Dinosaurs & A Dirigible (31 page)

It grew increasingly easy to proceed as they drew nearer to their destination. Additional trails forked into the one they were following. After each confluence, the way grew broader. Clawed feet had worn the way deeper, as well, so that the surrounding brush now loomed above the vehicle. On Earth in a later day, each bush would have stood on a mound protected by its own roots from the sculpturing wind. Now only rain and the feet of passers-by affected the terrain.

One hundred yards from the edge of a meandering stream, the brush had been browsed away and the ground trampled flat. In the shade of the broad-leafed cottonwoods and the magnolias fringing the water rested an incredible profusion of animals. The PR man in the front was muttering what seemed to be a prayer, and Mordecai Greenbaum kept repeating. “Superb! Superb!” in Hebrew. The driver stopped at the edge of the brush without needing orders.

There were hundreds of animals in plain sight. The splotches of shade held groups of up to a score, usually of mixed species. One or more of each assemblage greeted the half-track with a snort or a stiffness and focused eyes; then the sentinel would relax, having determined that the newcomer was not a hunting carnivore. Beyond that, a resting dinosaur had no brain capacity to find interest.

A single bull triceratops paced toward them. Its huge forehead bulged with jaw muscles instead of gray matter. Fifty feet away, the ten-ton beast halted and waggled its horns in sidewise arcs, its beak low. When the half-track did not respond to the challenge, even the triceratops struck it from its short list of significant stimuli. It waddled back toward the shade. Dried mud clinging to the ceratopsian’s hide turned it white. Where the mud had flaked off, the scales were as black and shiny as graphite.

“Oh, that I had brought my paints,” the Prime Minister murmured. “It is a landscape not of hills and trees but of animate creatures.”

In a carefully businesslike tone, Vickers said, “Here’s the bait to call down your tyrannosaur, Mr. Secretary. And besides using the carcass for the purpose, there are any number of fine heads. The ceratopsians make trophies that draw attention to themselves in any room they don’t absolutely fill. That triceratops that looked us over, or one of those pentaceratops over there”—he pointed—“the spikes are striking and the coloration is quite impressive if the shadow didn’t hide it.”

“And they’ll let you shoot, old boy,” Warren put in from behind Secretary Cardway. “No need to content yourself with one, not where the game’s never been hunted before.” He took his left hand from his gunstock to gesture in a wide arc. Though stretches of mud flats broke the stream into a series of connected pools, the line of cottonwoods and magnolias squirmed unbroken as far as the hunters could see in either direction. There was no reason to doubt that the herds of animal life in midday somnolence extended as far as the watercourse.

“There must be a dozen species of hadrosaurs in sight from here, crests of every shape and size,” the British guide gloated. “Just as many ceratopsians—take one of each. If they spook here, we’ll simply cruise a little further up the line to where they—”

“Let me see that,” the Secretary grunted, elbowing aside the soldier manning the fifty-caliber machine gun. The startled trooper resisted momentarily, his left hand still gripping the weapon. Stern gave him a quick order in Hebrew. Puzzled, the soldier slid aside. The driver, seated directly below the big muzzle, covered his ears with his hands.

“Pull the charging handle once more,” Stern said quietly. Cardway frowned. The Israeli official reached past the politician and drew back the lever on the right side of the receiver himself. When he let the handle go, the breech-block clanged like a horseshoe striking an anvil. “Now it is ready,” Stern said. “You press the trigger with your thumbs.”

Secretary Cardway’s face grew intent while those around him watched with varied expressions. The elephant guns had roared. The blast of the cal-fifty was by contrast as sharp as that of Vickers’ Ml4, as loud as a stick of bombs going off nearby. The first three rounds were high. One of them touched a cottonwood and exploded, shattering a branch as thick as a man’s thigh. Splintered wood and then the branch itself tumbled down on a trio of duckbills leaping upright from their sleep. Cardway corrected, lowering the muzzle and firing again. This time the explosive bullets raked the tree trunk and the bellies of the dinosaurs as they bolted straight at the gun. The duckbills flopped to the ground, squealing like freight trains slowing.

One of the wounded creatures staggered to its feet again. Cardway ignored it, swinging his gun onto a cluster of ceratopsians. Vickers leveled his own rifle. It was hard to sight on the duckbill’s head. It bobbed and dipped as the creature tried with its short forelegs to pat away the coils of its own intestines tangling it. A rush of tears blinded the guide. He cradled his weapon again, whispering to himself.

The half-track shuddered with recoil as Cardway hosed a triceratops standing broadside to them, thirty yards away. One of the beast’s long brow horns shattered, then a string of white flashes traversed its side. The triceratops plunged forward, bawling, and collapsed with its beak in the furrow it had plowed. The smoky line of tracers continued to snap through the air which its target had vacated. Bullets walked across the surface of the stream, gouting spray at two-foot intervals. Then they crashed into a gaggle of four pentaceratops staring blankly at the ruin of their fallen kinsman. The nitroguanadine-bursting charges slashed the beasts. Two fell, two turned to run. The latter drew with them the panicked creatures to either side. Mud and water sprayed as the line of animals rushed across the stream, stretching away from the gunfire as if it were an arrow drawing a bowstring.

The muzzle blasts ceased abruptly. An instant later the last explosive bullet cracked. The only mechanical noise remaining was that of an ejected case, ringing like a wind chime on the ground among the brass that had preceded it. The stench of propellant, pooling about the half-track in layers, was ripe and cloying. At least it hid the stink of blood and excrement from the dozen wounded and dying dinosaurs nearby. It did not hide their cries. Nothing could have done that, but the crashing gunfire had made even the bellows of pain sound reedy and distant.

Henry Vickers climbed over the side of the vehicle. Behind him, Secretary Cardway was saying, “I’ve wanted to do that ever since the Convention when those bastards from New York gave me the shaft so deep it clicked on my molars. Yeah . . .” Without turning around, Vickers could not tell whether the Secretary of State was addressing someone in particular or was just letting his thoughts spray the landscape. Vickers was afraid of what he might do if he turned to look at the man.

The gut-shot hadrosaur was still standing. It eyed Vickers’ approach as it might have that of one of the scavengers of its own time. Pain and shock kept the beast shackled into place, hooting at the guide through its tongueless palate. Even crippled, it towered above the man.

“Henry!” Adrienne cried.

Vickers shot the duckbill through the roof of its mouth. Soft tissue spattered him. The two-ton dinosaur arched backwards as if it had touched a high-tension line. Both the hind feet left the ground for the instant before the body thudded down on its side. The muscles were spasming under the russet hide, but there was no brain left to register pain.

Vickers walked to the next hadrosaur, sprawled in a heap on the ground. He socketed the slotted muzzle brake of the M14 in the creature’s ear and fired. The carcass did not move. The guide stepped toward the third beast, which had begun squirming in the direction of the stream after the explosive bullets smashed both hip joints.

“Henry!” Adrienne repeated, close at hand. She caught him by the shoulder. “What are you doing?”

“Let go of me,” the guide mumbled.

“Then get hold of yourself!” his wife said. Vickers pulled free. The blonde woman stepped in front of him and brain-shot the wounded hadrosaur herself. Vickers paused at the crash of the Schultz and Larsen. When Adrienne turned to face him, he met her eyes.

“All right,” Adrienne said angrily, “we’ll do what we have to do. But we don’t need to stand on top of the goddamned things to put paid to them!”

“No, I’m sorry,” the guide said. “I didn’t—I won’t do something foolish like that again.”

The phrase “do what we have to do” echoed through Vickers’ mind while he and his wife finished off the wounded animals. He continued to think about it far on into the night.

In a landscape that had no light source other than the stars, the propane mantle lantern inside turned the whole compound of mosquito netting into a pearly prism. The intrusion vehicles, the half-tracks, and the individual shelters within were blocks of shadow. A man, a shadow himself, stood just inside the zippered gate.

Vickers paused, still in the darkness as far as the person waiting was concerned. Beside him, his wife sighed. It was the only sound or sign of restiveness that she had given during the silent hours outside the compound. The guide smiled invisibly at himself and stepped forward again, fumbling for the zipper. Avraham Stern leaned toward him from the other side and opened a slit with a single motion. “Henry,” he said in greeting, “Mrs. Vickers. A pleasant night.”

Though the netting could not have made a significant difference, night sounds seemed distanced within the compound. The carnivore snarling at a lesser fellow was suddenly millions of years away. Adrienne lighted one of her small cigars; it belonged to this world, not the other one beyond the nylon gauze.

“Henry, might I speak with you for a moment?” the Israeli official asked. “You are well, I trust?”

Adrienne’s face glowed orange beneath the brim of her bush hat as she drew on her cigar. The smoke she exhaled hung in the distant lantern light like the ink of a squid in still water. “Me for a bath,” she said. “There’s no point hunting in the lap of luxury if you don’t—luxuriate now and again.” She sauntered toward the trailers that served as kitchen and showers, part of the cargo from the back-up insertion. Her rifle slanted past her left shoulder, safe and ready to use at an instant’s notice.

“I’m all right,” Vickers said, both men watching Adrienne disappear into the trailer. “I just—thought it might be a good idea to be outside for a time.”

“Certainly,” the official said. His right hand was toying with the breech of his rifle. When he noticed the fact, he stopped. “A good night to sit and talk, certainly.”

The guide laughed and dropped to seat himself cross-legged on the ground. “Avraham, every word anybody says within three hundred meters of the compound gets routed through the alarm system. Straight into the command post. Now, I’m not going wandering around farther than that into the dark; and do you really think I was going to say the things you’re afraid I was saying where the guard is going to run straight to you with them? No, I went out to sit and think; and Adrienne came out to sit with me and I suppose think too . . . or not. And then we came in.” He looked at Stern, who could see the outlines of his smile and feel the falseness of it. “We’ve got a problem that needs solving, you know,” Vickers continued softly.

“Henry,” the official said.

“No, no.” The guide brushed away the unspoken fear with his free hand, the hand that did not hold an automatic rifle. “No, I mean the problem you pay me to deal with, making important clients happy. Getting one a tyrannosaur, in this case.”

Stern did not attempt to hide his relief. “And you have?” he asked. “That is . . . is very good. Mr. Warren does not feel there is any certainty that a tyrannosaur will visit the, ah, bait, in the time at hand. And the Prime Minister is equally sure, with which I concur, that the time cannot be extended. Secretary Cardway will hunt tomorrow with us. To keep him longer must be against his will; which would, of course, be even worse than the present unfortunate circumstances.”

Vickers rose again in the limber motion of a man younger than he was. “All right,” he said, “we’ll see. Can you get the others together—Warren and the Prime Minister, that is?”

The official chuckled. “They are waiting in the command post,” he said. “I gave the guards—the soldiers—leave from listening to the warning microphones when I realized where you were. Not that I needed to have worried, of course.”

The command post was another trailer. It housed the radio, the alarm system, and the banks of nicad batteries on which they could operate when the half-track generators were not present to drive them. The lantern, which burned continuously in the center of the compound, hung on a pole nearby; but within the trailer, the only light was that from the instruments. In the blue glow, Thomas Warren disappeared behind his moustache and the Prime Minister looked like a skull. The amplified sounds of the Cretaceous night wove a blanket that smothered the words whispered within.

Vickers followed Stern inside. The guide started to close the door, then frowned. He gestured out into the darkness, toward the distant quadrant where the Secretary of State’s tent had been pitched.

Stern’s smile was a shift of the planes of his face in the dim light. “He was dictating in his tent,” the official said. “Now he is asleep. One of the sensors—” he tapped a separate display panel above a larger area screen—“was set within the compound, you see. It will register footsteps, long before they reach us. And his dog is sleeping at his feet.”

Vickers grinned back. Craig had been billeted in the large tent with the soldiers. By his own choice, however, the bodyguard had spread his bedroll on the ground a few yards from the entrance to the Secretary’s tent.

“That one concerns me, sometimes,” said Mordecai Greenbaum. “He is under too much strain. Either they should have sent three or four guards—or they should have been sensible and not sent any.”

Vickers shrugged. It was too late to worry about that now. “All right,” he said. “I’ve got a notion of how to get Cardway what he wants. But it’s going to be expensive. It’ll take one, maybe two round trips of the big intrusion vehicle to do it and to cover up afterwards what we’ve done.”