by R. Chauncey
“What about it?”
“There were only two soldiers at that ambush,” she said.
“I know,” he said.
“That was probably their first attempt to stop us,” she said.
“That means there are more waiting for us at the information center, and maybe more inside waiting.”
“Yes,” she said. “And not like those two at the ambush.”
Larson turned and looked at her. “What do you mean?”
“Those two at the ambush were clumsy. They missed.”
“You ever stop to think, Marajo, that’s what they were supposed to do to give us a feeling of success so we’d keep on going,” he said. “Every military man in the history of the human race has known there is nothing worse when fighting a battle than the illusion of victory.”
“And you think our escape from that ambush was an attempt by the Society’s soldiers to give us an illusion of victory?”
“I don’t know, Marajo, but I do know we’d be damn fools if we let down our guard because we escaped that ambush.”
She looked at the ground as she walked by his side and a feeling of hopelessness overcame her. “They don’t know who we are, and they don’t want to waste time trying to find out who we are. So they set up a situation where we have to come to them.”
“And if we’d decided to just run off and hide, they’d have all the time they needed to find out who we really are and kill us when they find us, and get the drives back that Julian gave me,” he finished for her.
“We’re between a rock and a hard place,” she said.
“Or as I heard a gambler in Las Vegas say one day many years ago,” he said. “We’re facing a stacked deck with no chance of winning.”
“I wish I’d just walked away from Julian when he told me about the Society twenty years ago,” Marajo said with a deep sigh of regret.
“No. That’s the wrong attitude to take,” he told her. He looked over at her and noticed the defeated look on her face.
“Didn’t you tell me a day ago you wished you’d thrown that letter Julian sent you into the trash?”
“Yes, I did, Marajo,” he said. “And now that I know what the Hidden Society is, I was wrong.”
“What changed your mind?” She looked at him with a curious expression on her face.
“I love history, Marajo. Really love it because history teaches lessons the human race needs to learn and never forget. And the most important lesson history teaches is that if no one does anything to stop tyranny, tyranny wins and everybody loses.”
“All it takes for tyranny to win is for a few good men to do nothing,” she said, smiling at him.
“Why are you smiling?” he asked her, looking in her face.
“You’re one of the few good men, Larson.”
“When did you become a man?”
“Alright I’m one of a few good women,” she added.
“There you go, Marajo,” he added, smiling himself. “Keep that positive mental attitude and our chances of winning improve.” He didn’t believe a word he said, but being negative wasn’t about to improve their situation.
“So let’s go oppose tyranny,” she said.
“Tyranny trembles in fear when a good man and a good woman like us oppose it,” he said, laughing as he walked.
They had gotten use to the walking and were making good time as they walked in silence for a few minutes.
“We’re real heroes, Larson,” she said, walking beside him.
“I wonder will that be said about us?” he answered.
“I doubt it,” she said.
They walked silently for another hour before Marajo spoke. “Larson, I’ve been thinking.”
“About what?” he asked. His backpack was beginning to weight a ton.
“How we can get to the information center,” she answered.
“Without being killed first,” he added sarcastically, ignoring the weight of his backpack.
“Why don’t we make a copy of the map on your com-cell,” she began.
“I’ve got a copy of where the Simpson Park Mountains are,” he told her.
“But not a map of how to get into the information center,” she told him.
“You’re right. The map on my com-cell is more detailed than the paper one I got of Northern Nevada. We’d need a map with more detail to use to show us where the information center is,” he finished for her as he stopped walking.
“Right,” she said.
“Damn am I dumb,” he said, removing his backpack from his back, dropping it to the ground, and kneeling down. He opened his backpack, searched around in it for paper, and stopped. “Damn!” he yelled. “No paper.” He looked up at her hoping she had brought some paper.
“No, all I’ve got are moist hand towels. No good from writing or drawing on,” she said, looking helplessly at him. “I didn’t think paper would be something we’d need.”
“Yeah, me too. Those moist hand towels are great for cleaning up after using the washroom out here in the wilderness, but not worth a damn for writing on,” he said.
“So no paper,” she said.
“That’s the problem with our computerized society today,” he complained. “Why write with pen and paper, when you can tell your com-cell what you want and it makes a recording.
The world is going to wake up one morning and discover writing has become a lost art.”
“When that happens, Larson, computers become our new masters,” Marajo said.
He didn’t hear her because he was thinking. After a few seconds he opened his parka and reached for his shirt pocket. “Thank God for old teacher habits, Marajo” he said as he pulled a ballpoint pen out of his shirt pocket. “I always believe in carrying a pen with me. Never can tell when you’ll need one.”
“Like now,” she said.
“Now for something to write upon,” he said, looking up at her.
Marajo had a smile on her face.
“What are you smiling about?”
“We’ve no, paper, Larson. Not even paper towels. But,” she said, removing her backpack from her back and opening it and taking out the medical kit. “But we do have bandages.”
“No,” he said. “We might need our medical kits.” He reached into his inside parka pocket and found the handkerchief he always carried, and removed it. “But I’ve got this.” He unfolded it.
“You always carry a handkerchief?” she asked him.
“Yeah, my parents taught me when I was a little boy to always have a handkerchief. You can never tell when you may need one.”
“Like now,” she added as she returned the medical kit to her backpack.
He nodded.
“How close do you think we are to that center?” she asked him, looking around at the hills surrounding them.
“I don’t know,” he said. “But we are certainly closer than six miles.”
“Real smart of us not to determine how far we’ve come,” she said.
“I figure we’ve probably walked more than twelve miles maybe more since we started yesterday. We’ve walked at a steady leisurely pace which means we’re probably less than six miles away,” he said, looking for a flat rock to place the handkerchief on. “There, that rock over there looks smooth enough to write upon.” He got up and walked over to the large rock, knelt down, and put the handkerchief on it.
“If you turn on your com-cell won’t they detect it?” she asked, following him.
Larson took out his com-cell and stopped and looked at her. “Su
re,” he said, hoping she’d have an answer. “But do we have a choice?”
“No, we don’t.”
“They’ll detect it. Even a small heat detecting device can cover a distance of ten or eleven miles and we’re closer to those mountains than that,” he said. “They could send out a helicopter to look for us. But by the time it gets here, we’ll be long gone.”
“If that infrared body heat detecting thing you talked about detects us won’t they be able to determine our location?”
“Yeah, it will and if they send out a chopper that has one of them too, and it’s a gunship, Marajo, we’re finished.”
“We don’t have much choice, do we?”
“It shouldn’t take me more than ten minutes to draw the map,” he said as he turned on his com-cell brought up the map of the Simpson Park Mountains and started drawing a copy of the map. “Don’t give up yet, Marajo. We’re not dead yet. And that gives us a chance.”
“Yes, you’re right,” she agreed as she looked in the clear empty blue sky before she returned the medical kit to her backpack. “A very slim chance.” Which is better than no chance, she thought.
***
Chapter 52
January 12, 12:43 p.m.
Willow was dozing when his com-cell started to vibrate even in the sleep mode. He sat up, took it out of his pocket, and turned it on and looked at the screen.
“Karl,” Willow said, looking at his com-cell as he was sitting on his sleeping bag.
Karl was sitting next to the infrared unit drinking coffee and looking pissed. “What?” he asked.
“My com-cell just detected the presence of another com-cell a little less than seven miles north of here,” he said.
Karl smiled and looked at Willow as he said, “Marlene Done and her accomplice.”
“How do you know?” he asked. “It could be Dodge.”
“No. I figure Dodge is dead or in a hospital somewhere,” he said, getting up and walking to Willow and sitting down next to him. “Bring up a picture of the area you detected this com-cell in.”
Willow quickly brought up a picture of the area using one of the satellites passing overhead the Society could access.
“Hilly but mostly open country,” Karl said.
“Looks like they’re planning to sneak up on us,” Willow said.
“Through open country, too,” Karl told him.
“Maybe they’re not as well trained as we think,” Willow told him. “We may have overestimated their abilities.”
“Yes, it certainly looks like that,” Karl said, standing up. “Get everything you can from that. I’ll be back in an hour.”
“Why don’t we get a chopper gunship to take them out?” Willow asked. “The Society’s got twenty of the best in the world.”
“I’ll let you know on that score when I come back,” he said, walking away.
Willow watched him leave and wondered who he was going to talk to? Then he dismissed the thought from his mind because it was none of his business.
*
Dorothy knew who Karl was going to talk to. And she suspected Derrick wouldn’t want any gunship attacking Marlene Done and her accomplice. It would attract the attention of the national air traffic controllers. With satellites that had ground scanning radar, they could see everything that got six feet off the ground. Even if the gunship had a cloaking device which it wouldn’t turn on until it was air born – fifty feet or more in the air. From the moment the gunship got that high in the air the air traffic controllers’ radar identification computers would scan it and know it was a gunship and they would want to know why it was up and who was flying it especially if it suddenly disappeared from their radar? Too many small plane and helicopter crashes in the early part of the century had forced the Federal Aviation Administration to pass new regulations controlling everything that flew. But a chopper gunship with radar cloaking would really arouse the interest of the air traffic controllers, and they would start talking to the Federal Aviation Administration. And the FAA would immediately call the Air Force to find out if they were conducting training operations in this part of Nevada. Once the Air Force said no, they would dispatch gunships to find out who was flying a helicopter with a cloaking device.
*
Karl knocked on the door of Derrick’s camper and entered as soon as Derrick opened the door without being asked to enter. Karl was beyond showing respect to Derrick by asking permission to enter his camper. The situation they were in called for him to act boldly and not caring whether Derrick thought his actions were disrespectful.
“I take it by your conduct you have some important news for me, Karl,” Derrick said as he walked to a chair in the small living room and sat down.
“We’ve picked up an electric signal about seven miles north of us,” he said.
“That Done woman and her accomplice?” he asked, forgetting about Karl’s disrespectful conduct.
“More than likely it’s them, Leader,” he said. “If we could get a helicopter gunship, we could kill them within an hour and this whole mess would be over.”
“No, Karl,” Derrick said, sitting in the comfortable chair he had been watching the wall TV from. “A helicopter gunship would attract unwanted attention. What we have to do must be done quietly.”
“The Society could have its computer experts confuse any satellites and most of the large ground radar sets that could detect a gunship. We could blind them to the gunship. Make any FAA watcher or air traffic controller think he was seeing interference.”
“Yes, we could, Karl, but how would we hide rockets and machine guns firing in the desert from some wandering civilian? And there’s always a chance there could be some nature lover out in the desert wandering around making sure the animals and desert plants are healthy. And they would have to be killed, too. And the last thing the Society needs is more dead bodies.
Everybody loves the environment these days, Karl. Killing an environmentalist would only result in questions and an investigation. And the last thing the Society needs is the FBI and state police walking around these mountains looking for evidence that a gunship killed some damn nature lover.”
“We’ve never worried about such things in the past?”
“If you’re thinking of that helicopter that took your soldiers from the Ames Ranch to Westport, don’t worry about it,” Derrick told him. “There’s a lot of difference between a helicopter flying around at night and one shooting rockets and machine guns. The FAA has been provided with an acceptable explanation for that flight.”
“So we just wait?” Karl asked, wondering how he knew about the flight from the Ames Ranch to Westport, since he hadn’t told him.
“And stay alert,” Derrick said.
Karl didn’t say anything else.
Derrick looked up at him and said, “If that’s all, Karl.”
“That’s all,” he said and turned and left the luxurious camper.
Karl walked back to his position thinking the infrared unit hadn’t malfunctioned electrically a few days ago. It had picked up someone hiding in the hills other than the two caretakers and Derrick. And that someone, probably another soldier, had monitored everything they did and said in the Society’s underground headquarters at the Ames Ranch and told Derrick. It meant that as soon as Marlene Done and her accomplice were dead, Derrick was going to have this soldier kill him and Willow and the caretakers, too. He wondered who this other person was. Not that it mattered. Whoever they were, they were a soldier, and an excellent killer. Or Derrick would never have chosen them.
*
“Do we get a gunship?” Willow asked as Karl walked into their camp.
“Those two we’ve picked up on infrared?” he asked.
“Yeah,” Karl said as he sat back down on his sleeping bag.
“Who are they?” Willow asked.
“Soldiers who are responsible for guarding the information center out here.”
“Two, fat lazy soldiers,” Willow snorted contemptuously.
“But I’ve got a feeling, Willow, there’s someone else out here with us,” Karl told him. “Who it is, and why they’re here is not important at the moment.”
“Another soldier,” Willow asked him.
“More than likely,” Karl answered.
Willow looked at him with hard, cold eyes and wondered if this other soldier was the result of Karl killing Lawrence Ames. If that was the case, then his being with Karl at the time of
Ames’ killing put him in a dangerous position, because he hadn’t done anything to try and stop Karl. He kept his thoughts to himself.
*
Damn fool, Dorothy thought as she closed her com-cell. She knew Karl had picked up on her presence when Derrick told him about the helicopter. She had told Derrick the FAA had been given an excuse for the helicopter to Westport to reassure him he didn’t need to worry about the FAA. Now by telling that to Karl he’d let Karl know there was someone else out here. Karl would respond by sharpening his survival instincts and waiting for her to make her move. That damn fool Derrick had just increased her problems.
***
Chapter 53
January 12, 4 p.m.
Dodge had no further use for the Chrysler. He had driven it off Route 50 behind a hill onto a dirt road after turning off the headlights that looked, from the plants growing in the center of the road, like it hadn’t been used it years. He had parked it among some woody brush two miles off the road, opened the glove compartment and took out the road map of Nevada he had bought at the road side store he’d stopped at two hours ago.