by Killing Time
“You went on enduring that,” I said, once again stunned, “because you wanted him to finish the four-gigabyte satellite system?”
“Well, I knew how much it would be worth to Malcolm and me once he was dead,” Larissa replied. “The reinvention of the Internet? Yes, I could endure his touch a few more times if it meant that my brother and I would get those profits. Then, once the system was in place and working smoothly, Father was called in on the ’07 economic summit. So we waited until after that. Right after. We went to Washington with him—even got to meet the president. On the jet back to Seattle it was just the three of us. He was very pleased with himself—why shouldn’t he have been? He and his friends had just become the most powerful people in the country. He got drunk. Fell against the emergency hatch and released it during descent. Apparently.” Letting out a brief sigh, Larissa held up one finger. “Fortunately, his loving children were smart enough to be wearing their seat belts and to keep their heads while the copilot got things back under control.” She shook her head. “I never will forget the look on his face …”
As she said all this, the objective detachment I’d been feeling began, without my quite realizing it, to deteriorate, overcome by a set of powerful empathetic reactions that were remnants of my own troubled past. And so, at that crucial moment, I simply put my hand to her face and said, “I suppose it made the assassinations easier—having already done, well, that.”
She shrugged. “I suppose it must have. But more than making it easier, I think it inspired me. It was quite a feeling, destroying people who so thoroughly deserved it. I got to have quite a taste for the experience. I remember that when I shot Rajiv Karamchand—”
“You shot him?” Karamchand, of course, was the Indian president who had authorized the use of the first atomic weapons in the Kashmir war. Despite the best efforts of many intelligence agencies, his murder had remained a mystery.
Larissa smiled and nodded. “And when I did it, I felt just the way that I had watching Father fall out of that plane. A man who takes responsibility for the lives and well-being of others and then betrays that trust so completely—I really can’t think of anything quite as vile. Plus”—she turned over onto her stomach, her words coming faster—“think about this: Why has there always been such a taboo against assassination? It’s ludicrous. A political leader can order people to their deaths or to kill others, and corporate executives can commit any kind of crime in the name of trade—yet they’re all considered untouchable. Why? Why should Karamchand have felt any safer when he went to bed at night than one of his own soldiers or than the Pakistanis he slaughtered? Why should an executive who profits from slave labor be immune to the terror his workers feel? The odd assassination is the only way to make people like that start to think a little more seriously about what they do. As for making the rest of the world think a little harder about whose orders they decide to follow and what they choose to believe—well, that’s the whole point of what we’re doing now, isn’t it?”
I weighed the statement. “Yes, I can see that,” I answered slowly. “Though I still don’t get what part I’m supposed to play in it all.”
Larissa threw her arms around my neck, again looking very pleased. “Keeping me happy—isn’t that enough?” Seeing the continued look of inquiry in my face, she feigned a frown. “No? All right—the truth is, Malcolm wanted a psychological profiler. We made up a list, and your background in history put you at the top of it. Then”—she moved in to kiss me—“when I saw that picture of you …”
As she pulled her lips away again, I asked, “But why a profiler?”
“Our various opponents,” she whispered. “They’ve been responding in fairly inscrutable ways. The Americans, for instance, with that ridiculous raid on Afghanistan. They had suspicions that the Khaldun footage was doctored. We even gave them hints. But they went ahead anyway. Malcolm wants you to try to predict things like that. And, of course, perform the odd little job like the one in the tunnel back there—”
Larissa was cut off when the entire ship suddenly shook more violently than it had at any time since I’d been aboard. I spun toward the tinted transparent panel in the hull near the bed and saw dim, eerie light outside: apparently, we’d once again climbed to a very high altitude. Against the mists of the stratosphere and the darkness of space beyond I could see dozens of glowing objects streaking toward us. Most of them were fairly small, I saw as they passed; but some, as they approached, grew to a considerable and disturbing size.
A second explosion lit up the sky around us and rocked the ship again, knocking me off the bed. When I righted myself I saw that Larissa was already halfway into her bodysuit and had one hand to her throat, activating the surgically implanted communicator that linked her to Malcolm. “Yes, Brother dear,” she said, looking more annoyed than concerned at the peril into which we’d suddenly been thrown. “I can see them—it would be a little difficult not to. I’m on my way to the turret now with Gideon. Tell Julien to divert whatever power he can to the external fields—you know how damned unpredictable these things are.”
I started to hurry into my own clothes. “What’s happening?” I said, trying to match her calm.
“Our admirers in the Defense Department,” she muttered, looking outside. “One of their pilots must’ve caught sight of our ship in Afghanistan. Looks like they’ve deployed their whole collection of toys: EKVs, LEAPs, ERIs—there’s even an SBL out there.”
“Larissa,” I said, doing up my coveralls, “arcane acronyms really aren’t going to reassure me right now.”
Even in the midst of such an attack—or perhaps because of it—Larissa became playful and coy: “No, but you’ll need to memorize these things, Doctor,” she said, giving me a quick kiss. “Believe me, there will be a test.” She began to point around the sky at the streaking objects. “Lightweight exoatmospheric projectiles, or LEAPs—they’re the smaller ones. Then there are the extended range interceptors, or ERIs, and the exoatmospheric kill vehicles—”
“EKVs,” I said, watching the wild display outside.
“And the really troublesome bastard,” she finished, pointing to some sort of satellite or platform in the distance. “An SBL—space-based laser. All part of THAAD, the ‘theater high-altitude area defense’ against ballistic missiles. You know, the Star Wars nonsense.” She grabbed my hand, and we rushed out into the corridor.
“How accurate are they?” I said.
“It’s not their accuracy we have to worry about,” Larissa answered, moving toward the ladder that led up to the ship’s turret and the big rail gun inside it. “The THAAD boys have never managed to hit anything intentionally. But that doesn’t keep them from throwing all that firepower around the atmosphere like they’re in some kind of high-tech spitball fight—and an accidental hit could do real damage.”
We reached the ladder and started up. “It’s a little like skeet shooting,” Larissa said with a laugh as we entered the turret to find Eli Kuperman waiting for us. “And don’t worry, they’re all unmanned vehicles, so you won’t actually be killing anybody.” She climbed into the seat of the rail gun and smiled at me in a devious way that hours earlier would have seemed very disconcerting.
Now, however, I found myself smiling back.
C H A P T E R 2 1
As Larissa began to direct the rail cannon’s fire in every direction, pounding away with glowing bursts at the midsize and larger interceptors that were being sent against us (the ship’s magnetic fields deflected the smaller ones), the stratosphere was lit up by dozens of explosions, as well as by the indiscriminate but no less dangerous fire of the space-based laser. My job during the encounter was to help Eli try to determine just which long-range radar station was giving our position away to the American THAAD command. Apparently there were only a few monitoring sites sophisticated enough to be able to thwart our ship’s stealth technology by doggedly fixing on the confusing combination of wave reflections and absorptions that the vessel was orchestrat
ing (and that the Americans had presumably tagged as ours after they’d made visual contact in Afghanistan). Using the banks of equipment in the turret, Eli—operating in that cool but no less energized and sometimes even jovial manner that I now accepted as normal for everyone on board the ship—finally determined that a remote English base was the most likely culprit. His hypothesis was confirmed by Leon Tarbell, who, working on a lower deck, managed to intercept and descramble a series of communications between the English and American air forces.
We needed to know all this, Eli explained, because now that our ship was definitely being tracked, once we dropped back down out of the stratosphere, we could expect to be greeted by more conventional but no less deadly air ordnance than was currently being thrown against us. If we could determine what and whose planes they were going to be, Colonel Slayton could program our ship’s computers to fly in an appropriately evasive pattern at a requisite speed. Eli seemed quite confident that this represented no overwhelming challenge, and as we talked over the prospect of going up against warplanes—be they human- or computer-piloted—I found myself being infected by his eager, slightly piratical enthusiasm.
This surprising reaction was only heightened when the ship’s alert system went off, letting us know that we were beginning to descend and needed to get ready for a new and perhaps deadlier kind of action. Our enemy now would be not some antiballistic missile system that since its deluded inception had been destined for failure, but attack craft fully intent on shooting us down. Apparently there had been other such encounters; indeed, according to various radio transmissions intercepted by Tarbell in months past, Malcolm’s ship had assumed a sort of mythical status among the world’s air forces and navies. And given the very powerful ordnance that the warplanes of such countries as England and the United States were now routinely carrying, along with the skill of the pilots who both flew them personally and—as in the case of the American raid on Afghanistan—guided them from the remote safety of theirs ships and bases, escape had sometimes been a near thing.
So it would be on this occasion. As we dropped into the cloudy skies over the North Sea near the fifty-ninth parallel, we were almost immediately intercepted by Royal Air Force fighters. The planes struck dark, angular silhouettes against the setting sun, giving them a very intimidating appearance. When I turned to Larissa, I saw her sizing them up with a nod and a defiant smile; but concern was evident in her look, as well.
“Gideon,” she called to me, “see if you can find out what’s happening forward, will you?” She clutched the control handles of the cannon tightly but did not fire. “My brother doesn’t like to use lethal force in situations like this, but if those things don’t actually have pilots I’m going to indulge myself …”
Rushing down the ladder and through the corridor, I entered the nose of the ship to find Malcolm and Colonel Slayton at the control panels, Slayton calmly but quickly tapping information into one of the guidance terminals. “They’re the new Joint Strike Force ultrastealth models,” he said. “First-day-of-war, highly survivable aircraft, armed with AIM-10 Predator missiles that can carry biological, nuclear, or conventional warheads.”
“Manned?” Malcolm asked.
“I’m afraid so. They haven’t worked the kinks out of the remote guidance system on this model, yet.” Slayton turned to give Tressalian a very serious look. “We may not be able to get out of this without returning fire.”
Malcolm—who, I now noticed, looked somewhat feverish—seemed deeply troubled by this statement; before he could answer it, however, Tarbell’s voice came over the shipwide address system. “They’re hailing us,” he said. Then he patched the voice of one of the pilots through: “Unidentified aircraft: you are in violation of British airspace. Accompany our escort to the nearest field or be fired upon.”
Touching a keypad on the console in front of him, Malcolm replied pointedly, “English aircraft: as far as we’re concerned this is Scottish Republican airspace. You therefore have no authority to challenge us.” He turned to Slayton. “Can we outrun them?”
Slayton shrugged. “We haven’t come up against this model yet. We should be able to, but they’ve got a signature lock now—wherever we go they’ll be able to track us, and if we head for the island they’ll come after us with a lot more than just a squadron. We could dive, but we’ll have to slow down—not much, but it would be enough to let one of the Predators catch up to us. And over the open sea I don’t think they’d hesitate to go nuclear. The only choice I can see is going back up, but—”
There was a moment’s silence, leaving it to me to step in: “But what?”
Malcolm, whose face was definitely growing paler by the minute, tapped a finger impatiently. “Colonel Slayton is attempting to be tactful, Gideon. The truth is that we’ve been away for an unusually long stretch, this trip, and it’s becoming somewhat urgent, as I’m sure you’ve noticed, that I get back to our medical facilities on the island.” Beads of sweat began to form on his brow, as had happened before: clearly another attack was coming. Knowing the origins of his mysterious illness and the circumstances of his past as I now did, I was filled with even greater sympathy than I had been on the first occasion. I also felt heightened respect for his stoicism: “This really is irritating,” was his summation of the situation. “All right, then, Colonel, if we must—” He stopped suddenly, listening; then he held a hand to his collar. “You’re sure?” he said over the link to his sister. He began to crane his neck, looking all around the transparent sheathing of the hull. “How far? I can’t see—wait, there they are!”
Slayton and I turned with him to catch sight of another squadron of planes descending from behind and above us. Their silhouettes were more conventional than those of the British planes, and they weren’t as fast—clearly, these were much older models. But they nonetheless swept in to engage the superior craft of our pursuers courageously. As they passed close by, I could see that they had large crosses of Saint Andrew painted on their fuselages.
To my puzzled look Slayton said, “Some of our friends in the Scottish Republican Air Force, Dr. Wolfe.”
One of the results of England’s international redefinition following the controversy over the Churchill-Princip letters that had “revealed” British leaders to have been responsible for the First World War had been a decision by the Scottish Parliament to formally declare its nation’s independence. What was unknown to the world was that Malcolm’s team, having forged those letters, had been indirectly responsible for that momentous vote. In addition, when Malcolm had sold his controlling interest in the Tressalian Corporation so that he could devote himself fully to his disinformation campaign, he’d used some of the fantastic proceeds to secretly purchase a group of small Hebridean islands from the Scots. The price had been substantial enough to allow Edinburgh to launch an effective armed resistance to England’s efforts to resubjugate its northern neighbor, and in the years since, Malcolm had continued to contribute generously to what London insisted on calling “the Scottish rebellion” but the rest of the world had dubbed “the Scottish war of independence.” Some of the practical results of his generosity were apparently now on display in the air around us.
“But will they really attack the English planes?” I asked. “They don’t look like they’d stand a chance.”
“They wouldn’t,” Slayton said. “They’re flying old Harriers, armed with Sparrows—too slow, and not enough punch. But that’s not the point. All they have to do is keep the English planes occupied long enough to give us a chance to dive.”
So they, and we, did: within moments our ship was once again under the waves. We cruised quickly through the Pentland Firth and westward into the Atlantic, then southwest, at a shallow enough depth to be able to tell that the ocean surface above us was extremely agitated. I was nevertheless unprepared for just how rough the waves were when we shot back up into the air: it was fortunate that we didn’t have to ride them but could cruise along at an altitude of some fift
y feet.
In a matter of minutes our destination became visible: seven small bits of land dotted the water ahead. As we approached, I could see that they were marked by high, dramatic rock formations, hidden coves, and windswept green fields.
“Well, Gideon,” Malcolm said, his discomfort alleviated at least somewhat by the prospect of an end to our journey, “welcome. Welcome to the Islands at the Edge of the World …”
C H A P T E R 2 2
Such, apparently, was the sobriquet long ago given to the little archipelago that was collectively known as St. Kilda. Protected most of the year by waters so rough that ships did not even attempt to approach it, St. Kilda seemed the perfect haven for Malcolm and his team. It had been uninhabited by humans since 1930 and was now home primarily to a fantastic assortment of seabirds—gannets, kittiwakes, puffins, and the like—which flocked so densely at various points that they changed the very color of the landscape. But what was most striking about the islands was their air of almost palpable mystery: the sea-sculpted rocks, remnants of an ancient volcano, be-spoke a shielded past full of dark secrets and perilous adventures. A romantic assessment, perhaps; but then, by the time we landed I had become possessed by every kind of romance.
On the main island of Hirta, Malcolm had constructed the base of his operations near the decaying remains of a small village that was centuries old. The buildings that made up his facility were cleverly designed to match those older stone ruins, though the technology that the newer structures housed could not have belonged any less to the past. All maintenance and operative systems were so fully automated that there was no need for any human presence at all; the island could be left deserted for weeks or even months at a time. As to style, the interior of the compound echoed the marked contrast aboard ship: functional minimalism in the laboratories and control rooms, inviting antiques in the living and lounging areas. Housed in one mock church was the projection unit for the ozone weapon, which apparently could also be used to adjust conditions on the island temporarily when the climate of the North Atlantic became too severe.
