He sent it three other newspapers, and to reporters at several blogs. Then he backed out, erased all of the local memory, and rebooted the computer.
Work done for the day, Kharon looked at his watch. It was well past midnight — too late to bother trying to sleep. He thought of the girl he had spotted earlier in the bar. Perhaps she would have returned by now.
He made sure the computer screen was back to the hotel’s front page, then went out to find a taxi.
16
Turk’s fourth beer of the night finally got him off to sleep. He dozed fitfully, curled up at the side of the king-size mattress, huddled around one of his pillows. His dreams were gnarled images that made no sense — an A–10, an F/A–18, Ginella, Zen, buildings, and endless sky.
His phone woke him up, buzzing incessantly.
He had no idea where it was, or where he was. He pushed around in the bed, disoriented. His head hurt and his legs were stiff.
The phone continued to ring. Its face blinked red.
“Turk,” he said, finally grabbing it.
“Captain Mako, I’m sorry I woke you.”
It was Ginella. Her voice was officious, almost quiet.
“Not a problem,” Turk managed.
“I’m down two pilots, Grizzly and Turner. I’m told you’re available, if you choose to volunteer.”
“Yeah, uh, well uh—”
“I just spoke both with your Colonel Freah and Operations. It’s entirely voluntary.”
“When do you, uh — when do you need me there?”
“We’ll be briefing the mission at 0600,” she told him.
“Um, sure. I guess.”
“That’s a half hour from now, Captain. Can you make it?”
“Yeah, um, I’m at the hotel,” he said.
Her voice softened a little. “I realize that, Captain. Would you like me to send a driver?”
“Man, if you could do that, it would be super.”
“Be in the lobby in ten minutes,” she told him. “He’ll have coffee.”
“Ten minutes?”
“He’s already on the way. I knew you’d say yes.”
17
It was absurd and ridiculous to think that he was responsible in any way for the dozen deaths and the other casualties at al-Hayat. And yet Ray Rubeo couldn’t help it.
The images he had seen of the strike tortured him. The fact that his people had no luck finding what went wrong bothered him even more. Surely it wasn’t just a mistake — the enemy must have done this for propaganda purposes. And yet his people found no evidence of that.
Something had gone wrong. But what?
Working over his secure laptop in his hotel room, Rubeo worked as he had never worked before. He pulled up schematics and data dumps, looked at past accidents and systems failures, reviewed the different aspects of the mission until he practically had it memorized. And still the cause remained as much a mystery to him as it did to his people.
There was nothing wrong with the system that he could tell. The systems in the Sabre that had made the attack were exactly the same as those in the others.
So the attack hadn’t happened. It was all a bad dream.
Rubeo had presided over disasters before. He had stood in the Dreamland control center as the entire world fell apart. He’d never felt a twinge of guilt. Fear, yes — he worried that his people would be hurt, or perhaps that his ideas and inventions would fall short. But he never felt guilty about what he did.
And he didn’t feel guilty now. Not exactly. He saw wars as a very regrettable but unfortunately necessary aspect of reality. This war was a righteous one, to stop the abuse of the people who were being persecuted by Gaddafi’s heirs. It was justifiable.
Accidents happened in wars.
He knew all this. He had thought about these things, lived with all of these things, for his entire life. And yet now, for the first time, he was upended by them.
Rubeo worked for hours. If he could just figure out what had happened, then he would be able to deal with it. He could fix the machines — his people would fix the machines — and this sort of thing wouldn’t happen again.
If it was a virus, how would it have worked? It would have had to be extremely sophisticated to erase itself.
Not necessarily, he thought. The aircraft recycled its memory when it transitioned off the mission. It had to do that so it had enough space for data.
But where would it be before you took off?
The only empty positions were the video memory.
Actually, you could easily slot it there — it would be erased naturally, as the aircraft engaged its targets and recorded what happened.
Impossible, though — who among his people would do this?
So interference from outside? A radar signal they couldn’t track?
That NATO couldn’t track. He could easily believe that. Certainly.
But it could interfere with just one aircraft, not the others? Did that make sense?
Need to know more about the source.
Need to know more…
I have to have this checked out. This and a dozen other things. A hundred…
Twelve lives. Was that all it took to unhinge him?
Weren’t his contributions greater than that? Without being boastful, couldn’t he say that he had done more for mankind than all of the people killed?
But it didn’t work that way, did it? And guilt — or responsibility — were concepts that went beyond addition and subtraction.
He was focused on a virus because he didn’t want to take responsibility. He didn’t want it to be a mistake he had made.
Same with the interference.
Maybe he had just screwed up somewhere.
Rubeo pounded the keys furiously.
It might be possible to throw the mapping unit off by varying the current induced in the system…
Hitting another stone wall as his theory was shot down by the data, Rubeo slammed the cover of the computer down in disgust.
He was a fool, tired and empty.
But he had to solve this. More — he had to know why it bothered him so badly. It paralyzed him. He couldn’t do anything else but this…
Rising from the hotel desk, the scientist paced the room anxiously. Finally, he took out his sat phone and called a number he dialed only two or three times a year, but one he knew by heart.
The phone was answered by the second ring.
“Yes?” said a deep voice. It was hollow and far away, the voice of a hermit, of a man deeply wounded.
“I am stumped,” said Rubeo, trusting his listener would know what he was talking about. “It’s just impossible.”
“Someone once told me nothing is impossible.”
“Using my words against me. Fair game, I suppose.”
“There was a beautiful sunset tonight.”
“It’s night there,” said Rubeo. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to wake you up.”
“You know I seldom sleep, Ray. I wasn’t sleeping.”
“The problem is… I… the thing is that I feel responsible. That something we overlooked — that I overlooked — caused this. And I have to fix it. But I don’t know how.”
“Maybe it wasn’t anything you did. I don’t really have many details, just what I saw on the news. I don’t trust those lies.”
“What they’ve reported was true enough, Colonel.”
“They made me a general before they kicked me out.”
“One day I’ll get it right.”
“I think it would sound strange coming from you, Ray.” The other man laughed. “Besides, they did take that away. Along with everything else.”