"Bullshit it is."
The driver grinned wider. "Well, everybody knows it was the Frogs what made the first steam carts, Nicolas-Joseph Cugnot, with his tricycle steamer in 1769. By the 1830s everybody and the king's nephew had steamers up and running, in England as well as half of Europe. Even had those in the States by the end of your Civil War. But we're not talking about scaled-down steam trains that ran on dirt roads now, are we? We're talking about automobiles.
"The first real car with an internal combustion engine? Well, that was built and driven up Shooter's Hill in London by Sam Brown round 1823 or 1826, if you believe old Sam himself, who was admittedly a bit hazy on dates. Ran on carbureted hydrogen, it did. I make that a bit sooner than John Lambert, who put the first one together in the U.S. in 1891. He beat the Duryea brothers by almost two years, though they usually get credit for the first 'un, but that's only a drop in the bucket compared to sixty years, innit?"
"Great," Fernandez said. "Just my luck to sit next to the fucking Royal Historian slumming as an airman driver."
The driver laughed. "Man ought to know his tools, right? I drive 'em, I might as well learn a little something about 'em, eh?"
Fernandez laughed. "Score one for the home team. Which side of the road do they drive on in France?"
"Who cares?" the airman said. "They're the bloody French, aren't they?"
Even Howard laughed at that one.
Ruzhyo met Peel at a corner in front of a giant Coke sign that flashed thousands of lights overhead. They were to discuss his assignment, but when he asked about it, Peel shook his head. "Let's leave off on that for a moment," he said. "I've got something else I need you to do."
Ruzhyo raised one eyebrow. "Yes?"
Tourists bustled along the sidewalks. A group of schoolchildren in uniforms, holding hands in pairs, snaked past like a blue and white caterpillar.
Peel looked nervous. He checked his surroundings constantly, if unobtrusively, as if he was being watched. "I need somebody to cover my back," Peel said. "I think maybe I stepped on somebody's toes."
Ruzhyo nodded. "All right. Do we know whose?"
"Not for certain. I have an idea, but I'll have to check further."
"Why me?"
What he was really asking was more involved than that: Why trust me? We don't know each other that well. Surely you have your own men?
Peel answered the unasked part of the question: "Because you don't have any reason to want me dead."
Ruzhyo kept his face deadpan. "Not that you know of."
Peel smiled, short and tight. "Have you gotten a gun?"
"Not yet," he lied. He kept his voice bland.
Peel produced a small, zippered, dark blue nylon pouch from his inside jacket pocket and handed it over. "Beretta, model 21A, 22 caliber, Italian, but this model was American-made. Six in the magazine, one in the chamber, double-action first round if you wish, tip-up barrel."
"I am familiar with the weapon."
Peel nodded. "There are two extra magazines, already loaded as well. CCI Minimags, solids. I could have gotten you a bigger gun, but I understand that Spetsnaz ops have a fondness for the smaller calibers."
"It will do. And it shoots how?"
Peel nodded, as if he expected the question, but nonetheless pleased to hear it. "I didn't have time to have the armorer smooth it out, so the double-action pull is a bit stiff, probably twelve or fourteen pounds. Single-action is fairly tight, five pounds or so, but with a little creep. Shoots dead on at seven yards, two inches high and slightly right at twenty-five yards."
"I understand."
"I would appreciate it if you would keep it handy, then. And if you should happen to see somebody sneak up behind me with a gun or a knife, shoot them for me, would you?"
Ruzhyo gave him a choppy, military nod, slipped the pouch into his pocket, and unzipped it. He removed the pistol, and thumbed the safety off. Given the stubby barrel, the Beretta would not be as accurate as the umbrella gun, but it was added firepower. And the little weapon would also be the devil that Peel knew about.
The Russian faded into the background, just another foreign tourist with an umbrella, to keep potential trouble off of Peel's arse. Peel felt a little better, a little safer. Maybe it was all in his mind, a figment of his imagination, being stalked, but he hadn't kept his body and soul together by ignoring his inner alarms. Now and again he was wrong, and nothing amiss ever turned up, but why take the chance?
Once, he had been on a bivouac with a drop squad doing training in the middle of some woods in NSW, Australia. They had backpacked in more than fifteen miles off the beaten track, into the foothills. They were only a couple thousand feet up, in a dry area where the dust was red and thick on everything, raising in clouds every time they took a step outside the tents. They were camped in a small clearing amid trees and scrub so thick it was like there were solid walls all around them.
Just before dark, as the men were settling down to cook the evening meal, Peel got spooked. A sudden, overwhelming fear rose in him, so fast and so powerful that he wanted to run, to get away from the area as fast as he could move.
It was totally irrational. There was nothing threatening around, no other people for miles, as far as they knew. He tried to reason with himself. God, he was a trained officer, a battle-tested lieutenant, young, brave, armed to the teeth, with six veteran men who could chew nails and pee needles, likewise armed, and there wasn't anything in the bloody woods that could seriously bother them. But that didn't matter. His sense of imminent doom was undeniable. Without explaining, and making it seem as if it was some part of their training, he ordered his men to pack up and be ready to move out in five minutes. It took them almost seven, but as soon as they were ready, they force-marched six miles before Peel's sense of danger faded. They reestablished camp, posted a guard, and turned in.
Early in the morning hours before dawn, the sentry woke Peel and pointed out the orange glow in the sky. A forest fire.
Later, when he checked, Peel found that the fire had begun just below their original campsite. It had swept up the hills so fast that fleeing deer had been caught in the deadly flames, and had he and his men stayed above, where the fire raged, none of them would have survived.
His men had been impressed.
How had he known? Some faint hint of smoke in the air nobody had caught? Some frightened animals in the woods whose fear had been powerful enough so that he could somehow sense it? He had pondered it but never came up with an answer that satisfied him. More important than how was that he had done it. Some intuition had told him Death was near, and he had had enough sense to go with it.
Similar things had happened in various firefights and patrols since, though nothing quite as dramatic as the Australian event, and when he had felt the cold touch of it on his shoulder, he had harkened to it. More times than not, such actions had saved his life.
There was no enemy in sight here, but he felt the fear. The only cause he could figure was the scientist. Nobody else knew what he was doing, and the man certainly had something to hide. It didn't make sense, not with Bascomb-Coombs giving him a bloody million and making him a kind of partner in the scheme, but who else could it be? And in truth, he hadn't seen the money stacked up neatly on a table somewhere, had he? It was all electronically vouched for by the Indonesian bank, and normally that would have been enough, but Bascomb-Coombs was owner and operator of the world's nastiest computer, wasn't he? Surely he could fool somebody not computer-savvy enough to know the difference, if that was his wish.