“Okay, that’s one. Ronnie?”
“Yeah, fine. Whatever.”
“That’s two. Therese?”
“Oui, s’il vous plait.”
“That’s three.”
Then I asked me.
“Jeffry?”
Then I answered me. I don’t know which was worse.
“Well you know, I hate to sleep on the ground, but look on the bright side. It could be a really small tent.”
The silliness of my asking myself for a vote, and then making a joke out of it finally broke the tension. Therese started to giggle first, then Ronnie. Evie was still working a bit slower than the rest of us, knowing what she knew, and the others didn’t, but then she gave in and started to giggle too. Then they all three broke out laughing, and I joined them. I think we all laughed until we cried. You have to let it out somehow. You just have to.
I headed back down towards the Limmat River, and grabbed the first bridge across that I saw. That led me north of the Bahnhof, and straight onto one of the main highways crossing the country. We drove for about a half hour before I found what I wanted. A cut-off that looked like it led straight up into the mountains. I took it, and it did.
Another half-hour and we were driving up a small switchback road, probably leading to the pass between valleys for the locals. These types of roads in Switzerland normally had rest areas every little while. We had passed the one-kilometer mark way back. It’s what I had been searching for, and I had found one.
Another twenty minutes and the uniquely Alpine road sign for ‘Approaching Cloud Layer Area - proceed with Caution’ on it was a black fluffy cloud on a reflective yellow background in a diamond shape. Like it would be self-evident, or something, right? Right. The cloud layer was sitting fairly low that night, and we had been in the cloud layer for at least the last fifteen minutes. I had the ‘Rover in Locked-Hub Full-Time Four-Wheel Automatic, Medium Range, with eight gears, and a microprocessor controlled shifting pattern, similar to my Voyager Minivan at home but with more options. The one I’d chosen for our down mountain run was comparable in a way to my own van’s Third, Auto-Shift-Down, where the transmission shifted up at the last possible moment and shifted down at the earliest possible moment. That kept the RPMs high and control at a maximum. People usually judge the power of a car, the engine, by how fast the car can go, and how quickly it can get to that speed. The true judgement of a vehicle can only result from pushing the unit under test to its limits, and beyond.
Then the fine tuning to better the results begins, and you end up with something that can be run at high revolutions, sometimes even over the red line for a few minutes at a time, for hours on end, and as long as there’s gas in the tank, oil in the engine, coolant in the radiator, and that one was flexible, like the Cadillac NorthStar System. Only with the ‘Rover, you were assured that it would actually work when you needed it most. The fact that the ‘Rover could get you into that situation easily made the capability stand as a more reasonable feature. Then there were the Safety Features. You drove it in safety as good as it can get using today’s technology, both out of Detroit and Osaka.
That’s how I was running it. The branches on both sides of the road scraped the roof and windows more than once, and every switchback was a four-wheel drift. The laws of physics took care of that kind of driving control, despite the programmed ‘sensible’ shifting patterns. That’s not so easy when you’re going uphill. That’s where the torque came in. High revolutions in low gears produced Maximum Torque. Even bettering the printed specifications. It was ‘torque’ that gave you the power, not ‘how many horses you have under the hood’, although the correlation was there.
I had been redlining at over sixty-five-hundred RPM on every switchback, and just flooring it on the straight sections. I was managing an average speed of about sixty-five miles per hour, or just over one-hundred kilometers per hour.
That’s how I almost missed it. A small multi-lingual sign, with international symbols for picnic tables and tents. I slowed right down, skidding the whole while, but with Anti-Lock Brakes, most of the fun’s gone, even if you can steer easily while braking. I had good old fashioned spin-out brakes on my own van, and I liked them a lot more. When you know what you’re doing, Anti-Lock Brakes are a hindrance to aggressive driving, period. As I came around the next switchback I was doing maybe twenty kilometers per hour, tops, and there it was. Two gravel wheel ruts leading off into the woods. Even though we were going so slowly around the turn, it was just a flash as the lights passed over it, but it was enough.
I came to a stop about thirty feet from the tracks. I pulled the shifter into reverse and slowly backed up until I had a good turning angle for the trail. I put the car in Four-Wheel Low, and made the turn, running slower now, not certain of the terrain. The ‘Rover took all of it in stride. Nice machine.
I slowed to a stop and turned off the lights when we were well into the bush, surrounded on all sides, and let the engine idle, cooling itself off while we talked.
“Evie?”
“Yes, sir?”
“Exactly! I’ve been meaning to tell you. Would it be possible for you to please stop calling me sir?”
“Sure thing. Now, what do you need?”
“You said something about a nightscope. We have one?”
“Certainly. Don’t leave… home without it.”
“Okay. You case the area. See how many others may be using this facility tonight.”
“Consider it done.”
She held out her hand and the headpiece was placed in it from the back seat.
“By the way, this thing is designed to operate in conjunction with the suits. It not only has night vision, but it registers in the infrared as well. Be back in a flash. Oh! Is my bag handy there? I need some shoes. Sneakers are all right.”
There was the sound of rumbling and mumbling, bags being thrust about. Zippers being undone, then done up again.
Finally, a pair of black Keds made their way forward. She slipped them on in a wink and hopped out the door. The darkness swallowed her up in two or three steps. I lay back in my seat and took a deep breath and let it out slowly, relaxing my body, forcing it to start turning off.
It was a measure of my trust of the people I was with that I relaxed my guard at all, never mind drifted off into dreamland. I remember thinking to myself how bone-tired I was… and then the soft voice in my left ear. “Time for bed, big boy.”
I came instantly alert, my entire body flexed and ready to move… and realized where I was and what had happened, and how we’d gotten here. Evie had opened the door and whispered in my ear. My hands had been faster than my mind, so I let go of her right arm and sighed.
“Sorry about that Evie. I’m Okay now. What’s the situation?”
If she had called me Jeffry, I wouldn’t have grabbed her that way. It had been very fast, and when I latched onto her arm I had grabbed it pretty tightly. Too tightly for a friend.
“And your arm. Is it all right? Did I hurt you? I’m so sorry if I did because that would never be an intent from me to you.”
“God! Stop rambling! It’s fine. In fact, everything is fine. The tent is up, the perimeters are established, and the monitoring systems are now active. You’re the last of the baggage. Let Therese take you to the site, and I’ll move the ‘Rover. What do you say, chief?”
I looked past her, and Therese was standing there smiling. That was the first time I’d seen her in this state. It was a bit odd. But it seemed that Commander Westwood had taken the task in hand, and achieved results. Or maybe it had been the Colonel’s choice. Whatever, it was done. I got out of the vehicle, and took Therese by the hand.
“The keys are in the ignition. Good one, Evie.”
Then I followed Therese across the picnic area and down a winding gravel path. Evie tootled off behind us, maybe doing two or three miles per hour. I turned around before going down the path, and I couldn’t see the headlights. It was as if the forest had swallowed up the ‘Rover.
At the bottom of the winding path was the campground proper. All of the amenities were here. Electrical and gas hook-ups. Propane station for Bar-B-Que refills. Refreshment stand. Public washrooms. The tent section of the centre, named after something in Swiss-German that I couldn’t translate, was large, I mean it was all through the forest, you could tell by the tables and the recycling bins. I didn’t see any tent, though. Therese watched my face, and laughed at me.
“We made the tent in hiding! Personne ne peut nous voir ici.”
I followed her, albeit reluctantly, because I was thinking of what kind of food might be found there. I was starving. The trip was less than two days old, and I wished I was back at home, asleep in my own bed, just comfortable, and drifting… my foot came down without flexing my knee, sending a shock up my body and waking me up again.
Therese held my hand firmly, and kept leading me. We weaved through the trees for a bit then we entered one of the small trails that led off from the park area, for birdwatching, walking, jogging, the lot.
A minute or so into the underbrush, Therese turned to me, and even though it was only the shadow of her that I could see, it seemed like a serious moment, and so I waited for her to tell me what she had on her mind.
“There are two rooms in the tent. I want privacy with you in one. That’s all.”
She turned back to her invisible trail as quickly as she had stopped. About five minutes later we were there. We’d taken a no-path cut through the woods, and ended up at a lovely place to Bivouac. The tent had been set up, and there was a Coleman lantern glowing softly inside. The tent was made for four, with one of those smaller zippered rooms for the kids. I could tell because the flap was partially open. The mosquito net was in place, though. I could see Ronnie’s shadow inside. Therese held the flap while I crouched to enter.
“Ah, Jeffry. Did you have a nice nap?”
“In fact, I did. Thank you for asking.”
Therese had followed me in, keeping hold of my hand.
“Does that smell like what I think it smells like?”
Ronnie positively beamed. No doubt here as to who made the dinner.
“We have a Coleman stove, yes. And that is hot beans, for which we have plenty of crackers to go with. And tea. With sugar and powdered cream. Pull up a piece of the floor.”
I did just that, and helped myself to the paper plates and coffee mugs. They were the old kind with the twin fold-out handle so you wouldn’t burn yourself. I hadn’t seen that in years. I was soon tucked into a plate of hot beans on crackers and a cup of tea. Life was good once more.
Therese and Ronnie were just dishing out their own when Evie came in. She still had that contraption on her head, sans balaclava.
“Man! I had to shut down way back there, you guys are putting out so much heat and light. I haven’t gotten the knack of setting it all just yet, but I’m getting better. This stuff is amazing! You should see the big picture, I mean, it’s scary.”
I managed to put my two cents worth in through a mouthful of beans and crackers.
“Good. Then we’ll look just like any other family out camping. Like we’re not trying to hide. As for technology, it has always been ‘scary’, unquote, because it gives some kind of power to the possessor of this technology. Not everyone has it, and then the power shifts to those who do. So, it’s a pretty much full time job just acquiring it. Research is slow but ultimately fruitful in the end. When somebody with a lot of technology, say, more than the guy across the road from them, gets tired of waiting for the research projects to bear that fruit they want so badly, but the guy across the road has more progressive information about that particular thing, then that somebody just uses their superior technology to take what they want from that guy across the street. Yeah, you’re right. That’s pretty scary.”
Evie thought about that for a moment, and nodded her approval. Then she did like the rest of us and tucked into the beans and crackers.
The hot food and the closeness of dawn made me wolf down my share. That and the ridiculous expenditure of energy I’d experienced since I left the Sommerau Hotel this morning, with Therese in tow. Now, here she’d gone and insisted on my sleeping with her in the small tent ‘bedroom’, and that Ronnie and Evie could share the larger ‘half’. Of course, she hadn’t considered the factor of whether or not I agreed to sleep with her in such intimate conditions, even if it was just a platonic relationship. The feelings that were floating around in my mind didn’t quite make it to the surface.
“Evie, you mentioned an ‘active perimeter monitoring system’, were you joking? I’m sorry, I’m just too tired to tell the difference.”
“No! Serious as hell. We can all sleep like babies tonight. On my Honour, sir.”
Then she gave me a little salute. Oh, well. I guess I had developed a trust for what Evie told me. If she said that the perimeter was secure, then it was.
I was done with my plate of food and my cup of tea, and somehow, I didn’t think there was any pie for desert, so I crawled over to the ‘room’ in the tent, and pulled back the zipper to open the door. When I did, the light from the lamps in the bigger room showed me that the room was already set up with sleeping bags. Two, zipped together to make one big one. I used to do that with the cousins out on the farm when I was a kid. On a good night we could get four of us into one big bag. This would be snug for two though. I wasn’t a kid anymore. It didn’t stop me, though I mumbled goodnight to all as I crawled through the entrance on my hands and knees and did the zipper up after me. I wriggled over to the side that was nearest the wall, and started stripping down my arsenal. When all of the guns, ammo, holsters and grenades, knives and bigger knives were off, the pile was bigger than any I’d ever carried. The proximity of the Japanese blade gave me a quick exit if required. It wouldn’t require more than a swing of my arm with that blade to open a door in the side of the tent that was larger than the front door.
The space was small, and I put all of my gear in a pile just above my head, but placed so that I could get at the Colt and my new short-sword. Then I stripped of my jacket, shirt, shoes and trousers, and crawled into the sleeping bag. I vaguely remember Therese crawling in beside me. I was turned towards the wall of the tent, and that was how I slept. Very deeply, too. Great night to be as tired as the Sphinx itself. I do remember waking once or twice, feeling the heat from her body, and the sensation of intimacy, then dropping off to sleep again. It was a comfortable feeling.
Morning came too soon, as it often does. When you’re in the woods, morning is a noisy time. Every little one of God’s creatures was awake and talking. I didn’t understand the various languages used by them, but I certainly heard what they were saying. A talkative bunch, forest critters.
As I awoke, I laid still, processing the information from the day before. What a hell of a day it had been. I was fairly refreshed, but I bounced back pretty good, always had. What I hadn’t been expecting, probably because I was asleep when she climbed in with me, was the fact that I was in a zippered sleeping bag with a beautiful young woman who was snuggled up close to me from the back. I could tell that she wasn’t wearing much of anything from the feel of her skin on mine. My stomach did a small flip, and there were the butterflies again.
Therese had slept with one leg thrown over mine, and one arm draped across my chest, while the other hand was holding onto a lock of my hair. If this woman had been my wife, or even my girlfriend, I think I would have rolled over and made love to her right then and there. In my sleep, my left arm had been under my pillow, while I’d placed my right hand firmly on the thigh of the leg that was slung over mine. It was actually pretty high up to call it a thigh. More like a ‘thigh meets the waist’ region. Her skin was soft and warm, and as soon as I woke, my awareness of the body to body position I was in started sending messages to my brain. Ones that were controllable, but just.
I listened carefully to the camp, and the forest. Either Ronnie and Evie were the quietest campers in the wor
ld, or they were still as asleep as Therese was. There was just a hint of light starting to show through the tent material, so it was probably just the false dawn finishing, and sunrise would follow in several minutes.
I gently moved my right hand up her leg, softly feeling her waist. There was nothing but skin. She was totally naked. My pulse started to rise, and I fought to control it. I dropped my hand down to her knee, and gently prized it from its position. I was trying to get up without waking her, but fate was more fickle than that.
As soon as I had moved my hand on her leg, she had woken up, but she hadn’t moved or said anything, or changed her breathing, nothing. I’d been convinced she was asleep. Instead of achieving my goal of lifting her leg and slipping out of the sleeping bag undetected, there was a small warm hand on top of mine, moving it back to her thigh. In my ear I heard the whisper, “Maintenent c’est un bon temps, mon chéri. Restes ici avec moi.”
The things that rang through my mind. A fine Swiss Alps morning, indeed. I turned to her and smiled.
“And a very good morning to you also, mon petite. Now I must work, and who can tell when fate will next bring us together, hmm?”
I looked at her face, as opposed to her eyes. I was a sucker for beautiful eyes, and I was surrounded by them, with two just inches from me at the moment. Then the scent, the naturally intoxicating smell of her. I’d caught hints of it before, but now I was really awake, and it was overwhelming. She didn’t need the eyes; she was powerful with a woman’s ways. But I could hear the chorus line to ‘Just Like a Woman’, by Dylan, like a small voice just behind me, singing the last chorus line over and over. ‘But she breaks just like a little girl.’
“I want you up and dressed, and outside for washing and for breakfast. Five minutes, d’accord?”
The disappointment was tempered by the anger. A result of her growing frustration resulting from her continued attempts to change a… funny kind of love… I guess is the best way to describe how Therese and I had felt for each other from the beginning. It had taken me longer than her to detect and respond to that love. That’s why she’d fallen asleep in my arms so easily when we were in the car going to, and coming from, both airports, Toronto’s Pearson International, and Zurich’s own Kloten. But then, I’d only been acting in a protective manner to someone who’d placed their trust in me. That was something I always took seriously. She finally hung down her head like a puppy that had no one to play with, and responded to me in a strong but soft voice.
The Diamond Dust on Dragonfly Wings: A Jeffry Claxton Mystery Novel Page 66
