Doctor Who_ Cat's Cradle_ Warhead - Andrew Cartmel [40]
Massoud was staring down at his hands, clasped tight. She could see his knuckles showing pale under tight skin. She knew she would have to deal with him. She could feel events accelerating, the wheel spinning its wet clay faster, her fingers digging in and forming ugly designs she could never change. The air around her was hot and close. When he thought she wasn’t looking, Massoud flashed a look at her in the half‐light of the warehouse. Ace caught the look. She was beginning to regret leaving her handgun at the hotel.
The man who was holding the grenade was gesturing for Ace to join him. He opened a wooden crate and stood back so Ace could look inside. There in a nest of shredded fax sheets was a tray of objects, wrapped in twists of soft opaque plastic featuring Turkish printing and pictures of lemons. The man unwrapped one and grinned proudly at Ace. It was a hand grenade, identical to the sample she’d brought with her. Miss David had done her job well. Unless some of the objects actually turned out to be pieces of fruit, this crate would contain about thirty high‐explosive grenades. More than enough. The man opened three more crates for Ace. The first one contained folded Afghan carpets. He’d opened it by mistake. The second contained tear gas cylinders and an anti‐riot dispersal system. The third contained assorted mismatched pieces of combat body armour and the Vickers night‐sight vision enhancement system, as requested.
Ace picked up the Vickers and examined it. There was an adjustable chin strap and a band inside the helmet to adapt the head size. Like the bicycle helmets She’d worn when she worked as a courier. Ace made some adjustments and checked that there was a fresh battery fitted. Then she lifted the helmet on to her head. It smelled faintly of old sweat and a scented hair oil. The warehouse vanished from view as she adjusted the dead screens of the optical unit over her eyes, a glass and rubber blindfold. Operating the power switch on the chin strap was easy, like using a remote control on a portable stereo. Ace fingered the toggle then twisted it to the On position. The black shielding over her eyes began to glow faintly, turning a milky grey, light spreading out from a point at the centre. It was like watching a monochrome desert sunrise.
The glow spread across her field of vision accompanied by a faint buzzing noise. Then images began to swim up out of the pale grey. The outlines of her surroundings, the roof beams and the warehouse crates appeared and drifted for a moment. Then the distorted shape of human figures, Miss David and the mercenaries. Their outlines were sharpening and now they came clearly into focus. As Ace looked around the optical system inside the helmet tracked her eyes, reading every minute change. It calculated the desired focus by analysing the physical behaviour of retina and iris, zooming in when she looked at distant objects. A low‐intensity beam of laser light scanned the eye, supposedly without damaging the tissue. It was a fairly crude system. Ace had had one demonstrated to her but had never used the device before. She didn’t find the Class One Laser Device warning sticker particularly reassuring. Also, the sighting mechanism scanned only one eye and used the data to make adjustments for both. You’d get splitting headaches if there was much variation between your right and left field of vision.
Ace studied the roof of the old wooden building, saw a tiny movement on a beam. She tracked with it and