Response Organization.........
As he stared at one glimmering and bejeweled moment of the storm framed
in the terminal window, Father Wycazik listened to Michael rattle off a
service biography of the colonel. Just as Stefan was beginning to sweat
with the strain of remembering all the details, his curate told him none
of that was important. Michael said, "Mr. X seemed to feel that only
one part of Colonel Falkirk's background might have a bearing on what's
happened to the people at the Tranquility Motel."
"Mr. X?" Father Wycazik said.
"Since he wouldn't give me his name, X will have to do."
"Go on," Father Wycazik said.
"Well, Mr. X believes the key fact here is that Colonel Falkirk was the
military's representative to a government committee, the CISG, that
undertook some important thinktank-type research starting about nine
years ago. The reason Mr. X thinks the key is CISG is because, while
poking around, he discovered two odd things. First, many of the same
scientists who served on that committee are now-or have recently been-on
long and unusual vacations, leaves of absence, or unexplained furloughs.
Second, a new level of security restrictions was put on the CISG files
on July eighth, two
summers ago, exactly two days after Brendan and the others had trouble
out there in Nevada."
"What does CISG stand for? What was that committee studying?"
Michael Gerrano told him.
Father Wycazik said, "My God, I thought that might be it!"
"You did? Father, you're hard to surprise. But this! Surely you can't
have foreseen this was what lay behind Brendan's problems. And ... you
mean ... that's really ... really what might've happened out there?"
"Coxild still be happening, but I must admit I can't claim to have
deduced it sheerly by the application of my gigantic intellect. This is
part of what Calvin Sharkle was shouting at the police just this
morning, before he blew himself to smithereens."
Michael said, "Dear God."
Father Wycazik said, "We may be teetering on the brink of a whole new
world, Michael. Are you ready for it?"
"I . I don't know," Michael said. "Are you ready, Father?"
"Oh, yes!" Stefan said. "Oh, yes, very ready. But the way to it might
be filled with danger."
Ginger was aware of Jack Twist's growing agitation as the minutes
passed. He was operating on a hunch that told him the last few grains
of sand were dribbling through the neck of the hourglass. As Jack
assisted with the tasks required for their departure, he kept glancing
at windows and doors, as if he expected to see hostile faces.
They needed almost half an hour to suit up for the bitter winter night
ahead, load all the guns and spare ammunition clips, and transfer the
gear to the Servers' pickup and to Jack's Cherokee behind the motel.
They did not work in silence, for that might have given warning of their
imminent departure to the eavesdroppers. Instead, they chatted about
inconsequential things as they hurried through their preparations.
Finally, at four-ten, turning on a radio very loud, hoping to cover
their absence for a while, they left by the rear door of the maintenance
room. They milled around in the wind and snow, hugging one another and
saying, "goodbye," and
"take care of yourself," and "I'll pray for you," and ,it's going to be
all right," and "we'll beat the bastards." Ginger noticed that Jack and
Jorja spent an especially long time together, embracing, and when he
kissed Marcie and hugged her goodbye, it was as if she were his own
child. It was worse than the end of a family reunion, for in spite of
protestations to the contrary, the members of this family were more than
half-convinced that some of them would not survive to attend another
gathering.
Squeezing back her tears, Ginger said, "All right, enough already, let's
get the hell out of here."
With Ned driving, the seven who would go to Chicago and Boston left
first, crammed in the Cherokee. The fine snow was falling so fast and
heavy that the Cherokee was half-lost to sight within a hundred feet and
became only a ghostly form within a hundred and fifty. Nevertheless, it
did not head straight up the hills, for fear of being spotted by the
observers Jack had located with his heat-reading device. Instead, the
Cherokee entered the sloping folds of land by way of a narrow glen. Ned
would stay in glens, vails, and gulleys as long as he could. The sound
of the engine was swallowed up in the greater howl of the wind even
before the Jeep began to vanish in the snow.
Ginger, Dom, and Jack climbed into the cab of the Servers' pickup and
followed in the tracks of the Cherokee. But with its headstart, the
Jeep soon disappeared into the white turmoil that claimed the land. As
they thumped, jolted, tilted, and rocked upward through the glen, Ginger
sat between Jack and Dom, looking through the windshield and past the
beating wipers, wondering if she would ever see those in the Jeep again.
In a few days, Ginger had come to love them all. She was afraid for
them.
We care. That is what differentiates us from the beasts of the field.
That's what Jacob had always said. Intellect, courage, love,
friendship, compassion, and empathy-each of those qualities was as
important to the human species as all the others, Jacob had said. Some
people thought only intellect counted: knowing how to solve problems,
knowing how to get by, knowing how to identify an advantage and seize
it. All were important factors that had contributed to the ascendancy
and supremacy of humankind, yes, but the many functions of intellect
were insufficient without courage, love,
friendship, compassion, and empathy. We care. It is our curse. It is
our blessing.
At first Parker Faine was afraid that the pilot of the ten-seat feeder
flight would not descend through the storm front and attempt a landing
but would instead divert to another airfield farther south in Nevada.
When, after all, the plane descended through the leading edge of the
storm, Parker almost wished they had diverted. The buffeting wind and
blinding snow seemed too hazardous even for a veteran pilot accustomed
to instrument landings. Then they were safely on the ground, one of the
last planes in before the Elko County Airport shut down.
The small airport provided no covered ramp for debarkation. Parker
hurried across the snow-patched macadam toward the door of the small
terminal, wincing as his bare face was stung by wind-driven snow like
thousands of tiny cold needles.
After his Air West flight from Monterey had landed in San Francisco
earlier today, he bought scissors and an electric razor at an airport
gift shop and hastily shaved off his beard in the men's room. He had
not seen his own unadorned visage in a decade. It was much prettier
than he had expected. He trimmed his hair, too. When he was in the
midst of this transformation, another guy in the men's room, washing his
hands at the next sink, said jokingly, "O
n the run from the cops, huh?"
And Parker said, "No, from my wife." And the guy said, "Yeah, me, too,"
as if he meant it.
To avoid leaving a credit-card trail, he paid cash for a ticket on an
Air Cal jet to Reno. After a forty-five-minute trip over the Sierra
Nevada to the Biggest Little City in the World, he had the good fortune
to find a feeder line with a single empty seat on a flight departing for
Elko in twelve minutes. He paid cash again, leaving only twenty-one
dollars in his wallet. For two hours and fifteen minutes, he endured a
frequently turbulent journey east across the Great Basin, toward the
higher country of northeastern Nevada, where he sensed his friend was in
desperate trouble.
By the time he pushed through the doors into the humble but clean little
building that served as the Elko County Airport's offices and public
terminal, Parker should have felt wrung-out both because of the horrible
experience in Monterey and because of his hectic travels. Strangely,
however, he felt vital, energetic, brimming with purpose and overflowing
with determination. He saw himself as a bull, storming into a field to
deal with a fox that had been frightening the herd.
He found the two public telephones, only one of which was in use. He
looked up the number of the Tranquility, tried to call Dom, but the
motel's phones were out of service. He supposed the storm might have
something to do with it, but he was suspicious and worried. He had to
get out there where he was needed, and fast.
In two minutes flat, he discovered there were no rental cars and that
the town's taxi company, equipped with only three vehicles, was so busy
because of the storm that he would have to wait ninety minutes to get a
cab. So he looked around the terminal at a couple of stragglers from
his own flight and at a few others who evidently had landed in private
craft just as the airport was closing down, and he accosted them one by
one, seeking a ride without success. Turning from one of them, Parker
literally collided with a distinguished gray-haired man. The guy looked
as frantic as Parker felt. He had pulled his coat open to reveal a
Roman collar. To Parker, he said, "Excuse me, please, I'm a priest with
urgent business, a matter of life or death, and I'm desperately in need
of a ride to the Tranquility Motel. Do you have a car?"
Dom Corvaisis sat tensely in the Servers' pickup truck, with the
passenger-side door on his right and Ginger Weiss on his left, squinting
ahead into a snowfall so heavy that it seemed as if they were driving
through countless barriers of gauzy white curtains. He peered forward
as though an incredible revelation lay just beyond the next curtain. But
when each parted without resistance, it revealed only an infinite array
of additional curtains blowing-rippling-fluttering beyond.
After a while he realized what he was so tensely anticipating: a
recurrence of the memory-flash that had stricken him when he had walked
out of the Tranquility Grille. Jets ...
What had happened after the third jet swooped over, driving him to the
pavement in terror?
Although the streaming snowflakes made the winter day appear to be a
tapestry of millions of randomly arranged white threads, they did not
help illuminate the glen. The false twilight of the storm brought a
deep-gray gloom to the land three-quarters of an hour ahead of the real
twilight. Gnarled, toothy rock formations and an occasional cottonwood
loomed suddenly out of the murkiness like prehistoric beasts out of a
primeval mist, never failing to startle. However, Dom knew that Jack
dared not risk turning on the headlights yet. Though the truck itself
was hidden by the snow and by the steep walls of the hollow in which
they were sheltered, the lights would reflect up through the falling
mega-trillion bits of ice crystals, and the glow would certainly be
visible to the observers below.
They came to a place where the fading tire tracks of the Cherokee, like
the trails of huge twin serpents, turned east into a branching glen that
led off the main hollow. Jack did not follow Ned Sarver and the others,
for the plan required them to head in a different direction. Instead,
he pressed the pickup steadily north, relying on Dom's reading of a
compass for guidance.
In another hundred yards, they reached the head of the glen, where it
narrowed to-and finally terminated in-a steep upward slope. Dom thought
they would have to turn back and follow Ned, after all, but Jack shifted
gears, accelerated, and the four-wheel-drive pickup started to climb.
The slope was rocky and rutted. The pickup progressed with many a
jounce and sway and lurch that repeatedly threw Ginger Weiss against Dom
in a series of collisions that were not without a pleasant aspect.
In the dreary gray storm light of the waning day, and in the dull and
beautiful than ever. Compared to her lustrous silver-blond hair, the
white snow appeared soiled.
With a leap and a crash that bumped Dom's head against the roof, the
truck crested the long hill. They drove down a brief incline, then
across a level strip of land. As they started up another slope, Jack
suddenly slammed on the brakes and cried, "Jets!"
Dom gasped, looked up into the seething snowstorm, expecting to see an
aircraft plummeting at them, then realized that Jack was speaking of
jets from the past. He had remembered the same thing that had come back
to Dom less than an hour ago. Judging by Jack's sure-handed control of
the pickup, however, he had not seen the memory as vividly as Dom had
seen it, but had merely recalled it.
"Jets," Jack said again, keeping one foot on the brake and one on the
clutch, gripping the steering wheel hard with both hands, staring out at
the snow but trying to look back into time. "One, two, roaring high up,
the way you said, Dom. And then another, low over the diner, and right
after that one . . . a fourth.........
"didn't remember a fourth," Dom said excitedly.
Hunching over the wheel, Jack said, "The fourth jet came just as I
rushed out of the motel. I wasn't over there in the diner with you.
There was this tremendous shaking and roaring, and I rushed out of my
room in time to see the third fighter-an F-16, I think. It virtually
exploded out of nowhere, out of the darkness, over the roof of the
diner. You're right: Its altitude couldn't have been more than forty or
fifty feet. And while I was still taking that in, a fourth came
straight over the motel, from behind the place, and it was even lower.
Maybe ten feet lower than the other one, and the window behind me burst
when it passed. . . ."
"And then?" Ginger asked in a whisper, as if a louder tone would shake
the emerging memory back down into Jack's subconscious.
Jack said, "The third and fourth fighters, the low ones, roared down
toward the interstate, about twenty feet above the goddamn power lines,
you could see right into the redhot intakes of t
heir engines, and they
went screaming out over the plains beyond I-80, one of them peeling up
and out to the east, the other to the west, both swinging around and
coming back ... and I started running toward you ... toward the group
of you who'd come out of the diner over there . . . "cause I thought
maybe you'd know what was going on........ I
Snow tapped on the windshield.
The wind whispered susurrant secrets at the tightly shut windows. At
last Jack Twist said, "That's all. I can't remember any more."
"You will," Dom said. "We all will. The blocks are crumbling."
Jack slipped the pickup into gear again and started up the next slope,
continuing their roundabout trek to Thunder Hill.
Colonel Leland Falkirk and Lieutenant Horner, accompanied by two heavily
armed DERO corporals, took one of Shenkfield's Jeep Wagoneers to the
roadblock at the western end of the quarantine zone. Two large Army
transports had been parked across the wide eastbound lanes of I-80,
effectively blocking them. (The westbound lanes were blocked on the
other side of the Tranquility, ten miles from this point.) Emergency
beacons mounted on sawhorses flashed in profusion. Half a dozen DERO men
were in sight, dressed in Artic issue. Three of them were leaning down
to the open windows of halted automobiles, talking to motorists,
courteously explaining the situation.
Telling Horner and the two corporals to wait in the car, Leland got out
and walked to the center of the blockade, to have a brief word with
Sergeant Vince Bidakian, who was in charge of this aspect of the
operation. "How's it going so far?" Leland asked.