"Oh, I would," she agreed sweetly, "but I'm afraid I don't have any standing in her chain of command, now do I?"
"You're enjoying this, aren't you?"
"Well, I have to enjoy something, Dick."
Several thousand miles from Holy Loch, a silent shape lay hidden on a rough flank of the Meseta de las Vizcachas at the southern tip of the Andean Mountains. The flight from Antarctica had been irksome and boring, for the pilot had held his speed to a mere eight hundred kilometers per hour and his altitude to less than a thousand meters. He hadn't enjoyed that, but he had also had no choice, for he had encountered an irritatingly high number of radar sources as he approached Cape Horn. Despite all earlier expectations, the tension between Buenos Aires and London was on the boil again, and the United Kingdom-already facing an increasingly chaotic situation in Southeastern Europe and suspicious that Argentina hoped that chaos would distract it from other matters-was determined that there would be no repeat of the Falklands War. The British military presence in the Falkland Islands had been substantially reinforced over the past eighteen months, and now both sides glared at one another through the invisible beams of their radar installations.
The Troll had neither known nor cared why there was so much electronic activity. It was simply one more problem to be dealt with, and his threat receivers and onboard computers had analyzed busily away. The primitive nature of the detection systems baffled his usual ECM equipment, but once he had a broader database it should be relative child's play to adjust for it, he decided. In the meantime, he'd descended to an altitude of fifty meters and crept under them with no more than a flicker of resentment that he must slink along in such a fashion.
He'd picked his hiding place with care, settling into a craggy pocket on the mesa's flank before he deployed three of his combat mechs. They'd whined off into the darkness, nearly silent on their anti-gravs, to swoop upon the mobile radar station the Argentine Air Force had placed near Cape Blanco to cover a blind spot. It had amused him to borrow his erstwhile masters' "sampling" technique, but the results had been disappointing.
His internal visual pickup swiveled dispassionately over the tightly curled figure on the floor of his cramped "control room." The motionless human wore the uniform of a captain in the Argentine Air Force, and at least its sobbing whimpers had finally stopped. So had its mental processes, unfortunately. The Troll felt a glow of disgust as he regarded his victim. The humans of his own time had been far tougher than this worthless piece of carrion. It was disturbing to reflect that he shared a common genetic heritage with it.
Still, there were extenuating circumstances, he supposed. This business of insinuating himself into human brains wasn't quite as straightforward as he'd assumed it would be, though it didn't occur to him that only his own arrogance had suggested that it would be simple.
The inert lump of flesh on his deck had been terrified when a trio of silent, metallic shapes invaded its isolated radar post, but it had tried. The Troll had to allow the captain that much-it had tried. It had called frantically for assistance, but the Troll's mechanical minions had jammed all its communication circuits even before they crossed the post's perimeter and butchered the paratroopers assigned to provide security. The captain and its men had rushed out of the command trailer, and it had emptied its Browning automatic into one of the combat mechs at point-blank range. In fact, it had actually reloaded with trembling fingers and emptied its weapon a second time in the moments the war machines took to slaughter its small team of technicians, but its pistol had been as futile as the paras' assault rifles.
The uselessness of its weapons in the face of the otherworldly attack had replaced fear with horror and panic at last ... or perhaps it had been the realization that it alone survived. It had turned to flee, but the IR systems of the combat mechs had picked it out of the darkness like a glowing beacon. In part, the Troll blamed himself for what had happened after that, but he'd been unable to resist the pleasure of drawing out the pursuit until the madly fleeing human collapsed in sweating, whimpering terror in the clammy fog. Only then had the combat mech closed in with the capture field and carried the twitching body away while its companions piled the dead in and around the trailer and set it afire.
The flames had arced into the heavens, turning droplets of fog into glittering tears of blood and gold, as the soulless mechanisms withdrew. Secondary explosions of generator fuel and ammunition had disemboweled the trailer, dismembering and scattering the victims' bodies, and the Troll had been content. He had his specimen, and even if he didn't understand the tensions which afflicted the region, he had observed enough to know there were two sides in conflict. He felt confident the side he had attacked would blame the other for it.
But Captain Santiago had proven a frustratingly imperfect prize. The Troll was fairly certain the human had begun to crack even before it recovered consciousness within the hidden fighter, but its mind had collapsed completely under the defilement and physical agony of his clumsy invasion. The Troll's grasping mental tendrils had time to snatch only the most jumbled of gestalts from the crumbling ruin before it lapsed into merciful catatonia, and nothing he'd tried had been able to drag it back from the escape of its self-imposed non-thought.
The Troll snarled a mental curse and summoned a combat mech. The machine whirred in on the big, low-pressure tires it used for ground movement and lifted the fetal curl of flesh in tireless arms. The Troll left the machine to its autonomous programming, too frustrated with his own clumsiness to find his usual pleasure in observing the death of a human, however mad, as the mech carried the captain outside and killed it.
The interior lighting fell to its normal, feeble levels, and the Troll considered the fragmentary information he'd gleaned. He had only a vague notion of who these "British" enemies of the captain were, but he had learned enough to be disinterested in them. He had, however, been surprised by how few nuclear-armed power blocs there were on this planet-surely that indicated an even cruder level of technology than he had anticipated? But it seemed that the only true so-called superpower lay further to the north on this same land mass. That was interesting. And it had an elective form of government. That was even more interesting.
The combat mech returned from its task, leaving behind a smoking pit containing a few ashy flakes of Captain Hector Santiago y Santos, Feurza Aerea Argentina. The hatch closed behind it, and four hundred feet of night-black silence rose into the dripping night with less sound than an indrawn breath. It skirted the southern slopes of La Meseta de las Vizcachas and dipped down into the valleys of the Andes, moving slowly and steadily north.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The US Navy CH-53E Super Stallion hovered above the helipad on USS McKee's afterdeck, navigation lights twinkling as it sank slowly onto the brightly lit landing circle, and Mordecai Morris made himself sit motionless in its red-lit, noisy belly by sheer force of will.
He turned his head and smiled at Jayne Hastings. Did he look as unnatural in his flight suit and helmet as she did? He was certain he looked equally tired, at least, he thought, running his aching mind back over the journey which had brought them here.
On the face of it, the whole thing was preposterous, and only the fact that Admiral McLain also knew Dick Aston could account for it. Even so, he'd been incredulous and a bit incensed by the paucity of the information Morris had for him. In the end, though, CINCLANT had agreed that if there was the slightest possibility Aston really was onto something the trip had to be made, and things had begun to roll.
Their original plan to fly out on an Air Force B-1B scheduled for a training mission to Britain had been scrubbed when the South Atlantic suddenly turned hot. Morris shook his head sadly, wondering what had gone wrong. He had many contacts in the Royal Navy, and he'd been positive the Brits contemplated no offensive action. But something had hit the fan down there, and the Argentinean charges of unprovoked attacks and the massacre and mutilation of prisoners sounded ugly, indeed. It was too bad the US hadn't had a recon bird up to see what was going on for itself, but it appeared that the first the Brits knew of it had been a sudden, totally unexpected strike on one of their LPH assault ships by a quartet of the Mirage 2000-5s which had finally replaced the venerable Super Entendards as Argentina's primary launch platform for the Exocet.