The Detonators (35 page)

I licked my lips. “Kind of a drastic demonstration, wouldn’t you say? What do you think it’ll accomplish?”

“It’ll do just what you said would be so hard to do. It’ll prove that we have it. At least one here; who’s to say that we don’t have another—maybe several others—elsewhere? After watching this one go up, do you think anybody’ll want to gamble that we don’t have other teams working toward the same goal, teams that will now find their missions much easier, since they’ll have all the information we gained here?”

“Do you have other teams?”

She smiled faintly. “Maybe, maybe not. I’ll let you guess about that, just as the world will be guessing soon.” Her smile faded. “Isn’t it time
somebody
fought back, Matt? Here they’re stockpiling the horrible things all over the world and talking nonsense about survivability; and all the lovely idealists just weep and wail and throw themselves down in front of the bomb trucks crying,
‘Squash me, please squash me!’
Well, we may get a little queasy at times, as you said; it takes a while to get used to blood and death. But we’re not starry-eyed idealists; and we’re going to give these warlike characters a taste of their own medicine!”

“Fighting fire with fire, right? And atoms with atoms.”

“I can always count on you, my dear. A fast man with a cliché.” She shook her head grimly. “It won’t be nice. People are going to die here, certainly. The settlement on Grouper Cay will vanish. Hell, Grouper Cay will vanish; and there are other island communities nearby that’ll be wiped out. The fallout… well, let’s just say that Nassau probably won’t have a very good time; and depending on the winds the Florida coast may even be affected. So? How many more would die in a worldwide conflict? And if they force us to go to phase two, and their weirdo missile silos and nuclear ammunition storage facilities start going up in radioactive smoke, there’ll probably be deaths in the thousands and hundreds of thousands all over the world; but the toll still won’t approach the casualty lists, or the contamination, of a real nuclear war. Damn it,
somebody’s
got to put a stop to it before it starts, Matt!”

I said, “Sure. But why here?”

“What do you mean?” Gina frowned. “This is where the conference is being held, isn’t it?”

I said, “Hell, the United Nations meets all the time. Why not impress those delegates instead; they’re pretty influential, too, aren’t they? Set off your big bang up in White Plains, New York, or down in Perth Amboy, New Jersey; and they’ll have a fine view of it from their big glass tower on the East River. Much more dramatic, anyway, than blowing up a bunch of crummy little coral islands with a few niggers on them.”

“Matt!”

“Don’t snap at me!” I said sharply. “I’m not the rich white American lady who’s decided to save the world by firing off a nuclear device in a foreign country inhabited largely by poor blacks. But you don’t think the lesson’s going to be overlooked by the so-called Third World, do you? They’ll see whose population and real estate are considered expendable by your well-heeled peace organization—which has how many nonwhite members?”

She started to blow up angrily but checked herself. “You’re being unfair and irrelevant,” she said. “We picked the most sparsely populated area we could find that would serve our purpose. Without regard to race, color, or creed. Have you asked all your questions?”

“One more,” I said. “There’s got to be another part to your program. Constructive rather than destructive.”

“There is. We’ve had the best political brains in the world working on it. We have a proposal. It’s not foolproof; but it’s a hell of a lot better than anything that’s been suggested so far, certainly better than anything they’re likely to come up with in Nassau, where they’re all just looking for nationalistic advantage and making soothing noises to appease their frightened populations. They’ll never come close to considering the problem honestly, unless somebody takes a whip to them. Well, there’s the whip!” She gestured toward the shiny contraption in the middle of the hold. Her face was set in hard, fanatic lines. “Let them see what it’ll be like if they don’t do the work they were sent to do, and do it sincerely. Let them feel the earth shake, goddamn it! Let them see the sky light up over here; let them see the whole horizon on fire. Let them watch the mushroom cloud rise into the stratosphere. Let them run like hell from the radioactive fallout and try to wash it off when it covers them. And when they’ve recovered a little, those who recover, maybe they’ll come to the conference table with a different attitude, they and the ones appointed to replace the ones who died! Maybe we’ll have a
real
nuclear control conference for a change!”

Well, it was a tempting scenario; but behind it was just the good old weapons syndrome that seems to attack a lot of people who don’t know anything about weapons. Somebody who’s grown up with guns, like me, knows perfectly well that a firearm is simply a tool for drilling a small round hole in an object, inanimate or animate. If that’s what you want, fine; but don’t expect a Smith and Wesson .38 or even a roaring, thundering Ruger .44 Magnum to turn you into some kind of an omnipotent deity with absolute control of the world around you. One of the saddest sights I’d seen was a young punk who tried a holdup on me and a colleague named Matson in a Washington parking lot when we were returning to our car after a pleasant dinner. The threat came from Janet Matson’s side so I let her take care of it, sweeping the cheap pistol aside with the routine moves we’re all taught at the Ranch in Arizona and putting three fast ones into the chest and belly of the target—as I’d told Amy, we don’t monkey around when they come at us with guns. That’s a for-keeps situation. Afterward the would-be holdup artist sat against the side of a parked car, dying in a spreading puddle of blood and urine, staring up at us reproachfully. Somebody’d told him a gun was all it would take to make him a big man giving orders to everybody. Why hadn’t we got the word?

Somebody’d told Gina Williston that an atom bomb was all it would take to make her a big woman who would save the world, particularly her wealthy part of it. But a nuclear weapon is just another tool for making a hole; a large, radioactive hole this time, but still a hole. It’s not a mind-bending force or a people-control machine; and I knew it wouldn’t work the way she expected, not even if she really found the ruthlessness to order it set off—and this was the woman who hadn’t been able to finish me off as I lay in my bunk, dazed from her first shot. These were the people who hadn’t been capable of wiping out two dangerous witnesses against them, even after a shark had obliged them by taking care of the third. They talked very big about the death and destruction they planned to wreak; but that was, I reflected, a clue in itself. There was a good chance that they’d chicken out when the time came to give the final firing command.

The hell of it was, I hadn’t been sent here to deal with any giant fireworks. Common sense said that I’d be expected to do what I could to prevent the blast; but if the members of the PNP had been all I had to worry about, I might have gambled on a last-minute change of heart. However, there was another factor: the man who’d brought me here. I looked at Alfred Minister, still standing beside his brainchild and wearing his white scientist-coat. His eyes met mine through the horn-rimmed glasses; and I could see in them contempt for the soft people whose money he was taking—the soft people and their hard talk.

He knew their weakness as well as I did; but if anybody thought he’d built this lovely thing in order to leave it unfired… Well, you didn’t go to bed with a girl and climb out and pull your pants back on again before you’d found the release you needed, did you? I knew that no matter what orders were given, or countermanded, or not given, Minister would see that the red button got pushed. As a matter of fact, judging by the record I’d studied, his record, there were probably timing devices and booby traps built into The Bomb to make quite certain it blew eventually, even if the remote-control detonator was disabled in some way. Nobody was going to cheat this man out of his king-sized, radioactive orgasm.

So there was nothing for me to do but play along until I saw a reasonable break; and if that meant killing a couple of innocent people to gain Gina’s confidence, that was just too damn bad. Nobody was totally innocent and everybody died sometime. I might die myself before this was over; and it wasn’t as if they were great friends of mine. We have very few great friends in the business.

I said, “Well, I guess I like peace as well as the next guy; and you’ve certainly picked an intriguing way of going for it. But I’d better be getting on with my chores.” I glanced at the watertight door leading forward. “Do I get that hatch opened for me, or do I have to climb those ladders up on deck and down again?”

It was Harrison Paul who spoke: “A little climbing won’t hurt you. And there’ll be two men with you to see that you do the job right.”

I shrugged. “Whatever you say, Mister Chairman of the Board…”

“No.” It was Gina’s voice; when we looked at her, she said to Paul, “You don’t understand the kind of man he is. Put guards on him, and he’ll take it as an insult and a challenge. For him to be of any real use to us, we have to trust him.”

“Trust him? Don’t be ridiculous, Georgina!”

“That’s right,” she said. “You don’t trust anybody, do you, Harrison? And maybe that’s why I’m Madame President here and you’re just the lousy chairman and don’t really have much say in what’s going to happen.” She hesitated. “But let me take out a little insurance, before I turn him loose… Matt.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

She looked at me steadily. “Matt, will you swear by all you hold sacred… Never mind. That’s foolish, there isn’t much any of us holds sacred or holy these days, is there? Except, perhaps, sometimes, one thing. Matt, will you give me your personal word of honor that you’ll work for us loyally and take no action against us, any of us, including Mr. Pope?…”

They tossed me back into my cell—our cell—without much ceremony, tripping me deliberately so that I sprawled on the rusty floor. I heard them laughing as they slammed the steel door and locked it. Well, that was all right, they had a laugh coming. Everybody had a laugh coming. Who the hell did I think I was, Sir Galahad or somebody? Who did I think I’d been working for all these years, the Boy Scouts of America?

See the ruthless secret agent who’d snuff out a couple of innocent lives like snapping his fingers if his mission required it. See the ruthless secret agent louse up said mission, and maybe foul up the whole world, by behaving like a kid with romantic notions of honor…
honor
, for Christ’s sake, that ancient and obsolete concept! But the damn woman had sneaked up on me, with her honorable paroles and trusting truces. I’d kind of got in the habit of keeping faith with her, so that when she’d at last asked of me a promise I had no intention of keeping, I hadn’t been able to give it instantly and smoothly, balking at the lie just long enough to make it pointless to lie at all. Buy your secondhand car from Honest Helm; he’ll tell you frankly that the crankcase is full of sawdust…

I became aware that Molly Brennerman was helping me up and brushing me off. There was the more distant sound of the deck hatch dropping with a crash, sealing us into the forepart of the ship, since the heavy door leading, aft into the hold was already closed. I looked around the cell and discovered that Molly and I were no longer alone. The beat-up young ensign had rejoined the living. He was sitting on his cot watching, sagging a little with weakness.

“Mr. Helm?” he said, speaking with difficulty because of his damaged mouth. “I’m Ricardo Sanderson.”

“I know, I met your papa a while back. How are you feeling?”

“Never mind how he’s feeling!” This was the girl. Her voice was strained. Well, locked up in this sardine can she was entitled to a little strain; who wasn’t strained around here, anyway? She asked, “What did you learn out there, if anything?”

I said, “Not much. Just that they’ve got…” For some reason I found it hard, to say. I found myself wanting to giggle like a schoolgirl. “They’ve gone and built themselves…” I heard myself snort with helpless laughter.

“What have they got?” Molly asked sharply. “What have they built?”

“The dumb jerks have gone and constructed a fucking atom bomb to save the world!” I heard myself laugh some more. “Only… only you’re not supposed to call it a bomb, are you? You’re supposed to call it a nuclear device. Like a whore must be called a lady of the evening.”

“What’s the matter with you, are you drunk?” Molly licked her lips, pale in her soiled tomboy face. Then she protested: “Matt, you can’t be serious!”

Sanderson chimed in: “You must be mistaken, sir! It doesn’t make sense! I thought these people were supposed to be fighting
against
nuclear—”

Molly interrupted sharply: “You mean it’s
here
? On this ship?”

“Hell, it’s practically next door,” I said. “In the main hold, just beyond the watertight bulkhead at the aft end of the passage, with the screwed-down door or hatch or whatever you call it… What’s the matter?”

She’d seated herself weakly on the unoccupied cot. She glared at me. “We’re locked up next to a… a weirdo hellfire machine, and the man asks what’s the matter!” She swallowed hard. “I suppose they’re planning to set it off with us right here!”

I said, “Well, atomizing the corpus delicti with a twenty-kiloton nuclear explosion is one way of getting rid of it, isn’t it? Or three
carpi delicti
, or whatever the plural is.”

“This is no time for a crummy Greek lesson!”

“Latin,” I said.

“Greek, Latin, Sanskrit, what’s the difference?”

Sanderson asked, “Are they really intending to
fire
it, sir?”

“Yes. As a demonstration,” I told them as much of what I’d learned as they needed to know. I deleted the parts about their planned demise at my hands and my display of honorable nobility. If we were to plan together, and act together, they had to be left with a little faith in the senior member of the party. I frowned thoughtfully. “What time do they serve breakfast in this tin hotel?” I asked.