Bio-Strike

“Far side of it, on the west face, is our spot,” Oskaboose said. “Go ahead and check the moving map on the instrument panel. Groundhog like you, it’ll help with your orientation.”

Ricci glanced at the nonglare video display, where a Real Time Geographical Information System map overlaid a live image of the rough, frozen vista below, plotting the airplane’s course with a series of flashing red dots, and enclosing Earthglow’s position in a bright green square. It was helpful, he thought. And precisely matched his recollection of the Hawkeye-I photos he’d seen back in San Jose. With a zoom resolution of under three centimeters, they had afforded detailed aerial close-ups of the custom biological facility and its perimeter defenses. But Ricci had wanted to get a visceral feel of the land that for him would only come with firsthand observation.

Oskaboose leveled the aircraft. “In today’s world, Tarzan wouldn’t have to worry about being raised by apes,” he said. “You’ve got, what, a couple thousand gorillas left in Africa, that’s counting all five subspecies. And they’re more used to having their pictures snapped than models and movie stars. Some British kid in knickers being nursed at the breast of a furry mama would be spotted in no time by rich tourists on photo safaris. And brought back to civilization, heaven help him.”

The guide’s apparent non sequitur drew a puzzled glance from Ricci.

“Another instance of how the wilderness isn’t wilderness like it used to be,” Oskaboose said, noticing his expression.

Ricci grunted.

“Give you one more example,” Oskaboose continued. “People hear the name Tibet, they think robed Buddhist mystics levitating and astral-projecting in transcendental bliss. Or at least I do. But you know, it’s become just another getaway for Hollywood stars with personal problems. Donate a million bucks to the temple chest, they’ll issue you a wallet card listing the chakras, declare that you’re pure of spirit, and initiate you as an honorary monk of the order. I kid you not.” He made a sad tsking sound and motioned out the window again. “We’re about to head over the basin. You might want to take a peek.”

Ricci looked downward. The folds of the rise they were overflying were thick with pine forest. On the almost perpendicular uplift at the basin’s far side, the growth was sparser, clinging to the rock face in stubborn, woolly tufts between wide, white expanses of snow. Directly below them now, the tributary was a crystalline blue ribbon in the midday sunlight.

“That water frozen solid?” Ricci asked.

Oskaboose shrugged his shoulders. “Hard to be sure from up here,” he said. “You can tell for yourself that there’s a surface layer of ice. But it only takes a little silty runoff for the crust to stay thin in patches. Especially this early in the season, when the temperature can still poke above freezing.”

Ricci compressed his lips. “The snow on the slopes. You have any idea how deep it is?”

“The precip hasn’t been too bad, so I’d guess about a foot, with drifts coming up maybe knee high.” He gave Ricci a quick glance. “Inexperienced climbers have to watch out for cracks in the rock that get covered by bridges of crusted snow. Fall into some of’em, and you can take quite a plunge.”

Ricci nodded thoughtfully.

“Okay,” Oskaboose said. “Soon as we cross that next hill, you’ll catch sight of Earthglow to your right, down on a ledge near its base.”

“We do one pass. That’s it. No doubling back.”

“Understood.” Oskaboose shrugged again. “The point of what I was explaining to you, though, is that the sight of a plane is nothing to make anybody suspicious around here. Pukaskwa National Park isn’t too far to the south. Rangers there use fixed wing aircraft and choppers for wildlife observation, search and rescue, and supply transport. Then you have airmail deliveries to townspeople, recreational pilots, and so on. We don’t have to be too worried about being noticed.”

Ricci kept silent, his pale blue eyes staring out the window.

* * *

In a large conference room at the Sudbury ground station, Rollie Thibodeau and the rest of the twenty-four- man RDT were gathered before a flat-panel wall monitor, viewing the same pictures that appeared on the Cessna’s video display as it made its flyby.

The Earthglow facility was a low, concrete building backed directly against the almost vertical eastern slope, bounded on its other three sides by a high, industrial chain-link perimeter fence topped with multiple rows of electrical wiring. A sliding gate in the north-facing section of the fence opened onto a two-lane blacktop that curved along the base of the hill and then stretched off eastward toward the railway station at Hawk Junction — about a hundred miles distant, across rolling, heavily forested country. Small guard posts were visible at the southern and western corners of the fence. A third stood outside the gate at the terminus of the blacktop. A network of access roads branched from the gate to various building entrances.

Watching the stream of recon images over his microwave link with the aircraft, Thibodeau muttered unhappily under his breath. He knew Tom Ricci better than he liked — would have liked not to know him at all — and could anticipate the mission plan he would present upon returning to base.

What bothered him, in part, was that it stood to be dangerous to the extreme. But the thing that filled him with deepest distress was also knowing there was no workable alternative.

* * *

Back at the ground station an hour later, Ricci and Pokey Oskaboose had joined Thibodeau and the others in the conference room. The lights were dimmed around them. On their screen was a bird’s-eye color still of the Earthglow building and its surrounding terrain, the key tactical points highlighted with Xs.

“That high slope behind the building is a natural defensive wall.” Ricci indicated it from his chair with the beam of his pen-sized laser pointer, feeling queerly as if something of the wicked Megan Breen’s persona had rubbed off on him. “Our pals at Earthglow don’t have a guard post there, either on the peak or any of the ledges. And it isn’t hard to understand why. It looks like they’re unapproachable from that flank.”

“Be the reason it’s the best way for us to come at them,” Thibodeau said. His tone was grimly resigned. “Take advantage of their overconfidence, soit.”

Ricci nodded and moved the pointer’s red dot to the right, focusing it on a small, flat hollow between the northernmost rims of the Two Shoulders hills.

“We can land a chopper here. Off-load our equipment, and one of those radio-frequency-shielded tents that we can use as a command and communications center,” he said. “It’s a nice pocket of concealment. And as close to Earthglow as I want to set down.”

“The RF-secure tents are cold-weather white, and should blend right in with the snow on the ground and slopes,” Oskaboose added. “Guess we can hide the copter under some cammo pretty easy, too.”

“Sounds good.” Ricci’s laser dot jumped up and to the left onto the blacktop leading to the facility. “We’ll have an escape vehicle ready to roll around this area west of the bridge, not far from where the two-laner swings around the bottom of the hill toward the perimeter gate. My team’ll have to reach it on foot once we’re out of the building. Then it takes us across the bridge, the chopper picks us up on the other side, and we’re off.”

“You catch a break, make a clean getaway, sure,” Thibodeau said. “But we can’t depend on it. Got to figure there might be somebody on your tail wants to stop that from happenin’.”

Ricci looked at him. “So your team prepares something to stop them from stopping us.”

Thibodeau scratched his beard.

“Yeah,” he said. “Suppose I got me an idea or two.”

Ricci nodded again. Then he turned back to the photo image on the wall, slid the red dot down onto the icy stream spanned by the bridge, and tracked its course through the basin that divided Two Shoulders from the larger hill.

“Our approach is going to be what’s trickiest,” he said. “From where we strike camp at Two Shoulders, my insertion team needs to hike to the stream, ski across its banks, then climb the northeast side of the hill and go down the northwest. That’ll leave us behind the building. From there we move along its side to the guard station at the gate, take out the sentries, and carry on with the rest of the program.” He inclined his head toward Pokey Oskaboose. “I know it seems like you’d have to be a damn spider to make it up that big slab of rock, but Pokey mentioned a couple of things I wouldn’t have noticed.”

“You and whoever built Earthglow figuring the hill would guarantee protection from the rear,” Oskaboose said. “Anybody knows this country could see how it’s tough but not anything near the worst. You’ve got all kinds of