“Got it?” Char asked He had a high, whining, demanding voice. Given time, Lessing could grow to dislike this man.
“Right! “Lessing wriggled back up out of the Viper, the slippery-smooth plastic sack clutched in his left hand.
“Signalling!” Char hissed “Teen’s signalling. He’s spotted somebody coming.”
What dismal luck! A curious farmer would delay them; a county sheriff or state patrolman would hang things up much longer. Explanations, offers to go for help, the rather chancy I.D. cards Gomez had provided: all were problematic. He didn’t even want to think about the possibility of a government patrol, MP’s or FBI, coming to investigate an unanswered telephone or unnoticed alarm back at the base. They couldn’t just hide: their tracks in the snow were like pointing arrows. Nor could they make it back to their car and run like hell, not in time.
He waved Teen into the depths of a stand of brush, then pointed Cheh to a heap of dead leaves and tree trunks. Both had the sense to cover their khaki camouflage suits with snow. Another crime to lay at Gomez’ door: the little bastard ought to have known that white was better than brown during a North American winter!
He still wore his red-orange hunter’s jacket. Char’s dun-colored pants and tan duffel-coat might arouse suspicion if anybody stopped to think about it; yet there ought to be some American hunters stupid enough to wear earth colors during hunting season! He grinned mirthlessly; many might perish, like jackrabbits caught in a car’s headlamps, but hell, there ought to be a new crop of idiots every year!
He dropped the white plastic sack into the drift beside him and scuffed snow over it. His Riga-71 assault rifle he pushed under the curve of the overturned Viper’s roof, where it was invisible yet easily reached. Char hid his smaller, stubbier stitch-gun behind his leg, by the front bumper.
They were as ready as they’d ever be.
The noise Teen had heard grew louder, the sustained clatter of a medium-size vehicle of some kind, its engine badly in need of tuning. It was another minute before it hove into view: an archaic, black, German pickup truck, the standard workhorse of twenty -first-century, rural America.
The newcomer paused beside their car, then jounced on to stop near the Viper. The front seat held two men and a woman. The cargo space in the rear was empty.
“Hi!” Lessing called. “Been an accident here.” Might as well be obvious.
The driver stayed where he was, but the other man opened the passenger door and got out The woman followed. Both wore nondescript winter clothing, boots, hats, and scarves. The man was youngish, red-faced, puffy-looking, and clean-shaven. The woman was older, plain, and pale. She wore rimless glasses and a bright-red stocking cap. Too young to be the man’s mother, too old to be his wife. No farmers, these. Looked like a law clerk and a librarian!
Lessing scowled, the good citizen who has just discovered a tragedy. “Woman… dead in there,” he began. “Came off the road and tipped over.”
The man said, “Lordy!” He edged forward as if to inspect the wreck.
“You from around here?” the woman asked.
“California.”
“Huntin’?”
“Yeah,” Char put in. “Vacation.”
“What was you huntin’ then?” The woman appeared too educated to use grammar like that. Blood began to throb at Lessing’s temples again.
“Oh… just high hopes—”
She pulled her handbag up, reached into it. She might have been looking for a handkerchief. “Not much around here to hunt, these days.”
Lessing was first. His Riga-71 sputtered, and the woman went down in a swirl of dark woollens and scarlet. Something blue and metallic spun from her hand. He went prone and heard bullets spang off the underbelly of the Viper. Then Teen’s automatic rifle snarled from somewhere back in the underbrush, and Cheh’s laser hissed and sizzled. The driver of the truck yelped, then shrieked, just once.
Silence. A single shot: Teen, likely, putting quietus to the driver.
Lessing crawled to his feet, the Viper’s flank cold and slick beneath his sweating palms. “Anybody…?” he began. Then he saw Char. The man lay on his belly in the snow. He humped up, grunted, writhed, and clutched his abdomen, from which red now seeped to stain the trampled whiteness.
“Oh, God,” Cheh breathed from behind him. “Get the car. We can….”
“No.” Lessing motioned her back, then jerked a thumb at Teen. “You look at him. You’ve done medic before.”
This was no time for proper medical practice. The Englishman pulled the stricken man’s red-dyed hands away from his belly. “Gut-shot,” he reported tersely. “In shock. Dead in an hour ‘less we get him to a hospital.”
“Forget that!” Lessing snapped. He went to stand before Char. “You want it over?” he asked softly. “Or you want us to carry you back? You’ll die on the road, you know. We can’t get you out in time. And it’ll start to hurt soon.”
The other stared at him from shock-glazed eyes.
Lessing raised his head to look at Teen, who had moved around to stand behind the wounded man. Teen’s rifle pointed casually downward, at Char’s cap of black hair.
The rifle echoed like a clap of doom.
“Aw… Jesus…” Cheh turned away.
“Belter so,” Teen muttered matter-of-factly. Lessing turned to inspect the bodies of the newcomers. He patted their garments, extracted wallets, flipped open card cases.
“U.S. government I.D.… Army Intelligence. Based in Albuquerque. Either there was a secondary alarm system the hummingbird didn’t get, or else somebody called to ask old Kopper the time of day.” He glanced into the truck, then exclaimed softly.
“Jesus, Cheh, your laser just missed some boxes of ammo! Couple of fragmentation grenades too! They were really ready for us.”
Cheh sat down in the snow. Lessing watched with sympathy; she had borne more today than many men could have.
“How… how did you recognize… them… as agents?” she managed.
“Clothes, manner. They looked as wrong out here as we did. Then the woman asked about what we were hunting, rather than about the car wreck. Hell, even if she’d been for real I couldn’t have answered her. How do I know what people hunt around here? In the dead of winter? It’s probably not even hunting season!”
“Armadillos,” Teen said.
“What? Armed what?”
The little man grinned and did a ludicrous parody of a Mexican accent: “No, senor, no! Arma-fucking-df’Woej.”
“Get stuffed!” Cheh looked as though she were about to cry.
Lessing picked up his gun. “Back to the car. There’ll be more agents on the way when these three don’t report in. We drop Char into the Viper, set it on fire, run the feds’ truck off where it can’t be seen, and hightail it for the base. We pick up the others, and head out for our drop site. We should be there by dawn. It’ll take the pursuit some lime to sort it all out.”
Lessing reached into the snow and hefted the white plastic bag. So much death, and all for these spheres and vials. Murderous germs, lethal gases, some other subtle and ghastly weapon — the stuff of nightmares. God damn it, people used to fight for gold, for women, for honor, for values a person could understand. Now they killed for abstractions, words on paper, causes, doctrines — murky political games in which there were neither rights nor wrongs.
And he, Lessing, had willingly chosen to become one of the pawns.
Cheh and Teen wrestled Char’s body up into the Viper’s front seat. The case of ammo and the grenades would make a nice fanfare for the funeral.