My initial participation in this endeavor lacked both full concentration and a certain heart. The circumstances surrounding Tarbell’s death, like those of Max’s, had revealed a side of human behavior that I thought worse, in its way, than anything I had encountered during all my years of studying criminal behavior. But whereas Max’s death had filled me with a desire for explanations from and revenge against persons who had grievously abused their positions of power, Leon’s fate seemed to confirm what I had already begun to suspect: that participating in such high-stakes games, even for the best of motives, would prove not only disastrous but corrupting. In short, the tragic events we were experiencing were being produced by the collective desires of all players, not merely Dov Eshkol, to see their own concept of right prevail.
“What are you saying, Gideon?” Larissa asked me as we lay on the bed in my quarters after some twelve hours of keeping relatively silent vigil in the turret. “That we’re as bad as Eshkol?”
“No,” I said, bridling a bit at her loaded simplification. “But you can’t deny that if we’d just stayed out of the entire thing he would have been quietly killed in General Said’s bowling alley. Or what if Malcolm had never ordered the creation of the Stalin images in the first place? Eshkol would have just kept on doing what hundreds of intelligence operatives do every day. There would have been no crisis.”
Larissa sat up. “I’ve never had much use for ‘what-if’s,” she said crisply. “In situations like this, in any situations that involve questions of force and power, virtue’s a relative thing. And speaking relatively, I’d say we’re the only ones in this mess even trying to do any good.”
I stared at the ceiling. “What’s that old saying—about it always being the good men who do the most damage in the world?”
Larissa looked even more irritated; perhaps, I thought, because in her heart she agreed with me. “Old sayings like that tend to depend on who came up with them.”
“I think it was Henry Adams,” I said. “Who, admittedly, chose to be an observer in the power game throughout his life. Unlike his forebears.”
“Exactly.” Larissa lay back down, trying very hard to douse the quick spark of misunderstanding that flared between us. “The point isn’t that Leon died, Gideon—it’s that he died as well as anyone could.” She smiled fondly. “Certainly as characteristically . . .”
I chuckled once, quietly and sadly, along with her. “He was fairly unbelievable. Even when he took pleasure in something he just seemed so—contemptuous of it. By the way—” I turned onto my side, my face inches from Larissa’s. “Did anybody ever actually find out where he came from? I asked him a couple of times, but he always dodged it.”
“He told me a story once,” Larissa said. “I have no idea whether it was true. It was just after he’d joined us, and I think he was trying to inspire sympathy as a way of seducing me. God knows sex was the only thing that could ever have made him show that side of himself. He claimed that his mother was a Siberian prostitute in Vladivostok and his father was a visiting English telecom executive. The mother was killed during a Russian bombing raid. After that his grandmother took him to Indonesia to get away from the war and supported his schooling by working in a microchip sweatshop. It killed her eventually. He began stealing and later forging to complete his education.”
I considered it. “Well,” I breathed, “it would explain at least some of his attitude. And if it’s not true, he’s the only one who could have made it up.”
Although I think she wanted to, Larissa could not let my moment of doubt pass without asking, “So is this going to be a problem for you? What we have to do now?”
I gave it several minutes’ hard thought. “I won’t deny that I have questions,” I finally said. “But I also know that since this situation is at least partly our doing, the solution should be, too. Maybe we shouldn’t have walked into it—but things aren’t going to get any better if we just walk out.”
Larissa pulled me close. “That’s true . . .”
I don’t think she was entirely reassured by my lofty words; certainly I wasn’t. But the conversation had nowhere left to go, and it was somewhat merciful, therefore, that Malcolm’s voice came over the address system at that moment, telling us to join him forward. Apparently we at last had a lead, one that we were pursuing with evident dispatch; by the time Larissa and I managed to dash through the ship’s corridors to the nose, the vessel was already heading up toward the surface at a good clip, and we joined the rest of our team (minus Julien, who was still in one of the labs) just in time to watch as we burst into the sky above the straits. At this point, however, any encouragement that might have been inspired by Malcolm’s announcement vanished:
The waters directly below us were full of American naval vessels, which immediately began bombarding our ship. The electromagnetic fields around the vessel succeeded in throwing these missiles off target or detonating them at a safe distance, but that didn’t explain how the warships had been able to locate us in the first place.
“They’re finally getting smart,” Slayton said, anxiously guiding the ship through the hail of fire from the guidance console. “They monitored the wake we left in the water and any air disturbances that originated with our surfacing point. Then they opened a blanket fire.”
“But—don’t they run the risk of hitting each other?” I asked. “Or other ships that are farther off?”
“Of course,” Malcolm said, wheeling his chair into position beside the colonel. “But they seem more willing than ever to take the chance—not surprisingly.”
I was confused for an instant, but Eli quickly turned to explain: “We monitored a Malaysian transmission about fifteen minutes ago, which said that somebody’d made off with the one B-2 bomber they had left—it was being kept at a remote airfield because the only Malaysian pilot who could fly it had been killed. Anyway, there was a lot of garbled, panic-stricken screaming that included a reference to a nuclear device.”
“Eshkol,” Larissa said. “The bastard can fly, too?”
“He’s the complete covert operative,” Jonah answered with a nod. “We’re on his tail, but the Malaysians also talked about the four of you and about what they saw of our ship. The Americans, according to their transmissions, have concluded that the mystery vessel they’ve been hearing about and occasionally running into all these months is on the B-2 job, somehow. So things are likely to get very hot on this ride.”
“But why?” I asked. “They can’t be tracking us.”
“No,” Jonah went on, “but we’ve got to follow Eshkol’s plane—”
“Which is an old American model,” Slayton said, “whose stealth systems the American air force knew how to defeat even when they were still using it. They think our ship’s escorting Eshkol, not chasing him. They’ll stay fixed on him and look for patterns of air disturbance that match what they monitored when we came out of the sea.”
“Do we have to stay so close to Eshkol, in that case?” Larissa asked. “We can track him from the stratosphere, after all—”
“Where we’ll be too far away to prevent his doing anything rash,” Malcolm cut in.
Larissa considered this with a nod. “Then we shoot him down.”
“The Americans may be willing to risk radioactive fallout,” Malcolm answered, “but I am not. No, Sister, this time the idiots have us, I’m afraid. For the moment.”
“Just for the moment?” I asked, alarmed at the explosions that were surrounding the ship but more unsettled still by Malcolm’s concession of even a momentary disadvantage. “What do you mean? What can we do later?”
“It depends on Eshkol’s nuclear device,” Eli said. “Julien’s studying the plans now. If it has electronic components that can safely be disabled—”
“Which we know his plane has,” Jonah added.
“Then,” Eli went on, “we can hit him with a pulse.”
“A pulse?” I asked, at first making the medical connection; then I remembered the
kind of ship on which I was traveling. “An electromagnetic pulse,” I said, breathing easier as I realized that we might indeed have a chance.
This feeling was reinforced when Julien suddenly burst in from the corridor. “Tonnerre!” he cried, seeming a little amazed himself. “It will work!”
C H A P T E R 4 0
During the next several hours the hopes engendered by my shipmates’ admirable scheme were summarily dashed by Dov Eshkol’s seemingly inexhaustible cunning. It quickly became apparent that his admittedly brilliant plan of escape rested on four principal considerations: first, that the U.N. alliance would hardly allow someone to fly out of Malaysia in a B-2 bomber—an obsolete piece of technology, perhaps, but still a deadly one—without giving chase with a view toward capture or, when that proved impracticable, termination. And when aerial combat was joined, Eshkol would have no chance against the squadrons of more advanced aircraft that would be dispatched to intercept him. Therefore the only real weapon at his disposal was the plane itself: if he kept to the skies above populated areas and refrained from forcing an engagement, no nation in the world would risk having its air force be the one to shower the earth’s surface with a flaming mass of wreckage that would conservatively claim hundreds—and potentially thousands—of lives. Finally, Eshkol’s tactic would be equally effective against our ship, for while we had planned a less cataclysmic way of ending his flight than shooting him down, the chance that a failure of the B-2’s electrical systems might result in a crash as devastating as any result of combat was enough to stay our hand.
What made the situation doubly frustrating was that as we followed Eshkol at a comparatively low altitude into Thai airspace, where he made a point of traveling as far north as he could above the crowded outskirts of Bangkok, the American navy apparently relayed the intricate tracking system it had designed to keep tabs on our ship to their own as well as the English air force: the naval guns that had given us such a rude shock when we emerged from the Straits of Malacca were replaced by the cannon fire of fighter jets, which attempted to harass both our ship and Eshkol’s B-2 into landing without a struggle (their missiles went unused, presumably out of the same fear of collateral damage that prompted their reluctance to shoot Eshkol down). We initially assumed that this situation would go on only as long as we were within the range of the first squadrons to intercept us; but as we streaked over Bangladesh we saw fresh squadrons appear from carriers in the Bay of Bengal, and it became apparent that the Allies intended to do everything they could to put an end to what they had no doubt decided was some sort of grand terrorist plot.
So on we went into the Indian sunset, with the Allied planes keeping up an almost incessant fire and Eshkol cleverly matching his course to the population density on the ground. His general heading seemed to be west by northwest, though it was impossible to guess at his ultimate destination due to the circuitous nature of his flight path. We of course feared that he was heading for Russia, a fear that was seemingly validated when he made a run for the Caucasus; but then he unexpectedly moved west into Turkey, flying over town after town along the Black Sea toward Istanbul.
“Can it be that he really does wish only to escape?” Julien asked as he stood with the Kupermans, Larissa, and myself behind Malcolm and Colonel Slayton at the guidance console.
Jonah shrugged. “It’s possible that he wants to wait until he’s under less scrutiny before he carries out whatever it is he’s planning.”
“I wish that were true,” Malcolm answered, never taking his eyes from the great black flying wing that was cruising just below and ahead of us. The B-2 was now becoming increasingly difficult to see against the darkened surface of the Earth, a fact that, while not actually significant, still seemed somehow discouraging. “But let’s not fool ourselves,” Malcolm went on. “At heart Eshkol is a terrorist, with the same craving for publicity as any terrorist. The fact that he’s being watched only makes him more dangerous, I’m afraid.”
“We need to start thinking about options,” Colonel Slayton said in a tone so steady—even for him—that I knew the situation was indeed as bleak as Malcolm was making it sound. “I know we don’t want to bring him down over a populated area, but let’s remember what he’s carrying. Putting an end to this run could be a question of limiting losses, rather than causing them.”
“I’ve considered that, Colonel,” Malcolm answered. “And if he’d continued on into Russia we would probably have been forced to exercise that option. But until we have some better idea—”
Malcolm was cut off by an explosion near the ship, one that indicated that the Allied airmen pursuing us had come to the same conclusion as Colonel Slayton: they were using missiles now, and detonating them close enough to both our ship and the B-2 to make what they apparently believed would be a very serious point. Little came of the outburst, of course—our ship’s magnetic fields could play havoc with the guidance systems of any air-to-air missiles in service, and there was certainly nothing that would intimidate Eshkol at that point—but the very ineffectiveness of the attempt was unnerving in the way that it seemed to make the Allied pilots recklessly furious. They began to edge ever closer to the B-2, greatly increasing the chances of a catastrophic collision; and as we flew on through the Balkans and north toward Poland the situation only became more violent and more volatile. The job of avoiding both the Allied planes and the B-2 without being distracted by the exploding missiles and continuing cannon fire eventually proved too much even for Colonel Slayton, and Larissa took his seat at the helm. Powerful though my feelings for and trust in her were, however, the switch did not reassure me, for I knew that Slayton would never allow anger to get the best of him, whereas Larissa? As Malcolm had said when he had first explained John Price’s death to me, “Well, Larissa . . .”
I don’t think any of the others felt any more secure at that moment, except of course for Malcolm; and it was therefore Malcolm who first noticed that our course heading had changed dramatically. “East,” he said, so quietly that I almost didn’t hear him over the din of the planes and explosions. “East,” he repeated, much more emphatically. “He’s turned east!”
Colonel Slayton leaned over to one of the guidance monitors, his voice becoming, much to my dismay, only more controlled: “If he stays on this course, he’s got virtually a straight line of heavy population—Bialystok, Minsk, Smolensk—” He looked up and out at the B-2, unwilling to name the final link in the chain:
“Moscow,” Malcolm announced slowly, his face becoming ashen. His next words were tight but emphatic: “Larissa, Gideon—I suggest you both get to the turret.” Larissa needed no encouragement but got quickly to her feet and began pulling me toward the door to the corridor. “We’ll wait until he’s passed Smolensk,” Malcolm called after us. “If there’s no deviation—”
Larissa turned. “That’s cutting it a little close, isn’t it, Brother? Given his speed—”
“Given his speed, Sister, your aim had better be true . . .”
There is a terrible simplicity to what remains of this part of my tale, a barren brevity that I would gladly embellish if doing so would alter the outcome. Larissa and I scarcely exchanged a word as we took up our positions in the turret; and during the next three quarters of an hour, as eastern Poland and western Russia shot unrecognizably by beneath us, silence continued to reign in that transparent hemisphere, unbroken, now, even by the continued sounds of cannon fire and missile explosions; for the Allied planes had abandoned their pursuit long before we entered the unpredictable airspace of that very unpredictable ruin of an empire, Russia. I do not know what Larissa was thinking, as in the days to come I did not think to ask her; as for me, I found myself wondering what must have been going through her mind as she prepared to end yet another man’s life. It seemed certain that she would be called on to do so: Eshkol’s own behavior had offered us no alternative to his execution, really, since the moment we’d first become aware of him. The only thing left to do now, I mused to myself a
s we waited in the turret, was hope that as few people as possible would be injured or killed on the ground.
It never occurred to me that Eshkol’s plane might simply disappear; yet somewhere between Minsk and Smolensk it seemed to do just that. There was no sign of the thing on any of my equipment, nor, as Malcolm soon informed us, on any of the ship’s other monitoring systems. I was profoundly confused, until Larissa pointed out the simplest possible explanation: that Eshkol had crashed. My spirits jumped at the thought, but I forced myself to be skeptical: Wouldn’t we have seen the flames? Or detected the descent? Wouldn’t Eshkol have ejected if he’d found himself in distress? Not necessarily, Larissa answered; planes could and did crash without significant explosions, and so suddenly as to make tracking their loss of altitude problematic. And nighttime flying conditions could sometimes be so disorienting that a doomed pilot never even knew he was in trouble. All the same, a massive set of double-checks of the area and our ship’s systems seemed urgent, and Larissa and I returned to the nose of the ship to assist with them. But the whole of our crew could find neither clues on the ground nor equipment malfunctions on board our vessel. It genuinely did seem that Eshkol’s plane had been lost, probably in some field or forest where its hulk would not be discovered until daybreak, if then.