“At last,” he said aloud. He was making money, relaying this call.
He heard it ring at the other end, then be picked up.
“What?” a man’s voice said.
“I’m looking for Peter from Pravda.”
Pause. Resignedly: “Peter went to Intertel.”
Nikkie didn’t want to know anything about who the man was or what was going to happen next, but he couldn’t help the images that rose in his mind—a tough man, unshaven, cruel—ex-military, hungry, impatient—Nikkie had dodged the draft because of Afghanistan and he didn’t like to think of the way ex-military would treat him if they knew. They had grenades—guns—
Nikkie cut off the images by saying, “Peter says ‘Get ready.’”
He broke the connection. He was sweating and his knees felt weak.
0439 Zulu. Mid-Atlantic.
Everybody in the squadron called the plane Christine, after Stephen King’s killer car. And Christine was a killer. Her nose had taken the head off a sailor during a cat shot; squadron myth said bits of him were still embedded in her radome. Long ago, in her first life as an S-3A, she had fired the rear ejection seats without human help, sending the back-end aircrew into ESCAPAC and smashing their legs on their keypads. Now, rekitted as an S-3B, she was like an aging queen with a facelift—older than she looked, and nasty.
She expressed herself tonight in vibrations and the unpredictable. Odd vacillations in a gauge. False readings from a fuel tank. A nut that could be seen slowly unscrewing itself just beyond the copilot’s window. Nothing serious, because Christine was not in one of her killer moods; only minor, constant, nerve-picking trivia. A mean old aircraft for a long, dull mission.
Boredom and discomfort. Old aircraft smells, engine noise, the abrasion of personality on personality. Four hours down; three to go, Alan thought. He yawned. Where was the battle group? Why did he care?
Christine shivered and gave him a temporary blip and made his heart lurch, and then he saw it was nothing.
What was in his lunch box? Should he drink some coffee?
How come Craw had stood up for him like that?
Would any of these guys ever begin to like him?
How many hours to go?
“Hey, Spy, what’s the word? I’m not going all the way to fucking Ascension Island! What’s the program, man?”
Bicker, bicker. Rafehausen would never like him, he supposed. What you might call a difference in culture.
Still. “I want to get where I can catch it in a wide sweep, Rafe.”
“They won’t go that far out of their way! These bastards have been one hundred and ninety days at sea. Which you haven’t!” Rafe wanted to stay closer to the carrier. He wanted to show that he thought that this was Mickey-Mouse fun and games. He wanted to scream that this was bullshit.
The copilot, a nervous j.g. everybody called Narc, sucked up to Rafe. “Yeah, wait till you’ve been out for your one-ninety, Spy. Nobody wants to make it one ninety-one.” Then, purely for Rafehausen’s benefit, “Only the fuckin’ Spy—” They laughed, the sounds tinny in his intercom.
Alan felt himself blush. He tried to see if Senior Chief Craw was grinning, but he could make out only helmet and mask in the green light of the screens. But it wouldn’t have mattered if the man’s head had been bobbing with laughter. He knew people thought he was funny. Because he was serious, he was funny. There was something peculiar in that. Well, it was true: nothing was Mickey Mouse to Alan. He took even games very seriously.
Alan tried to think of something to say, something that would be funny and cool and would make them like him, but by then Rafe and Narc had forgotten him and his grids and his plots; they were bickering about fuel and the readings Christine was giving them.
How many hours to go?
Nothing ever happens, he thought. Somewhere, things must be happening. Somewhere.
He thought of Kim. He resisted thinking of Kim, her inescapable eroticism a painful pleasure in these surroundings. Beautiful. Rich. Fun. Sex, my God. A woman who would—
Think of the radar screen instead. The pale green blank, with its hypnotic moving radius.
Kim in the bed in Orlando. Kim laughing, nude. Kim—
Think of the radar screen.
How many hours to go?
0459 Zulu. Brussels.
He had circles under his eyes now as he came into the air terminal, but he was little different from the others. Businessmen getting a jump on the day—businesswomen, too. They carried sleek attachés and laptops and were dressed for success, but nobody looked very bright yet.
The rain had ended but the tarmac was still wet. He came out of the terminal, took a taxi to a hotel within the airport, and, when he had dismissed the car, walked away toward the terminal he had just come from. A half-mile brought him to an area of sheds, more like a factory than an airport. Without pausing, he went between two of the buildings to a loading dock where trucks would be backing in another hour. He checked his watch, then the sky. No sign of the sun yet.
He waited in the shadows. He did not lean against the wall, despite his fatigue. He was a man of will, not easily recognized as such because of his fussiness and his pedantic attention to detail—the flashlight, the list.
Clanwaert plodded toward him through a shallow puddle. Clanwaert was a plodder, the thing he prized about the man. Unsurprising, steady. Capable of change? Perhaps not. In the pocket of the raincoat, his hand tightened on a piece of steel wire.
He called to Clanwaert from the shadows. Clanwaert tried to see him, failed, perhaps caught the glint of his eyeglasses because he began to search for a way up on the loading dock. To his right was a dumpster, which might have offered handholds to a younger or more agile man. Instead, he walked fifty feet the other way and struggled up a steel ladder like an exhausted swimmer coming out of a pool. He plodded back toward the shadows.
The man in the raincoat spoke for a full minute. His tired voice had the same tone of urgency, a kind of metallic hopefulness. Would Clanwaert? This great opportunity. More money.
But Clanwaert resisted. His voice rose; even invisible in the darkness, he was a man taking a stand. Surprising, to anybody who had seen his heavy plodding, he was a man of passion—and, it seemed, of hatred for the man in the raincoat. The word traitor hissed out.
“That is all dead now,” the man in the raincoat said.
Clanwaert raged at him. Perhaps the man had meant that a god was dead, for Clanwaert resisted, the way people resist a threat to their religion. At last, he ran down, gave a rumble or two, fell silent.
“I am sorry,” the other man’s voice came clearly from
