Killing Time (26 page)

Jonah shrugged. "It's
possible that he wants to wait until he's under less scrutiny before he carries
out whatever it is he's planning."

"I wish that were
true," Malcolm answered, never taking his eyes from the great black flying
wing that was cruising just below and ahead of us. The B-2 was now becoming
increasingly difficult to see against the darkened surface of the Earth, a fact
that, while not actually significant, still seemed somehow discouraging.
"But let's not fool ourselves," Malcolm went on. "At heart
Eshkol is a terrorist, with the same craving for publicity as
any
terrorist.
The fact that he's being watched only makes him more dangerous, I'm
afraid."

"We need to start thinking
about options," Colonel Slayton said in a tone so steady—even for him—that
I knew the situation was indeed as bleak as Malcolm was making it sound.
"I know we don't want to bring him down over a populated area, but let's
remember what he's carrying. Putting an end to this run could be a question of
limiting losses, rather than causing them."

"I've considered that,
Colonel," Malcolm answered. "And if he'd continued on into Russia we
would probably have been forced to exercise that option. But until we have some
better idea—"

Malcolm was cut off by an
explosion near the ship, one that indicated that the Allied airmen pursuing us
had come to the same conclusion as Colonel Slayton: they were using missiles
now, and detonating them close enough to both our ship and the B-2 to make what
they apparently believed would be a very serious point. Little came of the
outburst, of course—our ship's magnetic fields could play havoc with the
guidance systems of any air-to-air missiles in service, and there was
certainly nothing that would intimidate Eshkol at that point—but the very
ineffectiveness of the attempt was unnerving in the way that it seemed to make
the Allied pilots recklessly furious. They began to edge ever closer to the
B-2, greatly increasing the chances of a catastrophic collision; and as we flew
on through the Balkans and north toward Poland the situation only became more
violent and more volatile. The job of avoiding both the Allied planes and the
B-2 without being distracted by the exploding missiles and continuing cannon
fire eventually proved too much even for Colonel Slayton, and Larissa took his
seat at the helm. Powerful though my feelings for and trust in her were,
however, the switch did not reassure me, for I knew that Slayton would never
allow anger to get the best of him, whereas Larissa? As Malcolm had said when
he had first explained John Price's death to me, "Well,
Larissa ...
"

I don't think any of the others
felt any more secure at that moment, except of course for Malcolm; and it was
therefore Malcolm who first noticed that our course heading had changed
dramatically. "East," he said, so quietly that I almost didn't hear
him over the din of the planes and explosions. "East," he repeated, much
more emphatically. "He's turned east!"

Colonel Slayton leaned over to
one of the guidance monitors, his voice becoming, much to my dismay, only more
controlled: "If he stays on this course, he's got virtually a straight
line of heavy population—Bialystok, Minsk, Smolensk—" He looked up and out
at the B-2, unwilling to name the final link in the chain:

"Moscow,"
Malcolm
announced slowly, his face becoming ashen. His next words were tight but
emphatic: "Larissa, Gideon—I suggest you both get to the turret."
Larissa needed no encouragement but got quickly to her feet and began pulling
me toward the door to the corridor. "We'll wait until he's passed
Smolensk," Malcolm called after us. "If there's no deviation—"

Larissa turned. "That's
cutting it a little close, isn't it, Brother? Given his speed—"

"Given his speed, Sister,
your aim had better be true ..."

There is a terrible simplicity to
what remains of this part of my tale, a barren brevity that I would gladly
embellish if doing so would alter the outcome. Larissa and I scarcely exchanged
a word as we took up our positions in the turret; and during the next three
quarters of an hour, as eastern Poland and western Russia shot unrecognizably
by beneath us, silence continued to reign in that transparent hemisphere,
unbroken, now, even by the continued sounds of cannon fire and missile
explosions; for the Allied planes had abandoned their pursuit long before we
entered the unpredictable airspace of that very unpredictable ruin of an
empire, Russia. I do not know what Larissa was thinking, as in the days to come
I did not think to ask her; as for me, I found myself wondering what must have
been going through her mind as she prepared to end yet another man's life. It
seemed certain that she would be called on to do so: Eshkol's own behavior had
offered us no alternative to his execution, really, since the moment we'd first
become aware of him. The only thing left to do now, I mused to myself as we
waited in the turret, was hope that as few people as possible would be injured
or killed on the ground.

It never occurred to me that
Eshkol's plane might simply disappear; yet somewhere between Minsk and
Smolensk it seemed to do just that. There was no sign of the thing on any of my
equipment, nor, as Malcolm soon informed us, on any of the ship's other monitoring
systems. I was profoundly confused, until Larissa pointed out the simplest
possible explanation: that Eshkol had crashed. My spirits jumped at the
thought, but I forced myself to be skeptical: Wouldn't we have seen the flames?
Or detected the descent? Wouldn't Eshkol have ejected if he'd found himself in
distress? Not necessarily, Larissa answered; planes could and did crash without
significant explosions, and so suddenly as to make tracking their loss of
altitude problematic. And nighttime flying conditions could sometimes be so
disorienting that a doomed pilot never even knew he was in trouble. All the
same, a massive set of double-checks of the area and our ship's systems seemed
urgent, and Larissa and I returned to the nose of the ship to assist with them.
But the whole of our crew could find neither clues on the ground nor equipment
malfunctions on board our vessel. It genuinely did seem that Eshkol's plane had
been lost, probably in some field or forest where its hulk would not be discovered
until daybreak, if then.

How could we have known? What
would have caused any of us to once again turn our monitoring ears toward
Malaysia, where we would have learned about the theft of more than just the B-2
bomber? And even had we by some chance learned that a pilfered American stealth
system—so advanced and secret that only a handful of people in the United
States knew that its design had been stolen— had been installed in that same
B-2, would we have been able to meet the challenge of defeating it in time? All
such questions were horrifically moot. One fact held sway, that night as this,
and on all nights in between:

At the very moment that each of
us began to believe that our luck with regard to Eshkol might have changed, the
horizon to the northeast came alive with a lovely, brilliant light. Given that
our perspective was unblocked, the sudden glow was enough to attract the
attention of all of us; and, deathly aware of what was happening, none of us
said a word during the inevitable denouement as the signature cloud, angry
with all the terrible colors of the explosion that had just been unleashed,
slowly began to form above what had once been the city of Moscow.

The horrendous, transfixing
fireball had begun to fade long before any of us could find words to
acknowledge it. When at last someone did speak, it was Eli, giving voice to the
same question that was in all our minds: How had Eshkol gotten away from us? No
one could provide an answer, of course, and the terrible query was to hang accusingly
in the air throughout our journey back to St. Kilda, where Colonel Slayton,
after long hours in the monitoring room, would finally discover the
explanation. For the moment, however, we all just shook our heads and went on
staring silently, bewildered not only as to how the tragedy had been possible
but about what we should do next. At length it was, not surprisingly, Malcolm
who brought us out of our horrified daze: in a voice that grated like grinding
rocks and matched the deathly pallor of his face, he ordered Larissa to pilot
the ship into the burning city, a command that brought a collective gasp of
disbelief from the rest of us. Seeing the extent of her brother's devastation,
Larissa spoke very gently and carefully when she suggested that such a flight
might be dangerous; but Malcolm angrily retorted that the ship would keep us
safe from radiation, at least for a time, and that he needed to see the
devastation—as, he added, did we all. Without further discussion Larissa took
the helm, and we made the flight—and in so doing experienced a loss of
innocence such as comparatively few people in the world's history have, thankfully,
ever known.

There are no words; none that
I
can find, at any rate. Shall I describe how many shades I discovered there to
be in what are usually labeled "gray" ashes, as well as the infinite
range of colors that characterize what is generally dismissed as
"scorched earth"? And what prose can describe the sickening image of
those thousands of brutally burned and torn human bodies, both living and dead,
that had escaped actual vaporization? Yet I could not turn away. I once heard
it said that destruction perversely but consummately intrigues the eye; but I'd
never expected to see the assertion borne out by my own fixation on so
nightmarish a panorama.

Ground zero of the blast had,
predictably, been the Kremlin, behind whose walls the demented Josef Stalin had
once drunk peppered vodka and plotted genocide, though not the genocide in
which Dov Eshkol had imagined him to be complicit. Nothing remained, of
course, of this structure and its surrounding district; nor was there very much
left of Red Square or of the Tverskaya commercial district, which Stalin
himself had redesigned, or of fashionable Arbatskaya or of the medieval suburb
of Zamoskvorechie across the Moscow River. The miniature bomb had been powerful
enough to tear the very heart out of the city, and out of Russia itself—all to
avenge an imaginary sin that the profoundly unbalanced Eshkol had desperately
needed to believe was real so that he might finally have a rationalization for
his brutal maintenance of what he thought was faith with his ancestors and
prove himself worthy in the imagined eyes of all those who had died so long
ago.

Mundus vult decipi.

The grim tour of the devastated
city that Malcolm had believed so necessary ultimately proved too much for him:
guilt, exhaustion, and shock all combined with his chronic weakness to produce
a crisis, one that I don't think came as a shock to any of the rest of us. Indeed,
it seems a wonder now that more of our party didn't collapse under the burden
of those sights. Colonel Slayton once again slung the terribly stricken
Malcolm's left arm around his shoulders and with his own right arm lifted that
drastically underweight body fully off the floor and started off toward the
stern of the ship. Larissa pressed herself against me once hard, somehow
suspecting—quite rightly—that everything had changed as a result of what we had
just witnessed; then she went off to tend to her brother, holding his dangling
right hand tightly as Slayton carried him. Eli set the ship's helm on a
preprogrammed course for St. Kilda, and then at last the rest of us drifted
away, each trying to find some solitude in which to come to terms with the
incomprehensible.

Even before we reached the
Scottish coast I'd decided that I couldn't go on playing a part in Malcolm's
grand scheme. The doubts about his work that perhaps I should have heeded ever
since we'd first heard reports concerning the man we would come to know as Dov
Eshkol—a man pathologically prepared to be consumed by fabricated information,
a man willing, in fact, to commit murder on an unprecedented scale because of
it—now created a deafening crescendo in my skull. How many more Dov Eshkols
were loose in the world? How could we ever court similar disasters by
manufacturing more hoaxes? And hadn't Malcolm's own complaints that the world
was unwilling to accept that his elaborate lies were just that now been
horrifically borne out? Human society was not becoming any less entranced by or
besotted with information as a result of what Malcolm and the others were
doing, I now realized; and the responsibility for driving a madman over the
edge, if not direct, was close enough, in my own mind, to prevent my continuing
to play a part in the operation.

Such intellectual and moral
conclusions, while difficult to reach, seemed simple when compared to the
emotional and practical problems posed by the prospect of departure. First and
foremost, of course, there was Larissa. Having years earlier accepted the
unlikelihood of finding a woman who would not only tolerate but admire the way
in which I lived and worked, it was no easy thing to contemplate giving up the
one I'd finally found—particularly when our natural attraction to and ease with
each other were augmented by the strong bonds that often grow between people
whose childhoods were marred by violence. There was, of course, the possibility
that Larissa would abandon her brother for me; and indeed the alternative was
so heartbreaking, and my thinking had become so muddled, that I found myself
latching onto that idea more and more during the balance of the flight back to
St. Kilda.

This badly misguided fantasy,
which flew in the face of not only my professional training but all my
experience with Malcolm and Larissa, was nonetheless powerful enough to
influence the problem of how I would handle my status as an international
criminal, as well. Would I throw myself on the mercy of world justice, explain
that I personally had played no part in the hoax that had resulted in the
deaths of millions of people, and risk imprisonment? I would not; but I might
learn to tolerate and even enjoy life as an international fugitive, using the
skills I had learned from Malcolm and the others—provided, of course, that
Larissa would come with me. As the ship sped over the Isle of Skye, my dream
grew steadily more elaborate and romantic: Larissa and I would live on the run,
plucking whatever we needed or wanted from a world unable to stop us.