They seemed to come out of nowhere. The first Winters saw of them was the muzzle flashes of their guns. Spencer went down, and less than a second later, Rogers was hit. There were dark figures rappelling down from the rusty overhead gantries, the chatter of automatic weapons, and indistinguishable yelling. The light over Carlisle shattered, leaving only the gray dawn to see by. Maybe a dozen of them were moving in the gloom. There was an explosion and smoke. Winters, under hostile fire for the first time, could not believe it. He froze. The chaos did not apply to him. The bullets would go around him. Then bullet spurts stitched the rubber sheet at his feet. He looked desperately for cover. He attempted to sprint to safety behind a corroded megalith of a machine, but he was cut off by another seam of bullets. He swerved and then realized that he could not go back. In terror he dropped to his knees. A figure – ski mask, night goggles, flak jacket, bare arms – was running at him.
"We're the Lefthand Path, motherfuckers!"
Winters raised the Mossberg and pumped the trigger. It stuck. The godforsaken safety was still on. He had never checked. He frantically flicked it. A rifle butt was coming at his head. The world exploded and was gone.
Carlisle
The pain still did not come. How long were they going to play with him? His muscles were starting to twitch uncontrollably. He was shivering. Then something warm spattered his body.
"What?"
His exclamation was almost a shriek, deafening him. There seemed to be noise beyond the headpiece, but he could not tell because his head was ringing so hard. Still nothing happened. Then hands touched him. He shuddered. It was the roar of the surf. He was being lowered, gently lowered, to the ground. His neck muscles could not support the headpiece, and it banged on the hard floor. He was in a nuclear explosion. Someone tried to remove the helmet without first turning it off. Triple nuclear explosions. Then they did it correctly, and the howling was only in his head. The helmet was lifted off. A face in a knitted ski mask was looking into his. He could scarcely hear the words.
"Just be calm. We're getting you out of here."
A hand was holding a syrette.
"We're going to give you a little shot."
A second face in a ski mask entered his field of vision. The first ski mask questioned it.
"Did we leave a witness?"
The second ski mask nodded. "Just one. We greased the rest."
"Good. Get something to wrap this guy in. He'll be out in a second."
Carlisle sighed. He was out now. He was drowning in a warm black lake, and he didn't give a damn.
TEN
Mansard
"Praise be to larry faithful, government without end."
"You should watch your mouth, boss. We're on their turf now."
"Screw them all. They need me more than I need them." There were ten days to go to the Day of National Reconciliation, and Charlie Mansard was chain smoking and carrying a hip flask. He was standing beside Jimmy Gadd on a drafty outer runway in the military security section of Newark Airport, watching soldiers riding walkers and driving forklifts, breaking down the cargo mass of a C87. They had watched the impossibly bulbous aircraft come in to land. It seemed like a miracle that anything so heavy could ever lumber into the air. It was finished in winter warfare camouflage. Mansard had wondered for what ambitious scheme it had been originally commissioned. Probably some wishful but eventually aborted invasion of Canada. The government no longer had the trillions that the Reagan era had had to throw around, but considering the nation's straitened circumstances, the military continued to get most of the toys it wanted and still managed to remain ineffectual. After everything that had been poured into the Southern Border War, the Mexicans and their Havana Pact allies still held their slice of Texas, including Corpus Christi and, the crowning humiliation, San Antonio. There had been mutterings about nuking the greasy papist bastards, but everyone was well aware that any use of the aging nuclear arsenal would provoke immediate retaliation from Russia, Japan, and probably China. A red, white, and green Mexican tricolor with its gold eagle continued to flutter over the Alamo.
As the side panels of the C87 were removed and the containers were slid from the plane's interior framework, Mansard realized that he was actually getting his own small slice of the pie. Jimmy Gadd felt it, too.
"It's goddamn Christmas. I've never seen so much stuff. I didn't know there was this much hardware in the country."
"Our leaders move in mysterious ways."
"Half this stuff is technically illegal."
"Exactly."
A laden, olive-green forklift hooted at them, and they stepped out of the way. A walker followed with a redheaded corporal effortlessly providing the motion base for its gargantuan arms and legs.
"Those things always remind me of the old Toho monster movies. Godzilla heading out to eat Tokyo, remember? Shall we follow it into the hangar and watch the presents being unwrapped?"
Inside the big military hangar, soldiers were swarming over the containers from the C87, reducing them to their smaller components, which were then loaded onto waiting trucks for the second stage of their trip to the construction site. They would be trucked to Hoboken and transferred to pontoons, finally to be floated downriver to Liberty Island, where the enormous floating projector units were being assembled. The island had been closed to the public – not that it saw many visitors anymore. Access had been limited ever since the Daughters of Islam had tried to blow up the statue in '04. For Mansard, it had been turned into a full-scale military camp, complete with patrol boats, helicopters, and a floodlit perimeter. He had become king of his own island and he was loving every minute. His behavior had become shamelessly Napoleonic, and the military, in its turn, appeared to lap it up. Jimmy Gadd had his own explanation.
"The poor bastards probably welcome any diversion from being shot at by Zapata Legion snipers with those nasty little Cucaracha missiles."
Supply sergeants pulled cases off the line at random and checked that the contents matched the manifest and had arrived intact. Mansard and Gadd strolled toward one of those inspections. The lids had been removed from four aluminum coffins. Inside, four Sony DL-70s nestled in beds of blue foam rubber. Jimmy Gadd blinked in surprise.
"Those are DL-70Cs. We've always been lucky to get the basic model. They don't have these anywhere in South America yet."
Mansard laughed. "Are you suggesting that our holy leaders are doing covert business with the heathen japper?" A thought struck him, and he looked sharply at Gadd. "You do know how to operate these new wonders from the rising sun?"
Gadd grinned and shrugged. "I can read a manual with the best of them."
Mansard looked askance at him. "Christ, no wonder I'm an alcoholic."
"You're losing your sense of humor."
"That's hardly surprising."
Gadd was looking at his watch. "Listen, things seem to be running smoothly out here. Why don't we head back to the site and see that my guys aren't getting in any more beefs with the army?"
Mansard nodded. The downside to all the technical largess coming to them via the military was that the production had been turned into a military operation. The disrespect and loose camaraderie that held together Mansard's team and turned them into a fiercely efficient unit when they wanted to be had clashed badly with the army technicians' concepts of organization and discipline. There was yet to be a fistfight, but screaming matches were a daily occurrence, and there had been one unfortunate incident that was already being referred to as the Donut Strike. One of the roots of the friction was that Mansard's people handled quality control and invariably had the last say. The military did not take kindly to being ordered around by civilians, particularly civilians who looked like hairy subversives. They were also not used to working with women. All women had been removed from the military in the first three months of the Faith-fid administration while Mansard had always taken a perverse delight in doing all the equal opportunity hiring that he could get away with.