by neetha Napew
One of the things that he'd been taught on the survival course was that someone in a lit house could see virtually nothing that was going on outside.
The lecturer on that part of the course had been a petite black-haired New Yorker. They'd been staying in a log-built hostel with a long picture window and she'd gone out into the blackness, telling them to watch out for her. Despite trying to shade their eyes against the reflections on the glass, all they'd been able to make out was a pale blur, almost invisible. When she came in, she'd been grinning wolfishly. "You honcho studs been whispering about wanting to see my tits. I just showed them to you and you didn't see a thing, did you?" The next morning she'd casually broken the wrist of one of the younger men on the survivalist course when he'd made the big mistake of trying to "accidentally" touch her on the buttocks.
Jim tugged up the hood of his anorak and stepped out into the blizzard, giving a last glance behind him at the snug scene inside the abandoned hut.
Sly was fast asleep, flat on his back, hugging his wooden doll to his broad chest. Heather Hilton was sitting with her back against the corner of the cabin, looking at the fire. She caught her father's glance and gave him a quick wave of the hand. At that moment be felt one of those inexplicable surges of love for his daughter and he waved back to her, smiling.
Carrie saw the movement and also raised a hand to him. She was busily breaking up some of the pile of kindling that they'd all accumulated before the light began to go.
There was little wind, and the snow was starting to lie where it fell, particularly in the hollows and against stones. A clear strip lay close to the edge of the sea where the salt prevented it from settling.
Jim shuddered and hunched his shoulders. "Someone walking over my grave," he muttered to himself. He'd buckled the Ruger outside the waterproof coat in case he needed to get at it quickly.
He felt an unexpected wave of pessimism. Maybe it was the miserable weather or the dying of the day. His only child being brushed by the wings of the dark angel. The feeling that the four of them were all alone with no friends and a whole host of red-eyed enemies.
He walked slowly along, blinking at the snow. To his left the land rose steeply in a series of deep gorges and valleys. All of the hollows were filled with wet whiteness. Way above, like a snake clinging to the wall of a house, Jim knew there was the north-south highway, now invisible in the gloaming.
The man with the gun… or it could've been a woman. In his early days as a young airman, Jim had encountered problems with political correctness. Then the fervor seemed to die away, and life settled down in a more balanced way. But he still caught himself thinking of a gunman. Wondering where he… or she… had gone.
A short while ago Heather had been looking out at the ocean and had claimed that she thought she'd heard some shooting. But when the others had come to listen, there had only been the soft whispering of the waves and the lonesome cry of a circling gull.
Jim stood still, head on one side, then realized that the quilted hood was muffling his hearing. He pulled it back, feeling the butterfly kiss of the drifting flakes of soft coldness on his stubbled cheeks.
Visibility was vanishing quicker than a lawyer's conscience, and night was racing in across the lonely stretch of beach. Jim took a deep breath and turned around, ready to go back again toward the hut.
He paused as he heard, far off to his left, over the gray water, the echoing, mournful cry of a great whale. One of the saddest and most mysterious sounds in creation.
"Know how you feel," he said to himself.
JIM HAD WALKED all the way past the cabin, looking in to make sure all was well. Only Carrie was awake, sitting against the far wall, staring into the night. She didn't see him pass.
A snatch of an old folk song came to him, unbidden. And he hummed it to himself. "I'm drunk today, and I'm never sober…" He tried to remember the last time that he'd been drunk and realized that he couldn't even recall it.
A glance at his watch told him that it was about time to let Heather and Sly take a watch together. Only after they protested did he agree to let them be on guard for an hour, before finally going to bed for the night.
He was within sight of the hut when he heard the metallic click of a firearm being cocked and a cold voice out of the shadows at the bottom of the hillside telling him to keep real still.
Chapter Twenty
Margaret Tabor received the follow-up message just as she was getting dressed and ready to lead her sixty-eight-strong force out to the waiting Chinooks. Her clock told her that it was three minutes after five in the morning of December 22.
"One repeat one bird down hunter retired repeat hunter retired."
She had read it through twice.
So, after all, only one of the crew members of the Aquila, or one of the hangers-on traveling with them, had been removed from the board.
And Xavier Burnette had been killed.
That was the biggest shock.
He'd been one of the best. He'd trained with Special Forces and been seconded to the faceless suits of Central Intelligence years back. He'd been approached by contacts from the fledgling Hunters and enlisted without a breath of trouble. One of the best.
The Chief of the Hunters of the Sun sat on the side of her bed, thinking again about the retired female schoolteacher that they'd had in their cells. Sadly the men responsible for that had already been punished. It would be nice to punish them all over again, but torturing a corpse wasn't much pleasure.
Still, it looked as if everything was going to come together nicely. From the limited Intelligence available to her, Margaret was beginning to think that the missing pieces in her Aquila jigsaw were likely to be forever missing.
The young black photographer, Kyle something or other. The second pilot, Turner. The electronics guy, Jed Herne. Nothing had been heard of them, and it didn't look as if they were in either of the two groups on the West Coast. Which probably meant that they'd all died somewhere along the line.
An aide, greatly daring, had asked Margaret Tabor why the crew of the Aquila were so important. It had been his lucky day, as she'd nodded at the question and then given him a carefully considered answer.
"Aquila was the sharp edge of what we did best in the United States," she'd said. "If they'd come back before Earthblood, they'd have been heroes to rival anyone in history. Each member of the crew was someone special. Those who survive are still special. That's why we want them on our side."
"But if they won't come over to our side, Chief? What happens then?"
She'd tweaked his cheek, nearly making him piss himself. "Easy, son. If you aren't for us, then you're against us. And if you're against us…" Margaret had drawn a forefinger across the young man's throat, making the hissing sound of tumbling blood. And he had pissed himself.
ZELIG RECEIVED the update earlier than his enemy.
Partly because he was, geographically, just a little nearer to the scene of the action.
A young woman had been shot and killed on the beach where the ship and the boat had landed, so close together. Chronologically only three or four hours apart. Zelig guessed that it might be one of Jim Hilton's daughters. The one who had survived the cholera outbreak in Hollywood.
"Heather," he said, straightening his tie in the mirror. From outside his window came the sound of trucks warming up their engines. He pulled back the blind and looked out, seeing that it was still snowing steadily.
Or it might have been one of Henderson McGill's girls. Zelig had lost track of who was living in the McGill family and who had taken the last train for the coast.
It didn't much matter.
It was more interesting to read the report of the corpse that had been found on the bridge that carried 101 north, past the quake-wrecked regions.
Shot once at short range, smack between the eyes, with a 9 mm automatic, blowing most of the back of his skull onto the snow-clotted blacktop. And there'd been spent cases from a high-powered rifle alongside the
corpse.
Surprisingly, apart from the badge of the gold arrow and the silver sun, the man had been carrying ID in his breast pocket. It turned out to be legitimate ID, as well.
Xavier Burnette.
Zelig had made a note on the outside of the buff file. "One of the best."
Under it he'd written a woman's name in green ink. Circled it. Put two question marks alongside and circled those.
To take out the best, coldcocking Xavier Burnette like that, took the best.
"Nanci Simms," he wrote. And "??"
WITH ELEVEN PEOPLE in the ruined beach cabin, it had become uncomfortably crowded.
As Jim Hilton had stood still, his mind whirling with wild ideas about taking out the person stalking him in dark, Nanci Simms had stepped out of the shadows, surrounded by swirling snow. She looked fresh and energetic, the Port Royale machine pistol cocked at her hip.
"No point in keeping a watch if you're not watching properly, Captain," she'd said for openers, then followed up her comment. "In any case, the man you're worried about is a ways back there, dead and stiffening."
"It was a man."
"Of course. What did you think was up on the bridge shooting at you? A pregnant giraffe?"
"Nearly killed Heather. Bullet missed by less than a foot. Who's with you?"
She had hesitated for a moment. It was almost the first time that Jim Hilton had known her caught at all off balance.
"We landed near the same place as you in a ship we stole. Around three to four hours ago. The same marksman was in the same damn place. Killed Pamela McGill with a single shot."
AT FIVE O'CLOCK the next morning, Jim Hilton was sitting up in his compact sleeping bag, looking into the dying embers of the fire in the middle of the dirt floor. Outside, the wind was rising, and an occasional flurry of snow would be blown in through the open doorway.
The glowing ashes gave just enough light for his dark-accustomed eyes to see where everyone was lying.
Carrie was next to him on his left, and Heather on his right. Sly was next to his daughter. Then came Mac's two little girls, Sukie and Jocelyn, in a twin sleeping bag. Paul, tall and broad shouldered, slept next to his half sisters. His pump-action Winchester 12-gauge was at his side. Then came Jeanne McGill, restless, whispering to herself in the darkness. Mac was next in the circle.
Jim had been distressed to see his oldest companion so stricken by the fatalities that had torn his family apart.
Before sleep finally claimed him, Mac had sat up next to Jim and talked ceaselessly about the sons and daughters now dead, focusing on Pamela.
"Buried her well above the high-water mark," he said. "Deep as we could. Didn't want dogs or crabs or…" He'd rested his face in his hands. "I got up to the house in Mystic, and they were fine, Jim. Nine of them. Now there's four. I'm like a storm crow, Jim. Harbinger of fucking doom, aren't I?"
He wouldn't accept any sort of sympathy, and Jim stopped trying.
Jeanne McGill had woken and urged Mac to try to get some rest, then immediately laid herself down again and closed her eyes.
"She had on a fine cameo brooch and a lovely tiger's-eye ring, Jim. It was a present. Middle finger, left hand. She…she only had it for a few weeks."
Finally Mac, too, had fallen into darkness.
Jeff Thomas was in his sleeping bag between Mac and Nanci, who completed the circle.
Jim was even more uneasy with Jeff around. The man had always been a grade-A, numero-uno, checkered-flag asshole. His story of how Jed Herne had died still didn't ring true, leaving the suspicion that he'd either killed the ex-Giants free safety himself or stood by while he was murdered.
And there was the bizarre relationship with Nanci that had always had some sick and perverse elements to it. Now it seemed as if love and hate had polarized even more.
"Ticking off good and bad points, Jim?"
He started at Nanci's quiet voice. She was lying on her elbow, looking at him with her pale blue eyes.
"Sort of."
"How do I score?"
Jim felt that anything other than an honest answer would be a waste of both their times and would make the older woman feel contempt for him. He didn't want that.
"High on some things. Top marks. Lower on others."
She laughed, the sound barely audible. "You say the nicest things, Skipper."
"The truth."
The smile vanished and she nodded. "I know. One of your strengths, Jim Hilton. I understand why both General Zelig and the Hunters want you and your people so badly."
Sukie McGill sat up in her sleeping bag, thumb in her mouth, eyes open wide. She looked past Nanci Simms, through the plasterboard wall of the hut, and said, "Who's been sitting in my chair, Mama?" And then she lay down once more by her sister.
Jim waited a few moments before speaking again. "We get moving in the morning?"
Nanci nodded. "I have the uncomfortable feeling of an invisible net slowly closing around us. Do you not have that feeling at all, Jim?"
"No. I just feel like a man running blind along a corridor lined with razor blades. And the passage is getting narrower and narrower."
"Same feeling. We need to get to the highway and find some wheels."
"More killing," he said wearily.
"If that bothers you, then take your .44 and blow your own head off. If we are…any of us…to safely reach Aurora, then I can only promise you more killing. I just hope and pray that we will not be among the dead."
"Think the Hunters are really…really hunting us, Nanci? Right this moment, I mean."
"Doubtful. After the ravages of Earthblood, life hasn't been so easy for the military. No gasoline being processed. The technical side collapsing. If the Hunters move against us, then it'll start in the light. But I figure we have two or three clear days before that happens. Still… I can't always be right."
ALMOST TO THE SECOND of her saying that, the leading Chinook was being hand-flagged away from the desert base of the Hunters of the Sun.
The long rotor blades thumped at the dark air, sending the echoes clear across the desert, through the arroyos and dunes and ghost towns.
In a sun-bleached shack at the end of the main street of one of those derelict mining settlements, Hopeful Gulch, a young woman was jerked awake by the sound. She stepped out into the predawn cool wearing only panties and a faded T-shirt and peered across the wilderness with her Swiss-made night-glasses.
She watched as first the one Chinook, and then its twin, rose ponderously into the star-sparkled sky and headed off on a course that would take them roughly north by northwest.
It hadn't been possible to see from that distance what the logistics were of the Hunters' operation, but she guessed, when she sent her radio message, that the way the choppers took off indicated full loads.
The crucial message eventually reached Aurora through a number of cutoff intermediaries, later that same morning, December 22.
But by that time Zelig himself was already on the road.
GAS WAS a serious problem for Operation Tempest also, bidden away in the mighty heart of the Cascades. Zelig didn't have the manpower or the weaponry of the Hunters of the Sun at his disposal. There were no big CH-47 Chinooks, though they had one each of the Huey, the Bell Kiowa and the Huey-Cobra. The smaller military choppers.
For his recon southward to try to pick up the survivors of the Aquila before someone else got to them, Zelig had chosen to rely on land transport.
Bearing in mind the deep-winter weather that was gripping the Pacific Northwest, ordinary trucks weren't likely to be a whole lot of good.
That meant relying on the half-dozen trusty M113s that they had up in Aurora.
The tracked vehicles had a road speed, on open highway in good repair, of over forty miles per hour, with a water-cooled six-cylinder diesel engine that produced over two hundred brake horsepower at nearly three thousand revs. They didn't have a terrific range, but Zelig had allocated some of their precious supplies of gas to be towed
in two tanks behind a pair of the armored personnel carriers.
They would normally carry a crew of two plus a dozen infantrymen. But to travel and be self-sufficient for a thousand miles or more meant packing a whole lot of supplies.
Zelig's total force consisted of forty-seven men, moving steadily southward, toward the last report of the Aquila's crew.
He knew, as soon as he finally heard the crackling message from the abandoned ghost town, that he would be too slow and too late.
"Lastest with the leastest," Zelig muttered to himself.
Chapter Twenty-One
"The closer we stick to the coast, the less severe the snow will be."
The fire in the hut was cold and dead, and the air itself seemed damp, close to freezing. Every time anyone spoke, their breath plumed around their face. The snow had eased, only falling intermittently, mixed with a steady drizzle of rain. Visibility was poor, sometimes down below fifty yards. Every now and again the wind would rise, and it was possible to see a quarter mile or so out across the leaden Pacific.
Nanci spoke again. "But we'll need to move on land. I had considered the feasibility of stealing another craft. Should they come after us and the weather clears, then it'll be like shooting fish in a barrel."
"Steal a wagon?" said Paul McGill.
The older woman nodded. "With eleven of us, we have to go for something substantial."
"Or two smaller vehicles," offered Jeff Thomas. "Wouldn't that be better, Nanci?"
"No. Double the theft and you simply quadruple the risk."
Jim Hilton scratched his chin. "We need something that'll get us through deep snow. No ploughs out. Highways will be close to impassable."
"There are plenty of farms around here." Nanci stepped into the doorway. "Tractors. Get you through most weather."
"A tractor will take us forever."
"No, Jeanne. Being dead takes forever."
Without settling on a specific strategy, they packed everything.
Nanci carried her new Krieghoff Ulm-Primus rifle over her shoulder, the machine pistol hanging from her hip. The surviving Heckler & Koch automatic was safely holstered.