He climbed the ancient steps of a pyramid. A thick black cable trailed up and on to the observing platform, and wound its way into the base of a big shiny paraboloid staring fixedly at a point on the blue sky. The blue lightning logo of Mercury Inc. was painted near the top of the dish. The Valley of Morelos, flanked by steep-sided mountains, stretched to the southern horizon. Whoever once controlled this ancient hilltop also controlled the valley, and passing traffic, and probably territory far beyond. The thunderclouds to the south were building up rapidly. Big Daddy, when he came, would approach from there.
“You’re looking at thirty megabytes a second, son,” a voice said. A short, white-haired man in a khaki shirt, with a belly overhanging his belt, was looking up at Webb. Small blue eyes were set back in a round head.
“I’m impressed.”
“We use it to patch straight into the White House via one of our geosynchronous DSPs. You also link straight in to your Whitehall number through this selfsame dish so once the Holy Passover occurs you just pick up that phone over there and let ’em know. So you’re the Brit who identified Nemesis. General Arkle.”
“How do you do, sir?”
“I do fine. What’ll we see?”
“At two hundred miles impact parameter? A rapidly rising moon. It’ll cross the sky in a few seconds, going through all the phases of the moon as it passes. My guess is Nemesis will have a rough, pitted surface.”
Arkle nodded thoughtfully. “And if it’s a bit closer?”
“Say it touches the stratosphere. It’ll leave a black smoky trail, and tomorrow will be dark.”
“Closer still?”
“In that case, General, Nemesis won’t seem to move much. We’ll see a small crescent, very bright, low in the morning sky, coming from over there.” Webb pointed in the direction of the thunderclouds. “The crescent will grow very fast — in a few seconds it will form a yellow arch straddling the sky from horizon to horizon.”
“And what then?”
“The sky will go incandescent, but I doubt if our brains will have time to register the fact.”
“And then goodbye America. We should have zapped the bastards long ago.”
“There’s a lot riding on your communications, General, and there’s a thunderstorm on the way,” Webb said, pointing south. “What if your system is struck by lightning?”
“We got two of everything in this man’s army. Two backup systems, two generators”—the soldier’s hand swept over the plateau—“and the best communications men in the world, all here just so you and I can make a ten-second call.”
“Maybe the Russians know about this. Maybe they’ll try to knock you out, for the sake of confusion. What about spetsnaz activity?”
Arkle laughed. “Son, you’re talking to Task Force One Sixty here, from Fort Bragg, Carolina. You want to know about behind-the-lines activity? Ask us, we wrote the book. The nearest Russians are a hundred and forty miles away in Mexico City and we got them monitored. We’re a full brigade, with the blessing of the Mexican Government who are proving highly co-operative on account of they object to being vaporized.”
The Sun flickered briefly, and Webb felt a sudden down-draught. A helicopter whispered overhead and lowered itself into a clear space a few hundred yards away.
“You see that, son? That is a McDonnell-Douglas MH Sixty Pave Hawk. Quiet as a mouse on account of it’s for infiltration. It has all-weather vision, seven-point-six-millimetre machine guns and two-point-seven-five-inch rockets. It can do a hundred and eighty-five miles an hour and fly to Mexico City and back twice without refuelling. We got two of them too.”
“General Arkle, you seem to have two of everything.”
“Believe it. Anything you need?” The general looked appraisingly at Webb, then produced a large cigar and proceeded to light up. About a hundred yards over his shoulder Judy was having the intricacies of a diesel power generator explained to her by about a dozen GIs.
“I’d like to get back. Can I commandeer a jeep?”
“Sure, and a driver. Tell ’em I said so.”
“There’s an old joke, General Arkle. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, you are now flying in the first fully automated aircraft. There is no need to worry as nothing can go wrong nothing can go wrong nothing can go wrong… ’ ”
The soldier laughed again, and blew a smoke ring. “Boy, you sure are a worrier.”
Low, dark clouds overtook the jeep on the way back, blotting out the hot sun. Noordhof had stayed put, still having business with Arkle, and Webb had finally prised Judy away from her enthusiastic technical instructors before commandeering the little fat driver to take them back. The landscape, already primeval, took on a dull, alien look, as if it belonged to another planet. Out here, the brooding atmosphere was almost tangible.
The driver put on his headlights and assured them that Jesus begging your pardon ma’am we’re in for Sumthin that’s for Shore. He pulled over and stopped, the brakes squealing. The humidity was terrific and his short thick neck glistened with sweat. The silence was unnatural. He began to haul at the tarpaulin hurriedly, as if anxious to get away. Webb jumped out to help just as the first hailstone clanged noisily off the bonnet of the jeep, and they barely had time to scramble back in before an avalanche of hail poured down from the sky.
The first flickering blue etched a brilliant Christmas tree on Webb’s retina, and a deep electrical crackle rumbled round and round the mountains. Judy cried with delight, and after that the powerful echoing Boom! of one thunderclap after another merged with the solid roar of hailstones on the jeep, while wind tore at the canopy and lightning strobed the landscape so that it looked as if they were part of a jerky old movie. Conversation was futile, but the driver managed a steady stream of profanity.
Once the bouncing and mud-sliding got out of hand; the driver had mistaken the road. He put on the brakes but the jeep started to slither and they found themselves in a terrifying, out-of-control slide taking them sideways down towards a gorge. They were about to jump for their lives when the jeep hit a rock about three feet from the edge and stopped with a bump. Webb had a nose-down view of a surging, yellow river forty feet below them, and a fallen tree wedged between black rocks.
Judy and Webb jumped out and heaved on the jeep while the driver, white-faced and shaking, reversed slowly on to the real road. Arcs of mud flew up from the spinning wheels and they all turned a sodden, yellowish brown and their fear released itself in hysterical laughter.
They eventually reached the real road, where the driver pushed his nose up to the windscreen and called up some Special Reserve language which took them safely back to Oaxtepec.
Judy stopped Webb as he was about to enter his room, mud and water forming spreading pools around them. She spoke softly. “That was not an accident, Oliver.”
Webb stared. “Come on, Judy, the driver misjudged the road.”
“Warning posts had been pulled up. Recently. The sockets were still filling with water. The posts were probably thrown in the river. And there were footprints in the mud. Not ours.”
“How can that be? Nobody overtook us on the way back.”
Judy wiped water from her eyes. “The helicopter could have.”
“The helicopter? Do you know what that implies?”
She put a finger to her mouth. “Not so loud. We must talk.”
“Not in this state. Later.”
Webb had a shower, feeling badly rattled. It was too humid for comfort and he wrapped a towel around himself. He lay under a sheet, watching the rain pour down the French windows and listening to it hissing down on the grass, while the sky beyond crackled and flickered.