by Dean Ing
The Feebie again: “I suppose I could ask Scott King to let you disassemble it. Hell, it’s harmless,” he drawled easily in a sudden about-face. King, as I knew, was his-and Dana Martin’s-SAC in the region.
The reedy older voice was chuckling now. “That’s more like it; aren’t we worrying over trifles?”
The physicist laughed outright. “My sentiments exactly.” Under his on-mike mirth I could hear the others joining in.
And then the speaker overloaded its bass response in a thunderous crash. Several voices shouted as the second slam was followed by clatters of glass and stone. Clear, then: “Scotty, whatthehell-”, ending in a scream; three screams. From somewhere came a furious clicking, then an almost subsonic growling whuffff. Abrupt silence. Posterity had been spared the rest.
I glowered at Dana Martin. “What’s good about that?”
“Forewarning. Our man wasn’t the sort to vacillate, and the professor was known as a sourball. It’s barely possible that they all were being gassed somehow, to hallucinate during the attack.”
“Maybe,” I said. “That would explain why your man thought he saw Scotty King coming through the wall. Ah,-look, Dana, this just about tears it. You need a covey of hoverchoppers to find this, this hunter of yours. I get a picture of something that could simply stroll up to me while I grinned at it, and nothing short of a submarine net could stop it. Won’t I even have a brick agent to help?”
“Every hovercraft we can spare is quartering the Berryessa region. And so are a lot of chartered craft,” she said softly, “carrying consular people from Britain, France, the Soviets, and the United Chinese Republics. They know, Rackham, and they intend to be on hand from the first moment of friendly contact.”
“Some friendly contact,” I snorted. I realized now that the air activity over Lake Berryessa was a deliberate decoy. “Surely we have the power to ground the rest of these guys . . .”
“The instant our government makes contact, we are committed by treaty to sharing that confrontation with the rest of the nuclear club,” Dana said wearily. “It’s an agreement the Soviets thought up last year, of which we have been forcibly reminded in the past days.”
I showed her my palms.
“You’re not government,” she hissed. “We’re a laissez faire democracy; we can’t help it if a private U.S. citizen does the first honors. Could we help it if he should dynamite the spacecraft in perfectly understandable panic?”
“Destroy a diamond-mine of information? Are you nuts?” For the first time my voice was getting out of hand.
“Perfectly sane. We’ve got a kit for you to record the experience if you can get into the craft-maybe remove anything that looks portable, and hide it. We don’t want you to totally wreck the vehicle, just make it a hangar queen until another civilian friend has studied the power plants and weaponry, and then he might blow it to confetti.”
I was beginning to see the plan. Even if it worked it was lousy politics. I told her that.
“This country,” she said, “has an edge in communications and power plants at the moment. We’d a whole lot rather keep that edge, and learn a few things to fatten it, then take a chance that everybody-including Libya-might get into an equal technological footing with us overnight. Now will you drop the matter?”
“I may as well. Am I supposed to ask the damn’ hunter for some thermite so I can burn his ailerons a little?”
“We’ve sunk a cache of sixty per cent dynamite in the river shallows for you-common stuff you could buy commercially. We’ve marked it here on a USGS map. Best of all, you’ll have a weapon.”
I brightened, but only for a moment. It was a gimmicked Smith & Wesson automatic, a bit like a Belgian Browning. Dana took it from her briefcase with reverence and explained why the special magazine carried only seven fat rounds. I could almost get my pinkie in the muzzle: sixty calibre at least. It was strictly a shortrange item rigged with soluble slugs. Working with the dead pet and guessing lot, Cal’s veterinary science wizards had rendered some of its tissues for tallow and molded slugs full of drugs. They might stop the hunter.
On the other hand, they might not.
If I couldn’t make friends with it I would be permitted to shoot for what, in my wisdom, I might consider noncritical spots on its body.
Finally, if I hadn’t been marmaladed and if I had it stunned, I was to punch a guarded stud on the surveillance kit which looked like an amateur’s microvid unit with a digital watch embedded in its side. At that point I could expect some other co-opted civilian to “happen” onto me with his Hoverover.
I wondered out loud how much money the other guy was getting for his part in this, and Dana reminded me that it was none of my damned business. Nor should I worry too much about what would happen after the beast was trussed up in a steel net and taken away. It would be cared for, and in a few days the Feebies would “discover” what the meddling civilians had done, and the rest of the world could pay it homage and raise all the hell they liked about prior agreements which, so far as anyone might prove, would not have been violated. It was sharp practice. It stank. It paid one hundred thousand dollars.
I collected the pitifully small assortment of data and equipment, making it a small pile. “And with this, you expect me to set out?”
“I really expect you to crap out,” she said sweetly, “in which case you can expect to be iced down for awhile. We can do it, you know.”
I knew. I also knew she had the extra pleasure of having told me not to commit myself. There was one more item. “What if I find more than one hunter?”
“We only need to bag one. For reasons I’m not too clear on, we don’t think there’s more. Something about desperation tactics, I gather.” She frowned across the stuff at me. “What’s so funny-or are you just trembling?”
I shook my head, waved her toward the stairs. “Go home, Dana. I was just thinking: it’s our tactics that smack of desperation.”
She swayed up the stairs, carrying her empty case, talking as she went. It was no consolation to hear that nobody would be watching me. The little foil-wrapped AM/FM bug would be my only bait, and of course they’d be monitoring that; but it was essential that I dangle the bait only in some remote location. Lovely.
Spot ambled out as he heard my automatic gate energize, chose to frisk alongside Dana Martin’s sedan as she drove away. I called him back, closed the gate, and felt Spot’s raspy tongue on the back of my hand. I shouted at him and he paced away with injured dignity, his ears back at half-mast. How could I explain it to him? I knew he was enjoying the salt taste of sweat that ran down my arm in defiance of the breeze off Mount Diablo. It might have been worse: some guys get migraines. I’d known one-a good one, too, in my business-who’d developed spastic colon. All I do is sweat, without apologizing. You can’t explain fear to a cheetah . . .
I spent the next hour selecting my own kit. In any dangerous business, a man’s brains and his equipment are of roughly equal quality. Nobody has yet worked out a handier field ration than “gorp,” the dry mix of nuts, fruit bits and carob I kept-but I tossed in a few slabs of pemmican, too. Water, spare socks, a McPhee paperback, and my usual stock of pills, including the lecithin and choline.
I considered my own handguns for a long time, hefting the Colt Python in a personal debate, then locked the cabinet again and came away emptyhanded. In extremis, my own Colt would’ve been too great a temptation-and I already had a weapon. Whether it would work was something else again.
When the Porsche was loaded I spent another hour in my office. The maps refreshed my memory, corrected it in a few cases. A new bridge over the American River connected Sacramento’s northeast suburb of Orangevale with Highway Fifty, cutting through the dredge tailings. Gooseflesh returned as I imagined the scene at that moment. Dark as a hunter’s thoughts, not enough moon to help, the innocent romantic gleam of riffles on water between the tailings to the south and the low cliffs on the north side. More tailings on the other side too, upriver
near Orangevale. This night-and maybe others-it would be approximately as quiet, as inviting, as a cobra pit. I pitied anyone in that area, but not enough to strike out for it in the dark. I needed a full day of reconnaissance before setting out my bait, and a good night’s sleep wouldn’t hurt.
Usually, sleep is no problem. That night it was a special knack. And while I slept, a pair of youthful lovers lay on a blanket near the river, too near the Sac State campus, and very nearly died.
Saturday morning traffic was light on the cutoff to Interstate Five. I refueled just south of Sacramento, then drove across to the El Dorado Freeway and fought the temptation to follow it all the way to Lake Tahoe. A part of my mind kept telling me I should’ve brought Spot along for his nose and ears, but I liked him too much to risk him.
I left the freeway east of the city and cruised slowly toward the river, renewing auld acquaintance as I spotted the river parkway. Nice: hiking and bridle trails paralleled the drive, flowing in and out of trees that flanked the river. I didn’t wonder why the area was deserted until I saw the road crew lounging near their barricade. The flagman detoured me to a road that led me to a shopping center. I checked a map, took an arterial across the river, spotted more barricades and flagmen barring access to the drive along the north bank of the river as well.
That flagman’s khakis had been creased; and who irons work khakis these days? Also, he’d been too pale for a guy who did that every day. I found a grocery store and called Stockton from there, cursing.
Dana Martin answered on the first ring, bright and bubbly as nearbeer and twice as full of false promise. “Hi, you ol’ dumplin’,” she cascaded past, after my first three words. I stammered and fell silent. “I won’t be able to make it today, but you have Wanda’s address; she’s really dynamite. Why don’t you call on her, shug, say around noonish, give or take an hour? Would you mind just terribly?”
I’d worked with Dana enough to know that the vaguer she sounded, the exacter she meant. Wanda at twelve on the dot, then-except that I didn’t know the lady or her address. “Uh, yeah, sure; noonish more or less. But I’ve mislaid her address. You got her phone number?”
Slow, saccharine: “She hasn’t got a phone, honeybuns. Must you have a map for such a dynamite lady?”
Map. Dynamite. Ahhh, shee-it, but I was dull. “Right; I must have it somewhere. The things I do for love,” I sighed.
Dana cooed that she had just oodles of work to do, and hung up before I could object that the whole goddamn river area was crawling with fuzz in false clothing.
I went back to the Porsche and studied my map. The explosive cache was fairly near a dead-end road, only a few miles downriver. I found the road led me past a few expensive homes to a turnaround in sight of the river. No barricades or khakiclads that I could see, but the damned dredge had committed some of its ancient crimes nearby. I guessed there were so many dead-end roads near the river it would take an army to patrol them all. It was nearly two hours before noon and it occurred to me that the time might best be spent checking available routes to and from the tailings areas.
Shortly before noon I hauled ass from a bumpy road near Folsom and headed for my tryst with Wanda. I’d marked several routes on the map, where I could get very near tailings or sandbars from Sacto to Folsom. It was the sort of data the Feebies couldn’t have given me, since they didn’t really know what the Porsche could do.
At eleven fifty-three I realized I was going to be late if I kept to the boulevards. I checked my route, turned right, zipped on squalling tires to a dead end, and shifted to air cushion mode. A moment later the Porsche was whooshing over the lawn of some wealthy citizen, scattering dandelion puffs but leaving no tracks as it took me downslope and over a low decorative fence.
Using the air cushion there’s always the danger of overspeeding the Porsche’s primary turbo, but I kept well below redline as I turned downriver just above the ripples. In air cushion mode, the legendary quick response of a Porsche is merely a myth. The car comes about like a big windjammer and tends to wander with sidewinds, so I had my hands full. But I navigated five miles of river in four minutes flat.
Triangulating between bridges, eyeballing the map, I estimated that the cache of dynamite was at the foot of a bush-capped stone outcrop that loomed over the river. I slowed, eased onto a sandbar, let the car settle and left the turbo idling. At exactly noon by my watch, I stood over a swirl of bubbly river slime as long and broad as my kitchen. It had sticks and crud in it, and reminded me of the biggest pizza in town, which made my belly rumble. Junk food has its points too.
I was thirty feet from the Porsche, and past my grumbling gut and the turbo whistle I could hear the burbling hiss of the river. Nothing else. It was high noon on a sandbar on a hot Saturday in the edge of Sacrabloodymento, perfect for a meal and a snooze, and there I stood feeling properly unnerved, waiting for a woman to tell, or bring, or ask me something. I put one hand to my jacket, feeling the automatic in my waistband for cold-steel comfort, and to nobody at all I shook my head in disgust and said, “Wanda.”
“Mister Rackham,” said the voice above me, and I damned near jumped into the river. He was decked out in waders and an old fishing vest of exactly the right shades to blend with the terrain. He had a short spinning rig, and behind the nonglint sunglasses he was grinning. He’d sat inside those bushes atop that jumble of rocks and watched me from above the whole time, getting his jollies. I’d busted my hump to be punctual but judging from this guy’s demeanor, fifteen minutes one way or the other wouldn’t’ve mattered. No wonder people learn to scoff at government orders!
He’d done nothing for my mood, or my confidence. I cleared my throat. “Would you mind telling me-” I trailed off.
“I’m Agent Wanda. And there can’t be two car-and-mercenary combos like you, anywhere.” He didn’t climb down but made a longish cast into the river; began to reel in. “New developments,” he said casually. “Fortunately all the white noise around us should raise hob with any shotgun mikes across the water.”
I waited until he’d reeled in, changed his spinner for another lure, and flashed me the I. D. in his lure wallet as though by accident. Wanda explained that while the decoy action at Lake Berryessa still seemed to be working on the foreign nationals, some of that cover might be wearing thin. The night before, a lovestruck couple had been thoroughly engaged-even connected, one might infer-near the river when something, surely not boredom, added a religious touch to their experience. According to the girl it seemed to be a great guardian angel, suddenly transformed into a moving rock of ages wielding a terrible swift sword.
Agent Wanda broke off to tell me the girl was a devout fundamentalist, evidently a newcomer to the oldest sport, who’d been overcome by her sense of the rightness and safety of it all-until a huge boulder nearby became a winged angel, gave a mighty chuff, flashed a scimitar in the faint moonlight, and glided into the river like a stone again to sink from sight. It left pugmarks. It probably weighed five tons.
To the girl it had been a powerful visitation. To her boyfriend, who also got a set of confused images of the thing, it had been a derailment. But the girl was the niece of the Sacramento County Sheriff who had-and here fisherman Wanda drawled acid-not been told of the security blanket. The girl trusted her uncle, called him in hysterics. He knew an explosion had taken its toll at a campus lab, and had heard from Yolo County where his counterpart had delivered a wild woolly package to another campus, and like any good lawman he put some things together. By now, elements of the city, county, state and United States were gradually withdrawing the cordon of bozos he had deputized and strung along the river. It was quick action, but far too obvious to suit the feds. Worse still, the campus radio station at Sac State had already got an exclusive from the young man.
School media, Wanda told me, have their own news stringers and an alternative network in National Public Radio. When KERS-FM ran its little hair-raiser on Saturday morning, it scooped the whole country including the
FBI. The Feebies had only managed by minutes to quash a follow-up story which, in its usual ballsy aggressive way, NPR’s network headquarters in Washington had accepted from Sacramento. It described a huge version of the dead specimen, complete with silvery harness and flaming sword. As a dogdays item for summer consumption, it had almost been aired coast-to-coast over NPR. It would have blown the government’s cover from hell to lunch. As it was, KERS had already aired too much of the truth in Sacramento but with TV, Wanda sighed, fortunately almost nobody listens to NPR.
I resolved, in the future, to pay more attention to National Public Radio; it was my kind of network. Meanwhile, the national government was drawing off the protective net along the river, to avoid tipping our hand to other governments-while casually allowing hundreds of nature lovers to wander into harm’s way. When officialdom up and down the line conspires to endanger a thousand people, I reasoned, it must be balancing them against a whole lot more. Millions, maybe. It was a minimax ploy: risk a little, save a lot. I began to feel small, like the lure on the end of Wanda’s monofilament line: hurled into deep water and very, very expendable.
I watched Wanda cast again, the line taking a detour into the deepest part of the channel. “I expect my explosives are under all that crap,” I said, jerking a palm toward the slowly wheeling green pizza in the lee of the stone outcrop.
“Sure is. Looks natural, doesn’t it? Just grab the edge and pull it in when you need it. It’s anchored on a swivel to a weighted canvas bag. And you know what’s in the bag.”
I stared at the spinning pizza, and damned if it wasn’t a work of plastic camouflage. Real debris, polyurethane slime and bubbles, gyrating in an eddy. I said, “Never know what’s real along the river, I guess.”
“That’s the point,” Wanda replied, pulling against a snag almost below him. “The hunter was in plain sight last night, not ten meters from those kids, and the girl claims she never felt so safe. Even thought she saw an approving angel for a few seconds.”