Dan forced a grin. "You know me, Zac. I'm always careful."
Zac snorted. Dan grinned wider at the inevitable, "Right." Then Zac muttered, "Get out of here and let me get some work done."
Their parting handshake revealed a tremor new to Zac's steady hand. Dan wondered how much of it was due to Sue's notes and how much was due to thoughts of twelve-year-old Zachariah Hughes III, missing child?
Chapter Twelve
Francisco returned from Dr. Firelli's lab determined to find a way of placing a phone call off base. Someone had to be told what was going on up here. Surely he could find a satellite phone somewhere on a base as high-tech as this one was. What was that sergeant's name, the one who'd said something about a way to call home to his wife to be sure her labor went okay?
He had just sat down at his desk and was reaching for the base's phone directory when loud footsteps echoed through the nearly empty clinic. He frowned and glanced up just as the door to his office was thrust open. Two MPs he didn't recognize invaded the cramped space.
"Major Valdez, come with us, please." Despite the polite phrasing, the man's tone was curt, virtually insubordinate. Francisco leaned back in his chair. An involuntary chill trickled down his spine. Oh-oh.
"Why? There are two other doctors on duty in the wards."
The man's shrug was insolent. "Orders, Major."
"From?"
A flicker ran through the man's eyes. "Colonel Collins."
Francisco's chill deepened. The MP was lying.
"If you don't mind, I'm awfully busy right now, soldier. I'll just call Dan and see what this is all—"
He was reaching for the telephone when the first MP crossed the room with rapid strides and forcibly held down the receiver.
"You don't need to do that," the man said softly.
"Now, look here—"
With his other hand, the MP opened his parka and slipped out an obviously well-used Colt Woodsman pistol. But instead of a slender barrel and high-bladed sight, Francisco saw a long, cylindrical metal tube the thickness of a fluorescent lightbulb, at least seven inches long. He froze midsentence, afraid even to breathe.
They're going to kill me. Mother of God, they're going to kill me... .
"Now, Major," the MP was saying quietly, "we both know how quietly you want to come along. Just about as quietly as this little friend of mine would sing for you. Why, five shots from this wouldn't even attract their attention." He nodded toward the ward, where Francisco's medical staff worked in sweet oblivion. "They might look in, of course, and think you'd had a heart attack. And, naturally, they'd come in to check on you. It'd be a shame if we had to kill everyone in this building, wouldn't it?"
The man actually smiled at him.
Mother of God...
The spokesman said softly, "Put your hands flat on the desk, Major. Do it now."
Francisco complied. He sat motionless, palms slick against the cluttered desktop, and waited. The MP who hadn't spoken yet came around the desk and frisked him. Then pulled the chair—with Francisco still in it—out into the middle of the room. He didn't protest.
"Very good. Get up."
Francisco eased to his feet.
The MPs shoved him into a heavy parka. Briefly, he shut his eyes. Where were they taking him? A body could lie in those mountains for years... hundreds of 'em.
"Very good, Major. Now, we're going to go out there very quietly and watch you put together a field surgical kit. For an appendectomy."
"What?"
"I would advise you, Major, not to argue."
Francisco swallowed once and stared at the silenced pistol barely concealed by the other man's parka.
"Right. Sure. No problem. Field surgical kit." He licked his lips. "Anything else?"
"Your complete cooperation," the MP smiled. "I would hate to have to persuade one of your colleagues, instead."
Francisco found what he needed. When Dr. Allen and Dr. Kowalski asked what he was doing, he told them shortly that the base commander had summoned him for a medical emergency.
"What kind of emergency, sir?" Kowalski asked. "Anything we can do to—"
"Stop chattering when you're both three hours behind on your paperwork! Have you seen the mess that office is in?"
Allen and Kowalski exchanged puzzled glances and made themselves scarce. Francisco started breathing again once they'd gone.
"Excellent, Major," the MP murmured. "Let's go."
They shoved him into the back of a waiting troop truck and climbed in with him. The MPs took seats on opposite benches. The spokesman said, "On the floor."
He sat.
"And not another word from you, please."
They manacled his wrists with heavy bar cuffs.
Francisco was cold with more than the Arctic air as a third MP shoved the tailgate closed with a clang and disappeared around the side. Moments later the truck lurched into motion. The ride left him battered. From the little he could see out the back of the truck, they had climbed right across one of the nearby lower mountain ridges and descended the other side.
Where on earth were they taking him? If they were just going to shoot him, they wouldn't have forced him to assemble a surgical kit, but there was absolutely nothing out here but snow and ice and rock. Francisco eyed the silenced Colt Woodsman with a growing sense of foreboding. When the truck finally idled to a halt, nobody moved. Francisco tried to ease a cramp in his thigh. The nearest MP snapped, "Sit still!"
"Look, mister—"
Francisco had never been pistol whipped in his life.
It hurt.
He spat blood and groaned, then lay very still where he'd fallen. He did not want to be hit again.
The incongruous sound of thunder rumbled in his ears. Flashes of lightning blazed outside the truck. The thunder grew louder as false night descended over them. Then the MPs lowered the tailgate, jumped down, and dragged him out by the arms. The third MP grabbed the medical bag. Francisco stumbled and tried to regain his feet. As they hauled him bodily forward, he looked up.
And tried to stop.
"Mary, Mother of God—"
The men holding his arms ran him straight toward it. A glowing rip in the fabric of reality filled the air ahead. Blinding white light poured out of nowhere at all. Lightning blasted into the ground all around them. Francisco yelled—
Then they were inside it.
He fell... or thought he fell...
Frigid air that made Alaska feel like a balmy spring day hit him with a body slam. The shock robbed him of breath. He blinked and tried to see where he was. They had emerged onto a snowfield. The mountains looked vaguely like the Davidson Mountains north of the base, and that mountain off to the west looked like Table Mountain, in the Philip Smith range, but it couldn't be Table Mountain. Not far to the west stretched a sheet of ice that towered toward the sky, glittering a painful blue-white in the harsh sunlight. He tried to look around. To the east he found another massive ice sheet, farther away and much, much higher. That ice must be a mile thick... . Where in the name of Christ are we?
Between that ice sheet and the hole in reality they'd just dragged him through, Francisco focused on something dark brown and massive, moving slowly in the distance, but couldn't make his numbed mind identify it. Closer at hand was a prefabbed concrete building, similar to what the army used in Antarctica.
They dragged him toward that.
The MP holding the surgical kit pounded on what seemed to be the only door in an apparently windowless building. The door opened a crack.
"Special delivery from the boss." The man grinned.
"Joey! About bloody time!"
The door was thrown open by a man in blue jeans and a loud Hawaiian shirt with purple parrots on it. "Get him in here!"