“Another one there,” Teen muttered. Indeed, a heap of discarded clothing beside the water tower resolved itself into a second body.
The man was unmistakably dead. “Not in uniform,” Lessing murmured back. “But that’s to be expected. This isn’t a regular military installation. Not any more.”
Char came up, picking his way carefully across the crunching snow. Like Lessing, he was an American. Both were big men, burly and muscular, but Char was moonfaced, with milky skin and a stocking-cap of coarse, black hair, while Lessing’s features were thinner, his nose longer, and his hair like wispy, grey-blond ash.
“What’s keeping…?” Char began. Teen gestured at the visible bodies, and Char sucked in his breath and sat down. Lessing stuck up one hand to warn the rest to hold their positions.
“Going in?” Teen asked.
“S’what we’re paid to do.” Char thumbed one nostril.
“Doe and me,” Lessing replied. “You two cover us. Get Cheh down here with her laser rifle. She comes in when I give the up-sign.”
They distributed themselves amidst the boulders and gulleys of the forward slope. Lessing and Doe stripped off their camouflage suits to reveal quilled, orange hunters’ jackets and canvas pants. Doe pulled a red hunting hat out of his pack and straightened the jaunty, yellow feather in its band.
“Maybe you should yodel,” Teen snickered. “You look Swiss.”
Doe showed grey, uneven teeth, said something obscene in unintelligible Swiss-German dialect, and added a descriptive gesture.
Teen made a face. “You and your monkey too!”
Teen sounded vaguely British, but he shifted easily from one accent to another, and who could say? On this trip alone Lessing had heard him use Cockney, Chicano-American, and a somewhat shaky Texan. Hehad spoken Spanish with the pilot who had dropped them all into the United States, and Doe recalled him chattering in gutter Arabic in Syria. A useful man, though bitter-faced and given to sarcasm. Many mercenaries were like Teen.
They picked their way down the slope, two lost hunters looking for directions, a cup of coffee, or maybe a telephone. Their own weapons were left behind with their packs, and both now carried hunting rifles, good but not fancy.
“What the hell is this place?” Lessing called loudly, apparently to Doe. “Who lives way out here? Fire warden?”
“University scientists? Geologists?” Doe wondered back.
Lessing signalled him to shut up; Doe’s German accent would raise suspicions.
They wandered through the open gate, then through the second, inner barrier. The ten meters of open ground between the two perimeter fences was sown with miniature land-mines, Lessing knew: enough to knock a person down and maybe take off a foot A TV surveillance camera was mounted above the outer gate, but it seemed to be out of order, its stained, metal lens-tube pointed down at the ground beneath it.
They didn’t go around back. Not yet. Lessing clumped up onto the ramshackle front porch and knocked.
“Hey! Anybody!”
There was no reply. Doe prowled down to the end of the porch and squinted around the comer, along the far side of the house. He stuck out two fingers, parallel to the ground: two bodies there.
Lessing straightened up, abandoning his “lost hunter” pose. He went to the top of the front steps and stuck up his right thumb. A figure detached itself from the snow-splashed boulders and began zigzagging down the slope toward him. The rest of the landscape was utterly silent, ominously so. No birds, no insects — but what insects were there in New Mexico this time of year anyway? He had no idea.
Lessing yelled, “Hi! Anybody home?” Then he kicked the front door in.
The front room was like a thousand others in backwoods America: two chairs, a couch, a couple of lamps, a bureau, a fireplace with kindling stacked beside it, and a coffee table cluttered with orange peels, magazines, and old newspapers. Snapshots of friends and kinfolk smiled fuzzily down from beside glass statues of retrievers and spaniels on a knickknack shelf on the rear wall. In the front comer stood a battered desk, heaped with brochures, papers, and outdoorsmen’s magazines. A metal sign there proclaimed: ARTHUR L. KOPPER Department of Wildlife Conservation State of New Mexico.
Nothing was out of order. Everything was as it should be.
And it was all as phony as a game-show host’s front teeth.
They made a hurried search of the house. Off the hallway behind the parlor was a bathroom with yellow, chintz curtains, a woman’s doing. Back of that they came to a nondescript kitchen in which two blackened pots still stood on the propane stove. Somebody had turned off the fire, but the food inside — beef stew and boiled potatoes, Doe noted — was cold and greasy, maybe two days old.
In the side bedroom that opened off the kitchen a dead woman lay sprawled on a double bed.
Lessing eyed the room, saw nothing, and went to look at the body. The woman was in her forties, greying and bespectacled. A flame-pink, chenille spread was crumpled around her ample, pajama-clad hips, and a can of some cola drink stood on the nightstand beside her. The gaudy, blue cover of a paperback novel protruded from beneath her purpling left hand. She had been dead perhaps a day or two. The faint, sick-sweet smell told him that, yet she hadn’t a mark on her. Her tongue protruded, and her features were contorted, but there was no odor of chemicals, no blood, no violence. The pink coverlet had been tossed aside in the agony of her dying, and it now sagged down onto the threadbare, red carpet, a lurid lava-pool of middle-class tastelessness.
“Died at night,” Lessing said. “Just before going to sleep.”
“Either that or she took afternoon naps,” Doe suggested.
A board creaked behind them, and they both jumped, rifles up and ready. It was only Cheh, her laser rifle cradled in stubby arms.
“God, what happened?”
“Damn it, you were supposed to wait for my signal!” The girl shrugged, and Lessing said, “No idea what killed her. Outside?”
“Not a bloody soul alive. Four deaders, though.” Cheh was short, chunky, and as round-faced as a Dutch housewife. “Char ‘n’ Teen’ve searched. Somebody blew a great, gobby hole in the garage… took out the power plant. Don’t bother switchin’ on the lights.”
“There’ll be an emergency generator. “Lessing rose, strode along the hallway behind the kitchen to the back bedroom, and slammed one booted foot into the door there.
He almost let off a half dozen rounds into the figure that confronted him within: a huge, menacing, pale giant of a man in orange clothing.
It was Lessing himself. The closet door had been left ajar, and he had almost blown away the full-length mirror! He let up on the trigger shakily, thinking how easy it would have been to kill himself with glass shards flying all over! He hadn’t realized how terrifying he looked — and how jumpy he was.
“In here,” he called. The back of the closet was open, revealing the elevator cubicle beyond. So far the plan Gomez had given him in India had been completely accurate.
What they hadn’t told him was that the current occupants would be cold meat when they arrived.
“So. This is what we’re here for?” Doe spoke from behind him.
“Deactivated base,” Lessing growled. It was lime to give his squad their need-to-know. “Secret, left over from before the Vienna Treaty. They didn’t know what to do with it. Just a storage depot now.” He gestured at the bunks that lined the walls. ‘The barracks and living quarters were torn down… just a few people left to guard this house and the underground installation below it. They doubled as wildlife wardens.”