stones that crumbled out from underfoot in gravelly spills.
Still, they made it down fast and without injuries.
Again they gripped their ropes, this time looking upward. Again they gave five tugs to test the fastness of the ropes — and to indicate they had successfully reached bottom to those above.
Seconds later, the next group of five began their descent.
They found the base camp completely deserted. There were empty tents, some left standing, some partially folded. There was a single dusty, abandoned jeep with a flat tire. There were mounds of burned and buried rubbish, odd, scattered personal articles and pieces of equipment — entrenching tools, butane cookstoves, spools of rope, a metal bucket, first-aid kits, a disposable razor, four D-cell batteries, a pair of sunglasses missing one lens, an overturned wooden table, a commercially available Hammond map of the area with no penned-in notes or highlighted route markings.
The departed occupants of the camp had made a more or less clean sweep of it, leaving behind not a single weapon or round of ammunition, not a single clue to where they had gone.
Carlysle spat on the ground, then switched on his radio headset to contact Batter Two’s pilot.
“Roger, team leader, how’s it going?” the pilot responded.
“We’ve missed the party,” Carlysle said in disgust. “That’s how.”
Megan helped Thibodeau settle comfortably back against his pillow, lifted his campaign hat off his head, and laid it on the table beside the bed. He looked weary and haggard, and the ward nurse had reported that his temperature was slightly elevated — nothing of serious concern, she’d assured Megan, but an indication that it was time for him to get some rest. Though she’d left a plastic cup of painkillers on his tray, he had refused to take them, having insisted on staying awake and alert until word arrived from the strike teams.
Now that it had, Megan poured some water into his glass and handed him the pills.
“Bottoms up,” she said.
He grumbled something under his breath, tossed the pills into his mouth, and washed them down with a single gulp.
Taking the glass from him, Megan pressed the button to recline his backrest, pulled the sheets up over his chest, and bent to kiss him on the cheek.
“Night, Rol,” she said. “I’ll see you in the morning.”
He looked soberly up at her.
“Them prisoners won’t talk,” he said. “You know that.”
She nodded. “I doubt they will.”
“An’
Megan nodded again.
“Another thing bothers me’s that we still don’t know why they went to the trouble they did breakin’ into this compound in the first place, use all a’ that fancy equipment just to try and blow a low-security warehouse got nothin’ besides spare parts in it,” he said. “Can’t make any sense of it, you know?”
She patted his arm.
“Sleep,” she said. “It’s been a long day, and there’s nothing more we can do right now.”
Dimming the light, she lifted her purse off her chair, and strode toward the door.
“Meg?” he called weakly from behind her.
She turned toward him, her hand on the knob.
“Somethin’ goes down in Kazakhstan, you think this Ricci gonna be up to takin’ care of it?”
She stood there for a long moment, then merely sighed.
“Tomorrow’s another day, Rollie,” she said.
Then she stepped out into the hall, softly closing the door behind her.
TWENTY-ONE
Perhaps because of the dark cloak of secrecy under which Russia’s spacecraft testing has long been conducted in southern Kazakhstan, the region has since the early 1950’s been the scene of hundreds of unexplained UFO sightings by local peasants. Sugar-beet farmers, grain growers, goatherders, cattlemen, sinewy Mongol horse traders… many have had stories of strange airborne vehicles glimpsed above the brown, moraine-covered steppes, some accounts accurate, others embellished over the course of time and countless retellings, a considerable number complete fabrications contrived to amuse friends and kinsmen and add a little brightness to the drowsy tedium of life in their remote, mountainous comer of the world.
The dark, disc-shaped object that went skimming over the promontories near the Baikonur Cosmodrome around sundown on April 26—a singularly overcast evening in what had been an even more extraordinary spell of damp, cloudy weather — would be spotted by the entire al-Bijan clan, from great-grandparents on down to its children, all sixty-seven of them gathered outside an ancestral home still occupied by family members to feast on grilled horseflesh, drink potent alcoholic beverages (at least in the case of the adults), dance to chords strummed on the three-stringed
In this instance, their subsequent accounts of its appearance did not require any exaggeration.
Ricci sat alone in the silence of the trailer that served as his personal quarters outside the Cosmodrome, looking over some maps of the area, liking his situation, and particularly his Russian hosts, less and less with every minute that passed. Expecting them to keep a promise of cooperation was like thinking you could hire some degenerate pedophile as a camp counselor and accept his absolute guarantee that he’d keep his hands to himself. Their original agreement to put the launch center’s security under Ricci’s full direction had, in the last twenty-four hours, been qualified and ultimately redefined so that he was now in charge only of
The duplicity had been pure borscht, reminding him of what had happened in Yugoslavia after the bombing war back in the ’90s, when Moscow had no sooner cut a deal with NATO not to enter Kosovo than it had ordered a military occupation force into one of Pristina’s key strategic airports. Back then, they’d had a President who’d looked and acted like a huge leech pickled in vodka to blame for the supposed confusion… but what sort of excuses were they making now?
Ricci shook his head gravely. He knew Roger Gordian had been in repeated contact with Yuri Petrov, trying to persuade him to stick to his original commitments. But Ricci’s own last conversation with Gordian had taken place twelve hours ago, at which point he’d been told to sit tight and await further news. Gordian hadn’t sounded optimistic, though, and there had been nothing from him since — a clear indication that Petrov had fallen victim to the hereditary Russian breast-beating reflex and would keep thumping away until he keeled over backward. In other words, negotiations were stalled indefinitely and Ricci’s curtailed functions would continue to be the status quo until after the ISS launch was history.
Assuming it occurred without disaster striking first.
Ricci studied his map, feeling stretched thin in every sense. His exhaustion and jet lag, the haste with which he’d needed to organize his guard force, the ongoing logistical problems of building it up to a reasonable level of adequacy, Petrov’s frequent curve balls and increasing restrictions upon his authority… the whole kit and kaboodle was grating on him. Nor had there been a bit of encouragement in anything he’d heard about the strike on the terrorist camp in the Chapadas. Whoever had been occupying that base had flown the coop aboard the Lockheed, which had itself vanished without a trace. And if they were as good and well-equipped as his information led him to
