Unpopular Science

Chapter 8

The newspaper, Harold W. Smith decided, was drivel. Ever since a reporter with the New York Times admitted fabricating years of dramatic stories, journalistic integrity had gone down the tubes across the country. At least prior to that scandal, there had been lip service paid to journalistic integrity. Nowadays nobody even tried to pretend. The best papers in the nation had become tabloids.

Still, Smith couldn’t help but wonder at the report out of El Paso. The wires had picked it up, then pulled it. To Smith it looked as if somebody had tried to squelch the article.

But the CURE quartet of computers had snatched it out of the electronic ether before a seek-and-destroy internet spider could remove it from the world’s archiving mainframes, and had flagged it for Smith simply because it was anomalous and was in the proximity of his current watch zones.

An old man was dead in his shack not too far from one of the technology thefts at White Sands. He was found on his front porch with his head caved in against a wooden post.

What was odd was the letter he left, to his long-deceased father and dated the day of his death. Based on the coroner’s estimated time of death at between 2:00 a.m. and 6:00 a.m., that meant the letter had been written in the wee small hours of the morning. The reporter who wrote the story saw it as a sad yet hopeful last message by a man who was looking beyond his world into the next.

‘“Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we all had a little Ironhand in our life?’” the reporter wrote in closing. “‘What better than a memory of our childhood to give us comfort in today’s world, especially as we embark on our last great journey.’”

It wasn’t poignant; it was pap. And the letter. Smith decided, was clearly the work of a delusional mind. After all, the man was eighty-nine years old.

He closed the screen with the article and forgot it. Or so he thought. Hours later he found his mind returning to the article from the El Paso newspaper.

The air was stifling and it smelled. The fresh breeze coming in from the Atlantic Ocean was poisoned at the seaside with the fumes of rotting fish and spilled petrochemicals. Long before the breeze worked its way to the inner slums of Casablanca, it was polluted and unbreathable. The people in the Casablanca slums had no choice but to breathe it, along with the stench of their own neighborhood. They died a little with every breath they took.

“I thought it was fog,” Remo commented.

“You thought what was fog?” Chiun asked, ignoring the stares he received from the locals.

“You know, in Casablanca, when Ingrid Bergman is getting on the plane and Humphrey Bogart is doing his lines and there’s all this mist swirling around them. I thought it was fog, but it was smog. Fumes.”

“Would it startle you to learn that the movie was not filmed on location?”

“No!”

“Yes.”

“G’dam!’

“Here we are.” Chiun paused at the archway entrance to a partially enclosed, exceptionally dreary-looking section of the city. The man on the ground watching them smiled with a mouth full of black teeth-nubs. He briefly revealed a battered old revolver under his vest.

“No zoo-veneers,” the man said in English, every syllable an effort.

The guard was astounded when the small Asian man replied to him in his own tongue—not Arabic, but a Berber dialect that was all but extinct in the twenty-first century. “We do not seek trinkets.”

“You may not enter, little old man,” the guard said harshly.

“Is this not where one might spend a great deal of money?” Chiun asked..

“You wish to purchase T-shirts, go to the hotel district.”

“Pah! I do not wear T-shirts. Only this pale piece of a pig’s ear does so.”

The gate guard smiled at the insult. The white man didn’t know he was being insulted, obviously. He looked bored.

“We have much money,” the Asian man said in the Berber tongue.

“How much?”

“Enough to purchase our own army, if there is one for sale.”

The Berber guard scowled, then shook his head. “You need an appointment, little old man.”

Chiun looked thoughtful, and smiled, and his hand whisked at the guard, who slumped forward where he sat. His forehead began dripping into his lap, and his Berber dialect took one step closer toward true extinction.

“He says we need an invitation,” Chiun said as they left the nodding corpse.

“I’m inviting you,” Remo said, waving magnanimously at the entrance to the dank, dark slum-within-a- slum.

“I would refuse if I could.”

Through the archway they entered what had once been a fine courtyard, but was now a dim, evil-smelling grotto. The corners were black with filth and trash. The deteriorating cobblestones channeled some sort of evil, greasy-looking liquid between them.

“Who are you?” demanded a voice from the shadows beyond a crumbling brick divider wall. The interior of the courtyard was filled with shacks that might house an extended family.

“We came for the auction,” Remo called back, scoping out the figures in the shadows. The shacks were abandoned at the moment, but there were five men in the walkway around the fringes, and they were the kind of men Remo didn’t want to see any better than he could. Unfortunately he saw almost perfectly despite the darkness.

“The auction is over.”

“Hey, we didn’t get a chance to place our bids.”

“Go away, stupid foreigner.”

“I don’t want to talk to you, anyway. Who’s the real man in charge?”

The speaker came toward them, waving his automatic rifle. Everybody had an AK-47 these days, ever since the Iraqis stopped needing them by the hundreds of thousands and began their new lucrative export business. This one was brandished threateningly in Remo’s direction. “I am in charge!”

“You? You’re a twerp.”

“I am the commander of all these men and you are dead!”

“Don’t think so.” Remo reached out, and out, and out, and the Casablancan with the AK made a spluttering noise. The American seemed to be stretching his arm to inhuman lengths.

“Actually, I’m just light on my feet,” Remo said as he stood in his original position and gripped the shocked gunner by the collar.

“And in the head,” Chiun added.

“You really are the guy in charge?” Remo demanded.

“No, it is not I!”

“No, it’s okay, I believe you now, twerp.”

The man tried to get his AK leveled between him and his assailant. This was difficult to do while hanging by the shirtfront, toes just grazing the earth. The Casablancan suddenly felt himself being shaken.

His body rattled, his limbs jounced and a few blackened tooth chips joined his AK on the old cobblestones..

“Tell the Twerp Team to back off,” Remo said.

“They’ll kill you if you kill me!”

“Or not, I don’t care. Hold on.”

The Casablancan was suddenly on his own two feet. He squinted for focus and found himself staring at the tiny Asian in the outlandish robe.

“Your dwelling smells of offal,” the smiling Asian said in perfect Berber. Not city Berber, but the old traditional Berber of his great-grand-uncle.

Then he saw the white man, who was moving like a sentient shadow from man to man, crossing several yards in a heartbeat, and every time he reached one of them the man fell. Then, just seconds after he had been freed, the leader found himself being lifted again in the fist of the white man.

Off to the side he heard the collapse of the last body, and he knew his army of Casablancan street fighters was no more.

“Sorry, twerp, no more Team.”

“I talk.”

“Yeah, you just did something else, too,” Remo said in disgust, holding his captive far away where he couldn’t drip on him. “Who’s the broker?”

“Broke her?”

“Who sold the plans?”

“I did.”

“You just hosted the auction, you didn’t own the merchandise.”

“No, it was my merchandise.”

“You’re sort of the Christie’s of Morocco, hmm? Sony if I find it hard to swallow. I think you better come clean.”

Chiun smirked.

“The man will kill me if I say anything,” the captive whined.

“Like I won’t.”

The captive ran frantically, but all the leg-pumping in the world would get him nowhere without having his feet on solid ground. Eventually he went limp. “Barcelona,” he admitted.

“Good fish in Barcelona,” Remo noted.

“Arms man there. Cote. Allessandro.”

“An arms merchant in Barcelona named Cote Allessandro.”

“No, Allessandro Cote.”

“Okay. Good. Thanks.”

“So you won’t kill me?” The captive’s face broke into a hideous smile.

“Yes, I will. I was being sarcastic,” Remo explained. “The world need arms auctioneers like I need another old bossy guy telling me what to do.”

As they were leaving, Chiun said, ‘I forgive the casual insult because your earlier remark was amusing, however unintended ‘Better come clean.’ Heh!”

Through the door came the freckle-faced teenager with the dirty scrub-brush hair. He grinned and waved. “Hiya, Pop!”

“You bring in half zee desert vith you.” The older man was scowling, his voice heavy with a German accent. “You know what sand vill do to my electronics?”

“Nothing, Pop, not with my weather-proofing. You could take the roof off this place in a sandstorm and you wouldn’t so much as short a power supply.”

The kid never stopped grinning and his father never stopped scowling, but the old man reached out and scrubbed the kid’s crew cut with his knuckles.

“Hey! You nut! Cut it out!” The kid scrambled away and made for the tiny kitchen at the far end of the low building, where he bent at the waist with his head inside the refrigerator as if he intended to remain there for the duration.

The older man peered at his screen until he felt the cool breeze reach him, more than forty feet away. “Trying to cool zee whole building?”

The kid emerged with a bag of bread covered in a rainbow of dots, a package of bologna and a half-gallon squeeze bottle of bright yellow mustard. He set it up next to his father’s monitor and watched the screen as he laid out five bread slices, squeezed a thick puddle of mustard on the first four, then layered them with slices of pale meat from the package. He stacked them atop one another, putting the fifth slice of doughy white bread on top, and carefully compressed the sandwich until the mustard just barely began oozing out the sides. He took a huge bite and noticed his father watching him with unconcealed distaste.

“Train wreck,” the kid said, and opened his mouth wide to display the half-chewed contents.

“Disgusting.” The older man turned back to his display.

“Casablanca?” the kid asked.

“Yes.”

“Find the right plane?”

“Perhaps. How was school?”

“I got a B on a science quiz.”

“You are joking?”

“Nope.”

The older man waited for the punch line. It was impossible for his son to get a B on a science exam. “Teacher error?”

“Yeah. I set her straight. She was cool about it.”

“Cool as in not perturbed.”

“Yeah. You know. Not ticked off or anything because I was right and she was wrong. She changed it to an A.”

“Cool,” the older man said, his concentration on the screen.

The kid chewed loudly in his ear for a full minute as they watched the stark, high-contrast video images displaying in three small windows.

“Your possibles?” the kid asked.

‘Yes. This is the only aircraft I have traced so far.” He tapped the small window showing the looming profile of a sleek jet. The image, like the other two, seemed to be shot from extremely low to the ground, as if someone had dropped a video camera a few paces from the aircraft and it was looking up. The legend beneath the video feed identified the aircraft as originating in the State of Florida in the United States.

The kid rubbed the tip of this freckled nose contemplatively, then tapped another window. “Let me see this one.”

The older man expanded the window with the next aircraft, also videotaped from very low to the ground but from farther away. The long sweep of tarmac that dominated the image moved slightly as the camera seemed to creep slowly toward the aircraft.

“Nah. Forget that one.”

“Why?” the older man asked. ‘You don’t even know its origin.”

“I think it’s a Saudi jet. See this?” He tapped the blur of green on the tail. “Saudi flag, I bet. Plus, that’s a Cessna Citation X, no special retrofits apparent, which means it’ll cruise 1,500 nautical miles on a full tank. Not what you’d use for crossing the Atlantic.”

The father nodded and used the mouse to adjust the camera, zooming in on the blurry image of the flag and tapping out a command that made the window freeze. A moment later a high-resolution digital photo of the blur of color resolved itself laboriously on the screen until it was a square of green with white Arabic letters underscored with a white sword. The image next to it was a logo or family insignia of some kind.

“Yeah. Forget ’em,” the kid said.

“I agree.” The older man punched out commands, then moved on to the third screen. “Not much larger than the other Saudi jet.”

“It’s bigger than it looks and there’s a big difference in the specs, too. Pop. It’s a Raytheon business jet. Hawker Horizon. It’ll fly at least twice as far, for one thing, as the Cessna. Could have come from the U.S. easy.”

The aircraft in the image was closer than the others. The camera seemed to be inching ever so slowly up on the right rear wheel.

“Who’s the uniforms?” the kid asked.

“Airport security. Morocco is a dangerous place to leave a valuable aircraft unattended.”

“There’s like five of them. Seems excessive.”

“That in itself means nothing,” the older man said in his German-heavy speech. “It costs little to hire a small army to guard a jet for a few hours.” After ten minutes, the camera appeared to have crept only a few yards closer to the wheels of the aircraft and the older man said, “Don’t you have homework?”

“Done.”

“When?”

“I dictated the answers into the phone on the way home,” the kid explained, and stretched to one of the printers that were scattered among the vast array of electronics equipment in the big, low room. He snatched up a small stack of papers and fanned them. “See?”

“Humph.”

“Gonna have another sandwich. Want one?”

“No, thank you. I want to monitor the crawl.”

The centipede kept itself inside the channel dividing the concrete slabs that made up the tarmac on this private end of the airport at Casablanca. The terrain was broken and uneven from the perspective of a crawling creature that was no more than twelve millimeters in height, and time and again the centipede was forced to crawl out of the channel or over a crack or around a raised broken concrete chunk.

Once, one of the armed security men strolled around the back of the jet, out of boredom more than thoroughness. The chances of any mischief coming from the far side of the aircraft, across the open, empty airport runways, was small.

If he had been more observant he might have noticed the strange, dull, slate-gray thing stretched out in the gap in the concrete. He never saw it.

When the man passed on, the centipede began moving again. It came to the big wooden block, then to the right rear tire. It reared up, two inches off the surface, its activities now hidden by the tire from the view of the guards. It took the rubber in its legs and dug in. The eighty-four tungsten legs of the mechanical centipede were like filament, no wider than a human hair but strong and extremely sharp. The algorithms that controlled their movement, computer-generated to match the movements of real centipedes, allowed it to flow easily through a natural movement. Getting a grip was the easy part; not getting too much grip, that was a challenge.

The force of each leg was feather-light, but the filament legs were so sharp they penetrated the rubber easily. The tires were new, and the heat had softened them somewhat; still, the specialty aircraft tire polymer was so tough it adhered to the tiny needles that penetrated it. By the time the centipede had crawled to the top of the tire and onto the metal strut, it had lost six tungsten legs to the tire.

That was a slight handicap, but the centipede’s next task was its most difficult.

The kid with the crew cut grinned with his mouth full of white bread and olive loaf. “Ouch. Six legs lost. You gonna make it?”

“Please stop chewing in my ear,” the older man said. “I told you tungsten was a mistake.”

“There’s nothing stronger.”

‘Titanium thretcheth,” the kid managed to say while stuffing in a huge mouthful.

“Where are your manners? I did not understood you,” the father said irritably.

The kid chewed and swallowed a huge glob, washing it down with milk from a frosty glass bottle. “I said, titanium stretches.”

“Tungsten is far stronger. You look like an advertisement for zee Dairy Farmers of New Mexico.”

The kid grinned and dragged an arm over his mouth, erasing most of his milk mustache.

On screen, the chart of numbers updated itself dynamically and the image of the aircraft wheel well abruptly rotated and closed in.

Somewhere in the-northwestern corner of Africa, the centipede was gripping the strut of the aircraft through a combination of constriction and the needlelike penetration, to microscopic depths, of its seventy- eight surviving legs into the surface of the steel, and as it did so it ascended.

All they could do was watch. The algorithms controlling the centipede made their own adjustments far too fast for manual assistance.

But seconds later the image became stationary and the monitoring window indicated the centipede was in position.

“All right, Pops!” the kid shouted, spraying milk on the older man and on his computer screen.

His father was too self-satisfied to complain. Minutes later, he was gratified to see the next centipede likewise position itself in the wheel well of the other aircraft.

The third centipede had by this time crawled away into the grass by the tarmac to hide in wait for other commands.

The older man picked up the phone on the first ring.

“Mr. Fastbinder,” said a familiar voice. ‘Tm eager to hear about your progress.”

“Excuse me one moment,” the older man said, and put the phone to his chest. “Jack,” he said to his grinning son, “don’t you have a date with Sue Ellen this evening?”

“Not until six. Pops.”

“Can’t you find something else to do?” He nodded at the phone.

“Oh, yeah, sure. I’ll go install those new gyroscopes in the Walkers.”

When the teenager had moved across the workspace to a distant bench, the older man put the phone back to his ear and apologized. “My son is enthusiastic.”

“Don’t blame him, Fastbinder. What’s the word out of Morocco?”

“We narrowed it down to two aircraft that arrived in zee last three hours.”

“Did you get any eyewitness reports from the Barbers?”

“Berbers,” Fastbinder corrected. “All are dead.”

“Really? I guess I should have expected that. Wow. Nobody saw anything?”

“Our police mole says one passerby reported seeing a dark young man and an old man in a Japanese geisha outfit.”

“That’s it! That’s him! That’s them, all right!”

“As soon as I lost contact with our Berbers, I initiated zee airport activities. We’ll have stowaway on both aircraft.”

“And when will we know which is the right plane?”

“We’ll monitor their position on GPS, simple enough,” Fastbinder reported. “One of zee planes will make the flight to Barcelona, and then vee’ll know.”

“Yeah,” said his caller. “Then we’ll know! Ouch!” There was a fumble and the phone was recovered a moment later. “Scraped my foot on the carpet. Jesus, that burns! What’s the spook doing?”

“Decomposing,” Fastbinder reported.

“Aw, hell, did you have to kill him!”

“It did the job. Your friends showed up.”

“Makes me uncomfortable, though, killing CIA agents.”

Fastbinder didn’t reply.

“Well, whatever. Let me know when something happens.”

Fastbinder hung up, but he was dialing the phone again within five minutes.

“Already?” asked the man on the line excitedly. In the background was the sound of running water.

“They must have high-priority clearance,” Fastbinder said. “My motion sensors picked up increased movement on the aircraft just minutes ago, and already it is pushing back.”

“Ahhhh! Just got my feet in some water. Damn, that feels good. Your bug is not gonna get squished when the wheels are pulled in?”

“Unlikely. There is enough space in zee wheel well. The aircraft is taxiing.”

“Already? Can I just stay on the line and maybe we’ll know right away where it’s going.”

“As you wish.”

Fastbinder ignored the distant sounds of splashing water and sighs of contentment. “Zee aircraft is in the air.”

“This the first one or the second one, anyway?”

“The Raytheon Hawker, which my son assures me is capable of transcontinental transport.”

“He know his stuff?”

“Yes.”

“Okay. What’s it doing now?”

“Turning onto its flight path.” Fastbinder was watching the GPS feed from the device and, as the wheels were pulled in, his eyes locked on the data feed. Only so much transmitting power could be packed into the miniaturized electronics in the centipede, and they kicked in as the aircraft left the vicinity of the ground-based retransmitter that had been relaying the centipede signals thus far.

All Fastbinder needed was a minuscule data stream, just enough for a GPS read. And he got it.

“Vee have them,” Fastbinder reported happily. “They’re on a flight path to the eastern Iberian Peninsula.”

“That’s where Barcelona is, right?”

“Correct.”

“All right!” There was a heavy splash. “Oh shit, that hurts! Shit! Keep me posted, Fastbinder. I got a spill to clean up.”

Fastbinder hung up, and only then did he realize his son was standing at his shoulder again.

“Sorry, Pops, I couldn’t resist checking it out. Way to go.”

“Thank you. Jack.”

“But that Herbie is a real dweeb, isn’t he?”

“Dweeb does not begin to describe him.”