The hole started waist-high and extended to the ceiling. Beasley went through it with careful questing feet, backward, then was in urgent argument with others outside. Quantrill saw Beasley in the spread of half-light, now armed with a machine pistol. "I've told you what betrayal means, boy," he said. "Among the prophets, I'm the only friend you got."
"I want Delight," Quantrill whined, scrambling through the hole, one eye closed as Marty Cross had taught him. If you kept one eye closed in the light, that eye would have better night vision.
"Ever" body wants delight," an unfamiliar voice snickered. Faintly they could still hear the alarm; Quantrill felt sure it was patched into a radio alert.
"We got a little hightits vessel to get yet," Beasley warned, scooping up the beam and glass rope.
"You get her yourself," was the reply over receding steps of two men. Beasley stopped, indecisive.
"Go on," Quantrill said, taking a chance. "I'll find a way to get her out tomorrow."
"Tomorrow, shit, you don't know much! There ain't time; leave her!"
"I dunno where pa buried the stuff, and she does," Quantrill said, playing his hole card.
More cursing. A small vehicle thundered away without lights and Mitch Beasley sprinted to the larger vehicle. “Find the bitch so I can line up the truck," he called, tossing the cable into a cargo bay.
Quantrill knew Sanger's location; knew also that Control had arranged the transfer of other prisoners. He warned Sanger to get under a mattress, then resumed his monotonic transmission to Control. If law enforcement people reacted too quickly, he warned, they might blow the whole operation.
Beasley backed the terratired vehicle furiously toward the far end of the lockup; rushed to aid Quantrill at the high window. "Don't be scared, darlin'," Quantrill crooned through the window. "The kingdom of God almighty is at hand," and then the truck was lurching away, the glass cable humming as it came taut. The embedded windowframe came free this time, and a moment later Marbrye Sanger was wriggling past rough concrete. He grabbed her, felt the slide of lithe flesh, tasted the dusty, musty flavor of her mouth. Even in a jailbreak at midnight, he thought admiringly, Sanger gave award performances.
The cable and beam stowed, Beasley gestured Quantrill into the open cargo section and waved Sanger into the cab with him. When Beasley gestured now, he did it with a gun barrel. The truck sped away, going to battery mode for stealth, the hum of terratires and windsong muffling the electrics. The break had taken all of three minutes.
Alone, Quantrill spent the next ten minutes in an urgent dialogue with Control. “If Sanger acts too vulnerable to his religious doubletalk," he warned, "this Beasley character may decide to ice me and then sweet-talk her into showing him the stash. Tell her now, Control. He's quick; don't underestimate him."
"We don't," was the impersonal reply. "Beasley's thumbprint was on Sabado's belt buckle. We will brief Sanger as soon as she can acknowledge transmission."
Quantrill filed this for future reference. Sanger did not have to acknowledge a transmission, but inside that cab she was mostly surrounded by steel. Perhaps, after all, Control's own transmissions were more affected by a steel cage than T Section would like to admit. Quantrill reported that they were heading south on a secondary road, then cutting a trail to the east.
Beasley's helmsmanship was savage but unerring, the treadless terratires making a smooth spoor hard to follow. In an hour the truck, low beams flashing on when necessary, had covered fifty klicks of open country showing few and distant lights.
Quantrill roused himself as the truck stopped; saw the rhythmic flash of Beasley's lights, saw answering flashes from afar. Somewhere in the wild country on open range-land, T Section was about to enter the sacred sanctum of the Church of The Sacrificed Lamb.
Chapter Seventy-Two
By the last week in July, media broadcasts had done what SinoInd troops could not: US/RUS forces were pulling back on two fronts in fear of Chinese Plague. India's Parliament initiated a massive withdrawal of her expeditionary troops from Kazakhstan and repositioned them in an arc north of the Indian desert, on recommendation of the sly Kirpal. Everyone knew that a few of those troops had plague but, by isolating all transferred units, India kept ANZUS invaders guessing. China no longer needed those Indian reinforcements because the American Fifth Army had pulled out, taking up new positions in the Irkutsk region north of Mongolia. The Allies no longer feared a coordinated breakout from Mongolia but, perhaps inevitably, Russian troops had run short of antipersonnel mines and Frisbees before retreating.
The Russians knew of Chinese Plague from their radios, and those who placed little faith in protective CBW gear (i.e., most RUS troops) feared that they faced an enemy more than human. A Siberian salient already bulged up across the Amur, chiefly of harmless tribesmen seeking abandoned riches, becoming less harmless as plague spread into the tribes. Our Fifth Army made good use of RUS railways, racing to new positions above the Siberian salient. Thanks to excellent medical aid and frequent injections of half-truths in briefings, the morale of US troops was still good.
Keratophagic staph, our troops were told, depended largely on transmission from host to host, unlike windborne paranthrax. If you were young and well-fed, and if you stayed well clear of infiltrating locals, you might not be in danger. The CBW masks and envelopes would protect you in plague spots. The advance of the enemy — assuming he could rally for any advance — had been taken into account by the countless millions of antipersonnel minelets left by our re treating armies which we could trigger by microwave, or an enemy footfall could do it. The RUS still employed their interdicting Frisbees while backing away from the Sinkiang border. The westward retreat of our First and Third Armies was orderly.
The US Sixth and Eighth Armies still protected sortie bases in India, devastating that country's efforts to harvest a crop—any crop. The Viets were clamoring to know the whereabouts of some twenty divisions of troops they had sent into Szechuan. Allied media were only too happy to suggest a numbing truth (which we did not for a moment believe), namely that entire Viet divisions littered the floor of the Pacific in small defunct submarines. All this, our officers made clear to our troops. From several quarters, Allied troops were repeating an old phrase: home by Christmas.
In short, our troops got only the news.
Non-news: neutral Mexico, though pro-Allies, permitted a few well-heeled SinoInd refugees to take refuge in the State of Nayarit in June before she identified at least one case of plague among them. Removed offshore to the Islas Marias, they posed no threat beyond that of rumor.
Non-news: the rumor of Chinese Plague in Mexico was itself a news-vectored plague, gaining early credence through a few initial holo and radio broadcasts in our southern border cities. Our subsequent denials were fruitless appeals to frightened householders in Tucson and San Diego suburbs. While admitting that 'a few' Americans were needlessly evacuating, we did not add that in three days' time no US Customs people remained at Mexican border posts. Well-supplied by Pemex, Mexicans lost little time in streaming across the border. If gringos were fleeing from shadows, an enterprising campesino could help himself to what they left behind. Within a week, Pemex fuel was sloshing in Mexican trucks that plied the roads north of Mexicali, Nogales, Ciudad Juarez, in entrepreneurial support of this casual invasion. For the first time, America was learning what Germans had experienced in the final months of World Warn.
Non-news: the US Fourth Army was thinly spread on the west coast and depended on Mexico for half of its refined fuel since most of our refineries were in ruins. When Mexican tankers began to produce passengers as well as diesel fuel from San Diego to San Pedro, we had the choice of accepting both or neither. The Mexicans would not listen to schemes that kept their citizens offshore. This disrespect for US law was directly proportional to our loss of clout in Mexican eyes. Since the 1980's, Mexico's petroleum traffic had expanded her wealth greatly, but the US had lost half her population and ninety per cent of her industrial potential in the first week of the war. We were still capable of defying Mexico, but running on our reserves. It was a forthright case of a healthy neighbor leaning on a sick one, and only the politically naive were surprised. We had done exactly the same to Mexico, twice upon a time.Power politics is the only kind there is.