'Sergeant Hitt,' Masago asked slowly, 'the time is coming when I will ask you to kill several unarmed American citizens. These individuals are too dangerous to entrust to the courts. Will you have a problem with that'
Hitt slowly turned his clear eyes on Masago. 'I'm a soldier, sir. I follow orders.'
Masago settled back, arms crossed. General Miller had been right after all: Hitt was good.
The chopper thudded on, and then Hitt, checking his GPS, pointed to one of the men. 'Halber, ten-minute warning to drop point Tango.'
The man, a twenty-year-old with a shaved head, nodded and began running the final checks on his weapon. They flew on, following a long, deep canyon that ran to the valley where their objectives were headed, the shadow of the bird rippling up and down directly below them. It was a hellish, corroded landscape, an open sore on the face of the earth, and Masago was looking forward to getting back to the muggy greenness of Maryland.
'Five-minute warning,' Hitt said.
The Pave Hawk began to bank, coming around the side of a stone butte, and flew below the escarpment, easing down into a hover where a side canyon debouched into badlands. Halber rose, steadying himself in the netting. The rope, which was coiled neatly before the open door, was kicked out. Halber grabbed it and roped down, disappearing from view.
A moment later the rope was pulled up and the chopper lifted.
'Sullivan.' Hitt pointed to another man. 'Drop point Foxtrot, eight minutes.'
Once again the chopper sped over red desert. To the north, Masago could see the irregular black outline of an ancient lava flow; and far to the right some forested foothills rose to meet a line of snow-covered peaks. He had the country pretty well scoped out by now.
'Sullivan, one-minute warning.'
Sullivan finished his weapon check, rose, grabbed the netting as the chopper eased into a hover, the rope was kicked out again, the man was gone.
Five minutes later they had done their fourth and last drop-and then the helicopter headed off toward the landing zone in the valley at the head of the great cleft marked 'TyrannosaurCanyon' on his map.
9
FORD REACHED THE rim first, and looked down into a valley. With a shock, he recognized they had circled back around and were at the far end of Devil's Graveyard. It amazed him that even with his wilderness experience and knowledge of the desert, the landscape was so complex it had turned him around. He took out his map, checked it, and saw they had just entered the area from the northwest.
He glanced around, expecting at any minute to see a black dot on the horizon and hear the familiar sound of a rotary aircraft approaching.
He had been in plenty of tough situations in his life, but nothing quite like this. What he always had before was information; now he was operating blind. He knew only that his own government had tried to kill him.
Ford paused, waiting for Tom and Sally to catch up. They were amazingly resilient, considering that both of them were injured, exhausted, and severely dehydrated. When they hit the wall, it would pretty much stop them wherever they were. It might even come in the form of heat exhaustion, hyperthermia, in which the body lost control of its ability to maintain body temperature. Ford had seen it once in the jungles of Cambodia; his man had suddenly stopped sweating; his temperature had soared to 107 degrees, he went into convulsions so severe they snapped off his teeth-and in five minutes he was dead.
He squinted into the brilliant light. The mountains were fifteen miles away on one side, the river twenty miles on the other. They had less than a pint of water left and it was over a hundred degrees. Even without pursuers, they would be in serious trouble.
Ford looked at the cliff with a growing feeling of dismay.
'Here's a possible way down,' said Tom, from the edge.
Ford paused, looking down on a horrendous vertical crack. A faint throbbing sound impinged on the threshold of his hearing. He stopped, scanned the horizon, and saw the speck, two, maybe three miles away. He didn't even need to check with his binocs: he knew what it was.
'Let's go.'
10
MELODIE CROOKSHANK STARED at the three-dimensional SEM image of the ve-
nus particle on the video screen with a sense of awe. It was sixty-five million years old, and yet it looked as perfect as if it had been created yesterday. The SEM image was much clearer than any obtainable with a light microscope, and it showed the particle in great detail-a perfect sphere with a tube sticking out of it, with two crosspieces at the end like spars on a ship. The crosspieces had some complicated structures at their end, bunches of tubules that resembled a dandelion seed-head.
An X-ray diffraction analysis confirmed what she'd suspected, that the sphere of carbon was what chemists call a fullerene or a 'buckyball'-a hollow shell of double-bonded carbon atoms arranged like a Buckminster Fuller geodesic dome. Buckyballs had only recently been discovered, and they were rarely found in nature. Normally they were very small; this one was gigantic. The primary feature of a buckyball was that it was almost indestructible- anything inside a buckyball was totally sealed in. Only the most powerful enzymes carefully manipulated in a laboratory setting could split open a buckyball.
Which is exactly what Melodic had done.
Inside the sphere she had found an amazing mix of minerals, including an unusual form of plagioclase feldspar, NaQ 5CaQ 5Si3AlOg doped with titanium, copper, silver, and alkali metal ions-essentially a complex mix of doped ceramics, metallic oxides, and silicates. The tube extending orthogonally from the buckyball appeared to be a giant carbon nanotube with a crosspiece on which are attached side groups containing a mixture of ceramic compounds and metallic oxides.
Very weird.
She cracked a warm Dr Pepper and leaned back, sipping meditatively. After the removal of Corvus's body it had been quiet as a tomb, even for a Sunday.
People were staying away. It reminded her once again of how few friends she had in the museum. Nobody had called to check and see how she was, nobody had invited her to lunch or for a drink later to cheer her up. It was partly her fault, holing herself up in the basement lab like a sequestered nun. But a lot of it had to do with her lowly status and the whiff of failure that clung to her, the poor post-grad who had been sending out resumes for five years.
All that was about to change.
She called up some of the earlier images of the particle she had captured on CD-ROM, looking for more evidence to support a theory that had been developing in her mind. She had noticed that the Venus particles seemed to be clustered most heavily in cell nuclei. As she examined some of the images she had taken earlier for Corvus, she noticed something significant: many of the cells in which the particles appeared were elongated. Not only that, but many of the particles seemed to inhabit pairs of cells side by side. The two observations were directly related, and Melodic quickly put them together. She felt a prickling sensation at the base of her neck. It was amazing she hadn't seen it before. The particles were mostly inside cells that were undergoing mitosis. In other words, the Venus particles had infected the dinosour's cells and were actually triggering cell division. Many modern viruses did the same thing; that was how they eventually killed their host-with viral-induced cancer.
Back in 1925, the paleontologist Henry Fairfield Osborn of her own museum had been the first to propose that the mass extinction of the dinosaurs had been caused by a Black Plague-like epidemic sweeping across the continents. Robert Bakker in his book, The Dinosaur Heresies, had elaborated on the theory. He theorized that the mass extinction could be explained by outbreaks of foreign microbes 'running amok' among the dinosaurs. These 'foreign' microbes had come from the joining of Asia and North America. As species intermixed, they spread new germs. Bakker's book had been published almost twenty years ago, and as the asteroid impact theory of the mass extinction had gained acceptance, Bakker's theory was gradually forgotten.
Now, it seemed Bakker had been right after all. In a way.
The dinosaurs had been killed off by a plague, Melodic mused-and she was looking at the guilty microbe right now. But the plagues weren't caused by the slow joining of continents. They were triggered by the impact itself. The asteroid strike had caused worldwide forest fires, darkness, starvation, catastrophic loss of habitats.
