Killing Time

CHAPTER 38

In order for our plan to succeed, it was of course necessary that Eshkol be able to walk. In addition, the torment through which Said had put his prisoner roused some primitive form of empathy in me, despite all the contemptible things I knew about the man. For both of these reasons I did my best to clean, pad, and bind the bleeding soles of Eshkol's feet, forgetting in my disgust with such tortures as he'd endured that someone with his training and temperament could likely have run on bleeding stumps if he'd thought it would serve his fanatical purpose. What I did was not merciful but foolish, and it should have been I and I alone who paid for the mistake. Had it been, the tragedy that ensued might even have made some sort of twisted sense.

Just before the appointed hour of Eshkol's death, we all accompanied Major Sadad to the place of execution: the same abandoned hotel roof where we had first debarked from our ship. Following more of Tarbell's clever suggestions, the Malaysians had created a false command center on the roof, such as General Said might himself have used to direct his forces. Colonel Slayton was relatively sure that we were already under satellite observation — the United States had, after all, gained a great deal of experience with such long-range surveillance operations during its efforts to locate various elusive enemy leaders over the last thirty years — and when we returned to Said, who was staying carefully out of sight in a half-demolished suite on a lower floor of the hotel, the colonel declared that the authenticity of the stage and its props would certainly bring about the desired result. General Said was delighted with this affirmation from a fellow officer, and before long he ordered his men to bring up Eshkol.

The prisoner, in accordance with the plan, had been dressed in a uniform very similar to Said's, and his facial hair had been carefully adjusted. The general expressed some concern about the obvious discrepancy between his own height and that of his doppelganger; but Slayton told him that this shouldn't matter, since the American satellites would be watching from above. The colonel and Said continued to go over the details of the operation in an increasingly collegial manner, one that succeeded in distracting the general completely; and while he was thus engaged Larissa and Tarbell slipped back to the bowling alley to secure Eshkol's rucksack and the plutonium containment canister. They soon returned with both items, and though at the time this seemed a coup, it, too, soon proved a bad mistake.

At ten o'clock General Said announced that it was time to proceed: Eshkol was to be taken up to the roof, where his men would tether him to a heavy slab of concrete rubble. When we got outside we discovered that, as was apparently often the case on that mountain, a beautiful mist had formed around the resort, though not above it: the starry night sky was still quite visible through the vast white halo. Below the building the enormous crowd ordered by General Said had gathered, and though armed soldiers had surrounded the area, the spectators seemed to need no encouragement to cheer and holler in a bloodthirsty — and bloodcurdling — manner.

Just as five of Said's men were about to secure Eshkol to his Promethean slab of concrete, something that I had hoped and even expected never to see again drifted up from below a nearby edge of the roof: it was one of the American surveillance drones, our companions from the stratosphere, and it was not, of course, alone. Within seconds the entire roof was ringed with the things, and as they appeared General Said asked Colonel Slayton in a very agitated voice what they were, though this inquiry was impeded by the frequent need to tell his severely spooked soldiers to calm down and hold their positions. Slayton did his best to dismiss the drones as mere surveillance instruments, but Larissa, Tarbell, and I knew the grim facts of the situation. To begin with, the drones could at any moment have destroyed the roof or even the entire hotel, depending on their armament; but what was perhaps worse was that those of us from Malcolm's ship had now been recognized by the Americans, and this was likely to lead to a plethora of problems concerning our ship's escape and continued concealment, since any new anomalous radar readings would likely be assigned to us.

Bad as the situation was, it was about to get a great deal worse. The drones did not go on the attack immediately, most likely because of the confusion that their remote operators were experiencing as to just what was happening on the roof; but their appearance gave Eshkol an opportunity, one that he used every ounce of his training to exploit. After breaking free of the five men who'd been detailed to chain him to the concrete, he subdued three of them in a frenzy of savage blows, kicks, and gouges. Having secured a weapon from one of those he'd felled, he used it to blow the other two quickly over the edge of the roof. But Eshkol was far too clever to think that he would make it out of that situation armed with only an ordinary gun. Apparently he had divined, even while he was strapped down and being tortured, that the weapon Larissa wore slung at her side was something very unusual; and, spraying a hail of fire that forced us all to disperse and find cover, he hurled himself at her. Very neatly making it look as though he meant to do her harm, he instead plucked the rail gun out of its holster and rolled with it to the far side of the roof, while Larissa, who had been readying herself for hand-to-hand combat, looked on in stunned amazement.

We were in trouble, though at that point only we four visitors knew how bad the trouble was. Education for the others was, however, on the way. As the drones dashed about the edges of the roof like onlookers at a brawl trying to decide which side, if any, to take, Eshkol began moving among the huge pieces of rubble with an agility that would have been remarkable even had he not just endured long hours of torture. After several minutes of this display, he finally caught one unlucky Malaysian soldier out in the open and fired the rail gun. I had not actually seen the thing used on a man before, and the effect was at once greater and less violent than I had expected. Most of the soldier's body simply disappeared, as John Price's had done; and the pieces that were left, being wholly and cleanly detached from the trunk, had a certain prosthetic quality, as if they had never actually been part of a living human body. General Said lost about half of his men to panic after that, though the few who stayed showed admirable resolve in the face of what seemed certain death. It soon became clear from Eshkol's movements, however, that he wasn't interested in the Malaysians at all.

He began to vociferously demand his rucksack and the plutonium canister, the pair of which he had somehow noticed Larissa and Tarbell bringing up to the roof. Screwing up my courage, I got to Larissa's side with a few leaps and some low running, but she informed me that Leon had the deadly goods. Where Leon might be, however, neither she nor anyone else seemed to know. As General Said shouted to Eshkol that the rucksack and canister were not on the roof — true, as far as he knew — Slayton, Larissa, and I crawled about as best we could, urgently whispering Tarbell's name. My own attempts to contact him became, out of desperation, rather absurdly noisy; then, from behind the housing of an elevator mechanism, I heard him whisper:

"Gideon! Be quiet, you fool, you'll get us both killed!" I couldn't yet see him, but I was relieved to know that he was alive. "Are you hurt, Leon?" I called.

"Not yet!" he answered. "Although if you insist on — oh, no." The dread that had suddenly come into his voice indicated that Eshkol was nearby; and when I looked up I saw the huge man lying flat atop the elevator structure, safe from the fire of the Malaysians and pointing the rail gun down over the far side. I heard him demand the rucksack and canister and offer Tarbell his life in exchange. "You lying eunuch!" Leon said. "We know you too well—" What came next, though predictable, was nightmarishly unstoppable. Eshkol had demonstrated as pronounced a taste for unnecessary killing as any sociopath I'd ever encountered, and there was no reason to think that Leon — lacking weapons, cover, or bargaining chips — would receive the mercy that so many others had been denied. Still, the quiet discharge of the rail gun when it came brought me out of my hiding place screaming, loud enough for Eshkol to turn in evident alarm. Perhaps he thought that I would be so foolish only if I had some other miraculous weapon; or perhaps he had so squandered any human feelings he still possessed on his dead ancestors that he could not believe that anyone would put himself in danger simply out of brotherhood or grief. Whatever the case, he looked utterly confused, a confusion that probably saved me. Certainly it was a confusion that deepened mightily, as did that of General Said, his men, and, it seemed, the American drones, when the sky above the hotel cracked open to reveal Julien, who was once again standing in the hatchway of our ship.

He was holding a long-range stun weapon, which he aimed at the spot where Eshkol was lying. But again the number of similar situations that Eshkol must have been in during his career became evident: he disappeared off his perch, I think, even before Fouché pulled the trigger of his gun. A sudden outcry from the remaining Malaysians — who had lost the last of their nerve at the sight of the floating, hollering Frenchman — indicated that Eshkol was on his way down to the street from the roof by way of a damaged staircase. None of the soldiers, however, was willing to give chase, at least not until General Said's exhortations turned into open threats. When the troops finally did begin to move, Colonel Slayton rushed toward my position, as did Larissa; but I had already dashed to and around the elevator structure.

There was nothing left of Leon save an arm, probably the arm with which, given the care his murderer had taken not to damage it, he'd held the rucksack and containment canister. Of those items there was no trace, though at the moment that fact meant nothing to me. I fell to my knees and, in a kind of utterly spent mourning, began to chuckle tearfully: for the middle finger of Leon's dead hand was raised, as I was sure it had been when he'd met his end. Larissa soon put her arms around me and attempted to pull me up and toward the descending hatchway of the ship, but in my sorrow I would not be moved from the spot. Fusillades of gunfire began to be directed at us by the troops in the street, while the drones moved toward the hatchway with the clear purpose of inspecting it so that their operators could decide whether or not to attack; yet still I would not go, not until I'd determined what in God's name to do about Tarbell's arm.

It suddenly occurred to me that Leon would have enjoyed nothing more than the terrifying effect that this lone, eerie remnant of his earthly existence would have should it suddenly plummet into the crowd below. Perhaps the jest seems a ghoulish and even grotesque one, removed from its context; but at that moment I was surrounded by so much violence of such bizarre, even absurd, proportions that the idea seemed entirely appropriate. I therefore lifted one foot and sent the remains of the peculiar little man who from the moment of my arrival on Malcolm's ship had proved a genuine friend down to play his final prank on the world.