Donovan had reluctantly agreed, a decision which turned to anguish when he had learned his son had been recaptured by the Visitors and brought under the tutelage of the deadly Klaus. Mike remembered the last-ditch effort to rescue his son, the easy familiarity with which Sean had released the safety of a .357 Magnum and aimed it at him. Sean hadn’t fired it, but Diana had summoned the boy at that moment, and his son had turned from his own voice to follow hers.
“He’s ours or no one’s, Mr. Donovan,” Diana had gloated just before she had spirited the boy off. The last Donovan had heard was a scrap of intelligence gleaned from the San Francisco resistance network that Sean was in some sort of Visitor-run camp for boys in northern California. Mike had spent more than one wakeful night trying to think of ways he might learn the camp’s location and free his son. Right now, the situation looked pretty hopeless.
Mike knew he would continue looking for his son as long as he lived—but not with the same blind singlemindedness of purpose he had felt once before. He was still haunted in his deepest nightmares by the fact that Sean had chosen to go with Diana. And if there had been a glimpse of something in Sean’s eyes that gave Mike hope that his son might be his again, there were also other people to think about.
Now there was no one to take fishing or camping, throw a baseball to, or talk with about the Important Things on the minds of all twelve-year-old boys. God only knew what kinds of things ran through his son’s mind these days. Maybe he was teaching eight-year-olds how to fire Uzis or laserguns at human targets.
Wincing, Mike shut his eyes, then after a while he ate the two ham-and-cheese sandwiches and the apple that Miranda had packed for him, all the time frowning into the predawn darkness of Illinois below.
Then he must have dozed. The next thing he knew, he was bounced hard against his safety harness as the shuttlecraft hit a pocket of air turbulence.
A quick look at his flight plan and instruments told him he was in Ohio, about seventy-five miles from the Pennsylvania border. Near eight A.M. local time it was strangely dark. Then he saw the greenish-black clouds roiling toward him from the south.
Thunderheads! He pulled hard on the controls and banked sharply, intending to fly out and above the turbulence, when a sudden downdraft pummeled the craft like a fist. The boxy shuttlecraft had never been designed for flight in bad weather. Alien metal creaked and groaned throughout the ship, and something broke loose in the cargo hold and began rattling around the storage bay area with a hollow, spectral thump as Donovan fought to regain control of his ship. Sleet and rain cracked against the windshield and fuselage while lightning tore the sky into hellish jigsaw fragments.
Another downdraft sent him plunging sickeningly for several hundred feet before Mike could bring the nose up again. A sharp, peppery smell filled the air, and he realized that one of Miranda’s bottles of homemade salsa had broken. Hail the size of Ping-Pong balls battered into the left side of the craft, and he heard an odd coughing sound in one of the jet engines used for maneuvering. Then the engine began to whine alarmingly, signaling an overload. He had to shut it down.
The steering control in his sweating hands went stiff and sluggish, and Mike cursed. The tightly controlled turns that would allow an escape from these weather conditions were out of the question now. Somehow he would have to ride the storm out.
Far to his left, near the horizon, an inky cloud began to turn and twist into itself, and lightning sent blue-white streaks across his line of vision. The roaring of wind and the pummeling of the rain and sleet were almost deafening. Oh, God, he thought, fighting the urge to shut his eyes, am I going to wind up in Oz?
Fascinated in spite of himself, he watched the tornado form, a huge black snake that turned downward and began sniffing the ground as though for mice. The newsman that still lurked
within him wished for a minicam with a zoom lens as a bam lifted itself whole from the ground, did a sluggish pirouette, then imploded into splintered lumber. Trees nearby bowed down almost to the ground, as though in worship of an ancient and terrible god; one broke off and turned into a spinning missile that drilled itself into the side of an old farmhouse.
A tractor lifted itself into the air and attempted a missionary mating with the four-by-four parked across the yard. The truck didn’t fancy being on the bottom, and rolled over onto the John Deere, instead. Debris pelted the side of the shuttlecraft even from this distance, and Mike yelped in pain as the ship lurched sideways, slamming his wrist down hard against the control console.
Trying to ignore the agony which flared up his right arm, he wrestled with the steering control. The ship had turned into a living creature, a bronco determined to buck him off. At one moment, he was plummeting toward the ground, which stretched like a wrinkled old Army blanket in front of him. The next, he was facing the clouds, where a few were turning white again around a growing patch of blue sky.
Mike locked the craft into a course aiming for that small bright spot. The ship shuddered violently, as though the invisible giant behind him had made one last grab for it. Then he was flying smoothly again, and the sun was shining through the settling dust as the winds died down.
Donovan rolled up his sleeve and moved his arm experimentally, wincing as pain defined lateral and circular movements. He hoped it wasn’t broken. Jury-rigging a splint out of a newspaper and some tape, he swallowed a couple of aspirin and checked the indicators for any additional signs of damage.
The power reading was nudging into the dangerously low zone—he’d used up a lot of power battling the storm. Long Island and the Brook Cove lab were still almost five hundred miles away.
He climbed slowly, nursing the controls, taking every advantage he could of air currents and wind direction. Shutting power down on all systems except those related to flight, even the radio beacon, he divided his attention between his eastern heading and the readings on his console. He didn’t want to attempt a gliding, powerless landing—the fuselage and short, stubby wings weren’t built for it.
Over New Jersey, the greenish-brown blur of Long Island was just coming into view at the horizon when the engines began to hiss shrilly. Sucking air through his teeth, Donovan banked the ship and began his descent.
Once again he was grateful for the simplicity of the controls. As it was, it took all of his skill, learned from fighting the nasty, hot winds in Southeast Asia, to bring the craft down more or less in one piece. It was a bumpy landing in a pasture several miles short of the Brook Cove facility, and he saw several horses bolt in fright in front of him as the belly of the shuttlecraft churned turf into mud in a broad swath. Finally the shuttlecraft shuddered to a halt.
Mike’s legs felt a little weak as he fumbled for the catch of his safety harness and stood, the floor comfortingly solid and unmoving under him. Leaning over the console, he switched on the small battery-powered CB radio they had installed for emergency use. “Breaker one-nine, this is Hollywood Joe, do you copy?”
The speakers answered only wth the weak crackle of static.
Donovan frowned and tried several times more to no avail. He was wondering whether he’d have to walk it—and in what direction, for that matter—when he heard a muffled thumping on the shuttlecraft’s cargo doors and a shouted, “Hey, fly-boy!”
Unsealing the hatch, he stepped out into the gray, mist-damp air to see a tiny white-haired woman in enormous galoshes cheerfully waving an umbrella. A young woman wearing a down vest, her strawberry-blond hair in a ponytail, stood beside her, while a plump man in jeans and a plaid hunting shirt came up the slight rise from the road, puffing a little.
“Hard landing, wasn’t it?” the older woman asked.
She pronounced it “haahd,” and Mike found himself grinning. “A Bostonian, bom and bred. You must be Dr. Hannah Donnenfeld.”
“And you’re Mike Donovan.” She smiled and stuck out her hand. “I remember your stories on the hungry kids, the victims of war in Laos and El Salvador, in Life a few years back.”
; “I remember when you won the Nobel Prize. Glad to meet you.” Mike started to extend his hand, but pain twinged up his arm and he withdrew it, grimacing. “Rough flight. I just about ran out of gas.”
“You’ve got some swelling there,” the young woman observed, the freckles on her forehead bunching into a frown. “I’ll take an X-ray when we get back.”
“This is Sari James and Mitchell Loomis,” Hannah said, indicating each in turn. “My favorite chaperons, rabble-rousers, and—”
“—and personal cheering section.” Sari’s engaging grin revealed a slight gap between her front teeth.
“Enough nonsense!” Hannah made shooing motions at them, her expression mock-stern. “Mr. Donovan has had a long trip, and he’s much more interested in a hot toddy than your hot air.”
Her brisk stride belied her diminutive, fragile-looking appearance as she led the way to a jeep waiting by the roadside. “Mitchell, be a dear and grab Mr. Donovan’s bag, will you?” she called over her shoulder.
“I love it when you talk sweet to me, Hannah. ” He vanished into the cargo hold. A moment later, they could hear his excited shout all the way to the road as he reappeared, holding Mike’s battered suitcase and a bag of oranges. “Hey, look! Fresh vitamin C! Thanks, Mr. Donovan.”
“Call me Mike.” He smiled. “There are a lot of neat things in there. Julie sent me along with a bunch of stuff—computer disks, reports, pictures. It’s all in the blue vinyl carrying cases.”
“Mitchell, grab them as well,” Hannah shouted, then got into the driver’s seat. Turning to Mike, she said, “We’ll bring over a power pack and Sari’11 fly the whole thing back to Brook Cove later.”
“Sounds good to me.” Donovan leaned back in the seat. His arm ached dully, and it was good to let someone else take charge for a while.
“I wanted to be a scientist, and I wound up as a pack mule,” Mitchell groused good-naturedly as he swung the bags behind the rear seat and clambered inside.
“It’s good exercise, and you need it,” said Sari, poking playfully at his broad abdomen.
“What I really need is a woman who loves me for my mind.”
“Julie also sends her love, by the way,” Mike said as Hannah started up the jeep. Donnenfeld gave him a quick glance.
“She’s such a lovely girl. How is she?”
As they bounced along the winding, tree-lined road, Mike filled her in on Julie’s activities and her progress on the new kelp-based bacteria as best he could. Hannah asked him a couple of questions, but when he floundered to a halt, she shrugged. “Sorry, Mike. I get carried away when somebody talks technical to me. I wish Julie had been able to come along, too.”
“So do I,” he said, looking out at the lush greenery of the fields, so different from California’s palm trees and scrub.
Hannah nodded sympathetically. Sari touched his shoulder and pointed. “Welcome to Brook Cove Laboratories.”
Dark and boarded-up as it was, the old mansion on top of the hillside still had an imposing aura about it, and it didn’t look as much deserted as merely asleep. Donovan looked around, a little confused, expecting to see more signs of activity.
Driving the jeep into a garage heavily camouflaged by bushes, Hannah jumped out and led the way to a small storage shed nearby. Inside were crates piled on top of one another and shelves of books. “Here’s our heart and soul, Mike,” she said, reaching behind one of the bookcases. A section of it swung outward, and stairs descended to a highly sophisticated research complex behind a metal door eighteen inches thick.
A number of people, their ages ranging from early twenties to late sixties, were working at various tasks. Casually dressed in T-shirts, jeans or cut-offs, and sneakers, they looked cheerfully incongruous in this gleaming, high-tech environment. Computer terminals, microscopes, and pieces of ultramodern equipment Donovan couldn’t even begin to name were arrayed throughout the labs.
As Donnenfeld led him through the compact, well-designed warren of living and working quarters, introducing him to the members of her team, her pride in this dedicated group was obvious, and they just as plainly held her in the highest esteem.
“This is one hell of a setup,” Donovan said an hour later, leaning back in the leather easy chair in the library. After X-raying his wrist, Sari had pronounced it sprained and had wrapped it up, saying he should use it as little as possible for the next several days. Then she and Mitchell had taken a power pack out to the shuttlecraft so that they could fly it back to the grounds to a spot protected by rocks and pine trees. Sari, it seemed, was a fair pilot herself.
“Julie is a gifted researcher.” Hannah peered up at Mike over the reports in her hand. “I know she’s got more resources to work with now, but half the time it’s like magic, the insights she gets.”
Donovan grinned. “The first time I ever met her, she was wearing a beat-up sweatshirt and jeans, with her hair all stringy. She looked about as much like a scientist as I look like Einstein. How was I to know she could think almost as well?” Hannah laughed. “You should hear her talk about you. I was expecting a cross between Indiana Jones and Bob Woodward. ” Cupping a snifter of good brandy in his hands, Mike chuckled at the image. “I bet you have things down here even Science Frontiers hasn’t heard of. And the location—it would even fool the scalies, as Ham Tyler would say.”
“It did once.” The fine lines around Hannah’s mouth tightened for a moment at an old memory, then she sighed and settled back into an overstuffed chair in the small library. “I miss the fireplace back at the house, though. Ah, well. We all make our sacrifices. Tell me, how is the ever-charming Mr. Tyler?”
“Like fingernails on a blackboard, as always. If he weren’t the fastest lasergun in the West, we’d send him over to the Visitors for Thanksgiving. But he’s probably too tough a mouthful even for Diana.”
She laughed, inquired after Maggie, then stood with Julie’s folders. “We’ll get this stuff into our data banks right away. We’re one of the most protected research facilities in the country, so we’ve been collecting data and acting as a sort of clearinghouse for the results of all scientific research aimed at sending the Visitors packing back to Sirius.”
“Hi.” Sari, her face dirty and her expression cheerful, came bouncing in, followed by the slower-moving Mitchell. “We’ve checked your shuttlecraft inside and out. One of your jets took a load of debris from that storm you went through and needs to be flushed.”
“Also your landing gear needs realignment, and one of the struts is cracked,” Mitchell added, reaching for a cookie from the plate beside Hannah. “We’ve got a couple of good engineering types hanging around down here, and it’s about time they earned an honest day’s wage. Even so, it’ll take about four days to put it all back together.”
“Wash your hands, Mitchell,” said Hannah, affecting a severe expression.
“Can you get a message back to L.A., let them know I’m okay, just delayed?” Mike asked.
Her forehead wrinkled a moment. “It’s hard to get messages in and out, especially any distance, but we’ll see what we can do.”
“Yeah, communication is our biggest problem around here, as a matter of fact,” Mitchell said, reaching for another cookie.
“Don’t talk with your mouth full, Mitchell.” Hannah swatted him on his plump backside with Julie’s folder. “Our various scientific communities risk duplication in some areas of inquiry while ignoring others just because we don’t always know what the hell’s going on. We sneak off occasional phone calls or bounce through somebody’s satellite dish antenna, but it’s hard keeping track of everybody’s progress.”
“We do have some nifty stuff happening here on the East Coast, though,” Sari said proudly.
“Like what?” Mike asked.
“Let’s see ...” Donnenfeld ticked off people on her fingers as she spoke. “In Maryland, the Mariahs are looking at the Visitors’ genetic makeup from the samples they’ve collected, seeing if there’s a weakness to exploit. K
eller’s people in Connecticut are trying to find a drug that will render the Visitors catatonic but is harmless to humans. Kate Weaver in Toronto is researching weaponry, and Dr. Hathaway ...”
She waved her hand. “I’ll get this all written down so you can bring it to Julie along with an update on our own pursuit of the perfect frost-free red toxin. In the meantime, I guess you’re stuck with our humble East Coast entertainments for the next few days, but we’ll try to do our best.”
They did their best, and then some. Mike had never passed four days more quickly or pleasantly.
A lot of items were rationed, so the oranges and other fresh fruits and vegetables he’d brought from California were very much appreciated by the members of the resistance.
The “engineering types” that Mitchell had jokingly referred to turned out to include an aircraft technician, and repairs on the shuttlecraft progressed smoothly. When Mike wasn’t helping with that, he had plenty of opportunities to stroll along the beach, watch the waves break over the rocky Long Island shores, and unwind—especially after the high-speed printer at
Brook Cove tapped out the message from L.A. that they had received his message and understood that he would be delayed.
On Saturday night, two days after he had arrived, they took him to see a revival of Cats on Broadway. Times Square was a little quieter than he remembered it. Some of the gigantic neon signs, damaged in Visitor attacks, hadn’t been repaired, and people didn’t seem to hurry as much. Perhaps the Visitors had taught New Yorkers a lesson in the value of taking time to enjoy the present moment.
Most of all, it felt good to Mike to walk freely and openly down the street—more or less. Here in New York, he was still a national hero, not a wanted criminal. People recognized him, shook his hand, or asked for his autograph. The sudden attention and hero worship, after the last year of living behind sunglasses and upturned collars, was a little unnerving.
V 10 - Death Tide Page 8