Exile-and Glory (8 page)

"Whereas, if you'll close your borders and stop this infiltration, Rondidi can benefit quite a lot," Adams finished smoothly. "You've got iron ore in your hills, more than here in Namibia. It'll take a while to develop, but we can get a railroad in there to bring it here."

"Why would you do that?" Tsandi asked. He saw Ifnoka's scowl and winced, but continued to look expectantly at Adams and von Alten.

"For profits, of course," von Alten said. "His Lordship the Bishop got other motives, but us, we want profits. We make you a pretty good deal to get them, too."

Tsandi nodded.
This
he could understand. But there was Ifnoka's Union group and the coup he was undoubtedly planning in the army . . . .

"Another thing," von Alten snorted. "Seems I got me forty, fifty thousand submachine guns. Some good rifles, too. I wonder, Mr. Prime Minister of Rondidi, if you want some of those guns for your own party people, for your police too,
ja?"

"What?" The monosyllable was jerked from Tsandi's lips. He looked fearfully at Ifnoka.

"Ja,
we got the guns," von Alten said. "Already in Rondidi we got them. When Mr. Adams says smuggle in guns to Rondidi, me, I do it. I think maybe we organize a coup, only now I see what he really wants,
ja?"

Adams smiled tightly. "They can be distributed before either of you gentlemen get back to your capital. By the way, I'm sorry but the airfield's got some problems. Undermined by an aquifer, I understand. Unusable . . ."

"An aquifer?" Father Percy said carefully. He looked out at the barren desert. "I see." He suppressed a chuckle, but it was very loud in the still room.

"All you have to do is name the Cabinet people you want to distribute the guns," Adams said. "We'll see that they get them."

Ifnoka roared and charged out of the room. The door slammed behind him but didn't catch. Courtney went over to close it.

"Well, Mr. Prime Minister?" Adams said. "Of course we'd like your Minister of Trade to have a say in who gets those guns. Good man, that."

"What do you want?" Tsandi demanded. His tone was listless, flat.

"For the guns?" von Alten asked.

"You can't arm Rondidi!" Bloomfort exploded. "What's to keep Tsandi from taking the guns and still getting together with Ifnoka? Using them against Namibia?"

"Oh, he wouldn't do that," Adams said carefully. "Invasion of Namibia's a dream anyway. The Republic of South Africa wouldn't care to see an actual armed invasion of their showpiece descendant. Infiltration's one thing, open war's quite another."

"And who'd develop the iron ore?" Joe Bentley asked.

"Yeah. It does Rondidi no good." Adams stood at the head of the table. His smile was cordial and he spoke warmly to Tsandi, but Courtney saw his pale blue eyes were as cold as ice. "The Station was deliberately put a long way from cities. It won't fall to small arms. And everyone gains from the Station except Ifnoka. His whole power structure's built on poverty and promises. Now we're not in business to eliminate poverty, but there's no way to make a profit without leaving money behind us, and that upsets him. For the Premier of Rondidi, though, the Station's quite a good thing. What's it to be, sir? A chance to put Rondidi into the modern world, or life in Ifnoka's shadow forever?"

"I haven't even that choice," Tsandi said. "He's gone to order the military coup he's been planning for months. With me out of the country it will succeed."

Adams chuckled. "I wonder if Ifnoka's going to be surprised when he finds out somebody's broken the transmitter he brought with him . . . ."

"And the telephone's out, too," Courtney said. She was sure it was.

"Somebody's been jamming the whole Station," Jeff Franklin reported. "Strangest thing . . ."

"But we can get a signal through for our friends," Adams said. "Of course your instructions for distributing the weapons will upset the army. I'd suggest you ask your Minister of Trade to arrest the top Ifnoka people before they cause trouble, right?"

"And your price? Merely closing the borders?" Tsandi asked.

"Yeah, for the guns. But if you want Nuclear General and our combine to invest in Rondidi, you'll have to show enough political stability to convince the others. You heard the meeting."

"So that's why I was there," Tsandi mused. "You make a persuasive case."

Courtney held her breath. It was von Alten as much as Bill, she thought. Profits—Tsandi could understand that motive easily, but he distrusted altruism.

The door burst open. Ifnoka hurried in, his robes askew, a perplexed technician behind him. "What have you done?" he demanded.

Before Adams could answer, Tsandi stood. He looked at Ifnoka with contempt. "What they are doing, Henry Carter, is what you have demanded but never wanted." He pointed through the window to the huge reactors, the tractors, and water pumps. The faint hum of turbines came even to this sound-proofed room. "They are giving power to the people!"

Grey water crashed over the bows, throwing spray droplets high in the air, where they were caught by the screaming wind and whipped down the ship's length. The tug plunged into the trough of the wave, seeming to stand on her bows, then leveled off and began the climb up the next wave. That one broke across the deck with a crashing shudder felt in every compartment. Another wave advanced inexorably from the west. There was always another wave.

"The 'Screaming Fifties,' " Captain Jellicic announced to no one in particular. "Christ pity a seaman."

His companion didn't answer, possibly because he hadn't heard him. He was inches shorter than the captain, a round man, overweight, but his face was angular
and
craggy, the jaw set. Michael Alden wore earphones, and he was listening intently. The ship pitched again, and a rogue wave caught her to roll her over until it seemed the bridge would go under water. Alden looked up in excitement. "Hold her steady, Captain! He's found something!"

"Here?" The captain curled his lip. "Bloody lot of good it'd do if you hit a strike here, Alden. 'Tis the worst place in the world!" He waved expansively at the grey waters. The sun was invisible above dark, brooding clouds that filled the skies from horizon to horizon. To the west a line of dark waves approached in a stately march, endless waves with curling white tops. Wind screamed unceasingly through the tug's rigging until the sound became part of the universe itself.

"Come right a touch," said Alden.

Jellicic scowled, but barked orders to the helmsman. The ship moved across the face of a wave, presenting the angle of the bow to the white water on its top, and more sea broke across her decks. Spray crashed like hail against the bridge windows.

"Steady," Alden said. He lifted a microphone. "Position fix. As good as you can get it. This looks like it."

Microwave antennae on the mast made tiny movements. High-frequency signals winged upward, where they made contact with a navigation satellite, and information flashed downward. Again. And again.

Captain Jellicic released a collapsing chart table hinged against the bulkhead. When it folded down, it nearly filled the bridge. He bent over it, scowling, and took a small instrument from a rack in the space the table had covered. He moved that about on the map, and his scowl darkened. He straightened to speak to Alden, but the engineer wasn't listening, and Jellicic impatiently poked the supercargo in the ribs. "We're
here,
ye daft fool! Look!"

Fifty-three degrees south latitude; the Falkland Islands were seven hundred miles due west, and another four hundred miles that way lay the entrance to the Straits of Magellan. The nearest land was two hundred and fifty miles southeast of the point Jellicic indicated. South Georgia Island, good for nothing, and owned by the British to boot.

"Not for nothing," Alden said.

Jellicic looked up, unaware that he'd been muttering. "Eh?"

Alden's face was grim. A tinge of green was visible around his cheekbones. "South Georgia. Not good for nothing. They render whales there. They're good for exterminating whales."

Jellicic shrugged. In his opinion anyone who sailed these Antarctic seas deserved whatever profit he could make; but Alden was a fanatic on that. There was no reasoning with him. "What have your lads found?" Jellicic asked.

"Mass concentrations. Veining down there. Thick veins. Manganese nodules to the deep floor. Veins in the sides of the crevasse. Just what we were looking for, Captain. And we've found it." He listened again for a moment. "Can you bring her about and over the same course again?"

Jellicic looked out at the crashing seas and thought of his little tug broad onto them. He pointed. Alden glanced up, then back at the chart. The captain shrugged and went back to the wheel. He wanted to be near the helm for this. As he watched the seas, waiting for a calm moment when he dared bring her around, he shook his head again. So they'd found metals. Copper, tin, gold perhaps. How could they bring anything up from fourteen hundred fathoms below the Southern Seas? The discoveries were of no value. He looked back at Alden's grim features and caught himself.

Perhaps they'd do it at that. But how?

It took Michael Alden two years. First he had to invent the technology to bring in mines for profit at two-thousand feet below the stormiest seas on earth, then he had to convince investors to put their money in it.

Technology, he found, wasn't his problem. The investors were ready for that. Howard Hughes mined the seas for twenty years before, and Hughes hadn't risked money on vigia. Alden's techniques were new, but the concept wasn't; and he'd found the richest source of ores ever discovered.

Economists waxed ecstatic over the potential markets: all of Latin America, and most of southern Africa. The minerals would come from the sea onto boats—onto the cheapest form of bulk transportation known. Given the minerals, Latin America was a fertile field for industries. Labor was cheap, investment costs low, taxes lower. The United States had become a horrible place for risk investment, with its unpopular governments, powerful unions, bad schools, and confiscatory taxes. U.S. investors were ready to move their capital.

It wasn't technology or economics that frightened investors away from Alden's mineral finds. It was politics.

Who owned the bottom of the sea?

Eventually ways to avoid the legal problems were found. They always are when enough money is at stake.

Ten years went by . . . .

There was bright sunshine overhead and new powder beneath his skis. Mont Blanc rose above him, brilliant in the new-fallen stuff, untouched; and there weren't many people out. Superintendent Enoch Doyle released the tension on his poles and plunged forward,
schussing
down the fall line, waiting until he was moving dangerously fast before bringing his shoulders around in perfect form, turning again in a series of christies, then back to the fall line,
wedeln
down with wagging hips. There was a mogul ahead and he took it perfectly, lift, springiness in the knees. Who said he'd forgotten and he ought to take it easy his first time out after so long behind a desk?

He had just cleared the mogul when the beeper screeched insistently. "No!" Doyle shouted into the rushing wind. He scrabbled at his parka, trying to find the off switch on the condemned thing, but he was moving too fast, it wasn't possible, and on he went, the enjoyment gone, past the turnoff to the high lift, around the logging road, through a narrow trail, now that was fun again and the hell with the bleep-bleep from under his parka.

Pole down, turn, turn again, cliff to his left, a long drop to doom, and Enoch laughed. The trail led to a steep bowl crowded with snow bunnies in tight trousers and tighter sweaters, gay colors against churned snow. Doyle threaded through them as fast as he dared. His wife was waiting outside the lodge. Enoch clipped a pole and mitt under one arm and used his free hand to turn off the bleeper.

She knew. He saw it as soon as he neared her. Her heart-shaped face, ringed with dark hair, incredible that she was so lovely and yet a grandmother twice now.

"They can't do this to you," she said. "It's your first vacation in four years. Tell them no, Enoch."

"Tell them no to what,
liebchen?
What is it they want?"

"Oh," she said, her mouth perfect roundness, holding it for a moment. "They did not warn you? You must call them."

"You wanted me to say no," he reminded her.

"But first you must know what it is that you are to say no about," she said. Her accent was faint, but it always came through in her English. Her French and Italian had none at all, but Enoch was born on the Scottish border, and Erica would speak to her man in his own language. Always. As if his German were not as good as hers, and his French and Spanish better. He put an arm around her waist to steady himself as he bent with chilled fingers to release the safety bindings and martinets of the skis. He kept his arm around her as they went into the lodge.

It was too warm inside, he had overheated on the slopes, only his hands were cold. He caught the eye of the counterman and was let inside the manager's office, took a seat at the desk, and called.

"International Security Systems," a pleasant voice answered.

"Doyle reporting in."

"Oh. Ja, Herr Superintendent. A moment,
bitte."
The phone hummed and clicked. American telephones didn't do that, he thought sourly. Nothing else in America worked anymore, except the telephones; but they always worked. Best in the world. An epitaph of pride. They had the best telephones in the world.

"Van Hartmann," the phone said. "Doyle?"

"Ja, Herr Hartmann."

They spoke German by tacit consent. "The Argentine has boiled over," Van Hartmann said. "You must go there at once. Herr Alden has called five times."

"But the
residentes,"
Doyle protested. "And Chief Inspector Menderez . . . ."

"Arrested. There is a new military junta in the Argentine. Molina is out, on his way to Portugal. And all our people are arrested. There are Argentine soldiers and police in Santa Rosa. Herr Alden is not the only one upset. He has called his board, and they are calling us."