Philip Kerr - Esau

‘It only goes to show,’ said Boyd. ‘You never can tell. I was sure it was going to be you I’d have to kill, Swifty. But when it came down to it, I just couldn’t do it. Don’t ask me why. Don’t even thank me. And believe me, I shan’t hesitate to do it again. I’m kind of warmed up now.

‘Okay, people, I think it would be best if everyone went over to the other side of the clamshell. Just in case we have any more unfortunate accidents involving handguns.’

Jutta helped Swift to her feet as Boyd waved the gun impatiently.

‘Come on, come on.’

‘You won’t get away with this, Boyd,’ said Jack.

‘This? This?’ He laughed. ‘You don’t even know what this is all about.’ He paused as something seemed to occur to him. ‘No, that’s not quite true, is it. Jack? After all it was you who guessed about the satellite.’

Noting the look of surprise on all their faces, he permitted himself a smug little smile.

‘I heard you talking while I was lying on my bunk. The clamshell is bugged, of course. You don’t think I’d let you talk about me behind my back without listening in on what you had to say, do you? That’s not nice.’ He sighed. ‘I don’t mind telling you, I thought I was never going to find that bird. But it was you. Jack. You who told me where to find it, for which I owe you my thanks.’ He smiled thinly. ‘Thanks. I’m very grateful to you.’

Covered in Jameson’s blood, Jutta shook her head and said tearfully:

‘Why is this satellite so important that you had to kill him? Why?’

Boyd crouched down and glanced out of the airlock door.

‘The storm is beginning to blow over. But it will be a little while yet before I can leave you folks and finish my job.’ He stepped forward and, drawing up a chair, straddled it, leaning on the back. ‘I guess I can tell you. And me — well, you wouldn’t know it, Jutta, but I’m a natural born storyteller.’

‘It’s like Jack said. A spy satellite. A bird, as we prefer to call them. A Keyhole Eleven, for obvious see-through-your-bathroom-door reasons. Codename Peary, same as the explorer. The bird was to occupy a polar orbit along a seventy-five-degree line of longitude obtaining fine-grained strategic intelligence of specific sites in India, Pakistan, and the People’s Republic of China. In short, to monitor the developing situation in the North Indian theatre.

‘However, on completion of its low-orbit mission, instead of boosting to a higher orbit at thirty-five thousand kilometres, the bird began slipping closer to the earth’s atmosphere. Whoops. We wondered about that. The usual did-it-fall-or-was-it-pushed kind of question? Finally the eggheads decided that it had been affected by recent sunspot activity. Caused an overload in the bird’s solar power cells. You were right about that too, Jack boy. Solar cells supported by a small thermonuclear generator. You’re really a very clever man, for a rock rat. Anyway, the overload caused the computer to miscue both the imaging and the boost to higher orbit. The sunspots also acted to increase the density of the uppermost part of the earth’s atmosphere. But when the density increases, so does the friction acting on the bird, with the result that the bird effectively tripped and fell. Computer forecasts led us to believe that reentry would take place in a nonhazardous location somewhere on the Antarctic continent. That’s where I was at the time. Got myself all ready to go find it. But it turned out that periodically the bird tumbled sideways along its orbit, with the result that the air drag factor soared and the decay rate increased by fifteen or twenty times. So instead of coming down in the Antarctic, it came down somewhere else and it came down early. Whoops again.

‘Our earliest guess as to the location was along the original orbital line. We tracked the automatic distress signals on the existing frequency as long as we could but lost contact as the satellite entered Nepalese airspace. We figured somewhere in the Himalayas. But where? Sent up a few spy planes to try to spot it. No dice. Finally we got our best lead from, guess where? National Geographic magazine. A little article about Jack boy and his partner swept off the mountain in an avalanche caused by a meteorite, on or about the exact time we calculated our bird was in the sky. Wouldn’t you just believe it? Five-hundred-million-dollar aircraft overflying the whole of Nepal looking for a missing satellite, and this is where we find it. In a lousy magazine article. Eeeeeh! One in the eye for the folks at the Pentagon.

‘But hey, I’m missing the best part of the story. You see, what made the situation so urgent was that before reentry, Peary’s on board computer downloaded all the reconnaissance imagery it had collected to our tracking complex at Cheyenne Mountain. Now they discovered that the same malfunction caused the computer to photograph not nuclear missile and air force bases in India and Pakistan and their respective states of readiness, but strategic sites in countries antipodean to the Indian subcontinent along the same line of longitude. By which I mean Canada and the United States. Double jeopardy. Our own spy satellite ends up spying on us. What made this major pain in the ass even worse was the fact that Peary was designed for reuse. In other words, it would not burn up on reentry. And with the probability existing that the on board computer systems were still in possession of our own strategic intelligence, this made it imperative that we find and destroy the bird as quickly as possible. Major fuckin’ problem. Coming down so close to the Chinese border, during the current political situation, well, you can guess the panic that swept people back in Washington. Imagine what would happen if the slopes could target all our sites. That kind of thing. So you see how it is.’

Boyd stood up and went over to the door again, to glance out and check the weather.

‘So all this time,’ said Warner, ‘instead of looking for core samples from the glacier...’

‘That’s right. Link. I’ve been looking for some trace of a satellite.’

‘But why didn’t you throw your lot in with us?’ said Jack. ‘For God’s sake, we’re on the same side. Aren’t we?’

‘Nominally, yes. But ask yourself this question: What would have happened if my mission and yours came into a conflict of interest? Your new species versus my own satellite. We wouldn’t have gotten along at all. No, it wouldn’t have worked. My mission had — has — absolute priority, at all times. Whatever the circumstances. I can’t see Dr. Swift going along with that, can you? Isn’t that right, Swifty? You’re not about to allow any kind of risk to your precious new species, are you?’

‘What are you talking about?’ Swift said dully.

Boyd looked awkward.

‘I can hardly tuck that bird under my arm and take it home to Washington, now can I? It weighed the best part of eighteen hundred kilogrammes when it was launched. A little less now, I should think, but still heavy. No, I have to blow it up. Even if that means a few of Rebecca’s brothers and sisters getting in the way.’

‘You bastard,’ said Swift.

‘See? That’s what I mean by a conflict of interest. I don’t mean any harm to come to — what did you call them, Link?’

‘ Homo vertex. It means Peak Dwelling Man.’

‘Oh-keh! Oh-keh!’

‘Yeah. That’s nice. Even Rebecca sounds as though she likes it. Fact is, I don’t mean Mr. and Mrs. Peak Dwelling Man any harm. But if they get in the way, it will be too bad, y’know? Maybe they’ll get lucky. Maybe they will be somewhere else when it goes off. There are issues of national security here that I don’t expect you to be concerned about. Besides, it will only be a small explosion. It’s not like I’m planning to destroy the whole of your hidden forest. Jack. Shouldn’t need more than two and a half kilogrammes of plastic.’