by Tom Clancy
It looks like a wound, Scarborough thought. A wound that never healed shut.
Bradley had strode up alongside him and was peering through her binoculars, but a glance in her direction revealed she hadn’t been focused on the notch. Instead she was scanning the ground. As Scarborough guessed he should have been doing.
“I don’t get it,” she said.
“Get what?”
She looked at him.
“The rover’s tracks,” she said, and handed over the binocs. “Check them out for yourself.”
Scarborough readily obliged, his gaze following the parallel bands of Scout’s wheel marks. They coursed across the open sand in a fairly straight line for what he estimated was a hundred yards, and then swung away toward the notch. That didn’t surprise him. Rather, it seemed to confirm that the probe had been operational when it reached the area, since one of its selective tasks was to explore, image, and collect geologic samples from the notch’s interior. Why had Bradley sounded so puzzled then?
It took a minute before he understood.
Just when the tracks got to the flat apron of the notch, they evaporated. And insofar as Scarborough could judge from his vantage, did not resume at any point beyond.
“Crap,” he said. “Seems we’re about to lose the trail.”
“Yes,” she said. “What do you make of it?”
Scarborough was thoughtful. “I don’t know. Could be it was scrubbed clean by wind.”
Bradley’s silence betrayed her skepticism. Scarborough couldn’t blame her. His explanation had been pretty feeble. There was a significant distance between the spot where Scout’s wheel marks stopped and the entrance to the notch, and the gusts in this section of the pass were blowing a trifle less vigorously than in the last stretch his party had covered. It seemed improbable that the trail wouldn’t continue further on. At the very least it should have left some partial remains. But from where he stood, the rover might as well have been swallowed up by the sand.
Scarborough’s view through the glasses clouded from his breath, and he rubbed the steam off before it could freeze. Then he wiped his snow goggles. Not that he needed to bother. He knew what he had seen. Or hadn’t seen, to put it more aptly. Neither the wheel marks nor the rover would materialize at his command. That magic trick exceeded a Coke-bottle genie’s abilities.
“What’s happening?” Payton demanded from over his shoulder. “Why are we standing here?”
Scarborough turned to him. The guy was like a perverse talking doll with about four lines of nastiness recorded on its voice chip. Still, he was owed a straight answer. Scarborough would have preferred one that was simultaneously optimistic, but didn’t know how to pair his goals. He chose between them, braced for Payton’s reaction.
“Scout’s trail wipes out short of the notch,” he said. “From what we can see, it doesn’t pick up again.”
Payton looked at him.
“Short of the notch,” Payton repeated. Absorbing the implications of Scarborough’s words at once. “Which would be approximately where the rover lost contact with base.”
Scarborough nodded.
“I don’t understand,” Payton said. “If that’s as far as Scout traveled, that is where it still ought to be.”
Scarborough might have agreed that was the logical conclusion. Except the probe wasn’t there. And though a slew of possibilities had occurred to him, none convincingly accounted for its MIA status.
“We’ll keep going. See what’s what,” he said. “I wish I had a better plan.”
Payton thrust a hand at him, palm up. “Pass me the binoculars,” he said with derision. “I want to take a look. With my own eyes.”
Scarborough was tempted to suggest that Payton might also want to use his own field glasses, which were hanging in their case over the front of his parka. Instead he handed them to him.
“No problem,” Scarborough said. “Give ’em back to Shevaun when you’re done.”
Bradley nodded to Scarborough in a way he interpreted as sympathetic. It made him feel appreciated. And glad he’d curbed his irritation.
They waited as Payton studied the trail. A minute or two later he let the glasses sink to his chest.
“This isn’t possible, it—” He suddenly interrupted himself. “Wait. Do either of you hear that noise?”
Scarborough did. It was a kind of high metallic buzz that seemed to drill through the blanketing rush of the wind from an unresolved distance. He glanced at Bradley. The inquisitive tilt of her head revealed she was listening carefully to the sound, trying to pinpoint its source. While the reverberant acoustics of their surroundings made that hard, Scarborough thought it was issuing from the direction of the notch.
Payton evidently thought the same. He brought the glasses back up, aimed them at the yawning, jagged scar in the wall of the pass.
“What the hell is this?” he said. His voice was shaky. An instant later, his hands were too. “Scarborough, do your job. Will you do your goddamned job and answer me?”
Scarborough stared at the notch. At first nothing caught his attention. Then an object darted out onto the sand. From a distance it seemed a mere speck. But it was coming on at an incredible speed, growing larger in his vision with a quickness that matched.
Payton continued to stand beside him with his gloved hands trembling around the binoculars. Scarborough did not want to lose a beat getting his own set of glasses out of their case. The buzzing had grown louder and louder, filling his ears as it surged between the stone walls on either side of him. To his unaided eyes, the thing from inside the notch appeared to be a dark cloud of ground smoke churning around a solid and even darker core. At its present rate of acceleration it would be upon them in less than a minute. And he didn’t have a clue what it might be.
“I need the glasses,” he told Payton. “Hurry.”
The techie didn’t answer. He seemed oblivious to Scarborough, paralyzed with shock.
Scarborough reached out to take the binocs, but Payton’s grasp was unyielding. He pulled harder, snatched them from Payton’s petrified fingers, wiped the frost off them.
A glance through the eyepieces immediately told him what had induced Payton’s mental disconnect.
The cloud was not smoke but a storm of powdery reddish-brown sand. And the object kicking it up as it raced ever closer was something that should not have been in the pass, the valleys, nor anywhere on the continent. Not for any conceivable reason.
A storm, that’s it. Scarborough’s thought burst through the door of his memory with haunting irony. The fear arrived an instant later. A desert storm.
“Alan, talk to me.” Bradley had inched close, her arm brushing against him. “Tell me what you see out there.”
Scarborough held up a hand.
“Wait,” he said. “I need to be positive.”
But that was a lie. Scarborough knew what he saw in spite of his initial disbelief. What he really needed was to pull himself together.
When he’d served with the Corps in the Persian Gulf War, special forces units had used tricked-out dune buggies called Fast Attack Vehicles in advance recon and hit-and-run combat missions. Stripped down to their welded tubular frames and roll bars, their low-slung carriages left virtually no discernible signature for enemies to sniff and chase, which led to their reputation as the earthbound equivalents of Stealth bombers. Accommodating two riders in front and a third in an elevated rear gunner’s chair, they held various configurations of roof-mounted antitank tubes, forward and rear machine guns, grenade launchers, and side compartments for gear, small arms, and ammo storage. Back in the day, Scarborough and a buddy had taken an FAV for a workout in the desert and gone belting over dunes and trenches at an uninterrupted eighty-five miles per hour.
Scarborough inhaled sharply, all nerves. He was sweating under his innermost layer of apparel. Sweating torrents in the below-zero cold. The wagons had since been redubbed Light Strike Vehicles and given a bunch of munitions upgrades that ma
de them even deadlier, but call them whatever you wanted, one of those swift automotive killing machines was highballing straight at him. He had no time to wonder who had launched it. The vehicle was fully manned and armed. That was enough for him to know his party was in desperate trouble.
He lowered the binocs, looked urgently around for cover.
Cerberus’s steep grade was banded by a thirty-foot zone of loose, pebbly scree. No protection on that side. A large block of stone heaving up out of the sand near the fractured left slope was their only bet.
Scarborough grabbed Bradley’s elbow. “We have to move, get to that outcrop.”
She eyed the oncoming assault vehicle, emitted a breathless gasp of confusion and horror. The LSV had almost reached them. Long kerchiefs of sand streamed back from its spinning tires. The crewmen wore crash helmets, face masks, snow goggles, and wind-resistant camouflage outfits that melted seamlessly into the terrain. Scarborough made the heavy weapon sandwiched between the antitank tubes on its roof as an M-2.50-caliber machine gun. The man in the gunner’s station was gripping its black metal handlebar triggers. In front of the passenger seat’s occupant was a pintle-mounted M-60 machine gun — smaller but no less capable of blowing a human being to bits and pieces.
“My God.” Bradley was frantic. “That car… Alan… the guns on it…”
“Just come on!” Scarborough tugged hard on her arm, looked over at Payton. He was still a blank, lock-limbed mannequin. “Both of you, let’s go or we’re dead!”
His shouted warning finally snapped Payton out of his daze. Scarborough motioned him toward the outcrop and then broke for it, clinging to Bradley’s arm, half dragging her along at his side. A slight woman, she weighed about 115 pounds under the bulk of her packs and clothing, and would be unable keep pace without help.
Scarborough and Bradley had almost reached the big protuberance of rock, Payton trailing by a step or two, when their attackers opened fire. The rattle of the machine gun was deafening as its ammunition slapped the ground at their backs. Scarborough shoved Bradley behind the outcrop, dove after her, landed on his belly. He heard another crackle of gunfire on the other side, a grunt, and pushed himself to his knees, dirt spilling from his trouser legs. A hurried glance around the rock’s edge confirmed what he’d feared. Payton was sprawled on the ground, his garments ruptured with bullet holes, steam rising into the air from his wounds. There was blood on him, around him, everywhere.
Warm red blood flowing from his gaudy red coat into the parched-red cold-desert sand.
Scarborough dropped back into cover, looked at Bradley.
“You okay?” he whispered.
She stared at him wordlessly as if the question hadn’t registered. Then a shadow fell over their huddled forms. The LSV had jolted to a halt just beyond the rock, practically on top of them.
He reached out and gripped her arm again. “Are you okay?”
This time she nodded.
“Good,” he said. “Listen, Shevaun. We’ve got to surrender to these people.”
Bradley seemed astonished by the idea. She rejected it with a shake of her head.
“No, no, we can’t,” she said. “We don’t even know what they want.”
“Doesn’t matter. We want to live.”
She hesitated. “Payton… did you see… is he…?”
“It’s too late for him.” Scarborough heard the LSV’s engine purring with soft, certain threat. “Giving ourselves up is our only chance. But I won’t make the call. We both need to decide this.”
She took a couple of sharp, agitated breaths.
Scarborough waited. He could hear the engine purring. It sounded like an eager jungle cat.
“All right,” she said. “I’m with you.”
He saw her start to tremble, reached out for her hand, held it. “When we stand up, put your arms above your head. And keep them there. Okay?”
Bradley nodded.
“Don’t let go of me,” she said. “I can do this. But don’t let go.”
Scarborough eased his head above the edge of the rock. The vehicle had stopped not five feet away, its crew facing him in impassive silence. Sunlight glinted off the four racked headlamps on its impact bar. He tried to keep his eyes off the machine guns positioned above them, off Payton’s limp body on the ground below. Tried to tunnel his gaze onto the man in the driver’s seat. He wasn’t sure he could continue suspending his panic otherwise.
“We’re American researchers!” he shouted. “We have no weapons!”
More silence except for the steady idling hum of the vehicle’s engine.
Scarborough swallowed past a lump in his throat. “Do you understand? We’re unarmed!”
There was another tick of silence. Then the LSV’s driver turned to the man in the passenger seat, spoke to him in a language Scarborough didn’t understand, turned back toward the outcrop.
“Move away from the rock,” he said. His English was thickly accented. “Now.”
Scarborough looked at Bradley. He could feel her fingers pressing into his hand through its double layer of gloves, and tightened his own grip.
“Ready?” he asked her.
“Ready.”
The two of them rose, slowly, their arms raised high, his right hand still clutching her left. Then they stepped out from behind the outcrop.
“Stop where you are,” the driver said, studying them. “Turn toward me.”
They complied with his orders, hands linked above their heads, sharing their strength, their courage, facing their unknown attackers together.
That was the way they were standing when the man in the passenger seat trained the long black barrel of his machine gun upon them and also did precisely as he’d been ordered.
TWO
SAN JOSE, CALIFORNIA MARCH 1, 2002
With its arctic-blue body, coral side coves, and beige vinyl interior, the ’57 Corvette roadster was the car of Pete Nimec’s dreams. A bolt of glorious inspiration captured in streamlined fiberglass and a classy flourish of chrome, delivering decisive 283 dual-four-barrel go without showoff extravagance. Just over six thousand of them had hit showroom floors across the USA, and just under two hundred were pumped with Ramjet fuel injection, a handful out of a scarce, exquisite handful that were still around and running a half century later.
A ’57 Corvette fuelie. Reconditioned to its original Chevrolet standards, including minor production-line imperfections. Probably worth upwards of a hundred, a hundred fifty thou, assuming you could find one for sale or auction.
And it was Nimec’s.
Which is to say, he owned it outright.
Owned it from the crossed-flag badge over its toothy front grille back to the big twin exhaust pipes at its tail. Owned it from the removable hardtop down to the wide whitewall tires. Owned it, his dream car, and by surprise no less, having received it at his condominium with a decorative red bow and handwritten note of appreciation taped to its wraparound windshield, an unexpected present from the man he admired most in all the world.
On any other morning, Nimec would have been in an unsinkable state of bliss. And he had been while driving to UpLink’s Rosita Avenue headquarters with his Wonderbar dash radio tuned to an oldies station, while pulling the ’Vette into his reserved underground parking slot, while riding the elevator to his office on the twenty-fifth floor.
But now that mood was heavy and flat, punctured by a single click of the mouse next to his computer.
He checked his watch as his telephone bleeped. Nine o’clock. Gordian would have already arrived at work.
“Nimec,” he answered.
It was the boss, as anticipated.
“Pete, you’d better come on up here.”
“This about Megan’s e-mail?”
“Yes.”
“I just read it myself,” Nimec said. “Be right with you.”
He cradled the receiver and whisked out into the corridor.
Minutes later Nimec entered Gordian’s reception room, ti
pped a brisk salute to Norma, got her nod of admittance, stepped over to the heavy oak inner door that she guarded like a vigilant gryphon, and rapped twice as he shouldered it open.
He stood inside the doorway and waited. Roger Gordian sat at his desk in front of the floor-to-ceiling window with its view of the city skyline and, east of downtown, the solid heave of Mount Hamilton above the Santa Clara foothills. A look at him told two stories. One was about the lingering physical effects of the biological assassination attempt he’d survived last year. The other was about the force of will that had been as vital to his recovery as the gene-blocker codes grabbed during a scalpel raid on the germ factory in Ontario. This was in November, shortly before Thanksgiving. It would always stick in Nimec’s memory, the time of year it happened, because Gordian had revived from his coma precisely on Thanksgiving Day, his awakening a grace that, like so many, had been attained with terrible bloodshed and sacrifice.
Thanksgiving, not quite four months ago. It seemed longer.
Gordian had gained some weight since his illness, but was much thinner than before. Its ravages had left noticeable marks on his features: the pale cheeks, the slight wiriness of his graying hair, the finely veined skin at his temples, the dark hollows under his eyes. But his eyes themselves radiated an undiminished intensity and brightness. He was better, and with time would be better still.
