by Dusty Miller
“Then we built the addition on the back of the office. The store came later. For one thing, it’s got a decent bathroom, a fireplace, three bedrooms. Stuff like that.” Her eyes bored into his and she lifted her glass.
She took a healthy pull and set it down on a cheap, low coffee table. It was worth about two bucks at any garage sale in the country. Lindsey went and turned on one of the many old hi-fi systems he’d seen kicking around the resort. Dale must have collected them over the years. The Bernstein’s cabin had one and the cabin where some of their additional people were staying had a real gem, a 1954 RCA (or at least that’s what it said on the cabinet, being some kind of conversion).
“Say, Lindsey…”
“I’m sorry, Mister Kimball. Please forgive me. If you’ll give me half a second, there’s a leaky faucet in the bathroom and I need to check on it once in a while.”
Liam raised his eyebrows and sipped cold Russian vodka as the girl, who was wearing scruffy white painter pants and a baggy old blue knit sweater with long sleeves, brushed past him.
She snapped a switch and then he saw her go down the narrow little corridor that led to the back end of the trailer.
***
Liam hadn’t realized there was a dimmer switch. He was just examining a velvet painting of some big-eyed children on the living room wall when the lights dropped and he turned to look.
Wow.
Lindsey stood in the arch, and his jaw dropped.
She was wearing high-heeled shoes, sheer black stockings with a line up the back, a garter belt, also in black, and a thin, sheer teddy with a high neckline. Her breasts were just a nice B-cup, riding firm and high, with puffy nipples that would be pink when he got them out into the light.
Around her neck was a silk bow and she had dangly black hoop earrings in some kind of polished stone segments.
With her lips parted and her eyes locked on his, she sashayed into the room, turning and striking a pose. She had him cornered. She circled in, inexorably. There was no place to run and no way to hide. Not once he’d seen it. There wasn’t much he could do except sit down on the single upholstered armchair as she bent forward, face inches from his.
The look in her eyes was wild, angry, abandoned.
“Lindsey—”
“Shut up.”
“This is a real bad idea—honestly. You’re upset, you’ve been through a rough time—”
“This is not how it ends, Liam Kimball.”
She carefully pushed his knees apart and then got down on all fours. She held his eyes as she reached for his zipper, and rather than scream and shout and raise the roof, there really wasn’t much he could do about it without hurting her. Embarrassing her, humiliating her, damaging her even further.
It’s not that he couldn’t overpower her.
“Lindsey.”
The game was lost, as she helped his rapidly hardening member out and it popped into prominence. Those ruby lips plunged down, that hot wet mouth was on there and now it was Liam who was in shock.
He stroked her head, her shoulders and let her go as her body shook and quivered and gasped in some strong emotion.
“Lindsey, Lindsey, Lindsey…whatever are we going to do with you…”
The TV in the main house was so loud. Dale had been well on his way by the look and smell of things.
What in the hell was he supposed to do?
Lifting her head, she stared at him with this dark, animal look in her eyes—like she was waiting for some kind of an answer. Then she was crawling up into his lap and they were eyeball to eyeball.
It’s not like he didn’t want to.
Liam’s reached up under the teddy and took her breasts into his hands. She kissed him on the tonsils and then pulled back.
“I’m not a virgin, Liam Kimball.”
“Oh, Lindsey. This is a really, really bad idea.”
“Yes, it is. But you have to admit, Liam Kimball. I’ve been very, very patient.”
Things became a little fuzzy, and after a while, everything faded to a hot and sweaty black.
***
“So. How did it go?”
Liam gave a noncommittal shrug. It was after two a.m. and his knees were ready to buckle.
“We have reports of a dark grey seaplane landing on a small lake fourteen kilometres from here.”
“Oh, really.” Liam didn’t brighten up very much.
He badly needed rest.
“There’s a boat launch and there were a few people fishing up there. The plane is still there, tied to its mooring. It’s basically just an anchor with a buoy. Witnesses say a small boat came out from shore and took off two men and some luggage.” They were tracing the plane.
Liam sighed, deeply. He nodded. Yet there were a lot more than two individuals involved. Small boats had left the McKerlie Sawmill. Boats landing at major launch sites had been carefully watched with the manpower available. No one matching any of their descriptions had been observed, and no one seemed to be lugging big chunks of satellite around in their boat.
Like mice, the quarry had scattered.
“Okay. So they leave us searching frantically, searching practically everywhere else. And maybe they have a way of getting it out from there as opposed to here.” He sat down heavily on a kitchen chair, putting his elbows on the table and looking around. “The last thing I need is coffee…but what if it’s just a blind? They have to get it out of the country, one way or another.”
Ian stood on the other side of the table, cup in hand, eyes on their computers, the phones, the papers and notes and other bits and pieces of equipment laying around.
“The military are in shock. The bad guys apparently have some kind of small drone aircraft. It’s not unlike a missile. That’s what took out the Predators.”
“Ah. Yes. Smuggling missiles into the country would be difficult. Building something from plans, launching it from behind a rental cottage…shit.”
Enough wreckage of the Predators and their attackers had been located to suppose that the big and expensive drones had been taken out by remote-control ramming attack. Liam digested this information as best he could.
“We’re watching all major roads and intersections. If anything with a smidgeon of radioactivity turns up, we’ll be taking a close look at it.”
Liam nodded, head hanging in a kind of moral defeat. Ian studied him. This wasn’t quite the reaction he had come to expect from Kimball.
“What about some kind of miniature submarine?” Ian was thinking about the ramp, sloping down into the water at the end of the McKerlie mill.
“Argh.”
Ian was silent. It was best not to push sometimes.
Finally, Liam dragged himself up from the table and headed for the bedroom which hopefully wasn’t already occupied.
***
A week had passed. Technicians sat in their control room watching their screens.
It was time. A young man used a mouse to put a cursor on an icon. He clicked twice and it opened up the program for the recovery of Fandango.
Fandango had been built by the same small electronics firm that had built Barracuda and Shrike. These were small, unmanned, delta-wing turbojet aircraft with hardened noses and leading edges on all flying surfaces. Their purpose was to provide aerial security in an era when manned interceptors were pricing themselves out of the business. There would always be stateless customers, rebels, insurgents of all kinds, who simply did not have the physical resources to provide either training or bases—technical services of all kinds.
Fandango went from amber to green on his screen. The batteries were fully charged. The featureless torpedo that was Fandango lifted from the bottom a hundred metres offshore from the McKerlie mill. The mission was underway. In terms of detection, Fandango might as well have been on the far side of the moon. Hugging the bottom, carefully camouflaged and shielded for heat and sound signatures, it was undetectable to anything on the Great Lakes. At sea, it would be a different story. It would be
detectable to hunter-killer submarines and frigates from any number of different nations. The mission profile was such, that this was not a concern. It was designed for a specialized mission, and had proven itself smuggling arms into Gaza and other restricted places. Once in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, the machine would rise to the surface and be recovered by an outbound vessel. While weather-dependent to some extent, recovery would take five minutes to ten minutes.
Technicians watched in very near real-time through the video feed from the nose of Fandango. They were ready to override and drive it manually if necessary. If it took a month, travelling by night and lying up by day, EMERALD was theirs and they wouldn’t let that slip from their fingers.
Victory was sweet.
***
Aubrey Herschel was a people person. It’s not that he loved them or even liked them, but he had always felt that he understood them.
It was no big surprise when he got the call from the Mahdi. He’d been sweating it out for some days now.
He was cordially invited to attend the palace, this evening at seven p.m. if that was agreeable.
Aubrey knew better than to say it wasn’t. He had no appointments to cancel these days.
They had what they wanted, or something of value. They had EMERALD and surely the Mahdi must have never expected that. The long shot had paid off. It would be a boost to the Mahdi’s own nascent and not particularly competent space program.
Aubrey’s guts fluttered, he had to admit. It had been a huge gamble, to use the latest offerings in drone, robotic and remote-control technology, taking a page out of the evil Western and Israeli powers’ book.
Using weapons built by companies owned by Speck, Jackson and himself, all offshore in third-world countries with their own reasons for research into the future, had been a stroke of pure genius. The fact that he had avoided the use of his own network, hiring all contractors on a one-job, task-oriented basis was a business coup and icing on the cake. As far as the weapons were concerned, that was the end-user’s problem and he had plausible deniability in all things.
Admittedly, the privilege of staying in the country wasn’t exactly what he had in mind when first starting out. But he was, to some degree, a victim of his own success in that now the U.S. and other countries were talking a little more firmly about sanctions against El Mahdi.
They were sure pissed off about something, (a remark which might once have been funny), and Aubrey Herschel was a handy pressure-point: give him up and all of this might go away.
Leave the bitch at home.
Sigrid was passed out in her bed anyways.
One could hardly blame the Mahdi. They had all been friends once. It was indicative of mood, but there was more good news in that he’d finally managed to acquire a dozen Puma helicopters from a rapidly-collapsing African dictator who was going out of the business and just wanted a nice, clean, professionally-managed, quiet little retirement in Switzerland. With a quick refurbishment, fresh motors, gearboxes and the like, the Mahdi would be happy enough. One of Speck’s subsidiaries in Indonesia would do the work. They could be in the air by the next Liberation Day parade. The Mahdi would get a nice birthday present from a grateful people, and it would be plastered all over the front pages. Aubrey also had a line on some old Stinger missiles, almost antiques these days, but one of his suppliers was perfectly competent to refurbish those—after a time, the batteries went and the heat-seeker acquisition head lost the argon gas and chemical charge that bathed it upon launch. There were also some interesting solid-fuel rocket motor upgrades, both ejection and booster, the newest units designed to fit perfectly into the mounts.
It was a miracle, really. Aubrey’s supplier was saying he could line up eighty, maybe even a few more, of the basic units. The launchers were one thing, although easy enough to copy. The missiles were worth their weight in gold.
With reprogrammable microprocessor technology, the Mahdi would have the finest in man-portable low-level air defence.
Aubrey studied his face in the mirror. Freshly shaved and powdered, he was getting ever more flesh in the jowls and ever more puffy about the eyes. He’d been thinking about a diet, but the real problem was the habit of constant drinking. It was sheer boredom, a bit of old age creeping in.
Otherwise.
Life wasn’t holding much promise these days.
He nodded in the mirror. There was a glass of scotch there, as it was like smoking to some other man—he just felt naked without a glass in his hand or close beside him. It had become a part of him. With a wrench, he realized he didn’t need to finish it, and this meeting was important to all concerned.
The limo was waiting just outside his door. The servants were all shiny eyes and flashing teeth as they bid him goodbye at the door.
That should have been his first clue.
***
The Mahdi’s palace, one of several scattered around the little North African nation, was a sprawling edifice clad in white marble. The place had been built in frank imitation of the Al Faw palace in Baghdad.
Built by the same architects who had served Saddam Hussein so well, it was surrounded by an immense pond of sparkling clear water. The building itself was octagonal, rising up six stories on the towers at each corner. There was a central dome of the same height, and a regular progression of three stories for the bulk of the structure. The first story was the tallest, and the next two diminished in height, rising up in pleasing proportions.
It loomed before him, gleaming in the soft evening light. Unusually for the region, there was a light fog rising and coming in off the sea. Soldiers clad in khaki uniforms and black berets stepped smartly out to challenge the car. There was a brief halt while the driver’s hand-written pass was examined and someone called up to verify. Security was always tight, but then the Mahdi had become less popular over the years. Young people quickly discovered that abstinence, self-abnegation, chastity and compulsory public service, must usually of the military kind, wasn’t much fun. It didn’t pay much, didn’t get you much respect and offered little in the way of skills and training.
It was a country where there was no real middle class and virtually any form of viable employment was already being done by western specialists or unskilled workers from all over the region.
The car eased forward. The machine drove right into the building through the sally port and squeaked to a halt as vertical multi-leaf door-slabs slid down their tracks and shut out the night. Tile floors glowed, and just to their right sat a blindingly red Scarab, an exotic car from a little-known Swiss contractor. With a thousand kilowatts of electrical power, the machine was the fastest street-legal production car being made today. The Mahdi’s son Beyni had taken him for a ride in it one night, the Interior Police closing the highway all the way into Siberta for the run. The speedometer was hovering around the two-forty mark (and surprisingly quiet and smooth at that speed) when Aubrey politely mentioned that he had to pee and if Beyni wouldn’t mind, would he please maybe slow down a bit and pull off at the next interchange…?
It was just what the boy, barely seventeen and insufferably spoiled, had been looking for.
He had frightened the ugly American, which Aubrey surely was these days with the sweat pouring down from what the high-priced doctors were saying was a genuine ailment, if exceedingly rare. At that point Beyni backed off and became almost solicitous.
Like he didn’t have enough afflictions already.
The door was opened and a full colonel stood there at the door.
“Please.” His hand was extended. “Thank you for being prompt.”
It not so much a welcome as a command.
The Mahdi did not like to be kept waiting.
***
The great conference room was dead silent when it should have been buzzing. There should have been forty colonels and their aides.
He set his briefcase down on the mahogany surface of the incredible oval table, easily thirty metres from end to end and five metres wide. There
were the usual flowers and water carafes, but the air was dead as if the room hadn’t been used in a while. Aubrey sniffed for signs of cigar smoke, for the Mahdi was a heavy smoker.
Nothing.
Aubrey took a seat. Now that they had EMERALD, they should be making plans, putting out feelers to other like-minded governments. They should be asking him a thousand questions. They should be doing everything in their power to capitalize on their acquisition. He had waited patiently enough for the first few days after delivery. Naturally, they would want to have a look at it. Their engineers must go over it, assess it, and begin analyzing it, carefully dismantling it in a process that would take time. That knowledge, that it would take time, had been his only comfort the past few days. For the weeks had dragged on—first the weeks spent getting Fandango out of Canadian waters, across the Atlantic and into the Mediterranean. The triumphant delivery, dockside, with Aubrey and the cold-eyed security people hustling it away as quickly as humanly possible under cover of darkness and curfew.
The Colonel, as anonymous as all the rest of them (although he knew a few names, and one or two as individuals, on some level) stood behind his seat. There were two guards looking tired and bored by the door. Turning his head back to the Colonel, he raised an eyebrow.
“What’s going on? Where is everybody?” Aubrey was mindful of another occasion when he’d been stuck with a couple of low-ranking officials from the Ministry of Agriculture.
Painful hours later, the whole damned bunch of them had come in, roaring with drink and flushed with success from their blasted duck hunt on the salt marshes lining the curve of the Bight of Al Siberta.
The fellow looked but ignored him.
Aubrey almost jumped out of his skin as the door on the far side crashed open.
