Under Vanishing Skies Read online

  “Very good. And those opposed?”

  Michio, Shannon, and I raised our hands.

  “Will the secretary please note that there were ten in favor and three opposed. Having not met the required twelve votes, the motion fails.”

  Michio nodded and sat down, his face devoid of emotion. I made a mental note never to play poker with him.

  Abdul-Wahid took off his sandal and began to beat it on the tabletop while glaring at Michio, Shannon and me...but mostly at Shannon. Shannon smiled and blew him a kiss. She was the only female on the Council and her action sent Adbul into a rage. He stood up and beat his sandal harder. I waited to see Shannon’s next move, but a melodic Islamic chant worked its way into the room from the mosque down the street. Abdul froze, sandal still in hand.

  “Allahu Akbar,” someone said and then repeated, “Allahu Akbar.” The words had a Pavlovian effect on almost everyone in the room. One by one, people got up and started to shuffle out.

  “Gentlemen. It is call to prayers,” Ahmed said for formality’s sake. “Therefore, I propose a thirty minute recess. Is there a second?”

  Abdul-Wahid, who was now putting his sandal back on, mumbled something unintelligible.

  Lifting his gavel, Ahmed asked, “We have a second, so all in favor?”

  Half the room was already gone, but it didn’t matter. End of the world or not, the Maldives was still a Muslim state, so voting against daily prayers was not really an option. Those in the room raised their hands and Ahmed declared a recess with a thump of his gavel.

  Shannon came over and plopped down in the chair next to me. Without a word, she lifted her long legs and rested them on my lap. I pretended like I couldn’t see up her skirt, but I was never very good at pretending.

  She represented the far southern islands, the Gan atoll. The islands were populated predominately with refugees, most from Sri Lanka. I still thought it was odd that she ended up as their representatives, but she was a very likable person. I mean, what’s not to like?

  “You know,” she said. “I think I’ll teach Abdul how we used to settle our differences in the back streets of Dublin. We didn’t use sandals back there, we used our fists.” She smiled and winked at me as she pushed a loose strand of blond hair behind her ear.

  I smiled as an image of Shannon kicking the shit out of that little creep popped into my head.

  Michio walked over and joined us. “This is pointless. We have just wasted four days of work because they refuse to follow the rules.”

  “You said this would be easy, Shannon.”

  “I don’t recall using those exact words,” she said.

  “Well, whatever words you used, I’m getting really tired of this shit and I’ve only been on the Council for a couple of weeks. I don’t know how you two have lasted so long. I still think it would be easier if we let the captain of that ship decide for us,” I said.

  Both of them stared at me.

  Michio spoke first. “No. We must stand strong. The rest of the Council will eventually see that we all have too much to lose if we do not compromise. In the end, they will honor the charter.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?” Shannon said. “They have about as much honor as the fucking Irish Republican Army back in 2096 when they broke the hundred-year truce.”

  “The IRA uprising was over forty years ago,” I said. “I think it’s time you let it go.”

  “We let it go once and look what happened,” she said. “You can never let your guard down with bastards like that. We need to watch our backs.”

  I chuckled and Shannon asked, “What’s so damned funny, Yank?”

  “Us. There are only three of us, for God’s sake. The only way we can watch our backs is if you watch Michio’s back, Michio watches my back, and I watch your back.”

  Her smile widened and her incredible green eyes twinkled. “Sounds like some kind of excuse for you to stare at my backside.” She flipped another lock of hair off her forehead with a suggestive toss of her head.

  “Come on,” she said. “They’ll be gone for a good hour. Let’s go grab a cup of tea.”

  She swung her legs off my lap, placed a hand on my thigh, and pushed herself up. Michio stood up next to her.

  “What are you waiting for?” she asked. “An invitation from the bloody queen?”

  No. I was waiting for the blood to stop rushing to a particular part of my body.

  ***

  Down the street from the hotel was a small café with three tables set out on the sidewalk. Like most businesses in the post-storm world, the owner operated the café under the barter system. When we ordered our tea, Shannon gave him a small jar of fish paste, a product of her island chain, and a kiss on the cheek. I’ll bet he would have given us the tea just for the kiss. I would have.

  I sat down and listened as Shannon launched into one of her many tall tales. It was a story I hadn’t heard before. She was a great storyteller and I could listen to her for hours.

  “And so there I was, out in the middle of the channel trying to teach these six Buddhist monks to surf. The boat had dropped us off and wouldn’t be back for an hour. I had to admit that for pudgy fellas, they had pretty good balance. Anyway, after about ten minutes, I grabbed a beautiful curl and thought I’d show them a few tricks. The curl broke unexpectedly and I went down like a sack of potatoes. When I came up for air, I realized that my bikini, top and bottom, were gone...just gone.”

  Michio and I laughed.

  He asked, “So what did you do?”

  “Well, I figured these gentlemen paid for a full hour lesson and I wasn’t about to welch on the deal. So I climbed onto my board and paddled right back to the where I left the pack of them floating. I sat up, legs straddled on either side of the board, and said, ‘Alright gentlemen. Who wants to be the first to shoot the curl?’ I’m not sure what they thought I was talking about, but all six hands shot up, and a few were raising other parts of their anatomy, if you know what I mean.”

  Tea spurted out of my nose. I grabbed the edge of the tablecloth to dry my face. When I looked up, Jin was standing there. I sprang out of my seat, nearly dropping my cup.

  “Well I’ll be goddammed...look who it is.” We shook hands and I asked, “What are you doing here? Did something break in the radio tower again?”

  “It is good to see you too, Aron.” He nodded politely towards Shannon and Michio before saying, “No. There is nothing wrong with the tower as far as I know. I came to speak with you.”

  I gave him a puzzled look, but Jin’s round baby face remained impassive. The only indication that something was amiss was his eyes. Jin was the third member of the IICN musketeers. Rick, Jin, and I worked our asses off building the IICN. I knew him almost as well as I had known Rick. So when I saw his eyes, I knew something was wrong.

  “It is a private matter,” he said. “Can we go for a walk?”

  Looking at my watch, I said, “I don’t have a lot of time. Can we meet later for dinner?”

  He shook his head. “It is important that I speak with you now.”

  I looked over at Shannon and Michio. “I’ll see you guys back in the Council. Send me a message if something important pops up.” Not that I expected anything important to happen in that worthless meeting.

  I looked at Jin and said, “Okay, let’s go.” Jin’s expression worried me. The last time I saw him like this was when his son had almost fallen from the top of a hundred-foot communications tower.

  We walked in silence on the cobblestone street in front of a string of small, pastel-colored hotels facing the ocean. Hell, most of buildings on Male faced the ocean. The island was only a mile long and a half mile wide. It was hard not to face the ocean.

  We crossed the street and headed down toward the beach along the promenade. When we reached the base of the communication tower he stopped.

  Sheathed in overlapping curved stainless steel panels, it looked more like a modern art sculpture than a communications tower. A hundred y
ears ago it had housed equipment used to detect signals from tsunami buoys. Later, it became a memorial for the thousands killed during one of the largest tsunamis in recorded history. Now it was the main equipment hub and communications tower for the IICN.

  Jin didn’t say anything, so I did, “What’s up, Jin? You look worried.”

  He looked around, and then finally said, “I have learned something disturbing.”

  “Okay.” Now he had me looking from side to side and I didn’t know why. “It’s just you and me out here, what is it?”

  “You know that I was once in the Chinese Army?”

  I nodded.

  “Did I tell you that I was in the Cyber Warfare Division?”

  I nodded again. He had brought it up one night about six years ago. Rick, Jin, and I were celebrating the first operational test of the IICN with one too many bottles of moonshine. We all let a few skeletons out of the closet that night. The Chinese Army secret was his, although it wasn’t a big deal. The United States and China hadn’t been at war for over twenty years and either way, I didn’t care. And it wasn’t likely the war would start up again given that the United States and China didn’t exist anymore.

  “Yes.” He nodded as if he had remembered that night too. “But what you don’t know is that my specialty was hacking into satellites.”

  I wasn’t surprised. During the war, both sides hacked into each other’s communications systems. “So? There’s nothing left up there to hack. What’s this all about?”

  He looked up and said, “You are wrong, Aron.”

  I stared at him, not sure what he meant.

  He continued, “Three years ago, I built a device to transmit signals to satellites over a secret command-and-control frequency.”

  “You did what? Wait a minute. There is no way that any satellites survived a solar storm as big as the one that hit twelve years ago. And even if one did, you’d need a laser uplink station to communicate with it. Are you telling me that you built a laser uplink?”

  “No. I did not build an LUS. I did not need to. You see, most satellites have back doors, communication paths that use radio frequencies.”

  “Jin, I worked in the satellite communications software business for twenty-three years and I never heard of any back door RF channels.” From what I remembered, the last RF satellites were decommissioned around 2030.

  He looked down at his feet. “These were not...official communication capabilities. My government had some of our manufacturers surreptitiously install this capability in the satellite components. It enabled our military to keep track of certain information.”

  “So wait...you’re serious. You actually communicated with a satellite.”

  He nodded.

  I walked a few feet away and stepped onto one of the massive concrete rocks that served as a breakwater for the harbor. Closing my eyes, I let the ocean breeze fill my lungs. I needed to let this sink in.

  Jin stepped onto a rock next to me. I opened my eyes and looked at him. “What was the point of building the transmitter?”

  He shook his head. “After we completed the IICN, I needed something to keep my mind occupied, so I built the transmitter. Each night I would point it at a different part of the sky and try to connect to a satellite. I never really expected to find one, but it helped me pass the time. Then, a few weeks ago, I received a signal from a satellite.”

  “So what kind of satellite? A communications satellite? A weather satellite?”

  “No. It is a military reconnaissance satellite, an Indian reconnaissance satellite. It is in orbit over Pakistan. It sustained some damage from the storm, but I was able to hack in and assume control.”

  “So you’re in control of a reconnaissance satellite? This is big, Jin. Really big. The MDF could use it to—”

  “No! Nobody must know about this.”

  I flinched and took a step back.

  “I am sorry,” he said in his usual quiet tone. “Please…let me explain. The guidance system was broken, but I managed to fix it. Before trying to reposition the satellite, I needed to calibrate it. So I took a photograph of something that was within range of its current orbit. It had to be something that I was familiar with so I could calculate the distance between a series of geographical points.”

  “So what did you take a picture of? China? The Great Wall?”

  He shook his head. “No, I pointed the camera at the Maldives. I knew that I could measure the distance between some of the communications towers we built.”

  Jesus Christ, he was smart. I never would have thought of that.

  “It was when I studied the image that I saw it.”

  “Saw what?”

  “I saw an MDF boat docked alongside a supertanker positioned about a hundred nautical miles south of the Maldives. When I zoomed in, I saw the symbol of Jamal painted on the hull of the tanker. It must be their mother ship. The MDF boat was docked alongside a pirate fast attack boat and they appeared to be transferring crates between the ships.”

  “Are you sure it was an MDF boat? Maybe they painted one of their boats to look like an MDF patrol boat.”

  Shaking his head, he said, “I am absolutely sure. The clarity of the image was very good; good enough for me read the numbers on the hull and identify some unique characteristics of the boat. Before I came to see you, I went to the harbor.” He pointed over to where the MDF boats were usually docked. “I confirmed the identity of the boat in the photograph.”

  I turned, stepped off the rock, and walked back to the base of the tsunami tower. Jin followed.

  “Why are you telling me all of this?”

  “Because it is evidence that Ahmed is involved.”

  I shot him a look and said, “No it’s not. It’s circumstantial evidence at best. Look, I hate the bastard as much as the next guy, but you can’t accuse him of cozying up to the pirates unless you have ironclad proof. He’s a dangerous son of a bitch.”

  Jin walked next to me and said, “You are the only person I have told this to. You are my friend and a man of honor. I know that you will help me do the right thing.”

  “Whoa! What do you mean, ‘do the right thing’?”

  “If he is involved with the pirates, then we are all in danger.”

  “Yeah, well... unless you have a high-res glossy of him hugging a pirate you don’t have anything that proves he is guilty. Do you have a picture of him on the boat?”

  He shook his head.

  “Then you have nothing.”

  “I have the messages that they sent to each other.”

  “How?’

  “SIGINT,” he said.

  “SIGINT?”

  “Signal Intelligence. I was able to use some of the signal collection sensors on the satellite to intercept messages that were transmitted across the VHF channel. I triangulated the signals and isolated the location of where the messages were sent from. They were sent to and from the location of the mother ship.”

  “Wait,” I said. My brain felt like it was about to explode again. “How’d you crack the IICN encryption?”

  There were only two ways he could have cracked the encryption that we put into place on the message server. Either he convinced Ahmed to give him his personal encryption key, and I don’t think that Ahmed would hand over something like that to Jin or anyone else. Or else he built a quantum computer to crack the code for him…and not even Jin could do that.

  Jin shook his head again. “I did not break the encryption. I simply stripped the user information from the header, which is not encrypted. I then mapped the ID to Ahmed’s account by searching the server logs.”

  I grabbed his shoulders. “Then that’s it! That’s proof that he was communicating with the pirates.”

  He shook his head. “Unfortunately, there was an anomaly."

  My hands dropped to my side.

  Jin continued, “I discovered Ahmed’s User ID was on messages that originated both from Male and from the location of the mother ship. Some of these mes
sages were sent within minutes of each other, so—”

  “So you don’t have anything.” I shook my head. “I’m sorry, but there’s no way in hell that I’m going to expose Ahmed with this information. I’m no lawyer, but even I know that this wouldn’t hold up in court. For all we know, Ahmed has been sending threats to the pirates. I doubt it, but it’s possible. Hell, maybe he gave them his User ID so they could communicate a ceasefire or something.”

  Jin looked like I’d just kicked him in the gut.

  “I’m sorry, but I can’t do it... not without more proof,” I said.

  This wasn’t like Jin. He never acted rashly. And he knew better than to accuse Ahmed without hard evidence. Eight years ago, someone else had tried that. He accused Ahmed of stealing supplies and trading them for his own profit. The guy that accused him ended up dead. They said it was an accident, but I had a hard time believing that someone could accidently fall out of a helojumper.

  My data mat chirped in my back pocket. I pulled it out and read the message.

  “Look, Jin...I’ve got to get back. They’re starting the meeting. Let me know if you find anything more conclusive.” I turned and started to walk away.

  “Aron, wait!”

  I stopped and turned around.

  “There may be a way to decrypt the messages. Can we meet later, so that I can explain?”

  Throwing my arms up in the air, I said, “Yeah, okay, sure. The Council should finish around five o’clock tonight. Meet me at the café, the one where you found me. But Jin, keep quiet about this. Okay?”

  He bowed, and I took off for the hotel.

  Chapter 6

  I ran up the stairs, two at a time, and darted down the hallway. Out of breath, I pulled the oversized teak doors open and found Shannon standing in the middle of the room. Around the table, people rolled their eyes and ignored her. At the head of the table, Ahmed absently tapped his gavel in the palm of his hand while Shannon continued to talk.

  “...and so that brings us to how you behave after you drop in on, snake, hog the wave from, or simply run over another surfer. It is not a good idea to pretend that nothing happened. That will likely lead to a brawl on the beach. So if you find yourself in this situation, paddle over to the person and apologize. Accidents happen out on the waves, but that doesn’t excuse not having good manners.” Shannon looked over at me and winked. Then she looked back at Ahmed and said, “And so Mr. Chairman, I think that’s all I have to say about surfing etiquette. I hope that it is useful information that we can use to assess prospective candidates. I now relinquish the floor.”