Voyagers III - Star Brothers Read online

  He felt better, although his mind was still in turmoil. He was a smallish man, with a high forehead and round face that would have been bland except for the luxuriant black mustache and his probing dark brown eyes. This office was his sanctuary, where he could sit on his elevated platform and look down on the supplicants and schemers who came to beg favors from him.

  “You tricked me,” he accused.

  “Not really,” Stoner replied. “I showed you something very important.”

  “A band of savages in the Mato Grosso,” de Sagres sneered.

  Stoner, sitting in the leather armchair in front of the president’s imposing desk, replied, “They are men. And they are in New Guinea, not the Mato Grosso.”

  “New Guinea! Impossible! One moment we are here in my office, and then suddenly ten thousand kilometers away? And then back here again? It was a trick! Admit it!”

  “I wanted to show you that even so-called primitive men have ways of preventing war. Those elders, they are called ‘the Great Souls’ by their people. They talked the warriors out of fighting.”

  De Sagres reached toward the intercom.

  But Stoner suggested mildly, “Don’t you think you could make your own drink?”

  He pulled his hand back as if scalded. For a moment he simply sat in his high-backed swivel chair, looking troubled, undecided, almost frightened. Then he rose and walked shakily across the thick carpeting to the mirrored cabinet that served as a bar.

  “If you have some Jamaican dry ginger ale,” said Stoner, “I’ll have it with brandy. On ice.”

  By the time de Sagres mixed the drinks and returned to his desk he had pulled himself together somewhat. His hands barely trembled; the ice in the glasses clinked hardly at all.

  “You somehow talked your way into my private office, past all my staff and security. Why? Merely to show me a conjuring trick?”

  Stoner sipped at his brandy and dry. “Not entirely.”

  “Then what it is that you want?”

  “I want you to become one of those ‘Great Souls.’”

  De Sagres’s dark eyes flashed. Then he threw his head back and laughed. “You want me to live naked in the jungle with those savages? No thank you!”

  But Stoner was deadly serious. “I want you to prevent your military from intervening in the civil war in Venezuela.”

  The president’s mouth dropped open.

  “Your general staff thinks they are clever enough to move their troops across the border without having the Peace Enforcers intervene. Perhaps they are right. I can’t predict how the Peace Enforcers will react. The political situation is murky, after all.”

  “We have no intention…”

  “Don’t lie to me. Your army has been supplying the Venezuelan insurgents for more than a year. It was your army’s agents who fomented the civil war in the first place.”

  “That’s not true!”

  Stoner said nothing. He merely stared at de Sagres.

  The president felt like a little boy under the awesome presence of a sternly uncompromising priest. “We merely…the Venezuelan insurrection was a genuine movement, we did not create it.”

  “You armed those farmers. Trained them. Led them to believe they could accomplish more with guns than they could with negotiations.”

  “The government of Venezuela has ignored their farmers for generations!”

  “And to rectify that injustice you are helping those farmers to slaughter one another.”

  De Sagres ran out of arguments. He felt strangely empty, hollow. He tried to turn away from Stoner’s infinite gray eyes and found that he could not.

  “You must exert your authority over your own military,” Stoner said. His voice was soft, almost a whisper, yet there was implacable iron in it.

  “You don’t understand how difficult that would be.”

  Stoner smiled slightly. “Yes I do. Would I be here otherwise? Would I have taken you to that jungle if a simple request would have been sufficient?”

  “The military…”

  “The military will take over your government unless you stop them now. Their plans include not merely annexing Venezuela. They want their chief of staff to sit in your chair.”

  De Sagres’s heart constricted with fear. He realized that he had known it all along, but had never found the courage to admit it, even to himself.

  “What can I do?” he whimpered.

  “Stop them now,” said Stoner. “The people of Brazil will support you. The Peace Enforcers and World Court will support you.”

  “But the army is too powerful.”

  “Only if you are too weak.” Stoner leaned forward in his chair, stretching a hand over the desk to grasp de Sagres’s wrist. It was like being held in an inhumanly powerful vise.

  “You can become a ‘Great Soul,’” Stoner said urgently. “You can save your people untold grief and pain. And the people of Venezuela, too. If you don’t, the military will take over your government and you will be lost and forgotten.”

  De Sagres wanted to run away and hide. But Stoner had him pinned down like a helpless insect. His arm began to tingle.

  “You have the power to do it,” Stoner insisted. “Do you have the strength?”

  The president wanted to admit that he did not, but he heard himself saying, “I can try.”

  Stoner’s smile beamed at him. “Good! That’s all that anyone can do.”

  “If I fail…”

  “You won’t be any worse off than you are now. The army won’t kill you; they’ll keep you as a figurehead for their puppet government.”

  “A figurehead? Me? Never!”

  Stoner considered the Brazilian president for a long, silent, solemn moment. De Sagres felt as if his soul was being stripped bare and examined, atom by atom.

  “Will you do me a favor?” Stoner asked at last.

  De Sagres arched his brows. It always comes down to a favor, he told himself.

  But Stoner extracted a small straight pin from the breast pocket of his khaki jacket and pricked the tip of his thumb. A drop of blood welled up.

  “This is as primitive as those ‘Great Souls,’” he said, “but I’d like to make a blood bond with you, to seal the understanding between us.”

  Unwilling, but unable to resist, de Sagres held out his trembling hand and allowed Stoner to grasp it in his own warm, firm grip. The touch of the pin was painless, and then they were pressing their thumbs together like little boys sharing a solemn, sacred oath.

  “You have the strength to stop your military adventurers,” Stoner said. “You have greatness in you. One day you may even win the Nobel Prize for Peace.”

  The president of Brazil sank back in his chair as his unannounced visitor strode purposefully to the door and disappeared from his sight.

  CHAPTER 3

  THE island of Cyprus, once torn by bloody conflict between Greeks and Turks, basked in the Mediterranean sunshine and the money spent by ten thousand members of the International Peacekeeping Force who made the island their Middle East headquarters. Clerks, computer specialists, missile technicians, sensor analysts, bureaucrats, warriors by remote control, each of the ten thousand men and women who wore the sky-blue uniform of the Peace Enforcers was paid well and regularly.

  They had brought peace to strife-weary Cyprus, as Greeks, Turks, and even the descendants of displaced Palestinians found more to be gained by earning Peace Enforcers’ money than by shooting at one another. Prosperity did not end hatred and long historical grudges; it merely put them to one side while everyone put their best energies into the scramble for steady money.

  Banda Singh Bahadur, commandant, IPF Cyprus, was a huge Sikh, still strong and fierce-looking despite his eighty-odd years. His proud curly beard was as white as the immaculate turban wound around his leonine head. His back was unbent, his shoulders wide and square as a castle gate. In bygone eras he would have wielded a heavy curved sword against his foes, or fired a high-powered rifle with merciless, deadly accuracy. />
  Now he sat in a padded leather chair, surrounded by younger officers in a comfortable air-conditioned office as they pored over satellite pictures of poppy fields in Turkey. The picture table was one large horizontal display screen, and the false-color imagery he studied was being relayed in real time from an IPF surveillance satellite several hundred miles above the Earth’s surface. Four young men and one woman officer were hunched around the table, bending over, scrutinizing the imagery.

  The entire span of the table top glowed with harsh colors that showed steep jagged ravines deep in the Taurus Mountains, near Lake Van. The face of an old man, thought Bahadur as he studied the seamed craggy display. Much like my own.

  “Papaver somniferum,” said Bahadur’s imagery analyst, a blonde young woman from California. “I’d recognize that signature anywhere.”

  Bahadur looked up at her with eyes of cold steel. The young officer touched a few buttons on the keypad built into her side of the display table. A spectral analysis of the region they were examining appeared in a box at one corner of the horizontal screen. Alongside it appeared a laboratory spectrum that matched it so closely Bahadur could not tell the difference.

  “It’s poppy fields, all right,” said the intelligence chief, a stocky oriental. “And illegal as sin.”

  Bahadur nodded a ponderous agreement, yet still brought up the display that showed all the legal poppy fields in the region. They were small and under the relentless control of the Turkish government. The fields in the satellite views twined through tortuous valleys far from the eyes of government inspectors.

  “They even tried to overgrow them so the satellite sensors would miss them,” said the blonde imagery analyst.

  “We’ll have to move against them.”

  Bahadur said, “Standard procedure. Notify the Turkish authorities after we have sterilized the fields. Offer our assistance in arresting and interrogating the farmers.”

  One of the young officers stepped swiftly across the office to a red command phone.

  To his intelligence chief the Sikh said, “Trace the method of processing.”

  “Probably minimal,” said the Asian. “Just enough to make some potent opium. They wouldn’t dare to try to operate a sophisticated processing plant.”

  “They could have made arrangements with a legal medical house to produce extra, unregulated amounts of heroin,” said Bahadur, his voice heavy, slow, weary.

  “That is possible,” the intelligence chief admitted. “I will check on it.”

  The younger officers left after straightening up to attention and making casual but correct salutes. Bahadur leaned back tiredly in his chair, alone with his thoughts.

  In his mind he saw Peace Enforcer planes swooping low over those rugged valleys, spraying a nearly invisible mist of biological agents that specifically killed the poppy species and nothing else. He saw poor Turkish farmers running from the IPF helicopters and paratroopers that dropped out of the sky to round them up and turn them over to their government police. He saw smug men in expensive business suits suddenly arrested for their part in processing illegal heroin.

  After all these years they still have not learned, Bahadur thought. The money is irresistible. The lure of enormous amounts of money, if only they can avoid the notice of the Peace Enforcers. But they cannot. Year after year, decade after decade, they continue to try. We find them, we catch them, we kill their crops and destroy their factories and put them in jail for life. And still others try.

  The world is at peace, and even the lowest of the low are getting richer instead of poorer. Yet people still turn to drugs. Bitterly the old Sikh realized that global economic growth provided a larger market for the forbidden pleasures. The wealthier the world becomes, the more people can afford to play with narcotics. How the gods must weep at our folly.

  Is there no end to it? he asked himself. Will fools and devils always attempt to make themselves rich by crushing the lives of their brothers and sisters?

  The old Sikh got up slowly from his chair and walked to the window, where the port of Larnaca gleamed in the high Mediterranean sun, white and clean and prosperous. The streets were crowded with businessmen and women striding along purposefully, while others ambled more casually through the shaded shopping arcades. Down on the docks, laborers worked half-naked and sweating. How many of you, Bahadur asked them all, would sell your futures for the chance to make illegal millions?

  Too many, he knew. There were always more, every year, every generation. Selling their souls to the path of evil.

  He went back to his comfortable old chair and sat slowly in it, scarcely noticing its groan beneath his weight. Still, he thought, there are other young men and women who join the Peace Enforcers, who dedicate their lives to the path of righteousness.

  Bahadur was glad that younger men and women were willing to take up the challenge, to bear the burden that he had borne almost all his long life. For a moment his memory flickered back fifteen years to Africa and the day he had met Keith Stoner. A strange man, mysterious, powerful in spirit. Bahadur smiled and leaned his head back and closed his eyes. His last thought was of Stoner.

  When his aide found Bahadur dead, the smile was still on the old Sikh’s face.

  Paulino Alvarado knew there was trouble when he saw little Ramón racing down the village street as fast as his nine-year-old legs could carry him, straw hat clutched in one hand, face red with exertion.

  “Soldiers!” Ramón bleated. “Soldiers coming to the village! I saw them from the hilltop! Coming up the valley road!”

  A lightning bolt of fear hollowed Paulino’s chest, took the air from his lungs. Throwing down his half-smoked cigarette, he leaped up from the chair on which he had been sitting, his mouth suddenly as dry as the Moondust he had taken only half an hour earlier.

  The village looked perfectly normal. Perched on a hillside at the base of the Andes, it looked down on la ceja de selva, the edge of the tropical rain forest, the valley where once coca had been cultivated to the exclusion of all other crops. Its one curving street was quiet in the late morning sunlight. The houses, built of solid stone from the mountains, stood silent and enduring as they had for centuries. A few women in black shawls gossiped idly by the well in the square. Children played up by the church yard. Most of the men were in the fields with the yellow tractors and other implements the Peace Enforcers had given the village.

  And soldiers were coming up the valley road.

  What we are doing is not illegal, Paulino repeated to himself. There is no law against Moondust. But he remembered his father’s bitter anger when he had first brought the strangers into their village.

  “They will bring ruin down on our heads!” his father had warned.

  “But Papa,” Paulino had replied, “this is not like growing coca. All these men want is a place where they can manufacture their pills.”

  “The soldiers will come and kill us all!”

  Paulino had gotten very angry with his father and called him terrible names. There was money to be made, much money, more money than the whole village had ever dreamed of. More money than Paulino had ever seen in his entire twenty-three years of life. Money enough to buy a beautiful new automobile and an apartment in the city. Money for women and good restaurants.

  But his father saw through him. “I labored all my life so that you could go to the university and become an engineer,” his father had said. “And you come back a drug addict. I am ashamed of my son.”

  Paulino had cursed his father and screamed that he was not going to spend his whole life tinkering with computers while others made millions. His father, worn thin and coffee-brown from a lifetime of laboring over potatoes and corn in the Andean sun, bent and old before his time, bore the proud aquiline nose and strong cheekbones of the true Inca. But in the end he swallowed his pride and allowed Paulino, his firstborn and his only son, to have his way.

  Strangers came to the village, six men in tee shirts and faded jeans and dark glasses. They bro
ught truckloads of chemicals in big jars, cartons of evil-smelling powders, and crates of odd-looking equipment made of glass and shining metal.

  Paulino’s father shook his gray head. “The soldiers will come, you’ll see.”

  His son snorted contempt for the old man’s fears.

  “Many years ago,” his father said, “in my own father’s time, Norte Americano soldiers came out of the sky in their noisy helicopters and burned the whole valley, everything, coca, potatoes, corn, everything. As a punishment for growing the coca.”

  Paulino had heard the story many times.

  “Growing coca was against the law, they said. We were bewildered. Since time immemorial we had grown coca. The men from the capital who bought it told us that they sold it to Norte Americanos. Now Yankee soldiers had destroyed the year’s crop and the men from the capital said growing coca was illegal.”

  “That was years ago,” Paulino said impatiently.

  But his father went on, “Within one month other men from the capital came and told us that the Gringo soldiers had gone home and we could resume growing coca next season. In the meantime we nearly starved.”

  “But then…”

  “But then we were told to plant the whole valley in coca. So we did, and for years all was well. Until the day the Peace Enforcers arrived.”

  Paulino felt the inner trembling that signalled the need for another hit of Moondust.

  His father droned on, oblivious, “The Peace Enforcers carried no weapons. Not even pistolas. There were even women among them! They told us that the coca crop was going to die, and it would never grow in this valley again. In its place, they would help us to plant the valley in corn and potatoes and squash, food crops they said were needed by hungry people thousands of kilometers away.

  “The Peace Enforcers kept their word. The coca withered, blackened, and died. No matter what we did, coca refused to grow in our valley anymore. The Peace Enforcers gave us tractors and tools and the generator that turns sunlight into electricity.”

  “I need to go,” Paulino said. His hands were beginning to shake.