Wind Shadow

By William Blundell

On a remote indian reservation near the Canadian border, an ancient tribal clan has guarded for time out of mind a secret that has become the most valuable thing in the world—an energy source of unimagined richness. In a near future when overdevelopment and population growth have driven an energy-starved planet back into a second Age of Coal, alarmed American researchers using a new supercomputer discover clear signs that the thousands of power plants burning coal now are killing people, for reasons unknown. Informed by a spy, this is all that the shadowy criminal syndicate known as Black Dragon needs to hear. It moves to seize effective control of the only feasible energy alternative still available—nuclear fuels, long abandoned as a civilian power source after a string of horrific accidents. In this international crime thriller, Kaliman, the lethal chief operative of Black Dragon and the warped creature of its secret founder and head, Henry Wu Lin, the richest man in Asia, together conduct a hidden but violent struggle with the Americans, led by President Jacob Weldon Hammer, for this control—not yet knowing that success or failure for either side depends entirely on a single lode of uranium with characteristics never seen before, a treasure guarded by a handful of old men whose religion forbids them any conventional weapons to guard it with. But Kaliman and Wu Lin discover that the clan and Massine, its leader, have other resources to draw upon...

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Jun 30, 2017
• ISBN: 9781543901924

Book preview

1

Louis Bolbai was near seventy but his eyes were still good. Far below, on a bench where the pines opened momentarily into a clearing dotted by rabbitbrush, he thought he saw a glint in the bushes. He shaded his eyes. Now he was sure of it. As a Watcher, he was always alert to the unnatural, and he knew this reflection was something not of the land but of man.

All around him lay the country of the Cloud clan, the clan of the High Priests and their servants, the Watchers. Here no outsiders were allowed. Those of the People who were not Cloud clan obeyed the injunction, but there was no accounting for what a white man might do. Now and then one of them ignored the signs, went into the forbidden zones, and resented being escorted out. At their worst the whites were a plague on the earth, he thought. At their best they were like spoiled children, talking until they made you deaf with it and leaving behind them their crumpled tinfoil wrappers and crushed beer cans and all their other careless garbage.

Probably it is only that, he thought. A can top or some other bit of casliko trash. But possibly it is more. I will go look. I have to meet John anyway and he ought to be coming around that red hill over there right about now.

He started down the incline that would take him to the bench, picking his way over loose shale. He grinned at the joke he had been saving to tell.

John Mandrina had been his friend since childhood. They had grown up together in Nonapovi, on the edge of the Great Sink, farmed adjoining lands, and had been taken into the Watchers at the same time. People said it had never happened before, friends and neighbors both becoming Watchers together. Only a handful of men actively served this religious society, the most secretive in the tribe, the most secretive in any tribe, and they were handpicked from all over the reservation. You were born to your mother’s clan, and usually that was your place and fate in life. But no one was born to the Cloud clan or the society of the Watchers.

The sun beat upon the back of his neck as he scrabbled down the slope, his knees complaining a little. Hold me up a while longer, knees, he thought. I promise you rest later. Perhaps a little beer, too.

Louis knew this country as no man could who was not a Watcher. He had patrolled the Blue Wind sector, the northernmost in the outer ring, for twelve years. His training had made him relentlessly observant, sensitive to the slightest changes. If any little thing was out of place in his domain he would know it.

He descended to the level of the bench and lost sight of the glint in the brush. But he knew where it had been and he walked in that direction, scanning, scanning all around. He was so intent he almost stumbled over the boot protruding from the rabbitbrush.

John Mandrina lay on his side, knees flexed, his right hand under his head, pillowing it as if he were slumbering on a feather bed. But Louis could see instantly that his friend’s spirit was gone. A hat with a silver medallion on its band lay beside the body; the glint, Louis thought. Gently he turned the body on its back, and sucked in his breath. The bullet had shattered the right lens of Mandrina’s glasses before breaking the orbital bones and making a bloody pool of the eye socket. Looking at the broken glasses and the terrible wound, Louis, overcome, fell to his knees by the body. My dear old friend, he whispered.

Stop it, fool, he suddenly told himself. Whoever did this might still be around. Near the body he saw the waffled print of a lug-soled boot, and then another further on. He checked John Mandrina’s soles; they could not have made this print.

Fear prickled the back of his neck. What if there were more than one? The first would cover his position, the other would circle around to flush him out. And why had he not heard a shot? The sound should have carried easily to where he had been. A silenced weapon, he thought. And what kind of man would be carrying a silenced weapon in this country?

Crouching, he willed himself to be utterly silent and listened for a full minute. There was no unnatural sound, no disturbance among the birds in the pines, nothing but the pounding of his own heart. But he sensed a malevolence out there, waiting in the tree line.

He wished for a rifle, and instantly suppressed the thought; the Cloud clan was sworn to live in the old way, without the benefit of modern conveniences and technologies. Even to Watchers guns were forbidden.

Looking to right and left, he slowly rose to a half-crouch. But then he hesitated, torn; it would not be right, he thought. His spirit would blame me. Taking off his bandana, Louis Bolboi spread it over the ruined face and said the death prayer for his friend. Though his legs trembled with the compulsion to flee, he said the chant properly, not rushing. Then, when he was finished, he looked toward the tree line, gauging where it was most likely the danger lay. Suddenly he sprang upright and sprinted directly into the lowering afternoon sun, positioning himself between it and where he calculated the shooter would most likely be.

Try shooting into that, he thought, going as hard as he could, ignoring his aching knees, dodging now and then. He was not young but he was mostly whipcord and he had been running all his life. He thought he heard the snick of a rifle bolt behind him.

Look, look, the boy said, excited. He pointed to a forested ridgeline, its bulk silhouetted against the unclimbable crags and crests of the Ice Mountains glittering farther to the north. The man next to him followed the pointing finger and saw a tiny figure moving along the ridge, breaking out of the trees and into the open and then disappearing again. Moving a little too fast, the man judged, noting a thread of dust above the figure’s path. Weaving a bit while he runs, too.

What does it mean, elder brother? the boy asked, this time remembering to use the polite address. It’s too early for anyone to be coming back, isn’t it?

The boy meant that the shifts hadn’t changed yet. Yes, too early, the man thought. There will be news from this and it will not be good news. To the boy he said: Questions, questions. Does everything you are taught fly right out of your head? What is the rule of questions?

The boy looked down. Not to ask them until you have looked and listened, elder brother. So that you learn to see and hear better, and think for yourself.

The man said, Then do that, flapping tongue. First, do you see how the runner is running? He is in some kind of trouble. Go to him, fast, and find out what is wrong and if you can help him. Bring him a water bottle.

The boy grinned, a white dazzle, and vanished. A good boy, the man thought. A good boy in a bad time. His gray hair flying in the wind, he walked down toward the others.

The man was called Massine, which means Guardian, and he was head of the Cloud clan and chief of the Watchers. He had been high priest for fourteen years but a little white doctor at the Indian Health Service hospital in Denver had recently told him he would not be those things to the long end of life. The little doctor had showed him colored pictures of a person’s insides and told him that he had the wasting disease in one of the parts and that it could not be cut out.

Massine had not been surprised. The wasting disease was the common end of so many of his predecessors, the terrible burden of the office all had held. He said nothing to anyone about the symptoms or that he was going to the hospital to see about them. And he would say nothing about what the doctor had said, for there could be no distractions over leadership in the clan right now. The doctor had told him he would have some good time left, a year or more. It would have to be enough.

For weeks now he had been rising a full two hours before dawn, afflicted by dreams and filled with the sense that a darkness was beginning to gather around all of them. There had been omens. In the early months of the year a great comet, always a harbinger of trouble and this one more brilliant than any ever seen before, had hung burning in the night. Then last month seep springs on the West Wall had dried up for the first time in living memory. And not long after the shadow of the wings of a hawk had covered him at the instant that he made the pollen offering to the wind. Was it not all foretold in the legends?

When dark shall come in day

And light in night

And land withhold her own

From the Protected:

Then shall they who watch

See black evil walking

See black evil walking

After these things had happened Massine fasted for two days to sharpen his mind and purified himself with fire and the sacred herbs. Then he went alone down into the kiva when the moon was at its highest and, with the chant known only to himself and his predecessors, called upon the spirit of the First Protector. And that being had answered him across all the space that separated them, and had begun to move. But was it too late?

Louis Bolbai gave out a few hundred yards from the Watcher’s camp, and two others ran to help the boy with him. He had been shot through the big muscle near the top of the shoulder and his arm hung uselessly, but the wound was clean and had bled little. They would attend to it in Potari, the village of the Cloud clan: there would be no reports of a gunshot wound coming out of the indian clinic further south, there would be no FBI.

After Louis had gasped out his story, Massine sent four men to retrieve John Madrina’s body, together with another to take over patrol of his territory, and trackers to pursue the killer. None of them had to be reminded of the danger. He sent a messenger to warn the inner ring and reinforce it. He hurriedly revised the Watcher schedules for the next couple of days, putting extra men on. By the time he was finished a band of scarlet lay on the horizon behind the mountains, and the sky had deepened to purple.

He was weary to the bone by the time he left to see Louis, who was pale and in some pain, though he had been given soup and had regained most of his strength. They will send me down tomorrow, elder brother, Louis said. Let me be the one to tell Maritan. Please.

Maritan was Frank Mandrina’s wife. She was also Louis’ cousin. Massine nodded. Such sad tasks fell by custom to the Guardian, but he was not a man to follow custom with blinkers on. It would be better coming from Louis.

For a moment he was aware of his own loneliness since Nita had passed three years ago. Forty years, he thought, forty years of waking to the pearl light of dawn and her smile and a cup of herb tea ready for me before I arose from the bed in our little stone hut. Forty years of poverty and sacrifice and love, all for the sake of destiny. Now, at dawn, it was the boy who brought his tea. He was a good boy, an orphan sent to Potosi to help the old priests, but it was not the same.

He and the boy took the path by lantern light down to Potosi and the little stone hut. He walked the path without speaking. The boy, sensing Massine’s need, was silent too. The First Protector had been late in coming, the old man thought, too late to save Frank Mandrina, but he was still out there in the darkness; Massine could feel his presence on the land. Perhaps he would still be able to strike against the coming evil. Perhaps some time could be gained.

Exhausted, he slept. But in the middle of the night he dreamed of his beloved nephew, who had the Sight and who was the friend of the President himself. He awoke suddenly in the blackness, thinking: this must have meaning.

The next night he called the priests of the Cloud clan into the Great Kiva. He looked at the bronze faces flickering in the firelight and let the silence stretch out. What would these men think of the extraordinary measures he proposed now?

It has begun, he said.

Then he told them what he wanted to do.

2

Eighteen months earlier…

Whistling something tuneless and cheerful, Opah Sills flashed her credential and bounced past the marine guards with a finger wave, erupted into the operations room, and, picking a greasy packet out of the paper bag she held, thrust it at the chief operator.

You’re late, he said.

That’s why I brought you a burger, she replied. Peace offering. Not that I’m keeping you from a hot evening or anything. What with Francine dumping you for that guy from the State Department, I figure you for a night of brooding over a glass of hot milk back at the apartment. Am I not right? She went behind his chair and began kneading his neck muscles.

You are cruel but you speak truth, said the operator, Jimmy McDermott. A little more to the left. Ow. That’s it. Actually, I think I may be starting to forget her already.

Except for the boobs there wasn’t much to remember. You want to start the debrief now?

He nodded and she came around to take a chair next to his at the main console. As he began to talk they looked through the glass at the master they both served.

Opah Sills was twenty-nine years old, a heavy-hipped black girl out of Tulsa who wore huge hoop earrings of coral and three-inch violet fingernails. She had an I.Q. of one hundred eighty-seven and held twin doctorates from M.I.T. in esoteric realms of mathematics and computer science. A Federal employee, she had the highest security clearance extant and was paid more than the president of the United States. You want to drag home the really big dough, priestess is the job you want, she would say, laughing.

She and McDermott, together with twelve other people of similar background, had been recruited to design, program and operate the most extraordinary machine ever built. It had cost one hundred and seventy-three billion dollars. Its critical assembly was a sphere forty-seven feet in diameter filled with hundreds of thousands of the most advanced microprocessors. Its nomenclature was PPSC/MHDA-1, which stood for Parallel Pathway Superconducting Computer, Massive High Density Array. Everyone called it Papa.

Opah activated the voice circuits. Sills logging in, shift three, she said. Hi, Pops, how they hanging? She grinned at McDermott and he rolled his eyes. Then she ran through the biometrics. Papa studied her voice patterns, inspected her retina, matched her index fingerprint with the authorized one, pricked a finger and compared her DNA with the base finding in his staff database.

The voice boomed from the speakers in the operations center. Recognizing Opah Sills. Hi, kid, it said, in the unmistakeable gruff tones of Wilford Brimley, a character actor of a previous generation whose old films and commercials were currently in vogue. Using Brimley had been Jimmy McDermott’s idea.

On the other side of the glass, in a dimly-lit space under a hemisphere of reinforced concrete seven feet thick, lay the immense spheroid that was Papa’s main processing unit. Surrounded by a nimbus of water vapor from sudden condensation near its frigid surface, its great weight was nestled and supported in a shock cradle, a web of curved, rubber-coated steel beams mounted on gas-filled cylinders that would absorb the tremors of earthquake and explosion. Its heartbeat was the whisper of pumps circulating liquid helium under pressure through its core; thus supercooled, its circuits operated with a speed and efficiency unknown in nature. Colored lights raced across display panels on its surface. Papa was working. Papa never slept.

Jimmy continued his debrief, which mainly involved filling her in on the multiple projects engaging Papa at the moment. Anything running for the weenies on the Hill? Opah asked. A previous administration, which had conceived Papa, only got last-minute passage of funding by promising legislators free computer time. Unfortunately, it had never specified how much, and the allocations office of the National Assessment Agency, which was brought into being by Papa and controlled it, was continually besieged by bullies and wheedlers up on Capitol Hill. Though using Papa to meet their relatively simple needs was equivalent to using a howitzer to kill a housefly, few members of Congress could resist the cachet that priority on the great supercomputer conferred.

Fourteen jobs, said Jimmy. The usual crap. Analysis of voter characteristics and demographic updates in congressional districts, mostly. Five other jobs amount to sifting through the sandpile to come up with fresh sucker lists of potential campaign donors. Finally—you’re going to love this—we have the lusty senior senator from Michigan coming up again. He wants Papa to help him scour real estate databases for apartments here and Ypsilanti. For not one but three actual or potential mistresses.

Opah shook her head and began to laugh. What’s the old crocodile now, eighty-seven? What an optimist. Hey, don’t you ever get the urge to just say the hell with it and hand one of these little tidbits over to the tabloids?

Sometimes, Jimmy said. Like, every day. But then I think about selling pencils in the snow out on K street and I reconsider.

Opah nodded. As part of their security clearances all the senior technical officers, as the wunderkinder were titled at NAA, had to sign confidentiality agreements they called holy orders. In effect, they vowed never to write about any of their work or speak of it outside the building, including nonclassified work. Even passing along a tidbit about a lecherous senator would at the very least cost the miscreant his job and all chances of future hiring by any institution that got so much as a nickel in Federal grants or Federal business.

Which is practically everybody who’d be likely to hire one of us, Opah reflected. Congress had insisted on this provision, for reasons that became clearer to her every day.

The lights dimmed automatically in the operations center, and the status board, seven feet long, glowed more brightly by contrast. Between bites of hamburger, Jimmy went on through Papa’s other tasks. There wasn’t much to pique Opah’s interest, except for a long-running attempt by State to filter out constants in historical Iranistan foreign policy. Not a single hush-hush program was running.

Finally she said, OK, I’m in the picture. Time for the Data Queen to strut her stuff, so you get your skinny white racist ass off my big soft chair. Go home and sulk about your woman.

Jimmy gave her a mock salute and got up. At the door he said, You know you have the same first name as a fish? Is that some kind of black thing?

She threw a manual at him.

The time dragged by. She opened a desk drawer and poked through some magazines. Me, Self, Titties, and the Proceedings of the Fourteenth International Symposium on Biocybernetics. This is going to be a helluva long night, she thought, and yawned.

Operating Papa was a bore and any decently-trained high school grad could do it. The senior tech officers had brought Papa into being; the job that excited them now was giving him sophisticated ways to manipulate his knowledge, writing the arcane software that allowed him to work his miracles. They thought of him as a brilliant child, and of themselves as his teachers. By comparison, operations was as exciting as taking out the garbage.

Still, anyone operating Papa would have to have access not only to some of the most highly classified programs in government, but to the computer’s output on them and on politically sensitive material. NAA Security, paranoid about limiting access, would not allow anyone but the senior tech officers and their boss near the operations center. So, grumbling, the techies had to take turns babysitting their creation around the clock. Shift three, the graveyard shift, was the most trying. With the allocations office closed, no new programs were ever begun on this shift.

Opah nibbled on the last of her french fries. They were limp.

Just after two a.m. Papa spoke. Wake up, kid, he said, a greeting programmed into him for anyone working the night shift. Anomalous indication in task forty-seven. Probability of anomaly is seventeen per cent. More data needed. Instructions.

Well now, Opah thought, after looking in her log. This is interesting. Maybe. The probability was fairly high for this early stage of search.

Forty-seven was not a sensitive job. It was humdrum, in fact. Papa was matching U.S. power-plant output, capacity and scheduled expansion against his ten-year forecasts of future electricity demand—which, in turn, he had compiled from nearly two hundred thousand sets of data on everything from patterns of climatic change to public enthusiasm for a new kind of toaster.

Pops, data lockdown immediate, she said. This meant that for the time being, no one could get access to task forty-seven and Papa’s finding except her and NAA’s Deputy Director for Analysis. This was standard operating procedure. She switched off the voice circuits, also S.O.P. in the event that someone might try to pick up Papa’s spoken output with a listening device attached to the walls of the operations center. Fat chance, she thought. More paranoia.

Describe prospective anomaly, summary only. Coded hard copy only, she tapped out. Papa’s output now would be kept off the display board. It would instead be encrypted and channeled only through a single armored line that led into the translating printer at her side. She waited, all boredom gone. What possibly could come of a routine power-supply survey?

Papa was demonstrating the capability that, beyond his sheer capacity and power, made him unique, a capability that had been the most significant breakthrough in his design. He was doing something that heretofore only human minds did--noodling around with data, going far beyond his assignment, bringing in masses of seemingly unrelated facts and comparing them to look for unexpected connections, causes, effects, patterns. He was doing something close to thinking.

This capability had produced some surprising results. When Papa was not being taxed by assigned work he was free to roam through tens of millions of data sets, comparing and concluding randomly. The results were usually gibberish, but now and then he found something interesting. He had already determined that men who had played Little League baseball as youngsters had a divorce rate four times that of the general population; that ground aspirin had a marked aphrodisiac effect when mixed with guacamole sauce, and that a planned expansion of Iranistan’s air force might be affected by a psychogenic flaw common among Khazak males—they were afraid of heights.

The printer hummed and spat out a single page.

Opah read it and immediately shredded the page into the burn bag. Though the bag was less than half full, she sent it down the incinerator shaft and directly into an electric furnace.

No way my illustrious boss is going to take any chances with this one, she thought. He’s a creep but he’s not a dumb creep. This one is going straight up. Way up, maybe to the Big Man.

Speeding in from Reston in the official black limo—how marvelous that first day he had slipped into it, caressing the glove leather seat, knowing it was his, his!—a crisp Washington Post in his lap and a cup of freshly-brewed Costa Rican coffee on the fold-down tray, Larkin Blanck allowed himself a moment of self-congratulation.

After half a career carrying water for the nincompoop political appointees at the CIA, he had at last come into his own. Deputy Director for Analysis at the hottest agency inside the Beltway. Discoverer, interpreter, keeper of the deepest, darkest secrets. In a place where information ruled, he had the cojones of official Washington in his soft, moist palm.

The phone warbled discreetly at his side.

Yes? he said.

Number three requests a conference when you get in, sir, said a woman’s voice. It was Hanna, his secretary.

The phone was as secure as wireless transmission could be, which still left abundant room for doubt. NAA Security simply assumed that all wireless conversations were compromised, so names were never used, no classified material was ever discussed, and heavy use was made of numbers and euphemisms. Number three that week was Opah Sills, and her request was a command. The use of the word conference instead of meeting indicated something potentially important.

In a half hour, he said, and rang off, irritated.

He hoped Hanna hadn’t picked up the peevishness in his tone. The tech officers were his subordinates on the organization chart but he was under no illusions about that. In the event of crisis the techs had a direct line into the White House through the President’s science advisor. Also, they could demand meetings with any official of NAA on a moment’s notice, no matter how inconvenient that might be or how trivial the matter at hand. They inflated the importance of everything Papa came up with, and he did not expect this meeting with Sills to yield much.

Spoiled little geniuses, he thought. Hardly a surprise that they lacked proper respect for authority and were irksome to manage. Like trying to herd cats, he had told the Director once. And the Sills woman was the worst of the lot. Violet fingernails indeed.

But the flicker of irritation passed quickly. The morning was a gorgeous one, crisp and bright, and he found himself overcome by it. Shafts of sunlight struck through the car’s windows and, turning in his seat, he glanced out the back one to check on the Secret Service coverage. The big SUV, a hydrogen war wagon model, was there, keeping proper interval, its smoked windows concealing the hard men inside.

He gloated. None of the other deputy directors, and few others of rank in Washington, rated this. The rest would be taken to work in drab government helos. They would have no Secret Service cover, no print copy of the Post—a status symbol now, given their rarity; only two thousand a day were produced—and no Costa Rican coffee. Sitting back, he carefully drew up his trouser legs a couple of inches to preserve the crease in the soft cheviot. Life was good.

But he would have to be careful, very careful. When he took his appointment he had had to give up his little hobby, or at least active pursuit of it. After DuPray left—God, he’d been so nervous about DuPray—there had been no problem at the CIA. In fact the whole place had fallen apart, full of boozers and dopers and perverts and every kind of security risk, you could have sold the whole building to the Chinese and those idiots wouldn’t have known. Once you were initially cleared they forgot about you.

But not NAA. Heavy security and surveillance, real pros running it. Everyone who held a highly sensitive job was sporadically watched, bugged, their electronics covered, their contacts recorded.

So he couldn’t afford to take a chance just yet, at least until he found the gaps in the system or somebody decided to relax the full-court press. He would have to be satisfied with the holographic DVDs that periodically appeared in the compartment built into the back of his dresser. Black Dragon knew his peculiar tastes, knew how to deliver safely. He thought of the images dancing in the air of his bedroom, the winsomeness of them, and he felt a surge of heat.

When he got in the Sills woman was already in his reception room. Had an interesting possible anomaly last night, she said, after they had settled in his inner office. He noticed,