by Dusty Miller
So far, he hadn’t quite decided. Liam’s small lapel camera, capturing video and still shots, would go a long way to identifying these turkeys. Putting a radio transponder on his boat was a dead giveaway, although he could understand their thinking. If he had taken the right fork of the river and they took the left, it would be some time before they realized their mistake. For them, it was the worst kind of tail—all out in the open, with a small local population.
If they could be identified, it would be helpful in deciding what further action might be taken. He wasn’t quite sure what to do about their little radio-tag. It was stuck under the front seat with a gob of pine tar. He’d probably just leave it there for a while.
***
Emil Borz and Conrad Lom watched the Englishman motoring up the lake, really just a widening of the river but it was so confusing around here. GPS and good maps were a must.
Liam slowed the boat, threading his way. Going under a low railway bridge, the water was two feet deep underneath it, with sunfish and small fry darting here and there in the shadows. Out on the other side, the river swelled out into a blue body of water at least a half a kilometre wide.
Navigating around the area took some skill.
A small pond might appear on the map, with a name and everything, and yet a much larger body of water a half a kilometre away on the other side of a row of hills might have no name at all. At least nothing they could discern. What the locals might call it was another thing, but how would you ever know, unless it was properly marked? Their reports needed to be thorough, and precise.
You needed to know what the hell you were talking about.
Chapter Five
Emil was cross. The drain plug might be his fault, but he wasn’t in the mood to be fair with Conrad, (not his real name, but then neither was Emil’s) who had laughed outright on realizing it was nothing serious. Conrad’s first fear was one thing, an unattractive thing to see, but his own impotent rage was something else. It did not speak well for his self-control. It was such a tedious job. Perhaps mistakes were inevitable.
The trouble came when Emil leaned way over, and the plug was way down low on the starboard side. Conrad squealed like a girl. The boat leaned heavily in that direction. To run the motor, Emil was using his right arm, which necessitated sitting on the left side of the motor, facing forwards. It was disorienting to have to lean across, hanging half upside-down, trying to ram the plug in and get the spring-loaded rubber plug’s expander lever to snap shut. All the while, the heaving black water was barely a foot from your face. Trying to change seats in the surging backwash of other boats was trying, and then he got a slap of cold water right in the face when a bit of chop hit the transom dead-on.
Conrad baled and baled, offering half-witted suggestions, when he couldn’t see anything from there. Conrad must sit up front and try and keep the boat level as water sloshed back and forth. He knew nothing and that’s why Emil had taken charge of the boat, the vehicle, any sophisticated operation or piece of equipment they came across on their peregrinations. Emil was supposed to be training Conrad, but the powers-that-be sometimes forgot that not everyone was suitable.
The goal of training was to produce a field agent who could and would operate independently. They needed the proper support and direction of course, but they must be able to do the job and complete their mission regardless of risk or difficulty.
A field agent’s greatest asset was his ability to listen.
He’d told the man several times.
Conrad was not a good listener, the mark of a proper fool.
Conrad always nodded and agreed with him in that insolent and yet half-absent manner, and that irritated Emil for some reason. It was a cold and dangerous business they were engaged in. The stakes were very high, and nothing he’d seen in his partner so far inspired any kind of confidence.
The real problem with this job was that it was first and foremost exposed—whoever thought they could establish and maintain a cover out here were nuts—and secondly it was unbelievably tedious.
Emil’s instinct was that there was something there.
Englishmen, agents of this particular ilk and caliber, didn’t just turn up for long periods of extended angling and trolling for no reason.
They were too valuable elsewhere. This one had been reassigned, according to their sources, for health problems. Kimball had served for several years at the embassy in Instanbul, that international entrepôt of arms deals, spying and espionage…and betrayal. Not all embassy staffers were spooks, but this one just had that look.
The Englishman might be meeting someone, he might be looking for someone or something.
Or, he might just be bait. He’d left an obvious trail in that car of his—anyone who saw it had remembered it. They didn’t have enough information, and there were many questions to be asked. Driving all the way from Montreal, when he could have just taken a regional flight.
That was a big sacrifice just to establish a little cover. It was a good eight-hour drive, sharing the road with buses, transport trucks and the nine-foot tall pickup trucks that were the vehicle of choice in this northern country.
Occupied with such thoughts, Emil paddled the boat to the nearest shore. Conrad kept spinning the boat with his overly-enthusiastic efforts and it was all Emil could do not to backhand him in the throat with the paddle. It was the very same shallows and strand where Mister Kimball had left his boat. The marks of the sharp prow were there to prove it. The Englishman had big feet going by the tracks.
They leapt out, and dragged the boat higher, with water now flowing out of the transom plug again.
“All right. Let’s get her unloaded and see what the bloody hell is going on.”
Looking around at the tree-clad hillsides, they could always whittle a wooden plug and stick it in with some spruce gum.
If he tried telling that to Conrad, the fellow would probably just laugh.
That knowledge might save his life someday, and for one reason or another, Emil decided not to tell him.
You signed on to be a martyr, my brother.
Let it be so.
***
A light thunderstorm rumbled overhead. The rain was warm as it fell. Liam had turned one final corner, convinced that if they were following, they were a good long ways back. He had taken the precaution of removing their illicit little transponder. He set it high on a rock, sticking out of the water in a shallow cove. All he had to do was pick it up on the way home, act innocent and no one would be any the wiser.
If they caught on, the opposition team would know they were blown. It was a risk he had decided to take.
Surely they would be, surely they must be checking that display. And yet the smartest thing they could do would be to change the routine, to do the unexpected. That’s what transponders were for, after all. He cruised on for a couple of more kilometres. They wouldn’t watch the thing for every minute of every day. Liam’s casual behaviour and their uncertainty dictated to a certain extent how the opposition would play it. Watch him when they could, check up on him every few minutes, and have a continuous track of where the boat went when not in their direct observation. That would be about it. They would have a constant feed from the transponder, via their portable system. The signal, or pulses of signal might be going somewhere else, with people watching that screen constantly. Instant updates, instant analysis, with far greater resources than a pair of field agents normally had. That depended on who they were, who they were working for, and how much funding they had. It was the digital age, with all of its disruption of archaic systems and technologies. No industry would be immune in the long run.
These were all very interesting observations. He turned in, slowing and looking for his spot.
Shutting off the motor, he had judged it perfectly. The boat nudged its way into the shallows. Liam hopped out, getting his old sneakers wet. He’d brought them for just such a purpose. He dragged his boat up on hard, smooth rocks, a veritable boulder gard
en, where in spring flood the small creek passing through clefts and gaps pushed through hardy trees and greenery. He never would have done it on sand.
With the motor tilted fully up and locked in place, the only real problem was going to be getting her out again. He gave a good yank, feet locked in position, straightening his knees and putting his back into it.
Aluminum grated on rocks. He pulled and the boat slid forward another two or three feet with a lurch and a bump. Saplings whipped back up from underneath it, and he went around behind the boat and pulled more out from under it.
There was a low, white bed of gravel just off her prow. To put her down in there would be to lose her. Liam sank down on yielding weeds and underbrush after removing his knapsack and laptop from the boat. The mosquitoes weren’t too bad, but if he stayed long there would be more.
Blackflies were more of a problem in the bright light of day, and he was always swotting around the ankles. They were surprisingly smart, coming in behind the knees, going for the backs of the arms and also the middle part of the back where it was hard to get at them. Sure, it was instinctive, but how did they know which end was the front and which end was the back?
He would have lunch, transfer data from sensor array to laptop, and then from the laptop to head office as it was euphemistically called. Good old Universal Experts was a front for something a little darker, possibly a little more romantic. It was hard to know what to do if the opposition didn’t turn up.
He would have to wait and see.
When in doubt, do nothing, didn’t exactly apply here.
There were outboard motors out there, as the unmistakable note of more than one came on the breeze. There were a few others when he concentrated, but they were all much farther off. From his position, in the very last bay, if any boats came in he would know it. With a bit of luck they would keep going and swing around when they got to the end, mystified by his disappearance down a dead-end inlet that just kept getting shallower and more weed-choked the further one went.
This bay was special and if the rain kept up and his luck held, Liam was going to do a bit of diving.
Computer simulations were based on the last known trajectory, (or trajectories), of EMERALD and its debris. The tracking stations were far away and thus below the horizon. The best simulation showed the probability was high for this end of the lake. The heavier the object, the farther it would bounce. The fact that the payload module had been equipped with a low-level emergency system was the only thing that had saved it from complete annihilation.
Unfortunately, the main parachute had tangled and its high-drag streamer effect had only slowed EMERALD, not lowered her gently to earth as befitted such an expensive payload, a half a billion in top-secret technology. It was concluded that the booster’s self-destruct mechanism had malfunctioned. This should have been disarmed upon entering orbit. The package was relatively safe then and it had its own ability to maneuver. The mission might still have been saved. The unexpected detonation had blown its own payload out of the sky, damaging the emergency recovery chute when it did.
This was better than having a rocket spin into a major city somewhere with most of its mass remaining and at full throttle.
There was always a bright side.
***
Emil and Conrad ended up suffering the ultimate humiliation. Seeing their plight, or at least suspecting something was amiss, judging by their loud voices and angry gesticulations, a party of anglers, four older men in a bass boat with easily three hundred horse-power on the back, turned around, came back and stopped to inquire what the problem was.
Conrad in his idiocy had suggested a tow, and before Emil could stop them, the men on the other boat had snagged a line onto the bow. The next thing he knew everyone was aboard. They were gunning the throttle—and headed back to base, which was just where he didn’t want to go. Their motor was strapped with bungee cords to the middle seat and their feet were soaking wet. Conrad’s sleeves were soaked from baling. Sitting in the trailing boat, feeling like a proper fool, there was no calling out over the roar of the boat motor ten metres ahead of them. Emil knew that, because he had tried a couple of times before sinking back into sullen resignation.
They had a stick, slightly tapered, which they had jammed into the hole from the inside of the boat. The hinged drain plug seemed to have been both undone and then knocked askew, or possibly bent deliberately. Leaking continuously since setting out, fifty or a hundred litres (at a kilogram per litre) of bilge hitting the inside the plug had been enough to spring it. When the boat slowed down, the self-draining feature had taken in enough water to seriously affect the way the boat felt. It was the boat’s odd handling that had first alerted him. Emil couldn’t account for it in any other way. He was highly trained in small boats and he was sure he had checked it. As for the motor, if he could have gotten it started, he would have followed Kimball further still. It was no big deal. Seeing water rushing into the boat, with the motor not running and that impenetrable deep, a tea-coloured water all around—and not wearing his life-jacket, contrary to Emil’s instructions, Conrad had been a bit spooked.
That person on the dock had fixed the spark plug. What else might have gone wrong? Emil pondered water in the gas…sugar in the tank, a bit of bubble gum over some sort of carburetor bleed valve, air in the lines. Bad fuel. It could be almost anything. If a person were resourceful enough.
The prospect of drowning was only one of many fears, but it was a daunting one. They were a few kilometres from the road-head and a couple of hundred metres at least from shore. Emil had no doubt that Conrad was good with weapons, or building a cheap bomb. They were all good at it, and yet there were some huge gaps in their training sometimes. People had been given away by bad manners, not knowing their working environment, behaving in a culturally-uncharacteristic way. This happened even with perfect cover, perfect documents, and the perfect background. An unconscious man, knocked down by a bus, lying on a hospital bed, babbling in his native tongue…or the wrong tattoo, or someone getting curious and asking the wrong question—and getting an odd-ball answer, could so very easily get them all killed.
The bigger boat towing them could have gone a lot faster, but the fishing was good. The lake was very busy today. There were wakes, and waves criss-crossing every which way and it was best to go slow. The tow rope looked like about a three-eighths-inch yellow nylon, which was only going to take so much.
It was quite choppy in places and the boat felt different when not under its own power. Conrad was looking a bit green, focusing on the floor of the boat and not looking out at the bobbing horizon.
Oh, for fuck’s sakes.
Don’t tell me you’re sea-sick.
***
The water would be very cold, only the shallows survivable for more than five minutes without protection.
There was a light rain, barely visible as little concentric circles appeared all over the dead-smooth water. Low grey clouds sucked up all the light and the temperature had dropped. It took less than a half an hour for the weather to change completely. Liam pulled on his dry-suit hood, finally snapping the gloves into place. He pulled on his mask and snorkel, leaving them to ride high up on his forehead. His combination bottle and regulator/mouthpiece was clipped to the side of his hoodie. He put it into his mouth. Picking up his fins, and breathing carefully around the mouthpiece pinched between his teeth, he picked his way to the water.
The apparatus was a simple rebreather system. The rig was only meant for shallow waters.
He had been promised a gill system in the very near future. He’d even been involved in testing it.
That had been tedious, exacting, and due to the weight and profile of the rig, a huge pain in the neck after about three minutes of swimming.
All part of the job, really.
In order to produce the gas pressure required for deep dives, the membranes and pumps would have to be so much smaller than was presently practicable, and for some applications,
older methods worked best. He had been assured that later generations of device would be much better, and do away with the CO2 extraction and capture tank entirely.
Sitting on a convenient rock, out in the open, was his most vulnerable moment. He slipped on the fins and then walked as carefully but as quickly as he could backwards into the water. The adrenalin was always a cheap little thrill. When he had a couple of feet of water, he turned around and fell gently forwards, feeling for the bottom and hoping that he wasn’t under observation. There was always the shock of cold water at every constriction, every seam, and the exposed part of the face.
It was odd at first, how the beaches were often all sharp and craggy boulders, broken off a cliff or hillside. Once away from shore, the bottoms were flat, sand, silt and muck, leaf litter and relatively boulder-free. Structures in deeper water were as often as not the top of a submerged hill going back to glacial times. The flat, swamp-ridden bottomlands were muck, pure and simple, but the muck was filtered. When winter’s grime was washed away in springtime, the sand fell to the bottom. It had taken eons, he reminded himself. Half an eon, anyway.
His present behaviour was curious indeed. Anyone who saw him as a fisherman one minute and the high-tech frog-man the next would tend to wonder. His rig would fit into the average lunch-bucket, and yet it cost the taxpayers something like a hundred and fifty thousand good old-fashioned pounds.
The surface closed in behind him. The tinkle of bubbles escaping from the rough fabric surface of his suit was close in his ears. Way off in the distance but unnaturally loud, there was the thin high buzz of an outboard motor. In this small inlet, he would know all too well if they came close. He kicked smoothly and steadily, conserving his energy. The bottom was still only about two or three metres down. He was making barely a shadow, slowly crossing the bay from one side to the other. The sun kept going in and out. There was a submerged boulder ahead, coming up within two feet of the surface. He swam above the seamount in miniature, and then gingerly rotated, putting his bottom on it for a rest. He lifted his head cautiously above the surface. Nothing. The sound of a single boat motor dropped away and was gone, with his ears above the surface. Above, a gull looked charcoal grey against the cloud base. Bird calls and wind sounded in the greenery thirty metres away.
