“Go ahead,” he croaked. “Make it tough for me. I guess I deserve it.”
His eyes closed again.
Sarah looked at the general and shook her head.
“He’s still out there,” said Hayes.
“How’s Grimes?” she asked, taking Henry’s hand in hers.
“Alive. And the doctors don’t know why. Too stubborn to die, I guess. They’re giving him a fifty-fifty chance.”
Hayes looked around the room. “This isn’t a bad hospital room for an aircraft carrier.”
“What about Suarez? No one’s told me anything.”
“They tried to,” said Hayes, “but you wouldn’t listen. Unless it was about Henry. All you wanted to do was be with him.”
“Oh.” She blushed. “That seemed to be the only thing that mattered right then.” She had muddled memories of a million blank faces, all of them insisting on speaking in words that didn’t make sense and refusing to answer her one important question.
“Suarez,” Hayes was saying. “We found him with his throat torn open. There was blood all over Henry’s dog.”
Sarah stared at the general. “Shep?”
“As I say, he was covered with the man’s blood.”
Hayes smiled. “A five-hundred-man army invades the place and still it takes a dog to kill a terrorist. Still, it would have been better if we’d been able to capture Suarez alive. We need some information on the bombs. How deep in the ice they’re buried — that sort of thing.”
“But it could all be so much worse. What if Suarez had sent the signal to detonate?”
“He did.”
She stared.
“He sent that signal, all right,” said Hayes, “and he sent it in spite of our releasing five billion dollars, per his instructions. Seems the bastard had some big real-estate scheme. His intention all along was to change the world’s coastlines so he could make a huge profit out of millions of square miles of wasteland he’d bought up for next to nothing. All the business about the ransom was just a smokescreen. Well, and maybe some additional petty cash.”
“But…?”
The general patted her arm. “When our hero wakes up, Sarah, you can tell him he’s getting the Medal of Honor, and his dog is getting… whatever medal it is they give to dogs.”
“A fair reward for saving the world,” she said waspishly.
“Well, to tell you the truth,” said Hayes gently, “it was NASA that saved the collective hides of the human race.”
“NASA?”
“It was the biggest covert space project in history.
They couldn’t let Suarez get wind of it, you see. They were able to get a polar-orbiting radio-jamming satellite in place in only a few days. They even managed a Shuttle launch in secret. Amazing work. Everyone said they’d never make the deadline… but they did it. The story will come out soon.
“You see, there was no way we could stop Suarez sending his signal — short of nuking his Hacienda. We couldn’t get to him. But there was a way we could stop the signal getting through.
“Suarez pressed the big red button, or whatever adolescent device he’d set up, and he thought he’d detonated his bombs. The software on that laptop of his told him that that was exactly what he’d done. But of course the software was set up to report on what should have been happening — it had no way to detect what was actually happening. No sensors, no satellite cameras, no way at all.”
Hayes harrumphed.
“What the software had been programmed to do was run a simulation. Which was exactly what, according to our tech boys and girls who’ve been examining its hard drive, it did.
“So Suarez pulled the trigger and watched all the pretty pictures, while all the time his signal was being jammed a hundred miles above the South Pole.
“Now all we’ve got to do is figure out how to get the bombs out of the ice without setting them off.” He coughed and looked embarrassed. “They’ve special y requested I don’t help them with that part.”
“I don’t get this,” said Sarah. “If all this signal- jamming had been set up, why bother storming Suarez’s hideout? Why the big battle? Were all those lives wasted in vain?” Her voice was steadily rising. “Did Henry just about get himself killed for nothing?”
“Ah,” said Hayes, “there’s another part of it I haven’t told you yet, and it mustn’t ever leave this room.”
“Oh yeah?”
“You see, NASA managed to get the jamming satellite in place in time, as I’ve told you. A truly astonishing achievement.”
“And?”
Her foot was tapping the hospital linoleum. Even a battle-hardened military man like Hayes thought better than to look at the expression on her face.
“They managed it exactly forty-seven point zero three seconds before Suarez pressed the button.”
Epilogue
The wind was still there waiting for Henry when he returned to the deep ice some months later with his new bride.
Sarah leapt from the chopper ahead of everyone else and ran to the edge of the crater. The hole was a flat-bottomed bowl of ice a mile wide and over two thousand feet deep. A frozen lake loomed down at sea level, its shape so perfectly round that it looked as though a potter’s hand had smoothed it.
Henry, still having to move cautiously, his body protesting, followed as close on her heels as he could manage. Shep pranced along beside him.
Finaly, General Anthony Hayes stepped from the aircraft. Ducking involuntarily to avoid the rotating blades, he remained close to the chopper.
“Why do we come back to these godforsaken places, General?” said Kai Grimes, leaning out the door and staring at the blue-white snow.
“You’re on your own, Kai. It just seemed the right thing to do, somehow. Besides, we couldn’t disobey a direct order from the Commander-in-Chief, could we? Our President’s a man of sentiment, and has a good feeling for the proprieties.”
Grimes grinned. “I know, Tony. And if he hadn’t given the order I might have come back here on my own, just to see where it all started.”
For a few moments they said nothing, just watched the newly-weds and the dog disporting themselves on the ice. Then: “Henry seems to be doing okay,” said Hayes, “Good thing Suarez’s bullets weren’t filled with spent uranium, like the one that hit you, or your hero wouldn’t be sightseeing at all.”
Henry put an arm around Sarah and pointed to the middle of the great hole as though about to say something. Emotion welled up in his throat, cutting off his words.
He had been going to tell her that it was here that he’d run into the terrorists. But she knew that. That was why they were here, after all.
Why they were here. The truth of the matter was that they shouldn’t be down here on the ice. When they’d set off earlier in the day the plan had been just to fly over the crater, examining it from a safe distance. There was still radiation hanging about the site — and would be for many years to come. But, as General Hayes had pointed out, the site was safe enough for a brief visit. “Nuke technology has come a long way since Hiroshima,” he’d said. “Today’s techies can make tactical nukes pretty clean. It’s lucky Suarez’s boys knew what they were doing, otherwise no one would be studying this ice for a long time.”
Yet Henry and Sarah, looking down at where it had all started, had wanted to see the place, to experience the devastation at first hand rather than from a safe few thousand feet above. And, surprisingly, Kai Grimes had supported them as they’d argued their case to Hayes, who’d finally issued the instruction to the pilot to set the chopper down.