“. . . blood sacrifice. . .”
“Well, yeah, but. . .”
“. . . and I think they used to tear the jaws and hands off their rivals and kill them slowly over days, believing the screams of agony would appease the gods?”
“The longer the screams, the happier the gods. Yup, that’s them,” Henry admitted.
Sarah smiled, then sprang to her feet and started arranging her hair. “Cool,” she said. “Let’s go have a look.”
Shep stood beside her, looking at both of them, tail wagging happily.
“Oh, I guess you want some blood too, eh, Shep?” said Henry with an expression of mock disgust.
On deck they were surprised to see hundreds of sailors crowded to one side of the ship, admiring the pale blue-grey silhouette of the Andes on the horizon. At the water’s edge Henry could just make out a sprawling port city.
Sarah pointed to the sailors. “Won’t they tip us over, all gathered to one side of the ship like that?” she asked, apparently serious.
“Probably,” Henry replied, forcing himself to match her straight face. “In fact, I can feel it going over now. . .” He grabbed her.
Sarah let out an involuntary squeal. “I was joking.”
From above them a voice said, “Maybe we’ll get the admiral to marry you two right now.”
Henry looked up to see Grimes overhead, wearing a big grin.
“Fine with me, Kai. What do you say, Sarah?”
“Get serious, you two,” she said. “Does anyone have a pair of binoculars?”
When Henry glanced up again at Grimes the general was standing beside the SEAL. Hayes looked down at Henry and Sarah and waved.
“What’s that you said, Ms French? Binoculars? Here, use mine.” Hayes took a small pair of field glasses from around his neck and dropped them to her. “Heads up!”
She snatched the glasses from the air handily and spent the next few minutes staring at the coastline. The city seemed to slope slightly upward towards the mountains. Here and there church spires broke the city’s silhouette. Sarah was surprised that the landscape was so green. All along the docks, freighters lined up to be filled with cargo.
“Santiago is a happening town,” she remarked, handing Henry the glasses.
He studied the city for a moment, then turned to peer up at Hayes and Grimes.
“What’s next, General? More waiting?”
“Politics,” said Hayes in a bitter tone. “We need permission to go ashore, to do flyovers, to take a leak in the ocean. And by the way, Ms French, Santiago is over a hundred miles inland. That’s Valparaiso you’re looking at.”
Henry took the field glasses from Sarah and tossed them back up. Grimes caught them and handed them to Hayes. Without further comment he and the general disappeared into the ship.
Sarah stared at the city. “It’s not as I’d expected,” she said. “It looks like a Mediterranean city. Brightly coloured houses up on the hills, greenery everywhere.”
“Maybe we can visit.”
“But what did the general mean about politics?”
“My guess is they’re trying to get permission from the Chilean Government to do something.”
“Do what?” she said. “I don’t see why the terrorists should choose this place over, say, New Zealand as a hiding place. New Zealand’s much closer to the shelf than this is.”
“New Zealand’s the first place we’d look. We’re supposing the bastards would regard that as enough of a disqualification. ’Course, they could be trying a double bluff, but. . . Besides, Chile has the higher mountains. It’s not about hiding, it’s about broadcasting. We have to search the high ground. I think I understand the general’s political problem, though,” Henry continued.
“Most people think twice before letting foreigners go stomping around their country. Wasn’t this the place where the Spanish chose to begin their conquest of the Andean tribes?”
“But we’re not here to hurt anyone,” said Sarah. “The whole world is threatened. Don’t they realize they could lose it all? All those lovely. . .”
“Sheesh,” said Henry. “Don’t yel at me. Don’t forget – this is the country where the CIA took part in a coup that started a military dictatorship which lasted for twenty years.”
Sarah looked back out at the seaport. “Oh,” she said. “That’s right. I forgot.”
Henry looked back at the mountains. “Regardless of politics, I don’t think it’ll be long before there’s action.”
“What do you mean?”
“We’re the ones with the muscle to deal with the problem. Any nationalistic finger raised by Chile or any other country will get cut off at the knuckle by the rest of the world. But it’s going to take a while for this to sink in. The second bomb can’t be allowed to detonate.”
#
Unknown to Sarah and Henry, events were precipitating forced action by the United States. The terrorists had chosen to release a manifesto through the
New York Times
. Of course, it was viewed at first as just one more of a host of hoax claims flooding the switchboards of the news media around the world. But this one, unlike all the others, described the nuclear blast and its exact coordinates. Now the world knew the truth.
By now spy satellites had been assigned new orbits – without any concrete objective in mind, just random guesswork. Every country with the ability to act felt compelled to do so. Like angry ants swarming around a dirt mover, everyone had to find out
why
and
how
.
Despite pleas for restraint from world leaders, nearly all the world’s military machines were at full alert, even though they hadn’t a clue as to the appropriate action to take. All any country could useful y do was search its mountains – or its neighbours’.
Soon planes were flying sorties in record numbers, causing radar screens to flash warnings of potential incursions as planes flew unauthorized over mountain ranges that bordered neighbouring countries. Without permission, US Stealth bombers began flying continuous runs along mountain ranges everywhere in the southern hemisphere, each of them looking for something – anything – that might look like a jury-rigged broadcast station.
In a private session of the UN Security Council, the USA, acting on recommendations from its military experts, suggested shutting down all radio stations in the southern hemisphere, since the signal for detonation of the second device might ride piggyback on another transmitter’s normal signals. But Chile’s ambassador, his President listening at home on a special line, implored the nations of the world for calm and considerate action – mild words from a nation looking at one of the USA’s most lethal weapons of war floating within sight of its capital of tourism. He argued that only the USA had “official y” verified the threat.
Only hours later, China released satellite views of the Ross Ice Shelf on the internet. This angered the USA, especial y since it was US technology that had allowed China to get the pictures. The US ambassador argued that China had abused a solemn trust placed under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Agreements. So China argued that the United States had no jurisdiction or control over the truth. And so on.
Final y, only twenty-four hours after the
New York Times
story had broken, President Kerry was obliged to address the world. His address was concise. His long face seemed even longer when it flashed on the screens of televisions all over the world. He recounted, plainly and simply, what had happened.
That done, he seemed about to leave the microphone when he turned back to the camera and this time spoke clearly from the heart.
“Dear friends, this isn’t about war. And this isn’t about politics, in spite of that ‘manifesto’. It’s about
evil
. We must not let evil prevail. I think today we have to ask ourselves, soberly and openly, how this came about. Certainly we’ve all known that one day something like this might happen. I think we all have to take a long look at ourselves, and our shared past, before we start pointing fingers and affixing blame. But I believe that, in the end, under God, only goodness will prevail.”
#
The general and Grimes were in a recreation room three decks below the operations-command section of the
Enterprise
’s bridge. The admiral had invited them there to hear Kerry’s speech on TV. The room was full of cigar smoke. The general paced the wall at the rear of the room as the President spoke. It was obvious that frustration was driving him crazy. Grimes sat to one side and listened to the President with his eyes closed; you could tell he wasn’t sleeping because of the reactions that flowed across his face – his cynicism was perfectly synchronized to the President’s emotional comments. He snuffed a laugh when it was over, which brought him an angry look from the admiral.
“Perhaps
you
have some solutions, Mr Grimes?” said Hayes, equally irritated.
“Perhaps I do, sir.” Grimes opened his eyes like a cat.
“You’re free to speak here, commander,” grunted Hayes. “Why keep us in suspense?”
“You’ll be the first to know, General,” said Grimes, raising a plastic cup as if in a toast. “No offence, sir,” he added, pointing his cup at the admiral.
A red phone on the wall rang loudly. An aide answered it, then pointed the receiver to the admiral.
“Must be The Man himself,” muttered Grimes.
Seated behind Grimes were eight men dressed in dark uniforms bearing Navy insignia. They were of mixed race, size and demeanour, and, to a man, clean and well ordered. The general knew they were Grimes’s SEAL team. He had met them but had never seen them in action. Perhaps that was the trouble:
no one
saw them in action. They never worked in plain sight, only in darkness, and always in secret. Each day they worked out in private, not mixing with the rest of the crew.
But today they were here under Commander Grimes’s orders to hear their President speak.
Now that the President’s speech was over, they waited for the order to depart. None of them spoke.
Grimes stood and put on a black beret. His men watched him like a group of dobermans waiting for orders. He didn’t seem to be paying any attention to them, but looked at General Hayes, who had walked to the front of the room to switch off the TV.
Then Grimes nodded to the admiral.
“Soon,” he said.
He turned and headed for the door. His men rose and quietly followed him.
The admiral shook his head. “My God, Tony, what’s with that bunch?”
“Dogs of war, Milborne,” said Hayes. “They get crazy when they’re chained up, I guess.”
#
The next development started in cyberspace.
In the flurry of messages that jumped from computer to computer across the vast complex called the internet, a single message – poetically titled 000.000.000.1 – dictated a list of banks to be involved in paying the ransom of the world. Financiers who had moments before been musing on the investment possibilities of a new global coastline were now on the phone with their closest military contacts, demanding an end to this nightmare. Suddenly, with the prospect of mighty skyscrapers wading knee-deep in water and sharks swimming in their basements, corporations, like the people walking the streets, like the poor who lived on the trickle-down – all found themselves united in despair. Businesses began to shut down preparatory to relocating to higher ground. Rumours spread by mouth and by cable depicting ever worse cataclysms that might be caused by tidal waves.
President Kerry’s speech had done nothing to calm the worry, which in many quarters soon became hysteria. Fights and drunkenness were epidemic in every stratum of society. Inevitably, the so-called terrorist nations became targets for the world’s venom. But, like a nest of snakes with a flaming torch thrown into their midst, these nations found themselves striking at each other.
By midnight the situation had become critical. No one was getting much sleep.
Off the bow of the
Enterprise
, two Trident subs brazenly surfaced. They sat there silently in the water while a chosen few inside the three vessels’ respective nerve centres had quiet words with one another. At half- past the hour, two angular black helicopters shot from a special hold at the rear of the
Enterprise
. Moments later the subs sank silently from view.
While Henry, Sarah and Shep slept comfortably belowdecks, Grimes was finally going to work. The helicopters bearing the SEALs lifted into the overcast night, free of marking lights. The sound of their rotating blades was muffled by the sloshing of the sea against the ship. The two choppers – Gadfly 1 and Gadfly 2 – vanished into the night like technological phantoms. Each of them carried two Hel fire and four HARM radar-destroying missiles, and each had twin PUFF 2 miniguns with a variable fire rate of 500 to 8000 teflon-coated uranium rounds per minute.
On the bridge of the
Enterprise
, Admiral Schumacher and General Hayes watched through infrared glasses. Even with these, augmented by starlight scopes, the twin helicopters could barely be seen, and then only during liftoff.
The general knew that neither of these machines matched the crew they carried for sheer lethal certainty. He lowered his glasses and went into the bridge. There a circular screen showed a tactical display of the choppers’ position. Two red dots proceeded with astonishing speed towards the coast of Chile. Admiral Schumacher slapped him on the back and handed him a cup of coffee. A sailor sat before the screen, muttering into a headset, a closed circuit connecting him with the larger com centre nestled several decks below them.
“I guess we’ll just have to let Grimes do his worst,” said Hayes.
Schumacher looked at him with severity. “What?
That
’s why I authorized this flight?” His even skin and greying hair seemed to puff up a bit as he continued.
“You’ve got to do better than that, Tony.” The admiral removed his wire-rimmed glasses and cleaned them nervously on his sleeve. “I’m the one who’s got to explain whatever happens.”
“I know you do, Milborne, and, with all due respect, I don’t have a thing to tell you. The man has these, well, hunches.”
Schumacher turned his back on Hayes and walked to the window. He studied the lights of Valparaiso and wondered how many of its citizens would notice two unlit helicopters buzzing around their haciendas in the middle of the night.