“I’ll tell you what doesn’t mean anything. One word.” D.J. didn’t quite sneer, but his full lips held a condescending smile perfectly. “He could have meant home like home free.”
“He would’ve said it another way if he was on our side.”
“I don’t think he’ll say anything at all.”
Dhanumjaya Julakanti had jumpy eyebrows, a dimpled chin, and a tendency to overenunciate, especially the words I me my. Some people couldn’t see past his charisma or his IQ, a classic combination, and mistook his self-importance for leadership— but Lord knew she wasn’t Miss Humility. Ruth recognized a piggish obsession with being right when she saw it.
Todd Brayton wasn’t any help. Young, maybe twenty-five, straw blond with brown eyes, Todd was fidgety, too quiet, more nervous than Ruth and D.J. together. When they first met the week before, she’d tried to avoid staring at his blister scars. Todd made that difficult. He touched the blotch on his nose often, and constantly rustled his burned fingers together. He had been one of the last techs out of NORAD and Ruth admired his willingness to face the locusts again. Yes, they’d be wearing suits, but exposure was more than a nightmare to him.
Todd was the bravest of them.
He seemed to have already hit his limit, however, with nothing to spare for any conflict outside himself.
“Look.” Ruth strived to keep her voice friendly, which was impossible, half-shouting over the engine noise. “Hernandez would have preferred a full platoon of his own men. There’s no reason to send a mixed group except that our guy plugged in a separate unit. And he made sure to stack the deck while he was at it, seven to five.”
D.J. waggled his chin at her. “You’re just making assumptions again. Maybe they planned to send all Special Forces originally and Hernandez is the one who was switched in.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Todd said. “We can’t hint around about it, we might tip off the wrong side.”
D.J. kept shaking his head. “They wouldn’t tell us anyway.”
“You think they’ll wait to see how things play out,” Ruth said. Sure. Whether it was the Special Forces team or Hernandez and his Marines, they didn’t care about her peace of mind.
They’d want to keep their options open until the last minute, and couldn’t rely on her not to slip up.
James would be in trouble no matter what happened, she knew. Imprisoned? Banished? Ruth was only beginning to understand his sacrifice. But if this mission was a bust the soldiers could all go back to Leadville, no harm, no foul.
She and D.J. and Todd would have a harder time claiming innocence. In fact, they might be better off instigating a showdown between the two halves of their escort, stay out West.
It was a dangerous thought. Even if the right soldiers won, they might execute her for making them outcasts.
* * * *
Ruth went back to the front of the plane and chose a seat in the small crowd where she could see a wedge of sky through the open cockpit door. She managed a smile, thinking that the crash of the Endeavour had been preferable to this flight. At least it had been over quickly. Her anxiety was a restless jitter in her fingers and in her mind.
Below, outside this thin metal shell, lay an environment only marginally less lethal than the vacuum of space. The dead zone stretched without interruption from Utah to the mountains in California — and west of the Sierra range it blanketed a full third of the planet, unblemished and absolute except for the volcanic peaks of Hawaii, until the high points of New Guinea and Taiwan rose up across the Pacific.
The plane rattled and dropped left, and Ruth yelped as the nose stayed down. But it was only turbulence. They leveled out again, and nearly every man present said something nice to her or smiled and nodded. Ruth couldn’t even meet their eyes, silently cursing herself.
She was a damn poor choice to save the world.
* * * *
Landing was uneventful. The plane bounced once, a shuddering impact followed by a quick, gut-fluttering arc, but Ruth managed not to embarrass herself again.
Then they taxied for fifteen minutes, which was maddening.
Where was there to go? The plane moved at a crawl and stopped three times. Hernandez made her remain in her seat. They were going to jockey back around into a takeoff position, he said. Ruth kicked her legs. At last the pilots were satisfied, and the two Special Forces troops aboard went to lower the tailgate. Again Hernandez made her stay put, but she could smell pine trees and earth as soon as the plane opened.
Hernandez had already conferred by radio with the USAF pilot and five Special Forces in the Cessna, who’d touched down forty minutes ago. They reported everything as expected, no tricks, no traps, only a handful of malnourished survivors. Still, Ruth was ordered to keep close to the Marines.
Some instinct tensed in her hindbrain when she emerged into sunlight. At first she blamed Hernandez for this paranoia, but then D.J. said, “Top of the world, eh?”
That was it. In Leadville the close horizon of giant peaks manufactured the illusion of being protected. Here there was only the pale sky. They were up on the tallest point and their view appeared infinite. To the west, beneath the late sun, the land tumbled away in a zigzag maze of ridgelines and cliffs and rounded granite slopes.
The habitable zones in California were little more than a chain of flyspecks. Yosemite offered several large patches not far from here, but this peak seemed alone above the barrier. Her eyes went again and again to the tangle of ravines and dusky green forest below as she moved with Hernandez and the Marines.
Lord only knew where Sawyer had come from. If that ragged knuckle of lava southward across the valley poked above ten thousand feet, its surface area looked no bigger than two or three football fields.
The C-130’s tires had left inky skid lines like claw marks on the asphalt road, very near the only structure in sight. Glancing back at the plane was a mistake. This mountain was barren of trees, but she saw a rock outcropping down the road that their starboard wing must have cleared by a matter of feet — and they’d have to squeeze past it again to take off.
The building, originally, had been a two-room cabin with a stubby chimney. It was old, maybe 1950s. Another room had been tacked on years ago, and a modern whisker antenna rose alongside the chimney. More recent additions consisted of two-by-four framework and blue tarps, and behind it Ruth saw three low huts skinned in clear plastic. Greenhouses.
Five adults and a boy stood together away from the cabin, out on the road with an equal number of Special Forces in camouflage and an Air Force man in gray-blue. The two groups did not mingle. The soldiers all held assault rifles, long barrels tipped casually toward the ground.
Ruth frowned. Was this really how they planned to treat these people, herding them?
“Flank,” said the Marine beside her, like a swear word, and motion drew her eyes back toward the greenhouses— Two shapes, scuttling for cover— One of them thrust out its arm, and the men around her raised their weapons—
A woman up the road screamed, “Lindsey, God no!”
Her shrill fear was immediately lost in male voices: “It’s just kids!”
“Kids—”
“Stand down,” Hernandez said. “For Christ’s sake.”
The Marines surrounding Ruth lowered their rifles as a young girl’s laughter reached their ears, clear and breathless.
“Lindsey!” the woman shrieked, but the girl danced back into the open and pointed her stick at them, making buh buh buh sounds before ducking behind the cinder-block foundation of a greenhouse.
Ruth stared, even after Todd had nudged her and they’d started walking again. The girl looked to be nine or ten, dressed in yellow rain gear that hung on her like thirty-gallon garbage bags, and she was obviously delighted by the soldiers.