Because the FBI maintained tight relationships with the armed services, especially the Marines, Sam pretty much knew what to expect. This would be a Marine Reconnaissance force composed of the standard elements required by such a situation: one CH-46 helicopter carrying the recon team itself — probably twelve men detached from a Marine Assault Unit — accompanied by two Cobra gunships.
Turning around, looking in every direction, Tessa said, "I don't see them."
"You won't," Sam said. "Not until they're almost on top of us."
"They fly without lights?"
"No. They're equipped with blue lights, which can't be seen well from the ground, but which give them a damned good view through their night-vision goggles."
Ordinarily, when responding to a terrorist threat, the CH-46—called the "Sea Knight," officially, but referred to as "The Frog" by grunts — would have gone, with its Cobra escorts, to the north end of town. Three fire teams, composed of four men each, would have disembarked and swept through Moonlight Cove from north to south, checking out the situation, rendezvousing at the other end for evacuation as necessary.
But because of the message Sam had sent to the Bureau before Sun's links to the outside world had been cut off, and because the situation did not involve terrorists and was, in fact, singularly strange, SOP was discarded for a bolder approach. The choppers overflew the town repeatedly, descending to within twenty or thirty feet of the treetops. At times their strange bluish-green lights were visible, but nothing whatsoever could be seen of their shape or size; because of their Fiberglas blades, which were much quieter than the old metal blades that once had been used, the choppers at times seemed to glide silently in the distance and might have been alien craft from a far world even stranger than this one.
At last they hovered near the circle of light in the park.
They did not put down at once. With the powerful rotors flinging the fog away, they played a searchlight over the people in the park who stood outside the illuminated landing pad, and they spent minutes examining the grotesque bodies in the street.
Finally, while the Cobras remained aloft, the CH-46 gentled down almost reluctantly in the ring of cars. The men who poured from the chopper were toting automatic weapons, but otherwise they didn't look like soldiers because, thanks to Sam's message, they were dressed in biologically secure white suits, carrying their own air-supply tanks on their backs. They might have been astronauts instead of Marines.
Lieutenant Ross Dalgood, who looked baby-faced behind the faceplate of his helmet, came straight to Sam and Tessa, gave his name and rank, and greeted Sam by name, evidently because he'd been shown a photograph before his mission had gotten off the ground. "Biological hazard, Agent Booker?"
"I don't think so," Sam said, as the chopper blades cycled down from a hard rhythmic cracking to a softer, wheezing chug.
"But you don't know?"
"I don't know," he admitted.
"We're the advance," Dalgood said. "Lots more on the way — regular Army and your Bureau people are coming in by highway. Be here soon."
The three of them — Dalgood, Sam, and Tessa — moved between two of the encircling cars, to one of the dead things that lay on a sidewalk bordering the park.
"I didn't believe what I saw from the air," Dalgood said.
"Believe it," Tessa said.
"What the hell?" Dalgood said.
Sam said, "Boogeymen."
38
Tessa worried about Sam. She and Chrissie and Harry returned to Harry's house at one in the morning, after being debriefed three times by men in decontamination suits. Although they had terrible nightmares, they managed to get a few hours' sleep. But Sam was gone all night. He had not returned by the time they finished breakfast at eleven o'clock Wednesday morning.
"He may think he's indestructible," she said, "but he's not."
"You care about him," Harry said.
"Of course I care about him."
"I mean care about him."
"Well … I don't know."
"I know."
"I know too," Chrissie said.
Sam returned at one o'clock, grimy and gray-faced. She'd made up the spare bed with fresh sheets, and he tumbled into it still half dressed.
She sat in a chair by the bed, watching him sleep. Occasionally he groaned and thrashed. He called her name and Chrissie's — and sometimes Scott's — as if he had lost them and was wandering in search of them through a dangerous and desolate place.
Bureau men in decontamination suits came for him at six o'clock, Wednesday evening, after he'd slept less than five hours. He went away for the rest of that night.
By then all the bodies, in their multitudinous biologies, had been collected from where they had fallen, tagged, sealed in plastic bags, and put into cold storage for the attention of the pathologists.
That night Tessa and Chrissie shared the same bed. Lying in the half-dark room, where a towel had been thrown over a lamp to make a night-light, the girl said, "They're gone."
"Who?"
"My mom and dad."
"I think they are."
"Dead."
"I'm sorry, Chrissie."
"Oh, I know. I know you are. You're very nice." Then for a while she cried in Tessa's arms.
Much later, nearer sleep, she said, "You talked to Sam a little. Did he say if they figured out … about those animals last night … where they were all running to?"
"No," Tessa said. "They haven't got a clue yet."
"That spooks me."
"Me too."
"I mean, that they haven't got a clue."
"I know," Tessa said. "That's what I mean too."
39
By Thursday morning, teams of Bureau technicians and outside consultants from the private sector had pored through enough of the Moonhawk data in Sun to determine that the project had dealt strictly with the implantation of a nonbiological control mechanism that had resulted in profound physiological changes in the victims. No one yet had the glimmer of an idea as to how it worked, as to how the microspheres could have resulted in such radical metamorphoses, but they were certain no bacterium, virus, or other engineered organism had been involved. It was purely a matter of machines.
The Army troops, enforcing the quarantine against news-media interlopers and civilian curiosity-seekers, still had their work to do, but they were grateful to be able to strip out of their hot and clumsy decon suits. So were the hundreds of scientists and Bureau agents who were bivouacked throughout town.
Although Sam would surely be returning in the days ahead, he and Tessa and Chrissie were cleared for evacuation early Friday morning. A sympathetic court, with the counsel of a host of federal and state officials, had already granted Tessa temporary custody of the girl. The three of them said see-you-soon to Harry, not goodbye, and were lifted out by one of the Bureau's Bell JetRanger executive helicopters.
To keep onsite researchers from having their views colored by sensationalistic and inaccurate news accounts, a media blackout was in force in Moonlight Cove, and Sam did not fully realize the impact of the Moon-hawk story until they flew over the Army roadblock near the interstate. Hundreds of press vehicles were strewn along the road and parked in fields. The pilot flew low enough for Sam to see all the cameras turned upward to shoot them as they passed over the mob.