“Has Jarvis seen you?”
“No, he hasn’t. The guys you sent to help were competent.”
“Then I’ll explain.” Qazi talked while Sakol chain-smoked. The sunbeam coming through the one window crept up the wall and finally disappeared, leaving the room in growing darkness.
* * *
The phone rang. “Captain Grafton.”
“Jake, this is the Admiral. I’m here in Flag Ops with Captain James and Doctor Hartman. Would you come over, please.”
“I’ll be right there, sir.”
Jake gave the message board to Airman Smith to lock away and rooted in his desk drawer for his baseball cap. He needed to be covered to salute the admiral, and aboard ship everyone routinely wore ball caps. He found his and settled it on his thinning hair.
In Flag Ops, the commanding officer of the United States, Captain Laird James, was discussing a mechanical problem in the forward reactor with Admiral Parker when Jake arrived. Laird James was in his late forties and tall and lean, without an ounce of fat. In those few times Jake had dined with him, James had only picked at his food. His hair was shot through with gray and the skin of his face was stretched tightly around a small mouth. He never smiled, or at least he never had in Jake’s presence.
The doctor was looking over the shoulders of several members of the watch team as they worked the displays on the Navy Tactical Data System (NTDS) computer. Jake stopped several steps short of the admiral’s raised padded chair and waited. When Parker nodded toward Jake, he stepped over and saluted. The doctor joined them.
“Doc Hartman wants to ground you,” Cowboy Parker said without preliminaries. “He says that your night vision is unacceptable.”
“Yessir.”
“Why don’t you want to be grounded?”
“Admiral, we’ve got these flight crews stretched as tight as rubber bands. We’re getting all the flying out of them that anyone has a right to expect. We lost one crew last night. And no matter how careful we are, we may lose another. These men all know that. I can’t ask them to keep flying unless I put myself on the flight schedule. It’s that simple.”
“How long would it take to get a new CAG out here from the States,” Parker asked Captain James.
“A couple months, if we’re lucky,” James said gloomily.
Parker shifted in his chair several times, then stood up and stretched.
“What do you think, Doc?”
“Sir, the regulations say …”
“How many times did you check Captain Grafton’s eyes?”
“I didn’t, sir. A first-class corpsman did.”
“So you don’t even know if the corpsman’s result, or diagnosis, is correct?”
“Well …”
“Assuming the corpsman is correct, could this be a temporary condition that might clear up?”
“I suppose anything’s possible, but—”
“He said that maybe nicotine is contributing to the vision loss,” Jake put in quickly. “I got a bottle of vitamin pills to take. And maybe quitting smoking will help.”
Parker looked at the doctor with one eyebrow raised.
“It’s possible nicotine is contributing to the loss,” the doctor said.
“You personally recheck Captain Grafton’s eyes in two weeks,” Parker said, “and let me know the results.”
“Yessir.”
“Can you live with that, Laird?” Captain James had been ordered aboard the United States while she was still under construction, so he knew every frame, every space, almost every bolt and rivet, all ninety-five thousand tons worth. He knew all the systems in the ship better than any other living human. He had no time for incompetents or fools, preferring instead to transfer those officers whom he concluded fell into one or both categories with fitness reports that ensured they were professionally doomed. His department heads scrambled to match his knowledge of their domain and lived in terror of his wrath. Jake doubted that Captain James could lead a horse to water, but as the chief administrator of a fifty-six-hundred-man institution, he was ruthless efficiency incarnate. In short, he was a perfect bastard.
“Yes, sir,” Laird James said sourly. Although Jake was not under his command — indeed, under the new air wing system, James actually needed Jake’s permission to fire the ship’s weapons — still, it was his ship, and if Jake crashed coming aboard, James would be splattered with his share of the blame.
“Thanks, Doctor. And Laird, I’ll talk to you later.” Both the doctor and the CO saluted and left the space.
“Can you still see to fly at night, Jake?”
“Yessir. Not as well as I used to, but well enough. If I couldn’t, I’d be the first to know.”
“I’m banking on that. Just go easy on yourself. Do most of your flying in the daytime. Are you flying tonight?”
“No, sir.”
“How did it go this evening with the helmet?”
“You should have seen them looking at it. They’re thinking. A man or two may quit, but most of ’em will stick like glue since they’ve been offered an out. They wouldn’t be here if they weren’t stubborn as hell; they’d have washed out long ago.”
“Go get a decent night’s sleep.”
“Thanks, Cowboy.” Jake saluted and Parker returned the salute with a smile.
* * *
Jarvis was led into the room naked and blindfolded, in handcuffs, and a rope was lashed around his ample middle to hold him to the chair. A lamp had been placed on the table and shone directly in his face. Qazi and Ali stood in the shadows until the guards closed the door behind them. Sakol was not in the room.
“Welcome, Jarvis.” Qazi came forward and sat in the same chair that he had occupied when Sakol was in the room. A portion of his lower legs was in the lamplight, but he knew from careful experimentation that his face was hidden. He crossed his legs and began moving his toe back and forth slightly. He nodded and Ali stepped forward and untied the blindfold. Jarvis screwed up his face in the light and narrowed his eyes to slits.
“We know your little secrets, Jarvis. All of them.”
“Who are you? Where am I?” The voice was soft, hesitant, fearful.
Qazi uncrossed his legs, leaned forward and slapped him soundly. The man in the chair began to cry.
“All your little secrets, Jarvis. Each and every one of them.” Qazi slapped him again.
“Please …” Another slap.
“Get a grip on yourself, Jarvis, or this will go on all night.”
Sniff. Sob. Sniff.
“You are here to help us, Jarvis, and you shall. If you do your work diligently and well, you may live to return to your wife in Texas and your Tuesday evening meetings with the woman who supplies you with little boys. If you fail us, well … I need not go into that.”
Jarvis was at least sixty, with several long strands of brown hair which he normally combed over his bald pate but which now hung at odd angles and made him look pathetic. His jowls quivered when he breathed.
“You won’t tell my wife about … Will you?”
Qazi slapped him again. “You fool. Your wife is the least of your problems.” Wrong response, he thought. He changed tactics instantly. “You will do as we say, or indeed, we will tell your wife, we will send her pictures of you and several of your little friends, then we will pass the photographs to several newspapers. Every man, woman, and child in Texas shall know of your perversions and your wife’s shame. Do you understand me?”
Jarvis blinked continuously and his jowls quaked as he nodded his head.
“Answer me!”
“I understand.”
“Very good.” Qazi leaned back in his chair and crossed his legs again. He sat silently for a moment as Jarvis squinted to see his face, but finally began speaking when the prisoner began watching the foot that was in the cone of light. Qazi moved his toe rhythmically.
“I want you to build me seven instruments, Jarvis. These instruments shall be used to bypass the safety devices in Mark 58 nu
clear weapons.”
“I don’t …” The toe stopped and Jarvis ran out of steam.
“If you were going to tell me that you know nothing of these weapons, it is well you saved your breath.” Qazi got the toe in motion again. “Your position as a design engineer at the factory that assembles these devices is your finest credential. We did not bring you here because you disgust us. You will build seven instruments that will bypass the safety devices in Mark 58 nuclear weapons. These instruments shall contain a source of electrical power that will energize the weapon and trigger it. One of these instruments will contain a radio receiver that allows it to be triggered from a distance. Do you understand?” The toe stopped again.
“Yes.” The toe began its back and forth motion.
“Are you agreeing with me merely to avoid unpleasantness, or do you really intend to help us and spare your wife the agony we can inflict?”
“You said … my wife …”
Qazi placed both feet on the floor, leaned forward and slapped the quaking man several times. “Bring in the other man,” he said to Ali in Arabic.
A cursing Sakol was dragged in by four guards and lashed to a chair. Ali removed the blindfold and slapped him into silence. He did it with vigor, Qazi noticed. The guards assumed a position at the door.
“Another man with a secret. You Americans seem to be up to your eyes in filthy little secrets.”
“Please, mister,” Sakol begged. “For Christ sake, let’s talk about this. I didn’t mean to hurt her. It was an accident—” Ali’s open hand on Sakol’s face made a dull smack. And another. He began to weep.
“Let me introduce William James Moffet, Jarvis. He is a technician with some experience and a taste for young women. Unfortunately for them, they rarely survive his attentions. Moffet shall assist you in assembling the instruments. Now I am going to have you taken back to your cell where you will be given food and water and a pencil and paper. After you have eaten, you will make a list of the material you will need to construct these devices. Tomorrow morning at nine o’clock you will be brought back here. I shall examine your list and question you about it. You had better have all the answers tomorrow morning, Jarvis, or your wife’s humiliation shall begin before the sun sets. Do you understand me?”
“Yes.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Yes, sir.” He snuffled uncontrollably, in little gasps.
“I don’t think you do, Jarvis. I don’t think you do.” He produced a large black-and-white photograph which he held in the light. He watched the man’s eyes slowly focus. The picture was of Jarvis and a boy, about six or seven. Jarvis had the boy’s penis in his mouth.
“Guards, take them to their cells.”
6
The road ran south through a parched brown landscape. Heat mirages obscured the horizon in all directions. Still Qazi stared out the window at the barren earth as Ali kept the Mercedes at over a hundred and twenty kilometers per hour. They passed an occasional truck, but no other cars.
Qazi’s boyhood had been spent in country like this, living with his uncle and his family. They had lived in a small village and his uncle had been a shepherd. Qazi’s earliest memories were of dust storms and foul waterholes and the aroma of sheep and camels.
He had been about thirteen when his uncle’s only three camels had been stolen. He had never forgotten the look of despair on the old man’s face as he examined the camels’ leather hobbles, severed with a knife. The family’s journey across the harsh terrain, following the flock as it grazed, would be difficult without the camels, if not impossible. A third of the assets his uncle had worked a lifetime for were gone into the desert. The old man had borrowed four camels from his neighbors and, together with Qazi and his two sons, had set off after the thieves.
* * *
They rode for a week across the rock and hardpan. The nights had been bitter, the sun merciless. The wind had an edge that chapped exposed skin, then opened it and scoured a bleeding sore. The wind had wiped out the tracks of the fleeing thieves by the second day. They followed the trail of dung thereafter, until it too gave out because the thieves weren’t pausing to let the camels graze on thorns. Not that there were very many thorns. The desert had become a hot, empty hell, a wasteland of smouldering stone under a pitiless sun.
His uncle stared at the featureless horizon while the boys fingered their Enfields and looked helplessly about, tired and frightened and desperately weary. “The well at Wadi Hara,” his uncle finally said and goaded his camel into motion. “Not the closest waterhole, which is Wadi Ghazal,” his elder cousin said, “but the closest uninhabited one. The Mami live at Wadi Ghazal, and they would not steal our camels.”
Never before had Qazi rode so long and drank so little. They were baked by day and frozen by night. His tongue became a lump of useless flesh and his lips bleeding sores. But day by day the excitement had increased. The thieves would be at Wadi Hara with the camels.
The men checked their Enfields every evening, and Qazi practiced aiming at rocks. How would it feel to aim at man? How would it be to hear the whine of bullets? How would it be if one struck him? Would he be able to stand the pain? Would he die? The emptiness of the desert now had a new taste, a new feel. He heard the sounds and felt the wind as he never had before. He felt …
* * *
An hour south of the capital, Ali slowed and turned from the main road to an unmarked track that wound across the natural contours of the land. Immediately beyond the crest of the second ridge away from the highway they encountered a roadblock. Uniformed soldiers approached the car cradling submachine guns. Ali rolled down his window to show his identification. The smoldering air filled the interior of the car.
They rolled on through the sand and rock. After another fifteen minutes a military post appeared. Ali stopped before an unpainted, rambling two-story wooden building and both men got out of the car. Qazi stretched and let the furnace heat engulf him. “It feels good, eh, Ali?”
“Personally, Colonel, I wish we had some rivers and trees and grass.”
* * *
“Explain the device again.” Qazi stared across the waist-high table at Jarvis, who had cut himself several times that morning when he had been allowed to shave for the first time. Pieces of toilet paper clung to the gouges in his jowls. The men stood in a large room. The only illumination was the summer sunlight coming in the three open windows. Even with the breeze it was very hot and Jarvis was sweating.
“The weapon has numerous safety devices placed in the firing circuit. Upon release from the aircraft, a jolt of 220-volt direct current ignites a pyrotechnic squib. The heat from the burning squib is converted into an electrical current that charges a lithium battery. It happens quickly. The safety devices are between the battery and the detonators.”
Jarvis picked up a bundle of leads with alligator clips attached. “These attach to the battery. Basically, I have rigged up a timer, so you set these dials,” he touched them, “and at the end of the set period, current will run from the battery directly to the detonators.” He picked up another wire bundle with alligator clips on the end. “These attach to the detonator circuits.”
“What about the weapon’s safety devices?”
“Oh, they are still in the weapon, but they are bypassed. Once this thing is properly hooked up, the bomb will go nuclear at the end of the period set on the timer.” He pointed to the seventh trigger. “The radio in that one will receive the signal and that will start the timer. So you could initiate the firing sequence by radio and have whatever time was set on the timer to leave the danger zone.”
“We don’t want this bomb to blow up in our faces while we handle it or as we hook it up. Is there any way to leave the safety devices installed and still allow the weapon to be triggered remotely?”
“No way.” Jarvis shook his head and his jowls quivered. “Absolutely no way. The installed circuitry requires that you drop the bomb, let it free-fall for over ninety seconds continuously. Then the ra
dar altimeter in the weapon is enabled, and when the weapon reaches the preset height above the earth, it detonates. There are over a dozen safety devices in all. There is no way to physically satisfy all those parameters unless the weapon is used as it is designed to be used — that is, dropped or tossed by an aircraft. So these safety devices must be bypassed. And once bypassed, there are no safety devices.”
“And how do we ignite the pyrotechnic squib that charges the weapon’s battery?”
“This thing down here.” Jarvis led the way to the end of the table. “I’ve rigged four automobile batteries in series and used a voltage regulator and a capacitor. The juice is stored up and then fired as one brief jolt of direct current.”
He paused and looked at the device. “You wire this contraption to the battery in the weapon. The timer triggers it. That’s all there is to it.”
“Will these things work?”
Jarvis mopped his brow with a shirttail. The bits of toilet paper looked grotesque against his pasty skin. “Yes, they’ll work.”
“Will they, Moffet?” Qazi asked Sakol.
“They should. Actually both these things are pretty simple.”
Qazi bent down and examined the wiring and workmanship on the battery charger. Finally he straightened up. “Show me.”
It took only a minute to rig the battery charger to a voltmeter. Jarvis performed the task smoothly, with no lost motion, as Qazi and Ali watched. When all was ready, Jarvis used a portable voltmeter to check the charge on the automobile batteries. Then he pushed a switch on his device. The needle on the voltmeter on the output wire swung and stopped. Qazi examined the reading.
“See, I told you it would work.”
“Now the safety bypass device, please.”
This instrument took several minutes to rig. All the input wires were connected directly to the battery charge device since Jarvis had no battery capable of storing the energy required in only a few milliseconds. Separate voltmeters were connected to each of the dozen output wires. Colonel Qazi dialed in one minute on the timer and watched it tick down. While it ticked, Jarvis triggered the battery charger. At the end of the minute, the voltmeters on the output wires pegged, Qazi examined each one. “Satisfactory,” he said at last. “Now build me six more of each of these. Then we will test them all.”
Final Flight jg-2 Page 7
