The Vulcan Disaster

Vicki was silent for quite a while, shifting gears expertly, racing style, and really moving up into the hills behind Nice. It was a road I’d never travelled, but I had some idea where she was going. They’d have a meeting place stashed close by, a place with a radio...

“What do you know about doctoring?” I said.

“Nothing,” she said, her eyes on the road. “But we have a friend I can call...”

“I’ll be all right,” Leon said, but from between clenched teeth. He understood the need for her fast driving, too. “Sonia,” he said. “This is Nick Carter.”

“Nick Car...?” She turned her eyes to us. “B-but...”

“As you said,” I told her, “we’re all phonies here. Sonia? I kind of liked Vicki, somehow.”

“She is... my sister,” Leon said. “She has been our contact aboard the Vulcan. She has had the bulk of the dirty work so far.”

“I was trying to talk Leon into letting me go,” she said. She bit her lip, then went on. “I saw myself being a little fool, turning into the sort of vain and stupid and capricious person they were, just from being around them all the time. Today — I was so stupid and mean, playing with you like that...”

“Okay,” I said. “No problem. Besides, Constantin’s dead.”

“Dead? But he was not one of them...”

“But he followed me, and they took him for me in the dark. I ran into the somebody afterward, a minute or so later, and stuck a shiv into him. He...”

Leon tried to sit up some. “Nick. Did you see his hands? Did he...”

“Did he have a little Star of David tattooed on the web between thumb and forefinger? Yes. Why?”

He just nodded, though. “I knew it. I knew we would run into them here. The opening moves are over in that particular search. You hear, Sonia? It is the endgame. We are getting close. We...”

But she was paying attention to the road, and a good thing too; it was winding and twisting, and all the curves were banked the wrong way, and there wasn’t any shoulder above a sheer drop. I decided not to look down. Presently she turned into a big gap in a long row of trees on the shore side of the road, and we slowed down as the car’s tires hit gravel and crunched loudly, throwing rocks up against the mudguards.

Watching the “friend” — who turned out to be a brawny nurse — patch up Leon’s leg, with him grinding the molars but smiling, I decided he was more extraordinary than previously thought. We could only make small talk until she left; but then it seemed time to open up. We had to decide what we could do to patch up the operation.

“You were,” I said, sipping the straight scotch Sonia had handed me, “going to tell me about the guys with the tattoos. You...”

She handed Leon a drink, too. “The Sons of David,” she said. “They are the pilot fish of the people Leon and I are here to smelt out.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Israel,” Leon said, taking the ball, “has her own crackpots, fanatics — whatever you choose to call them. We also have our own traitors and renegades. We are a small country, but already we have a little of everything one can expect to find in a much larger country.” He sat up in the bed and pulled a pillow behind his back.

“There is a type of mentality I can only call suicidal. Fundamentally suicidal. Capable of orienting the entire organism around the prospect of its own death. In a way you’d have to say Hitler was an extreme example of this sort of already extreme mentality. The one thing you could reliably predict, given the first organization of the German war machine, was the eventual sight of Germany in ruins and rubble, her people demoralized, many of them homeless, starving. In a way you have to say that Hitler did everything he possibly could to ensure that this would happen. Every foolish move that he made, with such a bold and confident air, only hastened the arrival of that day in that bunker in Berlin. He had gone out of his way — perhaps more than any man in history — to make enemies, the stronger and more unforgiving the better...”

“I get you,” I said. “It’s one way of looking at it.”

“Nick,” Leon said. “Our parents managed to live through Auschwitz. My father once told me that the only thing that saved them was being able to take an objective view. Any other view ended in madness. Sonia and I have had to turn certain switches inside our minds off from time to time. We have had to...”

“I understand.”

“All right. These people — the Sons of David — are people who cannot wait for the next war with the Arabs. They want one right now — and one to the death. You know what that would mean, given the present odds as of the Yom Kippur War...”

“Ouch,” I said. “And... omigod.” I told them about the Hong Kong incidents — the hijacked shipment of arms, the lost microfilm, everything. “I couldn’t understand their actions then, though, and I can’t understand them now.”