To his credit, Tarnell caught on pretty quickly how things would have to go before Storch could muster some kind of apology. "This is bullshit, you motherfucker! Die!" He shouldered his rifle, but even as he twitched the trigger for his grenade launcher, Dyson's offspring were swarming him. Storch had time to grab Wittrock and dive behind the computer console before the grenade went off inside Brutus Dyson.
Incredibly, the explosion had been little louder than a belch, and now the sounds of Holroyd's suet-choked laughter and Tarnell's muffled screams became deafening. Under it all, the pilot of Joe howling for somebody, anybody to tell him what had happened. A hail of shrapnel, glass and Dyson pelted the walls and floor around them. Incredibly, Wittrock had managed to hold on to the laptop, and Storch wondered idly if it wasn't worth more than the scientist, now. It'd certainly be easier to carry out of here.
"Get up," he shouted in Wittrock's ear. The scientist looked stunned for once, and it was a goose in the glands to see him realize this wasn't going according to plan, anymore. Storch dragged him to his feet by his airhose. "Get up and go," he said. "When Tarnell's dead, they'll probably change their minds."
Wittrock snapped to and regained his bland composure, as if he'd been mentally recalculating the breakdown of the Mission and now had the formula for extricating his own ass from it. "Of course. Lead the way."
Storch turned and peeked over the top of the desk. Dyson was calling home the winged larva and trying to make himself a new torso with them. Holroyd was eating Tarnell alive, his distended head like a giant anaconda's as he gulped down the big Texan's pelvis and wrapped multiple barbed tongues around his abdomen. Tarnell flailed at Holroyd, but his arms were so badly broken that they pinwheeled and flopped uselessly, adding to his agony. Tucker sat watching. His new head was already starting to look like his old one, as the grinding pressure of his inborn rage wrenched all the facial muscles into bulging, trembling straps of leather.
"Remarkable," Wittrock observed. "The others were limited to autonomic reactions to their environment.
Their
bodies respond to volition. Do you know what this means, Sergeant?"
"Means we lost," Storch said. He wanted to vomit, wanted to spend his last few bullets on himself for letting this happen
again
, for letting everyone who trusted him die AGAIN. For failing to kill them AGAIN. He wanted to rail at them until they killed him, and the worthless scientist who'd brought them here. But Wittrock sprinted past him, and he thought, if that little shit's gonna get away, there's no reason for me to die here.
He backed out of the room, but he might have already left for all the attention they paid him. Then he looked at Tarnell again, still alive, but only to pain. Storch shot him in the head. Holroyd went on eating, oblivious.
At last, a confirmed kill on this shitty mission
. He turned and started down the hall at a dead run, but froze as Dyson called after him.
"See you at the movies, little Sergeant."
Oh fuck.
He ran as fast as he could, overtook Wittrock at the foot of the staircase.
"Wittrock, they know where your base is."
"No matter," he answered. "Everyone should already be evacuated. We'll proceed with the evasion protocol Bangs briefed you on."
Storch only stared blankly. If he'd been a healthier, better-humored man, he might've laughed in Wittrock's face.
"You are familiar with the evasion protocols, aren't you?" The convex lens of his facemask made Wittrock's eyes look like fried eggs.
"You better hope the pilot is."
"Yes, um, well, I notified him, and he'll be picking us up in a minute." Wittrock looked down at his computer. For him, Storch thought with a fresh thrill of disgust, this was probably at least a partial victory. "Sergeant, I realize it may be a little late for this, but I want you to know that I no longer have any substantive doubts about your loyalty."
Storch hit him as hard as he could with his casted arm. He cried out at the pain of grating bones, but Wittrock's head pinged off the walls of his helmet and he dropped like a poleaxed ostrich. Storch scooped him and the laptop up and ascended to the roof to wait for the Black Hawk.
33
On days like this, it didn't bother Mort Greenaway that he would never rise above the rank of Lieutenant Colonel. Let the perfumed princes have their plush bunkers and their armored limousines and the ears of politicians. Greenaway had been promoted high enough above his God-given vocation, and it was a rare enough occasion, like tonight, that he could return to it.
Tonight, Greenaway could hunt.
The call reached him just after sunset, trickling though layers of filtration, handlers and operators, so he'd cut through them all to get the truth himself: a Highway Patrolman on the 190 had overheard CB chatter about a pair of black helicopters traveling north, going through the mountains less than a hundred feet above the road. They had passed out of the Argus Mountains a half-hour ago. Greenaway bit his tongue thinking of the wasted opportunity, the lost time. By now they were over Visalia, headed for the Bay Area, or backing off their northbound feint over Death Valley Junction on the way to Vegas, or dropping bombs on Bakersfield. Greenaway had noted the point on a map and alerted all the search choppers with ordnance onboard to move on an intercept course. He had looked south on the map and he smiled at what he saw.
Most of the likely targets were already under discreet guard; FBI spotters overlooked all the major thoroughfares of every major city in southern and central California, as well as Las Vegas. The federal centers in most cities even had camouflaged SAM batteries, on the closed rooftops of nearby parking structures, or atop the buildings themselves. Heightened security was enacted at potential targets throughout the country, on the remotest chance that the terrorists had slipped the Navy's dragnet and yet not fled the country. National Guard units were on alert from here to San Francisco, and every law enforcement aircraft in the state was aloft and looking. Looking for two stealth-equipped choppers with softkill weaponry, at night in the largest mountain chain west of the Rockies. There were little or no new developments, and the fed funnel through which all his intel spewed ran so slow and so ineptly he began to wonder whose side they were on. It wouldn't be the first time.
They play their games. I play mine.
He radioed the crewman to get him a secured phone line and called the National Weather Service. It was a matter of minutes before he had a technician capable of accessing the most immediate satellite imagery of California, and another few minutes before he could impress upon him the importance of his task.
"You can see brush fires with those things?"
"Of course, we can shoot thermographic gradient images, but the interpretation people have all gone home for the day."
"Do
you
know what fire looks like? Digitally, don't bother printing anything."
"Yes, but—"
"There's a really big fire somewhere in California, or there's going to be, very shortly. I want your satellite to keep shooting and I want you to look at every image and call me at the number my lieutenant is going to give you the instant you see an image."
"Is this an official request, sir? because I'm going to have to get at least a verbal authorization from—ah, Jeez, I don't even know where to begin."
"This is a military state of emergency, son. Do you know what that means?"
Silence: paper shuffling and flop-sweat dripping.
"It means I'm sending someone to help you unfuck yourself and do what I've asked, and maybe execute you as a traitor by negligence, in the bargain. Do you follow me?"
"Nobody—nobody has to come here—"
And within minutes, Lt. Col. Greenaway was looking at richly detailed thermographic images of the whole lower half of California and the western wastelands of Nevada. Blowing them up and strolling up and down them was a maddeningly slow and aggravating process, as the modem speed fluttered and intermittently froze. But he learned much. The whole eastern portion of the state was only now throwing off a blanket of rain clouds that'd provided excellent cover for the assault. He'd thought of it himself only this morning, but rationally, what did it come to? He hadn't actually expected anything to come of the napalm theft, had honestly believed that if they were still in the country, they were lying low, and ruing the day they'd provoked the US military into the kind of war it fought best: a secret one. Now they were loose on the land, and he could only hope to find them by the destruction they'd wreak.
Five pointless minutes later, cruising over Bishop, he'd gotten a call from someone he'd hoped not to have to deal with: Special Agent Cundieffe, calling from his HQ back at China Lake. He'd shown either rare ingenuity or astonishing dumb luck in getting back from where he'd been dumped only a little over an hour ago. Greenaway reluctantly admitted the little ratfucker was loaded with both.
"Colonel, you have been less than cooperative in the course of this investigation."
"You've been less than baggage, Cundieffe."
"I expect it was under such an opinion that your goon squad left us in Titus Canyon a little while ago. Your conduct has been criminal if they were under your orders, and incompetent if it was not. All of this is being recorded and transmitted to my superior's offices in Washington."
"Then I have nothing to say."
"I do. I thought you'd like to know where they are."
A scheme to throw him off.
Over my dead body will this ever be a criminal investigation.
Best to play along. It would be too late to keep this from becoming a media event or push the Pentagon's buttons, but he could still insure there would be no embarrassing jailcell interviews. "Where are they?"
"Near Convict Lake, south of Big Pine. Local volunteer fire department responded to a cell phone call from a passing motorist who said he saw a fireball one mile east of the 395, about sixty miles north of my present position. I've only just gotten off the phone with the chief. Nice man, he's not afraid to admit it's way out of his league. It's a full napalm strike, Colonel."
This time, his interest wasn't feigned. "On what? What's out there?"
"Only a hospice community for terminal cancer patients. The chief says two helicopters cremated it. I can't get there, but maybe you or some of your thugs could take the initiative and force them to land."
Force them to land. All the while looking at the map, their present location lay over Devil's Postpile National Monument, ruling out a remote speculation by some genius at Naval Intelligence that the choppers were radical environmentalists bound for the logging operations bordering Yosemite. Convict Lake was less than fifty miles south of here. He hung up on Cundieffe and told the pilot to turn around and proceed to Convict Lake, and relay the order to all other armed aircraft.
A minute later, the tech from the National Weather Service called back, excited and out of breath. Greenaway had his lieutenant answer the phone as the head night orderly at the Mendocino County Mental Institution, and apologize for the harassment.
They reached the northern tip of the Owens River valley in ten minutes. After they passed over the smallish city of Bishop, the pilot didn't need to navigate by radar. The fire stood out on the lip of the barren valley wall fifteen miles away, the monstrous column of black smoke like a divine arrow pointing at the biggest, strangest terrorist operation in American history.
The pilot called back, "I don't see anything in the air, and I'm looking down to the ground. I think the bastards scrambled."
"Maybe, maybe not," Greenaway answered, already drawing up a containment maneuver around the valley on his map. "They're stealthed up the ass. How long 'til the first reinforcements arrive?"
"Nearest one is five minutes off, at landmark Olancha."
Greenaway handed the map to his LT, who started calling the support choppers. "Go weapons hot and approach. Watch your thermals, if you see them at all, it'll be by heat."
The fire grew on the horizon, and Greenaway held his breath in awed appreciation of the destruction unfolding before him. They had certainly gotten their money's worth out of every ounce of napalm. Radiant Dawn had been a village of forty or so single-story tract homes and an incongruously large four-story tower nestled in a one hundred-square-acre circular valley at the foot of the Sierra Nevadas. Now it was a cauldron of fire; only the skeleton of the tower reached out of the flames, a ruined castle in hell, still collapsing upon itself from a recent missile strike. There was a skirt of flashing red lights atop a ridge overlooking the crater from the east, but they only provided scale for the vast field of fire. There was no hope of containing this, no looking for survivors. Lt. Col. Greenaway got a chill. With Operation White Star in Cambodia, he'd seen more than his share of carpet-bombing: villages reduced to ash and slag, children running torches lighting the hidden Cong trails for machine-gunners to mop up the survivors. But he'd never seen any place so thoroughly
destroyed
. Cancer patients. What the hell did it mean? Either it was some kind of fanaticism, a grotesque mistake, or Radiant Dawn was something more.
Radiant Dawn. RADIANT. Fucking DI Spooks.
The helicopter nosed up and just as abruptly plunged, like a boat slamming into breakers. Even a mile away, the thermals rising up from the fire played hell with the pilot's best efforts to keep them level. They circled around Radiant Dawn along the high ground on the western side, staring into the fire and smoke until their eyes bled tears, but afraid to blink.
"Holy shit, sir, I have one chopper at nine o'clock, heading away at speed!"