"Tanya should have called in by now. The caravan should be loaded up and on its way out by now. And I can't find the right heat signature for Gilgamesh and Enkidu to save my soul."
"Umn," said Nichols with illuminating volubility. "Me neither." Nichols was still hunched over his tracking console, stripped down to a black t-shirt that showed the screaming-eagle tattoo on one muscular arm. "Think maybe they've gone off on their own? the OD's, I mean?"
The ODs: the Old Dead - Gilgamesh and Enkidu. One of Nichols' little rebellions was a feigned inability to pronounce either name. "Tanya would have let us know," Welch said, because it was his job to say that, not because he really believed he knew what Burke would do in any circumstance That might come up during fieldwork.
"Yeah?" Nichols was more blunt, the sneer on his square face eloquent as he shifted to lock eyes with his superior. "What if Achilles and her have cooked up a little something of their own?
That's lots of money, lots of power, lots of anonymity, down there." Nichols' gaze flickered to his feet on the deck, below which was the caravan camped on the shore in sight of Pompeii.
Nichols didn't like Achilles and the feeling was mutual.
Achilles liked Tanya, though. Anything with a dork would follow Tamara Burke anywhere, sniffing and wagging its tail and leaving its common sense behind.
Welch ought to know.
"What are you getting at?" They knew each other too well for Welch to take umbrage at the
"Sirs" missing from Nichols' badinage. When you were sweating it out in a corn truck on the battle plain of Ilion or in Caesar's private office at a New Hell villa or in a chopper flown by one of the biggest egos in
Hell, you wanted a man like Nichols - to have your best interests-and the success of your mission - at heart.
"A little recon. If you don't mind. You don't need me here right now. What these babies ain't sayin', you can handle." Nichols' chin jutted toward the electronics displays.
Maybe it wasn't necessary, but it was logical. And it was what Nichols did better than he did anything but exponentially increase body count.
Okay, you're go," said Welch absently in their familiar shorthand, and unwound from his chair to give the order to Achilles on the flight deck. He could have patched into Achilles' helmet-circuit from here, but if there was an argument - and there almost always was with Achilles - he didn't need Nichols hearing it.
Standing, Welch had to slump to avoid hitting his head. Stooped over, he said:
"Finish my beer for me. And take more than you need down-there. Including this." He reached into his hip pocket and pulled out one of the miniaturized black boxes he'd requisitioned for his recent sortie into Che's camp. "You get into trouble, or just want extracted, push this button."
He turned the match-box sized oblong in his fingers until the red nipple on one side was facing Nichols. "I'll be waiting."
"You expecting this kind of trouble?" Nichols frowned at the black box before he took it.
Tm expecting a real good reason why Tanya's not checking in, yeah."
Damned women, you could never tell what they had in mind. But it wasn't so much that he didn't trust Tanya, it was that Welch knew Nichols. Nichols had a disdain for the Old Dead that might cause him to underestimate the opposition.
No matter who me antiques were, the opposition here was really Mao. And Mao was nobody's friend, nobody's fool. Welch promised himself that, when he got back to New Hell, he was going to get Machiavelli transferred to Sanitation Engineering.
Up on the flight deck, listening to the inevitable "better idea" that Achilles had, Welch made a mental note to include the Achaean in Machiavelli's
Sanitation squad. Then he pulled his 9mm off his hip and, flicking suede lint from its barrel, said levelly to die pilot, "You fly 'em. I'll call 'em. Understood?"
The chopper pilot began landing procedures without another word.
Nichols had scrambled thirty feet away from the Huey before he looked back.
Even knowing where it was, he couldn't see die damned thing. Stealth technology had come a long way since Nichols died, not in the Med during the Big War, but on an island off America's coast in the aftermath.
Didn't matter. Nichols shook his camouflaged head. Didn't mean a damn thing, Welch was right.
But it made him queasy, looking back at the electro-optically distorted field which masked the chopper so well you could have walked right into one of its rotor blades and gashed your head open.
Okay, he thought, so Achilles knows his job. Ought to give him one point. But Nichols couldn't do that; his gut knew better. And Nichols, unlike Welch, remembered every minute of the Trojan Campaign - up until he'd died during it.
They'd scaled die very gates of Hell on that one, and Welch, with his partial amnesia and his officer's attitude, just wasn't applying enough good old-fashioned suspicion to the events that had brought matters to their present turn.
Nichols had died in Troy, but been held in limbo, somewhere, awaiting Achilles' pickup-for this mission. On whose orders? To what end? Welch, meanwhile, who would have gotten Nichols out of limbo if he had to use a P-38 to do it, was afflicted with convenient amnesia and watch-dogged by Tamara Burke, whoever and whatever she was. If all this was coincidence, Nichols was a Persian eunuch.
If it was just luck, it was bad luck. And Nichols didn't like bad luck. If he had a god, it was the one that got you out of wherever alive, stepping three inches to the right of a cluster-bomb that would have blown you to perdition; ducking your head to swat a mosquito just when the round that would have smashed it to jelly sped by.
Nichols knew damned well that Achilles was trouble - always had been, always was, always would be trouble, for friend and foe alike. He'd mucked up the first Trojan War and tied the commanders in knots during the second. If Caesar and Alexander the Great couldn't get around the jinx that Achilles put on any mission he was attached to, what chance did he and Welch have?
You couldn't talk to Welch about Achilles, beyond operational talk-Welch didn't believe in luck.
Welch took everything personally. Which was fine, most times-it made him an officer with whom Nichols was proud to serve. But it made him touchy about certain things, like what he didn't remember about Troy.
And Welch didn't remember one very important thing about that mission: he didn't remember that, when Achilles came flying into the middle of an already complex situation, nobody-not Caesar's crew, not the opposition down there, not his passenger Judah Maccabee, not Agency itself, and most especially not Welch - would admit to dispatching him.
Achilles was a damned wild card and even the Myrmidons hadn't had a real cheery survival quotient (so the unit's vets said), serving under him in life.
But Achilles knew his ECM. He could cajole stunts out that Huey like Nichols had never seen-or heard.
Blinking hard and listening harder, Nichols could barely focus on the chopper as it lifted, purring no louder than a happy cat. Stealth, you bet. Better than it had any right to be, like Achilles was better than he had any right to be. Nichols was willing to bet, all that capability was somebody's doing. Lake maybe the Pentagram faction that was supporting the dissidents.
Achilles and Tamara Burke: neither of them had put a foot wrong the whole time they'd been in Hell. He and Welch had called up their jackets, and there wasn't a single negative notation or disciplinary action in either of their files. Too damned perfect not to be trouble.
But you couldn't convince Welch of that, not without proof. Tanya failing to check in wasn't proof, not in the mind of a guy who d been laying her flat while Nichols was on ice somewhere for ... how long? Long enough, that was sure.