Night Trap. Gordon Kent
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unscrewing itself just beyond the copilot’s window. Nothing serious, because Christine was not in one of her killer moods; only minor, constant, nerve-picking trivia. A mean old aircraft for a long, dull mission.
Boredom and discomfort. Old aircraft smells, engine noise, the abrasion of personality on personality. Four hours down; three to go, Alan thought. He yawned. Where was the battle group? Why did he care?
Christine shivered and gave him a temporary blip and made his heart lurch, and then he saw it was nothing.
What was in his lunch box? Should he drink some coffee?
How come Craw had stood up for him like that?
Would any of these guys ever begin to like him?
How many hours to go?
“Hey, Spy, what’s the word? I’m not going all the way to fucking Ascension Island! What’s the program, man?”
Bicker, bicker. Rafehausen would never like him, he supposed. What you might call a difference in culture.
Still. “I want to get where I can catch it in a wide sweep, Rafe.”
“They won’t go that far out of their way! These bastards have been one hundred and ninety days at sea. Which you haven’t!” Rafe wanted to stay closer to the carrier. He wanted to show that he thought that this was Mickey-Mouse fun and games. He wanted to scream that this was bullshit.
The copilot, a nervous j.g. everybody called Narc, sucked up to Rafe. “Yeah, wait till you’ve been out for your one-ninety, Spy. Nobody wants to make it one ninety-one.” Then, purely for Rafehausen’s benefit, “Only the fuckin’ Spy—” They laughed, the sounds tinny in his intercom.
Alan felt himself blush. He tried to see if Senior Chief Craw was grinning, but he could make out only helmet and mask in the green light of the screens. But it wouldn’t have mattered if the man’s head had been bobbing with laughter. He knew people thought he was funny. Because he was serious, he was funny. There was something peculiar in that. Well, it was true: nothing was Mickey Mouse to Alan. He took even games very seriously.
Alan tried to think of something to say, something that would be funny and cool and would make them like him, but by then Rafe and Narc had forgotten him and his grids and his plots; they were bickering about fuel and the readings Christine was giving them.
How many hours to go?
Nothing ever happens, he thought. Somewhere, things must be happening. Somewhere.
He thought of Kim. He resisted thinking of Kim, her inescapable eroticism a painful pleasure in these surroundings. Beautiful. Rich. Fun. Sex, my God. A woman who would—
Think of the radar screen instead. The pale green blank, with its hypnotic moving radius.
Kim in the bed in Orlando. Kim laughing, nude. Kim—
Think of the radar screen.
How many hours to go?
0459 Zulu. Brussels.
He had circles under his eyes now as he came into the air terminal, but he was little different from the others. Businessmen getting a jump on the day—businesswomen, too. They carried sleek attachés and laptops and were dressed for success, but nobody looked very bright yet.
The rain had ended but the tarmac was still wet. He came out of the terminal, took a taxi to a hotel within the airport, and, when he had dismissed the car, walked away toward the terminal he had just come from. A half-mile brought him to an area of sheds, more like a factory than an airport. Without pausing, he went between two of the buildings to a loading dock where trucks would be backing in another hour. He checked his watch, then the sky. No sign of the sun yet.
He waited in the shadows. He did not lean against the wall, despite his fatigue. He was a man of will, not easily recognized as such because of his fussiness and his pedantic attention to detail—the flashlight, the list.
Clanwaert plodded toward him through a shallow puddle. Clanwaert was a plodder, the thing he prized about the man. Unsurprising, steady. Capable of change? Perhaps not. In the pocket of the raincoat, his hand tightened on a piece of steel wire.
He called to Clanwaert from the shadows. Clanwaert tried to see him, failed, perhaps caught the glint of his eyeglasses because he began to search for a way up on the loading dock. To his right was a dumpster, which might have offered handholds to a younger or more agile man. Instead, he walked fifty feet the other way and struggled up a steel ladder like an exhausted swimmer coming out of a pool. He plodded back toward the shadows.
The man in the raincoat spoke for a full minute. His tired voice had the same tone of urgency, a kind of metallic hopefulness. Would Clanwaert? This great opportunity. More money.
But Clanwaert resisted. His voice rose; even invisible in the darkness, he was a man taking a stand. Surprising, to anybody who had seen his heavy plodding, he was a man of passion—and, it seemed, of hatred for the man in the raincoat. The word traitor hissed out.
“That is all dead now,” the man in the raincoat said.
Clanwaert raged at him. Perhaps the man had meant that a god was dead, for Clanwaert resisted, the way people resist a threat to their religion. At last, he ran down, gave a rumble or two, fell silent.
“I am sorry,” the other man’s voice came clearly from the shadow. “Look out there.” One hand appeared in the light. Clanwaert turned to follow where it pointed.
The steel garrote fell over his face silently and tightened; heavy as he was, the smaller man was able to deal with him. Exercise of the will, passion of a different kind.
Grunting, he dragged Clanwaert to the edge of the loading dock and rolled him into the dumpster.
Twenty minutes later, he was in a terminal different from the one at which he had landed. He found a telephone in a bank of telephones, half of them occupied now by business people making their arrangements for the day. He put his notecard in front of him as he cradled the telephone and began to punch the buttons: another call to Moscow. As the connection was being made, he put a minus sign next to Clanwaert’s name.
“Yes?” the tight voice said in Moscow.
“Tell them, ‘Go.’”
He put the instrument back and looked at the last name on the list. Bonner. He touched it with his pen. He sighed. Bonner. He made a small question mark next to the name. For a few seconds, he hesitated there, apparently unsure of himself for the first time—made so by fatigue or by the thought of Bonner, and whatever difficulties that name represented.
0615 Zulu. Mid-Atlantic.
“Spy? You shut down back there?”
The night was almost over. Alan’s hand hovered over the switch that would shut the back end down. Once he threw it, the old computer (“the best technology of the 1970s”) would die and the radar sweeps would end. Their search for the homebound battle group would be over.
But he didn’t want to give up. “What if the BG went north of the Azores?” he said into the intercom. “Radar might have missed them if they hid between those islands.”
“Come on—shut down! This mission is over!”
He hated to let go. One more sweep, one more experiment—he didn’t believe there were problems that couldn’t be solved.
His hand wavered over the switch but didn’t touch it.
“We went way north of the Azores coming back in ‘86,” Craw said in his Maine twang. Craw always sounded like a comedy act but was a deeply serious man who couldn’t understand why people smiled when he spoke. “Admiral Cutter, there wa’nt anything he wouldn’t do to keep from bein’ found, no sir.”
“Oh,