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42

In Southern California, the year's rainy season had begun late but with gusto, reminding Rafi Glickman of winter in Israel. The tires buzzed on the wet freeway pavement, and the delivery van's wipers slashed furiously back and forth. Its cargo was not the bread suggested by the name "Romeo's Bakery" painted on the sides. The disguise was only skin-deep. There hadn't been room for even a facade of loaves, to satisfy a quick look through the door. There was barely room for the cargo and technician.

"Slow down," Rafi said in Hebrew. "The exit's just ahead."

Despite the exceedingly sparse 2 a.m. traffic, the driver had not been speeding. It wouldn't do to be stopped by the Highway Patrol. It was bad enough having to leave on an exit whose road would take them into the mountains. A bread truck driving into the Cleveland National Forest at two in the morning? If that wasn't suspicious! But the tall step-van would itself seem odd on such a road, so Ben David had ordered something misleading painted on its side.

Rafi was mildly troubled by not knowing how the test worked. He wondered if even the technician knew. He didn't know the technician, not even his name; names were not divulged unnecessarily, and one never asked. Only Ben David knew them all, kept in a memory as remarkable as Rafi's own. Somewhere, presumably, they were written, otherwise the loss of the gray and silent Yeshua Ben David would cripple the organization. Perhaps the names were in a safe deposit box somewhere. If he could find out . . . but he couldn't imagine being so lucky.

He saw the exit sign, and looked at the offside rearview mirror for following headlights. The only pair in sight were a half mile back; judging by the running lights, a semi. Elena moved onto the off-ramp. She was part of the disguise, not only female, but Hispanic-looking and speaking—a Mexican Jew whose Hebrew was limited. Her English was quite good though, with an accent she could thicken as needed.

Lights on dim, they drove a narrow blacktopped road that wound upward through chapparal foothills. It steepened, the winding became a series of switchbacks, and soon they entered forest—pine, eventually with a mixture of fir. With its heavy burden, the van's engine labored on the grades. When they arrived at the crest, Elena pulled off on a short side road leading to an overlook. By day there might have been scenery, but now, all Rafi saw was the sodden sky. At this elevation, he told himself, they were lucky the rain wasn't snow.

Wearing a slicker, he got out to guide Elena with hand signals. She parked with the rear doors facing east, with plenty of room between them and the overlook's waist-high stone safety wall. Then she set the parking brake, leaving the motor running to keep the battery charged. Even though they wouldn't actually launch the bird, the test program required unloading it and "going through the motions." It was a nuisance, but the hardware for monitoring was built into the bird, and only functioned in operating mode.

Elena stayed in the cab, out of the rain, which was better than all right with Rafi. That way she wouldn't see and wonder about some of the things he planned to do.

After opening the rear doors, he took out a pair of chocks and blocked the rear wheels. Inside, he could see the nameless technician at his keyboard, doing what, Rafi had no idea. They were to test the bird's guidance program, that was all he knew. He himself stayed outside in the weather, watching the heavy-duty telescoping ramp extrude from the cargo section, driven by a powerful electric motor. It extruded straight for two meters, supported by folding legs with wheels, till the first hinged joint was clear. Then legs and ramp began to fold, while the extrusion continued.

It seemed to Rafi that the ramp, with its tracks, must have cost $30,000 or more, built and installed, even at current prices. And it had to be compatible with the bird's launch computer. The vehicle's original struts, or whatever it had had, and its brakes, must have been replaced with something stronger. The motor probably had, too, and the van's electrical system must have been augmented. While the cost of the missile itself had surely been several times that of all the rest. A lot of money for the times. Obviously Ben David had very major resources.

When Baran had first mentioned having the bird, Rafi had researched the available, non-confidential information on it, including testing procedures. In military situations, the purpose of monitoring a Ninja Junior was to support ESAK installations—electronic seek and kill—reporting any hostile discovery events and interception attempts detected by the bird's sensors, and finally reporting its arrival on target. The reason for this test, however, could hardly be ESAK.

And from something Baran himself had said, Rafi had guessed that the bird, as delivered, lacked the military guidance software. So someone had had to write a program for one. Thus it seemed to Rafi that this would be a virtual flight—what the military termed a planetary matrix exploration—to test that program.

It was dangerous information for Rafi to have. His function was simply to see certain actions carried out, without knowing what they meant.

After a minute, extrusion was complete, the ramp in three segments, one within the truck, one slanting down to the ground, and the outermost forming a launch base. But the electric motor still hummed loudly, and the bird itself began to emerge, its sleek nose followed by an uptilted body with stubby wings. It rode a meter-and-a-half carriage, that on the ramp's sloping mid-section, adjusted itself to the bird's center of gravity.

When the carriage reached the end, the motor shut off. Now Rafi could hear a much smaller, whisperlike hum from inside the Ninja Junior. The sound, he supposed, of its onboard computer booting up.

Hitching up his left sleeve, he touched the light switch on his wristwatch, and waited. Heard a tiny beep within the missile, and read the time to the second. Then he clambered into the rear of the van to watch the computer screen, peering intently over the technician's shoulder.

It was a long wait, the bird still crouching on its carriage while an electronic duplicate moved across an unlabeled grid on the computer screen, an icon crossing cyberspace at a virtual 0.8 Mach.

The grid's edges were labelled with latitude and longitude, in ten-minute intervals. What Rafi waited for was something that would tell him what the target was—if anything did. Otherwise he'd figure it out, using his watch, a map, and the terminal phase speed of 0.8 Mach. That ought to do it.

Forty minutes, sixty . . . He'd tensed with watching, and realizing it, relaxed as best he could. He could hear Elena snoring in the driver's seat, but dared not doze himself. He had not taken benzedrine; he would not risk its effects on judgement. He'd stay on his feet, and if necessary fight off sleep using techniques he'd learned in the true Mossad. The old Mossad, the one he'd been proud to be part of.

Finally the icon burst in a virtual explosion. Numbers appeared, held for a long moment and were gone. A moment long enough that his odd and valuable memory had imaged and retained them. Glancing at his watch, Rafi imaged it, too.

Had the actual bird been fired, using the actual military targeting program, its 500-pound payload would supposedly have been delivered within three meters of its intended target. Theoretically. Three meters! Rafi was skeptical, even with the computer using the planetary gravitic matrix.

"Is that it?" he asked. Pretending he didn't know.

The technician nodded in the dim light of his tiny workstation. "Yes," he said.

"Good. Get ready to leave."

He didn't watch the emergence and extrusion processes reverse themselves. Instead he awakened Elena, rousting her muttering from the cab to walk about a little in the rain, which now was mixed with large snowflakes. He ran in place himself, and did pushups on the cold wet pavement.

When the truck was ready, they drove away. Now the precipitation was all snow, filling the headlight beams with onrushing white, and rattling Elena, who'd never driven in snow before. But by the time they reached the interstate, they were out of it, in rain again.

They arrived at the warehouse in a faint and sodden dawn. There a man they both knew took custody of the delivery van, and Rafi left in his Honda. Its dirt washed off by God, he told himself.

* * *

In his apartment, he spread a twenty-two-inch map printout of the Southwestern United States, from San Diego eastward to longitude 103 degrees. Then he put a tack at the location approximating the longitude and latitude he'd imaged mentally from the computer screen. It was a little west of Raton, New Mexico. The name meant nothing to him. He couldn't imagine anything there that the Wrath would invest their Ninja Junior on. Perhaps there'd been a programming error.

With pocket calculator and map scale, he estimated how many map inches the bird should have flown, given its stated terminal phase velocity, and fudging a bit for the average 0.65 Mach prior to reaching terminal phase. It was the best he could do. Then he tied a string to a soft pencil, knotted the string to mark the estimated flight length, taped the knot to the approximate location where they'd parked, and pressed a push tack through tape and knot. Finally he used the pencil to describe an arc on the map. It passed through "the impact site," curving northward. Eighty miles north, it passed a few miles west of Lauenbruck, Colorado. On his computer, he accessed the Absolute Geographical Atlas, magnified Colorado, then Huerfano County. Fifteen map miles west of Lauenbruck was a dot labelled Henrys Hat. Henrys Hat!

With a toneless whistle he straightened. A Ninja Junior for such a target? It made Ben David and Baran seem more insane than he'd thought. Ben David's cold stare would no doubt inspire his programmer to correct whatever had been wrong. Rafi was glad it wasn't himself.

His small project completed, he swigged orange juice, then poured a large bowl of cereal and put milk and sugar on it. That was quicker than almost any other meal. After eating it, he took a hot shower, and crawled into bed without setting his alarm.

 

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