Meryem spoke into a radio and Azad ambled up the stairs and over. He held a machine gun. Then, when he was five feet away from us, he turned and pointed the gun into the crowd. The gun was another of the HK33 assault rifles. It fired 5.56 mm NATO rounds. Almost thirteen of them per second. Azad smiled at me and placed his finger on the trigger. The square was his kill box. The setup was even better than a clock tower. He could run back and forth for maximum dispersal, and the best part was he didn’t even have to aim. Everybody, including the freckled children, would die.
“I’ll do you what you want,” I said.
Meryem smiled and Azad eased up on the trigger.
“Good choice, Michael. Now we kill some sailors, instead, yes?”
I bit my tongue and followed Meryem down the steps, the guard with the machine gun on my heels.
Chapter 60
I didn’t want to help. But I didn’t want Azad to open fire on a crowd of civilians either. And I still had my phone. So I made an imperfect decision. I bought time. Meryem held me at gunpoint in front of the trigger assembly while I made some quick observations. Up close, their silver cams rotating, tooled parts spinning like gyroscopes, the triggers were beautiful in their complexity. But I still thought it was a shame that they were haphazardly propped up on two crates. Then it struck me. Something so obvious that I was surprised that I hadn’t thought of it before.
“I’m going to need my backpack,” I said.
“You will fix the trigger with our equipment,” Meryem replied.
“I’m going to need my backpack, I’m going to need to move this whole assembly, and I’m going to need you to get the hell out of my way.”
“Why?” Meryem said. “The triggers are here. You are here. Fix them.”
I looked at her. I was treading a dangerous line, but it had to be done.
“They aren’t triggers,” I replied.
Meryem took a step back and conferred with the three tech guys. They didn’t look happy. There was some heated discussion in Turkish. She turned back to me.
“They are triggers. Our intel tells us they are triggers. The journal says they are triggers. Even you have said they are triggers,” she said.
“That’s what I thought too, but not anymore.”
“So what are they?” she said.
“They’re a gyroscopic targeting mechanism,” I replied.
I was going out on a limb, but if the best lies contained a grain of truth, this one contained a bucket of it. If I was going to sell what I needed to do next, I was going to have to play it as close to the truth as I dared. And given my predicament, I was daring pretty big.
“It’s a gyroscopic mechanism and it fits inside the sphere. Not outside of it. You want this thing to shoot straight, lower the Device.”
“Why inside?” Meryem asked.
“See the crosshatching? It matches the skin of the sphere. The sketch of the triggers in the journal? That’s just your grandfather ensuring that the Device isn’t used by the wrong people. This Device was Tesla’s crowning achievement, but look at these things. I can guarantee you that Tesla would have demanded a far more elegant solution than having these components sit outside the sphere like so much lost luggage.”
I was taking a big risk and I knew it. I was telling Meryem how to blow up six thousand sailors. Meryem smiled. She didn’t argue. She didn’t protest. Instead, she picked up a walkie-talkie from the orange fender of one of the generators. I noticed that since the test firing they had stopped working. Maybe they had shorted out. I didn’t know.
“Lower the sphere,” Meryem said into the walkie-talkie.
Clearly, the crane operator spoke English. Or maybe he didn’t, because there was no movement. The crane didn’t budge.
“Lower the sphere,” Meryem said again.
This time, I heard a crackle of static and a brusque voice.
“Technical problem. The crane is not operating,” the voice on the other end of the walkie-talkie replied.
The crane was electric and the generators may not have been up to the task. They could have easily blown a breaker.
“Then I’m going up,” I said. “It’s the only way if you want this thing done.”
Meryem thought about it.
“I am coming with you,” she said.
The crane must have been twenty stories high. There were a series of ladders, each canted at an eighty-degree angle, up the middle of the metal superstructure of the mast. I climbed, Meryem following directly below me with her gun. Below her, Faruk and another soldier each carried one of the triggers in rucksacks on their backs. What was more important was who wasn’t there — Azad. She had left him and his machine gun on the rampart as a deterrent.
I wondered who was in charge of their operation, and I was beginning to think that Meryem was at the head of it all. Above Azad. Above everybody. But whoever was ultimately in charge, the very clear message was that if anything untoward happened, Azad would start shooting into the crowd. There was no need to waste words on the matter. I believed them.
I counted two hundred and fifteen rungs to the top. The cab of the crane was mounted immediately above the enormous slewing mechanism that the big jib arm rotated on. But that wasn’t my focus. My sights were set on the crane operator in the cab. It took only a moment for me to see that, besides being armed, he balanced a second blue-screened laptop on his knee. Four against one. Plus the guys below. What I had in mind wasn’t going to be easy.
We reached a metal walkway. To my right ran the main jib, the sphere hanging from the trolley on its far end. To my left ran the counter jib, which wasn’t as long as its partner, but made up for its lack of length with big concrete weights to keep the crane balanced. The sphere’s position, hanging from the far end of the jib, gave me room to work, but I wasn’t going to have a lot of room for error. First things first. I needed to sell it.
I stood on the metal walkway of the main jib and began walking forward, toward the sphere. Being up there was like walking the plank. If the rungs of the ladder had been spaced at about a foot, I guessed it was two hundred and fifteen feet to the castle floor below. Add another two hundred or so feet to the ground below that and we were over four hundred feet in the air. Good thing I wasn’t afraid of heights. On the contrary, it was an excellent operational environment for me because it gave me a lethal weapon just as deadly as any bullet — gravity. Not thinking that through was Meryem's first mistake.
“Hand me my backpack,” I said.
“Why do you want it?”
“This is going to take all night if I need to explain every move,” I said.
“We have searched your backpack. You have one flashlight. Clothes. One Swiss Army knife. A very poor weapon if I may say. I ask you again, how does that help?”
“Never underestimate a Swiss Army knife,” I replied.
She passed me the pack and I slung it over my shoulder.
“You did not look for the knife.”
“I already know you took it out.”
“Then I say, once more, why the backpack?”
A gust of wind blew in over the Mediterranean. There was smoke in the air from the massive fire still burning on the horizon.
“Do you want to blow up the Sixth Fleet or do you want to putz around worrying about my methods?”
“I do not trust you, Michael Chase.”
“I don’t care. Now pass me the knife.”
Meryem looked uncertain, but she reached into the pocket of her khakis and tossed me the knife. Bold move that high in the air, but I caught it.
“Thank you. Now pass the triggers here. Lay them on the walkway directly behind me. I have work to do.”