The zenith angle (34 page)

“Tony, you used me in an act of treason. I swore an oath. I’m in the government.”

“What, you’re wrapping yourself in the flag now? Is this Hollywood, are we cuing the violins? Me telling the Indians about you, that was just my bargaining ploy. Those Chinese didn’t sign anything. It was all just an ad pitch.” Tony looked at Van’s face searchingly. “Come on, pal. You were never a top venture-capital guy, but you were definitely one of us. Don’t you know how much you’ve lost already?

What’s left of your life?” Tony wiped at his bleeding lip. “Do you even know why I had that stupid ray gun in my stupid bag? I was going to mail it to you. From wherever. I was never gonna come back here to this creepy little version of America. I don’t have to, and I don’t need to. I can make another life in a better place. Let me go, Van.”

“You’re not going anywhere.”

“Anywhere will do. I’m an inventive guy, I’ve got a big imagination. I’ll just reinvent myself overnight, okay? It doesn’t matter wherever you send me, because I’m global. I’ll go live in some stupid leper camp in Thailand if you want. Then I’ll bring the joy of broadband connectivity to the planet’s illiterate masses. Wouldn’t that make you happy?”

“How, Tony? You angle all that, and then I do what for you? What is it you want from me this time?”

“Nothing! Nothing, really! You just let me be free.”

Van moved his chin in a nod. “You see that large, black creature standing in the doorway over there?

Standing in the only exit? Between you and all that freedom?”

Tony glanced over his shoulder and yelped.

“That is one of my cyberwarriors, Tony. I ordered them here so that I could demolish you.”

Tony stared at Van in astonishment. “What the hell are you talking about?”

“Tony, al Qaeda is only fifteen years old. American Special Ops commandos have been dying in secret wars ever since John Kennedy turned them loose in 1963. These are my guerrillas, and we just defeated you and your spacewar scheme. I need to know something now, Mr. so-called Space Warrior. Your only way out of here is through my soldier. Will you kill him?”

“Is this a trick question?”

“Yes.”

“Kill him with what, exactly? You took my rifle away.”

“You might use this ray gun that I am pointing at your chest, Tony. Because I put one of your rifle rounds inside of it. And then I plugged it in.”

Tony looked at the ray gun skeptically. “You’re kidding me. What the hell kind of weapon is that? You plug it in, you turn the heat on, and sooner or later a bullet explodes and somebody gets killed? That’s your big concept here?”

“That’s cyberwar, Tony.”

“Look, Van, I don’t want to play your weird ray gun game.”

“
Now
you don’t want to play it, Tony. Because I play it better than you do.”

Tony bent to look up the gun’s barrel. “You really put a real bullet inside that cool little toy?”

“Cyberwar is real.”

The ray gun exploded: Carew catapulted backward out of his chair. A 250-grain elk cartridge was designed to take down a bull elk at four hundred yards. It ripped a hole through Carew. Van looked down at a stinging pang in his arm. A blackened shard of metal had lodged in his flesh. There were perforations all through his black shirt. Little dust-sized bits of titanium shrapnel. He could feel the bigger ones dribbling fresh blood.

Hickok walked up from the black doorway. He leaned down without a word, grasped the shard of metal, and yanked it out of Van’s arm. Van gritted his false teeth and said nothing.

“I’ll get a field dressing on that wound,” said Hickok, opening his pack. “I can’t believe you just shot this bastard. Those Cyberspace boys are being so good down there. They didn’t hurt even a fly.”

“Mike, listen to me. In information warfare, a shooting never counts for much. Media is everything. We’re going to vanish this guy and all his works. We’re gonna break all his tools. Nothing that happened here ever really happened. So the public never learns.”

“I get you, sir,” Hickok said.

“Those foreign techs in the Network Operation Center? Five minutes ago they were a bunch of engineers on visas. From now on they are a covert cyberterror cell. If you have to shoot them, that’s fine. If they run and hide, good luck. If Ashcroft gets them, God help them. It’s time to phone in some backup.”

“Hoo-ah, sir.” Hickok dressed the bleeding wound in Van’s arm with comradely tenderness. “Who exactly do we telephone about a situation like this?”

“That would be the Homeland Security Computer Emergency Response Team. Oh, wait, they don’t exist yet. Who’s closest over here? The Air Force in Colorado Springs? Phone the damn Air Force, Mike. Get me the black helicopters.”

Van winced as Hickok tied off the bandage. “Demerol,” Hickok said knowingly.

“Yeah, Demerol,” said Van. “That’s wonderful stuff.”

Hickok examined the spreading stain of blood under Tony Carew’s corpse. “Boss, we got ourselves a very dead rich guy here.”

“I’m ahead of the curve with that. We’ve got to sanitize this whole area. I’ve got a plan.”

“I knew you would have a plan, Dr. Vandeveer. Can I tell you something now? I have seen a lot of people killed. A whole lot. I stopped counting back in 1998. Nintendo wars, yeah, air strikes, yeah, collateral damage, yeah. But in all that time, I have never killed a bad guy with my own hands, no, not ever.” Hickok looked Van in the eyes. “You are one tough bastard, boss. You are the true pro.”

“The evildoer goes straight into his weapon of mass destruction,” Van said.

“Aw, no, Van. Jesus.”

“Yes. We dump his body into the telescope. We override his weapon’s operating system. We turn up those laser amps to eleven. We shut the gates to heaven. We lock that door from outside. Then we vanish this terrorist. Utterly. He is less than history, he is less than ashes. He’s going to vaporize. This is an airtight building made of flammable straw. When the heat and pressure builds up in there, we are going to blow this gizmo into bits.”

Hickok scratched beneath his helmet. “How do we do all that, again, exactly?”

“You don’t do that, Mike. I do it. You stay near here and you put it all on video.”

Van drove the cart one-handed, in the dark, down the mountain slope. Van had a fully loaded elk rifle, a sling for his wounded arm, and an open laptop. Hickok had attached the oxygen mask to his face, rigging him an improvised black harness for the tank.

With fresh oxygen inside his lungs, Van literally had a second wind. Van had blown right past fear, loathing, rage, and exhaustion into a state of battlefield glory. It was two o’clock in the morning. He had killed. He had been wounded in battle. He felt not one atomic particle of remorse or doubt. His mind had never been clearer in his life.

He was exalted.

The truth was, he loved war. He had never been in war before, but now he recognized war as his home. He loved war more than he loved women, food, or sleep. He would grind his teeth when cyberwarfare was denied him. In moments of peace, he would miss his dear war gone by. He would miss it so. Wimberley was waiting inside the operating center. He was standing over an unconscious technician. He was tapping at a mouse.

Van set his rifle aside. “So what happened to the weapon’s operator here?”

“I sprayed nonlethals on his keyboard. All over his fingers, Dr. Vandeveer. That spray-on stuff is voodoo.”

“Too bad. I was planning to interrogate him.”

“No need for that, sir,” said Wimberley. “I set Tempest bugs on his monitor. We got every screen shot. Every keystroke. I’m just resetting these system preferences so we can push this laser past the limit.”

“Can we get enough wind power to surge this weapon past its red line?”

“I do think so, sir,” said Wimberley. “And that power-console guy looked real surprised when I busted in there and knocked him cold.”

“How’d you do that?” said Van.

“I used a chair leg, sir,” said Wimberley. He stared at Van’s wounded arm and tactfully said nothing. Another Internet technician appeared at the far end of a tall set of blue cabinets. He was carrying a hunting rifle cradled in both arms.

Van made a one-handed lunge for his own rifle, but Wimberley just turned his black-helmeted head.

“U.S. Cyberspace Force!” he shouted from the keyboard. “Freeze!”

The technician dropped his rifle with a panicked clatter. Van heard an exit door bang open. He heard shoes rattling down a set of stairs.

Wimberley returned to Van with the abandoned rifle. He checked the action expertly. “No round inside the chamber. Safety still on. He busted the scope when he dropped it, too.” He returned to his screen.

“You were right about the no-guns rule, sir. Guns, that’s just not our way.”

“What does a giant laser death ray run under?” said Van.

“OpenBSD. And X-Windows.”

“Awesome.” Van had another huff of oxygen.

“I can run this console. I’m controlling all the enemy’s software. You know what, sir? I’m about to blow up a spacewar weapon. I’m gonna save an American satellite. Me. William C. Wimberley. This is the most important thing I’m ever gonna do in my whole life, and I’m only twenty-one years old.” Wimberley looked at Van and blinked. “You didn’t have to give me another chance, sir. I broke your head in.”

Van shrugged.

“I am such a screwup. I’ve always been a loser. When your phone call came for me to do this, I was drunk and I was crying in my beer. I just thought, maybe he’ll give me some money. I’m a pretty smart kid, Dr. Vandeveer, but I never knew who I was, or what the hell I was doing. I’m finally gonna do something here that really, really matters.”

Van nodded. He had heard about such things before, but he had never before seen it happen. He was seeing a troubled young man rehabilitated by his military service.

“The past is over and we’re gonna set it on fire,” Van told him, waving him on with his free left arm.

“You carry on.”

Van watched his laptop screen for Hickok’s video surveillance.

The observatory’s round wall was bulging. The building warped and began gently smoldering. It was very strange to witness a weapon being demolished on a screen, thought Van. He had just been physically inside that place. He had ordered all the buttons pushed to smash it, but the resulting mayhem could have been anywhere on the planet: North Korea, Iran, Iraq.

Plumes of red light. Boiling gas was squeezing itself through the curved doors to the heavens. As the gas hit fresh air, it caught in thin, livid flames.

There was violent flashover as all the laser-blasted fumes within the structure ignited at once. The explosion was sudden and elegant. The walls of packed hay splayed out like a giant child puffing a dandelion. The observatory blew its top. The rounded dome tumbled headlong down the mountainside, twirling like a tossed coin.

Tufts of flaming hay swirled across the blackened foundation. Bouquets of flame stuck to the molten instrument consoles. The Lady was in agony. She was blackened, on her knees. Her very bones were going. The mirror of Venus, stamped flat by the boot of Mars.

When dawn broke, the black helicopters had already been and gone. The local civilians were standing around the wreckage of their telescope. Their prized handiwork was a total, tragic loss. Some of them were spraying bits of flaming hay with fire extinguishers. Most were just wringing their hands, mourning in small groups. It was an awful thing to lose a major scientific instrument. It was a cultural calamity. Gonzales offered Van a pair of binoculars. Van refused them.

Van didn’t care to look at people as the smoke rose from their hopes and dreams. One of them was almost certainly Dottie.

“You gotta try this MRE, Van,” said Hickok. “A man who’s lost some blood needs to eat a meal. You learn that in combat.”

“Is that dogface chow?” said Wimberley, sniffing at it.

“No, man, this stuff’s brand-new. It’s civilian MRE. Made in Brazil! Got this sort of pork loin and pineapple thing going, these really spicy black beans . . . and it’s self-heating!”

Van put the food across his knees. He used the fork left-handed. The food tasted great. In Brazil, people could really cook. Why did Brazil never have wars? he wondered. Brazil was a really big country on a big American continent. How come Brazil had no enemies? It didn’t make sense. Brazilians didn’t invent much. Well, that explained it.

Van had more oxygen. His tank was low.

“Here comes the enemy plane,” said Gonzales.

“Okay,” said Hickok, climbing to his feet. “Now this is the part that an Air Force boy likes best.”

The Indian actor was flying his newly purchased jet plane. He had just taxied off from the DeFanti airstrip. It seemed a little odd to Van that two groups of Chinese and Indian spies would fly off across the Pacific Ocean together, all polite and collegial, inside the same aircraft. But they were people of two practical nations, thought Van, and the trip here hadn’t been their idea. For a moment, Van suspected that the Boeing was out of range of the overriding radio signal. But when it came to forward air-controlling operations in the mountains, Michael Hickok knew his stuff. The jet banked hard left and roared over them so sharply that the mountainside shook. Birds exploded from the forest.

Wimberley had taken off his helmet to eat. He jammed his hands over his ears. Hickok caressed his joystick. The captured jet spewed black smoke and rose in a steep arc. “Looka that,” crowed Hickok. “I got ’er. Boys, this is sweet.”

“Okay,” said Wimberley in a stunned, small voice. “You just used that black box and you pulled a jet out of the sky.”

Van and Hickok exchanged wary glances. Wimberley and Gonzales had not attended the Summit in Virginia. The general public was not at all up to speed about cyberwar projects to control civilian jets.

“Yeah, I did that,” Hickok told him, grinning. “Now watch me put ’er into a slow loop over the telescope ground zero there. That aircraft is chock-full of Indian and Chinese space spies. Can you imagine the nerve of those clowns? They’re supposed to hate each other! Everybody knows they hate each other! But here they are, infiltrating our own country, and picking on my favorite satellite. I have got them right by the throat!”