But out over the dunes Orion cartwheeled down toward the end of the night. Cool, dry air from the desert smelled of salt, camels and old petroleum. Once he learned to forget the great depth beneath him and get on with the job, it was far from unpleasant to be a hundred meters up in the Arabian night sky.
The job was not difficult. As it was done every night, the salt had little chance to build up. It took only a firm slow rub along each wire-thin pipe, front and back, with the chemically treated cleaning wads. The crew broke for mint tea and peppery coffee, hoisted up from the surface level in buckets, and by the time the sky began to turn cobalt in the east they were done.
Hake went down with the others, excused himself to go to the men’s room, and waited there until there were no more sounds from inside the tower. Then he peeped out.
Most of the crew had returned through the tunnel. Some had left by boats tied to the tower’s base. He did not think anyone would care much about not seeing him in one place or the other. He had marked the TV monitors that scanned the interior space of the tower and was careful to avoid their fields of view. And he sat down and waited, three levels up from the gentle waves, with a clear view of the shore through one spray-splashed window, and a panorama of the sea’s horizons through the others.
The fact that he could see nothing but water in that direction did not mean there was nothing there; the Team would be on its way by now. And on land as well. Peering cautiously over the squat dugout at water’s edge, he saw the pink roof of the guard shack. Tigrito and his goons would be there by now, checking their watches. It all looked peaceful, even the tangle of bright plumbing that projected above the eastern headland, the gas-cooling plant and the radar mast of an LH2 tanker waiting to be loaded.
It would be sinful to destroy this. So thought Hake, minister of a church that never used the word “sin,” veteran of a quarter century of New Jersey’s brownouts and freezeouts and sooty grime. Clean hydrogen was a good. What madness were Curmudgeon and the others engaged in? What madness the world?
The sky beyond the headlands was orange, ready for the sun’s entrance on the stage, the color picked up by the plumbing of the LH2 plant. So many megawatt-hours from this array; and this only one tiny cove, invisible on a map, that could be duplicated a hundred times along this coast alone. No wonder the fight was so intense. The stakes were fantastic.
The pumps throbbed suddenly, and the TV cameras began to swing back and forth in their scan.
Hake jumped. It was time. The sunflowers were beginning to open. The sun was not yet high enough to produce much energy, but he could see the violet ghost image spring into being, halfway up the sky. It laid a trail of oily glitter along the surface of the sea—
And in the middle of that shining trail was a sprinkle of pockmarks.
Bubbles. The invaders were approaching.
The first one up the ladder was Mario, wet suit gleaming in the long slants of sunrise, waterproof tote lashed to his back. He did not speak to Hake, just stripped off his suit and opened the bag to lay out the tools of his trade. Speaking would not have been easy. The pumps were roaring at full force now, and the whole tower thrummed with their noise and the scream of gas through piping. The underwater tug bobbed up to the lowest rung of the ladder, and one, two, three more persons pulled themselves up.
“Stay in this corner!” Hake shouted in Mario’s ear. “I rolled a screen over the doorway. You can get to the tunnel without the camera picking you up.”
Mario looked at him scornfully, then repeated the orders to the others. That wasn’t necessary, except to reinforce the fact that it was he, not Hake, who was running things. He spoke into a radio, listened and nodded. “The others are on their way,” he said. “Let’s move it!”
Yosper’s bully-boy quartet were reassembled here in A1 Halwani, rapidly getting out of their wet suits, spreading their treasures on the steel deck. Mario’s gear was nose-masks, sleep-gas canisters, slabs of gray-pink plastic explosive. Sven (or Carlos) had his own tools: the camera to photograph the machinery, the kit to take apart any equipment interesting enough to carry away, the detonators to explode Mario’s plastic and bring the tower down, when it had been looted of everything worth taking. Dieter (or Sven, or Carlos) carried the biocans of fungus spores. They were to go into the trickle-irrigation system, infecting the sunplants with the wilt. Carlos (or whoever) carried the guns. Bulgarian Brollies and Peruvian Pens, with green-tipped darts like hypodermic needles; one touch, and the victim was anesthetized, in case the sleep gas failed. And a clutch of machine-pistols. They were not nonlethal. Any person who took their thousand-round-a-minute blast would sleep forever, in blood.
The second crew arrived, three persons. Two turned out to be the sheik’s men and the third, a-hop with excitement, was Yosper himself. “Goin’ like shit through a tin funnel!” he cackled, skinning out of his suit. “We ready, Mario? Get on with it, Hake, lead the way!”
Hake climbed down the ladder and crouched at the door to the tunnel as the others came behind him. Yosper raised himself on tiptoes to peer through the little window, then turned, scowling. “You didn’t cover the TV cameras,” he accused.
“How could I? They just would have come out and fixed them.” It was a true reason, if not a real one, but it didn’t solve the problem for Hake. Dieter (or Sven) said cheerfully:
“Not to worry. Give me a minute with the wires.” He located and opened a junction-box, and in a moment all the dim red lights beyond the door winked out. “We better move it, Yosper,” he said. “They’ll be checking that in a minute.”
‘Then let’s go!” Yosper grabbed machine-pistol and sleep-dart projector from the pile and started off at a trot, the others following. Hake lagged, slipped on a nose-mask, and tossed two of the sleep-gas canisters into the darkness behind the Team.
They did not have time to turn around. He heard the clatter of the canisters, the puff of their explosion, a few grunts and gasps, and then the sound of bodies falling.
When he was sure they were all out cold for at least an hour, Hake reclimbed the ladder, picked up the rubbery wads of plastic and the fitted box of detonators and pushed them into the sea, along with as many machine-pistols as he could collect. Then he descended the ladder again, stepping on a thigh here, a spine there, and stumbled through the black tunnel to the control dugout. What he would do when he got to the dugout he was not sure, but at least he could dump the problem on whoever was there. He tripped over a body just before the end—how had anyone managed to get that far?—and reached for the door.
Just as Yosper’s voice said softly behind him, muffled through a mask, “You know, Hake, I thought you might try something. Now open the door real easy. What you feel in your back isn’t sleepy gas.”
Hake stopped still. “You can’t blame me for trying,” he said.
“Wrong, boy,” sighed Yosper. “I can kill you for trying.”
Even as Hake started to move, one part of his mind was assessing what Yosper had said: how true it was, but also how irrelevant. If he had a choice, he could not find it.
Three weeks Under the Wire are not much to change the pacific habits of a lifetime, but they had been hard weeks.
The lessons stuck. Fall forward, kick back; twist around, grab for a leg. Hake executed the maneuver flawlessly. His heel caught Yosper just where it was supposed to, lifting the old man off the ground. Yosper brayed sharply, and something rattled away down the corridor as Hake jerked at the leg nearest his flailing arms. The training paid off. The gun was gone, they were hand to hand and Hake had every advantage of youth and size and strength.