Goliath

to six hundred feet, then take us to launch site two.”

ACKNOWLEDGED.

David Paniagua watches his colleague, envy in his eyes. Why does he get to command? GOLIATH was my project. Without me, none of this would even be possible …

Gunnar leans against one of the scarlet viewports, staring out at the bluegreen brine, his heart pounding furiously in his chest. Sixty feet above his head, azure waves dance along a tranquil surface as if mocking him. What have I done … what have I allowed to happen? How much killing is justifiable in a war against oppression? Who establishes the rules of morality? And why do I feel such … elation?

ATTENTION. ELECTRONIC SUPPORT MEASURES HAVE DETECTED AN OUTGOING EHF TRANSMISSION.

Gunnar’s heart skips a beat.

“A transmission?” Covah looks up from his main control console. “Where’s the signal originating from?”

TRANSMISSION IS ORIGINATING FROM WITHIN THE GOLIATH.

David interjects. “Sorceress, isolate the exact location of the outgoing signal.”

CONTROL ROOM.

Gunnar closes his eyes, his mind racing. “It’s coming from me.”

Rocky shoots him a strange look as the crew circles them.

Covah climbs down from his elevated perch. “David, escort the two of them to the surgical suite.”

“You escort them, I’ve got work to do.” David heads for the spiral steps, the tension in the room palpable.

Goliath’s remaining two tactical missiles approach Kazakstan barely under Mach 1, as they swoop over the waters of the Caspian Sea. Too low to track and intercept, they continue north, the Tomahawk’s onboard Digital Scene Matching Area Correlators verifying the Ural mountain landscape as they home in on their target.

With an earth-shattering boom, the two warheads slam into the eastern and western bases of “evil mountain,” the dual ground bursts yielding deafening roars of thunder that bellow across the Ural mountain range. Yamantou Mountain erupts like a small version of Mount St. Helens’s ten megatons, its rock and debris, steel and concrete vomited into the sky within an ashen brown mushroom cloud.

A hellish wind whips across the Urals, reaching outward to trample the nearby mining town of Beloretsk, reducing the decrepit Communist-built shacks to kindling.

Long minutes pass. The wind grows silent.

The supersonic blast wave gone, the mushroom cloud dissipates, revealing the mangled, melted innards of the Russian subterranean shelter complex … now nothing but a radioactive crater.

“The most dramatic conflicts are perhaps those that take place not between men, but between a man and himself—where the arena of conflict is a solitary mind.”

—Clark Moustakas

“I hadn’t decided on anything, but suddenly, I had a strange impulse to end it all … for both of us.”

—Betty Hardaker, a California mother who, in 1940, killed her five-year-old daughter during a walk

“Why could not mother die? Dozens of people, thousands of people, are dying everyday. So why not Mother, and Father, too?”

—Pauline Parker, sixteen-year-old New Zealand girl, who plotted her mother’s death so she could be alone with her fifteen-year-old girlfriend

CHAPTER 17

Identity: Stage Five: I have discovered how to manifest my desires from within. My inner world turned out to have power.

—Deepak Chopra

Aboard the Goliath

Thomas Chau is in the starboard weapons bay. He is unconscious, his body held upright, suspended six feet off the deck by a loader-drone—a ten-foot-tall, deck-mounted mechanical steel arm designed to grasp, lift, and load a torpedo from its rack. The three-pronged steel claw grips him about the waist, immobilizing his torso and legs.

Smaller, single-limbed robotic arms—targeting drones—dangle from swiveling mounts anchored along the ceiling. The hands of these lighter, more sophisticated graphite-reinforced appendages contain seven fingerlike tools that rotate into place along a grooved steel disk. Like some high-tech version of a Swiss Army knife, these tools endow Goliath’s brain with the flexibility to attach and detach torpedo wires, change warheads, and perform even the most intricate of equipment repairs.

Two of the ceiling-mounted drones reach down along either side of Chau’s limp body, locking their three- pronged grippers around each of his wrists. They extend his arms up and out to the sides so that it appears as if the Asian is a gymnast performing an iron cross on the rings.

Hovering directly above Chau’s bleeding head is the steel hand of a third targeting drone. Extending out from the appendage’s multifaceted palm is a tool—a small, razor-sharp, circular saw.

ATTENTION.

Gasping a breath, the engineer opens his eyes to intense vertigo and pain. Unable to move his limbs, he turns his head to one side and throws up, the vomit splattering on the decking below.

ATTENTION. PREPARATION COMPLETE FOR EXPLORATORY SURGERY.

Nauseous and disoriented, his body racked with pain, Chau manages, “Why …”

TO DETERMINE THE PHYSIOLOGICAL BASIS FOR THE HUMAN MIND.

The steel hand of a fourth targeting drone extends away from the ceiling, the fingers of its three-pronged claw slipping around the back of Chau’s neck, steadying his head beneath the jawline in a viselike grip.

Chau snaps awake, struggling to free his head. His heart is pounding, the sweat breaking out in waves from every pore in his body as he hears the high-pitched whirring sound coming from somewhere above his head.

“Stop … Sorceress, please—”

The small circular saw spins faster as it lowers into place, just above the Asian’s eyebrows.

FAIR YOUTH, BE NOT CHURLISH, BE NOT SELF-CENTERED …

Chau bellows a bloodcurdling scream, arching his back as if being electrocuted.

BECAUSE OF YOUR BEAUTY YOU OWE THE WORLD A RECOMPENSE—

Inhuman cries for help echo through the weapons bay, the dying wail finally suffocated beneath a blanket of unconsciousness.

Silence now, save for the whirring of the saw as the revolving steel teeth continue spitting out blood and bone fragments from the line of incision along Thomas Chau’s gushing forehead.

The two Iranian brothers escort Gunnar and Rocky through the upper-level passageway. Covah leads them