"No. nothing." But she turned around and stepped inside, grabbed the trash bags and hauled them out before shutting the front door. He offered to help, but she shouldered him aside as she carried them down the icy-slick lane to the dumpsters. As she rounded the corner, a sleek black shape appeared from behind the dumpster corral, snarled at her and snapped its fangs at the bag.
"Mannix! No!" An old fat man in a golf cart hove into view from behind the dumpster corral at the other end of the dog's absurdly long leash. Mannix tore the bottom out of the bag and immediately recoiled from the wave of noxious fetor that exploded into his hypersensitive nostrils. He backpedaled, gave a sharp, snorting bark and lunged at Stella. Her eyes widened in shock at the swiftness of the attack, but her own hand whipped out before her and slipped under the dog's muzzle, took firm hold of the tender pipes that fed the dog air and water and food and blood, and gave them a good squeeze. Though her arm was still little more than a jointed stick, she could rip the Doberman's life out with little or no effort, could pull his spine out through his fucking mouth, if it came to that. She was no less horrified than the dog by this realization, and let him go with a gentle shove. Mannix yelped and streaked across the lane and began retching and gobbling up weeds.
"Good Lord, what's that stink?" The old man levered himself up from the cart and shuffled towards the dumpster.
Stella swung the gate out to cover the ravaged bag and leaned against it, trying not to throw up on the man. "I'm sorry about the mess. I'll take care of it."
The old man shook his head, squinting at Stella, spooked by her as much as by the incident. "That's all right, ma'am, it's the damned dog's fault. He doesn't cotton to strangers poking around the trash. And you are a stranger…"
"I'm Marguerite Weintraub. My Aunt Naomi lives in #72? She's been ill, so she's come to stay with us for a while. The poor dear left some things in a mess, so my husband and I cleaned it up. I trust there's no problem?"
The old man rolled his eyes, smiling at Stella so awkwardly his upper plate slipped loose and made a break for it. He caught the denture in his hand and popped it back in. His mouth and eyes worked themselves into knots as her features slowly came into focus. He didn't seem to notice that she was dressed in her aunt's ill-fitting clothes. "No trouble at all, Mrs. Weintraub. Where is Mrs. Gordesky now, ma'am?"
"Oh, she's fine, but my husband took her to the hospital in Las Vegas for a check-up early this morning."
Twitching suspicion making his dentures click in his mouth, the manager said, "Your aunt said you lived in Bakersfield, is what I recall."
"We moved last year. My husband works at Caesar's Palace. My aunt's lease is paid up through the spring, I take it?"
"Oh, there's no problem with that. Just worried about the lady, is all. She's always been one of the nice ones. Left scraps out for my dogs."
Stella tightened her face in a dismissive smile and stooped to clean up the mess. The man clucked and doodled on his clipboard before heeling Mannix and rolling away in his golf cart.
Stella held her breath as she scooped putrid flesh and cracked bones back into the trash bag. The remains smelled different from the odor she'd grown accustomed to in the trailer; there was a sourer smell, though most of the bones were as clean as if they'd been bleached, with deep nicks and gouges in them, and the marrow all gone. She picked up a concave ellipsis of bone the size and shape of her palm and turned it over. There were strands of yellowed white hair hanging from it.
Was this her hair? She'd seen it falling out, but it hadn't turned white. Was this her skull? Her head had been badly beat up and decayed, but had she shed her old skull? Her old brain? She stroked the hairs on the shard. Her thoughts still ran riot in this new, improved head. Her memories still gave her the anger she needed to stay strong and go on living. Her soul was still in here, even if it was not alone. If this was not her head, God help the God who had to share it with her.
Unless the skull was someone else's, but…
Where is Mrs. Gordesky now, ma'am?
This broken old thing must be part of her skull. There was no other logical explanation. She scoured her brain and could find no memory, no flicker of guilt over having harmed anyone, at least not lately. She bundled up the rest of the mess and tossed it into the dumpster.
Life is for the living, Stella.
Dr. Keogh pulled up beside the dumpsters and came around to open her door for her. She stopped short of climbing into the passenger seat, looking at him and at the trailer. He touched her shoulder, fixed his gaze on her and spoke to her in her ear and with her brain. "There's no time to lose, Stella. The life force awaits."
She watched herself climbing into the car, and the car pulling out of the trailer park, and she fell almost immediately into a deep, deep sleep.
~6~
January 3 Over the Gulf of Mexico; 120 Miles south of Corpus Christi, Texas
The mammoth C-130 cargo plane rode the storm like a sled hurtling across a glacier, pulling itself forwards by main strength of its four massive props, but dropping serious altitude whenever the furiously roiling cells of wind shifted. The cabin rose and fell as on a restless ocean, then, for variety, made like a washing machine.
In its infinite wisdom, the National Weather Service had not elected to christen this storm, which had sprung up out of a sudden low pressure fault line opening along the Texas Gulf coast, drawing together a very wet, warm weather system from the Yucatan Peninsula with freezing rain sucked down from the Plains states. Somewhere below them, the storm was punishing the Gulf with sheets of fat, tepid rain and fist-sized hail, but experts predicted the storm would come no closer to land, and so it was theirs to name. They'd come up with all kinds of names for it, until they'd exhausted all profanity.
The pilot was a learned hand at this kind of flying, and had made the route dozens of times, with and without the approval of the FAA and the DEA, but he had never carried passengers as illegal as these, nor a cargo anywhere near as dangerous as the one that groaned and rocked in the cavernous expanse directly behind the cockpit. Though they had worked with the Mission many, many times, on this flight, he elected to keep the door to the cabin locked until they landed.
The Mission unit commander, Major Ruben Aranda, truly dreaded flight. He was not, strictly speaking, afraid of it. Therapists had told him that he was uncomfortable with the surrender of control, that it was only natural for a very hands-on Army officer to mistrust someone else's defiance of gravity, and that his symptoms were purely psychosomatic reactions to stress. Still, Aranda was reasonably certain that his aversion was purely physical. The tiny bones of his inner ear seemed to grind together like coal in a diamond mine, and his eardrums made each correction of air pressure into an excruciating ordeal that could not be relieved with chewing gum, strong drink or hard drugs. Even under the best of circumstances, in an empty first-class section with a jacuzzi, he would be on edge and in pain, and this flight was not first-class anything.
There were no seats or other human amenities, only the huge cargo cabin, which was filled with plastic shipping crates with forged Mexican labels and customs forms on them. The cabin was poorly pressurized and not heated at all; he couldn't feel his hands or feet, and his ears were making the most of the free bandwidth. He was actually grateful for his chattering teeth, because they seemed to help with depressurizing his eardrums. The omnipotent roar of the engines made conversation all but impossible, and nobody had anything to say but to bitch about the cold. Lt. Grostick had trumped them all with his tale of sneaking out of the USSR in the landing gear well of an Aeroflot airliner in '88, and the subject was laid to rest.
Major Aranda sat near the cockpit with his group of eight trusted subordinates, while the other group sat around and atop the tower of crates. He despised the other group of passengers, and instinctively knew they held him in even lower regard.
He loathed the cargo, but he was even more afraid of it. He knew very little about their final destination, but everyth
ing he'd learned so far only made him hate it, and the people around him, and the huge palettes of high explosive stuffed into the smugglers' holes beneath their feet, even more. It almost made him begin to hate the Mission.
They were on the edge of U.S. territorial waters, carrying twenty-five metric tons of an experimental chemical weapon, and the last remaining field command element of the central cell of the Mission. The great man who had recruited him into this chickenshit outfit had joked that they were a counter-evolutionary army. He thought at the time that it was a joke.
The command element consisted of himself and the old man at the far end of the cabin. He did not know Dr. Calvin Wittrock very well, but he was beginning to realize that, in describing him, Major Bangs had exercised rare understatement.
They were flying an old CIA-run drug smuggling route up a seam of minimum vigilance to an abandoned naval airstrip outside Kingsville in Texas. Aranda knew that drugs and less pleasant contraband came in via this conduit on SOD's Seaspray freedom flights in the eighties, and that it was maintained for other purposes, today. If they gave the proper electronic response burst when passing into US airspace, they'd be tacitly invisible on all other radar systems. By the time word of the corridor's use reached someone high enough to know about the Mission, they would be on the road, totally untraceable, and eight hundred miles away. If the state line wasn't closed and overrun with Army National Guard troops, they hoped to get back to HQ by tomorrow, this time. Medication time, give or take an hour if they had to shoot it out. He wished they still had the infrasonic generator technology Armitage designed. He wished Armitage was still alive.
He had not asked to be the ranking military officer in the Mission, would gladly have passed on the reins to anyone else, but he was the senior, and far and away the most qualified for this kind of warfare, even if most of his qualifications were only half-remembered nightmares that had been scrubbed from his brain by the same well-meaning therapists who tried to tell him why he was afraid of flying.
His watch beeped. He looked at its face, turned around to the inside of his wrist, an old habit from jobs where the glow off a watch face could get your hand blown off. Time for his meds. He palmed them out of his pocket pill caddy, dry-swallowed them with a blink and a momentary grimace. A high orange count in the mix today: he must be near the peak of his cycle. Shit, he'd sure hate to kill somebody and forget about it. His men were too good not to notice, but too good to make him feel noticed. Gripping his knees with his hands to hide their shaking, he waited to start feeling normal.
Enlisting in 1968, only a month before the Tet Offensive rendered the war a hopeless hamburger mill, Major Aranda passed through the Army's layered sifting box in freefall—Airborne straight out of basic training, then OCS. Blooded in Vietnam as a second lieutenant, then a captain, with
101st Airborne, he came back to the U.S. in '72 with a jacket of medals, top-flight fitness reports and a will unblunted by the bitter defeat. His war had been a thing of beauty. He slashed and burned through Special Forces training and had to fight to get sent back to the war. The brass loved his brains and nerve, and wanted to rub against it in the Pentagon. The politicians loved his squeaky-clean ethnicity, and wanted their pictures taken with him, wanted him to introduce them on campaign stops. But most important, his troops loved him. He never got scared, but unlike every other suicide-case the war had hatched, Aranda never got angry, either. He never wasted men, he never let adversity throw him off-task, and he always came home with the job done.
His contract was picked up by the CIA in '73. He entered their elite one hundred-man covert combat unit, working deep in-country, most often inside the North. For the unspeakable things he did there, they made him a Major.
He came back in '75 a little bitter, a little morose, but far better put-together than many officers who'd lost far fewer men. He wanted to keep fighting, but the Army needed field officers close to home to help rebuild its gutted morale, they said. They lied. Bitter feuding took place in generals' country over his file, which somehow slipped through the cracks into some subcommittee of the National Security Council, and Aranda himself followed it into a crack in the earth.
He joined SOD, the Army's Special Operations Division, and took control of an operational detachment. One of the unit's first missions was to destroy their own Pentagon records. Aranda no longer belonged to the military. He never did figure out who owned him, then. Or maybe he just didn't remember.
Contrary to what muckraking congressmen and the media would say about SOD, it was not an anarchic frat party, with wild-eyed Vietnam vets drafting their own missions and funding them with blank government checks. Not all the time. The orders came from a back channel in the National Security Council. The missions had very little to do with stopping Communism, and their targets, all too often, were civilian. Major Aranda knew that he ran counter-insurgency ops throughout South America from '79 to '85. He also knew that in the second year, he began to see a CIA therapist after each mission. He knew that he must have successfully completed all of his missions, because he was still alive. Beyond that, he had only a skein of rude holes—lacunae, the therapists called them—to account for six years of his life.
Sometimes, out of nowhere, a taste or a smell, or even the uneasy moments before plunging into sleep, would trigger a blinding vision, and parts of some of them would come back. The Sendero Luminoso splinter-faction UFO cult in the Andes, and the thing they called down from the sky that was not an airplane or a spacecraft, nor any kind of machine at all. The French archaeological team on the Rio Negro, and the ruins they claimed were pre-human, and contained nuclear reactors. The tiny Guatemalan fishing village where the people, horribly deformed from inbreeding and environmental pollution, waded into the sea and never came back: the smell of the ocean after the air strike, the scaled body parts boiling in the waves…
He clearly remembered the day he told them he didn't want to go on any more ops. They were very clumsy trying to kill him, like they thought he wanted to die, like they were doing him a favor. He walked away with twenty million dollars in DoD money, funneled to SOD over the years by a blindly patriotic civilian bursar, and vanished off even the intelligence community's maps.
The lowest rung of the black ladder was the Mission. At last he'd found a command he could live with.
That is, until Bangs's unit had destroyed itself and left a mess for them to clean up, and their war to fight.
When he didn't really hate anything much, any more, he got up and made his way down the length of the cramped fuselage to the other group. Stamping his feet—both to give them fair warning and to work the blood back into his feet—he approached Wittrock's clique. The six civilians and three soldiers were dressed in US Navy flight crew jumpsuits and rain slickers, but the disguise wouldn't hold up to close scrutiny. Most of the civilians were too old by far for any branch of the service, while the soldiers were dark-skinned Latinos with almost purely Indian features. They were Colombian FARC narcoguerillas, the most hardened jungle fighters in the Western hemisphere. Two carried Ingram Mac-10 machine pistols, and they bulged with flak vests and knives and extra clips on bandoliers under their raincoats. The third guerilla stood at the narrow window beside the aft loading door, watching the storm through the scope of a M24 7.62mm sniper rifle that still had some poor Special Forces bastard's blood on it.
"We're landing in less than an hour, Doctor. Tell your friends to stow their toys."
"You speak fluent Spanish yourself, Major," Wittrock said, but shrugged and mumbled something to his FARCs. He studied Aranda with bland condescension. "I trust there's been no further change in the flight plan?"
Dr. Wittrock's precious cargo had already cost one good man his life. When they'd gone to the airstrip outside of Bogota, the local cartel had thrown a collective rod over the delay of one of its own shipments, and a scuffle had ensued. Former Navy Lt. Dennis Kinney was shot under his right armpit, between the plates of his flak vest, as he loaded the cargo
onto the plane, killing him instantly. More in retribution than self-defense, Aranda's men had taken out sixteen Colombians. The only real comfort Major Aranda could take in his death was that he would not have to inform Lt. Kinney's next of kin, because they had thought him dead for nearly a decade. Such were the terms of recruitment into the Mission.
The C-130 got into the air posthaste and got lost in low clouds, talking its way out of South America only by a lot of lying and radar bluffing. They'd planned to land in Mexico and transfer the cargo to fuel oil trucks, which would carry it across the border. Now, with fast and furious enemies in the drug cartels, they were flying directly into the United States, and Aranda was trying not to think about Wittrock's insane final solution contingency plan.
"Everything's copacetic, Doctor," he finally said.
"There's nothing else we might need to know about," Wittrock said, chidingly, "nothing you've…forgotten?"
"No. We set down at the Kingsville Naval Air in seventy-five minutes. We don't expect any trouble."
Trouble meant they couldn't set down. Trouble meant they announced over military channels that they were carrying nuclear weapons, and flew over heavily populated areas as much as possible, all the way to the final destination. Trouble meant that when they got there, they would detonate the explosives in the deck of the plane, and unleash a cloud of the most toxic substance ever created by man or nature on the target. No one but Wittrock and Aranda knew about the contingency plan.
Major Aranda dug his fingers into his scalp and tried to hold his head together.
"I trust the landing zone will be secure?" Wittrock asked. The venerable bomb-maker looked waxed and wall-eyed, grinding on the dregs of some powerful lab-grade stimulant.
"It's a blessed conduit, Doctor. If anyone would know, I would. And the cargo is worth any amount of risk, right?"
Wittrock smirked, knowing exactly what he meant. It was, he'd said time and again, the ultimate weapon in their war. Once and for all, the Mission would cure the disease that was the fruit of RADIANT. Sure, it was worth a soldier's life. But it had yet to be tested outside of a beaker. "The research is sound. Tests on Dr. Mrachek's tissue samples have yielded lysosome dissolution reactions more complete than we dared hope. Dr. Barrow and the Greens have been pouring poison in your ear about it because they have no alternative. But I believe you trust Dr. Barrow even less than you trust me."
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