more lights flickered on. He saw that the dark contoured hole was an excavation, its rounded walls and domed ceiling sprayed with ferroconcrete, and that the job was not complete. Judging by the flexible seals where the concavity began, this excavation might eventually be sealed and pressurized with a twin to the portal nearby.
Four white-clad men came near, operating a pneumatic lift and bearing more crates that looked familiar.
The men were orientals, one with his hair in a pigtail, and they did not have the bodies of laborers. Faces glistened with sweat. A grunt, a snarl of torn fabric, a laugh; no hint that they might be tense. On the contrary, they flopped onto whatever was handy to wipe a brow, investigate a hangnail, stretch kinks from shoulders. Quantrill damned them for making it necessary for him to squat immobile, but ten minutes later got his reprieve.
The thickset Caucasian who accompanied the last palletload spoke mostly in the same foreign intonations, but Quantrill recognized him from mugshots provided by young Brubaker. Marengo Chabrier spoke with authority and received deference without exuding arrogance or false
Quantrill recalled a tip from a sly-bodied Army linguist, Karen Smetana: a few perfect unaccented phrases can let you pass as a native from another village — but make sure you
But he'd heard Chabrier topside speaking excellent American. If Quantrill couldn't find a way out without a guide, his ticket outside would bear Chabrier's likeness. A month previous, driven by Control, Quantrill might have taken extraordinary chances on such a mission — in part because he'd had no hope in the future. Now he dared hope, knowing that hope might make him hesitate at some vital instant when hesitation equaled death. Then he thought of Marbrye Sanger, and trembled with fresh intent.
When the Frenchman finished his spiel, one of the Chinese drew a note plate from his smock and encoded notes on its keyboard as Chabrier studied the crate labels. The other men wandered off to the elevator and Quantrill considered taking two prisoners as soon as they were alone. Chabrier rapped a knuckle on one crate, then another, then Quantrill's, then a fourth. Priority items, perhaps, for immediate attention. A hail echoed in the near distance; Chabrier turned with his assistant and quickly walked away.
Quantrill's moment had not passed; it hadn't really existed.
He made himself lie back and recheck his equipment during the next half-hour, giving them abundant time. Better to waste a few minutes than to be surprised at his work. That surprise would work both ways, of course. His little Heckler & Koch automatic was hardly in the same class as a chiller, but for a silenced handgun its balance was respectable, and its Canadian 5 mm. rounds contained curare in their soft noses. They didn't blow you away; they just embalmed you where you stood.
His time-delay detonators remained a worrisome enigma because he had no idea how precise their rugged chemical timers might be. Young Brubaker had sworn by them. They would write like any other pens but, stabbed into a bag of ammonium nitrate with the top unscrewed and the timer set, were supposed to pop plus or minus one minute over a one-hour range. Sloppy in comparison to solidstate devices, they were invulnerable to electronic detection.
Quantrill was already setting the stuff up in his mind: a chain of bags overlapping in a vee along the base of two walls, with a shaped-charge mound piled between the legs of the vee. The blast waves would sequence themselves in milliseconds for maximum shock up through the building, pretty basic stuff for any powder money and just about the limit of Quantrill's expertise.
Sometime after nine P.M., he slid the catches from the door of his crate, grateful for the few glowing fluorescents. Working in furious haste, he took the sides from marked crates using detents as they'd shown him, then began to emplace the bags — and there were hundreds of them. He worked with the knowledge that he might be caught at it somehow, his coverall damp with sweat. He could not know that, as he spent his first breather inspecting the pressurized portal, an enhanced infrared video bug silently followed him with its snout.
Alone in his chambers at the other end of the lowest level, Marengo Chabrier watched his video monitor with cold shock.
CHAPTER 51
The great boar let instinctive caution divert him as he approached the scatter of old-style ranch structures, low black silhouettes on a moonlit horizon. He saw distant figures scurry in patches of light as the ranch staff welcomed the 'chuck-wagon' occupants. He might have stood motionless and waited there, but the wind was not right and some of the stock in nearby stables had evidently caught his scent.
Pacing silently away, Ba'al studied the compound as he tested the breeze and returned, this time downwind of the restive horses. By chance he chose to wait in the moonshadow of a darkened guest cabin. He waited with good cheer, for his questing nose repeatedly caught the promise of an oestrus female.
Eve found herself in an unfamiliar role. Her companions could not say enough for her courage in facing down the brutish apparition so that they might scuttle to safety. More irked than embarrassed, she accepted applause and one nightcap before pleading exhaustion. Accepting a chemlamp to light her way, she walked from the central lodge and gracelessly refused Hutch's offer of escort to her cabin. A vagrant breeze at her back tickled the base of her neck.
In black shadow, Ba'al heard her heavy footfalls and the rhythmic song of Eve's corduroy breeches, size fifty. More important, the odor of a ready female was now a steady reek on the wind. He heard her fumble at the front door of a cabin near the one where he stood. The cabins on either side of Eve's were unoccupied, drawing him to slip nearer in the darkness and to study this puzzle. It appeared that he was studying some new hybrid, an inexplicable cross between asiatic swine and human. He had met the person face to face, knew her to be a person and, moreover, one who did not panic at first sight of him.
But her scent was now richly swinish and her great size richly suggestive. He moved to the rear of her cabin near its one feature, the broad sliding glass door, that clashed with its decor. He could not see through its inner partition, but snuffled against the glass.
Eve heard movement through the folding cedar partition; heard a soft explosive grunt. If that poor pitiful Cleve Hutcherson was trying for a late date, he could — well, maybe he could have one. Maybe something about their mutual experience had turned him on so that he would please her without lobotol.
She turned off all but a single nightlight, drew the wooden partition back, and gazed at the demonic face that stood high as her own and near enough to touch were it not for the glass pane.
She stood transfixed, trembling in the grip of her glandular cascade. Ah, but it was unspeakably good!
Her memory served up a scene from a porn cassette, lissome young Cow Patty with her lunging pony, and now the little studhorse seemed shoddy goods. Even if Russian boars were not hung so well, she thought wildly, it would be an ecstatic experience to couple with this devil; with the demon, Ba'al. She smiled and unlocked the glass door, then slowly slid it aside. With this act she did not merely overstep sanity, she flung it to oblivion.
Ba'al had rarely entered a human dwelling but showed no reluctance, snuffling in curiosity, stepping onto floorboards that creaked with his enormous weight. He ignored the distant sounds of merriment from celebrants in the lodge who were still toasting the escape. When he was inside, Eve managed to shut the glass door and the partition with fluttering hands. Now, no one could see or hear the apotheosis of Eve Simpson.
Even among lackluster domestic boars, certain forms of courtship are common. In Ba'al the instinct was tempered with high intelligence and despite goading from the command of pheromone he made haste slowly, emitting his soft insistent mating song as he did so. That song consisted of quick gutteral grunts in a truly subterranean basso with pauses for breath. He smelled fear in her too, a little, a person-sweat. He urinated briefly on the floor, also part of the mating ceremony, and gently thrust the tip of his snout against her side.
Eve could not recall her voice ever carrying such a tremolo as she heard the stream of urine. 'Excited, lover? I'll bet you are,' she breathed, shuddering in delight, daring to touch the monstrous ivory tusk behind his snout. He looked at her in bold curiosity, his grunting now insistent, and nuzzled her between her legs.
