"Blood?"
"No way to tell."
"Use your nose, man. You know what blood smells like. "
The hound-dog sound of the captain sniffing the air transmitted back to the tower.
Finally the captain admitted what both officers knew instinctively.
"We appear to have lost the team, colonel." Earl Armalide had been prepared for anything.
If it was a race war, no problem. He had built himself a fortress of timber and stone on a high hill in the wilds of Oklahoma, near Enid. Below the barbed-wire-topped fieldstone fence, he had cut down every tree and bush and kept the hill denuded with defoliants. It gave him a clear field of fire in all directions. No pillaging revolutionaries were going to get past Earl Armalide's 334-piece gun collection.
If it was Armageddon, he had that covered. The basement of his home was built with three-foot-thick granite blocks encased in lead for protection against radiation. Inside the blocks he had built the finest fallout shelter imaginable. The house would go if it was caught in the blast radius, of course, but even a direct hit by a high-yield thermonuclear device would only fuse the topside escape hatch. There was still the escape tunnel leading out into the forest. Earl Armalide had enough provisions-canned vegetables, dried fruits, water, and condensed milk-to survive as long as the gas-powered generators held. He even had a VCR with a six-hundred tape library. He could live in Spartan comfort until the radiation dropped to survivable levels.
If it was an invasion, Earl was prepared for that too. He strung fine razor wire from the ham-radio antenna mast on his roof to the surrounding fence. They were like the strands of a spider's web, thin and nearly invisible. If Communist paratroopers tried to land within his designated defense perimeter, they would dismember themselves coming down. Earl would put them out of their misery as they bled on the ground, of course. He believed that soldiers deserved to die with dignity. And he had plenty of bullets to waste. He cast them himself.
He had it all figured out because Earl Armalide was a survivalist. He knew the end was coming, and he was going to survive it even if no one else did. Let them come. On foot, by air, in tanks, dressed in camouflage or in bulky flak jackets. They couldn't get up the hill without being seen. No one got up the hill, except the mailman, who was allowed to slip the mail into a gun port in the main gate-which Earl only opened for his monthly dash for supplies. Earl allowed the mailman up the hill so he could receive his subscription copy of Survivalist's Monthly. He always threw the rest of the mail away.
That was Earl Armalide's downfall.
When they came for him, they were not wearing combat fatigues, or dropping out of the sky with Kalashnikov rifles cradled to their chests. They came in a late-model Ford, wearing gray worsted and clutching expensive leather briefcases.
"IRS," one of the men called into the gate intercom.
"Go away," Earl Armalide said. "I don't pay taxes anymore."
"Yes, sir. That's why we're here, Mr. Armalide. You've ignored repeated requests to explain your nonpayment of taxes at our Oklahoma City office and have been declared in default. We'll have to ask you to come with us."
"Nothing doing. What if they drop the big one while we're in traffic? All this protection won't do me any good, now will it?"
"Mr. Armalide, this is a serious matter. It's your duty as an American citizen to pay your taxes. Now, will you open the gate, please?"
"Look, I don't even have any money anymore. I ain't worked since eighty-one."
"We understand that. But you are delinquent back to 1977."
"I ain't paying."
"Then we may have to confiscate your property and sell it at auction."
Those were the last words the IRS agent ever spoke. Earl Armalide split his skull like a melon with a clean shot from a .22 Swift. The contents of the agent's skull splattered onto his companion's face. The second agent pawed at the liquid matter in his eyes and walked around in circles while Earl Armalide tried to get a bead on his head. He could not.
So Earl shot him in the right knee. When the man folded up, Earl took him out with a head shot. He felt bad about that. He didn't enjoy the thought of the man suffering from a shattered knee in the three-second interval between the two shots. As his daddy had always told him,"Earl, killin's one thing. But inflicting suffering on any living thing, that's a sin in the eyes of your creator. Always go for the head, son. It's God's way. "
Earl left the bodies out in the sun.
When a second Ford came up the dirt road later that day, Earl waited for them to spot the bodies. He tripped a radio-controlled antitank mine buried in the dirt. The car jumped twelve feet into the air and landed in flames.
Two days later, backed by an FBI SWAT team, state troopers surrounded his hillside home. Earl held them off for nearly a week as the helicopters buzzed overhead and the story of his siege climbed to the top of the national newscasts with each passing day. After he had picked off nearly a dozen of them when they attempted to storm the south approach, Earl began to realize they were not going to go away, no matter how many he killed.
Earl stuffed his pockets full of ammo and dried fruit, collected his two favorite rifles, and belted a.44 AutoMag pistol to his hip. He stuffed the latest, unread issue of Survivalist's Monthly into his back pocket and took a last, wistful look at his prized collection of Mack Bolan paperbacks before he disappeared into the fallout shelter, escaping through a tunnel that led to the woods where he had buried a crated trail bike.
The trail bike carried him as far as the Ozarks in Missouri, where he hot-wired a pickup truck. He drove east, not exactly sure where he was going. He traveled by day. By night he slept in the flatbed, his eyes on the heavens above. Earl fervently hoped the nukes wouldn't fall while he was so exposed.
On the fifth night, he realized there was only one path to survival. Out of America. There was no way he could build a new shelter, and no time to do it in. He would have to go somewhere safe, somewhere the Soviets would not attack. Some place where there were no people, no enemies, no race problems, and no IRS.
Earl Armalide decided to go to Tahiti. He jumped out of the back of his flatbed in the middle of the night when the inspiration hit him. He drove to the only place he knew where he could pick up an international flight, New York City. It was true he did not have enough money to buy a ticket, but he did have three guns. Guns were as good as money in some situations. Sometimes better.
Earl left his guns in the pickup while he wandered through the bewildering maze of terminals at Kennedy Airport. He looked in vain for the official Tahitian airline. Finally he asked at the JAL counter. He thought JAL might be Tahitian.
"You go to Tahiti, lady?"
"No, sir, I'm afraid we're not going anywhere today," said the ticket agent. "They've asked us to evacuate the terminal."
"They? They who?" Earl asked suspiciously, wishing he hadn't left his AutoMag in the truck.
"There's a Russian spacecraft on the main runway. The Air Force has it surrounded. We're being told to evacuate to the city."
Earl Armalide followed the woman's pointing finger.
Out on the runway, like a sick bird, the big white shape of the Yuri Gagarin sat quietly.
"What's it doing there?" Earl demanded fearfully.
"No one knows. Could you please leave now?"
"Sure, sure, I'm goin'," said Earl. He backed out of the lounge, one eye warily regarding the silent shuttle. This was it. Earl was convinced of it. The Russians' first move. Out in the parking lot, he ran for his pickup, and jumped in. He ground the starter to life, and then it hit him.
There was no chance of reaching Tahiti. There was no returning to Enid, either. Earl Armalide was a fugitive. Sooner or later, the government would catch up with him, and Earl knew he would die in a hail of gunfire. The way he had always dreamed of dying.