"Quite a determined undertaking for a handful of civilians," he complimented, pausing specifically to eye Trennt. "If that is what you really are."
He next stopped at Wayne.
"And here is a new face. But I don't see the old one. Where—ahh! You stirred up a hornet's nest among the tribes and he remained to deal with them. I see."
Dobruja tapped a pensive finger to his lips as he swaggered.
"I've speculated much over what your purpose in such a resolute trek might be. But whatever, I'm certain the low northerly passage of that damaged jet aircraft figures in prominently. Now, I want to know how and why."
No one volunteered and the major nodded curtly.
"Honor-bound. I do appreciate the notion of valor and camaraderie. But the dawn is near and there is no time for bargaining."
He casually drew a sidearm and stuck it between Trennt's eyes.
"If three are dead, the fourth is guaranteed to talk."
He blinked apologetically and cocked the hammer.
"Sorry, my friend. You are first."
"NO!"
All faces swung toward Wayne.
"It's my project," he declared boldly. "These people are merely working for me. I'm the one you want. Let them go."
Josef lowered the pistol and approached curiously.
"And you are who?"
"Doctor Martin Keener."
"No!" Geri shouted. "Don't!"
Trennt barked as well. "What the hell are you doing?"
Wayne looked over mournfully.
"There's no use pretending. Let me be."
The major looked about, then shook his head.
"The name means nothing to me. Doctor of what?"
"Bioengineer," explained Wayne. "North American Chief of Studies for the Manna Project. You will find it all verifiable."
Josef gazed derisively about.
"I must apologize, but I am currently without any such method of doing so."
Josef's men chuckled darkly and Wayne offered the limp, crushed journal.
"Here is the diary I've kept on the matter," he explained, then pointed at Baker.
"He carries the finished product about his shoulders."
Dobruja hooked a finger, silently beckoning for the bandoleer. Baker slipped it off and flung it at the Red, who snapped it up, trying not to flinch at the loose and flailing ends.
"Another silly such action will be your last," he warned courteously.
Slipping one of the stainless vials from its grimy elastic band, Josef separated the scratched metal halves. A crimped, tempered glass ampoule slid into his palm. Raised to the beam of a flashlight, it shone as deep, 24-karat amber. The major's eyes ignited in its presence; not so much comprehending its value as basking in the glory of its possession.
He pointed at Wayne. "Take this and him with us. We will figure things out later."
Returning to Trennt, he snapped a magnanimous, mock salute.
"Thank you for your efforts, my friend. Mother Russia thanks you as well, I'm certain."
Dobruja's smile stayed tacked in place as his gun hand again raised. But his grin fled at the sound of a sudden, gathering groan.
The land began to growl, then shift. Soon the earth all about was quivering; swelling and surging. Surrounding trees were animated with a leaf-shaking palsy; their trunks popped and splintered. Captives and captors alike were pitched off their feet.
Disregarding the rest, Dobruja grabbed Wayne and hurried his men aboard the deflated ground-effects craft. It rose quickly and in seconds was cushioned safely above the gyrating landscape, gaining speed back toward the chemical flats.
In seconds more, the tremor ended. Trennt, Geri and Baker climbed back to their feet. Where level ground had been just moments before, now was a network of shallow, jagged furrows and rent earth.
They stood dumfounded amid the settling dust. Their lives had been spared, but they were disarmed and totally abandoned on hostile, unfamiliar ground. Once more, it was Baker who broke the spell. He threw a frustrated fist high after the departed GEV.
"Lousy bastards!" he growled. "Take a man's guns!"
He stomped about in maddened circles, kicking up muddy grass and frothing on, until Trennt calmly spoke.
"Dawn's still got to be at least a half hour away. The ground is soaked and cool from all the rain. If the overcast holds . . ."
Geri blinked dumbly. Baker forgot his rage.
"Jimbo. They took our suits, 'member? Besides, Whiskers said fog shot forty feet high as soon as sunup hit. We get stuck out there if that sky breaks—"
Trennt cut him off. "Then stay here, dammit!"
"He's right, though," added Geri. "What could we even use for skin cover?"
Trennt kicked at the mucky, rent earth.
"That!"
They clawed out wads of the tacky, foul-smelling clay and slapped it to their faces. More was slathered over their skin and clothes. Doing so, Baker spared time enough to quizzically regard his friend.
"Jimbo, what d'yah figger that ole boy was up to—givin' over the juice like he did, but lyin' to them Commies that way?"
Trennt sighed. "No personal good, that's for sure."
Sergeant Karelian paused as he finished climbing the rise. Ahead, the major was busily sweeping brush from Top's truck. Noticing his longtime comrade, he offered a disarming smile, but continued in his chore.
"Have we learned anything of value from our prisoner?" asked the sergeant, a bit mystified by Josef's actions.
Dobruja nodded judiciously.
"Much! From the good doctor's explanations, I believe we have captured a fine and valuable prize."
Sergeant Karelian grinned in accord. But something in the major's tone also struck him oddly—as did the gag over Wayne's mouth and his hands cuffed to the truck. Simultaneously, he noticed two grenades set loose on the ground.
Karelian never was able to ask why. A second later he found himself gazing down the silenced barrel of Dobruja's pistol. And into the officer's ruthless eyes.
The sound of the shot was barely that of a grasshopper taking flight. The stunned sergeant grabbed at his chest, slumping dead without a cry.
Dobruja smiled diplomatically at his shocked prisoner.
"My regrets for having to view that. But, you see, great promises were made to me early on in my career, yet they remain unfulfilled. All my hard labors have gone unappreciated and promotions been denied me for one vexing political reason or another.
"I've long needed something to expedite my career. But now, with the article in hand, I realize it just well may be time for me to put further allegiances aside and strike out on my own. There are other legion settlements further up the coast. We will proceed there and trade you and your product to the highest bidder." Josef's eyes ignited. "Back to your own people, perhaps!" He shrugged impishly. "But, I cannot leave witnesses behind. So, please excuse me one last time."
Dobruja retrieved his grenades and smiled thinly, stepping around the body of his longtime comrade. He walked above the remainder of his men, seated at the hill's base. When a few looked up from their rest break, they saw only their trusted major waving from above.
Josef gazed upon them with a deep and burning pride. Such fine soldiers. Genuine tears of love gathered as he slipped his fingers through the grenade pull pins. They would understand.
The salt flats had a much softer, spongier surface than during their night crossing. To this point it still held, but with less and less authority.
To protect the others from a breakthrough, Trennt had spread his point lead twenty yards. They were three-quarters of the way across when he heard Geri's frightened call.
"Trennt!"
He saw the danger immediately. Just yards behind, their trailing prints were filling with lazy coils of dense smoke. Like freshly seared branding-iron marks, each new impression was dissolving, linking up to the others in sullen, weblike fractures.
Advancing from its center, the salt flat itself was gradually passing back into solution. Sluggish, misty waves burped from the awakening stew and radiated outward like a leavening stage fog.
Trennt checked the sky. The cloud cover still held, but had much thinned to a shade of burnished pewter. The air was warming and, through his boots, he realized his feet were likewise starting to heat up.
But in the distance he could also see the other shore.
Baker swiped a hand at his mud-clogged eyes.
"Mebbe if we slow down some, Jimbo. Our steps'd be lighter then."
"And slower," he argued. "No. We've got to be over the shallows by now. Way passed the deep stuff and above the last to thaw. Don't slow down. Speed up! Faster! Go!"
But for the first time ever, Trennt saw Geri shake her head in surrender.
"Let's go!" he repeated.
She didn't move. Instead, her eyes swelled with tears. She sobbed and reeled perilously on her feet.
"No more. I can't. Just leave me be!"
Her words cut through Trennt at gut level. He felt a genuine sense of fear burn through him; a great notion of lost purpose and direction.
He walked back and growled in her face.
"No! You're not going soft on me now! After making it through a plane crash, desert, and all that other bullshit, you're going to quit when safety is only a few hundred yards away?"
Trennt grabbed Geri by her shirt sleeves and yanked her to face him.
"Lady, you were the tough one through this whole nightmare! Thirsty, freezing, you never once complained and I admired that. It was you who kept me going, because I was too damned ashamed to quit first! Now, you just want to sit down and die? All right! Quit if you want. But so do I!"
Trennt swung his hand at Baker, some yards removed.
"Go on, man! She and I are stopping here! You go!"
Geri's stupor bled away to shock. Her eyebrows furrowed and flexed in disbelief. Yet Trennt stayed put. For the first time ever, he matched and held her stare.
His eyes filled with wonder. What a deplorable specimen she was—comically plastered in a foul-smelling mud wrap, speckled in goose bumps and red bug bites, puffy and swollen with cuts and scrapes, feverish from exhaustion and thirst. But in the entire world nothing more beautiful existed for him.
No contrition could possibly earn forgiveness for all the wrong he'd done. So Trennt merely stood there, hovering before her like a pathetic dunce.
Then, from somewhere far away, the true and right words gathered and finally came.
"What happened back at the church was real. I love you, dammit!"
Geri's bloodshot eyes flared. She didn't speak, but slowly, a hand gently rose to touch his filthy, beard-stubbled cheek. His arms, in turn, went tight around her.
"I don't care anymore about this," he declared. "I just want you."
Her gaze thawed. A trusting hand went to his and they joined Baker in making for the home shore.
The trio shuffle-walked side by side, keeping a double-time pace as growing whiffs of the chemical mist skittered determinedly after.
It reached their ankles, quickening toward their shins and knees. The white fumes probed vigorously among flex cracks in their flaking mud cover. It found fabric and wicked its way inside, toward unprotected flesh.
Their skin began to tingle. First, insectlike tickles coursed up and down their legs. Then determined pinpricks, and finally legions of scalding bee stings.
They struggled on as a unit, forging through the last yards of caustic sands and toward the first spot of true earth. Never losing their contact with each other, the threesome bulldozed through the waist-deep, dead pine boughs, pulling and pushing. With their strength reserves at the absolute lowest, they gathered for a clumsy near-run toward the distant safety broadcast in a faint wash of green.
In their wake, the first probing rays of a new sun lanced the failing cloud cover. Mini white twisters sprouted in each sunbeam. Teetering uncertainly at birth, they eagerly gained their balance and launched skyward. More bloomed and joined the dance, until dozens of the ghostly entities whirled about in a frenzy.
Finally the sun burst through, flooding the caustic plain in one single blast. All the solitary flares raced toward its center and detonated into a single, mighty thrusting column of boiling silver-white.
But safe from its reach, the survivors stumbled, clothes and all, into the welcoming, algae-green waters of a well-shadowed marsh. They gratefully splashed through its shallow acreage, dousing themselves with soothing muck and splashing its scummy waters across their seared flesh, before simply plopping down.
Dipping her fingers in a shirt pocket, Geri withdrew a familiar and battered foil packet. She wordlessly rattled it before the others—Top's return-trip ration of detox pills.
They all choked down their last dose of the astringent zinc and citric acid pellets, adding handfuls of brackish water, as well. Stomachs long empty and numb were violently awakened by the sour medicine and it stayed put only with the greatest effort.
Trennt spied a tree-lined ridge not far off. Later, they'd spend the night sheltering at its base. But for now, he just wanted to soak in this cool bath and relax.
Major Dobruja shoved himself painfully away from the truck's oversized steering wheel. Ahead, shattered windshield glass was flecked with his blood. Through the cracks and spatters, a mauled reflection gazed back.
The scalp above the major's left ear glistened with a tarry sheen. Matted hair fed sluggish tributaries of ooze that forked about it and rejoined in the coarse weave of his shirt collar.
He looked to the handcuffed man slumped beside him.
"Are you hurt?"
Wayne put uncertain fingers to a bloody nose but did not answer.
Josef touched his own smashed cheekbone and his universe swayed suddenly with pain. Then he froze, realizing it was indeed doing just that.
Gazing passed his fractured image, the major settled on a slowly bobbing emptiness just beyond. The truck was seesawing on a rocky ledge. Beneath, a dim rugged slope plunged off to a shadow-choked bottom.
Josef cursed his haste. Winner's euphoria had clogged his better senses. Flying down the quake-leveled trail, he hadn't anticipated the hard jog cleaved into the fresh ridge. Only his catlike reflexes had prevented both vehicle and men from completing the full ride down. Now they were trapped.