Commandos (15 page)

Only a few more days left. Victor had been studying Alec’s and David’s files for the last few hours and could not find anything to fault as far as their military competence was concerned. They were both outstanding soldiers, highly trained under Levi’s supervision, as well as acknowledged specialists in their chosen fields of science. David was a cyberneticist and Alec an electronics specialist and chemist. Both in their late thirties and graduates of the finest military academies, there was nothing in the files Victor had not known beforehand. Both were highly proficient marksmen
– a skill which may soon come in handy, Victor had to admit once he’d managed to regain his ability for cold calculation. The enemy had quite a few skilled marksmen in their ranks as well.

David had been delegated to the base of Freestation near Old Cairo and fervently took up his new duties aiding the reconstruction of the city. As for Alec, it seemed that he’d been recently posing as an altruist.

Victor took off his glasses and shook his head. A Zen school? An ecological mission? It was hard to believe an egoist like Alec would get involved in helping anyone but himself. His location – Kyoto.

He got up to stretch his legs. He walked to the kitchenette, fixed himself a cup of coffee and took a sip before swallowing a pill which was supposed to be a substitute for a full meal. He had not time to go down to the canteen and have some proper food, there was too much to be done. He apprehensively glanced at Kaminsky’s file and forced himself to pick it up. The first page contained a picture of the terrorist. He looked rather… well, dark hair, beard and moustache, with only a few strands of grey here and there and the thick, angrily raised eyebrows overshadowing his dark eyes. He must have been around fifty when the picture was taken, but even though he was well over sixty now he still looked pretty much the same.

He tossed the file aside, unable to force himself to start reading just yet, even though he knew he’d have to eventually. He looked at the cup of coffee in his hand feeling it burn his skin. Levi’s files were also left aside. Victor was quite confident he knew all there was to know about the commodore. His professional career had been, for lack of a better word, brilliant. He was the best student in his year, most respected lecturer at the military academy and most decorated officer in the force. His promotion to commodore was swift and well deserved. Once he was charged with the command of a new shuttle, he renamed it the Luna and needed surprisingly little time to handpick its crew.

By contrast, his personal life was a long chain of disasters. Be it due to character incompatibility or his wife’s unwillingness to move from London to Atlantis, before he knew it he had become involved in divorce proceedings. Levi’s wife left the city and moved out with their daughter to a place Levi could not, or would not find. Engrossed in his efforts to save the world, he failed to save his own family life. He tried not to let it show, but his thoughts drifted to his daughter, Laura more often than he would ever admit, pondering what she looked like, what she did and most importantly where she was. Victor flicked through the remaining pages and glanced at the last paragraph – Charles’ current location, Washington.

As he reached for Jo’s file he was once more briefly surprised how thick it was. As night was slowly settling in, he stretched out on his bed and pulled a blanket over his legs. He reached for his glasses to aid his tired eyes. It was going to be a long read. Curious about what new facts this file could contain about Jo, he started to read.

The first pages listed her family details, origin, and place of birth, nothing he didn’t already know.
Joanna Starska, born in 2108 in Warsaw in the territory of the UN Polish zone. The father, Adam Starski, was a celebrated computer programmer, the mother, Franciszka, a teacher. After she’d contracted a heart disease she was forced to retire. No siblings. In 2127, the family moved to France where Jo enrolled in a military school. As an outstanding student, she was awarded a scholarship at the NASA Military Academy in Washington where she spent the next ten years of her life, always among the best of her peers.
Victor stopped reading for a moment. He recalled the day they first met and involuntarily smiled. He quickly fanned through the next few pages containing her detailed test results, teacher opinions and descriptions of her friends and first dates. He was amazed by how detailed her file was. The best student on her year, awards for achievements in spacecraft pilotage, methodology, psychology and computer programming. Not bad for a young girl from Poland. The image of Jo with wet hair, wrapped only in her towel, came back to haunt him. He couldn’t help smiling as he dove back into the text.
The final exams at the military Academy passed with bravura.
At the dean’s discretion, her test results were cancelled and her application for Atlantis rejected, without a word of explanation. No one expected Jo to give up just like that, so it was hardly surprising when she demanded a retest. What awaited her was the most difficult combination of logical, psychological and practical tasks in the history of the school, at the same time an experiment she could not be aware of.
Victor continued to read with growing interest. Here was finally something he’d not known beforehand.
Several other students, randomly picked from the school’s most distinguished fresh graduates, took the exact same test. Jo came out with the highest score. One of the examination panel members was Charles Levi, the creator of the test who used it to find a captain for his shuttle. Soon afterwards, Jo marched onboard the Luna for the first time. However, the military council had a different plan in stock for her.
Well then,
thought Victor,
seems Levi was not one hundred percent honest with me, after all.
After a dozen or so months of active service as the shuttle’s pilot, Jo had sufficient experience to volunteer for a more demanding mission.
As Victor continued to read, he realised he was getting more and more engrossed in the documents. The night they’d spent together over a year before had left him hungry for more. He wanted to know her better regardless of how often he would remind himself that the night might have been little more than an accident. He suddenly realised that he had thought about her long before he’d even met her. Levi used to talk about her a lot and the stories had fascinated Victor more than he would care to admit. He could not remember ever thinking of another woman with such intensity, such craving. His feelings, when realised, surprised even himself, but he also remembered that he was first and foremost a tracker. His desires as a man were not a priority. He could not allow a woman to turn his life upside down, to interfere with his deliberate solitude. He resumed reading with a conviction that he’d managed to set himself back on track – no more of this romantic daydreaming.
On an order by the Defence Council, Levi set the Luna on the course to Atlantis, where Jo was about to stand before a committee. Levi was allowed to be present as the only independent observer
.
Damn it,
thought Victor.
Charles never talked about that.
It was stressed by the Council on several occasions that the mission would be top secret, never to be disclosed to anyone.
Victor held up a photograph of Jo smiling brightly, daring sparks in her eyes.
The following day Jo was shipped to Fuerteventura, an island converted into a closely monitored, restricted zone.
Wait a second. Victor sat up. What son of a bitch decided to send her to Tenerife, knowing it was bloody well right next to Fuerteventura!
Only six people were allowed to enter the closed zone. Jo was stationed there as the sixth, her mission to determine which of the other five was the real leader of the terrorists. It was shortly after the military had had a lucky break capturing Kaminsky and several others, all claiming to be the caliph. The only way to determine who the real one was, was to infiltrate the group, gain their trust and watch them closely. In fact, Kaminsky was probably the least suspected of the lot. He was a geneticist, a scientist, completely devoted to his work on new methods of cloning. His research had been rejected by the United Nations who had refused to subsidise it further, thus leading him to join the ranks of the enemy whose eagerness to finance his research had never been weakened by any moral doubts.
The file’s contents were truly repugnant. They’d sent Jo to a closed off island to spend weeks with a psychopath! Victor threw the papers aside angrily and once more looked at the woman’s photo.
Is the president aware of this,
he asked himself.
Or the Defence Council? I must find out.
Victor remembered Kaminsky’s arrest well. There were rumours of his involvement in acts against the United Nations and faint hints of his leading part in certain events. In time, they all proved to be true. The tracker got up to get another cup of coffee. It seemed like the night would never end.
Jo passed lots of psychological tests, each one indicating that she was mentally resilient and capable of concealing her true feelings. She agreed to take the mission which would turn out worse than anyone could have expected.
Victor recalled Levi speaking of some sort of a nervous breakdown she’d undergone, her nightmares and a constant fear she could not shake off. Even Alec, her partner at that time, was unable to help her get over it, not knowing the real cause of her state. She suffered form severe depression, a condition uncommon among commandos.
The living conditions in the restricted zone were fairly good, the rooms were comfortable and they were allowed to move around freely as long as they stayed within its limits. Jo had sufficient time to win the men’s trust, but nevertheless her task soon turned into a living nightmare. People started dying of food poisoning and a suicide. At first the deaths seemed completely unrelated, accidental, but after the third one died, Jo accepted the fact that one of the remaining men was a cold blooded killer, methodically murdering the others. A hair raising psychological game began. Through her long discussions with Kaminsky, Jo realised that he was the one they’d been looking for, the terrorist leader and the murderer. But at the same time a genuine genius, demented, yet brilliant. After the fourth man lost his life, it was clear that Kaminsky had decided to leave her for dessert.
Victor burnt his tongue as he drank nearly boiling water by accident.
“Fuck!” he growled angrily. Only now was he beginning to understand her decision to undergo the memory erasure.

Once it was only her and Kaminsky, she had no doubt it was now her time to die. Having analysed the previous murders and the caliph’s ingenuity she guessed that he would attempt to drown her, making it seem like yet another accident. So she prepared herself, mentally and physically. After faking her own death and letting Kaminsky believe that he’d succeeded in killing her (he was later released, the authorities unable to secure his conviction as nothing could be proven), she was secretly sent back to the base where she suffered a severe nervous breakdown.

The island was swept clean and not a trace of the dramatic events was left. Jo found refuge in her work, hoping to get her life back on track through complete devotion to her duties.

Victor stopped reading. He already knew the rest of the story. He was overwhelmed with compassion and he would give anything to be able to be with her right now, to hold her close and comfort her.
What a brave woman,
he thought.

In the next few days he often caught himself thinking of Jo, but each time he forced himself to focus on the tasks at hand. He needed to maintain his professional distance and control his feelings. There were greater things at stake.

Eventually, he decided to go to Levi first. The following day he informed the president that he had studied the files thoroughly and was ready to set off. He actually bent the truth a little as he felt no need to read any of the files on Kaminsky. He knew more than he ever wished to find out about the man. He did not forget to ask why Jo had been sent to Tenerife. They explained that it had been an attempt to stimulate her memory to recall everything she knew about the caliph. She’d once known more than any other living person about received his final orders the terrorist leader. As he

and detailed instructions on finding the commandos, Victor was ready to leave.
* * * *

Young students at the NASA space academy often came up with innovative solutions for booster rockets, supervision of the satellites around the Moon and various probes scattered throughout the solar system. Levi read them with great interest, studying specifications of manned deep space flights and shuttle missions, meteorological divagations or tele-detection. He found some of the flight experiments fascinating. He devoted a lot of his time to snatch allowances for a few more flight hours for his students from the prefecture. In time, he managed to have his way and organised a flight presentation including some of the newest airplanes available. In his excitement, he failed to oversee all the technical safety procedures and as a consequence one of the students lost his life in an accident. Even though the commodore’s oversight was arguable at best, as he was not directly responsible for the crafts’ technical condition, his duties were purely supervisory. He was immediately arrested and placed at a penitentiary until the matter was resolved.

He was quickly fired from his position at the university, denied access to any facilities and evicted form his flat. The world he thought to be his home was swift to turn its back on him.

In the past, he had witnessed the torture of prisoners, particularly those of Muslim origin, a practice absolutely unacceptable, yet common and until very recently always assiduously covered up from the general public. He was therefore understandably apprehensive when he first entered his cell. His only consolation was the fact that that particular prison belonged to the space forces district, giving him hope of more humanitarian treatment until his case was resolved.

Modern prisons run by the space forces were mainly designed for convicted terrorists, but the population of common murderers and other criminals was also quite sizeable. Prisoners assigned to the group of seniors were given better cells, with decent beds, furniture and free library access. They even included a small bathroom and a separate study, but very few prisoners were able to enjoy such luxuries, as such cells were mainly reserved for high ranking officials, such as ex-senators or commando officers. Luckily for Levi, he was assigned to this block. In the days to come, he would learn to appreciate this privilege, as he witnessed the inhumane treatment of regular prisoners at the military penitentiary.