The accusation hit Saeed like a blow, driving him back a step, but Kismet did not relent. He turned to fully face the other man, tensing his muscles in readiness as he hurled the final verbal assault. “I’m sure your brother would be proud.”
As the Iraqi staggered back another step, Kismet saw his chance. But in the instant he leapt from his perch, fully intending to pounce on Saeed in order to wrestle the gun away, the other man was abruptly swept off his feet. From out of nowhere, Chiron had launched a simultaneous attack, tackling the Iraqi to the metal deck. Even before Kismet’s feet touched down, the noise of a gunshot, muffled by the close proximity of bodies, punctuated the violence of the action.
Kismet landed badly twisting his right ankle and sprawled headlong, but in the grip of adrenaline, barely felt the pain. He sprang to his feet and charged at the writhing tangled shape that was Saeed and Chiron. The gun roared again, and a scarlet mist appeared for an instant in the air above them. Then Pierre Chiron, who had once attacked and defeated a similarly armed killer with only his umbrella, rolled away, clutching ineffectually at the gushing torrent of crimson that boiled from his chest.
In the instant that Kismet made his leap from the turret, a very different struggle was reaching its climax three hundred meters below. Phillipe Baudoin, the acting chief engineer stared anxiously at his wristwatch, then wiped a hand across his forehead. He had tacitly promised Kismet that the last-ditch plan to thwart the madman atop the tower would be in place in one hour. That had been sixty-three minutes ago.
He had expected that there would be delays. Experience had taught him that events rarely proceeded according to plan. Anticipation of these unpredictable but foreseeable problems had been the reason for his original two-hour estimate, but he had been confident that, if only a few things went wrong, he would be able to have the tower pylons wired ahead of the one-hour mark. True to expectations, those problems had become manifest. The supply of copper wire he had requested from the power company had to be drawn from several locations, requiring an unparalleled feat of logistical juggling. Traffic around the tower had snarled to a halt, making it difficult for the trucks to get through. The last shipment had arrived forty minutes after his request, leaving precious little time to splice and coil it around the last remaining pillar. There had been other setbacks. The team on the north pylon had inadvertently wrapped the wire in the wrong direction, and while it had not actually delayed the operation, it was typical of what Americans called Murphy’s Law: anything that can go wrong, will. Even more frustrating was the evident disappearance of one of his crew leaders. Perhaps the man had succumbed to panic or abandoned his post in a futile effort to warn loved ones. Baudoin knew the missing man, and knew him to ordinarily be of unimpeachable character, but these were not ordinary circumstances.
He had not once stopped to consider the merit of what he had been instructed to do. He had no illusions about the efficacy of depolarizing the tower in order to prevent some kind of catastrophe. Kismet had made it clear that the procedure’s real value was as a psychological bargaining chip with the madman high above, and as such, it really didn’t matter whether they completed the job or not, so long as Chiron believed it done. But Baudoin was driven by a different motivation. He was an engineer, a problem solver, and when he committed to a course of action, he would settle for nothing less than absolute success.
“Phillipe,” crackled a voice from his walkie-talkie. It was Renny on the south pylon. He held the radio to his ear and glanced up to the sloping column where the last section of wire was being strung. The whole affair seemed like some insane Christmas decoration. “Go ahead.”
“”Phillipe, it is done!”
Baudoin heaved a sigh of relief and checked his watch one last time. Sixty-five minutes. “All teams get clear of the tower. I will activate the system in twenty seconds.”
He continued counting audibly into the speaker as he started the gasoline generator that was spliced into a DC power converter. Although a relatively low voltage was required to create the desired electromagnetic effect, there was no escaping the simple physics. They had used more than a kilometer of copper wire, and it was going to take a lot more than a dry cell battery to make this work. His finger hovered near the switch that would start the flow of electricity into the circuit until finally the moment came. For safety’s sake, he made a final visual sweep of the tower base.
All clear, he thought, and threw the switch.
A torturously loud humming noise issued from the power converter, followed by a flash of brilliant light. Baudoin did not need to smell the ozone and burnt wiring to know that something had gone wrong. The exact nature of the malfunction eluded him. Perhaps the tower’s intrinsic magnetic field was greater than he had believed, or maybe he had miscalculated the resistance in the line. Whatever the cause, there was no escaping the totality of his failure. He had promised Kismet an oppositely charged electromagnet in order to thwart Chiron’s plan. That wasn’t going to happen.
He could only pray that Kismet had already succeeded in bluffing the madman atop the tower into relenting from his mad scheme. If not…
If not, Baudoin realized darkly, I suppose I’ll never know.
Saeed brandished the pistol at Kismet, but he was a fraction of a second too late. Kismet’s left fist wrapped around the barrel and, with a deft twist, he ripped it from the other man’s grasp, but a flailing blow from Saeed knocked the gun away and sent it skittering across the platform. A second strike, directed with more force and intention, caught Kismet in the chest and redirected the momentum of his charge so that he flew over Saeed’s supine form and crashed headlong. He recovered almost instantaneously, but his assailant had likewise regained his senses. Saeed struck first.
There was no hesitancy in the Iraqi’s attack. His hands flew toward Kismet’s throat, his fingers digging into flesh like the talons of a raptor. Kismet instinctively struck at Saeed’s forearms and wrists, but his foe merely pulled himself closer to limit Kismet’s range of motion. Kismet felt his pulse pounding in his veins as the stranglehold tightened. Abandoning the futile defense, he instead launched an attack of his own.
Saeed was a killer, but he wasn’t a fighter. Though his victims during the long years prior to his exile were almost innumerable, they were without exception prisoners, deprived of sleep and food and tortured into submission. As an officer, he had disdained combat training, and now, faced with a battle of the most primitive kind, he had only his atavistic impulses to guide him. It was a poor substitute for skill.
Threading his hands between Saeed’s forearms, Kismet gripped the lapels of the other man’s garment and crossed them over to form a makeshift garrote. Ferocious though it was, Saeed’s assault was ineffectual alongside Kismet’s cross-collar chokehold. The Iraqi’s eyes bulged, first with distress, then from the pressure of depleted blood trapped in the vasculature of his face. Realization dawned, but it was already too late; Saeed’s grip on his neck simply fell away as his oxygen-starved brain ceased transmitting nervous impulses.