“But the front is the best seat. Great view,” added Fash-ona.
Dean shrugged but then remembered the rough landing at the field. How well could they possibly tie down the jagged metal in the back?
He walked with the pilot to the nose cabin, which looked a little like an upside-down fishbowl. A sensor boom protruded from the top of the cabin like a spear, its four winglets looking like knives.
“They took the cannon out before they sold it,” said Fashona, pointing to the underside of the nose.
“Bummer,” said Dean.
“Yeah, big-time. There’s something about a nose gun, you know what I mean? We have podded cannons we can slap on if the going gets tough, but they just don’t have the same, the same something, you know—”
“Savoir-faire?”
“Yeah. I mean, they are thirty-millimeter Gats, so don’t get me wrong, plenty of firepower. More than the Commies had. But still… suave. It’s lacking.”
“Sure.”
“I’m lobbying to get it back. Plus, some of these have shark’s teeth, you know? Right here?” He swung his hand up the front of the fuselage. “That would be intense.”
“Very,” said Dean.
“OK.” Fashona pulled open the door. Dean climbed up and then slipped in, feeling a little as if he were climbing down a sewer hole. The seat restraints were so thick, donning them felt like putting on a quilted vest.
“Headphones,” said Fashona. “They work.”
He pointed to a headset at the side, then slammed down the canopy, which failed to latch. He slammed it again — apparently the pneumatic prop was broken, since it bounded up. Dean managed to grab it from the pilot and close it gently, latching it shut. He pulled on the headphones just in time to hear Lia ask, “So what are you going to tell them when you get home, baby-sitter?”
“I don’t know that I’m going to tell them anything,” said Dean.
“Just tell the truth,” said Karr. “They’ll have you on a lie detector anyway.”
“Probably right.”
“Probably ask if the Princess put out,” said Karr. “In that case, you probably want to lie.”
The blades started to whirl. Dean felt the helicopter shaking back and forth and heard the engine whine — it seemed only slightly more distant here. Just like before, the engines revved, coughed, and died.
“Stinking fuel,” grumbled Fashona. “They piss in it, I swear.”
The rotors spun again. The blades seemed awfully close to the canopy, and Dean found himself staring down at the ground as the helicopter began to move forward, rocking up and down. There was a cough from the engines, but they kept running, the Hind moving steadily down an access ramp that led to the runway. Dean listened as Fashona exchanged barbs with the controller — in English.
“I’m a contract pilot,” he told Dean over the interphone circuit, which could not be heard by the tower. “Part of my cover. Work for Petro-UK. That’s why I talk English.”
“Uh-huh.”
“It’s obvious I’m an American. And the aircraft, you know, it’s traceable. So it’s not a security breach or anything.”
“Don’t be so paranoid, Fashona,” said Lia. “They’re not after your ass.”
“I’m
“We’ll all get raises; don’t worry,” said Karr.
Dean could see that there were no planes in front of them. Nor did it appear that they were waiting for any to land. Nonetheless, the controller kept them waiting more than fifteen minutes before finally clearing them to take off. By then the sun had set and everything was turning gray.
As the engines revved and the helo began to skip quickly along the pockmarked pavement, Dean realized that sitting in the front seat was a mistake. Whether it was because of the physical location or just the clear bubble, every move the chopper made seemed amplified up here, ten times worse than it had been in the back. The helo pitched forward sharply as it came off the ground; Dean felt as if they were going to do a somersault right into the tarmac. It turned sideways into a bank and he swore he’d fall out. A sharp rise and then another bank and Dean wondered if his internal organs had rearranged themselves.
“Quite a ride, huh?” asked Fashona.
“Oh, yeah,” said Dean. “The best.”
His stomach was still unsettled ten minutes later when he heard the pilot curse and call Karr.
“What?”
“MiG-29s, hot, on our tail,” said the pilot tersely. “RWR says they’re scanning. Shit — we’re spiked!”
Before Karr could answer, the helo pitched hard toward the ground.
21
Nothing in the world was more depressing than a pure mathematician at middle age. Young, they were full of vim, vigor, and fresh answers to Fermat’s Last Theorem. When they hit thirty, however, they inevitably began tumbling downhill. In Rubens’ opinion, it wasn’t that they lost mental acuity. Instead they started to question things outside of math, and that threw them off. Questioning the sequence of prime numbers was one thing; questioning whether to change a haircut or have an affair was something else entirely. By the time they hit forty, the questions had done serious damage to the certainty required for top-level math.
And then, most devastatingly, they would ask the Impossible Question. This might be phrased many ways, but its most terse expression found its way to coffee cups throughout the complex:
In a few cases, the result of asking the question was relatively benign — a bath in the stock market. Too often, however, Rubens had watched it lead to ashrams and mass marriages in baseball stadiums.
Or stadia, as a mathematician would insist they be called.
John Bibleria—“Johnny Bib” to his co-workers — was fifty-one, and a prime candidate for the stock market/stadia stage. He had joined the NSA out of Princeton. His area in the government was cryptoanalysis, but his true interests involved string theory, and during the early years of his career he had published several papers with impressive titles and even more impressive arrays of Greek letters in the text. He had also been responsible for realizing the Chinese were using a fractal code in the early 1990s.
The days of one individual “cracking a code” were long gone by the time Johnny joined the agency. “Codes”— lists of word-for-word substitutions — had been obsolete for a hundred years or more, and even the more complicated ciphers of the early Cold War seemed quaint. Modern encryption was done by translating plaintext into data streams through mathematical algorithms or formulas governed by keys. Teams of cryptoanalysts, cryptologists, mathematicians, computer scientists, and programmers with overlapping abilities and responsibilities worked with cutting-edge computers to “solve” a cryptosystem.
But even with all that, Johnny Bib came as close as anyone to being a one-man show. To Rubens, his genius had little to do with his math, at least not in the way most people thought about math. What Bib at the height of his powers did as well as anyone in the world was intuit the significance of sequences. You didn’t need to know the precise words being used in a sentence if you knew that the sentence told a missile to launch. Simply knowing that allowed you to answer many questions. Did you want to know how many missiles there were? Count the sentences. Where they were? Look for the sentences. How they were aimed? Study the events before the sentence was uttered. Bib not only spotted the sentences; he also could come up with questions no one else had thought of that they would answer.
But Bib’s heyday had passed. Officially an Expert Cryptologic Mathematician, Johnny Bib was now an excellent team leader and an invaluable member of Rubens’ inner circle. But he was no longer a star’s star. Rubens, a connoisseur of genius, hated to see diminution. He looked at Johnny Bib and felt pain for the true heights the man’s mind might have reached.
Rubens had hopes, however — a few mathematicians were able to enter remission following the question
