by Tom Clancy
Thibodeau's glazed eyes widened with surprise as Felix came speeding toward him from the right, its wheels swishing over the catwalk's runner, its gripper arm extending straight out in front of it.
Startled by the sound of its advance, the invader standing over Thibodeau whirled toward the 'hog, bringing his rifle up from Thibodeau's head. But the 'hog's side-mounted shotgun discharged with a belch of smoke and flame while he was still bringing the rifle around to fire at it.
The invader spun back against rail of the catwalk, his rifle flying from his hands. The advancing robot tracked his movement, angled its gun, and fired another shot at nearly point-blank range, hitting him hard enough to lift him off his feet. Shrieking and clutching at the air, the invader went sailing over the guardrail and plummeted to the floor of the storage bay, his body landing with a heavy crash.
The roar of its shotgun still echoing in the air, Felix hurtled toward the second invader, who triggered his own weapon, spraying the 'hog with a short burst of automatic fire. But he'd been unable to recover from his surprise in time to position himself for his shots, and only one or two nicked Felix's carrier, the rest going completely astray, ricocheting off the wall and catwalk.
He did not get a chance to unleash another volley. The hog's gripper claw shot out just as he was taking aim, snatched his leg below the knee, and clamped down with several hundred pounds of force.
His trouser leg suddenly wet with blood, the invader screamed and tried to twist away, but Felix's hold was unyielding. Screaming in pain, his rifle clattering from his hands, he bent and wrapped his fingers around the robotic arm, struggling in vain to tear it loose.
Watching blearily from inches away, Thibodeau saw him sink onto one knee, then heard the bones of his opposite leg splinter with a sickening crunch under the relentless pressure of the gripper claw. His screams growing in shrillness, the invader continued to pull at the arm as the robot resumed its advance, shoving him implacably backward, out of reach of his fallen weapon.
Sonsabitchin' contraption's good for somethin' after all, Thibodeau thought, then let his head slump to the floor again, no longer able to keep it up.
His field of vision contracting to a small, fuzzy circle, he lay there motionless, the side of his face against the floor. He was vaguely aware of footsteps far below him, a lot of them. Someone shouted--first in Spanish, then English. He heard a fusillade of gunfire.
Before he even had time to wonder what any of it meant, Thibodeau's eyes rolled back under their lids, and he ceased to be aware of anything at all.
As the Sword ops bolted into the payload storage bay, they heard two reverberating shotgun blasts over their heads, and then saw a man in a black cammo suit fall from one of the catwalks, screaming and flailing as he dropped to the floor to their left, slamming down with a hard thud, then neither screaming nor moving anymore. An instant later there was a chop of automatic fire in the air high above them. Looking up, they spotted another dark form on the catwalk, this one suddenly folding to his knees as a hedgehog launched at him across the catwalk, its gripper arm rapidly whipping out to snatch him like the foreleg of a preying mantis. Several of the ops saw a third man sprawled on the catwalk behind the 'hog, and noticing his Sword uniform, realized instantly it must be Thibodeau.
But before they could react to this sight, a third figure in black sprang from a crouch below a towering work platform up ahead, leaving an object behind on the floor near one of its supports. All of them were experienced enough to know it was a satchel charge--and they could see two more in plain view below other platforms.
"Stay right where you are!" one of the ops shouted, raising his weapon.
The man wasn't inclined to listen to his warning, regardless of the language. He raised his gun and swung it toward the group of Sword ops.
The response from the Sword op who had called out to him was immediate and conclusive. Bullets spurted from his gun, cutting the invader down before he could fire a single round.
Lowering his barrel, the op sprinted past the invader to the platform support, knelt over the satchel charge, and rapidly assessed its threat. He was no demolitions expert, but it looked like it was on a simple timer pencil and fuze configuration... although looks could be deceptive. There could, he knew, be internal wiring that would detonate the explosives if he tried yanking out the fuze, or other types of booby traps totally unfamiliar to him. Yet the timer's pin was nowhere in sight, and it only had a couple of minutes left on it, leaving him with no chance to move the bomb or call for help--
He hesitated briefly, feeling his body tighten. Then, gritting his teeth, he pinched the fuze between his thumb and forefinger and gave it a hard pull.
A moment later he took a deep breath, and then another, thanking God that the bomb hadn't gone off in his hands, that he and everyone around him were still there, still there and not blown to bits.
Which did not yet mean they were in the clear, he quickly reminded himself.
"This one's out of commission, we better get on to the others!" he shouted. "Let's hurry!"
Back in the driver's seat of his chase car, Carlysle looked out his windshield at the fleeing group of invaders and swore aloud. Less than a minute ago, their jeep had sped through the gap in the perimeter fence and he had followed on their tail.
The problem was that he wasn't at all certain he ought to be doing that.
He tried to think it through even while gunning his engine, pushing to close the distance between them.
Having sent Newell for medical treatment and dispatched their prisoners to a holding area with one of the other units, his squad had been returning to their car when they saw the invaders hasten back into their own vehicle, pull it around in a screeching circle, and whip toward the fence. As the men who by chance were closest to them, Carlysle's team had launched off in pursuit... but the jeep had been passing through the fence before Carlysle even got behind the wheel, giving it a good head start.
What troubled him was a simple question of authority. UpLink's host government had sanctioned the emplacement of an independent security force on the ISS compound, period. It was not prepared to have that force move about at will, engaging in what amounted to a small war. Carlysle was sensitive to that, and because he was a disciplined professional, could not close his eyes to the boundaries of his license to operate. If there had been no prisoners taken on the compound to hopefully yield information about the motives and objectives behind their raid, he might have been inclined to push those bounds and carry on the pursuit, calling in the Skyhawks for aerial support. But there were, and it was hard to justify going forward knowing the repercussions that might be expected as a consequence.
He gripped the wheel, his eyes on the taillights ahead of him. Stop or go, what was it going to be? With Thibodeau not answering his radio, the decision was his to make.
Producing another string of curses, he shifted his foot to his brake pedal and eased it down. The chase car lurched to a halt over the bumpy road.
"Never mind that bunch, we're going back," he said to the man beside him. "There's a whole lot of pieces that need picking up at the facility, and nobody but us to do it."
Its engine throbbing, Kuhl's jeep shot through the gap in the fence at full horsepower, reversing the path it had taken into the compound.
Kuhl turned in the front passenger seat and saw the twin points of headlights in the darkness behind him. But they were a good distance away, and that distance seemed to be growing. Still, he wanted to keep his eyes on them.
The jeep plunged ahead into the jungle, bouncing over the road, vines and branches lashing its windshield, leaving behind long, drippy swipes of moisture. Soon the unbroken tunnel of vegetation around it was screening out the sky.
Kuhl watched the headlights steadily, convinced they were indeed becoming further off. Why might that be so? he asked himself. Certainly their position beside the jeep had given Kuhl and his three companions a jump on the security teams, who had dispersed
from their own vehicles during the firefight. But that only accounted for his head start, not the absence of any concerted and determined pursuit. And what of the helicopters? Why hadn't they been sent after him?
A faint smile touched his lips. Even flight had its lessons, and it struck him that he'd just gained another bit of understanding about UpLink's vulnerabilities, limitations, and the dynamics of its relationship with the Brazilians.
It was knowledge he would have to carefully digest along with the rest of what he'd learned tonight.
Knowledge that was bound to be very useful as the next phase of the game commenced.
FIVE
VARIOUS LOCALES
APRIL 17, 2001
THE BALD EAGLE LAUNCHED FROM THE TALL TREES downhill to their right, soaring above the old pilings at the marshy tidal band, its long outspread wings a serrate outline against the sky, the untinged whiteness of its head and tail feathers contrasting so strikingly with its blackish body they seemed almost like luminous, painted-on accents to guide the eye across its perfect form.
Megan watched it circle the pilings twice, rise gracefully on an updraft, and then swing out across the shiny waters of the bay. The shore below her was silent. Nothing moved amid the rushes. Nor was there any motion in the tangled scrub sloping off from the deck where she sat with Nimec and Ricci, a cup of strong black coffee on the table in front of her.
"It'll generally stay quiet for five, ten minutes after she's gone. Then you'll see the gulls, terns, and ducks come back, sometimes a few at a time, sometimes hundreds of them at once, like there's been an all-clear," Ricci said. "The eagles prefer eating fish to anything else, but when they're really hungry or nursing a brood, they'll make a meal out of whatever they can sink their talons into. Smaller birds, rodents, even house cats that stray too far from their backyards."
Megan reluctantly dropped her gaze from the eagle's path. Its sudden appearance had given her a thrill of excitement, but Ricci had promised an explanation for the ugly scene on the road, and she was more than ready to hear it.
She shot a glance across the table at him. "How about urchins?"
Ricci smiled a little. "Them too," he said.
She kept looking at him pointedly.
"I think Megan was offering you a neat little segue there," Nimec said from the chair beside her. "Might not be a bad idea to take it."
Ricci paused a moment, then nodded.
"You two want to go inside first?" He gestured toward the sliding door leading back into his house. "It's getting pretty brisk out here."
Nimec's shoulders rose and fell. "I'm okay."
"Same," Megan said. "I can use the fresh air after all the schlepping around we've done. To use an Irish word."
Ricci sat there, his face showing not one iota of concern about the headaches he'd caused them. That irritated Megan, and she hoped the expression on her face made it abundantly clear to him. The schlep she'd mentioned had included following his pickup for nearly an hour as he'd led them to a fish-smelling wholesale seafood market on a wharf at the foot of the peninsula, where they'd had to wait while he'd spent another hour hustling back and forth between one saltbox shed and another, haggling with buyers over the value of several large plastic trays he'd been carrying in the flatbed of the truck ... or more accurately the layers of spiny, tennis-ball-sized green sea urchins inside those trays, what he'd earlier referred to as his catch. And all that after she and Nimec had traveled three thousand miles across the country by air and ground, and the unexpected confrontation with the warden and deputy sheriff.
"I suppose," Ricci said at length, "you'd like me to tell you why those uniformed humps were on my case."
Megan watched him coolly over the rim of her cup.
"That would be nice," she said.
Ricci lifted his own coffee to his mouth, sipped, and then set it down on the circular tabletop.
"Either of you know anything about urchin diving?"
Megan shook her head.
"Pete?" Ricci said.
"Only that urchins are a specialty item in foreign seafood markets. I'd assume they can bring good money."
Ricci nodded.
"Actually it's the roe that's valuable. Or can be, anyway. You ever been to a sushi bar, it's what they call uni on the menu. The bulk of it gets shipped out to Japan, the rest to Japanese communities in this country and Canada," he said. "Its price depends on availability, the percentage of roe in comparison to its total weight, and the quality of the roe, which has to be a bronzy gold color--kind of like a tangerine--if you want to fetch a premium. Those trays I unloaded had about two and a half bushels of urchins each and were worth almost a grand to me."
Megan looked at him. "If somebody had told me that when I was ten, I'd be worth millions today. My big brother and I would walk along the beach and collect them off the jetties in our plastic buckets. Then we'd fill the buckets with ocean water and try to convince our parents to let us bring them home as pets. My dad would tell us to get those damned sea porcupines out of the house."
Ricci smiled faintly.
"People have different nicknames for them around here, but they shared your father's sentiments till recently, when everybody heard about the Asian demand and got a yen for the yen," he said. "Before that, they were just considered nuisances. Most of the old-time lobstermen still refer to them as whore's eggs because they mess up their traps. Clog the vents, eat the bait, even chew through the headings and lathe to get at the bait. The nasty little buggers have some sharp teeth to go with their spines."
"You gather the urchins yourself?"
"Harvesting's done in teams of at least one scuba diver and a tender, who waits above in the boat," Ricci said. "I like to do the underwater work alone. Take a big mesh tote below with me and pick the best-looking urchins. When a bag's full, I send up a float line so my tender, this guy named Dexter, can spot it and hoist it aboard."
"Tender?" Megan said. "Define, please."
"It's the diver's equivalent of a golf caddy. He's supposed to maintain the scuba equipment, look out for the diver's safety, make sure the catch doesn't freeze, and if time allows, cull the urchins. Something goes wrong, how he reacts can be critical." He paused. "That's why the profits get split down the middle."
Nimec raised an eyebrow. "I heard you mention a Dex when you were facing off with the deputy...."
"That's him," Ricci said.
"Didn't sound like your partnership's exactly rock solid."
Ricci shrugged.
"Maybe, maybe not," he said. "I'll get to that."
Megan watched him, warming her hands around her cup. "Is it always your job to bring the catch to market?"
He leaned back slightly in his chair.
"I'm getting around to that too," he said, and drank more coffee. "The urchins are found in colonies, usually in subtidal kelp beds. Once upon a time they practically carpeted the bottom of the Penobscot from the shoreline on out, so you could scoop them up without dunking your head." He paused. "Past few years have been slim pickings. Overharvesting's driven the value of the catch up into the stratosphere, and made people so protective of their zones they're baring their teeth and beating their chests if you come anywhere close to them."
"These zones ... I presume they're demarcated by law."
Ricci nodded.
"There's a license that costs almost three hundred bucks, and with the conservation restrictions nowadays you have to wait your turn in a lottery to get one. When applying for it, you have to choose the area and season you want to dive in. Wardens inspect it very carefully. Tells them whether you're legal in black and white."
"Your trays were packed full," Nimec said. "Seems to me you're doing okay."
Ricci nodded again.
"Also seems to me that would get noticed fast during a period of decline in the overall yield. By other divers, buyers, and the warden if he's got his eyes open."
Ricci looked straight at him and nodded a third time. "You won't find a whol
e lot of guys who like going out as far, or down as deep as I do... especially not this time of year, when the water temperature can still drop near freezing and the currents are rough. But there are hundreds of tiny islets in the bay, a few of them within my diving area, and I hit on one that's got a deepwater cove where the urchin count's wild and wonderful."
Nimec looked thoughtful.
"Word got around," he said.
"Uh-huh," Ricci said. "When you're talking about a stake that's worth serious cash, and men who are having a hard time feeding their families, it's a volatile combination. There are resentments toward people from away that go back a long, long time and are maybe even a little justified. Back around the turn of the century, rich out-of-towners started buying up acres and acres of bay-front land around their summer mansions as privacy buffers against the fishermen and clam diggers they thought of as white trash. Stuck 'No Trespassing' signs up everywhere, restricting their access to the water that was their livelihood."
"Somebody twist the locals' arms to sell?" Megan said.
Ricci gave her a sharp look.
"Either you've never been poor, or you've forgotten what that can be like," he said brusquely. "Watch your kids starve through a Maine winter, and you won't need any other kind of arm-twisting."
She sat there in the brittle silence that followed, wondering if his reaction had made her feel guiltier about her remark than she should have.
"Dex and the warden cut some kind of deal?" Nimec said. The last thing he wanted was to get sidetracked.
Ricci turned his coffee cup in his hands, seeming to concentrate on the steam wisping up from it.
"Let's get back to whether it's usually me who drives the catch to market," he said at last. "I've been working with Dex for over a year and never went there without him before today. Guy likes wheeling and dealing, likes to get the wholesalers bidding. The whole thing from soup to nuts, you know?" He paused. "He also looks forward to having his cash in hand. But this morning he tells me something about needing to rush home to watch his kids after school. Said his wife had to work late and there was nobody else. The minute we pull the boat in, he's up and away."