Steve Martini - Guardian of Lies

The brake lights dim and he shoots straight ahead, down the hill. The road curves to the right and he disappears around the bend.

I crawl out from under the car. I don’t stop to brush off my clothes. Instead I begin to run faster and faster into the darkness under the trees near the fence at the zoo. My heart is pounding. I turn and fall against the chain link, leaning with all of my weight as I catch my breath. Then I make my way slowly in the dark along the twisting lane. I can’t run, though I want to. In the pitch-black under the shadows of the trees, I would break my neck.

I am passing the first intersection when suddenly I see the lights of a vehicle winding its way along the lane, coming toward me. I look for somewhere to hide. There are some scrub bushes along the fence near the gnarled trunk of a eucalyptus tree. I make my way to the tree and position myself between the trunk and the fence and watch the headlights, trying to keep the tree between myself and the twin beams of light as the car approaches.

It isn’t until the flare of the bright light is past me that I can see the windows of the taxi and Herman in the backseat with the window down and looking out the other side.

“Herman! Here.” I step out into the street.

“Alto. Aquí,” says Herman.

The taxi driver throws on the brakes.

I run up along the right side of the car and get in the front seat. “Go,” I tell him. A second later we are moving.

“I waited for ya at the top of the stairs,” says Herman. “I saw the guy come outside. Then when he went in I saw you run across the street. But I wasn’t sure how to get to you. I figured the best way was to get a cab. Is he still at the house?”

“No.”

“Who was he?”

“I don’t know.”

“What did you see?”

“A visitation from the angel of death,” I tell him.

“What do you mean?”

“I saw him up close for only an instant. He was behind a car window. But it was a face I won’t forget. It was pockmarked, one side of it, not the usual adolescent acne. It was something more sinister. Maybe smallpox or fire scarred, I couldn’t tell.”

“Funny you should say that. When I was at the gate working on the lock, I had a real edgy feeling, like somebody or something was lookin’ at me, and not just lookin’, if you know what I mean.”

“I know what you mean.” I don’t tell Herman, but the reason I couldn’t look more closely at his face was because my focus was drawn to something in the eyes. It is hard to explain, something you have to see to understand, a kind of reflection of evil.

I have seen that look before. As a young prosecutor in Capitol City, I had sent someone with those same haunted eyes to prison. He was a man who had killed many times, and according to the doctors, he liked to do it, and given the chance would do it again. I remember some years later I stood on the riser and looked through the blinds, through the plate-glass window of a green metal room. I watched as the demons were drawn and exorcised from the eyes of Brian Danley, in the fog of the San Quentin gas chamber.

The uranium projectile suddenly toppled from the muzzle of the gun. Instinctively Tomas reached out with his gloved right hand and caught it in midflight. But at arm’s length, reaching across the table, he couldn’t hold the weight.

The projectile’s leverage and the momentum of its fall forced his hand down until his fingers were suddenly pinched between the heavy, falling uranium slug and its fissile target.

Tomas pulled the projectile back toward his chest as the air in the room ignited in a brilliant violet light. It rippled in waves and hues of blue that Tomas had never before seen. The heat was intense. It burned his fingers right through the gloves, but Tomas was so dazzled by the radiance that he didn’t notice. As the glow from the agitated molecules of air evaporated, the heat sapped the energy from his body.

He looked down and realized he was holding the enriched uranium against his chest. He carefully laid the projectile on the table, as far from the target as he could. Then he turned and walked out the door to where Nitikin and the other man were standing.

When Yakov turned and saw him, Tomas had already lifted the protective hood from his head. His face was running with a river of sweat. Other than that, he looked fine. He was animated, smiling and laughing, like a soccer goalie who has just blocked a free kick.

He assured Nitikin that the projectile had not struck the uranium target. He had saved it, but his fingers had been pinched in the process.

Tomas did not seem to comprehend the flash of blue light and the intense heat that was still sending rising vapors of smoke off of his suit. He told Yakov that everything was all right, then lifted his right arm to pull off his glove.

Tomas stopped in midstride and looked at his hand. There was nothing left of the first three fingers but charred stumps.

Yakov reached him the instant before he collapsed. He laid him on the ground and helped him take off his suit. He hollered at Alim’s man, the one holding the ramrod, to help him. But the man just stood there shaking his head.

Alim and the rest of his cadre remained off in the trees, at least a hundred meters away. Yakov told the man with the ramrod to put on Tomas’s suit, that he would need his assistance. When the man didn’t understand, Nitikin gestured with his hands, sign language, to put it on.

The man looked at him and slowly shook his head as he backed away. Yakov yelled into the trees and a couple of seconds later he heard Alim’s commanding voice speaking in Farsi. The man looked to the trees, then back at Nitikin with a kind of trapped expression on his face. Reluctantly he stepped forward and began to put on the suit.

Nitikin hollered assurances to the translator off in the jungle, asking him to tell the man that there was no longer anything to fear. With the proper tools, Nitikin could now complete the assembly quickly and safely. They would be finished in a matter of minutes. The translation came back and the man nodded. What the Russian didn’t tell them was that Alim’s man, who was now donning the suit, was already dead. The lifetime body burden of radiation was far exceeded by his naked exposure to the wicked tail of the dragon.

Together they entered the hut. The radiation had elevated the temperature inside the room to the point that they could not remain more than two or three minutes.

Yakov had the man steady the barrel of the cannon, his bare fingers projecting through the holes burned into the right-hand glove. Nitikin retrieved the projectile with the tongs. In less than a minute, using the ramrod, Yakov seated the uranium bullet securely down the barrel of the gun.

It took another thirty seconds to insert the safety disk of uranium-238, the neutron deflector, into the slot between the end of the gun barrel and the target. Once in place, the disk of uranium-238 began doing its job. It bounced the wandering neutrons from the two elements of highly enriched uranium, the projectile and the target, back to their respective sources, instantly reducing the gain in radiation. Nitikin heard the rapid clicking from the Geiger counter on the table suddenly fall off sharply.

The safety disk of U-238 was attached to a rigid piece of steel wire. The wire protruded through a tiny hole in the side of the bomb case. A quarter-twist of the wire in a clockwise direction locked the safety disk in place. Anyone trying to remove the disk without first twisting the wire in a counterclockwise direction would snap the brittle connection between the safety disk and the wire, rendering the bomb useless. The gun would fire. The cordite explosion would destroy the barrel and bomb housing, but there would be no nuclear chain reaction. Even radioactive fallout would be minimal and generally contained to any structure the device was in.