Alan E. Nourse & J. A. Meyer (4 page)

"Then you drive it," Bahr said.
"Now
get
it moving."

He
knows you,
Alexander
thought.
He
knows you, and he's playing this little game out, just waiting for you to
break.
There was no longer
any question in Alexander's mind about his being investigated. But McEwen could
get him off the hook. He'd known McEwen back in Mexico, when McEwen was
training with BRINT. McEwen would help him . . .

Viciously,
Alexander slammed the controls into full drive. The car screamed out of the
soft, muddy rut, siren going, and Alexander sent it screeching along the center
of the road strip, wet grass and bushes slapping at the sleek, high-speed
plastic shell, headlight on high and red turret-light winking. The Volta could
actually do 300 on a good road, but on this winding, gravel-shouldered road
strip Alexander held it down to 120. They made a sharp turn, and he slammed the
directional gyro at a ninety-degree offset, using the boosters to overcome the
inertia of the loaded car. Gravel spat out under the single wheel as the Volta
skidded onto the shoulder, gyros whining to keep the car from toppling. He
could feel Bahr's huge body stiffen as a tree loomed up at them, then relax as
they slammed off it and kept on going after the jolt.

"Hold
it," Bahr said as they approached the helicopter cluster. Alexander hit
the brake button and the Volta squealed to a halt, rocking. Spotlights were on
them for three seconds before the car stopped. Carmine opened the door, and he
and Bahr jumped out without a word to Alexander.

The DIA ground troops were already trotting
into the drenched brush and forest, their flashlights bobbing, disappearing.
They melted into the brush with a certain grim urgency
...
no shouting, no waste motion. Probably veterans of the crack
801st, Alexander thought, the legendary guerilla army that had been fighting
the war of containment in the East Indies. Commanded by the British, the 801st
had never been manned by anyone but Americans, the toughest, hardest, most
incorrigible mercenaries the British could find, executing raids on Indonesia
and South China that made Sherman's march look like a reforestation project.
British Intelligence used the 801st to forge stubborn links in the Asian
economic and political situation, but BRINT's interest in a young army sent
back to the Americas each year a steady quota of battle-toughened, BRINT-
rrained
intelligence men in their late twenties.

The
DIA had their pick of these men, and to date there was no record of anyone
resisting arrest by DIA agents.
Which, Alexander thought, was
just a little bit ominous.

"Strike!"
the squawker boomed again.
"Ground Unit Three. There's something up here, Mr. Bahr."

"Hold your position," Bahr's voice
grated from one of the 'copters. "What do you see?"

"Nothing
clearly.
It's hot, though . . ."

"Get
some flares in the air. Bring your circle in tighter, but hold fire . . ."
Bahr's voice trailed off in a crackle of static. Then another voice came in.

"Mr.
Bahr? This is Johnson, at the plant. You were right, sir. Three U-metal slugs
are missing from Number Four pile. Dummies loaded instead."

"Good
work," Bahr's voice came back. "That about clinches it. We've got
them cornered out here. Sit tight."

Stunned,
slack-mouthed, Alexander slumped back in his seat, his heart barely beating,
cold sweat forming on his palms and forehead. A dead, crushing weight seemed to
be locked inside his chest.

Three slugs missing.

Even McEwen could not help
him now.

His
security system, worked out step by step over the months at Wildwood, thought
to be absolutely flawless, had let three U-metal slugs, each weighing fifteen
pounds and furiously radioactive, get out of the compound. And his career
...
he
swallowed,
a bitter taste cloying up in his mouth.

A supply dump
in
Watooki
at
best. At worst, a full-scale DIA investigation, a court-martial, a DEPCO
psych-probe, the final downgrading.

Once Bahr got those three
slugs, he was finished.

Somewhere
in the sky a flare burst, throwing dead white light down on the treetops.
Another flare, and another, appeared below the fiery 'copter rotor jets.
Alexander pulled himself out of the car, stumbled up the hill into the woods.
He heard radio chatter crackling from a ground unit as he passed:

"Disk . . ."

"What is it?
Where?"

". . .
looks
like some kind of craft. . . ."

"Where?"

. .
metal
disk, over
there to the left. . . ."

". . .
been
there all the time. . . "Move back, move back . . ."

Beyond
the closing circle of men, Alexander could see something. It lay in a clearing
in the trees, vaguely defined in the harsh flare light . . . something large
and gray and flat.

"Put
a camera on it, whatever it is," somebody was shouting very near him.

"Get
us Air,
Lowrie
Field; well need Air. Ground units
hold . . ."

Quite
abruptly, the gray thing in the clearing seemed to blossom out like a violent
orange flower. The blast wave of the explosion struck Alexander like a wall,
hurling him flat, as a flame-colored cloud mushroomed upward, brilliantly lit
from below by something burning furiously, briefly,
then
sputtering out in a wave of intense heat. The 'copters still in the air closed
in like so many vultures to peer down into the smoking crater, and in the
silence and darkness there was only the scattered sound of bits of wood, dirt
and metal falling down through the trees; then shortly after, the smaller
fragments, almost dust, sprinkling slowly down in the rain, silent, invisible,
and
slighdy
radioactive.

Numbly
, Alexander flexed his fingers a couple of
times, feeling his wrist artery hammer revealingly against the pressure cuff that
was making his left hand swell and discolor, and driving one of the polygraph
pens across the recording sheet in an agitated sinusoid pattern.

"It's
all very simple, Major," Bahr was saying, walking a-round in front of him.
"All we want from you is the truth. Now, I think that's a reasonable
enough request under the circumstances.
Just a few simple
facts.
You know them. You must know them, because you were the security
officer there, and you admit you devised the system. Our investigation is going
to turn up those facts eventually. You'll help yourself if you save us some
time."

"I've told you everything I know,"
Alexander insisted, his diaphragm collapsing in a long, exasperated sigh.

McEwen,
sitting on one side of the room, motioned to Bahr, who glared at Alexander for
a moment and then turned away with a growl. From the corner of his eye
Alexander watched them whisper. Bahr's huge fist slapped the arm of McEwen's
chair angrily; the elderly DIA Director mumbled back something low and
inaudible, shaking his head. Alexander couldn't catch the words, but one thing
was apparent: Bahr was winning the argument.

John McEwen had arrived. McEwen, the
ace-in-the-hole, the white hope, the letter-of-the-law defender of National
Stability and the democratic way of life, took one look at the gaping crater
five miles north of Wildwood, and ordered a complete news blackout (illegal
except under hemispheric Condition B), isolation of the area within a
twenty-mile radius (illegal without consent of the Army unit responsible for
the land, since it was part of a military reservation, and Alexander had not
even been asked for his consent), and scrambling of all communications (legal,
but almost without precedent since the bleak days of 1995-96 when the panic
wave that followed the Crash was at its bloodiest).

Bahr
had outlined the observed facts to McEwen, briefly and
audioritatively
,
and McEwen
had accepted the most obvious explanation. The three U-metal slugs missing from
the plant had been carried—by person or
persons
unknown-past
the road alarm, and loaded into the vehicle in the woods —whatever that
was—which promptly blew up when searchers approached it too closely.

When
Alexander had protested and brought up certain annoying details such as the
questions of method, motive, and the silent exit monitors at the plant gates,
Bahr had countered angrily with charges of obstruction, interference,
non-co-operation and concealment. Quickly he tore into the lardy arrival of
Alexander's security troops, who were still strung out halfway across Illinois
on a long eye-beam perimeter, wondering what had happened.

Finally Alexander had played his trump . . .
the blatant illegality of Bahr's DIA unit forcing an inventory at the plant.
McEwen muttered something unintelligible about Project Frisco, and walked back
to stare into the crater again. Alexander was packed into a 'copter and flown
to Chicago for questioning.

The questioning had started six hours ago.

In
spite of the glare of lights in front of him, Alexander could turn his head
enough to get a fairly good look at McEwen's face. The DIA Director's skin
looked dirty
gray,
his eyes hollow with deep creases.
The comers of his mouth were pulled down, immobile even when he talked. The
face was a mask, the face of a man who had been sick for a long time
...
or afraid.

Do I
look like that?
Alexander
wondered. He knew the look of a man who was fighting to hold on; he had seen it
on his own face often enough these last few months.

He
broke off sharply as the real, immediate problem of how to get this
investigation over with exploded in his mind. He felt a sudden wrenching in his
stomach, and a dizzy, sick feeling of fear. So far neither he nor Bahr had
given the slightest indication of their previous acquaintance, imposing their
own private rules in this cat-and-mouse game of
polygraphy
in which Alexander was the carefully-calibrated mouse. But the questioning was
getting sharper. Bahr didn't seem to tire; already Alexander could feel fatigue
catching up with him.

It was only a matter of time before his
ability to pick his way through the razor-edged questions would begin to
falter, and confusion and bewilderment would set in . . .

And he knew, as Bahr glared at him and argued
with McEwen, that there was more to this than just a routine interrogation.

Bahr was remembering Antarctica.

Vividly the memory flooded back to Alexander
now. Bahr had been in the Army then
...
a sergeant in Communications Command, assigned to the tiny post in the
earlywarning
net that stretched across the frozen
Antarctic continent.

How long ago? Four years?
Five?

Alexander's
mind placed the date instantly: July 12th, 2019, just three days after the first
radar alert, when the scopes of Station 1743, buried deep in the Antarctic ice,
had picked up three unidentified objects moving over the lower end of South
America at an altitude of 800 miles, three times higher than anything had
traveled since the satellites had been scuttled and the infamous Moon-rocket
project abandoned back in the '90s. The three objects had made four passes
around the Earth at precise orbital speed, tracked at the South Pole and across
the Pacific, then lost as they moved over the East Indies, China and the
Soviet. An immediate report had gone to the special intelligence section of
DEPEX, and when the objects did not reappear after the fourth pass across the
"dead" area, the entire Western Bloc went into Condition B—preparation
for H-missile attack.

Coded
intelligence releases from DEPEX inferred that the Eastern Bloc had developed a
missile, unknown even to British Intelligence liaison, which could be mounted
in orbit. BRINT of course denied that anything approaching that size could have
been developed in Eastern territory without their knowing it years ago, and
suggested an extraterrestrial source, possibly meteorites—a somewhat
unsatisfactory idea, since meteorites do not normally orbit at 800 miles.

Antarctic
Station 1743, Alexander's command, was the chief early-warning unit between
Southeast Asia and the vital South American population centers. It was expected
that the first hostile move from the East would be an armored H-missile
plunging into the buried station from a 600-mile altitude. The station had been
living on coffee and
hyperstimulated
fear for forty
hours, the air reeking with sweat and adrenalin, the men snarling at each other
with increasing tension, when the sergeant had come into Alexander's office.