Armitage inhaled. His chest felt tight. If the feeling persisted, he would have to page his nurse into the room and be administeed a respiratory dilator. He felt a sudden bolt of hatred, and wasn't sure why. Nor was he even certain toward whom it was directed.
Outside the window a seabird emitted a shrill, ribboning cry as it plunged through the low veil of fog.
He looked at Halpern.
"I appreciate the tip, William," he said. "But the one thing you haven't told me is where you come down in this."
Halpern crossed his legs and was silent a moment.
"We've known each other for years, and you've always given me sound financial advice," he said finally. "But as you said yourself, this business is about money, not loyalty or faith… and like all bankers, I'm an agnostic."
"Meaning you'll be listening to Roger Gordian's statement before deciding whether to stay behind the bid."
Halpern nodded, brushing a speck of lint off his trousers.
"Yes," he said without hesitation. "And very closely."
On a stubby finger of rock jutting off his island base's ocean side, Kersik stared out across the benighted water at the lights of Sandakan Harbor. Restless, he had left camp alone, thinking the freshness of the breeze would somehow dispel his somber mood, but instead it had made him feel worse. He supposed it was his knowledge of the violence that soon would be launched from his pristine shoreline, the deaths that were inevitably to come. There would be dozens, perhaps hundreds… if not many, many more. For a just cause, yes, or anyway a cause in which he squarely believed. But wasn't that the same ancient, self-righteous madness which drove every act of war?
Men fought. They had always fought, whether armed with stones, arrows, guns, or nuclear torpedoes. And they found their reasons. Indeed, Kersik sometimes felt that belief in a cause was nothing but a dark funnel into which both heroes and villains leaped with equal certitude, all tumbling together like clown players in a circus. Like the man who presently ruled Indonesia as if he were a Javanese king, parsing the nation's wealth out to his courtesans… like his predecessor, and Suharto, and those who had come before them, Kersik saw himself as being on the right side of history. Zhiu Sheng, Nga, Luan, they too were right from their individual perspectives — and yet the forces that had moved them into alignment were far too complex to be defined by absolutes.
Kersik's brow creased above his bushy eyebrows. Wasn't the judgment of right or wrong only a matter of who survived to render the verdict when the smoke cleared and the spilled blood of the dead was washed away? He had renounced his allegiance to his country's government and was about to place himself in defiance of ASEAN, Japan, and the United States. The entire world, really. Before all was said and done, he would be called a rogue, an international pariah. And what would he think of himself in the end? Might a division ultimately form in his own mind… half of him feeling validated, half condemned?
Kersik gazed out at the lights of a city that in the last 150 years had been governed once by the Germans, twice by the British, and exploited by traders, gunrunners, and timber lords from diverse corners of the globe. That during World War II was invaded by the Japanese and leveled by American bombs… and that now literally and ironically held the keys to the fate of both those nations.
Kersik stood and thought and looked out across the ocean swells.. and after a while became dimly aware of a scurrying in the mangrove thicket behind him.
He turned, snapping on his flashlight, his right hand falling to the holstered Makarov at his waist. The sound had not really alarmed him; the only men on the island were the Thai's seawolves and his own commando units, and both groups had lookouts posted along the shore. Still, he was beyond all else a soldier… and good soldiers had cautious habits.
He trained the beam of his flash at eye level, saw nothing but smooth, gangling mangrove trunks and prop roots, and lifted it higher. Just below the leaf cover, a flying lemur clung to the bark and watched him with huge orblike eyes.
For a moment Kersik experienced a queer, almost dizzying transference, imagining how he might appear to the strange little creature — clumsily threatening, out of place, himself the real alien. He withdrew his hand from his pistol grip as if it were red-hot, feeling an intense and incomprehensible guilt.
The creature studied him for another second or two with its perfectly round eyes, and then spread its flight membranes and kited off into the forest blackness.
Shaken and hardly knowing why, Kersik stepped into the brush and walked back toward camp.
As one of the test pilots of the original Learjet had told Gordian about its maiden run, the flight had gone better than expected and he'd expected it to go well.
That about said it for the trip to Washington.
Now, approaching Dulles International Airport at 8,500 feet and 350 knots downwind, autopilot off, the night sky clear and moonlit, Gordian cross-checked the Global Positioning System and VOR windows on his horizontal-situation indicator for a course fix, then radioed ahead to request airspace clearance.
"Washington, Learjet Two Zero Nine Tango Charlie, over Alexandria VOR at eight thousand, landing Dulles. Squawking one two zero zero," he said, finishing his initial communique with the standard numeric identification code for civilian aircraft.
A moment later the traffic controller responded, providing the computer code by which his radar-beacon system would differentiate Gordian's plane from other aircraft in the vicinity as it was guided down.
"Good evening Nine Tango, Washington Approach. Squawk five zero eight one and ident. Radar contact established, cleared into Washington Class B airspace. Descend and maintain four thousand."
"Roger. Learjet Nine Tango, squawking five zero eight one. Understand cleared into the TCA. Out of eight for four."
The buildings and illuminated landing strips of Dulles in sight below, Gordian trimmed power and entered a steady sink, carefully monitoring the instrument panel, making small heading corrections as he descended. Less than ten minutes later he again contacted the man on the ground floor.
"Approach, Leaijet Nine Tango, level at four."
"Learjet Nine Tango, roger. Am familiar and would like Runway One Four Left."
"Cleared for approach One Four Left," the Approach controller began after a brief pause, then vectored and sequenced him into the lineup of arriving aircraft.
Not at all to Gordian's surprise, Approach concluded the transmission by informing him he would have to hold and circle at four thousand feet. In D. C. and other major cities, the terminal environment was often stacked with inbound traffic, in which instances one could look forward to a tedious wait.
He re-engaged the auto and informed his passengers they would have time for at least a couple of Scull's equally tedious jokes.
It was twenty-five minutes before the controller assigned a further descent altitude and then handed Gordian over to the tower — not as long as it might have taken, although he was still glad to be out of the pattern. The repetitive banking maneuver had been tiresome, and gobbled up more fuel than he would have preferred.
He switched to the tower frequency and identified himself.
"Leaijet Two Zero Nine Tango Charlie cleared to land Runway One Four Left," the ATC acknowledged.
Gordian took the wind headings from him, rogered, and then read down the items on his computerized final checklist, mentally ticking them off to the line above Gear and Flaps. Although it sometimes seemed he had memorized the various checklist tasks when he was still in diapers, Gordian conscientiously ran through it before, during, and immediately after each flight. To do otherwise would be to deny his own fallibility, and that was not a mistake he ever intended to make — most especially not at the risk of people's lives.