Something coughed, loud over the helicopter’s steady chatter, and a streak of flame shot out from the machine’s underbelly. A solid spear of pearly smoke etched itself upon the sky.
“Rocket!” shrieked Wrench. He threw Mulder flat, rolling over and over in the powdery snow.
The missile hurtled toward Mulder. Then, oddly, it veered away to the right, graceful as a stooping falcon, and plunged directly at the limousine Mulder’s party had used.
Memories of hot, dry, Syrian sand, of stones and baked earth, took over as Lessing hurled himself down. He glimpsed Wrench’s deep footprints in the whiteness in front of him; then he ploughed into them face first. A wave of heat, light, and unbearable noise smashed against his back.
He struggled up, dazed but relieved to be alive.
Nothing broken, no blood, no pain. Any flying shrapnel had missed, and the snow had saved him from a nasty fall. His ears rang; his vision was blurred. Somehow he had managed to turn around and was now looking back toward their car. In its place a pillar of flame and dark, oily smoke roiled up into the sky. There was no sign of the gun-wielding agent, and the blonde man lay face down in a jumble of red, blue, and charred black. He did not move.
Wrench crawled over to Lessing. “Christ, man! You dead?”
“Not yet.” His voice sounded tinny and far away. He hoped any hearing damage was temporary. “Mulder? Morgan? Outram?”
“Okay, I think. Goddam! Here comes the bastard again!”
The hoppy-choppy clattered back across the azure bowl above them, a second rocket peering malevolently out from underneath it. The popping started up from the President’s escort once more. Then a pencil of fire shot out from among the vehicles, and they heard the breathy whoosh of a hand-held GTA rocket launcher. An arrow of flame-laced smoke reached up to caress the helicopter’s beetle-green carapace.
A bright flower of fire bloomed in the air.
The helicopter twisted, lurched, and faltered. Then it exploded. Metal and glass debris rained down onto the snow. The body of the machine tumbled down into the road, two hundred meters west of the fleet of escort vehicles.
There was silence.
People stared openmouthed, stunned by the noise, the light, and the grim suddenness of others’ dying.
Mulder and Morgan came staggering over to the wreckage of the car, followed by Outram and three of his aides. One of the latter shouted something about being a doctor; he knelt to help the blonde agent, but the man was dead, a shard of glass from a car window buried in his throat.
An inane thought crossed Lessing ‘s mind: how would they ever explain this to the poor bastard whose car they had borrowed?
Wordlessly they all tramped back down the road to inspect the helicopter. Its second rocket had gone off in its mounting, and the machine was an inferno. Serious forensic science would be needed to identify its occupants. One of Outram’s people used his communicator and learned what Lessing expected: no record of any authorization and no flight plan. Not any more. Somebody had been clever. The facts might eventually be discovered, but it would take time.
Outram motioned his escort back to their cars. He towered over his men, a hulking walrus in his mid sixties with a full head of rumpled, iron-grey hair, drooping mustachios, and mottled skin like a lemon left too long in the sun. Lessing couldn’t remember whether he hailed from Idaho or Wyoming — one of the two.
The President beckoned to one of his aides. “Get Pierce and MacNee and Korinek on this, Charley. Find out who the hell is behind it.” He glanced beyond at a uniformed Army colonel. “And, George, I’m ridin’ back with you. No helicopters… no big mallard duck flyin’ over all the hunters in creation!”
Everyone scrambled to obey. Outram wheeled around, saw Mulder, and rumbled, “You’re ridin’ with me too, Herman. You and your boys. And don’t you give me no shit about security, George. Not after this morning!”
George clamped his lips together, dismissed his enlisted-man chauffeur, and drove.
As they entered the last stretch of road leading into the complex, Outram leaned forward. “Listen,” he said to George, “I ain’t goin’ back down into that hole. Find us a motel… one with good coffee… and we’ll talk while we eat.”
Lessing, next to the driver, opened his mouth to protest, but the President clapped him jovially on the shoulder. “Sure, we don’t have your plastic shower curtain any more, but what the hell? The whole world’s gonna know anyhow.”
There was no arguing. On the seat behind, Lessing saw Wrench make a circular warning gesture to Mulder: bugs, recorders, spy devices were possible in this vehicle, too.
Mulder ignored him and said, ‘The missile… the rocket… was aimed at us, Jonas. Yet it arced away and hit our car instead.”
“Prob’ly a heat-seeker. Your car’s engine was off, but it was still the hottest thing the damn missile could see within its range.”
Lessing had another thought. “The Secret Service man… the one who was killed by shrapnel…”
“Cargill? What about him?” Outram twisted to peer at his face, silhouetted against the smoked-glass windows in the front seat.
“Just before the rocket hit he said there was something strange about our car. Maybe a bug. Maybe it was a homing device for the missile.”
“But you went over the car…?”
“We didn’t have much time. Anyway, if the thing wasn’t using power or emitting a signal, it couldn’t be detected until it was activated, likely by radio. Hide it in the ignition, the transmission, the systems-check computer, and nobody could find it without tearing the whole car apart.”
“You can paint circuits directly onto the body,” Wrench added. “Then spray enamel finish over ‘em. One transistor here, another way over there. The whole car itself becomes a bug.”
“I got plenty of opposition,” Outram declared cheerfully. “People who ‘d rather have a turd in their soup than me for President. My folks’re good, though. They’ll find the bastards responsible.” As he spoke, his cowboy twang seemed to fade in and out, like distant music. Chameleons and politicians both changed color to good effect.
Outram’s answer was not reassuring. What if the missile had been planned only for Mulder’s car? What if the hoppy-choppy, arriving at the meeting site late, after they had disembarked, had had no time to reprogram the missile to manual targeting? The assassins might have decided to try for Mulder — or Outram, or both — anyway.
“Does this… this business just now… change what we discussed?” Mulder questioned in neutral tones.
“Hell, no, Herman. You boys got the organization, ‘specially in the rural states… the South, the Midwest, the Northwest. We can use you.”
“As I said, we’re not as powerful or as well structured as you think…”
“Horseshit! I seen Eighty-Five’s printouts… some of ‘em anyhow. You got tentacles, Herman. What you got ‘em for I don’t know, but you got more tentacles than a bull octopus! You got church groups, but you’re no preacher; schools, but you’re no educator, universities and colleges, but you’re no goddam flip-top egghead; labor committees, but you’re no union man; lots of capital that stretches way overseas and down into the cracks in a bunch of places….”
“Really
“Shit!” Outram chided, unperturbed. “The one thing you ain’t is what we… my folks… also ain’t: minority-operated, y ‘might say. Civil Rights’re ‘civil wrongs’ in a lot of cases.”