The Rackham Files (13 page)

"The best guess is that the animal's owner is hunting, all right. Here's what we have on the big one," she said, selecting another glossy. "Four men and a woman weren't as lucky as the fellow who lost his feet."

I gazed at an eight-by-ten of a plaster cast, dirt-flecked, that stood next to a meter stick on a table. Something really big, with a paw like a beclawed rhino, had left pugmarks a foot deep. It might have been a species similar to the dead pet, I thought, and said so. "Where'd this cast come from?"

"Near the place where the beer-bust was busted. They're taking more casts now at the Sacramento State University campus. If the hunter's on all-fours, it may weigh only a few tons."

"Davis campus; Sac State—fill it in, will you?"

It made a kind of sense. Once inside a chilled-steel cage, the captive pet had quieted down for ethologists at Davis. They used tongs to fumble a little plastic puck from a clip on the harness, and sent it to Sacramento State for analysis, thinking it might be some kind of an owner tag. It turned out to be a bug, an AM/FM signal generator—and they hadn't kept it shielded. The owner must have monitored the transmitter and followed it to Sacramento. More guesswork: its vehicle had traveled in the American River to a point near the Sac State labs where the plastic puck was kept.

And late Tuesday evening, something big as a two-car garage had left a depression on the sand of an island in the river; and something mad as hell itself had come up over the levee and along a concrete path to the lab.

A professor, a research assistant, a top-clearance physicist brought in from nearby Aerojet, and an FBI field agent had seen the hunter come through a pumice block wall into the lab with them, but most of the information they had was secure.

Permanently.

Dana Martin didn't offer photos to prove they'd been dismembered, but I took her word for it. "So your hunter got its signal generator back," I prompted, "and split."

"No, no, and yes. It's
your
hunter, and our man had left the transmitter wrapped in foil in the next room, where we found it. But yes, the hunter's gone again."

"To Davis?"

"We doubt it. Up the river a few klicks; there's an area where a huge gold dredge used to spit its tailings out. A fly-fisher led us to remains in the tailings near the riverbank yesterday. A mighty nimrod type who'd told his wife he was going to sight in his nice new rifle at the river. That's a misdemeanor, but he got capital punishment. His rifle had been fired before something bent its barrel into a vee and—get this—embedded the muzzle in the man's side like you'd bait a hook."

"That's hard to believe. Whatever could do that, could handle a gorilla like an organ grinder's monkey."

"Dead right, Rackham—and it's loose in the dredge tailings."

Well, she'd warned me. I knew the tailings area from my own fishing trips. They stretch for miles on both sides of the American River, vast high cairns of smooth stones coughed up by a barge that had once worked in from the river. The barge had chewed a path ahead of it, making its own lake, digesting only the gold as it wandered back and forth near the river. Seen from the air, the tailings made snaky patterns curling back to the river again.

This savage rape of good soil had been committed long ago and to date the area was useless. It was like a maze of gravel piles, most of the gravel starting at grapefruit size and progressing to some like oval steamer trunks. A few trees had found purchase there; weeds; a whole specialized ecology of small animals in the steep slopes. The more I thought about it, the more it seemed like perfect turf for some monstrous predator.

I took a long breath, crossed my arms, rubbed them briskly and stared across the table at Dana Martin. "You haven't given me much to go on," I accused.

"There's more on the recording," she said softly.

I guessed from her tone: "All bad."

Shrug: "Some bad. Some useful."

I let her lead me downstairs. She had an audio-tape salvaged from the lab wreckage, and played me the last few minutes of it.

A reedy male expounded on the alien signal generator. "We might take it apart undamaged," he ended, sounding wistful and worried.

"The Bureau can't let you chance it," said another male, equally worried.

A third man, evidently the Aerojet physicist, doubted the wisdom of reproducing the ar-eff signals since what looked like junk on a scope might be salient data on an alien receiver. He offered the use of Aerojet's X-ray inspection equipment. A young woman—the research assistant—thought that was a good idea at first. "But I don't know," she said, and you could almost hear her smile: "it looks kinda neat the way it is."

The woman's sudden voice shift stressed her non sequitur. It sounded idiotic. I tossed a questing frown at Dana and positively gaped as the recording continued.

The Feebie again: "I suppose I could ask Scott King to let you disassemble it. Hell, it's harmless," he drawled easily in a sudden about-face. King, as I knew, was his—and Dana Martin's—SAC in the region.

The reedy older voice was chuckling now. "That's more like it; aren't we worrying over trifles?"

The physicist laughed outright. "My sentiments exactly." Under his on-mike mirth I could hear the others joining in.

And then the speaker overloaded its bass response in a thunderous crash. Several voices shouted as the second slam was followed by clatters of glass and stone. Clear, then: "Scotty, whatthehell—" ending in a scream; three screams. From somewhere came a furious clicking, then an almost subsonic growling
whuffff.
Abrupt silence. Posterity had been spared the rest.

I glowered at Dana Martin. "What's good about that?"

"Forewarning. Our man wasn't the sort to vacillate, and the professor was known as a sourball. It's barely possible that they all were being gassed somehow, to hallucinate during the attack."

"Maybe," I said. "That would explain why your man thought he saw Scotty King coming through the wall. Ah—look, Dana, this just about tears it. You need a covey of hoverchoppers to find this, this hunter of yours. I get a picture of something that could simply stroll up to me while I grinned at it, and nothing short of a submarine net could stop it. Won't I even have a brick agent to help?"

"Every hovercraft we can spare is quartering the Berryessa region. And so are a lot of chartered craft," she said softly, "carrying consular people from Britain, France, the Soviets, and the United Chinese Republics.
They know,
Rackham, and they intend to be on hand from the first moment of friendly contact."

"Some friendly contact," I snorted. I realized now that the air activity over Lake Berryessa was a deliberate decoy. "Surely we have the power to ground the rest of these guys . . ."

"The instant our government makes contact, we are committed by treaty to sharing that confrontation with the rest of the nuclear club," Dana said wearily. "It's an agreement the Soviets thought up last year, of which we have been forcibly reminded in the past days."

I showed her my palms.

"
You're not government,
" she hissed. "We're a laissez faire democracy; we can't help it if a private U.S. citizen does the first honors. Could we help it if he should dynamite the spacecraft in perfectly understandable panic?"

"Destroy a diamond-mine of information? Are you nuts?" For the first time my voice was getting out of hand.

"Perfectly sane. We've got a kit for you to record the experience if you can get into the craft—maybe remove anything that looks portable, and hide it. We don't want you to totally wreck the vehicle, just make it a hangar queen until another civilian friend has studied the power plants and weaponry, and then he might blow it to confetti."

I was beginning to see the plan. Even if it worked it was lousy politics. I told her that.

"This country," she said, "has an edge in communications and power plants at the moment. We'd a whole lot rather keep that edge, and learn a few things to fatten it, then take a chance that everybody—including Libya—might get into an equal technological footing with us overnight.
Now
will you drop the matter?"

"I may as well. Am I supposed to ask the damn' hunter for some thermite so I can burn his ailerons a little?"

"We've sunk a cache of sixty per cent dynamite in the river shallows for you—common stuff you could buy commercially. We've marked it here on a USGS map. Best of all, you'll have a weapon."

I brightened, but only for a moment. It was a gimmicked Smith & Wesson automatic, a bit like a Belgian Browning. Dana took it from her briefcase with reverence and explained why the special magazine carried only seven fat rounds. I could almost get my pinkie in the muzzle: sixty calibre at least. It was strictly a short-range item rigged with soluble slugs. Working with the dead pet and guessing a lot, Cal's veterinary science wizards had rendered some of its tissues for tallow and molded slugs full of drugs. They might stop the hunter.

On the other hand, they might not.

If I couldn't make friends with it I would be permitted to shoot for what, in my wisdom, I might consider noncritical spots on its body.

Finally,
if
I hadn't been marmaladed and
if
I had it stunned, I was to punch a guarded stud on the surveillance kit which looked like an amateur's microvid unit with a digital watch embedded in its side. At that point I could expect some other co-opted civilian to "happen" onto me with his Hoverover.

I wondered out loud how much money the other guy was getting for his part in this, and Dana reminded me that it was none of my damned business. Nor should I worry too much about what would happen after the beast was trussed up in a steel net and taken away. It would be cared for, and in a few days the Feebies would "discover" what the meddling civilians had done, and the rest of the world could pay it homage and raise all the hell they liked about prior agreements which, so far as anyone might prove, would not have been violated. It was sharp practice. It stank. It paid one hundred thousand dollars.

I collected the pitifully small assortment of data and equipment, making it a small pile. "And with this, you expect me to set out?"

"I really expect you to
crap
out," she said sweetly, "in which case you can expect to be iced down for awhile. We can do it, you know."

I knew. I also knew she had the extra pleasure of having told me not to commit myself. There was one more item. "What if I find more than one hunter?"

"We only need to bag one. For reasons I'm not too clear on, we don't think there's more. Something about desperation tactics, I gather." She frowned across the stuff at me. "What's so funny—or are you just trembling?"

I shook my head, waved her toward the stairs. "Go home, Dana. I was just thinking: it's our tactics that smack of desperation."

She swayed up the stairs, carrying her empty case, talking as she went. It was no consolation to hear that nobody would be watching me. The little foil-wrapped AM/FM bug would be my only bait, and of course they'd be monitoring that; but it was essential that I dangle the bait only in some remote location. Lovely.

Spot ambled out as he heard my automatic gate energize, chose to frisk alongside Dana Martin's sedan as she drove away. I called him back, closed the gate, and felt Spot's raspy tongue on the back of my hand. I shouted at him and he paced away with injured dignity, his ears back at half-mast. How could I explain it to him? I knew he was enjoying the salt taste of sweat that ran down my arm in defiance of the breeze off Mount Diablo. It might have been worse: some guys get migraines. I'd known one—a good one, too, in my business—who'd developed spastic colon. All I do is sweat, without apologizing. You can't explain fear to a cheetah . . .

I spent the next hour selecting my own kit. In any dangerous business, a man's brains and his equipment are of roughly equal quality. Nobody has yet worked out a handier field ration than "gorp," the dry mix of nuts, fruit bits and carob I kept—but I tossed in a few slabs of pemmican, too. Water, spare socks, a McPhee paperback, and my usual stock of pills, including the lecithin and choline.

I considered my own handguns for a long time, hefting the Colt Python in a personal debate, then locked the cabinet again and came away empty-handed. In extremis, my own Colt would've been too great a temptation—and I already had a weapon. Whether it would work was something else again.

When the Porsche was loaded I spent another hour in my office. The maps refreshed my memory, corrected it in a few cases. A new bridge over the American River connected Sacramento's northeast suburb of Orangevale with Highway Fifty, cutting through the dredge tailings. Gooseflesh returned as I imagined the scene at that moment. Dark as a hunter's thoughts, not enough moon to help, the innocent romantic gleam of riffles on water between the tailings to the south and the low cliffs on the north side. More tailings on the other side too, upriver near Orangevale. This night—and maybe others—it would be approximately as quiet, as inviting, as a cobra pit. I pitied anyone in that area, but not enough to strike out for it in the dark. I needed a full day of reconnaissance before setting out my bait, and a good night's sleep wouldn't hurt.

Usually, sleep is no problem. That night it was a special knack. And while I slept, a pair of youthful lovers lay on a blanket near the river, too near the Sac State campus, and very nearly died.

Saturday morning traffic was light on the cutoff to Interstate Five. I refueled just south of Sacramento, then drove across to the El Dorado Freeway and fought the temptation to follow it all the way to Lake Tahoe. A part of my mind kept telling me I should've brought Spot along for his nose and ears, but I liked him too much to risk him.

I left the freeway east of the city and cruised slowly toward the river, renewing auld acquaintance as I spotted the river parkway. Nice: hiking and bridle trails paralleled the drive, flowing in and out of trees that flanked the river. I didn't wonder why the area was deserted until I saw the road crew lounging near their barricade. The flagman detoured me to a road that led me to a shopping center. I checked a map, took an arterial across the river, spotted more barricades and flagmen barring access to the drive along the north bank of the river as well.