Free Rock Killer by S. Evan Townsend Page B

amongst her delicates.
    The next morning she took a cab to Tel Aviv. Soon after arriving in her apartment there was a message from building security that someone was there to see her.
    Elisa Morgan came into her room and almost wordlessly checked the chips for data with a hand computer. She smiled as the data scrolled across the screen.
    “Any problems?” she asked.
    “No. He didn’t suspect a thing.”
    “Good,” Morgan said. She turned a debit card from the SRI bank over to Karen. Karen went to her computer and checked the balance–it was to her liking.
    Morgan left and Karen went back to her computer. She wondered what the south of France was like this time of year.
    And how many rich men she could find.
    ***
    Democracy had swept through the Middle East like some unstoppable jihad early in the twenty-first century, starting with what was called the “Second Arab Spring” (after the first, in most cases, simply replaced one bastard with a worse bastard). Many countries made their royalty figureheads after the British model, some had a spate of violence as the labor pains of the birth of freedom. Some flirted with radical Islam, but those states soon found their people rising up against them–except those countries where the Baath party held the population in control with tactics developed over 80 years of brutal rule in the now-defunct Soviet Union.
    Unwilling or unable to resist, the West allowed the Baathists to march into country after country, aborting fledgling democracies by preying on their inherent weaknesses. The vacuum left when the United States pulled out of the region needed to be filled, and the Baathists were brutal enough to do it.
    Oil, replaced by hydrogen as the fuel of choice in the wealthy Occident, was still used for internal combustion in the third world, including the Russian Federation. Russia was often called a third-world country with a first-world space program.
    Oil was also used everywhere in the manufacture of plastics, lubricants, and fertilizers. In the West, environmental concerns guaranteed their oil reserves would remain in the ground; the Russians still couldn’t get enough of their petroleum to the surface to even take care of their own needs. So the Baath Party controlled almost all the world’s accessible oil. With that money they bought arms they hoped to eventually use against the Zionist state and the wealthy, greedy West. They also built a space facility with Russian help.
    When their tanks rolled into Muscat, Oman, the Baathists claimed they were invited in by a popular, rebel government that had taken control in a bloody coup. Why the people would overthrow a government they had elected, the Baathists didn’t explain.
    When the rulers in Damascus decided the United Baath Arab States needed space capabilities, it built a space facility at Mirbat in southern Oman. Once it was built, educated men (not women) were needed to operate it. But schools and science were not Baath priorities. Educated men, like many commodities the Baaths couldn’t seem to produce domestically, had to be imported.
    And, like all things imported from the West, these, too, carried unseen dangers.
    Jackson didn’t listen when his friends told him he was making a big mistake. They asked if he noticed the Baaths weren’t hiring women. They asked if he was willing to help the Butchers of Damascus. But he shrugged off their protests. How else could a recent graduate, with less than sterling grades, work on space systems? So Jackson left the U.S. for Oman.
    In Frankfurt he had a long layover. Flights into the United Baath Arab States had to be on their airline and its schedule was sporadic at best.
    He was approached in an airport lounge by an attractive, Asian woman. She said he could make even more money than the Baaths were offering.
    The danger didn’t put him off but rather excited him. He took the job suspecting his new employer was either the Japanese government or Space Resources