"Good-bye, Suzanne. Try to relax and have a pleasant trip."
"I doubt it," she said under her breath.
She raced out of the house at top speed, trying to beat Harrison before he could press the horn again. Too late . .. another ear-piercing blast greeted her as she opened the front door.
Harrison was standing by the driver's side, about to bend down and press the horn again. He looked ready to jump on a boxcar . . . unshaven, wearing an old fedora, his tuxedo downgraded to the usual plaid flannel shirt and a rumpled pair of corduroys that obviously had never seen the hot side of an iron. As she approached, he reached for her bag without a word and tossed it carelessly into the back of the Bronco.
"You didn't have to honk so many times," she said coldly. Boss or not, he wasn't about to get away with treating her so thoughtlessly. "Maybe you can pack a bag in five minutes, but I have a daughter to think about. I had to get someone to take care of Debi. I hope you have a very good reason for this—"
"Damn good reason," he said, and she fell silent because he clearly meant it. "Can you handle a manual transmission?" The words came out slurred.
She studied him closely. He was actually swaying a little . . . not drunk, which was her first thought, but totally exhausted. Her tone changed. "When I have to."
"Good. You have to. You're driving." He handed her the keys, went around to the passenger side, and climbed in.
She took a very deep breath and released it, trying to relax, but all she wanted to do was shake him and scream at the top of her lungs, What the hell is going on? The thought that Mrs. Pennyworth might still be peeking at them through the window held her back. She brushed crumbs and an empty granola bar wrapper off the driver's seat, then slid behind the wheel, pulled the seat forward a bit, and put the keys into the ignition. Harrison had already reclined the passenger seat back and pulled his hat brim down over his eyes.
"It would help," she said calmly, utilizing every ounce of self-control, "if I knew where we were going."
"Map's on the dash," Harrison yawned. "Route's outlined in red."
It was there all right... on top of an opened box of granola bars, several scholarly astronomy journals, yellowed newspapers, and what looked like his doctoral thesis. She looked back at him to ask another question: why, but his jaw had dropped slightly, causing his lips to part. For God's sake, he was already asleep!
She picked up the map and found the red markings. Their destination seemed to be out in the middle of the desert... a several-hour drive. What on earth would they be looking for out in the middle of nowhere?
Either the man was crazy, or . ..
Or what? There is no "or". . . he's just plain crazy.
Sighing, she started the Bronco's engine.
The cobra gunship hovered over the Jericho Valley Disposal Site like a noisy insect. In the co-pilot's seat, Lieutenant Colonel Paul Ironhorse leaned forward
and gestured at the pilot to move the chopper in for a better look. Whatever had happened, Ironhorse knew, was not good. All communications with the installation had been cut off for more than twenty-four hours; Jericho Valley was silent as a tomb, and both the inner and outer entrance gates lay wide open. Ironhorse was not surprised to find the sentries missing.
The cobra moved past the entrance and dipped lower.
"My God," Ironhorse said, but it was drowned out by the thumping copter blades. In front of him, the pilot's head jerked back as he made a silent observation of his own.
The barracks had been blown apart, reduced to a blackened skeleton of wood and rubble. Debris littered the yard for a hundred-foot radius. A surprise attack, then, with no intent of taking any hostages. There would be no survivors among the seventeen stationed here.
The question was, where had their killers gone? Perhaps they were still here, waiting for the cobra to move in just a little closer.
The copter flew past the remains of the barracks to the far corner of the yard where stacks of toxic waste barrels stood in neat aisles. Ironhorse frowned. Strange. The barrels were loaded onto double-tiered scaffolding, but only onto the upper tier. The bottom was empty, which made the structure dangerously topheavy. Rack one up to noncom inefficiency.
And then he noticed one of the barrels down on its side, oozing. Jesus, the place was hot! Good damn
thing they'd seen it in the cobra first before they sent anyone in on foot. The pilot didn't seem to react, probably hadn't even seen.
Along a farther aisle lay the bodies. The cobra lurched a bit; the pilot averted his head, sickened.
Ironhorse didn't flinch. It wasn't an easy thing to look at, but he'd seen worse in Beirut, in Kampuchea. He motioned the reluctant pilot a hair closer and tried to count. All seventeen were probably there, though the way they were stacked on top of each other, it was hard to be sure, plus the vultures were in the way. Four of them, feeding. One had a red strip of thigh muscle in its beak and was flapping its wings as it struggled to tear the meat from a corpse. What made it rough was the fact that even at this distance Ironhorse could see the vultures had already plucked out the tenderest delicacy—the eyes. They always got the eyes first.
Ironhorse had learned that as a kid on the reservation. He'd seen birds on lots of animals, once even on a man who'd gotten himself caught in a bear trap. They'd pecked his eyes out too. It was in the forests of the Blackfoot reservation in northwestern Montana, just shy of the Rockies to the west and Alberta to the north. Rugged, mountainous land, and merciless: It had taught him a lot. One survived by one's wits and accepted harshness, or one perished. The land took no excuses; it was cruel and unfair, and those who failed to learn its lessons died.
His people still lived on that land, where they had struggled vainly against the encroachment of the white man with his train—the "iron horse." Paul's
family had fought against the train and lost, yet they kept the name, "one-who-shoots-the-iron horse." oven though now the train and the white men owned their souls.
But not Paul Ironhorse's. He had seen too many men and women, including his own father and brother, destroy themselves on the reservation because they had forgotten the first lesson of the land: discipline, survival. If the only way for Paul to survive was to take advantage of the white man's system, the white man's discipline, then he would do it and take pride in it. He left the reservation for West Point; his first year after graduating he went to the Olympics as a decathlete and returned with a Bronze Medal.
His brother accused him of "turning white" and no longer spoke to him. His mother still wrote him but remained on the reservation in spite of his offers to take care of her elsewhere.
Ironhorse told himself it didn't matter: what mattered was that he, Paul, had survived; in his own way he had overcome his people's defeat. He had no patience with those like his brother, who whined when things were not easy, cried because life was unfair.
Of course it's unfair, Paul had shouted. Life is always unfair, and the best anyone can do is try to even up the odds through hard work.
That attitude had earned him a reputation in the army as hard-nosed, an ass-kicker, labels he was proud to wear.
He watched the vultures work for a while, the sight filling him with hatred. Hatred, he learned long ago, could be a good thing if you used it to motivate yourself and didn't bury it inside, where it ate at you like a cancer.
He tapped the pilot on the shoulder and motioned upward with his thumb. The grisly tableau receded as the cobra flew up and away. They landed back outside the gate, not far from the parked personnel carrier. As soon as the thumping blades slowed, Ironhorse half yelled over the noise to the pilot: "Whoever did this is long gone."
The pilot, a skinny freckle-faced kid who was still shaken by what he'd seen, blinked innocently at Ironhorse. "How can we be sure, Colonel? I mean, other than the fact no one fired on us? It could be an ambush, sir."
Ironhorse shook his head. "I'm sure. The vultures," he said enigmatically. It was true, to an extent. Vultures usually liked to wait unti
l everything living was dead or gone. If they weren't too hungry.
"Wow." The kid looked so round-eyed and gullible, Ironhorse was hard-pressed to keep his own expression grim. He enjoyed cultivating what he called his "Indian mystique." The kid would probably buy it if Ironhorse pressed his ear to the ground and proclaimed that the attackers were exactly seventy-five kilometers due east. No point in mentioning the obvious clues such as the overturned barrels, which would clear anyone with an ounce of brains out of there, or the wide-open gates.
Ironhorse climbed from the cobra to call his superiors and relay the bad news.
Suzanne had been driving an hour and a half—not even enough time to leave civilization behind—when Harrison stirred and pushed back the brim of his hat with a finger.
"Feeling better?" she asked not unpleasantly. The monotony of driving in silence had worn the edge off her anger.
He brought the seat upright and rubbed his face, yawning. "Much, thanks."
"You didn't sleep very long—only ninety minutes or so."
"Ninety minutes?" His eyebrows flew up. "Jeez, I overslept. Usually I nap only one hour for every five I'm awake."
She frowned, skeptical. "You're joking."
"No, really, you should try it sometime." He meshed his fingers, turned his hands palms outward, and stretched. "Someone as dedicated as you .. . I'm surprised you're not already doing it. Makes it easier to give that hundred and fifty percent." He shot her a mischievous glance, which she ignored. "Why don't you pull over? I'll drive."
"Fair enough." She maneuvered the Bronco into the right-hand lane and pulled into an Amoco station.
"Pull 'er up to the self-serve super unleaded."
She did so. Harrison got out, stretched some more, and filled the tank. After paying up, he crawled back in on the driver's side, wincing when his knee hit the dash.
"Sorry," she said. She never could remember to move the seat back for Derek.
"'Sail right," he said, rubbing it. He got the Bronco
back out on the highway, and they rode in silence for a minute.
"All right." Suzanne turned to look at him at the first light. "I've been exceptionally good. I haven't screamed or threatened you with physical harm or burst into a flood of angry tears, but I promise to do all three if you don't tell me right now where we're going and why."
Harrison didn't answer for a beat. "Is that all?"
She stared coldly at him and waited.
A smile spread slowly over his face. "Okay, okay, I admit to being a little ... uncommunicative. But I was preoccupied. Here goes." He took a deep breath. "Last night Norton picked up a radio broadcast signal from the location pinpointed on our map there."
She shrugged. "Out in the middle of the desert. I figure it's some type of military installation. What's so unusual about that?"
"Plenty," Harrison replied. He removed the hat, set it on the dash, and absently ran his fingers through his short, golden brown curls. "For starters, the signal was a powerful one, directed at a point somewhere in the constellation Taurus."
"But that's the same thing Norton's transmitter is doing, isn't it?" She frowned, unable to see what was so earth-shattering about the fact. "Broadcasting signals into space to see if anyone's listening?"
"If anyone else were doing this type of work out in the desert, so close to us, I'd know about it. It's hardly classified." He paused and glanced briefly at her with those intense pale-blue eyes of his, then stared back at the road. There was no amusement in his eyes or voice
now. "This signal"—he nodded at the map on the dash—"was answered."
"What?" It came out a gasp; her first instinct was to giggle at the outright absurdity of it. "That's impossible. First, radio waves can't travel that fast—it would take years for that to happen—"
"I know," Harrison said calmly. "But the fact is, it happened. Norton has the computer printouts. He showed them to me. They show first a signal— originating from our spot in the desert—and then being mimicked, amplitude for amplitude, by a second signal coming from the Taurus constellation. Another signal, another mimicked response . .. then what follows looks suspiciously like a friendly little chat." He patted his breast pocket. "Norton made me a recording of the actual signals."
They traveled in silence for a while, and then she asked, "Harrison, in all honesty, what do you expect to find there? Little green men?"
"I don't know." He hesitated, then said in a quiet voice that made her shudder, "I know what I hope to God I don't find."
EIGHT
"Come in, Reynolds," Ironhorse said gruffly. He was seated into a personnel carrier that had been turned into a mobile command post and was in a particularly foul mood, having just shouted himself hoarse at a whining supply sergeant on the phone. Outside, within the Jericho Valley installation, soldiers wearing protective suits wandered through the yard, some of them carrying Geiger counters, some portable video packs, others with dogs on leads, policing for booby traps.
Staff Sergeant Gordon T. Reynolds, a tall man with a defensive linebacker's build, had to crouch down to enter since the vehicle was designed for sitting, not standing. Like the men in the yard, he wore protective radiation gear, except for the helmet. The dark brown skin of his forehead was puckered, his expression a
The Resurrection mixture of agitation and concern. "You told me to brief you, Colonel, as soon as we had anything—"
"Wait a minute." Ironhorse stopped him with a gesture and peered suspiciously at him. "You clean?"
"More or less, sir." At Ironhorse's mistrustful look, Reynolds elaborated. "The tech sarge swore there's not enough radiation left on me to knock more than a few months off your life."
Ironhorse's upper lip curled slightly. "Why am I not reassured?" He nodded at his staff sergeant. "Come in, Reynolds."
Reynolds entered, crouching low, his head touching the ceiling. Ironhorse liked and trusted Gordon Reynolds, though he was careful not to show it. Maybe it had something to do with the fact that Reynolds had grown up a poor black inner-city kid, and, like his commanding officer, had battled prejudice and the odds and come out the winner. Of course, Ironhorse had no idea what Reynolds thought of him—he did not fraternize with his men; he was not in the army to be liked.
"We did a body count, Colonel," Reynolds said. "You were right, sir, all seventeen were there ... at least what was left of them. We had to verify the number through HQ, since the roster was missing. Looks like fourteen died when the barracks were blown up—probably a rocket launcher, though no weapons were left behind."
"Damn," Ironhorse said softly. He felt a muscle in his right jaw begin to twitch. "What about the other three?"
"Shot up. Automatic weapons. The tire tracks are from an eighteen-wheeler—we're getting impressions now—and there are four-wheel all-terrain vehicle tracks all over the yard. Probably had more than one of those, from the looks of it. I figure they got the truck inside, shot the sentries, then used the rocket launcher before anyone knew what was going on."
"Killed everyone and then left." Ironhorse shook his head at the senselessness of it, then looked up sharply at the sound of an explosion outside.
"Sappers setting off booby traps," Reynolds offered helpfully.
Ironhorse ignored the comment. Reynolds had a habit of stating the obvious. "This whole thing doesn't make any sense, Sergeant. Think about it. Why the hell would someone want to overrun an installation and then leave? They even mined the perimeter, as if they were expecting to stay awhile."
Reynolds nervously stroked his regulation-trimmed charcoal mustache with a gloved hand. "I figure it was the punctured barrel you saw from the cobra, Colonel. Maybe the radioactivity scared 'em off. Funny thing, though, they didn't touch the protective suits in the guard house."
"Why would anyone who was going to overrun a nuclear waste dump not be prepared for such an emergency? And why choose Jericho Valley, of all places? There are other places they could overrun a lot easier—say, a nuclear power plant—
and get a much bigger bargaining chip. A core meltdown of a power plant could cause a lot more havoc than some barrels of nuclear waste."
Reynolds shrugged. "Maybe they're stupid, Colonel."
Ironhorse's lips thinned. "So far, that's the best explanation I've come up with today." He paused. "Even so, I want those barrels inventoried. Low priority—just get someone on it when you can, hopefully by the end of today. Unless you have anything else to report, you're dismissed."
"Yes, sir." Reynolds turned to leave but lingered in the exit, a hesitant expression on his face.
Ironhorse raised a blue-black brow. "Was there something else, Sergeant?"
"No, sir." Reynolds seemed to change his mind, and moved reluctantly away.
"What's with you? Bodies get to you?"
Crouched in the doorway, Reynolds faced him again. "Yes, sir—well, no, sir—it's not that."
"Something else, then." Normally, Ironhorse never pried, but he got the definite impression there was something else Reynolds really wanted to say but simply didn't have the nerve for it. "Spit it out, Sergeant. We haven't got all day, and I can't have anything interfering with your efficiency."
Reynolds seemed truly flustered. "Well, it's uh . . . personal, Colonel. Now hardly seems the appropriate time." He gestured at the scene outside the carrier.
"I'll be the judge of that," Ironhorse answered firmly. "Say it."
Reynolds cleared his throat and fidgeted. "Permission to ask a personal favor, sir."
What the hell. . . Ironhorse frowned sternly. "Per
mission granted." Which did not mean that he would grant the favor, by any means.
"I'm getting married next month, sir, and I—"
Ironhorse smiled faintly, for a moment forgetting the gruesome surroundings. "Reynolds, you son of a bitch! I thought you were a confirmed ladies' man."
Apparently pleased by the remark, Reynolds smiled shyly and stroked his mustache. He didn't even try to refute the notion that women found him handsome.
"When did this happen?" Ironhorse asked.
"A couple of months ago, sir. But I wondered if you would—" He paused awkwardly, averting his light brown eyes. "If you would be my best man, sir."
J.M. Dillard - War of Worlds: The Resurrection Page 9