Forty seconds ticked by while the elevator lowered Quantrill to the guts of the lab. Very slow elevator — or very deep basement. He'd been trained to memorize every datum going in, the better to grease his skids coming out. He tried, thrusting aside the failure scenarios his imagination paraded before him.
Fiasco One: They had sensors so good they would discover him before he had time to leave the crate, and guards alert enough to surround him before he could find a way out. Fade to Fiasco Two: His crate would be stored in a building completely removed from the others. He would have no explosives and no hovercycle. Fade to
Fiasco Three: They put all the crates into vacuum storage. Fadeout.
At least, he told himself, they were sliding the entire pallet load into the same place. That gave him the
'cycle and two hundred kilos of deadly 'desiccant'. Now if only they didn't start opening the damned crates immediately! Old Brubaker had manufactured a brief delay to make certain the delta could not arrive in the middle of the day.
Presently the alien singsong argot faded, borne away on shuffling feet. Quantrill's sensor, even on full gain, could detect no motion outside his crate. He eased noiselessly to the spyhole; put his eye to the lens expecting darkness. Instead he saw, dimly lit by fluorescents, a forest of crates on pallets. In the shadowy distance squatted a flat treaded earth-borer, its toothed boring bit erect on a cantilevered beam. He studied the rig for long minutes; it looked capable of chewing a tunnel all the way to the surface, if a man had the time and no concern for the noise he made — and if he knew how to operate the goddamn thing.
The concrete walls were featureless slabs except for two areas that drew his interest. In one place near the earth-borer, gray flatness gave way to soft contours in concrete that led into darkness. In another, a great white spinnaker of plastic bulged like a tumor into the storeroom, inflated from behind. Beside the velcrolok portal in the plastic, flexible conduits drooped from raceways in the ceiling to plunge like feeding tubes into the tumor. Whatever lurked behind that positive-pressure seal, he judged, must be very delicate to need clean-room conditions.
An orderly commotion of men and machines issued from somewhere beyond Quantrill's view. Moments later more lights flickered on. He saw that the dark contoured hole was an excavation, its rounded walls and domed ceiling sprayed with ferroconcrete, and that the job was not complete. Judging by the flexible seals where the concavity began, this excavation might eventually be sealed and pressurized with a twin to the portal nearby.
Four white-clad men came near, operating a pneumatic lift and bearing more crates that looked familiar.
The men were orientals, one with his hair in a pigtail, and they did not have the bodies of laborers. Faces glistened with sweat. A grunt, a snarl of torn fabric, a laugh; no hint that they might be tense. On the contrary, they flopped onto whatever was handy to wipe a brow, investigate a hangnail, stretch kinks from shoulders. Quantrill damned them for making it necessary for him to squat immobile, but ten minutes later got his reprieve.
The thickset Caucasian who accompanied the last palletload spoke mostly in the same foreign intonations, but Quantrill recognized him from mugshots provided by young Brubaker. Marengo Chabrier spoke with authority and received deference without exuding arrogance or false egalite in the process. A harried man, Quantrill decided; a man consumed by details and gifted with languages. His speech was peppered with American phrases: assembly line, overtime, and to a refrain of snickers, stoned to our follicles.
Quantrill recalled a tip from a sly-bodied Army linguist, Karen Smetana: a few perfect unaccented phrases can let you pass as a native from another village — but make sure you do pass on, before somebody realizes you're faking it. Now Quantrill stared at the other side of that coin. The foreign crew might not know any more of Quantrill's language than those few phrases Chabrier used.
But he'd heard Chabrier topside speaking excellent American. If Quantrill couldn't find a way out without a guide, his ticket outside would bear Chabrier's likeness. A month previous, driven by Control, Quantrill might have taken extraordinary chances on such a mission — in part because he'd had no hope in the future. Now he dared hope, knowing that hope might make him hesitate at some vital instant when hesitation equaled death. Then he thought of Marbrye Sanger, and trembled with fresh intent.
When the Frenchman finished his spiel, one of the Chinese drew a note plate from his smock and encoded notes on its keyboard as Chabrier studied the crate labels. The other men wandered off to the elevator and Quantrill considered taking two prisoners as soon as they were alone. Chabrier rapped a knuckle on one crate, then another, then Quantrill's, then a fourth. Priority items, perhaps, for immediate attention. A hail echoed in the near distance; Chabrier turned with his assistant and quickly walked away.
Quantrill's moment had not passed; it hadn't really existed.
He made himself lie back and recheck his equipment during the next half-hour, giving them abundant time. Better to waste a few minutes than to be surprised at his work. That surprise would work both ways, of course. His little Heckler & Koch automatic was hardly in the same class as a chiller, but for a silenced handgun its balance was respectable, and its Canadian 5 mm. rounds contained curare in their soft noses. They didn't blow you away; they just embalmed you where you stood.
His time-delay detonators remained a worrisome enigma because he had no idea how precise their rugged chemical timers might be. Young Brubaker had sworn by them. They would write like any other pens but, stabbed into a bag of ammonium nitrate with the top unscrewed and the timer set, were supposed to pop plus or minus one minute over a one-hour range. Sloppy in comparison to solidstate devices, they were invulnerable to electronic detection.
Quantrill was already setting the stuff up in his mind: a chain of bags overlapping in a vee along the base of two walls, with a shaped-charge mound piled between the legs of the vee. The blast waves would sequence themselves in milliseconds for maximum shock up through the building, pretty basic stuff for any powder money and just about the limit of Quantrill's expertise.
Sometime after nine P.M., he slid the catches from the door of his crate, grateful for the few glowing fluorescents. Working in furious haste, he took the sides from marked crates using detents as they'd shown him, then began to emplace the bags — and there were hundreds of them. He worked with the knowledge that he might be caught at it somehow, his coverall damp with sweat. He could not know that, as he spent his first breather inspecting the pressurized portal, an enhanced infrared video bug silently followed him with its snout.
Alone in his chambers at the other end of the lowest level, Marengo Chabrier watched his video monitor with cold shock.
CHAPTER 51
The great boar let instinctive caution divert him as he approached the scatter of old-style ranch structures, low black silhouettes on a moonlit horizon. He saw distant figures scurry in patches of light as the ranch staff welcomed the 'chuck-wagon' occupants. He might have stood motionless and waited there, but the wind was not right and some of the stock in nearby stables had evidently caught his scent.
Pacing silently away, Ba'al studied the compound as he tested the breeze and returned, this time downwind of the restive horses. By chance he chose to wait in the moonshadow of a darkened guest cabin. He waited with good cheer, for his questing nose repeatedly caught the promise of an oestrus female.