Steal the Lightning: A Field Ops Novel (Field Ops #3)(93)

“Hey, boss.”

I pointed north. Up where the readings had been highest, by the palace, and the temples, and the big mound of the ziggurat.

Nothing for it now except to carry on.

I joined the other two, lugging the gear up to my chosen spot. I wish I could have called someone, got some advice. One of the older guys. Fredericks, say, or Karen Meier in Frankfurt, both great ops in their day, just to ask them, “Is this smart? Would you do this?” The trouble was that I’d been doing the job so long now, I pretty much was one of the older guys. I was the one the new kids came to for advice, unaware how ignorant I still was, how much I, like them, was flying by the seat of my pants.

How much the guys who’d taught me had been doing just the same.

So I knew already what advice I’d get out of the older guys. If it works, they’d say, then yes, you should have done it. If it doesn’t, no, you shouldn’t.

Then maybe I should trust myself. “Acceptable risk.” Maybe I did know what was best, after all.



“Yanks were guarding it during the war,” said Carl. “Thought they were trying to protect the history, an’ aw.”

“Our history,” said Nouri, “has been mortgaged many, many times. I am surprised, to tell the truth, that we have any left.”

“Ha.” Carl handed him a cigarette. “You’re kind of selling off the family silver here, aren’t you?”

“Silver. Oil. We give it you, perhaps you fuck off, leave us alone, hey? No offence there.”

“Aw, none taken.”

“And you, Mr. Englishman.” Nouri turned on me gleefully. “Already, you have half Iraq, locked away in your Museum. I have been in London, I have seen this! Half our heritage! I tell you, one day—” He leaned towards me, squinting through his glasses, pointing with his cigarette, “one day, I am coming to London again. And I will take it back!”

It was the first time they’d involved me in their banter, and I took it for a good sign. Maybe they’d trust me. More than I could trust myself just now, at any rate.

So we finished off our break. I told them what I wanted: where to put the generator, where I’d start to lay the cables.

“I’ve worked with Registry before,” said Carl. “This isn’t how they did it last time.”

“No.”

“This like, some special method, then?”

“Not really. But I can’t get a proper fix on the thing, the way it is. I’m going to try . . . kind of a trick. I’d like to get it done before the sun goes down. Then we’ll camp, finish off by sunrise, yeah?”

They looked at me. I said, “You might want to keep back once I get started. You know. Just in case.”

Nouri took his glasses off, polishing them on his shirt. “What is your plan, my friend? What will happen here?”

“I’m not going to go for the catch. Not right away. I’m just going to . . . nudge it a bit, see?”

“Nudge.”

This didn’t fill them with delight.

“Yeah,” I said. “Just try and . . . kick it into shape. You know. See if it’ll start behaving.”

Nouri put his glasses back on, frowning through the lenses, looking like an anxious gnome.

“My friend. It sounds like you plan to wake it up.”

“Just a bit,” I said. “Only a little bit . . .”