Flicker of Doom

by Paul Kenyon

  It was stuck to the harp of the lamp with a little magnet. No doubt the booster transmitter was hidden somewhere on the terrace, where Ahmed had lingered so long, or was buried in the sand outside.

  She left the bug where it was. She didn't care what Ahmed's employers picked up on it. It wasn't going to tell them anything important.

  11

  "Something's wrong," the Baroness said. "We should have been challenged before now."

  She peered through the night glass at the dark coast ahead. There was nothing. Then a brief flare that quickly died out.

  "We're too late!" Paul cried in despair.

  He still looked haggard from his ordeal, and his handsome black face was lumpy from the giant mosquitoes that infested the swamps of southern Iraq. He hadn't made it to Kuwait after all. He'd been picked up in the Persian Gulf, floating in his stolen canoe, by a Greek oil tanker heading for Ahmadi Port. He'd been raving from dehydration and exposure to the sun.

  "It's not your fault, amigo," Skytop said. "You got the message to us as soon as you could."

  It had taken another day and a half for them to assemble in Oman, and for Key to arrange an equipment drop for them there. It was over three thousand miles from Tangier to the shores of the Persian Gulf, and Sumo, on his way from the States, had had to travel even faster.

  They were all in swimsuits, their scuba gear piled behind them in the cockpit of the motor launch. They had the masks and the respirators and the flippers, but they hadn't bothered with rubber wetsuits. The Persian Gulf was like warm bath water, even at night.

  "We're not too late," the Baroness said. "We're not too late until that atomic bomb goes off."

  She braced herself against the handrail, her hair flying in the wind, straining to see through the darkness. She was wearing a stunning black bikini that would have drawn stares on the beaches of Costa Smeralda or the Côte d' Azur. There would have been more stares for the ammunition pouches and the waterproof holster slung across her bare hip, and for the belt of grenades looped around her shoulder.

  "Look!" Wharton said, pointing.

  It lay dead in the water ahead of them, a dark hull without lights. Yvette, at the helm, cut the engines and they drifted toward it. Penelope risked a quick flash of the spotlight to check the insignia. It was an Iranian patrol boat, a fifty-foot craft with mounted cannon and machine guns.

  Skytop, barefoot and bare-chested, swung himself overboard, looking like a bear in swim trunks. He appeared at the rail a few minutes later and jumped to the teak deck.

  "Dead," he said. "The whole crew. Not a mark on them. A couple of them crapped in weir pants. One of them bit through his own tongue."

  "Psychomotor convulsions," Inga said. She looked like a pale Nordic goddess in the starlight, a dim, almost naked figure with the ugly straps of weaponry crossed over her breasts and hips.

  "How would they have done it, Tommy?" the Baroness said.

  Sumo looked across at her, a small, skinny figure in his swim trunks. "That searchlight thing that Paul saw is probably a large-scale version of what I found in the camera that Fiona swiped on Gibraltar. I took it apart and checked the shutter arrangement with a quartz timer. It can flash for less than a millionth of a second, but the light that gets through is very intense. It's laser light — all concentrated in a very quick squirt."

  "Too quick to register on the conscious mind?"

  Inga spoke up. "Yes. That's what they told me in Munich. But it registers on the nervous system, no matter how fast the flash is. It acts as a stimulus on the visual centers of the brain. Neurons fire and start a chain reaction."

  "So you could induce a flicker at the right rhythm to trigger an epileptic fit…"

  "About seven times a second."

  "…and still not be aware of seeing any flashes of light at all?"

  Inga nodded. "You might have the impression you saw flickering, but you couldn't be sure."

  The Baroness hitched up her bikini top and smoothed her hair. "So when the boatload of PAFF guerrillas was challenged by the Iranian patrol boat, they turned on the searchlight. The sailors didn't notice anything till they were lying on the deck, convulsing to death."

  "That's bad medicine," Skytop said grimly.

  They came upon two more Iranian patrol boats, drifting helplessly in the water. On one of them, they thought they saw an arm dangling over the side give a twitch, but it was hard to be sure.

  "I don't understand," Fiona said. She looked bewitching in her string bikini, the waterproofed machine pistol dangling along one slender thigh. "Why would this PAFF group want to blow up an Iranian naval base? Arabs against Arabs?"

  Paul shrugged. "They want to remove Iranian influence in the Persian Gulf. Iran is too moderate. They want to make a big noise in the world. Give them clout. Make everybody take them seriously."

  The Baroness had the glasses to her eyes. "Cut the engines!" she hissed.

  Yvette killed the twin engines. They drifted in silence, hearing only the sound of the waves lapping against the hull.

  "Is that what you saw?" the Baroness said to Paul.

  He took the glasses from her. "Yes. That's it." He passed the glasses around so that the others could have a look.

  They were about a half-mile offshore. The Bandar Abbas naval installation loomed against the stars, a forbidding complex of gray military piers and anchored ships, shore batteries and skeletal cranes. There was no sign of fife.

  The Arab dhow that Paul had identified was tied up to a naval pier, its sails furled. Evidently it had come in on its auxiliary engine. The thing that looked like a giant searchlight was mounted high on the poop, pointed inland. A couple of Arab guards lounged negligently on deck, smoking. There was a handful of guerrillas patrolling the immediate dock area.

  "Their security isn't very good," Wharton said.

  "They don't need security," Penelope said. "All they have to do if they think anyone's coming is to swing that thing around and sweep the horizon."

  "I'd like to have a look at it," Sumo said.

  "You'll have your chance, Tommy."

  They donned their face masks and strapped on the heavy tanks. Paul looked unhappy.

  "Let me go with you," he said.

  The Baroness finished strapping on her flippers and looked up at him. "You're still too weak, Paul," she said matter-of-factly. "You'd be in the way. You know it yourself."

  He nodded, still looking unhappy.

  Skytop was buckling a strap across his massive chest. "Next time, amigo. Anyway, we need someone to stay with the boat."

  Paul had regained his good humor. "That's woman's work."

  "Don't be a male chauvinist pig, Paul, dear," Fiona said. She shoved a grenade into her bra, where it made an extra bulge.

  They slipped into the water, one by one, silently, without splashes. Penelope indicated with gestures what she wanted each of them to do, then let herself under the surface.

  The water was warm as soup. Her long legs pushed against resistance with powerful, easy strokes. She had no sense of moving through a medium; it was impossible to see through these black waters. She could only put her trust in the tiny glowing arrow on her wrist, the miniature inertial guidance device that kept her pointed toward the fix she'd taken. Inside its tiny sealed bowl, taking the place of gyroscopes and flywheels, dozens of little magnetized steel balls rolled around drunkenly, feeding their positions constantly to an averaging computer that was no larger than a sugar cube.

  She had a half-mile to go. Somewhere around her, invisible in the murk, were seven people, swimming as blindly as she was. She checked their positions with the little flashlight-size sonar unit, sweeping its beam of ultrasound in circles until she felt them. Literally, she did feel them; long hours of practice had made the feedback vibrations in the handle as much a part of her senses as a cat's whiskers are to the cat. Only these were whiskers that extended for hundreds of yards. She played the beam over one of the swimming figures, feeling out the contours of the bo
dy. It was Skytop; you couldn't mistake that massive torso. He couldn't feel the ultrasonic caress, but his detector did. He sent an acknowledgment signal back, a little tingling jolt. She checked all the others. One of them was swimming a little outside of the pattern. It was Fiona; she could feel the hard lump of the grenade against her breast. She flicked Fiona back into formation with a couple of nudges of the ultrasound beam.

  They all had to come up in the right places, at the same time.

  The water was getting shallower now, and she could feel the vertical posts of pilings with the beam. Almost there. They could never have gotten this far if the Iranian Navy and Air Force hadn't been knocked out of commission. Radar would have picked up their motor launch. Sonar detectors would have sounded the alarm at her probing beam. The guerrillas didn't have time for such refinements. They were going to get in and out as quickly as possible.

  A sudden shiver went down Penelope's spine as she thought of the atomic bomb. What if it went off, right now? She pushed the thought from her mind and continued to wriggle through the dark water.

  A steel piling materialized a foot from her face. She put a hand on it to steady herself, and waited for the others to position themselves. They were one living creature now, an eight-headed creature united by a single nervous system made of ultrasound. She knew that they were feeling her body as she was feeling theirs. Eight pairs of lungs breathed in deeply together. Eight pairs of hands unbuckled air tanks. The air tanks sank to the bottom. They wouldn't be needed if she succeeded, and they wouldn't be any use if she failed.

  She shinnied up the steel post, agile as a monkey. Fiona was just behind her. She could see past the underside of the metal platform to the next pier, and the gorilla shape of Skytop swarming silently up a piling, Wharton coming after him. She knew, without checking, that other heads were emerging from the water, climbing up poles.

  And then she was twisting over the edge of the pier, springing to her feet, sprinting toward a startled guard who didn't realize that this half-naked woman who had risen from the sea was a danger.

  She was on him before he had the wits to raise his rifle or even to shout. Her hand was over his mouth, and she was behind him, his shoulder blades pushing into the softness of her breasts, forcing his head back while the other hand with the long knife sliced across his throat.

  The other sentry was transfixed while Fiona, with a dazzling smile, stood in front of him, her hands fetchingly behind her back, her breasts, barely held by the insignificant triangles of cloth, thrust out toward him. While he gaped, one of the hidden hands came out and flashed steel, and there was a rubber knife handle sticking out of his liver.

  Over on the next pier, Skytop had simply seized the PAFF sentry by the shoulder and hip, raised him over his head, and broken his neck over his knee.

  For, by now, they'd all realized that it wasn't necessary to kill silently. It didn't matter what sounds their victims made. All around them was an awful chorus of the damned — hundreds of little moans and cries and gasping wails — like a carpet of crickets or the pervasive croaking of a swamp full of frogs. She could see one of the nearer sources of sound: a young Iranian soldier writhing and twitching on the ground at the foot of the pier.

  There were dead bodies there, too. There must have been hundreds of dead bodies strewn over the naval base's three square miles, and hundreds — perhaps thousands — of the twitching survivors, locked in the hells of their short-circuited senses.

  The two PAFF sentries high on the poop of the anchored dhow were laughing at the spectacle of the writhing sailor. They were still laughing when Sumo and Eric leaped over the rail and cut their throats.

  The eight of them held a council of war on the deck of the dhow. Sumo was already at the huge searchlight with a screwdriver, his tool kit spread out at his feet.

  "Do you need any help, Tommy?" the Baroness said.

  "Can you spare Eric?" Sumo asked.

  She nodded. "I'll have to. Work fast, Tommy, we haven't much time."

  But he was already lost in the intricacies of the circuitry, a dreamy smile on his lips as he traced the computer connections. Eric was bent beside him, helping him to unscrew the control panel.

  The Baroness turned to Wharton. "How big a force do you think PAFF landed here?"

  His brow furrowed as his fine tactical mind went to work. "Paul said there were about a thousand men at the base in Iraq. Half of them were new recruits. I'd say that they left fifty or a hundred seasoned men behind to hold things together, and took a couple hundred of the most reliable of the new men." He gestured at the nightmare expanse of the naval base in front of them. "So maybe there are six hundred PAFF guerrillas spread out there. They'd need that many to comb the base, while the technical team planted the atom bomb. This light thing can't be the most reliable weapon in the world. It zaps anyone exposed to it — there's no way you can defend yourself against it — but there must have been sailors and airmen scattered all through the base who were indoors, away from windows, or around corners or who got a mild dose."

  He gestured at the young sailor on the pier. He'd stopped writhing, and lay in an exhausted sleep.

  "Those aren't bad odds," the Baroness said dryly. "Us against six hundred PAFF guerrillas."

  There were intermittent explosions and shots and flashes of light out there in the dark area. The PAFF guerrillas were having a fine time, tossing grenades into windows, slitting the throats of helpless men, vandalizing the installation. It was like a playground constructed for the benefit of destructive children: all the gleaming paraphernalia of the authoritarian world, and no one to stop them while they wrecked it.

  "Three square miles to search," she sighed. "Somewhere out there, they're arming that atom bomb."

  She rummaged in her equipment pouch. She showed them the sniffer, a little box with a cluster of miniature horns sprouting from it.

  "If we get within a couple of thousand yards of the Honest John, we'll know it," she said. "This is set to detect the whole range. The Honest John they stole is old. There's probably some radioactive leakage. And deteriorating chemicals from the propellants — Key got the formula for me."

  They climbed down to the pier. Penelope pointed at a distant control tower. "We head in that direction, children," she said. "I'm going to start with the assumption that they'd want to set off the bomb somewhere near the center of things. The landing strip is a good bet. It's got a tall tower. They'd want to set it off as high above ground as they could get."

  They prowled through the darkness, six men and women in skimpy bathing costumes, carrying machine pistols and grenades.

  Their first encounter was in a warehouse area. A dozen guerrillas were amusing themselves by shooting up cases of canned goods. The Iranian clerk who'd been on duty had been ripped to shreds by bullets. They'd shot him up, too.

  They spread out among the stacked cartons. Penelope ducked behind a loaded fork-lift truck, Wharton's comforting bulk behind her. A couple of Arabs were off to the side, pitching cans into the air. The others were firing bursts from their automatic rifles, laughing and calling out bets. It was obvious that they'd been into the liquor stores.

  A big can of tomatoes hung in the air, then exploded, raining red pulp. A can of beans burst like shrapnel. There were a half-dozen cans tumbling through the air, jerking from the impact of the bullets.

  Fiona looked questioningly at the Baroness from behind a stack of crates. The Baroness nodded. Fiona drew the grenade from her bikini top and pulled the pin. A moment later there was a pineapple suspended in midair among the tomatoes and beans.

  The guerrillas laughed, then froze in horror. They threw themselves into the mess of tomato pulp on the floor, trying to hide. But there was no hiding from the vicious rain of metal fragments. There were screams, and blood mingled with the red slime they were lying in.

  The Baroness and her five people moved out swiftly, their machine pistols chattering. The eight or nine Arabs who had been relatively unhurt sank b
ack into the pool of ketchup.

  They ran on toward the distant tower, their rubber sandals slapping the tarmac. A guerrilla appeared out of nowhere, startled at the sight of four women in bikinis and two men in bathing trunks running toward him. The Baroness caught him with a single shot. He fell backward, clawing the air.

  There was an overturned jeep ahead, and the sound of gunfire. A small group of embattled Iranian Marines had taken shelter behind an improvised barricade, while about twenty PAFF men were taking pot shots at them. The Marines must have been off duty, out of reach of the terrible flickering light.

  The Baroness darted into an alley between two rows of barracks. Yvette and Wharton followed her without waiting to be told. Skytop, with Fiona and Inga, circled around in the opposite direction.

  They came out, guns blazing, only twenty feet from the PAFF force. It was practically point-blank range. Steel-jacketed slugs tore into the guerrillas, sending them dancing and clutching at the air. A stream of fire went past Penelope's head, too high. She cut down the man who had aimed it.

  Skytop was in among the disoriented group now, using his knife. His arm rose and fell in methodical slaughter. The rest of them were in among the surviving Arabs by now. Penelope grabbed a bearded terrorist by the sleeve of his jacket as he was trying to shoot Inga, and yanked him toward her. Her knife cut across his abdomen, spilling out guts. He stood there as she ran past, a stupid expression over his face, his hands clasped over his belly, while loops of slippery intestine poured out of him.

  The Iranians had been quick to react to the change of circumstances. They were swarming from behind their barricade of overturned vehicles, asking no questions. In a couple of minutes, the PAFF men were lying dead. One of the Marines was dead, and there was a boy with a bullet in his arm.

  Penelope explained things to the Marine officer in a few terse phrases. He nodded. He didn't waste time gaping at the bikinis or asking who these six people were. He was a crisp, intelligent man with a swarthy face and lively eyes, bleeding from a patch of torn skin on his forehead.