Tom looked down at his four-hundred-dollar handmade Italian shoes, battered beyond recognition but still holding up. At least he had ordered the ones with rubber soles. As he looked back up, the tail end of dust from the explosion came rolling lazily over them, casting a sulfurous-colored pall across the sky.
'Let's go.'
He grabbed the first handhold and hoisted himself up. 'Watch where I put my hands and feet and use the same holds. Maintain a ten-foot gap. Sally, you come next.'
Tom braced his knee against the stone and worked his way up. He tried to ignore the fact that his mouth felt like it was full of grit. The agony for water had gone beyond thirst; it had become physical pain.
It was hard, vertiginous climbing, but there were plenty of handholds. Tom climbed methodically, checking every minute to see how Sally was doing. She was athletic and got the hang of it quickly. Ford climbed fearlessly, like a monkey-a true natural. As they ascended, space yawned below, vast and terrifying. They were free-climbing with no ropes, no pitons, nothing. It was what climbers euphemistically called a 'no-fall pitch'-you fall, you die.
Tom focused his eyes on the rock face in front of him. He had moved beyond tiredness into unknown territory beyond. They came to a small ledge, pulled themselves up, and rested. Ford took out his canteen.
'Oh, my God, is that water?' Sally asked.
'Very little. Take two swallows.'
Sally grabbed the canteen and with trembling hands drank. She passed it to Tom, who drank. The water was warm and tasted of plastic, but it seemed the most marvelous fluid Tom had ever drunk in his life and it took a supreme act of will to stop. He passed it to Ford, who put it back in his pack without taking any.
'You aren't drinking?'
'I don't need it,' he said tersely.
Tom looked up. He could still hear the faint, mosquitolike buzz of the drone but he couldn't see it. He pressed himself back against the stone, still trying to wrap his mind around the attack. 'What the hell is going on?'
'That thing hunting us is a forty-million-dollar Predator Unmanned Aerial Vehicle, classified tail to wingtip.'
'Why!'
Ford shook his head. 'I'm not sure.'
Heat radiated off the canyon wall. Tom examined the rest of the cliff above, picked out a route, and began climbing. The others followed in silence. They
were now two hundred feet up, but the pitches were getting easier. In another five minutes they had scaled the sheer part of the cliff. The rest of the climb consisted of an exhausting scramble up steep talus slopes and benches. At the top, Sally stretched herself out on the flat stone, gasping, Tom next to her. He looked up at the empty sky, which was silent, the plane apparently gone.
Ford slipped a tattered map from his pocket and opened it.
'Where are we?' Tom asked.
'Just off the map.' He folded it back up.
Tom looked up, examining the landscape ahead. The mesa top was slickrock, a plateau of naked sandstone hollowed and carved by the action of wind and water. Some of the lower areas had filled with wind-blown sand, rippled by the constant wind. Here and there a wind-blasted juniper clung to a crack. The mesa ended a quarter mile away in blue sky. Tom squinted, peering ahead. 'I'd like to see what's beyond that rim. We're sitting ducks up here.'
'We're sitting ducks everywhere, with that eye in the sky.'
'They're still watching us?' Sally asked.
'You can be sure of it. And I have little doubt they're sending a helicopter after us. I'd say we've got ten to twenty minutes.'
'This is truly insane. You've really no idea what's going on?'
Ford shook his head. 'The only thing I can think of is that dinosaur.'
'What interest could they possibly have in a dinosaur? It seems to me a lot more likely that a bomber accidentally lost an H-bomb, or a classified satellite crashed-something like that.'
Ford shook his head. 'Somehow, I don't think so.'
'But even if it was the dinosaur, why come after us?' Tom asked.
'To get information.'
'What information? We've no idea where it is.'
'They don't necessarily know that. You've got the notebook and I've got the GPR plot. With either of those, they could find it in a few days.'
'And when they get what they want from us?'
'They'll kill us.'
'You don't really believe that.'
'I don't believe it, Tom. I know it. They already tried to kill me.'
Ford climbed to his feet, Tom painfully following suit and helping Sally up. The monk set off across the stone plateau at his usual breakneck pace, his brown robes sweeping the ground with each step, heading toward the rim on the far side.
8
THE ROTORS WERE already spinning up as Masago hopped into the chopper,
shielding his face against dust and gravel. He threaded past the seven members of the CAG/DEVGU chalk that made up the operation and took a rear-facing seat near the front. The crew commander handed him a pair of headphones with a mouthpiece, plugged into the ceiling by a black cord. He fitted it over his head and adjusted the mike as the bird lifted off and peeled out, doors still open, just clearing the upper canyon rim and skimming above the buttes and mesas, once in a while passing the gaping crack of a canyon plunging down into the earth. The sun was almost directly overhead and the landscape below looked red-hot.
On the matted floor of the chopper Masago unrolled a U.S.G.S. 1:24,000 topo of the target area. He still preferred paper maps to GPS electronic maps; somehow, paper gave him a feeling for the landscape that the electronic version didn't. The images from the drone, circling invisibly at twenty-five thousand feet, showed the objectives had managed to climb out of the canyon after all and were heading toward a deep, complex valley beyond. It was a hell of a place to look for someone, but on the other hand it had the advantage of being a defined area whose perimeter could be secured.
When Masago had finished marking up the map with a red pencil he passed it to the chalk leader, Sergeant First Class Anton Hitt. Hitt examined the map in silence and began punching the way points marked on the map into his GPS unit. The men had received their final Patrol Order just before liftoff without comment or apparent difficulty, especially when Masago briefed them on the possible need to kill American civilians. Of course, he'd laid it on about how they were
bioterrorists in possession of a doomsday microbe. Most people were not equipped to deal with complex truths-better to simplify.
He watched Hitt work. The chalk leader was an African-American man of few words, in superb physical condition, with a high mahogany brow, clear pale brown eyes, and a demeanor of great calmness. He was dressed in desert multi-cam fatigues and combat boots, carrying an M4 chambered for the 6.8SPC, equipped with Aimpoint electronic sights. As a sidearm he had a Ruger .22 Magnum revolver, an eccentric choice for a special forces soldier, but one that Masago approved of. For a fixed blade he carried a Trace Rinaldi, another choice that spoke well for him. Masago had allowed Hitt to make the decisions regarding equipment: and the sergeant had decided his men should go in light and fast, carrying no extra ammo, one-liter canteens only, no grenades or extra magazines, and without the usual Kevlar body armor. No Squad Automatic Weapons either. This wasn't, after all, an op in downtown Mogadishu with heavily armed bad guys spilling out of every doorway.
When Hitt was finished, he passed the paper map back to Masago.
'The four men we're dropping in won't need to maintain radio silence. We're setting up a perimeter around our objectives and drawing it tight. It's a very simple plan. I like simple.'
Masago nodded.
'Any final questions?' Masago asked.
Hitt shook his head.
