Serpent's Walk

CHAPTER TWO

Thursday, January 30, 2042

“Christ,” Doe grunted. He swung the binoculars left, then right “Come on, what is it?” Lessing wrested the glasses from the smaller man. Their four companions were somewhere behind them, hunkered down in the glazed, ankle-deep snow. Who would’ve thought there’d be so much snow in the American Southwest, even in January? People said the climate had changed since the Vietnamese-Chinese War back in 2010.

Teen wriggled up beside them. The muzzle of his Riga-71 automatic rifle had been blackened with grease, but it still gleamed. Lessing pushed it down so no sentry could see it flash in the watery winter sunlight.

The compound below was empty. A dilapidated truck stood beside the peeling, white, wooden wall of the main house. The garage in back was unpainted and ramshackle, and the boxy, little water-storage tower — the logical place for a sentry — was as dis-reputable an edifice as Lessing had ever seen. Even the Angolans built better than that!

Doe gestured urgently. Panch and Cheh would be watching the rugged slope behind them while Char continued to scout, invisible somewhere in the grey-black rocks ahead. Lessing waggled two fingers at Teen, indicating that he should watch the rest of the white-shrouded terrain around the compound. Only when he was satisfied did he look through the glasses.

A booted foot protruded from behind the dirt-caked back wheel of the ancient truck. The vehicle was a four-wheel-drive Hideyoshi, vintage about 2025.

“He working on her?” Lessing whispered. He rested one thick forearm on his knee and adjusted the glasses.

“Too quiet. Not moving.” Doe reached for the binoculars again, but Lessing held onto them. “Gate’s open, but nobody there.” Doe’s English was tinged with the remnants of a German — or maybe Belgian — accent. Lessing had worked with him before, fighting with the covert American-Israeli strike force in Syria during the Baalbek War in 2038.

Lessing had only a hazy idea of Doe’s real name, or at least the name he used now. On temporary missions it was better this way: today’s comrade could become tomorrow’s foe. Such makeshift “units” often gave their members numbers, letters, or artificial names picked for easy comprehension in battle. When Gomez, Lessing’s Goanese contact in Bombay, had supplied him with this squad of five, Lessing had whimsically named them with Hindi numerals. He himself was Ek, “one”; the others were Doe, Teen, Char, Panch, and Cheh. Doe and Teen carried automatic rifles, as did Lessing; Char and Panch had light Israeli stitch-guns and grenades; the girl, Cheh, who came from Australia or New Zealand or some place “down under,” bore the heavy laser rifle.

“Another one there,” Teen muttered. Indeed, a heap of discarded clothing beside the water tower resolved itself into a second body.

The man was unmistakably dead. “Not in uniform,” Lessing murmured back. “But that’s to be expected. This isn’t a regular military installation. Not any more.”

Char came up, picking his way carefully across the crunching snow. Like Lessing, he was an American. Both were big men, burly and muscular, but Char was moonfaced, with milky skin and a stocking-cap of coarse, black hair, while Lessing’s features were thinner, his nose longer, and his hair like wispy, grey-blond ash.

“What’s keeping…?” Char began. Teen gestured at the visible bodies, and Char sucked in his breath and sat down. Lessing stuck up one hand to warn the rest to hold their positions.

“Going in?” Teen asked.

“S’what we’re paid to do.” Char thumbed one nostril.

“Doe and me,” Lessing replied. “You two cover us. Get Cheh down here with her laser rifle. She comes in when I give the up-sign.”

They distributed themselves amidst the boulders and gulleys of the forward slope. Lessing and Doe stripped off their camouflage suits to reveal quilled, orange hunters’ jackets and canvas pants. Doe pulled a red hunting hat out of his pack and straightened the jaunty, yellow feather in its band.

“Maybe you should yodel,” Teen snickered. “You look Swiss.”

Doe showed grey, uneven teeth, said something obscene in unintelligible Swiss-German dialect, and added a descriptive gesture.

Teen made a face. “You and your monkey too!”

Teen sounded vaguely British, but he shifted easily from one accent to another, and who could say? On this trip alone Lessing had heard him use Cockney, Chicano-American, and a somewhat shaky Texan. Hehad spoken Spanish with the pilot who had dropped them all into the United States, and Doe recalled him chattering in gutter Arabic in Syria. A useful man, though bitter-faced and given to sarcasm. Many mercenaries were like Teen.

They picked their way down the slope, two lost hunters looking for directions, a cup of coffee, or maybe a telephone. Their own weapons were left behind with their packs, and both now carried hunting rifles, good but not fancy.

“What the hell is this place?” Lessing called loudly, apparently to Doe. “Who lives way out here? Fire warden?”

“University scientists? Geologists?” Doe wondered back.

Lessing signalled him to shut up; Doe’s German accent would raise suspicions.

They wandered through the open gate, then through the second, inner barrier. The ten meters of open ground between the two perimeter fences was sown with miniature land-mines, Lessing knew: enough to knock a person down and maybe take off a foot A TV surveillance camera was mounted above the outer gate, but it seemed to be out of order, its stained, metal lens-tube pointed down at the ground beneath it.

They didn’t go around back. Not yet. Lessing clumped up onto the ramshackle front porch and knocked.

“Hey! Anybody!”

There was no reply. Doe prowled down to the end of the porch and squinted around the comer, along the far side of the house. He stuck out two fingers, parallel to the ground: two bodies there.

Lessing straightened up, abandoning his “lost hunter” pose. He went to the top of the front steps and stuck up his right thumb. A figure detached itself from the snow-splashed boulders and began zigzagging down the slope toward him. The rest of the landscape was utterly silent, ominously so. No birds, no insects — but what insects were there in New Mexico this time of year anyway? He had no idea.

Lessing yelled, “Hi! Anybody home?” Then he kicked the front door in.

The front room was like a thousand others in backwoods America: two chairs, a couch, a couple of lamps, a bureau, a fireplace with kindling stacked beside it, and a coffee table cluttered with orange peels, magazines, and old newspapers. Snapshots of friends and kinfolk smiled fuzzily down from beside glass statues of retrievers and spaniels on a knickknack shelf on the rear wall. In the front comer stood a battered desk, heaped with brochures, papers, and outdoorsmen’s magazines. A metal sign there proclaimed: ARTHUR L. KOPPER Department of Wildlife Conservation State of New Mexico.

Nothing was out of order. Everything was as it should be.

And it was all as phony as a game-show host’s front teeth.

They made a hurried search of the house. Off the hallway behind the parlor was a bathroom with yellow, chintz curtains, a woman’s doing. Back of that they came to a nondescript kitchen in which two blackened pots still stood on the propane stove. Somebody had turned off the fire, but the food inside — beef stew and boiled potatoes, Doe noted — was cold and greasy, maybe two days old.

In the side bedroom that opened off the kitchen a dead woman lay sprawled on a double bed.

Lessing eyed the room, saw nothing, and went to look at the body. The woman was in her forties, greying and bespectacled. A flame-pink, chenille spread was crumpled around her ample, pajama-clad hips, and a can of some cola drink stood on the nightstand beside her. The gaudy, blue cover of a paperback novel protruded from beneath her purpling left hand. She had been dead perhaps a day or two. The faint, sick-sweet smell told him that, yet she hadn’t a mark on her. Her tongue protruded, and her features were contorted, but there was no odor of chemicals, no blood, no violence. The pink coverlet had been tossed aside in the agony of her dying, and it now sagged down onto the threadbare, red carpet, a lurid lava-pool of middle-class tastelessness.

“Died at night,” Lessing said. “Just before going to sleep.”

“Either that or she took afternoon naps,” Doe suggested.

A board creaked behind them, and they both jumped, rifles up and ready. It was only Cheh, her laser rifle cradled in stubby arms.

“God, what happened?”

“Damn it, you were supposed to wait for my signal!” The girl shrugged, and Lessing said, “No idea what killed her. Outside?”

“Not a bloody soul alive. Four deaders, though.” Cheh was short, chunky, and as round-faced as a Dutch housewife. “Char ‘n’ Teen’ve searched. Somebody blew a great, gobby hole in the garage… took out the power plant. Don’t bother switchin’ on the lights.”

“There’ll be an emergency generator. “Lessing rose, strode along the hallway behind the kitchen to the back bedroom, and slammed one booted foot into the door there.

He almost let off a half dozen rounds into the figure that confronted him within: a huge, menacing, pale giant of a man in orange clothing.

It was Lessing himself. The closet door had been left ajar, and he had almost blown away the full-length mirror! He let up on the trigger shakily, thinking how easy it would have been to kill himself with glass shards flying all over! He hadn’t realized how terrifying he looked — and how jumpy he was.

“In here,” he called. The back of the closet was open, revealing the elevator cubicle beyond. So far the plan Gomez had given him in India had been completely accurate.

What they hadn’t told him was that the current occupants would be cold meat when they arrived.

“So. This is what we’re here for?” Doe spoke from behind him.

“Deactivated base,” Lessing growled. It was lime to give his squad their need-to-know. “Secret, left over from before the Vienna Treaty. They didn’t know what to do with it. Just a storage depot now.” He gestured at the bunks that lined the walls. ‘The barracks and living quarters were torn down… just a few people left to guard this house and the underground installation below it. They doubled as wildlife wardens.”

“What’s here?” Doe asked.

“Atomic stuff? Radiation?” Cheh added.

“Chemical warfare?” the German persisted.

“Worse,” Lessing did not want to talk about it. “Come on, we’ve got to go down.”

“Wait.” Cheh gnawed at her thin lower lip. “We have a right to know, mate. Who… what… killed these people, then?”

Doe pawed at his cheek with one knobby finger. “Biological warfare!” He backed away, toward the front room.

Lessing’s grimace told him he had hit the target dead on. “Damn it, there’s nothing here that’ll hurt us! If there was a leak we’d all be dead by now.”

“But these people…?”

“Somebody else was here just before us. I don’t know who, yet. Or why.”

“Too bloody lovely,” Cheh peered into the silent elevator. ‘The Russians? The Israelis?”

“The Jews wouldn’t have to kill anybody,” Doe sneered. His shaky voice belied his truculent tone. “Just ask President Rubin pretty-please for the key ya? More likely one of the American rebel factions. Bankrupt farmers? Black ghetto gangs? Tax protesters? Anti-war? Pro-war? Mexy immigrants?”

“Or mothers against bleedin’ child abuse!” Cheh knitted her pale brows in thought. “At least the American Army probably has its hands too full to bother with us right away. How much time do we have?”

“Who knows?” Lessing shrugged. “There must be alarms, even on this fallen-down chicken coop of a base.”

“They’ll send somebody, eh? Eventually?”

Lessing gestured toward the elevator. “That’s right. Let’s get it over with. Quick. Whatever happened here happened about a day and a half ago. Either we finish up and hide in the hills until our pickup, or else we abort.”

“Abort, I say,” Doe blurted. “No killer germs for me!”

“No mission, no money,” Lessing snarled back.

“God damn it. You go. I stand watch.” “Fine. I’ll do it alone.”

“No reason to get all exclusive and snobby, mate.” Cheh came over to stand beside him. “Two of us still. Just say what our chances are.”

A companion was more welcome than Lessing wanted to admit. He said, “We’ve seen nobody alive so far. If they’re dead down inside too, we grab what we’re after and get back out within ten minutes. We can holler if we run into trouble.” He slapped the sleek communications box strapped to his belt. “You, Doe, find the others. Bring them up to search the yard, the bodies, the garage. Break radio silence only if you spot somebody coming this way.”

“Look…,” Doe began lamely.

Lessing let himself smile. “No problem. We’ll squawk if the party gets exciting.”

“Right.” The German took a deep breath, then coughed into his fist. He was a good man in afire fight, but a black catacomb, possibly filled with invisible, miasmic death, might have daunted a stronger man.

Doe’s footsteps clumped back through the house and down the steps. Cheh fidgeted while Lessing inspected the elevator. There were three buttons on the panel and no traps that he could detect He realized that he was stalling; he would lose his nerve if he waited too long. He jabbed the middle button quickly. The door closed, lights came on, and the car began to descend. The emergency power was indeed working.

The door sighed aside to awaken shadowless, fluorescent tubes along the ceiling of a cream-colored anteroom. Lessing advanced, crouched, and advanced again, while Cheh covered him with her laser rifle. There was no one; the room held only sheeted furniture. An open door in the rear wall gave into a passage about ten meters long. This had two doors on either side, and a fifth at the far end upon which a stenciled sign proclaimed in letters the color of old, dried blood: SECURITY CLEARANCE 1-A ONLY.

Three of the side rooms were offices, dust-filmed and unused; the fourth was a storeroom. Bright cans of floor wax, boxes of toilet rolls, and cartons of duplicator paper lined its walls. Lessing made only a cursory search. A secret door was possible but unlikely.

Inside the room at the far end of the hall Arthur L. Kopper lay face down in a welter of cartons and electronic components; the badge on his stained and crumpled white shirt proved his identity. Lessing rolled him over. Kopper had been a fat, elderly, little man, the very model of a petty bureaucrat. His balding head was just beginning to show the purplish-brown mottlings of decay.

“Radio room,” Lessing murmured. He stepped over the corpse to inspect the communications gear that covered the back wall.

He saw it at once. One item did not belong: a fist-sized, silvery cannister spliced into the console.

“Hummingbird!” Cheh breathed. “Czech or Korean?”

A hummingbird was a small, self-powered computer. Plugged into a security rig, it silenced alarms, overrode local signals, and continued to send whatever “situation green, all normal” message had been programmed into the system. A hummingbird could not be shut off, and it usually contained a bomb to keep busy fingers from mucking with it.

Lessing prodded the spilled electronic parts with the butt of his rifle. The silence was more worrisome than Arthur L. Kopper’s mortal remains. “Jury-rigging around the hummingbird so you could get a message out?” he asked the corpse conversationally. The erstwhile Mr. Kopper made no reply.

Cheh sidled over to the communications board and peered at the innocuous cylinder. She did not touch it. “No backup security system?”

“They built this place just after the turn of the century, maybe during the missile crisis in 2013,” Lessing said. “The Born-Agains were in power then, and their security was state-of-the-art for the time. Hummingbirds came later.”

Arthur L. Kopper made no comment, his glazed, dead-fish eyes fixed upon the ceiling.

Lessing rubbed the bridge of his nose. “Always spoil-sports. Somebody develops a gadget, somebody else makes it obsolete.” He shivered. Kopper’s death was fresh, but there was old death down here too.

He retreated to the door. “Come on. Even if the hummingbird is still sending out a clear signal, somebody may’ve telephoned and got no answer. They’ll be on the way.”

Cheh stopped for a final look. “No point to a hummingbird after an assault. You put it on first, to silence any alarm. An inside job? A weasel?”

They both hefted their weapons involuntarily. “Damn,” whispered Lessing. “The bastard may still be around.”

They made it back to the elevator in record time.

At the top Lessing turned to face the girl. He gave himself no time to think, to consider whether Gomez’ 75,000 American dollars might be poor exchange for losing his life. He said, “I’ve got to go down again, all the way to the bottom this time. You don’t need to come. Get back to the others and look for transport.”

“Neither Teen nor I saw any vehicles,” the girl said stubbornly.

“What about the staff here? They had to have something. That rusty truck in the yard is garbage… window-dressing.”

“Too right, but… I’ll tell Doe to widen the search circle.”

“Go out and join him, dammit! I can handle the rest myself.”

He stared at her until she dropped her gaze and left The grubby little bedroom was stuffy, the cheap furniture sly and secretive. Lessing found it hard to breathe; the air was thick with the smell of mothballs and old clothing.

He was still studying the elevator panel when he heard footsteps.

It was Cheh. He had not told her to return, and he raised his head to protest.

“Passed on your message.” She brushed back a lock of short, fine, dirty-blonde hair from her forehead. “I’m goin’ too. You’ll want backup down there.”

“No!” he snapped. “No need. Nobody…”

“Push the bleedin’ button.” She gave him no chance to argue but thumbed the third and lowest stud on the panel herself.

Together, they descended once more into the netherworld.

The lowest level was bigger: a dozen rooms and cubicles buried twenty meters beneath the New Mexico desert. The fluorescent lighting still worked, and the silent foyer and outer office were bright and impersonally businesslike with the irred-leatherettechairs, buff-hued filing cabinets, and desks panelled with no-scuff-real-wood plastic. Above one desk a homemade sign still proclaimed: SMOKERS WILL BE WALLED UP ALIVE. Lessing exchanged a grin with the Australian girl. Only a few old-timers still smoked tobacco.

God, it was cold down here, though. The heat must be off. Lessing stopped to sniff. A reassuring drone somewhere far away behind the walls told him that the air-conditioning was working. The place smelled like the inside of a vacuum cleaner, like any other sealed building.

It was totally still. If there were a weasel hiding down here, he was either very good or else he was as frozen as soybean ice cream!

Behind the anteroom, at the end of a short corridor, they came to a heavy security door. This stood open, apparently in perfect working order. The retinal-pattern scanner had been shut off, but the alarm light beside the door glowed a pleasant green, showing that the hummingbird was operating. It looked more and more like an inside job. They might not need Char, their electronics man, after all.

Lessing checked around the door. Some of these places were protected by secondary systems, he knew: gas, automatically activated machine guns, lasers. He found nothing, signalled to Cheh, and stepped gingerly over the sill.

The laboratories opening off the passage beyond the door had long since been stripped. Everything movable was gone, and only bare wires and less-dusty squares on the formica-topped tables showed where equipment had once stood. Bare shelves and racks, filing cabinets, a few pieces of heavy machinery of unknown function, all were shrouded in plastic. It was a morgue, a mummy’s tomb, a sepulchre for the murderous offspring of the paranoid twentieth century.

Not that the twenty-first was proving any less bloodthirsty

The stillness could be deceptive. Lessing forced himself to remember the chances of one or more hidden foes down here. He crouched and glided from door to door, wall to wall, as though the place were full of Russian “advisors,” just like Angola. Behind him, Cheh did the same. The laboratories were lifeless, the fluorescent lights bright and unblinking. The cold increased. There must be an outlet directly to the winter landscape above. Yet the air did not smell fresh; it stank of ancient chemicals.

His ears caught a throbbing, a motor sound just above the threshold of audibility, from the room ahead. He hefted his rifle as he had done a hundred times before in a dozen different countries and slid forward.

Ahead, he saw another open security door, this one with keys yet protruding from its double locks. There was a room beyond. Lessing sidled in, Cheh covering him warily.

This place was furnished: more filing cabinets, chairs, desks, red leatherette and plastic and crackle-finish metal. Here was the record room for what was still stored on the base.

At the far end, a heavy, steel door stood ajar, its glass window glinting white in the impersonal fluorescent glare.

White? It did not look like paint. Frost?

Both the motor noise and the cold emanated from that inner chamber.

Lessing understood. “Refrigerator,” he whispered. Then, in case the Australians called it something else, he added, “Cold storage.”

The girl nodded, watery, blue eyes large and round. It was her turn to move up.

Lessing stood sentinel over the mute furnishings, a deep foreboding skulking just below the horizon of his consciousness. His head ached, and his own eyes felt like sandstone pebbles in their sockets. He struggled to focus. On a desk before him lay a stained blotter, a stapler, and a flip-top calendar that still cheerily displayed the month of April 2035. He would lay money on there being neatly stacked stationery, envelopes, and boxes of paperclips in the drawers. Pencils, ballpoint pens, ribbon boxes for the printers, all would be in place, ready to hand, waiting for some bored Army secretary to come bustling back from her coffee break and get down to work. Most of what was personal and human would be gone, however: the photographs of friends and children, the old Christmas cards, the party invitations, the souvenir napkin from somebody’s wedding reception, the letter opener bought during a forgotten holiday in Mexico. The blank, timeless room had an accusatory air, like an old girl friend you didn’t call any more. Life had once been injected into this remote, subterranean labyrinth; now it had been withdrawn.

Cheh’s hoarse call jolted him back to the present. The Australian girl stood by the doorway of the cold room. She beckoned urgently.

“Here… a deader!”

In the far rear corner of the outer office, behind one of the desks, a man lay crumpled against the grill of an air-conditioning duct.

He had not died easily. A trail of blood and entrails zigzagged back to the heavy door of the cold room, and smears upon the desk panels and baseboards showed where he had dragged himself along. He was young, thin-faced, and athletic, handsome in a bland, middle-class- American sort of way. His eyes were closed, the lashes black half-moons within deep sockets. The cold had slowed decay, and only a chalky tinge to his tanned cheeks hinted that he was not just sleeping. His features were relaxed and peaceful, but his lower back was a shattered ruin. A stitch-gun had plowed six, maybe seven, tiny, explosive needles from behind into his spine, buttocks, and thighs.

Lessing inspected the corpse quickly. Whether the man had been one of the locals or the weasel himself could be discussed later. The mission demanded precision, and he knew what had to be done. Five steps carried him to the thick door of the refrigerated room. It took only a moment to scan the compartments and bins within for the aluminum cases Gomez wanted. Those cases would be marked with U.S. Army identification numbers and the letters PCV: “Pacov,” as the little Goanese pronounced the acronym. There were supposed to be two separate PCV containers, PCV-1 and PCV-2.

Doors hung ajar, cartons and containers lay in untidy disarray upon the frosted, black-plastic floor, and someone had even opened the service hatch to the refrigeration unit, revealing coils and ice-sheathed mechanisms inside. The motor was running full blast, struggling unsuccessfully to cool not only this storage chamber but also the rest of the complex — and the whole Southwest beyond!

He spotted the PCV cases at once. They lay open just inside one of the storage compartments: three boxes of dully shining metal marked “PCV-1.” The ten egg-shaped depressions in the grey plastic foam inside each case were empty. Lessing looked about and saw three more boxes, smaller and flatter than the first, stencilled “PCV-2.” These were also open, and their deep, squarish sockets held nothing.

“What’s up?” Cheh put her head around the door.

“Shit! We’ve been preempted,” Lessing let out pent-up breath in a whooping gasp. The dry, frigid air made him cough, and he sat down upon a stack of containers.

The girl understood at once. “The opfoes’ve nicked our stuff? Bastards!” Only a few mercenaries remembered that “opfo” had once stood for “opposing forces”; when Lessing had first heard the term out in Angola, he had thought it a word from some African language.

He groaned and got up. It was harder and harder to find energy — and willpower — for this sort of strenuous, damn-fool mission after you passed thirty. Lessing was now thirty-two.

Something else caught his eye: another open carton, of buff-colored plastic this time. One comer was ripped away. The ribbed flooring beneath it was dark red with congealed blood. The dead youth outside had wanted something from this box, wanted it very badly.

Lessing peered at the frost-furred legend stamped onto the plastic. I tread “GD-74.”

Nerve gas. One of the later and most lethal varieties.

The container had cushioned spaces for twelve round objects, but only eleven shiny, plastic spheres glittered gold against the charcoal-hued packing.

“Now what?” Cheh asked, reasonably enough.

He did not mention the nerve gas. Instead, he moved swiftly back into the outer office and bent over the corpse. It was as he suspected: the air-conditioning duct had been opened, its grill work slimed with dried, blackish blood. The fingers of the young man’s left hand were a rigid maroon-and-white spider clenched upon the cream-colored metal frame.

“You need a torch?”

“A…? Oh, a flashlight. No… no. I think I understand—”

“What?”

“Which way was the wind blowing when we came… yesterday… today?”

“Umm… to the northeast, I think. Fairly steady breeze. Why?”

“That’s why we’re alive. And why those people upstairs and out in the yard are dead. Nerve gas: a single globe of it dropped into the air conditioner.”

Cheh goggled at him. “What? Nerve gas? They were killed by… by…?”

“One of the GD series. Advanced as all hell. A milligram on your skin or in your lungs, and you’ve got barely time to lie down. Then you’re history.”

White-faced, the girl stared at her own fingers as though they were somehow contaminated. “Gawd! No…! Wait… how… why? Why here? Nerve gas doesn’t need refrigeration, does it?”

“Just stored here, I think. After the base was deactivated. All sorts of stuff stacked away down in a convenient hole where nobody would find it and raise hell.”

Cheh had another thought. “But wasn’t the bloody stuff a binary? Two separate compounds that had to be combined to be lethal?”

“Right But the Bom-Agains got antsy during the missile crisis of 2013. They put GD gas into double-chambered ampoules that could be dropped from the air.”

“But those were supposed to be lough — near unbreakable unless you threw ’em out of a plane or off a buildin’. Bloody hell.”

“This boy here knew that if the drop down the air-conditioner shaft wasn’t enough to crack the shell, then the fan blades at the bottom would do it.”

“But… why?”

It was coming together. “Somebody… a staff member, a guard, a technician… was the weasel. He had access to the keys. Then he cut out the security system with the hummingbird Kopper and his staff were probably sloppy about it. The weasel came down and took what he wanted. This boy” — for some reason his subconscious mind refused to think of the twisted corpse as an adult — “caught him at it, probably in the refrigerator room. The weasel shot the kid and left him for dead. Meanwhile Kopper came into the communications room upstairs, saw the hummingbird, and tried to wire past it to get out a call for help. The boy probably never knew about that at all. The weasel blew the power plant as he was leaving, to keep the locals confused.”

“And once the weasel was gone,” Cheh cut in, “the kid came out of shock enough to get a globe of… of the gas… and crawled over and potted it down the shaft. He must’ve thought he was savin’ the bloody world!”

“Maybe he was.” Lessing stood up. He found that his hands were shaking. “Important enough, anyway, to kill not only the weasel but himself as well… plus his own people and any ranchers, tourists, or goddamned sheep who happened to be in range downwind! ” The idea was terrifying; he backed into a desk, laid his rifle on it with a clatter that sounded like a tank rolling off a cliff, and leaned against the cold metal to keep his legs from trembling.

“The… the woman upstairs, them out in the compound?”

“Us, too, if the wind had been blowing to the southwest.”

“Great bleedin’ Christ! What… what’s to the northeast?”

Lessing shut his eyes, rubbed the bridge of his nose. “I don’t know. I’ve never been in this state before. Magdalena? Socorro? Not much population between here and there. Some ranches, some Indians, some resorts… livestock. God knows what the range is. I don’t think it’ll reach Albuquerque. Jesus!”

Cheh put up shaking fingers to pat her dust-colored hair. “And this was what the weasel wanted? This nerve gas?”

Lessing shook his head. Gomez had told him little, but he could guess. “Worse, I think.” He gave the girl a hard stare. “The weasel got what we were sent for. And don’t ask me what that is or what it does, because the players don’t tell their goddamned pawns a damned thing. And don’t ask me why the weasel decided to act just a day or two before we were set to arrive! I don’t know.”

Gomez would have some explaining to do. Son of a bitch! Had he used Lessing and his squad as dummies? What did they call it — red herrings? Patsies to take the fall for raiding a top-secret American installation? While the real thief was supposed to get away with the goodies?

They had to get out. Lessing snatched up his rifle and ordered the surprised girl back to the elevator shaft

On the way back up, Cheh panted, “And now?”

Lessing thought and said, “If we find the weasel dead in the yard, we finish our mission. If not, we look for tracks… they’ll show up on the snow… and if the weasel’sgone north or east there’s a chance we can still catch up, if we can find a car.”

“Catch up? Now? After a day or more?”

“If he headed out in the direction of the wind, there’s a very good chance he’s as dead as these people. We can only follow and see. If he went some other way, into the wind, he’ll be long gone by now. Then we can give it up.”

Cheh shuddered. “Not sure I want to catch ’im, even though we get only half pay for comin’ home empty-handed!” She furrowed sparse brows in sudden thought. “Wait — how long is the gas active, then? What’s the risk to us?”

“Not much. It’s airborne, as I recall — dissipates after a few hours.” He strove to remember the article he had read during one of his flights to — or was it from? — Angola. “It evaporates quickly, combines with things in the atmosphere, and becomes inert… harmless. By now it’ll be gone.”

“Jesus. I hope so.”

“If it isn’t, we’ll hardly know it.”

“You’re a cold sod, Lessing. Christ!”

“My name is ‘Ek,’ remember? On this mission I’m Ek.”

Cheh snorted, wiped her stubby nose with equally stubby fingers, and said no more.

The sunshine, weak and pallid as though Filtered down through a shallow sea, provided unabashed relief. Lessing met his squad at the front door of the house.

“None of the corpses got anything on dem,” the man Lessing had named Panch reported. “No bombs, no veapons. No bulletholes either… some kind of gas must’ve got dem. Look like dey vas from de staff here.” Panch was Swedish, a gaunt and bony man who looked like he ought to be plowing rocks in some tiny field beside an arctic fjord. Lessing had worked with him before, during the Baalbek War in Syria. Together they had managed to save a village full of Arab refugees from an over-zealous Israeli tank commander who had wanted to flatten the place.

He mustn’t think of the past now. “Transport?” he inquired gruffly.

“Little four-wheel-drive Dceda Outdoorsman,” Char replied. “Over there in a shed behind the garage. No boobytraps. I checked.”

“I’m surprised the weasel didn’t disable it,” Lessing said, “since he went to the trouble of blowing the power plant”

“Then the kid dropped the plum into the bleedin’ puddin’,” Cheh added. It took several minutes to explain the probable sequence of events to the others.

Lessing finished and asked, “Anybody spot tracks in the snow?” He found himself hoping that there were none — or that they led off to the south or west.

“Auto,” Teen answered laconically. He pointed off toward the northeast. “Small — Army, maybe. Or one of them new all-terrain Vipers.” He spat into the mud-splattered snow at the bottom of the front-porch steps. Lessing was amused. The man was a chameleon: he had subtly shifted his stance, his posture, and his accent so that he now looked and sounded much like an American from the rural Southwest. A hick from the cow country! If there had been a grass stalk handy, the bastard would be sucking on it! What a fraud! Any real native would pick him out at once.

The automobile held four of them: Lessing, Teen, Char, and Cheh. Doe remained sullen. He tramped off to stand lonely sentry duty atop the hill behind the dilapidated base. Panch stayed behind to prowl around the house and the snow-covered foundations of the destroyed barracks and other buildings within the complex. Lessing knew this type of mercenary all too well; he ordered Panch to steal nothing that might be missed and not to tear the place apart like some adolescent ghetto burglar. Let the authorities guess who had come visiting and why.

The fuel gauge showed about a quarter full, enough for a quick search. Twelve miles out and twelve back, Lessing decided, to be on the safe side. If they didn’t catch up with the weasel within that range then so be it Gomez could send somebody else.

They drove in silence, the Viper’s track a double line winding off ahead of them across the snow, a railway to Hell. Lessing was tired. He rubbed the bridge of his nose again. Cheh, in the front passenger seat beside him, glanced over at him with concern. He hoped she would keep any erotic fantasies to herself. She was an excellent comrade — and might, in time, become a good friend — but she had almost as much sexual appeal for Lessing as the ice-shrouded cacti that loomed up like pallid bogeymen outside the car window.

He hated to remember, but memories came anyway. The last time a woman mercenary had got her panties wet over him had been in Jerusalem during the Baalbek War. She had died somewhere near Damascus, in a nameless ditch full of mud bricks that were as old as Babylon.

Get the job done. Do the needful, as Gomez said in his impeccably British-Indian accent. Do the needful and get out.

Whoever had driven the Viper knew the way. There was a road of sorts under the drifted snow, twin ruts that had once known asphalt but were now no more than a frozen, dirt track. More silent cacti lurched up out of the grey desolation, mesquite, sagebrush, rocks and boulders and twisted monoliths of stone. It looked like the empty quarter of Hell.

“There!” said Teen sharply. Lessing, in the driver’s seat in front of him, jumped and swore under his breath.

“Goddamn it!”

“Right there.” The man leaned past him to point. The Viper’s tracks swerved, turned almost a half circle, then dived off behind a tumbled stand of white-hoared brush. The odometer showed that they had travelled eleven miles.

Lessing slewed their car to a slush-spraying stop. They piled out, took cover behind the vehicle, and looked around. Nothing moved. He signalled for them to draw up in tactical squad formation. Canvas rustled; weapons clicked; Teen’s asthmatic breathing wheezed in the frigid air. Then they were ready. It was about fifty meters around the brush pile.

Lessing squinted, then waved an arm for a rapid advance. They began to jog, then to trot. Bushes, rocks, snow, a set of tiny tracks — Lessing had time to wonder if they were rabbit or squirrel or something else — then they reached the tangle of black branches and debris around which the Viper had gone. There was no road here. The driver must have lost control. The spoiled-meat features of Arthur L. Kopper leaped up unbidden before his eyes, then the chalk-limned face of the dead boy in the subterranean office.

Icy daggers began to stab at Lessing’s lungs. His breath plumed out in white banners. Blood surged against his temples, and he felt the jarring crunch of each footstep upon the slippery roots and stones buried beneath the snow. His rifle banged against his side. He heard Cheh just behind him to his left, Teen’s heavy, gasping breathing to his right. Char was invisible behind them, guarding their rear.

There was snow in his eyes, and he blinked. Snow? He tried to bring up a hand to brush his face but found it pinned beneath him. He was lying prone behind a log. He realized that he had fallen flat, a reflex action so automatic that he had done it without being aware of it God, if he got out of here he’d have to take a rest. Otherwise he might find himself waking up with a scream on his lips and a gun in his hand He was minded of Colfax, who had stabbed his wife three times one night before he realized he wasn’t in Angola any more. The Paraguayan police hadn’t taken to that excuse well at all, and poor Colfax was still languishing in some hole of a prison down there.

Lessing shook his head once, hard, then peered through the dead leaves and twigs in front of him.

A bright-blue Viper lay upside down amidst the ghost-grey saplings.

Lessing motioned Teen and Cheh to stay put and provide covering fire; he and Char got to their feet and moved in. Except for their breathing and the crackling of their footsteps in the snow-swathed weeds, there was no sound. Char took the left, toward the front of the Viper. Lessing headed for the rear and got there first. He paused, panting, beside the rear wheel. It took him a long moment to remember that American automobiles had a left-handed drive; goddamn it, he had been away too long! In an American car this was the passenger side — the right side when it was upright.

No sound came. He squinted down the Viper’s mirror-polished flank and noted that the passenger doors were closed, the car tilted so that snow obscured the side windows. The rear window was dark as well. He gathered strength, lurched up, and floundered through an unexpected, waist-deep drift to reach the driver’s side. The front door was unlatched, though still shut. To get out, one would have had to crawl up at a fairly steep angle. He could not see any tracks in the snow below the door.

The driver — and any other occupants — were still inside.

A movement beneath the front bumper caught his eye: Char. He waved to show he was all right, ready for the final advance. The other wiggled a Finger in return.

The driver’s window was still closed, rimed and blotched with frost He rubbed it with his glove but could make out only shadows within. The door, then: this gave easily, lifting up without so much as a creak. He steeled himself for whatever lay inside.

He expelled breath in a rasping cough.

So, the weasel was a woman! A Black woman, in fact, although her wavy hair and fair skin hinted at an admixture of Spanish or Indian blood. Caribbean?

She wore a tight and stylish blouse of some fancy, crushed-looking, maroon fabric; a short polo coat; elegant, grey slacks tight enough to have been painted upon her rounded thighs; and soft desert boots. Bronze-hued sunglasses hid her eyes.

Which was just as well. She had died at least a day ago, maybe two.

The smell wasn’t really bad yet — the weather had been cold — but Lessing’s nose told him that she had soiled herself in her dying.

“Jee… zuss!” That was Char, just behind him.

Lessing could see nothing of any size under the body. He opened the rear door. The Viper lay mostly on its back, tilted so that the driver’s side was higher than the other; its rear seal was now a narrow tunnel full of upholstery and litter. At least he didn’t have to crawl down on top of the dead woman.

A wad of white plastic caught his eye, something much like a kitchen garbage bag. He sighed gulped cold, fresh air, and dived down to retrieve it.

It was heavy and lumpy. A glance told him this was what they had come for. inside he could see oval capsules of silvery metal, about the size of small hand grenades. There were also tubes of some dull, black material: stoppered vials like overgrown deodorant bottles. The globes were stamped “PCV-1,” the black cylinders “PCV-2.” He knew without counting that there would be thirty of each.

“Got it?” Char asked He had a high, whining, demanding voice. Given time, Lessing could grow to dislike this man.

“Right! “Lessing wriggled back up out of the Viper, the slippery-smooth plastic sack clutched in his left hand.

“Signalling!” Char hissed “Teen’s signalling. He’s spotted somebody coming.”

What dismal luck! A curious farmer would delay them; a county sheriff or state patrolman would hang things up much longer. Explanations, offers to go for help, the rather chancy I.D. cards Gomez had provided: all were problematic. He didn’t even want to think about the possibility of a government patrol, MP’s or FBI, coming to investigate an unanswered telephone or unnoticed alarm back at the base. They couldn’t just hide: their tracks in the snow were like pointing arrows. Nor could they make it back to their car and run like hell, not in time.

He waved Teen into the depths of a stand of brush, then pointed Cheh to a heap of dead leaves and tree trunks. Both had the sense to cover their khaki camouflage suits with snow. Another crime to lay at Gomez’ door: the little bastard ought to have known that white was better than brown during a North American winter!

He still wore his red-orange hunter’s jacket. Char’s dun-colored pants and tan duffel-coat might arouse suspicion if anybody stopped to think about it; yet there ought to be some American hunters stupid enough to wear earth colors during hunting season! He grinned mirthlessly; many might perish, like jackrabbits caught in a car’s headlamps, but hell, there ought to be a new crop of idiots every year!

He dropped the white plastic sack into the drift beside him and scuffed snow over it. His Riga-71 assault rifle he pushed under the curve of the overturned Viper’s roof, where it was invisible yet easily reached. Char hid his smaller, stubbier stitch-gun behind his leg, by the front bumper.

They were as ready as they’d ever be.

The noise Teen had heard grew louder, the sustained clatter of a medium-size vehicle of some kind, its engine badly in need of tuning. It was another minute before it hove into view: an archaic, black, German pickup truck, the standard workhorse of twenty -first-century, rural America.

The newcomer paused beside their car, then jounced on to stop near the Viper. The front seat held two men and a woman. The cargo space in the rear was empty.

“Hi!” Lessing called. “Been an accident here.” Might as well be obvious.

The driver stayed where he was, but the other man opened the passenger door and got out The woman followed. Both wore nondescript winter clothing, boots, hats, and scarves. The man was youngish, red-faced, puffy-looking, and clean-shaven. The woman was older, plain, and pale. She wore rimless glasses and a bright-red stocking cap. Too young to be the man’s mother, too old to be his wife. No farmers, these. Looked like a law clerk and a librarian!

Lessing scowled, the good citizen who has just discovered a tragedy. “Woman… dead in there,” he began. “Came off the road and tipped over.”

The man said, “Lordy!” He edged forward as if to inspect the wreck.

“You from around here?” the woman asked.

“California.”

“Huntin’?”

“Yeah,” Char put in. “Vacation.”

“What was you huntin’ then?” The woman appeared too educated to use grammar like that. Blood began to throb at Lessing’s temples again.

“Oh… just high hopes—”

She pulled her handbag up, reached into it. She might have been looking for a handkerchief. “Not much around here to hunt, these days.”

Lessing was first. His Riga-71 sputtered, and the woman went down in a swirl of dark woollens and scarlet. Something blue and metallic spun from her hand. He went prone and heard bullets spang off the underbelly of the Viper. Then Teen’s automatic rifle snarled from somewhere back in the underbrush, and Cheh’s laser hissed and sizzled. The driver of the truck yelped, then shrieked, just once.

Silence. A single shot: Teen, likely, putting quietus to the driver.

Lessing crawled to his feet, the Viper’s flank cold and slick beneath his sweating palms. “Anybody…?” he began. Then he saw Char. The man lay on his belly in the snow. He humped up, grunted, writhed, and clutched his abdomen, from which red now seeped to stain the trampled whiteness.

“Oh, God,” Cheh breathed from behind him. “Get the car. We can….”

“No.” Lessing motioned her back, then jerked a thumb at Teen. “You look at him. You’ve done medic before.”

This was no time for proper medical practice. The Englishman pulled the stricken man’s red-dyed hands away from his belly. “Gut-shot,” he reported tersely. “In shock. Dead in an hour ‘less we get him to a hospital.”

“Forget that!” Lessing snapped. He went to stand before Char. “You want it over?” he asked softly. “Or you want us to carry you back? You’ll die on the road, you know. We can’t get you out in time. And it’ll start to hurt soon.”

The other stared at him from shock-glazed eyes.

Lessing raised his head to look at Teen, who had moved around to stand behind the wounded man. Teen’s rifle pointed casually downward, at Char’s cap of black hair.

The rifle echoed like a clap of doom.

“Aw… Jesus…” Cheh turned away.

“Belter so,” Teen muttered matter-of-factly. Lessing turned to inspect the bodies of the newcomers. He patted their garments, extracted wallets, flipped open card cases.

“U.S. government I.D.… Army Intelligence. Based in Albuquerque. Either there was a secondary alarm system the hummingbird didn’t get, or else somebody called to ask old Kopper the time of day.” He glanced into the truck, then exclaimed softly.

“Jesus, Cheh, your laser just missed some boxes of ammo! Couple of fragmentation grenades too! They were really ready for us.”

Cheh sat down in the snow. Lessing watched with sympathy; she had borne more today than many men could have.

“How… how did you recognize… them… as agents?” she managed.

“Clothes, manner. They looked as wrong out here as we did. Then the woman asked about what we were hunting, rather than about the car wreck. Hell, even if she’d been for real I couldn’t have answered her. How do I know what people hunt around here? In the dead of winter? It’s probably not even hunting season!”

“Armadillos,” Teen said.

“What? Armed what?”

The little man grinned and did a ludicrous parody of a Mexican accent: “No, senor, no! Arma-fucking-df’Woej.”

“Get stuffed!” Cheh looked as though she were about to cry.

Lessing picked up his gun. “Back to the car. There’ll be more agents on the way when these three don’t report in. We drop Char into the Viper, set it on fire, run the feds’ truck off where it can’t be seen, and hightail it for the base. We pick up the others, and head out for our drop site. We should be there by dawn. It’ll take the pursuit some lime to sort it all out.”

Lessing reached into the snow and hefted the white plastic bag. So much death, and all for these spheres and vials. Murderous germs, lethal gases, some other subtle and ghastly weapon — the stuff of nightmares. God damn it, people used to fight for gold, for women, for honor, for values a person could understand. Now they killed for abstractions, words on paper, causes, doctrines — murky political games in which there were neither rights nor wrongs.

And he, Lessing, had willingly chosen to become one of the pawns.

Cheh and Teen wrestled Char’s body up into the Viper’s front seat. The case of ammo and the grenades would make a nice fanfare for the funeral.

Lessing peered into the crinkly, white plastic bag. The silvery PCV-1 spheres winked evilly back; the black vials of PCV-2 kept their counsel to themselves.

He slipped a hand tentatively into the bag, extracted one sphere and one cylinder. They felt cold, inimical, hostile. He thought, then made up his mind: he dropped them both down into the hidden pocket sewed into the lining of his canvas trouser leg. If Gomez or anybody asked, he would claim that he had only found twenty-nine. Who could know? Up Gomez! Up them all! Such insurance might come in handy some day.

It was time to go home.