The Second Coming by John Dalmas

Hitching up his left sleeve, he touched the light switch on his wristwatch, and waited. Heard a tiny beep within the missile, and read the time to the second. Then he clambered into the rear of the van to watch the computer screen, peering intently over the technician’s shoulder.

It was a long wait, the bird still crouching on its carriage while an electronic duplicate moved across an unlabeled grid on the computer screen, an icon crossing cyberspace at a virtual 0.8 Mach.

The grid’s edges were labelled with latitude and longitude, in ten-minute intervals. What Rafi waited for was something that would tell him what the target was—if anything did. Otherwise he’d figure it out, using his watch, a map, and the terminal phase speed of 0.8 Mach. That ought to do it.

Forty minutes, sixty . . . He’d tensed with watching, and realizing it, relaxed as best he could. He could hear Elena snoring in the driver’s seat, but dared not doze himself. He had not taken benzedrine; he would not risk its effects on judgement. He’d stay on his feet, and if necessary fight off sleep using techniques he’d learned in the true Mossad. The old Mossad, the one he’d been proud to be part of.

Finally the icon burst in a virtual explosion. Numbers appeared, held for a long moment and were gone. A moment long enough that his odd and valuable memory had imaged and retained them. Glancing at his watch, Rafi imaged it, too.

Had the actual bird been fired, using the actual military targeting program, its 500-pound payload would supposedly have been delivered within three meters of its intended target. Theoretically. Three meters! Rafi was skeptical, even with the computer using the planetary gravitic matrix.

“Is that it?” he asked. Pretending he didn’t know.

The technician nodded in the dim light of his tiny workstation. “Yes,” he said.

“Good. Get ready to leave.”

He didn’t watch the emergence and extrusion processes reverse themselves. Instead he awakened Elena, rousting her muttering from the cab to walk about a little in the rain, which now was mixed with large snowflakes. He ran in place himself, and did pushups on the cold wet pavement.

When the truck was ready, they drove away. Now the precipitation was all snow, filling the headlight beams with onrushing white, and rattling Elena, who’d never driven in snow before. But by the time they reached the interstate, they were out of it, in rain again.

They arrived at the warehouse in a faint and sodden dawn. There a man they both knew took custody of the delivery van, and Rafi left in his Honda. Its dirt washed off by God, he told himself.

* * *

In his apartment, he spread a twenty-two-inch map printout of the Southwestern United States, from San Diego eastward to longitude 103 degrees. Then he put a tack at the location approximating the longitude and latitude he’d imaged mentally from the computer screen. It was a little west of Raton, New Mexico. The name meant nothing to him. He couldn’t imagine anything there that the Wrath would invest their Ninja Junior on. Perhaps there’d been a programming error.

With pocket calculator and map scale, he estimated how many map inches the bird should have flown, given its stated terminal phase velocity, and fudging a bit for the average 0.65 Mach prior to reaching terminal phase. It was the best he could do. Then he tied a string to a soft pencil, knotted the string to mark the estimated flight length, taped the knot to the approximate location where they’d parked, and pressed a push tack through tape and knot. Finally he used the pencil to describe an arc on the map. It passed through “the impact site,” curving northward. Eighty miles north, it passed a few miles west of Lauenbruck, Colorado. On his computer, he accessed the Absolute Geographical Atlas, magnified Colorado, then Huerfano County. Fifteen map miles west of Lauenbruck was a dot labelled Henrys Hat. Henrys Hat!

With a toneless whistle he straightened. A Ninja Junior for such a target? It made Ben David and Baran seem more insane than he’d thought. Ben David’s cold stare would no doubt inspire his programmer to correct whatever had been wrong. Rafi was glad it wasn’t himself.

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