Chase leaned toward her. 'Gelstrom isn't behind this project, can't you understand that?' His voice had risen, and he glanced at Dan's door, then went on in a lowered tone. 'He's not involved in any way.'
'Except for the small matter of a couple of billion dollars.'
'Does it matter where the money comes from? Money is money.' Chase had said it without knowing if he actually believed it.
For Cheryl, words were hardly adequate to express what she was feeling.
'I didn't understand when you first told me about the project, before I knew that Gelstrom was funding it. But now--'she broke off, fighting down emotion. 'How can you, of all people, say that? Knowing
what that man has done? My God, it does matter about the money--it
She stood up and he heard her rummaging about in the darkened room. A moment later something solid and heavy with sharp corners hit him on the chest and tumbled into his lap.
'Read your own goddamn book!' Cheryl stood next to the couch, breathing hard. 'It's all in there. How certain companies made fortunes by raping the world and quietly disposing of anyone who got in their way. How a few scientists tried to warn people what was happening and were persecuted or ended up dead for their trouble. My own father, you might remember. You ought to read it. It might do you good--certainly jog your memory about a few things you've obviously forgotten.'
Chase smoothed the rumpled dust jacket and placed the book on the table. There wasn't anything Cheryl could say that he hadn't already thought about and agonized over. He was even prepared to concede that she was right; morally right, that is. But moral Tightness or wrong-ness wasn't the issue. He
'You've spoken to Nick about it. How does he feel?'
'He thinks you've taken leave of your senses.'
'Then he must have changed his mind overnight,' Chase said. 'I told him about Gelstrom on the way back from Desert Range. His exact words were, 'Money is the means to an end, not an end in itself. If the guy wants to pay for his sins, why try to stop him?' '
'You omitted to tell him that Gelstrom murdered my father.'
'The reason I didn't tell him that is because we don't know whether Gelstrom was responsible. We don't know that anyone was. It could have been an accident.'
Cheryl laughed, an ugly sound in the dim room. 'What the hell is this, Gavin? A meeting of the Joseph Earl Gelstrom Appreciation Society?' He couldn't see her face but he knew its expression. She said with a vehemence he'd never heard before, 'At least Nick has principles he believes in--and adheres to.'
Well, well, well. It began to look as though a true-confessions therapy session had been going on here while he was running himself ragged at the UN. Little wonder that when he got back to the hotel he'd walked into an atmosphere you could have cut with a blunt shovel.
'Where do we go from here?' 'I guess that's up to you.'
'I've given them my answer. I'm not going back on it.'
'Then I guess you have my answer too.'
'I don't want to lose you, Cheryl.'
'No?' The word was a bark, short and brutal. 'I thought perhaps you were looking forward to working with Ruth Patton.'
'Ruth isn't involved in the project.' What the hell was this?
'Is she involved with you?'
'What do you mean?'
Cheryl was leaning stiffly against the back of the couch, her face a pale indecipherable blur. 'You ought to be more careful, Gavin. Especially in front of your son.'
A sickening chill swept through him. He tasted something vile at the back of his throat. He felt as if the solid foundation of his life had given way, as if he had been betrayed: first Nick, and then Cheryl, and now Dan. There were other emotions mixed in with it, sorrow, self-pity, and a thin streak of stubborn, bitter defiance.
He took a breath and said very calmly, 'I'm not doing this for Ruth, for Prothero or Van Dorn, for Gelstrom, or for myself. If you can't see why I'm doing it, if you won't try to understand, then you and I have nothing more to say to each other.'
'I didn't think we had,' said Cheryl, tight-lipped and dry-eyed.
By dawn of the day after the incident at the UN, armored ground forces, airborne troops, and two squadrons of helicopter gunships had been mobilized for a combined assault on an area adjacent to the White River, roughly ten miles south of the small town of Lund in eastern Nevada.
Intelligence reports indicated that members of the religious sect known as the Faith had been living in the vicinity for at least ten years, yet three sorties by reconnaissance aircraft had so far failed to pinpoint the exact location. The army commander in charge of the operation doubted whether the settlement could number much above three hundred people, but even so a community of that size should have been easy to spot in the emptiness of sparse scrub and bare mountain peaks. He ordered another sweep at first light, this time employing the full range of detection devices at their disposal, including high-resolution film, infrared and spectroscopic analysis.
Meanwhile roadblocks were set up on every highway, minor road and backwoods trail within a radius of fifty miles from the target point. Which turned out to be a real headache. There were literally hundreds of unmapped mining trails crisscrossing the valley between Currant Summit and Mount Grafton, and it seemed impossible to seal off the area so that individuals and small groups couldn't sneak through the cordon.
By ten o'clock the data from the latest reconnaissance had been processed. They revealed extensive cultivation to the east of the river and also showed up a high level of thermal activity, detected by the infrared scan, which could mean one of two things: natural hot springs bubbling up from underground or human habitation.
Yet still, maddeningly, the film and photographs revealed nothing. A few old mine workings and that was all.
Finally, running short of patience and inspiration, the commander made the decision to send in two advance ground units, to approach from north and south respectively. At 1:20 a column of trucks and armored personnel carriers moved along the narrow blacktop of route 38; the southern force comprising 264 officers and men of the Forty-seventh Marine Group. Their orders were to locate the settlement, detain anyone they found there, and radio back the position to headquarters at Caliente.
Fifteen miles from Lund, Maj. Sam Coogan told his driver to stop. Behind them the column crept to a halt. With his second-in-command, Captain Hance, he leaned over a map spread across the wheel cowling of the leading truck.
Major Coogan circled the area with a gloved finger. 'It has to be somewhere here. Gotta be. But where?' He shook his head and gazed around at the scrub-dotted hillside. It was cool and the sky was darkening rapidly. Three miles away the peak of Mount Grafton wore a cap of purple thundery-looking clouds.
'Storm coming on, sir,' Captain Hance observed. 'Damn, if they can't give us a fix from the air how do they expect us to find it?'
Coogan grunted. 'You know what concerns me more? They could be waiting for us. That pyro-suicide was on every telecast and radio bulletin--they must know we're coming after them. And with a bunch of religious nuts you can never be sure--'
His attention was caught by a staff sergeant farther down the column who was standing on the lip of the road and pointing down into a gully. The two officers went to look. It was the gutted burned-out wreck of a jeep lying on its side, with twisted and blackened Utah plates.
Coogan raised his eyebrows quizzically and looked at the captain, and together they turned to look at the rutted track on the opposite side of the road that wound jaggedly upward through the foothills toward Mount Grafton.
Inside the mountain Bhumi Bhap sat cross-legged on the sandy floor of his cell. A wick floating in a bowl of oil provided a dim flickering glow, illuminating the crudely carved walls that sloped up to the conical roof.
From outside the cell there came a low muttered chanting. The inner circle of adepts had been summoned; they were now waiting, preparing for Lift-Off.
It would not be long. Soon men with weapons would come to destroy, in the same way they had blindly and
