Peacekeepers (1988) (26 page)

"Those were the orders he radioed," Alexander said.

"Course, they could always be countermanded once you were in the air."

"Pavel," said Kelly, from the protection of her father's embrace, "I'm sorry. You saved our lives, and I didn't trust you. I was wrong, and I'm sorry."

Pavel nodded, his thoughts churning: I had told her that I love her, but that made no difference to her. No difference.

She did not believe me.

"Well," said Alexander happily, "all's well that ends well."

"Except for Barker," said Mavroulis.

"He won't be able to walk for some time," Alexander admitted. "But he'll be okay. If I have to donate a few tendons myself, we'll get him back on his feet."

"What about Shamar?" Pavel asked. His voice sounded harsh and hard, even to himself.

The others stared at him, their self-congratulatory smiles fading.

"Hassan claimed Shamar left Libya weeks ago," said Alexander tightly.

"With the bombs?"

Alexander slowly shook his head. "The bombs were not with him. He's got them stashed somewhere, but we don't know where."

"We'll find them," Kelly said.

"We'll find
him
," her father growled.

Pavel looked into their faces. He saw smoldering hatred in Alexander's gunmetal eyes. In Kelly's he saw gratitude, perhaps even affection—but not love.

"I must return to Moscow now," he said. It is better, he told himself. I do not belong among these people.

But Alexander shook his head. "You can't do that. Red. You haven't accomplished your mission. You're supposed to assassinate me, remember?"

Pavel shook his head. "No jokes, please. I will return . . ."

"The hell you will! You think we went through all this crap just to send you back to shoveling snow?"

"I don't understand . . ."

Alexander took his arm from his daughter and reached out to clasp Pavel's shoulder. "Red, my dear old Uncle Max used to tell me, 'Only a fool does something for just one reason.' You could have fucked up this aquifer mission. You could have made Moscow very happy and gotten three of my best people killed. But you didn't."

Pavel stared at the older man. "You were testing me. My loyalty . . ."

"Damned right," Alexander said, grinning wider than ever. "You did okay, and Moscow isn't gonna be very happy if you go home now."

"I would be considered a failure," Pavel admitted.

"So stay with us! We can use a man with your skills and your smarts."

"But Moscow . . ."

"Moscow wants you to keep an eye on me, right? I'll bet they're just as glad that Rayyid's on his way out. Hassan's the saner of the two. Besides, there's still Shamar and those damned nukes of his."

"You want me to stay?"

Mavroulis grumbled, "For a Russian, you're not so bad."

But Pavel was looking at Kelly. She glanced at her father, then turned to face Pavel.

"We want you to stay," she said, so low it was almost a whisper. "Like I told you back in the computer room—we have a lot to talk about."

Pavel would have preferred that she fling herself into his arms, but he nodded slowly at Kelly and her father. This was better than nothing. Moscow would be suspicious, he knew. I will be playing a very dangerous game; practically a double agent.

Kelly was smiling at him now. From the protection of her father's embrace.

"Very well," Pavel heard himself say. "I will stay."

"Great," said Alexander. "Now that that's settled, the next thing we tackle is these poachers in Rwanda. The bastards have nearly wiped out the last remaining freeliving gorillas in the world. And Shamar was heading in that direction, according to my information . . ."

So Zhakarov, nicknamed "Red," became a

reluctant member of Alexander's little

group, his loyalties divided at least three

ways among Moscow, Kelly, and a growing

admiration for Cole Alexander and his

work. Jonathan Hazard, Jr., was not

recruited until nearly a year later, and even

then it was mostly an unfortunate accident.

I had been a member of the court-martial

at the younger Hazard's trial, shortly after

the officers' coup had been thwarted by

Hazard, Sr. I still had both my hands then.

The young man refused every offer of help

that his father made. That did not, of

course, altogether prevent the older man

from helping his son.

J. W. Hazard, Jr., received a much lighter

sentence than his fellow conspirators.

Cardillo and most of the others went to jail

for life. Jay Hazard was merely banished to

the Moon for ten years.

"FOUR minutes 'til the nuke goes off!"

The words rasped in Jay's earphones. He knew that the woman was nearly exhausted. Inside his pressure suit he was soaked with sweat and bone-tired himself. The adrenaline had run out hours ago. Now all they were going on was sheer dogged determination.

And the fear of death.

"It's got to be here someplace. " Desperation edged her voice. Four minutes and counting.

Long months of training guided Jay's movements. He halted in the midst of the weird machinery, took the last of the antistatic pads from his leg pouch and carefully cleared his helmet visor of the dust that had accumulated there.

Then immediately wished he hadn't.

Six other pressure-suited figures had entered the factory complex. Each of them carried a flechette gun in his gloved hands.

Jay tried as best as he could to duck behind the lumbering conveyor belt to his right. He motioned for the woman to do the same. She had seen them too, and squatted awkwardly in her suit like a little kid playing hide-and-seek.

No radio now. They would pick up any transmission and home in on it. Actually, Jay realized, all they have to do is keep us here for another three minutes and some, then the nuke will do the rest. They don't care if they go with us.

That's their real strength: they're willing to die for their cause.

The woman duck walked to Jay and leaned her helmet against his.

"What do we do now?" she asked. Her voice, carried by conduction through the metal and padding of the helmets, sounded muffled and muted, as if she had a bad cold.

He knew shrugging his shoulders inside the pressure suit would be useless. But he did it anyway. There was nothing else he could think of.

They were hiding in the midst of Moonbase's oxygen factory, out on the broad plain of Mare Nubium, the Sea of Clouds that had seen neither water nor air for more than four billion years. The factory was out in the open vacuum, no walls, covered only by a honeycomb metal meteor screen so thin that it almost seemed to sway in the nonexistent breeze.

Automated tractors hauled stones and powdery soil scooped from the Moon's regolith and dumped their loads onto the conveyor belts, ignoring the human hunters and their prey. Crushers and separators and ovens squeezed and baked precious oxygen from the rocks, then dumped the residue into piles at the far side of the factory, where Other automated machinery mined metals and minerals from the tailings. Glass filament piping carried the oxygen to huge cryogenic tanks, giant thermos bottles that kept the gas cold enough to remain liquefied.

The conveyor belts rumbled, the crushers pounded away, in nearly total silence. Jay could feel their throbbing through the concrete pad that formed the base of the factory. In the vacuum of the Moon, though, normal sound was only an Earth-born memory.

In all the vast complex there were no human workers.

Only robots, which actually performed better in the clean vacuum than they did in the corrosive air needed by their human owners. No humans set foot in the factory, except for the two cowering behind the main conveyor feed—and the six now spreading out to cover all the perimeter of the factory and make certain that Jay and the woman could not escape.

Three minutes thirty seconds.

Jay closed his eyes. Hell of a way to end it. The nuke will wipe out the oxygen factory, and that'll kill Moonbase. We won't go alone, he thought grimly.

It had started innocently.

Jay had reported for work as usual, riding the power ladder from his quarters on level four to the main plaza. It was Tuesday, and sure enough, there was a fresh shipload of tourists hopping and tumbling and laughing selfconsciously as they tried to adjust their clumsy Earth stride to the one-sixth gravity of the Moon.

The tourists wore coveralls, as the Moonbase Tourist Office advised. But while Jay's coveralls were a utilitarian gray with Velcro fastenings, the Flatland tourists were brilliant with garish Day-Glo oranges and reds and yellows, stylish metal zipper pulls dangling from cuffs and collars and calves. Just the thing to tangle in a pressure suit. Jay thought sourly as he entered the garage office.

He had expected to spend the day driving a tour bus around Alphonsus, locked away from everyone in his solitary cab while some plastic-smiled guide pointed out the ruins of Ranger 9 and the solar-energy farms with their automated tenders and the robot processors that sucked in regolith soil at one end and deposited new solar cells at the other. The tourists would snap photographs to show the Flatlanders back home and never have to leave the comfort of the bus. Jay would drive the lumbering vehicle back and forth across the crater floor along the well-worn track and never have to speak to anyone.

But the boss had given him a red ticket, instead.

"Special job, Hazard," she had said, in that hard tone that meant she would brook no arguments. "Flatland VIP wants to see Copernicus."

"Christmas on a crutch!" Jay fumed, lapsing back to the euphemism he had used when his father would punish him for profanity. "That's a six-day ride."

"And it's all yours," the boss retorted. "Got number 301 all set for you. See you in six days."

Jay knew better than to complain. He snatched the red ticket from the boss's counter and stomped out into the garage. Actually, he thought, a six-day trip up to Copernicus and back might not be so bad. Away from the tourists and the boss and the rest of the world for nearly a week.

Out in the wilderness, where there isn't a blade of grass or a puff of air or even a sound—alone.

Except for some Earthside VIP. A part of Jay's mind wondered who he might be. Somebody I used to know?

The thought sent a wash of sudden terror through him. No, it couldn't be. The boss just picked me out of the computer.

She knows I like to be left alone. She's trying to do me a favor.

Still, the thought that this VTP might be someone from his former life, someone from his father, even, scared him so much his stomach felt sick.

When he saw who it was, he relaxed—then tensed again.

It was a woman, a petite snub-nosed redhead who looked too young, too tiny and almost childlike, to be a Very Important Person. But when Jay got close enough to see her brown eyes clearly, he recognized the kind of no-nonsense drive and determination he had seen in others: his father, his former commanding officer, the grim-faced men who had led him into treason and disgrace and banishment.

She was waiting for him by the bus, in the midst of the noisy, clanging garage. She wore dark maroon coveralls, almost the color of Burgundy wine. No dangling zipper pulls. A small slate-gray duffel bag hung from one shoulder.

"Are you my driver?" she asked Jay.

"I'm the driver."

He was nearly a foot taller than she, and he judged that they were roughly the same age: middle twenties. Jay had not bothered to shave that morning, and he suddenly felt grimy and unkempt in her level stare. She didn't have much of a figure. Her mouth was turned down slightly at the comers.

"Okay, then," she said. "Drive."

He popped the hatch and stood beside it as she climbed the metal steps slowly, uncertain of herself in the low lunar gravity. Jay took the six rungs in one jump and ducked into the shadowy interior of bus 301.

On the outside, 301 looked like any other heavily used tour bus: its bright yellow anodized hull had been dulled by exposure to vacuum and the hard radiation that drenches the lunar surface. There were dents here and there and a crusting of dust along the wide tracks. The crescent and human figure of its stylish Moonbase logo was the only fresh bit of color on its bodywork. Management saw to that.

Inside, though, 301 had been fitted out for a long excursion: the seats removed and a pair of sleeping units installed, each with its own bathroom facilities. The galley was forward, closest to the cab, and the air lock and pressure suits at the rear by the hatch. Jay would have preferred it the other way around, but he had no say in the design of the bus or its interior layout.

Without a word to his passenger, he pushed past her and slid into the driver's seat. With one hand he slipped the comm headset over his thick dark hair, while with his other he tapped the control board keys, checking out the bus's systems displays. He got his route clearance from the transit controllers and started up the engines.

The bus lumbered forward slowly, the thermionic engines purring quietly, efficiently. Jay felt his passenger's presence, standing behind and slightly to one side of him, as he steered along the lighted path through the busy garage and out to the massive air lock.

She slipped into the right-hand seat as he went down the final checklist with the controllers. The inner air-lock hatch closed behind them; Jay thought she tensed slightly at the muted thump when the massive steel doors sealed themselves shut.

Pumps whined to life, their noisy clattering diminishing like a fading train whistle as the air was sucked out of the big steel-walled chamber.

"You're cleared for excursion, 301," he heard in his earphone, "Three-oh-one, on my way," he muttered.

The controller's voice lightened. "Have fun. Jay. Six nights with a redhead, wow!" He chuckled.

Jay said nothing, but shot a quick sidelong glance at his passenger. She could not hear the controller, thank the gods.

The air lock's outer hatch slid open slowly, revealing the desolate splendor of the Sea of Clouds. It was night, and would be for another sixty hours. But the huge blue globe of Earth hung in the sky, nearly full, shining so brilliantly that there was no true darkness.