It was the only use either of them dared make of the heart-touch gesture, love. Each of them — mistakenly — assumed the other would recoil from overt words of tenderness.
"I'm only a sex object," he signed in mock dejection.
"A killing object. You died, remember?" Then she thought of something else; bit her lower lip.
"Problem," he signed. Not a question, but his eyes probed.
She nodded. Carefully, she placed a strong hand against his breast, rolled to one side, breathed in the conifer-spiced evening air of northern Wyoming highlands. Signing: "My last hit. They always promised we'd never get a mission against someone we know."
"So?"
"I knew her— second-hand."
There was really nothing he could do about it but: "Sorry," he signed.
Momentarily then she wanted him to feel the full impact, and spelled it out for him. "Dr. Catherine Palma."
Quantrill froze. He had known the woman well, a stolid, fiftyish medic who'd risked lingering death in the fight against Chinese plague during the war. Palma, a mother-figure for him before his enlistment at age fifteen. He'd mentioned Palma to Sanger on many occasions, always silently by necessity. The late Palma? In a soundless agony he balled his fists, rolled onto his back, eyes closed.
Sanger placed her hand on his breast as if to smooth away the tendons that stood out, fanning inward and up from pectorals to throat. Then she coughed, a demand for attention.
When he opened his eyes again she was smiling, almost in apology. "I suspect she was on guard," said the lithe fingers. "Rebel medic now; couldn't find her." About the big things, she had to lie.
"Bitch. Could've told me an easier way."
"Sorry; honestly," she signed in shame.
Suddenly suspicious, he squinted as his hands said, "Really couldn't find her? Or wouldn't?"
" Think I want to die? Tried my best," she lied again.
His exhalation lasted at least five seconds. "I believe you."
Now she was up on one elbow, frantic with the notion that he might not believe her. They were both professionals; it was his duty to report suspicions, even such a one as this. Perhaps she could phrase it in a way to compel belief. "Listen hotsy; better believe me. If you ever deliberately funk a mission, make sure you tell me first."
"Why?"
"Because I want you to get it from friendly fire," said graceful hands that could kill him as easily as caress him.
CHAPTER 3
Search & Rescue was both highly publicized and saturated in secrecy. Boren Mills was one of a dozen outside S & R ranks who knew its double purpose. At war's end in 1998 America's great Mormon president, Yale Collier, had envisioned a regular cadre of young civilians who would operate directly under executive orders, and who would be superbly trained to rescue citizens in mortal trouble. Freeway overpasses, weakened years before by nuclear blasts, still occasionally collapsed without warning — as did buildings, dams, and underground structures. Along the eastern border of Streamlined America, hotspots of paranthrax sometimes appeared, usually borne by some illegal immigrant from the Confederation East of the Mississippi River. Along the vaguely-defined southern border region called Wild Country, ranchers from Texas to the San Joaquin valley appealed for help against a variety of deadly problems.
To the North, Canada now controlled what had once been most of the northern U. S. until the keratophagic staph plague scare during the great war; and along that border, the problems were less obvious.
Collier had become infused with a dream that Streamlined America, under the Mormon stewardship of his administration and those groomed to follow, would be rebuilt into the true Zion. But Yale Collier had been infused with cancer, too. He lived long enough to see his Search & Rescue teams become a symbol of young American altruism and audacity, and he entrusted the development of S & R
to his successor, Blanton Young. Collier was spared any suspicion that Young might have his own ideas about the uses to which a small cadre of daredevils might be put.
Shortly after the death of Yale Collier in 1999, President Young exercised some executive options.
Search & Rescue's three hundred regulars already had Loring Aircraft's sleekest new close-support sprint choppers, with the shrouded fans swiveling on stubby wingtips to provide both helicopter modes and level flight in excess of six hundred kph — and the hell with fuel consumption.
They already got the best training: paramedic skills, alpine and desert survival courses, flood and mine disaster seminars. Their equipment was already the latest, including dress and mission uniforms familiar to millions who saw holovised rescues to the greater glory of Blanton Young and his Federalist party.
What S & R did not initially have, — what the sainted Collier had not wanted it to have, as an arm reporting only to the Chief Executive — was a covert military charter. Blanton Young wasted no time in swelling the S & R ranks with another select group which had been attached to Army Intelligence during the war. The group had been known to its members as T Section; T, as in 'terminate'.
Survivors of T Section were almost all wary youthful specimens to whom the quick covert kill was paramount, and these few became S & R's rovers. Regulars gave each other nicknames. Rovers did not answer to nicknames, scorning even the small luxury of feeling damned together. Quantrill was only Quantrill; Sanger only Sanger.
Blanton Young did not regard himself as a heretic. He took great pains to show that one could remain on the church's Council of Apostles while serving as the nation's chief executive. America was recovering; and as always during a reconstruction period, the government relaxed its restrictions on business and industry. And individual freedoms? That was something else again.
An industrial spy, a union organizer, or an anti-Mormon activist was more likely to disappear than to face public trial. The President viewed his S & R cadre as a nicely-balanced tool. Regular missions, eighty per cent of the total, searched out the vulnerable and rescued individuals. The rover missions searched out dissidents and rescued the status quo. So far, Young's hit team was barely a rumor even among grumbling Catholics and members of masonic orders. Certainly the regular S & R members would not broach the secret because they did not share it. Just as certainly the assassins would not divulge it; each of them still carried small mastoid-implant transceivers, 'critics', with self-destruct charges that could drive a gram of debris into the brain with the same results as an explosive bullet.
The critic had been a wartime innovation and, working with Naval Intelligence, Boren Mills was as quick as Young to see the potential peacetime uses of this tiny, deadly audio monitor buried behind the ears of agents thoroughly trained in single combat. If government and business found common cause, they could also share common remedies. When both could fly the banners of a popular religious movement, a certain amount of excess could be made palatable to the public.
This was not to say that most Mormons, guided by their Council of Apostles, sought a repressive society.
In a genuine ecumenical spirit, LDS tithes helped defray the costs of some protestant sects and promoted open forums for debate. The church had even donated campaign contributions to some fence-straddling legislators of the Independent party, though Indys were similar to Democrats of the prewar era, many of them openly critical of this growing connection between the state and the church of the LDS.