“Ah,” the old man said, lifting a hand. “Wait.”
Ten seconds later there came a muffled thud and a brilliant flash of light, just as quickly extinguished, in the middle distance. Alvin jolted where it stood. When it settled, the vibration was gone.
Harbison said, “That was your baby?”
“The CARV, yes.” Stephens gave a shrug. Then he smiled. “Easy enough to plant a limpet mine on it, designed to go off at depth.”
Harbison understood. “Without its cameras, they’re blind up top now.”
The old man smiled. “Yes, blind and panicking. Scrambling around, trying to figure out what happened to their robot sub… and us, too. Blind, deaf, lost.”
Harbison thought about it. “With the deep scattering layer, they won’t even be able to find us on sonar.”
Stephens nodded. “Right now they just think they’re in the middle of a fiasco. By the time they figure out what really happened, we’ll be long gone.” He made a delicate gesture with the fingers of both hands, like a bomb exploding. “And they’ll have plenty of other things to worry about.”
That had been the part of the plan Harbison had heard, though he’d been spared the details. Pick up the bomb. Return unseen to the surface, where they would be met by two boats run by Stephens’s compatriots. Once they’d taken the bomb aboard, they’d sink Alvin over the depths of Monterey Canyon, where it would never be found.
One boat would then head inland to launch the attack. The other, with Stephens and Harbison onboard, would head west, into international waters, to meet up with the larger ship that would carry them to safety.
It was guaranteed that at first the military would have no idea where the two of them had gone, or even if they were still alive. There would be a search, but it was likely that in the long run Harbison would be declared dead, a captain gone down with his ship.
And, as Stephens had said, once the conventional explosives on the hydrogen bomb had detonated, sending a vast cloud of radioactive material over densely populated northern California and across into the fertile Central Valley, the U.S. government was going to have plenty on its hands. By the time the search resumed, their trails would have gone cold.
As close to a foolproof plan as you could devise.
Though, of course, no plan was completely foolproof.
At the end of their conversation in Stephens’s New Jersey office, Harbison had said, “Why?”
The old man had raised bushy gray eyebrows in an answering question. But Harbison knew he understood, and merely waited.
Finally Stephens said, “Fear.”
Harbison was quiet.
“Fear,” Stephens said, “is powerful. Yet you Americans have never felt it here, not real fear, not on your own soil. For you, it’s always someplace else. Everyplace else.” His mouth twisted. “Fear loses wars, especially the ones that last for decades.”
Still Harbison didn’t speak.
“And you?” the old man said.
Harbison was ready for the question. “Revenge,” he said. “Of course.”
And kept his gaze steady.
On a typical mission, his next step would have been to dump ballast and head for the surface. But this time, the bomb securely clasped in Alvin’s claws—up to the task, as he’d known they’d be—he followed Stephens’s instructions. Using the thrusters to move north, then west, then north again, maneuvering into position over Monterey Canyon in preparation for making their rendezvous at the surface.
Following instructions, that is, for every move but the last one. That one he took on his own.
When Stephens said, “Fifty meters south,” he set the thrusters on idle instead. The submersible hung in the water, quivering.
In the sudden stillness, Harbison looked out the porthole at the pitch-black void that lay below them. A strange current like the flat of a huge hand tried to push the submersible down into the canyon.
But he wasn’t staring at eternity. In his mind he saw only Adriana, the way she’d looked in the hospital, the last time he’d seen her.
Stephens glanced over. His expression showed only annoyance, as if he thought his orders simply hadn’t been heard correctly.
Then his eyes widened at what he saw in Harbison’s face.
“I couldn’t do it,” Harbison said, reaching for the inside pocket of his wool jacket. “I never could.”
Stephens went still for an instant. He stood just a few feet away, but that moment’s hesitation was enough. Had Harbison had a gun, he could have put a bullet through the old man’s head.
Yet it wasn’t a gun that Harbison pulled from his inside pocket. It was a hammer.
With his left hand he shut off the thrusters. With the hammer in his right he smashed their controls, at the same time bracing his legs for the jolt.
Alvin fell into the darkness.
I’m sorry, Harbison said to it. I’m sorry.
He heard Stephens curse, lose his balance, stagger against the far wall. A sharp metallic sound as his gun slid across the floor.
A second blow of the hammer, and the switches that released the ballast, that allowed the sub to rise to the surface, were damaged beyond repair.
Alvin fell.
By now Stephens had regained his balance. With a wordless grunt, he threw himself across the small space and brought his hands down in a clubbing motion on the back of Harbison’s neck.
Late. Too late. One last swing before the hammer went clattering away, and all the sub’s lights, inside and out, were extinguished.
Carrying its lethal cargo with it, Alvin fell, spinning end over end like an out-of-control satellite plunging to earth.
Stephens screamed, a guttural sound swallowed up by the darkness. His body fell away from Harbison and slammed against the far wall. His scream cut off, leaving no echo behind.
Harbison had been ready for the freefall. He clung onto the sub’s ruined controls, put his face up against his porthole, and stared unblinking into the abyss. He felt calm. He’d long accepted that his world would end this way.
A light flared just outside the window. A sudden blue flash illuminated the porthole and let him catch a glimpse of his own face. Then another flare, this one a fiery green, and a third as warm and yellow as the sun.
They accompanied him the whole way down, creatures no one had ever seen before and no one was likely to again. Tracing his path until their beautiful lights merged with the ones inside his skull, and he closed his eyes.
SPARKS TO THE BEAR’S HIDE
BY ROBERT MANGEOT
In Budapest the streetcars were painted yellow. Sometimes I believed that was all the color left in Hungary. Margaret, my foster mother, said that the cars had been painted yellow before the communists took over and would be yellow after the communists fell. To her, the color was a spark.
We jerked and swayed along with the other people crowding the line out to Little Pest. At each stop the January wind cleared the air thick with body heat and drying wool.
“See?” Margaret said, a smile on her leathery face. “The men drool over my sweet Helena. Saint Jerome is with us.”
Margaret was Roma and a closet Catholic. For her the world was as piled up with signs as the snow against her farmhouse. After knowing her eighteen years, I found that she had a way of creating the signs she credited to her saints. On a streetcar full of workers heading back to their tenements, I was the only young Budapesti wearing an Italian overcoat and with my hair styled for evening. I was the only girl in a floral dress, one Margaret had me sew tight to catch Typhon’s eye.