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Novels by William Walling
Novels by William Walling
Category:
Science Fiction
Publisher: Virtualbookworm.com Publishing, Inc., College Station, Texas
ISBN-10: 1589394968
Type: Fiction
Pages: 276
Copyright: © 2003 by William Walling
ISBN-13: 9781589394964
Price: $7.96 (eBook)
The successful deployment of a space elevator system allows China to virtually monopolize international commerce, and U.N. Intelligence Agency Asset Rudy Cateel is blackmailed into accepting what amounts to a "mission impossible" espionage assignment.
Chin Zhonghua Renmin Conghehuo, The Peoples Republic of China, achieves a staggering economic triumph with its “Great Leap Upward,” the successful late-21st Century development and installation of a “space elevator” rising from an equatorial mountain peak in the Kalimantan region of Borneo to an enormous microgravity production satellite in a geosynchronous orbit, and beyond toa spacecraft inertial launch and retrieval complex that permits commercial products assembled from lunar raw materials to be transported to Earth at negligible cost.
U.N. Intelligence Agency Field Asset Rodolfo “Rudy” Cateel is blackmailed by his superiors into performing a “mission impossible” aimed at penetrating the satellite’s closely guarded secret operations in order to temporarily sabotage elevator operations. Cateel unknowingly becomes embroiled in a subtle plot hatched by China’s counterintelligence director, who is frightened to think his nation’s economic overkill might result in a thermonuclear holocaust initiated by the Western powers.
Elevator repair and rework are mandatory, yet the intel director’s scheme to create an artificial hiatus in elevator service so that China can “save face” by not arbitrarily shutting down oprations on its own, and thereby admitting to any faults, but rather by stage-managing a false sabotage. The scheme goes awry when a double-agent is instructed to do away with Cateel, and then perform actual, totally destructive sabotage of the elevator system. The fast-paced action takes place in Tokyo, California, Borneo and out into space when Cateel, and the reader, are taken for a ride on the elevator.
Excerpt
Sometimes The Dragon Wins
William Walling
“Let China sleep. When she
wakes, the world will tremble.”
Remark attributed to
Napoleon Bonaparte
Prologue
Lightfooted under mild lunar gravity, a practical nurse bustled into the solarium carrying the pièce de résistance of gifts, a parcel wrapped in silver foil tied with a scarlet ribbon. Not sure if the patient was awake or dozing, she diffidently approached his powered rollabout chair.
“Mr. Cateel . . ?”
The patient did not stir. Basking in the sunlamp’s artificial radiance clad in a backless gray hospital gown, he had let his lap blanket slip to the floor.
At their first encounter in the ward, the nurse had been startled to hear her halting query in pidgin Tagalog answered in flawless Mandarin. Not knowing what to make of the tall, singularly self-possessed gentleman whose head was swathed in bandages, she decided he had lingered in the solarium longer than was beneficial, but felt it not her place to advise a return to his private room.“Mr. Cateel,” she repeated more firmly, “a package for you.”
The patient’s mummy-wrapped head turned slowly.
“I don’t . . .” faltered the nurse. “It’s, heavy . . . candy, perhaps. Security took the usual precautions, judged it harmless. I thought you might like to —”
“Leave it with me,” he said testily.
Miffed at his brusque manner after she had sacrificed minutes of her forenoon break to deliver the fancy package, the nurse handed it over, turned on her heel and left the solarium with gliding, disenchanted steps, the soles of her white Uwabaki slippers squeaking on the tiles.
There was no accompanying card, nor was one necessary; a very short list of gifters knew where he’d been sent to recuperate. Caesescu the younger seemed the likeliest, or perhaps General Yee, and possibly even Chairman Li Qin himself. Dismissing the latter guess as farfetched, he slipped a thumbnail under a fold of silver foil, peeled it back. Wrapping and ribbon fluttered to the floor in lunar slow motion. Having neither seen, spoken nor heard a word of English for many months, and had to shift mental gears. Regarding the hardbound volume askance, a soft chuckle issued from deep in his throat. The book’s blood-red dust jacket was emblazoned with a stylized version of the U.N. Intelligence Agency’s helm-and-mace logo, and the title embossed in golden letters:
A Furtive Career
Sir Carlton S. Daniel
He turned the book over, read a short puff describing the author’s “meteoric” rise from anonymous Cambridge don to UNIA director, and eventual knighthood. A flat photograph captured Sir Carlton half-turned toward the camera, posing beside the lichen-encrusted stone wall at his estate near the Cornish town of Tevistock. The very model of a tweedy country squire, he was pictured bending to pet an intimidated Welsh terrier. Cateel noted with bemused skepticism Daniel’s incongruous, droop-lidded pout of infinite sincerity that looked sharply at odds with his vacuous gaze, suggesting the onset of senility.
He opened the volume at a ribbon someone had inserted, and began skimming the text.
* * *
. . . and whether bogus or genuine, declassified documents identify the asset as Rodolfo Taruc Cateel. Apparently falsifying his age upon enlisting in U.N. Aerospace Forces from poverty-stricken Mindanao, he had seen lunar combat with the 33rd High Rangers during infamous scuffles which, despite moderate casualties on either side, failed to prevent the Peoples Republic of China from industrializing lunar sites in and around the crater Aristarchus, as well as mining rilles in the Prinz region.
Concluding his tour of duty, he opted for honorable discharge when his unit rotated to Sinus Iridum for rest and recreation. He briefly enrolled in a California college, where he proved to be an indifferent student, but nevertheless excelled in the martial arts disciplines, and as an adept came to the attention of an associate professor of linguistics who happened to be in our employ. Casually recruited and rigorously trained, Cateel subsequently engaged in a number of exacting field assignments which must unfortunately remain unsung.
The author came into personal contact with this exceptional asset during a period of severe trial and tribulation for the West. Having observed from afar the decade-long construction of an enormous geosynchronous satellite orbiting above northwestern Kalimantan, the Indonesian portion of Borneo, conjecture regarding its purpose and location became rife in the international intelligence community. Satellite surveillance soon unearthed a collateral mystery: a massive construction project of some kind adjacent to the summit of a volcanic mountain peak in Kalimantan dubbed Gebergte Beturan by long-departed Dutch settlers. Rearing a statute mile above the upland rain forest, it was judged no coincidence that the dormant volcano locals knew as Gunung Beturan straddled the equator at precisely the huge orbiting satellite’s “substellar” point. Shortly Chinese shuttles began resupplying major on-orbit operations of some kind, which of course threw light on the inferred purpose of such a major endeavour.
The notion of achieving facile, economical access to and from low earth orbit via a “space elevator” linking a point precisely on the equator and a satellite orbiting in dynamic equilibrium had been bruited about in the technical literature for a century and more. Western experts voiced misgivings, citing the “monumental” engineering obstacles, and “insurmountable” instability problems” et cetera, to be overcome if such a leviathan construction were to be effectively maintained in situ. Yet the PCR proved these caveats basically inaccurate.
Despite our history of mutual, uneasy enmity, credit must be accorded to the “liberated” pseudo-Marxist society dwelling on the far side of our beleagured planet. The revamped Artsutanov Satellite looms above Kalimantan today, a pair of tremendous, disc-shaped structures induced to counter-rotate in order to “null” what is said to be the “gyroscopic moment” induced by orbiting in consonance with earthspin which would otherwise cause the massive structure to drift toward one of the poles. The open secret of PRC success turned out to be an ultra-lightweight nanotechnology material producible only on-orbit under microgravity, namely carbon-based “nanotubes” exhibiting phenomenal tensile strength, the product used to fabricate a set of thirty-six-thousand-kilometer-long “miracle” tethers anchored in a “receptacle” pit excavated deep within Mt. Beturan’s bowels, which linked the enormous satellite and the ground.
Witnessing completion of this monumental project, the civilized world thrust aside geopolitics momentarily, and lauded with thunderous applause PRC’s extraordinary technological feat, yet in certain quarters regarding it with no small amount of envy mixed with apprehension. When operations began, passenger capsules and freight modules began traversing the quadrate tether system in week-long journeys up to and down from the Artsutanov satellite, as well as to and from the “inertial spacecraft launch and retrieval complex” situated at the secondary tether set’s starward terminus. A veritable sea of high-efficiency solar energy receptors arrayed to co-orbit with the satellite shunted bountiful gigawattage to the surface, transforming a hitherto lightly populated region of Kalimantan into one of the world’s most power-wealthy communities.
Far too much ink has been spilt concerning the PRC’s brilliant “Great Leap Upward” blatantly trumpeted as the technological marvel of the third millennium which endowed the capitalistic Communist autocracy with a truly staggering advantage in the exploitation of near-Earth and cislunar space. Envy and apprehension aside, in speaking of the world’s ancient and modern Seven Wonders Artsutanov looms as a monumental triumph of innovative technology, and indisputably puts in the shade trifles such as Egypt’s pyramids, or Lagrangian space habitation macrostructures like Xanadu.
Here in the West, however, the obverse of this bright, shiny Chinese coin soon began corroding, and took on a much more somber hue. The successful deployment of China’s modern day “Jacob’s Ladder” into the sky created a turnabout “loss of face” that proved severely jarring in the West. It would be pointless to dwell on the machinations, recriminations, inquiries, table-pounding debates and vituperous denunciations leading to Rodolfo Cateel’s mission assignment. Western noses, already painfully out of joint, were bent further when the PRC’s ruling clique issued a stern caveat, vowing that any attempt to interfere with Artsutanov operations would be met with massive retaliation. This gratuitous threat sharply nettled certain dignitaries responsible for the conduct of national affairs. in the West. Having always abhorred blackmail and blackmailers, the author confesses to numbering himself among the most sharply nettled.
* * *
Muffled laughter issued from beneath the patient’s bandages, turning scattered heads in the solarium. If aware of the curious stares directed his way, Cateel gave no sign.
* * *
An obscure Soviet-era scientist, Yuri Artsutanov, had elaborated upon “fanciful speculations” about a similar enterprise touched upon in the works of Russia’s legendary innovator and teacher, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, by publishing an advanced space elevator schema in Komsomol’skaya Pravda. If noticed at all in the West, the article was laughingly dismissed, as were other theoretical explorations of the radical concept by Soviet visionaries, including an even less known scientist named Polyakov. During the latter phases of elevator construction, a veritable parade of UNIA assets, in addition to those dispatched by other intel organizations, attempted to penetrate the Artsutanov Satellite. Few returned, and of those who did none had learned anything of lasting significance. Field assets of Asian heritage were seldom used during our own clandestine “games” with the PRC, and the select few who did were prone to dual, triple and on occasion quadruple allegiances, and never failed to demonstrate a consistent reluctance to part with freedom or their lives in exchange for vital information.
Derogatory to their ethnic strain as it may sound, Filipinos have earned a reputation in some quarters as “the world’s greatest thieves.” When Rodolfo Cateel was first proposed as the best asset to undertake the job of penetrating Artsutanov, the author believed him rather a dubious choice. On the eve of his penultimate briefing, however, our thinking changed, not so much because of the man himself — muscular and lean, tall for a Filipino, and possessed of remarkable physical presence — but rather due to the acquisition of a trump card involving his personal affairs. As for the asset himself, he and his eventual fate remain enigmatic.
A childish cartoon found crumpled in a wastebasket at the Tokyo safe house where UNIA Asian Section assets were often sequestered prior to field assignments, presumably drawn by Cateel on the eve of his paradrop into Kalimantan, depicted a scaly, fire-breathing monster squatting on its haunches, contentedly picking its dragon’s teeth with a medieval lance, while all about were strewn segments of the knight’s shining armour. Scrawled in Spanish cursive, the caption read,
A veces gana el dragón.
In light of what later transpired, this may be pertinent . . .
* * *
Cateel’s reading was cut short by an officious orderly who approached quietly, switched off the sunlamp and announced with an air of challenge, “Therapy now.”
The orderly drew back in alarm when the patient, dark eyes burning through slits in the layers of bandage, informed him in staccato Mandarin of an indecent act he could perform with his therapy, introducing into the indictment scurrilous flaws attributable to the young man’s antecedents, contemporaries, and prospective progeny.
The orderly fled in search of reinforcements. Without bothering to retrieve the fallen blanket, Cateel laid the gift book in his lap, energized the chair and rolled out of the solarium, guiding it to a slideramp at the corridor’s far end. Riding upward two levels, he found the medicenter’s small observation rotunda unoccupied.
Brooding in a silence broken only by the faint susurration of air issuing from life support louvers, he gazed across the sere, desiccated field of rubble flooring the walled plain of Mare Crisium, now bathed in earthlit refulgence. Fascinated by the stark desolation, especially the mystical, enchanting way earthlight delicately silvered the gray-scale wasteland pocked with boulders and craterlets, etching inky, sharply defined shadows. Above the distant ringwall’s serrated rim, the three-quarter “marble” of Earth hung suspended like a blue-and-silver Christmas tree bauble. A typhoon’s snowy whorl marred the Indian Ocean’s cobalt sheen.
Slumped in the rollabout chair, he studied the lunarscape with unseeing eyes, reflecting on places and faces from the past, recalling victories won, defeats endured. Idly fingering the gifted book’s gaudy red dust jacket, he briefly reviewed the kaleidoscope of personalities and events leading up to the Artsutanov mission, and the sour note upon which it had begun.
He neither acknowledged their presence, nor protested, when the orderly and a hulking companion ran him to ground and escorted him back to the his temporary prison, a characterless, antiseptic private hospital room.
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