The Spy I Loved (14 page)

Sooner or
later he had to go home and that would be the dead
giveaway.

Otherwise
it would be time to quit. One of their assumptions was that the
enemy didn’t have access to satellite tracking by zoom-video or
ultra-high resolution stills. This was only an assumption. Such a
system would be defeated by cloud cover, infrared and the like
would only present a heat signature—they could never be sure they
were actually looking at him and no other.

Accept no substitutes.

He had a
cooler, with pop and a couple of cold beers. Liam lazed on the
shore, letting a good half hour pass after he’d washed up, noting
who was on the lake. After a few days, he recognized boats
belonging to other outfitters, boats belonging to The Pines, even
quite a few of the faces. In a passing runabout he saw a familiar
huddle of kids in their lifejackets, rods tipped up as dad raced
past at full throttle, determined to try the other end of the river
before dinnertime and maybe prove to the kids that this was really
fun after all.

He was
feeling distinctly burned out by the time he meandered his way back
to the little bay at the end of a long trail, taking the right fork
and going up to Goddawannapiss Lake (in the ancient and traditional
homeland of the Awful-Nasties) as he had taken to calling it
recently. Its real name, Wabagishik Lake, wasn’t much
better.

It was
the same routine as before. If it was a hard chore the first time,
he now had an additional two hundred fifty pounds of underwater
sled and onboard weapons.

He sat in
the bay, up close to shore, listening intently with the motor off.
There were plenty of boats out on the water, but none seemed very
close by.

He got
out, tying the boat off temporarily and lugging the big bags into
the underbrush. Next it was the motor. By this time Liam was
sweating, possibly even swearing. The bank was higher and steeper
than his last landing.

He
quickly undid his special knot and dragged the boat, battering it
up and over the heap of boulders that made up the shoreline, the
thing squeaking and thumping over every single blasted one of
them.

The
bushes were all smashed down. He had taken the precaution of
picking a spot twenty metres from his first landing. He did his
best to prop them all up again. Where the grey bark had been peeled
from white wood there wasn’t much he could do about it. After
another long listen, he decided on taking a break down in amongst
the boulders. Pulling out a powerful and lightweight pair of
binoculars, he swept the hillsides and the adjacent forest, what he
could see of it from his low position.

A minute
or two of that and he knew it was fruitless. If there was somebody
out there, he’d never spot them if they had even half a brain. The
odds of hearing them were somewhat greater. He tried the headphones
and an amplified digital microphone. Liam got nothing but a
cacophony of birds, insects, and the miscellaneous noises of the
forest at midday. The longer he stayed there, the greater the
chances were that someone would come along in a boat. Even the most
innocent of people would pick the worst possible time.

He had
eaten and he didn’t have to go to the bathroom.

Liam
Kimball uttered a sigh. He reached for the nearest duffel. The
whole problem with sneaking around and avoiding observation was
that it rubbed off on the psyche. A man began to feel guilty,
furtive. A creeping kind of paranoia set in.

A person
spent too much time alone, looking over their shoulder, not
accepting anything or anyone at face value.

If the
average bear in the street walked up and asked what he was doing,
and if he told them he was searching for a satellite, they would
probably just laugh. They would turn around and walk away. One
tended to forget that, but their subjects were an entirely
different sort. One tended to obsess about the subject.

It
isolated you, and that reinforced the problem. In the end, there
was only the work and that great divide between you and regular
people.

He did
the work so that people like Lindsey could be safe, and live
peaceful lives, for the most part without worry or knowledge of
that other world, that darker, harder world where things weren’t
nearly so rational.

Sure.

Sure we do.

He felt
pretty low for a moment, then shook it off.

This was
no way to be.

He might as well get suited up and into the water. The sled,
outwardly a copy of a popular sport model, needed assembly and
checking before he would trust it any distance. Once assembled, he
had some ideas on hiding the sled for future convenience. Of
necessity, this would be a remote location, as far from
here
as possible. This
would entail the underwater tow of an unmanned sled, which was
always fun. His machine had ten times the power of the civilian
model, which meant he could net a heavy object and bring it to the
surface. He could go all day on a charge and still have something
left in reserve. Completely programmable, it was a complete weapons
system in its own right. There were one or two tools aboard, the
kind that civilian sled designers could only dream about and drool
over.

He’d had
one of the older sleds break down in a frozen fjord in Norway a few
years back. The thing was based on available naval torpedoes of its
day and weighed a tonne—literally.

He’d
nearly caught his death of cold that time.

***

Liam was using the latest, most experimental model of a tried
and true concept. The
problem,
as he had explained to Q-Branch in London, the
quartermaster people, was that the more vital bits of the
satellite, scattered from here to hell and gone, were fairly heavy.
The Ministry was good in that it did consult with field agents on
development of new systems and new ways of doing
business.

The EMERALD satellite before re-entry had massed well over
four hundred kilograms. The sensitivity of its surveillance systems
relied on size, number of sensors, and overall power. On initial
impact with the upper atmosphere, the satellite had broken up
into
partes tres,
(as Caesar would have said, once again showing the benefit of
a public-school education), plus several hundred smaller bits. Then
there was a lot of what could best be described as alloy cornflakes
for the remainder, going down to the size, not of the head of the
pin, but the other end—the point of the pin. Then there were the
more esoteric, forensic traces, radiation, smudges of insulator and
plastic, rubber and silicone. There were heavier metals and rare
earth elements—all of which could be traced on the ground using
relatively simply instrumentation. There were two positively
identified impact points, hard rocks under a little soil
contributing to the satellite’s destruction as well as the
impressive bounce effect of the remainder. Dogs had been trained to
search for such debris, and were at least as effective as other
methods. Hence their map of the impact debris field.

It was
the sort of instrumentation that any self-respecting rogue nation
or paranoid raving lunatic with a bit of money and desperate to
rule the world would be likely to have.

They took
him by surprise. He was cruising at two knots, three metres below
the surface, heading for the GPS coordinates of his primary target.
The ominous shadows coming up from behind elongated, the
coruscating light-beams showing shapes against the pale backdrop of
the bottom. The wavering feet kicked, revealing forms that could
only be enemy frogmen.

They were
above and behind him. The sun had given them away, in a complete
reversal of aerial combat doctrine.

Cranking
the throttle hand-grip to the max, he pushed down on the
handlebars. The nose came up under full power. The machine pulled
up and around. Twisting his upper torso, Liam rolled out in an
underwater Immelmann turn that made his lower spine crack as he
rotated. He didn’t reach for his own knife just yet. To go
one-handed at this speed was to lose control. There was no chance
to arm, aim and launch any of the onboard weapons. It was all he
could do to hang on.

He must
have startled them with his quick reflex action. The first dart
missed, flying over his shoulder a good two feet up. The other hit
the poly-glass windscreen with a loud snap and sprang off into the
brilliant glare of the water’s surface.

Damn the torpedoes.

Always
turn into the threat. That part of doctrine still held
good.

***

Sending
the sled straight at the assailant on the left, Liam let go and
kicked hard, drawing the Ka-Bar knife out of its ankle scabbard. He
closed and quickly grappled with the one on the right. The fellow
was above him, desperately trying to reload his weapon when he
should have been pulling a blade. Going around in a slow spiral,
the low whine of the sled receded in the direction of the deep
water and the shoreline along the far side of the bay. The other
guy was still kicking. He was swimming on his back and going
backwards, ten metres away, busy trying to reload and watch Liam at
the same time.

Liam had
his man by the regulator. The diver dropped the spear-gun, panicked
at the close proximity. Liam pulled the rig out of the man’s mouth
and stabbed him hard in the belly.

With a
left-handed punch, a kick of the fins, and a sudden hundred-eighty
degree rotation, Liam grabbed the struggling man. There was still a
trail of small bubbles coming up from where the spear-gun had hit
mud. Liam held the man down in spite of his contortions, in an
agony of pain and desperately trying to get to the surface now. He
dragged Liam upwards, and there was only one thing to do. Liam
pulled him in close, stabbing again and again. The other diver was
still out there in the murk. Liam had to let him go. There was a
silver flash a foot to his right and he knew the second shot from
the other diver had missed by just that much.

He
dropped the knife when a sudden smash of the dying man’s knee
caught him in the funny bone, paralyzing his arm. He fought his way
back in close, the man contorting in a paroxysm of pain, panic and
fear. Liam would choke him to death if he had to, and there was the
knife on the guy’s ankle.

The body
went limp in his hands.

Mercifully, it was over.

Liam
pulled a dart from the pouch on the dead guy’s hip, his hand still
buzzing and half numb. The man hung vertically. His face was tilted
down in the water, arms floating upwards like a seagull. Liam
didn’t have time for a good look. Blood clouded the water. There
were clicks from not far away.

That
would be a spear-gun being reloaded.

Liam bent
double, stuck his head between his feet and kicked hard for the
bottom.

The gleam
of the weapon beckoned from between the ubiquitous sunken trees and
logs on the lake bottom. It was dead simple. Gas-charged, the CO2
cylinder was clearly visible. He was familiar with the type. He
jammed in the dart, cocked it with a quick push and found his
target. Straightening, he kicked forwards, down low in the weeds.
He was just lined up with the figure, floating in the darkness. The
guy was down low and down-sun, having learned the harsh lesson. The
arm raised and the man tried to steady himself in spite of the
fear. He had the better shot with the light behind Liam.

Liam
fired first. The guy flinched and then tried to run. It had caught
him just above the hip. The other fellow tried, but it was futile.
He couldn’t line up the shot and he knew it. He was kicking and
clutching and screaming into his flooding mouthpiece. He was
desperately trying to swim backwards and shoot. He pulled the
trigger. Liam looked around for the dead body in case he needed
another dart. The projectile passed a few metres to his left and
disappeared into the lightening depths nearer to shore. The man
dropped the spear-gun and cleared his regulator with a quick tap on
the purge button.

Liam’s
knife was still down there. He felt naked and lost without it. Seek
and you shall find, for there it was, a bare metre and a half from
where he’d recovered the gun.

The other
fellow was swimming away. Liam forgot about finding another dart
for the gun on the dead one’s belt. He swam after him, the knife
out in front and with the benefit of not being wounded.

The dark
face turned and the eyes were big and round inside the
mask.

Liam,
still swimming, jerked a thumb at the surface, holding up for half
a second to see if the guy would surrender.

No such
luck.

The man
put his head down and thrashed his fins in renewed
desperation.

The enemy
diver still had a knife on his ankle. To reach and pull it would be
to slow him down.

The other
guy knew that, of course.

Liam
kicked strongly, cursing in a small corner of his mind. The sound
of at least one boat motor, a big one, was getting louder and
louder. His breathing was something else. The other guy was loud in
his ears, trailing massive clouds of bubbles. For a man with a
spear sticking out of his lower abdomen, he swam very well. His
left hand clung to the aluminum shaft, and Liam could imagine the
pain as it worked away against muscle, expanding and contracting.
The man took another look back.