Voyagers III - Star Brothers Read Free Page A

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