Islands in the Net

9

It was huge and alive, ticking over like some transatlantic jet, drizzling seawater with sharp pneumatic huffing and a deep shuddering hum. Laura heard drones hissing past her in the darkness, taxiing in to land on the hull. Evil, waspish sounds. She couldn't see them, but she knew the machines could see her, lit by her own body heat.

The inflatable collided gently with the sub, a rubbery jolt.

The sailors climbed a detachable rope ladder up the dark curving hull. Henderson waited as they left. Then he smeared wet hair from his eyes and grabbed her arm.

"Don't do stupid shit," he told her. "Don't yell, don't act up, don't be a bitch. I saved your life. So don't embarrass me. Because you'll die."

He sent her up the ladder ahead of him. The rungs hurt her hands, and the slick steel hull was deep-water-cold under her bare feet. The flattened hull stretched out endlessly into wash- ing darkness. Behind her, the conning tower loomed thirty feet high. Long spines of black-and-white antennas sprouted from its peak.

A dozen more sailors clustered on the hull, in elegant bell-bottom trousers and long-sleeved blouses with gold-braided cuffs. They tended to the drones, manhandling them down a series of yawning hatches. They moved with a strange tippy- toeing, hunch-shouldered look. As if they found the empty night sky oppressive.

The inflatable's crew expertly hauled it up after them, flinging rope hand over hand. They deflated it, trampling out air in a demented sombrero dance, then stuffed the wet rubber mass into a seabag.

It was all over in a few moments. They were jumping back into their vast steel warren, like rats. Henderson hustled

Laura over a hatch coaming onto a recessed floor. It sank beneath their feet. The hatch slammed over her head with an ear-popping huff and a squeal of hydraulics.

They emerged from the elevator shaft into a vast cylindrical warehouse lit with sullen yellow bulbs. It had two decks: a lower floor, beneath her bare feet, of solid iron, and an upper one of perforated grating. It was cavernous, two hundred feet long; every ten feet it was cut, left and right, by massive bulging elevator shafts. Shafts nine feet across, steel silos, their bases stuck with plugs and power cables. Like bio-tech tanks, she thought, big fermenters.

Two dozen sailors padded silently in foam-soled deck shoes on the narrow walkways between the silos. They were work- ing on the drones in hushed concentration. An incense stink of hot aircraft oil and spent ammunition. Some scrambled vibe of war and industry and church.

The compartment was painted in sky blue, the tubes in spacy midnight indigo. Henderson headed aft. As he hauled her along, Laura touched the cold latex surface of a tube, wonderingly. Someone had painstakingly stenciled it with dizzy five-pointed stars, comets with whizzing comic-book tails, little yellow ringed Saturns. Like surfboard art. Dreamy and cheap.

Some silos had been welder-cut and, hung with arcane repair tools-they were retrofitted for drone launches. The others were older, they looked intact. Still serving their origi- nal function, whatever that was.

Henderson spun the manual wheel in the center of a water- tight door. It opened with a thermos-bottle thump and they ducked through. Into a coffinlike chamber plated with egg- carton antisound padding.

Laura felt the world tilt subtly beneath •her feet. A river rush of ballast tanks and the distant whir of motors. The sub was diving. Then a startling junkyard chorus of pops, harsh creaks, glass-bottle clinking, as pressure began to bite into the hull.

Through the chamber into another room flooded with clean white light. Supersharp fluorescents overhead, that strange laserish light of three-peak spectrum radiance, casting everything into edgy superrealism. Some kind of control room, with a Christmas-tree profusion of machinery. Vast tilted consoles loomed, with banks of switches, flickering readouts, needle-twitching glassy dials. Sailors with short, neat haircuts sat before them in sumptuous padded swivel chairs.

The room was full of crewmen-she kept noticing more and more of them, their heads peeking out through dense clusters of piping and monitors. The room was jammed floor to ceiling with equipment and she couldn't find the walls. There were men in it elbow to elbow, crammed into arcane little ergonomic nooks. People sockets.

Acceleration hit them; Laura staggered a little. Somewhere, a faint high-pitched whine and a liquid trembling as the great steel mass picked up speed.

Just before her was a sunken area about the size of a bathtub. A man sat in it, wearing bulging padded headphones and clutching a knobbed steering wheel. He was like a child's doll surrounded by pricey stereo equipment. Just above his head was a gray gasketed lump with the stenciled legend

ANTI-COLLISION LIGHT-SWITCH TO FLASH. He was staring fixedly at half a dozen round glass gauges.

This was the pilot, Laura thought. No way to look outside a submarine. Just dials.

Footsteps on a curved stairway at the back of the room- someone coming down from the upper deck. "Hesseltine?"

"Yo!" said Henderson cheerfully. He tugged Laura along by the wrist, and she slammed her elbow jarringly into a vertical column. "Come on," he insisted, dragging her.

They threaded the maze, to meet their interrogator. The new man was portly, with black curled hair, pouting lips, his eyes heavy-lidded and solemn. He wore shoulder tabs, elabo- rate sleeve insignia, and a round black-brimmed sailor's cap with gold lettering. REPUBLIQUE DE MALI. He shook Henderson

Hesseltine's hand. Maddeningly, the two of them began speaking fluent French.

They climbed the spiral stairs, walked down a long dim stifling corridor. Hesseltine's shoes squelched loudly. They chattered in French, with enthusiasm.

The officer showed them into a set of narrow shower stalls.

"Great," said Hesseltine, stepping in and pulling Laura after him. For the first time, he let go of her wrist. "You up to taking your own shower, girl? Or do I have to help?"

Laura stared at him mutely.

"Relax," Hesseltine said. He zipped out of his utility vest.

"You're with the good guys now. They're gonna bring us something new to wear. Later we'll eat." He smiled at her, saw it wasn't working, and glowered. "Look. What were you doing on that ship? You didn't turn data banker, did you?

Some kind of double-agent scam?"

"No, of course not!"

"You got some special reason to regret those criminals?"

The moral vacuity in it stunned her. They were human beings. "No... " she blurted, almost involuntarily.

Hesseltine pulled off his shirt, revealing a narrow suntanned chest densely packed with muscle.

She stole a sidelong glance at his utility vest. She knew he had a gun in it somewhere.

He caught her looking and his face hardened. "Look.

We'll make this simple. Get in the shower stall and don't come out till I say. Or else."

She got into the shower and shut its door and turned it on.

She stayed in it for ten minutes, while it squeezed out maybe a quart of buzzing ultrasonic mist. She rinsed salt from what was left of her clothes and ran some thin acrid soap through her hair.

"Okay," Hesseltine shouted at her. She stepped out,-wear- ing .the raincoat again. Hesseltine was neatly groomed. He wore a midnight-blue naval uniform and was lacing his deck shoes. Someone had laid out a gray terry-cloth sweatsuit for her: drawstring pants, a hooded pullover.

She stepped into the pants, turned her back on him, threw off the raincoat, and tunneled quickly into the pullover. She turned back, saw that he had been watching her in the mirror.

Not with lust or even appreciation-there was a chill, vacant look on his face, like an evil child methodically killing a bug.

As she turned back, the look vanished like a card trick.

He'd never sneaked a glimpse at all. Hesseltine was a gentleman. This was an embarrassing but necessary situation that the two of them were working through like adults. Somehow

Hesseltine was managing to say all this to her, while bent over and tying his shoes. The lie was radiating out of him. Out of his pores, like sweat.

A sailor waited for them outside, a wiry little veteran with a gray mustache and faraway eyes. He led them aft to a tiny cabin, where the hull formed a rounded, sloping roof. The place was about the size of a garden tool shed. Four deathly pale sailors, with their sleeves rolled up and collars open, were sitting at a tiny cafe table, silently playing a checker game.

The French-speaking officer was there. "Sit down," he said in English. Laura sat on a cramped wall bench, close enough to one of the four sailors that she smelled his floral deodorant.

Across the cabin, stuck to the curved ceiling, were idealized portrait posters of men in elaborate uniforms. She had a quick look at two of the names: DE GAULLE, JARUZELSKI.

Meaningless.

"My name is Baptiste," said the sailor. "Political Officer aboard this vessel. We are to have a discussion." Pause, for two beats. "Would you like some tea?"

"Yes," Laura said. The mist-shower hadn't offered enough for drinking. Her throat felt leathery with seawater and shock.

She felt a sudden trembling shoot through her.

She didn't delude herself that this was a situation she could handle. She was in the hands of murderers. It surprised her that they would pretend to consult her about her own fate.

They must want something from her, though. Hesseltine's lean, weasely face had a look on it like something she would have scraped from a boot. She wondered how badly she wanted to live. What she was willing to do for it.

Hesseltine laughed at her: "Don't look that way, uh, Laura.

Stop worrying. You're safe now." Baptiste shot him a cyni- cal look from beneath heavy eyelids. A sudden sharp cascade of metallic pressure pops rang from the wall. Laura started like an antelope. One of the four sailors nearby languidly moved a checker piece with one forefinger.

She stared at Hesseltine, then took a cup from Baptiste and drank: It was tepid and sweet. Were they poisoning her? It didn't matter. She could die at their whim.

"My name is Laura Day Webster," she told them. "I'm an associate of Rizome Industries Group. I live in Galveston,

Texas." It all sounded so pathetically brittle and faraway.

"You're shivering," Baptiste observed. He leaned back- ward and turned up a thermostat on the bulkhead. Even here, in some sort of rec room, the bulkhead was grotesquely cluttered: a speaker grille, an air ionizer, an eight-socketed surge-protected power plug, a wall clock reading 12:17 Green- wich Mean Time.

"Welcome aboard the SSBN Thermopylae," Baptiste said.

Laura said nothing.

"Cat got your tongue?" Hesseltine said. Baptiste laughed."Come on," Hesseltine said. "You were chattering away like a magpie when you thought I was a goddamn data pirate."

"We are not pirates, Mrs. Webster," Baptiste soothed.

"We are the world police."

"You're not Vienna," Laura said.

"He means the real police," Hesseltine said impatiently.

"Not that crowd of lead-assed bureaucrats."

Laura rubbed one bloodshot eye. "If you're police, then am I under arrest?"

Hesseltine and Baptiste shared a manly chuckle over her naivete. "We are not bourgeois legalists," Baptiste said.

"We do not issue arrests."

"Cardiac arrests," Hesseltine said, tapping his teeth with his thumbnail. He truly believed he was being funny. Baptiste stared at him, puzzled, missing the English idiom.

"I saw you on Singapore TV," Hesseltine told her sud- denly. "You said you opposed the data havens, wanted them shut down. But you sure went about it in a screwy way. The haven bankers-my former coworkers, you know-laughed their asses off when they saw you handing that democratic guff to Parliament. "

He poured himself tea. "Of course, they're mostly refugees now, and a pretty good number of the bastards are on the bottom of the sea. No thanks to you, though-you were trying to kiss them into submission. And you, a rootin-tootin'

cowboy Texan, too. It's a good thing they didn't try that at the Alamo. "

Another sailor made a move in the checker game, and the third one swore in response. Laura flinched.

"Pay them no mind," Baptiste told her quickly. "They're off duty."

"What?" Laura said blankly.

"Off duty," he said impatiently, as if it embarrassed him.

"They are Blue Crew. We are Red Crew."

"Oh ... what's that they're playing?"

He shrugged. "Uckers."

"Uckers? What's that?"

"It's a kind of ludo. "

Hesseltine assembled, aimed, and fired a grin at her. "Sub crews," he said. "A very special breed. Highly trained. A

disciplined elite."

The four Blue Crewmen hunched closer over their board.

They refused to look at him.

"It's an odd situation," said Baptiste. He was talking about her, not himself. "We don't quite know what to do with you. You see, we exist to protect people like you."

"You do?"

"We are the cutting edge of the emergent global order."

"Why did you bring me here?" Laura said. "You could have shot me. Or left me to drown."

"Oh, come on," said Hesseltine.

"He's one of our finest operatives," explained Baptiste.

"A real artist."

"Thanks "

"Of course he would rescue a pretty woman at the end of his assignment-he couldn't resist a final dramatic grace note!"

"Just the kind of guy I am," Hesseltine admitted.

"That's it?" Laura said quietly. "You saved me just on a whim? After killing all those people?"

Hesseltine stared at her. "You're gonna piss me off in a minute... . Don't you think they'd have killed me if they knew what I was? That wasn't just your mickey-mouse indus- trial espionage, y'know. I spent months and months in a deadly deep-cover operation for the highest geopolitical stakes!

Those Yung Soo Chim guys had background checks like nobody's business, and they watched my ass like a hawk."

He leaned back. "But will I get credit? Hell, no, I won't."

He stared at his cup. "I mean, that's part of the whole undercover biz, no credit

"It was a very slick operation," said Baptiste. "Compare it to Grenada. Our attack on the Singapore criminals was surgical, almost bloodless."

Laura realized something. "You want me to be grateful."

"Well, yeah," said Hesseltine, looking up. "A little of that wouldn't be too out of line, after all the effort we put into it."

He smiled at Baptiste. "Look at that face! You should've heard her in Parliament, going on and on about Grenada. The carpet bombing took out this big mansion the Rastas gave her. It really pissed her off."

It was as if he'd stabbed her. "You killed Winston Stubbs in my house! While I was standing next to him. With my baby in my arms."

"Oh," Baptiste said, relaxing ostentatiously. "The Stubbs killing. That wasn't us. That was one of Singapore's."

"I don't believe it," Laura said, sagging-back. "We got a

FACT communique taking credit!"

"A set of initials means very little," said Baptiste. "FACT

was an old front-group. Nothing compared to our modern operations.... In truth, it was Singapore's Merlion-Commandos.

I don't think the Singapore civilian government ever knew of their actions."

"Lots of ex-paras, Berets, Spetsnaz, that sort of thing,"

Hesseltine said. "They tend to run a little wild. I mean, face it-these are guys who gave their lives to the art of warfare.

Then all of a sudden, you know, Abolition, Vienna Convention.

One day they're the shield of their nation, next day they're bums, got their walking papers, that's about it."

"Men who once commanded armies, and billions in government funds,"

Baptiste recited mournfully. "Now, nonpersons. Spurned.

Purged. Even vilified."

"By lawyers!" said Hesseltine, becoming animated. "And chickenshit peaceniks! Who would have thought it, you know?

But when it came, it was so sudden...."

"Armies belong to nation-states," said Baptiste. "It is hard to establish true military loyalty to a more modern, global institution.... But now that we own our own country- the Republic of Mali-recruiting has picked up remarkably."

"And it helps, too, that we happen to be the global good guys," Hesseltine said airily. "Any dumbass mere will fight for pay for Grenada or Singapore, or some jungle jabber

African regime. But we get committed personnel who truly recognize the global threat and are prepared to take action.

For justice." He leaned back, crossing his arms.

She knew she could not take much more of this. She was holding herself together somehow, but it was a waking night- mare. She would have understood it if they'd been heel- clicking Nazi executioners ... but to meet with this smarmy little Frenchman and this empty-eyed good-old-boy psychotic.

... The utter banality, the soullessness of it ...

She could feel the iron walls closing in on her. In a minute she was going to scream.

"You look a little pale," Hesseltine remarked. "We'll get some chow into you, that'll perk you up. There's always great chow on a sub. It's a _navy tradition." He stood up.

"Where's the head?"

Baptiste gave him directions. He watched Hesseltine go, admiringly. "More tea, Mrs. Webster?"

"Yes-thank-you ..."

"I don't think you recognize the genuine quality of Mr,

Hesseltine," Baptiste chided, pouring. "Pollard, Reilly, Sorge

... he could match with history's finest! A natural operative!

A romantic figure, orally-born out of his own true time....

Someday your grandchildren will talk about that man."

Laura's brain went into automatic pilot. She slipped into babbling 'surrealism. "This is quite a ship you have here.

Boat, I mean."

"Yes. It's a nuclear-powered American Trident, which cost over five hundred million of your country's dollars."

She nodded stupidly: right, yes, uh-huh. "So, this is an old

Cold War sub?"

"A ballistic missile sub, exactly."

"What's that mean?"

"It's a launch platform."

"What? I don't understand."

He smiled at her. "I think 'nuclear deterrent' is the concept you're searching for, Mrs. Webster."

" `Deterrent.' Deterring what?"

"Vienna, of course. I should think that would be obvious."

Laura sipped her tea. Five hundred million dollars. Nuclear powered. Ballistic missiles. It was as if he'd told her that they were reanimating corpses on board. It was far too horrible, way off the scale of reason and credibility.

There was no proof. He hadn't shown her anything. They were bullshitting her. Magic tricks. They were liars. She didn't believe it:

"You don't seem disturbed," Baptiste said approvingly.

"You're not superstitious about wicked nuclear power?"

She shook her head, not trusting herself to speak aloud.

"Once there were dozens of nuclear submarines," said

Baptiste. "France had them. Britain, U.S., Russia. Training, techniques, traditions, all well established. You're in no danger-these men are thoroughly trained from the original coursework rework and documents. Plus, many modem improvements!"

"No danger."

"No."

"Then what are you going to do with me?"

He shook his head, ruefully. Bells rang. It was time to eat.

Baptiste found Hesseltine and took them both to the officers'

mess. It was a nasty little place, next to the clattering, hissing racket of the galley. They sat at a solidly anchored square table on metal chairs covered in green-and-yellow vinyl. Three officers were already there, being served by a cook in an apron and crisp paper hat.

Baptiste introduced the officers as the captain-lieutenant, captain second rank, and the senior executive officer, who was actually the junior of the bunch. He gave no names and they didn't seem to miss them. Two were Europeans, Ger- mans maybe, and the third looked Russian. They all spoke

Net English.

It was clear from the beginning that this was Hesseltine's show. Laura was some kind of battle trophy Hesseltine had - won, -blond cheesecake for the camera to dwell on during slow moments in his cinema biography. She didn't have to say anything-they didn't expect it from her. The crewmen gave her strange, muddied looks compounded of regret, spec- ulation, and some kind of truly twisted superstitious dread.

They dug into their meals: foil-covered microwave trays marked

"Aero Cubana: Clase Primera." Laura picked at her tray.

Aero Cubana. She'd flown on Aero Cubana, with David at her side and the baby in her lap. David and Loretta. Oh, God ...

The officers were edgy at first, disturbed and excited by strangers. Hesseltine oozed charm, giving them a thrilling eyewitness account of their attack on the Ali Khamenei. His vocabulary was bizarre: it was all "strikes" and "impacts"

and "targeting," no mention at all of burned and lacerated human beings. Finally, his enthusiasm broke the ice, and the officers began talking more freely, in a leaden jargon consist- ing almost entirely of acronyms.

It had been an exhilarating day for these officers of the Red

Crew. After weeks, possibly months of what could only have been inhuman suffocating tedium, they had successfully stalked . and destroyed a "terrie hard target." They were going to get some kind of reward for it, apparently-it had something to do with "Hollywood baths," whatever that meant. The Yel- low Crew, now on duty, would now spend their own six-hour shift in a boring escape run across the bottom of the Indian

Ocean. As for the Blue Crew, they had missed their chance at action and were bitterly sulking.

She wondered what they were trying to escape from. The missiles-"Exocets," they called them-had flown for miles before hitting. They could have been launched from almost any large surface ship in the straits, or even from Sumatra.

No one had seen the sub.

And how would anyone suspect' its existence? A submarine was a monster from a lost era. It was useless, designed only for killing-there was no such thing as a "cargo sub" or a

"Coast Guard sub" or a "search-and-rescue sub."

Sure, there were little deep-sea research vessels, bathy- scaphes or whatever the word was- just like there were still a few manned spacecraft, both equally obscure and quaint and funny-looking. But this thing was huge. And the truth, or a dread strong enough to pass for one, was beginning to seep in.

It reminded her of something she'd heard when she was eleven or so. One of those horror folk tales that kids told each other. About the boy who accidentally swallowed a needle... . Only to have it show up, years or decades later, rusty but still whole, in his ankle or kneecap or elbow ... si-, lent steel entity sliding unknown and unknowable through his, living breathing body ... while he grew up and married and held down some unremarkable service job... till he goes to the doctor one day and says: Doc, I'm getting old, may be rheumatism but I have this strange stabbing pain in my leg... . Well, says kindly Doc, put 'er here under the scanner and we'll have a look...y word, Mr. World-Everyman, you seem to have a vicious septic needle hiding under your kneecap.... Oh yeah, gosh Doc, I kinda forgot about it but as a young boy I used to play with needles habitually, in fact most of my allowance went toward buying extremely sharp and deadly needles which I scattered lavishly in every direc- tion, but when I grew up and got a little wiser I was sure that

I'd picked up every last one... .

"You okay?" Hesseltine said.

"Excuse me?" Laura said.

"We're talking about you, Laura. About whether to put you straight in a tank, or let. you hang out a while."

"I don't understand," she said numbly. "You have tanks?

I thought you were navy people."

The officers laughed, false yo-ho-ho club-room laughter.

The Russian-looking one said something about how the world's women hadn't gotten any smarter. Hesseltine smiled at her as if it were the first thing she'd done right.

"Hell," he said, "we'll show 'em to you. That all right, Baptiste?"

"Why not?"

Hesseltine shook hands all around and made a studied exit.

He and Baptiste and Laura emerged into a dining hall where thirty neatly groomed Red Crewmen were eating, jammed elbow to elbow around collapsible tables. As Hesseltine en- tered, they set down their forks with a clatter and applauded politely.

Hesseltine offered her his elbow. Frightened by their flat, fishlike eyes,, she took his arm. He paraded her down the narrow aisle between rows of tables. The men were all close enough to grab at her, to wink or grin or hoot, but none of them did, or even looked like they wanted to. It smelled of them: their soap and shampoo, their beef stroganoff and green beans. In the corner a wide-screen TV was showing an illegal kick-boxing match, two wiry Thais silently beating each other bloody.

They were out. Laura shivered helplessly and let go of his arm, her skin crawling. "What's wrong with them?" she hissed at him. "They're so quiet and numb...."

"What's wrong with you?" he riposted. "A long face like that ... you're making everyone nervous."

They took her back to the first room she'd seen, with the elevators. They emerged on the upper deck of grating. Below them, Yellow Crewmen were at work on the drones, examin- ing stripped-down bits of machinery on cramped little blankets of tarpaulin.

Baptiste and Hesseltine stopped by one of the elaborately painted silos. The crude stars and whizzing comets ... she saw that it had a black silhouette, the nude outline of a stylized buxom babe. Long leg kicked out, hair flung back, a stripper's pose. And lettering: TANYA. "What's this?" Laura said.

"That's the tank's name," Baptiste said. A little apologetic, like a gentleman forced to bring up an off-color sub- ject. "The men did it ... high spirits... you know how it is."

High spirits. She couldn't imagine anything less likely from the men she'd seen aboard. "What is this thing?"

Hesseltine spoke up. "Well, one climbs inside there, of course, and... " He paused. "You're not lesbian, are you?"

"What? No ... "

"Too bad, I guess.... If you're not gay, the special features aren't going to do much for you... . But even without the simulations, they says it's very relaxing."

Laura backed a step away. "Are... are they all like this?"

"No," said Baptiste. "Some are drone ports, and the others launch warheads. But five of them are our recreation tanks-'Hollywood baths,' the men call them."

"And you want me to go inside there?"

"If you like," said Baptiste reluctantly. "We won't activate the machinery-nothing will touch you-you simply float within it, breathing, dreaming, in nice heated seawater."

"Keep you out of trouble a few days," Hesseltine said.

"Days?"

"They're very advanced and well designed," Baptiste said, annoyed. "This isn't something we invented, you know."

"A few days is nothing!" Hesseltine said. "Now if they leave you in a few weeks, you might start seeing your Optimal

Persona and all kinds of twisted shit.... But in the meantime you're perfectly safe and happy. And we know where you are. Sound good?"

Laura shook her head, minutely. "If you could just find me a bunk ... a little corner somewhere.... I really don't mind."

"Not much privacy," Baptiste warned. "Crowded conditions."

He seemed relieved, though. Glad that she wouldn't be taking up valuable tank room.

Hesseltine frowned. "Well, I don't want to hear you bitching later."

"No, no. "

Hesseltine looked restless. He glanced at his waterproof watchphone. "I really need to uplink with HQ and debrief."

"Please go ahead," Laura said. "You've done more than enough. I'm sure I'll be fine, really."

"Wow," said Hesseltine. "That almost sounds like a thank you."

They found room for her in a laundry space. It was a chill, steamy warren, stinking of detergent and crammed with sharp- edged machinery. A bare little single bunk slid out over chromed storage rails. Towels hung from a forest of gray, stenciled pipes overhead: there were a couple of steam presses inside, old laundry mangles.

And carton after strapped carton of old Hollywood movie films, the thick mechanical kind that ran through projectors.

They were neatly labeled with hand-printed tape: MONROE #1,

MONROE #2, GRAnLE, HAYWORTH, CICCONE. There was a closed- circuit phone on the wall, an old-fashioned sound-only handset with a long, curly cord. The sight of it made her think of the Net. Then, of David. Her family, her people.

She had vanished from their world. Did they think she was dead? They were still looking for her, she was sure. But they would look in Singapore's jails, and hospitals, and, finally, the morgues. But not here. Never.

A Red Crewman made up her bunk with clean, sheet- whipping efficiency.

He produced a nasty-looking pair of chromed tin snips.

"Let's see them hands," he said. The two remaining bracelets of plastic handcuff still looped Laura's wrists. He pinched and worried at them till they came loose, reluctantly. "Musta been a mighty sharp knife that cut those," he said.

"Thanks '

"Don't thank me. It was your pal Mr. Hesseltine's idea."

Laura rubbed her skinned wrists. "What's your name, sir?"

" 'Jim' will do. I hear you're from Texas."

"Yeah. Galveston."

"Me too, but down the coast. Corpus Christi."

"Jesus, we're practically neighbors."

"Yeah, I reckon so." Jim looked about thirty-five, maybe forty. He was broad-faced and chunky, with reddish, thinning hair. His skin was the color of cheap printout, so pale she could see bluish veins in his neck.

"Can I ask?" she said. "What are you doing here?"

"Protectin' people," Jim said nobly. "Protecting you right now, in case you decide to do something stupid. Mr. Hesseltine says you're a funny little duck. Some kind of political."

"Oh," she said. "I meant, how did you get here?"

"Since you ask, I'll tell you," Jim said. He popped down a steel-wired bunk from a space high on the wall and hoisted himself in. He sat above her, legs dangling, neck bent to avoid the ceiling. "Once upon a time, I was a professional fisherman. A shrimper. My dad was, too. And his dad before him... . But they put us in a squeeze we couldn't get out of.

Texas Fish & Game police, a million environment laws. Not that I'm speakin' against those laws. But American law didn't stop the Nicaraguans and Mexicans. They cheated. Cleaned out the best grounds, took everything, then undersold us in our own markets. We lost our boat! Lost everything. Went on the Welfare, had nothin'."

"I'm sorry," Laura said.

"Not half as sorry as us.... Well, me and some friends in the same jam, we tried to organize, protect our lives and families.... But the Texas Rangers some goddamn informer is what it was-caught me with a gun. And you know a man can't own a handgun in the States these days, not even to protect his own home! So it looked pretty bad for me.... Then

I heard from some pals in my, uhm, organization... about recruitment overseas. Groups to protect you, hide you out, teach you how to fight.

"So, that's how I ended up in Africa."

"Africa," Laura repeated. The very sound of it scared her.

"It's bad there," he said. "Plagues, and dustbowls, and wars. Africa's full of men like me. Private armies. Palace guards. Mercenaries, advisers, commandos, pilots... . But you know what we lacked? Leadership.

"Leadership. "

"Exactly.-

"How long have you been inside this submarine?"

"We like it here," Jim said.

"You never go out, do you? Never surface or go on, whatever they call it-shore leave?"

"You don't miss it," he said. "Not with what we have.

We're kings down here. Invisible kings. Kings of the whole damn world." He laughed quietly, pulled up his feet, a little balding man in deck shoes. "You look pretty tired, eh."

"I ... " There was no point. "Yeah. I am."

"You go ahead and get yourself some sleep. I'll just sit here and watch over you."

He didn't say anything more.

Hesseltine was being sympathetic. "A little tedious."

"No, no, really," Laura said. She slid away from him, rumpling the sheets of her bunk. "I'm fine, don't mind me."

"Don't worry!" he told her. "Good news! I straightened it all out with HQ, while you were sleeping. Turns out you're in their files-they know who you are! They actually commended me for picking you up."

"HQ?" she said.

"Bamako. Mali."

"Ah."

"I knew it was a good idea," he said. "I mean, an operative like me learns to go by his gut instincts. Seems you're a pretty important gal, in your own little way." He beamed, then shrugged apologetically. "Meanwhile, though, you're stuck in this laundry."

"It s okay," she said. "Really." He stared at her. They were alone in the tiny cabin. An awful silence. "I could wash some clothes if you want."

Hesseltine laughed. "That's cute, Laura. That's funny.

No, I thought, as long as you're stuck here, maybe some video games."

"What're those?"

"Computer games, you know."

"Oh!" She sat up. To get away, partially, for a while, from these walls, from him. Into a screen. Wonderful. "You have a Worldrun simulation? Or maybe Amazon Basin?"

"No, these are early games from the seventies, eighties....

Games played by the original sub crews, to pass time. Not much graphics or memory of course, but they're interesting.

Clever."

"Sure," Laura said. "I can try it."

"Or maybe you'd rather read? Gotta big library onboard.

You'd be surprised what these guys are into. Plato, Nietzsche, all the greats. And a lot of specialty stuff."

"Specialty ..."

"That's right."

"Do you have The Lawrence Doctrine and Postindustrial

Insurgency by Jonathan Gresham?".

Hesseltine's eyes widened. "You're putting me on. Where the hell did you hear about that?"

"Sticky Thompson showed it to me." She paused. She had impressed him. She was glad she'd said it. It was stupid and reckless to say it, to brag at Hesseltine, but she was glad she'd stung him somehow, put him off-balance. She brushed hair from her eyes and sat up. "Do you have a copy? I didn't read as much as I'd have liked."

"Who's this Thompson?"

"He's Grenadian. The son of Winston Stubbs."

Hesseltine smiled mockingly, back on his feet again. "You can't mean Nesta Stubbs."

Laura blinked, surprised. "Is Sticky's real name Nesta Stubbs?"

"No, it can't be. Nesta Stubbs is a psycho. A drug-crazed killer! A guy like that is voodoo, he could eat a dozen of you for breakfast. "

"Why can't I know him?" Laura said. "I know you, don't I?"

"Hey!" Hesseltine said. "I'm no terrie-I'm on your side."

"If Sticky-Nesta-knew what you'd done to his people, he'd be a lot more scared of you than you are of him."

"Really!" mused Hesseltine. He thought it over, then looked pleased. "I guess he would! And he'd be damned right, too, wouldn't he?"

"He'd come after you, somehow, though. If he knew."

"Whoa," Hesseltine said. "I can tell you'd be all broken up about it, too... . Well, no problem. We kicked their ass once, and a couple months from now there won't be a

Grenada... . Look, nobody with your attitude needs to be reading a crazy fucker like Gresham. I'll have 'em bring you the computer instead."

"Okay. "

"You won't see me again, Laura. They're flying me out on the next Yellow shift."

It was the way it had always been with Hesseltine. She had no idea what to say to him, but had to say something. "They sure keep you busy, don't they."

"Don't I know it.... There's still Luxembourg, you know.

The EFT Commerzbank. They think they're safe, since they're embedded in the middle of Europe. But their banking centers are in Cyprus, and Cyprus is a groovy little island. You can think of me there, when they start poppin' caps."

"I certainly will." He was lying. He wasn't going anywhere near Cyprus. He might not even be leaving the boat.

He was probably going into a tank, she thought, to be rubbed down by wet rubber Hollywood dolls while floating in limbo.... But he must have some reason to want her to think about Cyprus. And that might mean that someday they would let her go. Or at least that Hesseltine thought they might.

But she didn't see Hesseltine again.

Time passed. The sub ran on an eighteen-hour cycle: six hours on duty, twelve hours off. Sleep fractured between shifts so that day and night as in all ocean depths-became meaningless. On each shift a crewman would bring her a meal and escort her to the head. They were careful not to touch her.

They always took her to the same. toilet. It was always freshly sterilized. No contact with bodily fluids, she thought.

They were treating her as if she were a retrovirus case.

Maybe they thought she was. In the old days, sailors used to rush onshore, drink everything in sight, and fuck anything in skirts. But then harbor hookers all over the world began dying of retrovirus.

But the world had the virus pretty much whipped now.

Contained anyway. Under control.

Except in Africa.

Could it be that the crew had retrovirus?

The video-game machine had about as much smarts as a kid's watchphone. The games plugged into the deck, little spring-loaded cassettes, worn by endless play. The graphics were crude, big stairstep pixels, and you could see the screens refreshing themselves, jerky and Victorian. She didn't mind the crudity-but the themes were amazing.

One game was called "Missile Command." The player controlled little lumps on the screen meant to represent cities.

The computer attacked them with nuclear weaponry: bombs, jets, ballistic missiles.

The machine always won annihilating all life in a big flashy display. Children had once played this game. It was utterly morbid.

Then there was one called "Space Invaders. " The invading creatures were little pixeled crabs and devil dogs, UFO things from another planet. Dehumanized figures, marching down the screen in lockstep. They always won. You could slaughter them by the hundreds, even win new little forts to fire things- lasers? bombs?-but you always died in the end. The computer always won. It made so little sense-letting the computer win every time, as if circuitry could enjoy winning. And every effort, no matter how heroic, ended in Armageddon. It was all so eldritch, so twentieth century.

There was a third game that involved a kind of round yellow consumer-the object was to eat everything in sight, including, sometimes, the little blue pursuing enemies.

She played this game, mostly, as the level of violence was less offensive. It wasn't that she liked them much, but as the shifts passed, empty hours spinning over and over, she dis- covered their compulsive, obsessive quality... the careless insistence on breaking all sane bounds that was the mark of the premillennium. She played them until her hands blistered.

Rub-a-dub-dub, three men in a tub: the butcher, the butcher, and the butcher.... Three sailors manned the inflatable, un- der a hot towering sun and a cloudless, -infinite sky, on an endless flat, gentle swell of blue-green ocean. The four of them were the only people who had ever existed. And the little rubber blob of boat was the only land.

They sat hunched together, wearing shiny drawstring hooded overgarments of thin reflective foil. The foil glittered pain- fully in the pitiless tropic glare.

Laura pulled her hood off. She flicked at greasy strands of hair. Her hair had grown longer. Since entering the sub she had never truly managed to get it clean.

"Put your hood up," warned sailor #1.

Laura shook her head dizzily. "I want to feel the open sky."

"It's not good for you," said #1, adjusting his sleeves.

"With that ozone layer gone, you're asking for skin cancer in sunlight like this."

Laura was cautious. "They say that ozone problem was mostly scare talk. "

"Oh, sure," sneered #1. "If you take your government's word for it."

The other two sailors chuckled darkly, brief laughter evaporating into utter oceanic stillness.

"Where are we?" Laura said.

Sailor # 1 looked over the side of the boat. He dipped his pale fingers into seawater and watched it drip, murmuring.

"Coelacanth country ..."

"What time is it?" Laura said.

"Two hours to end of Yellow shift."

"What day, though?"

"I'm gonna be glad to see you go," said sailor #2 suddenly.

"You make me itch."

Laura said nothing. A dreadful silence descended again.

They were flotsam, chromed tinfoil dummies in their matte- black floating blob. She wondered how deep the ocean was beneath the film of hull.

"You always liked the Red Shift better," said sailor #3

with sudden shocking venom.

"You smiled at Red Crewmen over fifteen times. You hardly ever smiled at anyone from Yellow Crew."

"I had no idea," Laura said. "I'm really sorry."

"Oh, yeah. Sure you are. Now."

"Here comes the plane," commented sailor #1.

Laura looked up, shading her eyes. The empty sky was full of little vision blurs, strange little artifacts of sight, trailing along with the movements of her eyeball. She wasn't sure what they were called or what made them, but it had some- thing to do with brightness levels. Then she saw something opening in the sky, something shredding and, popping and, finally, unfolding stiffly like an origami swan. Huge parafoil wings of bright life jacket orange. It was gliding in.

Sailor #2 examined his military phone, checking for the homing signal. Sailor #3 attached a long flabby bag to a tank of hydrogen and began inflating it with a loud flatulent hissing.

Then another cargo drop, and another. Sailor #2 whooped happily. Cargo dumpsters crossed the empty sky, bus-sized brown lozenges with broad, unfolding wings of riffling dayglo- orange plastic. They reminded Laura of June bugs, fat-bellied flying beetles from Texas summer nights. They came down in broad, wheeling descent.

Their curved hulls splashed and settled with surprising, ponderous grace. Curling bow waves. Wings refolding with loud pops and creaks.

Now she could see the plane that had dumped them, a broad-winged ceramic air-bus, sky-blue beneath, its upper surfaces cut with dun-and-yellow desert camouflage. Sailor

# 1 switched on the inflatable's engine, and the boat mumbled its way toward the nearest cargo drop. The drop was bigger than the boat, a bulging floating cylinder, its bow and sides studded with sturdy tow rings.

Sailors #2 and #3 were fighting with the weather balloon.

They let it go, and it rushed suddenly upward, uncoiling length after length of thin cable with a savage hiss.

"Okay," said #1. He hooked the end of the cable to a series of clips on the back of Laura's life jacket. "You want to hold your knees up and in, with your arms," he told her.

"Also keep your head well down and your jaw clenched. You don't want your neck to whiplash, see, or your teeth to clack.

When you feel the aircraft snag this cable, you're gonna go up in a real hurry. So just uncoil, let your legs go. Like a parachute drop."

"I didn't know it would be like this!" Laura said anxiously.

"Parachuting! I don't know how to do that!"

"Yeah," said #2 impatiently, "but you've seen it, on television."

"A skyhook is just the same as a para-drop, only in reverse," said sailor #1 helpfully. He steered them to the bow of the first cargo bulk. "What do you suppose this one is?"

"New missile consignment," said #2.

"No, man, it's the new chow. Refrigerator drop."

"No way. That one's the fridge, over there." He turned to

Laura. "Didn't you hear a word I said? Grab your legs!"

"I-" It hit her like a car wreck. A sudden terrific jerk, as if the skyhook wanted to yank the bones from her flesh. She soared upward as if fired by a cannon, arms and knee joints wrenched and burning.

Her vision went black, the blood of acceleration draining to her feet. She was helpless, close to fainting, wind tearing furiously at her clothes. She began to twist, blue world flopping and spinning around her like an unlimited carousel.

Suspended in space, she felt a sudden roaring sense of mystic ecstasy. Sublime terror, helpless awe: Sinbad yanked up by the roc of Madagascar. East of Africa. Below her, blue bed sheet of turning sea: toy boats, toy minds...

A shadow fell across her. Mighty buzz of propellers, the whine of a whirling pulley. Then she was up and inside it, in the belly of the plane. Underlit splash of daylight: stenciled boxes, crates, a spiderwebbing of steel bracing cord. An interior crane arm plucked at her cable, swung her neatly across from the cargo bay, and plunked her onto the deck.

She lay there bruised and gasping.

Then the bay doors banged shut and pitch darkness fell.

She felt speed hit the plane. Now that it had her, it was climbing, putting its nose up and pouring energy into conti- nental flight.

She was in a flying black cavern smelling of plastic and oiled tarpaulin and the sharp primal aroma of African dust. It was dark as the inside of a thermos.

She yelled. "Lights, come on!" Nothing. She heard her words echo.

She was alone. This plane had no crew. It was a giant drone, a robot.

She managed to fumble blindly out of the life jacket. She tried variants of the lighting command. She asked for general systems help, in English and Japanese. Nothing. She was cargo-no one listened to cargo.

It began to grow cold. And the air grew thin.

She was freezing. After days in the unchanging air of the sub the cold bit her like electricity. She huddled in her tinfoil survival gear. She pulled the drawstring sleeves and trouser cuffs over her hands and feet. She put her foiled hands before her face: too dark to see them, even an inch away. She covered her face with her hands and breathed into them. Icy puffs of thin Himalayan air. She curled into a ball, shivering.

Isolation and blackness and the distant trembling hum of motors.

Landing woke her. The butterfly touchdown of cybernetic precision. Then, half an hour of timeless anxiety as heat crept into the cabin and dread crept into her. Had they forgotten about her? Was she misplaced now? A computer screwup in some F.A.C.T. datafile? An annoying detail that would be shot and buried .. .

Creak of bay doors. White-hot light poured in. A rush, a stink of dust and fuel.

The rumble and squeak of boarding stairs. Clomp of booted feet. A man looked in, a sunburned blond European in a khaki uniform. His shirt was blackened with sweat down both sides. He spotted her where she crouched beside a tarpaulined mass of cargo.

"Come on," he told her. He waved at her with one arm. .

There was a little snout of metal in his clenched fist,, part of a flexible snaky thing strapped to his forearm. It had a barrel. It was a submachine gun.

"Come on," he repeated.

Laura stood up. "Who are you? Where is this?"

"No questions." He shook his head, bored. "Now."

He marched her down into superheated, desiccating air.

She was in a desert airport.. Dust-heavy, heat-shimmered runways, low whitewashed blockhouse with a faded wind sock, a tricolor flag hanging limply: red, gold, and green.

Huge white aircraft hangar in the distance, pale and barnlike, a distant angry whine of jets.

There was a van waiting, a paddy wagon, painted white like a bakery truck. Thick lugged tires, wire-reinforced win- dows, heavy iron bumpers.

Two black policemen opened the back of the van. They wore khaki shorts, ribbed knee-high socks, dark glasses, billy clubs, holstered pistols with rows of lead-tipped bullets. The two cops were sweating and expressionless, faces blank, radiating careless menace, calloused hands on their clubs.

She climbed into the van. Doors slammed and locked. She was alone and afraid. The rooftop metal was too hot to touch and the rubber-covered floor stank of blood and fear-sweat and a nauseating reek of dried urine.

People had died in here. Laura knew it suddenly, she could feel the presence of their dying. like a weight on her heart.

Death, beaten and bleeding, here on these filthy rubber mats.

The engine started- and the wagon lurched into movement, and she fell.

After a while, she mustered courage and looked out the wire-netted window. .

Flaming heat, flashbulb glare of sun, and dust. Round adobe huts-not even real adobe, just dried red mud-with ramshackle verandahs of plastic and tin. Filthy stretched rags throwing patches of shade. Trickles of smoke. The little domed huts were crowded thick as acne, an almighty slum stretching up slopes, down slopes, through gullies and trash heaps, as far as she could see. In the remote distance, a row of smokestacks gushed raw filth into the cloudless sky. A

smelter? A refinery?

She could see people. None of them moved: they crouched stunned, torpid as lizards, in the shade of doorways and tent flaps. She could sense enormous invisible crowds of them, waiting in hot shadows for evening, for whatever passed for coolness in this godforsaken place. There were patches of raw night soil in certain crooked alleys, hard yellow sunbaked

'human shit, with vast explosive hordes of African flies. The flies were fierce and filthy and as big as beetles.

No paving. No ditches, no plumbing, no power. She saw a few klaxon speakers mounted on poles in the midst of the thickest slums. One rose over a fetid coffeehouse, a cobbled superhovel of plastic and crating. There were men in front of it, dozens of them, squatting on their haunches in the shade and drinking from ancient glass pop bottles and playing peb- ble games in the pitted dirt. Over their heads, the klaxon emitted a steady squawking rant in a language she couldn't recognize.

The men looked up as the van went past, guardedly, mo- tionless. Their clothes were caked with filth. And they were

American clothes: ragged souvenir T-shirts and checkered polyester pants and thick-heeled vinyl dance shoes decades out of, fashion and laced with bits of wire. They wore long turbans of bright quilted rag.

The van drove on, crunching through potholes, kicking up a miasma of dust. Her bladder was bursting. She relieved herself in a corner of the truck, the one that smelled worst.

The slums failed to end. They became, if anything, thicker and more ominous. She entered an area where the men were scarred and openly carried long knives on their belts, and had shaved heads and tattoos. A group of women in greasy burlap were wailing, without much enthusiasm, over a dead boy stretched out in the doorway of his hovel.

She spotted familiar bits and pieces of the outside world, her world, which had lost a grip on reality and swirled here into hell. Burlap bags, with fading blue stencil: hands in a friendly clasp and the legend in French and English: 100% TRITICALE

FLOUR, A GIFT TO THE PEOPLE OF MALI FROM THE PEOPLE OF CANADA.

A teenage boy wearing a Euro-Disney World T-shirt, with the slogan "Visit the Future!" Oil barrels, blackened with trash soot over curlicued Arabic. Pieces of a Korean pickup, plastic truck doors and windows painstakingly cemented into a wall of red mud. Then a foul, smoke-stained lodge or church, its long, rambling walls carefully outlined in a terrifying iconography of grinning, horn-headed saints. Its sloped mud roof glittered with the round, stained-glass disks of broken bottles.

The van drove for hours. She was in the middle of a major city, a metropolis. There were hundreds of thousands living here. The entire country, Mali, a huge place, bigger than

Texas-this was all that was left of it, this endless rat warren.

All other choices had been stolen by the African disaster. The drought survivors crowded into gigantic urban camps, like this one. She was in Bamako, capital of Mali.

The capital of the F.A.C.T. They were the secret police here, the people who ran the place. They were running a nation ruined beyond hope, a series of monstrous camps.

In a sudden repellent flash of insight Laura understood how

FACT had casually carried out massacres. There was a sump of misery in this camp city big enough to choke the world.

She had always known it was bad in Africa, but she'd never known that life here meant so utterly little. She realized with a rush of fatalistic terror that her own life was simply too small to matter anymore. She was in hell now and they did things differently here.

At last they rolled past a barbed-wire fence, into a cleared area, dust and tarmac and skeletal watchtowers. Ahead-Laura's heart leapt---the familiar, friendly look of brown, walls of concretized sand. They were approaching a fat domed build- ing, much like her own Rizome Lodge in Galveston. It was much bigger, though. Efficiently built. Progressive and mod- em, the same techniques David had chosen.

Thinking of David was something so amazingly painful that she shut it off at once.

Then they rolled into the building, through its double walls of solid sand four feet thick, under cruel portcullises of welded iron.

The van stopped. A wait.

The European flung open the doors. "Out."

She stepped out into dazzling heat. She was in a bare arena, round baked-earth exercise yard surrounded by a twostory ring of brown fortress walls. The European led her to an iron hatchway, an armored door leading into the prison. Two guards loomed behind her. They went inside, into a hall lit by cheap sunlight pipes bracketed to the ceiling. "Showers," the

European said.

The word had an evil ring. Laura stopped in place. "I don't want to go to the showers."

"There's a toilet, too," the European offered.

She shook her head. The European looked over her shoul- der and nodded fractionally.

A club hit her from behind, at the juncture of her neck and shoulder. It was as if she'd been struck by lightning. Her entire right side went numb and she fell to her knees.

Then the shock faded and pain began to seep in. True pain, not the pastel thing she'd called "pain" in the past, but a sensation truly profound, biological. She couldn't believe that that was all, that she'd simply been hit with a stick. She could already feel it, changing her life.

"Get up," he said, in the same tired voice. She got up.

They took her to the showers.

There was a prison matron there. They stripped her, and the woman did a body-cavity search, the men examining

Laura's nakedness with distant professional interest. She was pushed into the shower and handed a cake of raw lye that stank of insecticide. The water was hard and briny and wouldn't lather. It shut off before she had rinsed..

She got out. Her clothes and shoes had been stolen. The prison matron jabbed her in the buttock with five cc's of yellow fluid. She felt it sink in and sting.

The European and his two goons left, and two female goons showed up. Laura was given trousers and shirt of striped black-and-white canvas, creased and rough. She put them on, trembling. Either the injection was beginning to take effect or else she was scaring herself into the belief that it was. She felt lightheaded and sick and not far from genuine craziness.

She kept thinking that there was going to come a time when she could take a stand and demand that they kill her with her dignity intact. But they didn't seem anxious to kill her; and she didn't feel anxious to die, and she was beginning to realize that a human being could be beaten into almost anything. She didn't want to be hit again, not till she had a better grip on herself.

The matron said something in Creole French and indicated the toilet. Laura shook her head. The matron looked at her as if she were an idiot, and shrugged, and made a note on her clipboard.

Then two female goons cuffed her hands behind her back.

One of them pulled a billy club, wrapped it cleverly through the metal chain of the old-fashioned handcuffs, and levered

Laura's arms up in their sockets until she was forced to double over. They then marched her out, steering her like a grocery cart, down the hall, and up narrow stairs barred at top and bottom. Then, on the upper floor, past a long series of iron doors equipped with sliding peepholes.

They stopped at cell #31, then waited there until a turnkey showed up. It took about five minutes, and they passed the time chewing gum and wisecracking about Laura in some

Malian dialect.

The turnkey finally flung the door open and they threw her in. The door slammed. "Hey!" Laura shouted. "I'm hand- cuffed! You forgot your handcuffs!" The peephole opened and she saw a human eye and part of the bridge of a nose. It shut again.

She was in a cell. In a prison. In a fascist state. In Africa.

She began to wonder if there were worse places in the world. Could anything be worse? Yes, she thought, she could be sick.

She began to feel feverish.

An hour is:

A minute and a minute and a minute and a minute and a minute.

And a minute, and a minute, and a minute and a minute and a minute.

Then another, and another minute, and another, and yet another, and another.

And a minute, then two more minutes. Then, two more minutes.

Then, two minutes. Then, two minutes. Then a minute..

Then a similar minute. Then two more. And two more again.

That's thirty minutes so far.

So do them all over again.

Laura's cell was slightly less than four paces long and slightly more than three paces across. It was about the size of the bathroom in the place-where-she'd-used-to-live, the place she didn't allow herself to think about. Much of this space was taken up by her bunk. It had four legs of tubular steel, and a support frame of flattened iron struts. Atop the frame was a mattress of striped cotton ticking, stuffed with straw.

The mattress smelled, faintly and not completely unpleas- antly, of a stranger's long sickness. One end was lightly spattered with faded bloodstains.

There was a window hole in the wall of the cell. It was a good-sized hole, almost six inches around, the size of a drainpipe. It was approximately four feet long, bored through the massive concretized sand, and it had a crisscrossed grill of thin metal at the far end. By standing directly before the hole

Laura could see a simmering patch of yellowish desert sky.

Faint gusts of heated air sometimes rippled down the tube.

The cell had no plumbing. But she learned the routine quickly, from hearing other prisoners. You banged the door and yelled, in Malian Creole French, if you knew it. After a certain period, depending on whim, one of the guards would show and take you to the latrine: a cell much like the others, but with a hole in the floor.

She heard the screaming for the first time on her sixth day.

It seemed to be oozing up from the thick floor beneath her feet. She had never heard such inhuman screaming, not even during the riot in Singapore. There was a primal quality to it that could pass through solid barriers: concrete, metal, bone, the human skull. Compared to this howling the screams of mob panic were only a kind of gaiety.

She could not make out any words, but she could hear that there were pauses, and occasionally she thought she could hear a low electrical buzzing.

They would unlock her handcuffs for meals and for the latrine. They would then seal them up again, tightly, care- fully, high on her wrists, so she couldn't wriggle through the circle of her own arms and get her hands in front of her. As if it mattered, as if she might break free with a single bound and tear her steel door from its hinges with her fingernails.

After a week her shoulders were in a constant state of low-level pain, and she had worn raw patches on her chin and cheek from sleeping on her stomach. She did not complain, however. She had briefly spotted one of her fellow prisoners, an Asian man, Japanese she thought. He was handcuffed, his legs were fettered, and he wore a blindfold.

During the second week, they began handcuffing her hands from the front. This made an amazing difference. She felt with giddy irrationality that she had truly accomplished some- thing, that some kind of minor but definite message had been sent her from the prison administration.

Surely, she thought, as she lay waiting for sleep, 'her mind gently and luxuriously disintegrating, some mark had been made, maybe only a check on a clipboard, but some kind of institutional formality had taken place. She existed.

In the morning she convinced herself that it, could not possibly mean anything. She began doing pushups.

She kept track of days by scratching the grainy wall under her bunk with the edge of her handcuffs. On her twenty-first day she was taken out, given another shower and another body search, and taken to meet the Inspector of Prisons.

The Inspector of Prisons was a large smiling sunburned white American. He wore a long silk djellaba, blue suit pants, and elaborate leather sandals. He met her in an air-conditioned office downstairs, with metal chairs and a large steel desk topped with lacquered plywood. There were gold-framed portraits on the walls, men in uniform: GALTIERI, NORTH, MACARTHUR.

A goon sat Laura down in a metal folding chair in front of the desk. After sweltering days in her cell, the air condition-- ing felt arctic, and she shivered.

The goon unlatched her handcuffs. The skin below them was calloused, the left wrist had an oozing scab.

"Good afternoon, Mrs. Webster," said the Inspector.

"Hello," Laura said. Her voice was rusty.

"Have some coffee. It's very good. Kenyan." The Inspec- tor slid a cup and saucer across the desk. "They had good rains this year."

Laura nodded dumbly. She picked up the coffee and sipped it. She had been eating prison fare for weeks: scop, with the occasional bowl of porridge. And drinking the harsh metallic water, two liters every day, salted, to prevent heatstroke. The hot coffee hit her mouth with an astonishing gush of richness, like Belgian chocolate. Her head swam.

"I'm the Inspector of Prisons," said the Inspector of Pris- ons. "On my usual tour of duty here, you see."

"What is this place?"

The Inspector smiled. "This is the Moussa Traore Penal

Reform Institute, in Bamako."

"What day is this?"

"It's ..." He checked his watchphone. "December 6,

2023. Wednesday."

"Do my people know I'm still alive?"

"I see you're getting right to the crux of matters," said the

Inspector languidly. "As a matter of fact, Mrs. Webster, no.

They don't know. You see, you represent a serious breach of security. It's causing us a bit of a headache."

"A bit of a headache."

"Yes.... You see, thanks to the peculiar circumstances in which we saved your life, you've learned that we possess the

Bomb."

"What? I don't understand."

He frowned slightly. "The Bomb, the atomic bomb."

"That's it?" Laura said. "You're keeping me here because of an atomic bomb?"

The frown deepened. "What's the point of this? You've been on the Thermopylae. Our ship."

"You mean the boat, the submarine?"

He stared at her. "Should I speak more clearly?"

"I'm a little confused," Laura said giddily. "I just spent three weeks in solitary." She put her cup onto the desk, carefully, hand shaking.

She paused, trying to sort her thoughts. "I don't believe you," she told him at last. "I saw a submarine, but I don't know that it's a genuine nuclear missile submarine. I have only your word for that, and the word of the crew onboard.

The more I think about it the harder it is to believe. None of the old nuclear governments were stupid enough to lose an entire submarine. Especially with nuclear missiles onboard."

"You certainly have a touching faith in governments,"

said the Inspector. "If we have the launch platform, it scarcely matters where or how we got the warheads, does it? The point is that the Vienna Convention does believe in our deterrent, and our arrangement with them requires that we keep our deterrent secret. But you know the secret, you see."

"I don't believe that the Vienna Convention would make a deal with nuclear terrorists."

"Possibly not," said the Inspector, "but we are counter- terrorists. Vienna knows very well that we are doing their own work for them. But imagine the unhappy reaction if the news spread that our Republic of Mali had become a nuclear superpower. "

"What reaction," Laura said dully.

"Well," he said, "the great unwashed, the global mob, would panic. Someone would do something rash and we would be forced to use our deterrent, unnecessarily."

"You mean explode an atomic bomb somewhere."

"We'd have no choice. Though it's not a course we would relish."

"Okay, suppose I believe you," Laura said. The coffee was hitting her now, nerving her up like fine champagne.

"How can you sit there and tell me that you would explode an atomic bomb? Can't you see that that's all out of proportion to whatever you want to. accomplish?"

The Inspector shook his head slowly. "Do you know how many people have died in Africa in the last twenty years?

Something over eighty millions. It staggers the mind, doesn't it: eighty millions. And the hell of it is that even that has barely got a handle on it: the situation is getting worse. Africa is sick, she needs major surgery. The side shows we've run in

Singapore and Grenada are like public relations events compared to what's necessary here. But without a deterrent, we won't be left alone to accomplish what's necessary."

"You mean genocide."

He shook his head ruefully, as if he'd heard it all before and expected better from her. "We want to save the African from himself. We can give these people the order they need to survive. What does Vienna offer? Nothing. Because Afri- ca's regimes are sovereign national governments, most of them Vienna signatories! Sometimes Vienna dabbles in sub- verting a particularly loathsome regime-but Vienna gives no permanent solution. The outside world has written Africa off. "

"We still send aid, don't we?"

"That only adds to the misery. It props up corruption."

Laura rubbed her sweating forehead. "I don't understand."

"It's simple. We must succeed where Vienna has failed.

Vienna did nothing about the terrorist data havens, nothing about Africa. Vienna is weak and divided. There's a new global order coming, and it's not based in obsolete national governments. It's based in modern groups like your Rizome and my Free Army."

"No one voted for you," Laura said. "You have no author- ity. You're vigilantes!"

"You're a vigilante yourself," the Inspector of Prisons said calmly. "A vigilante diplomat. Interfering with govern- ments for the sake of your multinational. We have everything in common, you see. "

"No!"

"We couldn't exist if it weren't for people like you, Mrs.

Webster. You financed us. You created us. We serve your needs." He drew a breath and smiled. "We are your sword and shield."

Laura sank back into the chair. "If we're on the same side, then why am I in your jail?"

He leaned forward, steepling his fingers. "I did tell you,

Mrs. Webster-it's for reasons of atomic security! On the other hand, we see no reason why you shouldn't contact your coworkers and loved ones. Let them know you're alive and safe and well. It would mean a great deal to them, I'm sure.

You could make a statement. "

Laura spoke numbly. She'd known something like this was coming. "What kind of statement?"

"A prepared statement, of course. We can't have you babbling our atom secrets over a live phone link to Atlanta.

But you could make a videotape. Which we would release for you. "

Her stomach roiled. "I'd have to see the statement first.

And read it. And think about it."

"You do that. Think about it." He touched his watchphone, spoke in French. "You'll let us know your decision."

Another goon arrived. He took her to a different cell. They left the handcuffs off.

Laura's new cell was the same length as the first, but it had two bunks and was a stride and a half wider. She was no longer forced to wear handcuffs. She was given her own chamber pot and a larger jug. of water. There was more scop, and the porridge was of better quality and sometimes had soybean bacon bits.

They gave her a deck of cards, and a paperback Bible that had been distributed by the Jehovah's Witness Mission of

Bamako in 1992. She asked for a pencil to make notes on her statement. She was given a child's typer with a little flip-up display screen. It typed very nicely but had no printout and couldn't be used to scribble secret messages.

The screaming was louder under her new cell. Several different voices and, she thought, different languages too.

The screaming would go on, raggedly, for about an hour.

Then there would be a coffee break for the torturers. Then they would set back to work. She believed that there were several different torturers. Their habits differed. One of them liked to play moody French cafe ballads during his break.

One night she was woken by a muffled volley of machine- gun fire. It was followed by five sharp coup-de-grace shots.

They had killed people, but not the people being tortured- two of them were back next night.

It took them two weeks to bring her statement. It was worse than she had imagined. They wanted her to tell Rizome and the world that she had been kidnapped in Singapore by the Grenadians and was being held in the underground tunnel complex at Fedon's Camp. It was a ridiculous draft; she didn't think that the person who had written it fully understood

English. Parts of it reminded her of the FACT

communiqué issued after the assassination of Winston Stubbs.

She no longer doubted that FACT had killed Stubbs and shot up her house. It was obvious. The remote-control killing smelled of them. It couldn't have been Singapore, poor brilliant, struggling Singapore. Singapore's military, soldiers Like

Hotchkiss, would have killed Stubbs face-to-face and never bragged about it afterward.

They must have launched the drone from a surface ship somewhere. It couldn't have come from their nuclear submarine- unless they had more than one, a horrible thought.

The sub couldn't have traveled fast enough to attack Galveston,

Grenada, and Singapore during the time of her adventure.

(She was already thinking of it as her adventure-some- thing over, something in her past, something pre-captivity.)

But America was an open country and a lot of the F.A.C.T. were Americans. They bragged openly that they could go anywhere, and she believed them.

She believed now they had someone-a plant, a spy, one of their Henderson/Hesseltines-in Rizome itself. It would be so easy for them, not like Singapore. All he would have to do was show up and work hard and smile.

She refused to read the prepared statement. The Inspector of Prisons looked at her with distaste. "You really think this defiance is accomplishing something, don't you?"

"This statement is disinformation. It's black propaganda, a provocation, meant to get people killed. I won't help you kill people."

"Too bad. I'd hoped you could send your loved ones a

New Year's greeting."

"I've written my own statement," Laura offered. "It doesn't say anything about you, or Mali, or the F.A.C.T., or your bombs. It just says I'm alive and it has a few words my husband will recognize so that he'll know it's really me."

The Inspector laughed. "What kind of fools do you take us for, Mrs. Webster? You think we'd let you spout secret messages, something you'd cooked up in your cell after weeks of your ... oh ... feminine ingenuity?"

He tossed the statement into a bottom drawer of his desk.

"Look, I didn't write the thing. I didn't make the decision.

Personally, I don't think it's all that great a statement.

Knowing Vienna, it's more likely to make them tiptoe their way into that termite castle under Fedon's Camp, instead of shelling it into oblivion, like they should have done way back in

'19." He shrugged. "But if you want to ruin your life, be declared legally dead, be forgotten, then go right ahead."

"I'm your prisoner! Don't pretend it's my decision."

"Don't be silly. If it meant anything serious, I could make you do it."

Laura was silent.

"You think you're strong, don't you?" The Inspector shook his head. "You think that, if we tortured you, it would be some kind of romantic moral validation. Torture's not roman- tic, Mrs. Webster. It's a thing, a process: torture is torture, that's all. It doesn't make you any nobler. It only breaks you.

Like the way an engine wears out if you drive it too fast, too hard, too long. You never really heal, you never really get over it. Any more than you get over growing old."

"I don't want to be hurt. Don't pretend I do."

"Are you going to read the stupid thing? It's not that important. You're not that important."

"You killed a man in my house," Laura said. "You killed people around me. You kill people in this prison every day. I know I'm no better than them. I don't believe you'll ever let me. go, if you can help it. So why don't you kill me too?"

He shook his head and sighed. "Of course we'll let you go.

We have no reason to keep you here, once your security threat is over. We won't stay covert forever. Someday, very soon, we'll simply rule. Someday Laura Webster will be an upstanding citizen in a grand new global society."

A long moment passed. His lie had slid past her comprehension, like something at the other end of a telescope. At last she spoke, very quietly. "If it matters at all, then listen to me. I'm going to go insane, alone in that cell. I'd rather be dead than insane."

"So now it's suicide?" He was avuncular, soothing, skeptical.

"Of course you've been thinking of suicide. Everyone does. Very few ever really do it. Even men and women doing hard labor in death camps find reason to go on living. They never bite their own tongues out, or open their veins with their fingernails, or run headlong into the wall, or any of those childish jailbirds' fantasies." His voice rose. "Mrs.

Webster, you're in the upper level here. You're in special custody. Believe me, this city's slums are full of men and women, and even children, who'd cheerfully kill to have it as easy as you do."

"Then why don't you let them kill me?"

His eyes clouded. "I really wish you wouldn't be like this."

He sighed and spoke into his watchphone. After a while the goons came and took her away.

She went on hunger strike. They let her do it for three days. Then they sent her a cellmate.

Her new cellmate was a black woman who spoke no English.

She was short and had a broad, cheerful face and two missing front teeth. Her name was something like Hofuette, or Jofuette. Jofuette would only smile and shrug at Laura's

English: she had no gift for languages and couldn't remember a foreign word two days running. She was illiterate.

Laura had poor luck with Jofuette's language. It was called something like Bambara. It was full of aspirations and clicks and odd tonalities. She learned the words for bed and eat and sleep and cards. She taught Jofuette how to play Hearts. It took days but they had a lot of time.

Jofuette came from downstairs, the lower level, where the screaming came from. She hadn't been tortured; or, at least, no marks showed. Jofuette had seen people shot, however.

They shot them out in the exercise yard, with machine guns.

They would often shoot a single man with five or six machine guns; their ammunition was old, with a lot of duds that tended to choke up the guns. They had a worldful of ammunition, though. All the ammunition of fifty years of the Cold War had ended up here in African war zones. Along with the rest of the junk.

She didn't see the Inspector of Prisons again. He wasn't the guy who ran the place. Jofuette knew the warden. She could imitate the way he walked; it was quite funny.

Laura was pretty sure that Jofuette was some kind of trusty, maybe even a stool pigeon. It. didn't bother her much. Jofuette didn't speak English and Laura had no secrets anyway. But

Jofuette, unlike Laura, was allowed to go out into the exer- cise yard and mingle with the prisoners. She could get hold of little things: harsh, nasty cigarettes, a box of sugared vitamin pills, a needle and thread. She was good to have around, wonderful, better than anyone.

Laura learned about prison. The tricks of doing time. Mem- ory was the enemy. Any connection with the outside world would be, she knew, too painful to survive. She just did her time. She invented antimemory devices, passivity devices.

When it was time for a cry she would have a cry. She didn't think about what might happen to her, to David and the baby, to Galveston, to Rizome, to the world. She thought about professional activities, mostly. Writing public relations state- ments. Testifying to public bodies about Malian terrorism.

Writing campaign documents for imaginary Rizome Commit- tee candidates.

She spent several weeks writing a long imaginary sales brochure called Loretta's Hands and Feet. She memorized it and would spin it off sentence by sentence, silently, inside her head, slowly, one second per word, until she reached the end. Then she would add on a new sentence, and then start over..

The imaginary brochure was not about the baby herself, that would have been too painful. It was simply about the baby's hands and feet. She described the shape and texture of the hands and feet, their smell, their grasp, their potential usefulness if mass-produced. She designed boxes for the hands and feet, and old-fashioned marketing slogans, and ad jingles.

She organized a mental dress store. She had never been much of a fashion maven, at least not since junior high school . days, and her discovery of boys. But this was a top-of-the- line fashion outlet, a trend-setting emporium catering to the wealthy Atlanta crowd. There were galaxies of hats, march- ing armies of hosiery and shoes, whirlwinds of billowing skirts, vast technicolor brothels of sexy lingerie.

She had decided on ten years. She was going to be in this jail for ten years. It was long enough to destroy hope, and hope was identical with anguish.

A month, and a month, and a month, and a month.

And another month, and another and another and another.

And then three, and then one more.

A year.

She had been in prison for a year. A year was not a particularly long time. She was thirty-three years old. She had spent far more time outside captivity than in, thirty-two times as much. People had done far more time in prison than this.

Gandhi had spent years in prison.

They were treating her better now. Jofuette had made some kind of arrangement with one of the female goons. When the goon was on duty she let Laura run in the exercise yard, at night, when no other prisoners were present.

Once a week they brought an ancient video recorder into the cell. It had a black-and-white TV manufactured in Alge- ria. There were tapes, too. Most of them were old-fashioned

American football games. The old full-contact version of football had been banned for years now. The game was spectacularly brutal: huge lumbering gladiators in helmets and armor. Every fourth play seemed to leave one of them sprawl- ing and wounded. Sometimes Laura would simply close her eyes and listen to the wonderful flow of English. Jofuette liked the games.

Then there were movies. The Sands of Iwo Jima. The Green

Berets. Fantastic, hallucinatory violence. Enemies would be shot and fall down neatly, like paper cutouts. Sometimes the good guys were shot, in the shoulder or arm usually. They would just grimace a bit, maybe bind it up.

One week a film arrived called The Road to Morocco. It was set in the African desert and had Bing Cosby and Bob

Hope. Laura had vague memories of Bob Hope, she thought she must have seen him when she was very young and he was very old. He was young in the film, and quite funny, in a quaint premillennial way. It hurt terribly to watch him, like having a bandage ripped away, touching deep parts of her that she had managed to numb. She had to stop the tape several times to mop at tears. Finally she snatched the tape out and jammed it back in the box.

Jofuette shook her head, said something in Bambara, and plugged the tape back in. As she did so a folded slip of tissue, cigarette paper, fell from a crevice in the box's cardboard side. Laura picked it up.

She unfolded it as Jofuette watched the TV, riveted. It was covered with smudgy, minuscule writing. Not ink. Blood, maybe. A list.

Abel Lacoste-Euro. Cons. Service

Steven Lawrence-Oxfam America

Marianne Meredith-ITN Channel Four

Valeri Chkalov-Vienna

Georgi Valdukov-Vienna

Sergei Ilyushin-Vienna

Kazuo(?) Watanabe-Mitsubishi

(?)Riza-Rikabi-EFT Commerzbank

Laura Webster-Rizome IG

Katje Selous-A.C.A. Corps and four others