He paused, and for a moment they weren’t sure if he was going to take this as an insult, but then he smiled and said, “Of course! I apologize for my stupidity! You see, we are very remote here, and schedules, time clocks, and such are as foreign as snow to us. Mariana is our watchword here, I fear. But there is but one meteor, sí? And it will not wait. I understand.” He turned to one of the other men and barked some crisp orders in Spanish quite different in tone from the one he was using with them, then turned back to them.
“I have asked Juan, my son, to accompany you. With him along, you will find few barriers. His English is fairly good, so you should not need the lovely Senorita Perez to translate, and Juan is a very good helicopter pilot who can assist when you need it.” He paused again and for the first time seemed slightly nervous. “This meteor—it is huge, yes?”
“Very large,” Maklovitch acknowledged. “Maybe the biggest thing to hit the Earth in thousands of years.”
“What will happen when it hits, if I may ask? Here, for example.”
Lori decided it was time to take over. “Senor, I don’t think we should mince words. Perhaps nothing, although the last track I saw takes it within 150 kilometers of here. There will be debris, some of it possibly as large as heavy rocks and some of it extremely hot. The explosion itself when it lands will be gigantic, like an exploding volcano or worse. How much of the effect you’ll get here, whether fallout of rocks or blast damage, will depend on how close it hits. Make no mistake—if it does not clear the Andes, and we do not believe it will, it will hit within a 150-kilometer radius of this estate. Within fifty, you will suffer some strong damage. Within a hundred, some minor damage analogous to an earthquake about that far away. I would certainly take some precautions to secure things, tie them down, get breakables off shelves, that sort of thing, but I wouldn’t panic. The odds are very good you won’t be in the direct path—but you will know when it comes.”
Campos seemed impressed by this. “I thank you. I will do what I can to ‘batten the hatches,’ as they say, then watch you and pray.”
“They hooked up a relay to the house?” Maklovitch asked, impressed.
“No, no. I will watch you on my satellite television. On CNN.”
The reporter seemed momentarily taken aback. “Good heavens!” he muttered, more to himself than to the others. “I wonder if the ratings people know about places like this?”
Just then a figure emerged from the house, summoned apparently by one of the bodyguards.
There was no question that Juan Campos was the son of Francisco, but there was a difference far greater between them. What was handsome and cultured on the older man seemed somehow raw and violent in the younger, almost as if the veneer of civilization had been stripped off with the years. His hair was long and black, his mustache was large and bushy, and the eyes were—well, mean. He wore green military fatigues that showed custom tailoring and combat boots, and the leather gun belt around his waist held a holster with a mean-looking automatic pistol sticking out of it.
Lori thought, but didn’t dare say, that the younger man looked almost like the generic poster of a Latin American revolutionary.
Francisco introduced them around, and the younger man nodded to each in turn, giving each of the news team a penetrating stare, as if he were trying to memorize every detail he could see about them.
Finally he said, in a voice both deeper and more gruff than his father’s as well as more heavily accented, “All right. We go.”
Terry gave Lori a sudden look that was understood almost instantly; this wasn’t their guide but their keeper, and no matter what kind of bastard he was, he was in charge.
They walked around the very large hacienda toward some large outbuildings in the rear, and almost instantly they could see where the crew had set up. A small area against a nondescript green-painted barn was being test lit by some very bright portable lights, and a generator rumbled to give the whole thing power. Gus was happy to see that they’d brought his gear around, and the crew, almost all Brazilians, had already unpacked some of it and set up for the spot.
Terry looked around in the darkness. “Too bad we couldn’t get a better backdrop,” she commented. “This could just as well be Macon County with that barn.”
“No photographs of the ranch,” Juan Campos growled. “Your plane or this barn only.”
She shrugged. “Too bad. John will have to carry the remoteness with his personality.”
The reporter chuckled, but then he turned to Juan Campos to get the other ground rules straight. “What do you want me to say about where we are?” he asked. “Just that we’re on a remote airstrip well inside the jungle, or can I say more?”
“You may mention my father and his hospitality,” the man in green responded. “In fact, we want you to do so. But do not mention me or what you have seen here.”
“Fair enough. Uh—for the record, what does your father officially grow and export from here?”
“Bananas,” Juan Campos responded flatly. Terry rolled her eyes, and Lori had a hard time not laughing in spite of the danger. It was all too, well, comic book, real as it might be.
“Doc, you and John stand over there against the barn,” Terry instructed. “We want to play with the lighting, and Gus wants a camera test. We’ll have to adjust to get rid of some of the shadows. John, I’m going to talk to base and see what they want and when.”
They were already getting bitten by all sorts of small insects—a medical crew had met them at the airport in Manaus and had filled them with shots, but in spite of that and liberal doses of industrial-strength bug repellent on the plane, Lori was still not sure what was biting her or how hard it would be to look into a camera and not keep scratching and swatting. Thoughts of assassin bugs and malaria mosquitoes came to her unbidden. Once in the lights, though, the little bastards seemed to gang up in swarms. It was going to be a very tough few minutes with those lights on.
Almost as surreal was the little Brazilian man with the pancake and small kit of makeup who actually came in and touched both of them up while Gus took his own sweet time doing his tests and also rearranging the lighting. Finally the main lights went off, leaving them with enough electric light to see but still giving an almost eerie sense of darkness after that brightness.
“Can’t do with available light and get a decent shot here,” Gus told them, “but I think we can manage with just the one portable light there.”
He seemed oblivious to the bugs. “Aren’t you getting eaten alive, Gus?” Lori asked him. “How can you keep that steady?”
“Aw, shucks, this ain’t no worse than a Minnesota lakes summer,” he responded casually. “Up there the bugs got to get in all their eating in a real short time. You catch ‘skeeters in little teeny bear traps.”
“Yeah. Sure.” She remembered an old boyfriend once saying that anybody who started something with the words “Aw, shucks” should be closely watched and never totally trusted. Gus wanted everybody to think of him as just a country hick from the Minnesota backwoods, but this was a man who made a living as a free-lance cameraman for foreign correspondents. She couldn’t help but wonder what that country hick act concealed. Perhaps he was the type of person nobody could ever really know.
It was amusing to watch Maklovitch at work. He’d stand there with his scribbled notes, lights on, camera running, and go through the shorthand script several times, often stopping and looking disgusted and then starting all over again. Occasionally he’d examine himself in the tiny monitor and call for somebody to adjust his hair or put a little makeup here or there, and then he’d also go back and forth with someone on the microphone as if he were on the telephone. It was a moment before she realized that he was sort of on the telephone; he had an earpiece connected to the large apparatus beneath the satellite dish just beyond and was clearly in direct communication with Atlanta.
Suddenly he looked around. “Doctor Sutton!” he called.
“Yes?”
“G
et over here! We want to introduce you and go over the initial spot.”
She hurried over, suddenly as self-conscious of her appearance as Maklovitch was of his, but it was too late to do much about it.
Terry came up to her and handed her an earpiece similar to the reporter’s. She stuck it in her ear. A small microphone was clipped to the front of her blouse.
“Hello? Doctor Sutton? You reading us?” a man’s voice came to her.
She was suddenly panicked, unsure of how to reply.
Maklovitch was an old hand at this sort of thing and said, “Just talk. That little mike you have on will pick you up. Just use a normal tone. It’s pretty sensitive.”
“Uh—yes, I hear you fine,” she responded, feeling sudden panic and stage fright.
“All right. We’ll be coming to your location after the next commercial spot.”
“That can take twenty minutes,” Maklovitch commented dryly. Then he said to her, “It’s going to be easy. Just relax, I’ll make some introductory remarks, introduce you, then ask you the same kind of questions we’ve asked all along. They might have a few extra questions as well, but don’t expect anything complex or anything you might not be ready for. This isn’t brain surgery, and the audience aren’t physicists. Okay?”
She nodded nervously. Up until now this was the one thing she’d thought the least about; now, oddly, it was the thing that was making her the most nervous, and she tried desperately to calm down.
“All I want to do is not make a fool of myself,” she told him honestly.
“Don’t worry. You’ll do fine. The one problem is the audio. You’ll be hearing two channels at once sometimes— the director or supervising producer in Atlanta and the anchors. Just don’t let it confuse you.”
The next few minutes were something of a blur, but all thoughts of the discomfort, the lights, the bugs, and the heat and humidity faded. She remembered being asked, “Is there any danger that this asteroid is large enough to cause worldwide problems?” and answering reflexively.
“If you mean the sort of thing that wiped out the dinosaurs, a nuclear winter, no,” she told them. “At least not from the figures I’ve seen so far. We did have a near miss with an asteroid that might have done us in a few years back, but this isn’t in that league. Still, it is a very large object, relatively speaking, and there will be some very nasty aftereffects. We might well have some global cooling for a period of years, much as if a couple of very big volcanoes erupted at the same time, and, depending on the upper-level winds here, an even more dramatic effect on the South American and possibly African continents for some time. It will be impossible to say anything for sure until we see it hit.”
“Then we don’t have to find a survivalist with a fallout shelter,” one of the distant anchors said jokingly.
“No. Although if you’re living in the western Amazon basin and know somebody with one, it might not be a bad idea,” she responded.
There was more of that sort of question and answer, but considering she wasn’t even going on current data, there was, she reflected, nothing she could say that any nonscientist might not have said from somewhere in the States.
Still, when the light went down and somebody, probably Terry, said, “Okay, that’s enough for now,” Lori felt almost stunned, not quite remembering what had gone on. Almost everything—their questions, her replies, even her annoyances—seemed distant and unfocused, beyond remembering clearly. She was suddenly afraid that she’d just made an absolute fool of herself on national television.
Terry came up to her and asked, “Well, what do you think about the new data?”
“Huh? Oh—sorry. It’s all something of a blur. New data?”
“Yeah. Impact point ninety kilometers west southwest of here in—” She looked at her watch. “—about three hours, give or take.”
“They’re that certain? There are so many variables . …”
“NORAD’s computers are pretty good these days, I hear, since they got into such hot water over muffing even the continent Skylab was gonna hit some years back. If this asteroid hadn’t gone into unstable low Earth orbit, they might be guessing still, but it’s deteriorating now right on schedule. They fed in the wobble and decay characteristics, and their computers came up with the predicted mass, and that was the missing element. They say they’re ninety-plus percent sure. Didn’t you hear anything!”
“I—I heard it, but it just didn’t register. I guess I was just too nervous.”
The producer grinned. “You did fine. Look, we’ll keep getting data for the next hour or so, and if this prediction continues to hold, we’ll do one more standup and then it’s off to the plane. Take it easy, relax. Don Francisco’s men brought out some sandwiches and drinks. Take the coffee, go easy on the beer, and don’t touch that sangria—it’s like a hundred and fifty proof.”
She looked over at the small but elegant-looking spread. “I see Gus isn’t taking your advice on the sangria,” she noted.
“Aw! He’s a cameraman. He has a reputation to uphold.”
Lori was much too excited and nervous at that point to think about putting anything in her stomach, so she wandered over to where the technicians were monitoring the steady satellite feed and listened to the program.
It appeared that there would be no fewer than a dozen instrument-laden airplanes aloft at rockfall, after all, although Lori’s group would be the on-site news pool. If nothing else, this would be the most covered impact in history, witnessed and monitored by more people around the world than any other. And even though they would have a ringside seat, the best view would be from the big tracking telescopes in Chile, which could lock on to the meteor while it was still coming in. She only prayed this wouldn’t be another one of those overhyped duds astronomical science was famous for. If the thing did break up as it entered the atmosphere, or if the resistance was stronger and the angle less steep than projected, it might be nothing more than an anticlimatic meteor shower with very little reaching the ground. Still, this rock was so large that something would hit, and it would be bigger than a baseball, that was for sure.
If it did hit with real force, it would be very dangerous, but then they’d be in the perfect position to view the impact. The newspeople were concerned only with their pictures and an event opportunity which allowed them to build audience and sell diet plans and commemorative plates and such via commercials; she wanted to be in the neighborhood when a big one hit and see it just afterward. It was the chance of a lifetime.
Terry was preoccupied with her clipboard, which was constantly being updated to the point where it resembled the tracks of drunken worms more than a comprehensible schedule, listening to cues and the remote director’s queries and commands from the tiny transceiver she wore like a hearing aid in her left ear. Oblivious to anything beyond the moment, she was startled to the point of near shock when somebody grabbed her rump and squeezed.
“How dare you!” she spit, whirling around, only to see the leering grin of Juan Campos. He was obviously high, possibly from drink—he smelled like it, anyway—but also, possibly, from something more. “You touch me again and I will grab your balls and twist them off!” she snapped in Spanish.
He just grinned and gave a low chuckle. “Spirit. I like a pretty girl with spunk.”
“You are a pig!” she snapped. “Would you dishonor your father’s hospitality in his own home?”
“My father is an old man,” Juan Campos responded. “In his time he did as much and more, but now he remembers himself only as a gentleman. He sits here in his palace and acts the patron, Eton Francisco, the great benefactor of his people. It is I who now make it all possible, not him.”
“Shall we tell him that? He is not far.”
Campos stiffened. “You will not approach my father!”
“Then we will approach him together and ask him what he thinks of his son’s behavior to his guest!” She started toward the house, and he suddenly reached out, grabbed her arm, and pulled
her violently back. High or not, there was a homicidal, lunatic look in his eyes and manner, the kind of dark malevolence that would give anyone chills.
“All right, bitch! For now! But you will not always be in this place and so— protected. You forget where you are and how long a journey you have to get anywhere else!”
And with that, he faded back into the shadows.
Terry put on a good, tough front, and she was tough after all she’d been through in her job, but she was badly shaken by the encounter. It was a sudden mental free-fall back to Earth, a reminder of just how dangerous this place and these people were and how vulnerable she and her people were, too.
She hoped that one of those damned meteors would strike the bastard or perhaps wipe out this whole sordid place, but she knew that there would be no such luck. Her father’s caution years ago, when she’d first gone out on her own, floated back to her. “Always remember that God reigns in heaven,” he’d told her, “but Satan rules the Earth.”
Perhaps, she thought sourly, she’d seen so much of the latter’s evil, she just took it for granted.
John Maklovitch came over to her. “We’ve got one quick standup in five minutes, then we’d better get to the plane,” he told her. “It’s coming in.” He was suddenly aware that she was hardly listening. “Something wrong?”
“The pig of a son just made a move on me and threatened me,” she told him.
The newsman nodded. “I figured as much. Think you can handle him?”
“Alone? Sure. I’ve got a black belt, remember? But against him and some cronies with their big guns—well, I’m not so sure. Besides, what would the old man do if I broke his son’s neck? We’ve got to get out of here, you know.”
He thought a moment. “Maybe, but I’ll report it in to the studio so they’ll know to check up if something happens after the story. Nobody is dumb enough to do anything until we’re breaking down. Tell you what… You remember the massacre in Chad? Why don’t we just try the same gimmick? I’ll have sound rig a trigger switch on the remote mike for me. Stick close to me, and if he pulls anything, at least he’ll be broadcasting it back to the studio. You can imagine what the old man would be like if he heard that on his satellite TV!”
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