
“So why don’t you understand more of what you see? What about the tower?”
“It’s tall and isolated. A few boats around it. No connection to the land that I could see.”
Impatiently, “There’s a tunnel. Keep going.”
“That’s it. I couldn’t see much—except that purple light. That I don’t understand at all. It hurt my eyes to look at it. It just appeared in the sky.”
“Hellfire, Hake, that’s a hologram. That’s the beauty part of the whole scheme. Didn’t they teach you any geometry in school? If they bred the flowers to point directly at the sun, they’d reflect directly right back at the sun, and what would be the good of that? So they breed them to respond to high UV—good thing you didn’t stare at it real long, because most of the radiation’s out of the visible spectrum. Then they generate a spinflip laser hologram in the right UV frequencies and just move it where they want it in the sky, halfway between the sun and tower. Draw yourself a diagram when you get a chance, and you’ll see that all the reflectance has to go right to the tower every time.”
Hake stared at the tabletop, calculating angles in his mind. “Why, that’s brilliant, Yosper.” He shook his head. “Damn it! Why kill them off? Why don’t we just let them go ahead and make hydrogen for us?”
Yosper was scandalized. “Are you crazy, Hake? Do you know how much of a drain on the balance of payments you’re talking about? We’ll make a deal, all right, but we’ll make it with the sheik. After we take these hippies out. Blow up the tower. Kill off the plants—we’ve got a great little fungus specially bred by our good friends in Eatontown. They’ve borrowed beyond their means to get this thing going, and when we’re finished with them they’ll be bankrupt. Then old Hassabou comes back to power, and we make a deal.”
“Let’s get on with it,” Jessie Tunman complained. “Did Horny get the job on the tower so he can let us in?”
Hake glared at her, then admitted, “Well, actually, no. I mean, they’ll give me a job, but not for
a couple of weeks. They hired Leota right away.”
“Hake!” Yosper exploded. “You failed your assignment!”
“I couldn’t help it! They said I was overqualified—whose fault is that? I didn’t make up the cover identity!”
“Boy,” said Yosper, “you just lost most of your bargaining power, you know that? We spent five effing months getting you ready for this because you spoke the languages, could get by with the locals—and now you’re no place!”
Jessie Tunman looked up. “Maybe it’s not so bad,” she said.
“Don’t talk foolish, Jessie! If we wanted to storm the tower we wouldn’t have bothered with lover-boy in the first place.”
“He’s still here. He just doesn’t have an ID to get into the tower.”
“That’s right, but— Oh,” Yosper said. “I see what you mean. All we have to do is get him an ID.” He beamed at Hake. “That shouldn’t be too hard, considering our resources, at that. You got anything else to say, boy? No? Any more questions about what this mission is all about?”
“I do have one. Why do we have to destroy it? Why don’t we just steal the plants and build our own?”
Yosper shook his head. “Boy, don’t think. Just do what you’re told. We’ve had the plants for three years. They’re no good to us.”
“Sure they are. That coast looks a lot like Florida.”
“Hake,” the old man said kindly, “Miami Beach is in Florida. All that land’s built up, or didn’t you notice? God has chosen to give these creeps just what you need for this kind of installation—sunlight, water, port facilities. Most of the U. S. of A.‘s too far north. Even around Miami you’d only be getting forty or forty-five percent yield in the winter. Get it up to where you really need it, around New York or Chicago, not to even think about Boston or Seattle or Detroit, and you just don’t have power to speak of at all for three or four months of the year.”
“Yosper,” Hake said, “doesn’t that suggest to you that maybe God is telling you something?”
The old man cackled. “Bet your ass, boy. He’s telling me that we’ve got to use the gifts He gave us to do His will! And that’s just what we’re doing. If God wanted the Persian Gulf to have our power, he would have put Pittsburgh there. Oh, maybe we could use it around Hawaii—or even better, like Okinawa or the Canal Zone, if we hadn’t given them away when we didn’t have to. You got to figure the useful areas are between twenty-five north and twenty-five south, and in God’s wisdom He has seen fit to put nothing but savages there. Switch that thing off, Jessie.” He stood up. “I got to go talk to Curmudgeon and the sheik,” he said. “You people just take it easy for a while. You, Hake? I think you better stay in your stateroom till we need you. Tiger’ll show you where it is.”
As it began to grow dark they fed him. A very young black child in a tarboosh knocked on the door and passed in a tray. “Bismi llahi r-rahmani r-rahim,” he piped politely. Hake thanked him and closed the door. The polite form was an invocation of the compassionate and merciful Allah, and Hake could only hope that the sentiments were shared by the members of the crew whose voices had finished changing. The food was lamb, rice and a salad, all excellent. Hake ate cheerfully enough. He was getting used to the patterns of working in the cloak-and-dagger business, long periods of waiting for something to happen without knowing what it was going to be, long periods of doing something without quite knowing what it was for. And now and then, for punctuation, somebody hitting him or blowing up his car.
He had not only got used to it, he was almost coming to accept it. At least for himself. For Leota— That was something else, and worrisome. Neither Yosper nor Jessie Tunman had said where they proposed to get an ID to copy, but Hake was far from sure they would not think the one Leota had been given a good source.
No one had told him he was a prisoner, and nothing stopped him from opening the door and joining the others.
He didn’t want to. Watching them play their silly spy games was unappealing. They acted like—
They acted like half the world, he told himself, playing a role. Dramaturgy. “Thinking with.”
As The Incredible Art had said, if you looked with open eyes, that explained so many of the fads, lunacies, causes, passions, meannesses and incongruities of human behavior! It even explained Hake himself. It explained why he had played the game of being a minister so long… and then the game of cloak-and-dagger spook… and then the game of rebel against the skullduggery. It explained why Yosper played Christian and criminal at the same time, why Leota played revolutionary and harem slave; and it explained how the world got into such a mess to begin with. Because we all play roles and games! And when enough of us play the same game, act the same dramaturgic role, at one time—then the game becomes a mass movement. A revolution. A cult. A religion. A fad.
Or a war.
He put his tray outside the door and leaned back on the neat, narrow bunk. There was an important piece missing in all of this. The cause. How did all these things get started?
The question was wrong. It was like asking why the locusts came to Abu Magnah. No individual locust had made the decision to attack the city, there was no plan, there was not even a shared genetic intent. If one examines the fringes of a locust swarm, what one sees is a scattering of individual insects flying blindly out, twisting around in confusion and then flying back in to join the cloud. What moves the locust swarm from one place to another is the chance thrust of wind. The swarm has no more volition than a tumbleweed.
And he, and Yosper, and Leota, and everyone else— what were they doing, if not devoting all their strength to being a part of their particular swarm? Causes and nations moved where chance pushed them-—even, sometimes, into a war of mutual suicide, when both sides knew in advance that neither winner nor loser could gain.
Exactly like locusts—
Someone tapped at his door.
Hake sat up. “Yes?” he called.
It opened on the child who had brought his dinner, looking fearful. In barbarous English he said, “Sir, I have brought you tea, if God wills it.”
Hake took the tray, puzzled. “It’s all right,” he said kindly, but the boy’s fright did not diminish. He turned and bolted. Hake sat down and put the tea on the night table, his train of thought shattered. Not that it mattered. None of it was really relevant to the present problem, which was pure survival, his own and Leota’s.
Something rolled across the floor as he shook the napkin open. When he retrieved it, it was a double golden finger-ring.
There was no note, no word of any kind, but he didn’t need one. On this yacht at this time it was not likely that there was more than one person with the double-ring of an American group marriage. So Alys was aboard.
“Wake up now, Mr. Hake. There is to be a briefing.”
Hake staggered to the door and opened it on Mario, looking sleepy but oddly pleased with himself. “Now? It isn’t even five a.m.!”
“Not just at this minute, no, but soon. Immediately after the sheik’s morning devotions. However,” he smirked, “there is an interesting development which I think you will wish to see.”
Hake groggily pulled on his shoes. “What is it?”
“Hurry, Mr. Hake. See for yourself.” The youth led the way back as they had come, to the aft deck. It was just sunrise, and the slanting light laid long shadows across the city of A1 Halwani, and on the launch that was whining toward them. “They radioed that they were bringing someone,” Mario said over Hake’s shoulder. “There, do you see? She is sitting by herself, just inside the canopy.”
“Leota!”
“Yes, Mr. Hake, your dear friend, for whom you risked so much. So now you will be together again—or, at any rate, not more than a few hundred feet apart. I don’t suppose Sheik Hassabou will invite you to his harem.”
“How did you catch her?”
Mario frowned. “It was not difficult at the end,” he said. “She was simply strolling down the esplanade by herself. The boatmen reco
gnized her, and she offered no resistance.”
Hake leaned over the rail to watch, as the launch came up to the float. A woman in veil and headdress was waiting; it was only from her wrinkled and age-spotted hands that Hake could tell she was ancient. As Leota came aboard she shrank from the old woman, who angrily thrust her inside.
“Mario— Mario, I want to talk to her. Just for a minute.”
“Why, Mr. Hake! What a ridiculous request! Of course that is impossible—and now,” the youth said merrily, “if you do not come quickly you will miss your breakfast.” The confused baying from across the water was the muezzins’ calling for five-o’clock prayers. Down on the landing stage the boatmen were dropping to their knees, and on deck those of higher status were spreading their prayer rugs, checking the built-in magnetic compass for proper orientation, before doing the same.
Hake followed Mario to the dining salon. He did not eat, did not join in the conversation, accepted only coffee. His mind was full of quick plans and instant dismissals, and when the Team members got up for their briefing he trailed after them silently. Only when they passed an arms locker, with one of the armed boatmen standing silent before it, did he hesitate. For just a second. He could overpower the guard. Seize a couple of the rapid-fire carbines and a dozen clips of cartridges. Shoot up Yosper, Tiger, the crewmen and everyone else. Find the harem. Arm Leota. Make a run for the launch.
And what were the chances of getting away with it? At the most hopeful estimate, one in a million? Something in Hake’s upbringing had taught him to risk anything to save a woman from debauchery… but did Leota share his view?
