Blood sprayed from the center of Manuel’s chest, then ejaculated from his mouth in a red gush.
He was dead before he hit the ground.
A lo hecho, pecho.
After dropping four hundred feet from the table of the plateau in its VTOL attitude, Batter Two perched on a weathered spur of cliff above the ravine, its LZ chosen after careful examination of relief maps prepared from Hawkeye-I’s stereoscopic terrain images. From here its twenty-five-man strike team would rappel another hundred feet down to the floor of the trench, then wind their way between its sheer sandstone walls to the hostile camp.
The Osprey’s cargo ramp opened and the rappellers, led by Dan Carlysle, debarked in hurried single file, night-vision goggles lowered over their eyes, rubber-soled boots crunching on the rocky earth.
There were five ropes, five climbers to each. Removing blade-type titanium pitons from their web rigs, the men drove them into the projecting rock with mountaineer hammers, slipped their ropes into the piton rings, fastened them with square knots, and tossed the ropes over the side of the cliff, glancing downward as they uncoiled to make sure they were long enough to reach bottom.
Gloved hands gripped the ropes. One, two, three, four, five hard tugs tested that the pitons were securely anchored. Five nods confirmed that they were.
Straddling their ropes as they faced the anchor points, the lead men wound the ropes into harnesses around their bodies — once around the hip, then diagonally across the chest and back over the opposite shoulder. This done, they began their rapid descent along the cliff wall.
They moved in a kind of springing hopskip, bodies leaned out and away from the slope, backs straight, legs spread wide, treaded boot bottoms scuffing along the furrowed rock face. Their braking hands were down, their opposite hands raised to guide them along the rope-lengths.
The satellite maps had indicated firm, hard slope along most of the decline — favorable conditions — and that was essentially what they encountered. The last ten yards were more difficult to traverse, a scree of pebbles and 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’ le chaut sauvage… he wasn’t there. Must’ve been on the plane got away.”
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 komuz, and generally celebrate the wedding of one of its daughters to the son of a well-respected and, by Kazakh standards, well-heeled livestock breeder.
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 perimeter defense, with the VKS space cops, or whatever they were called, assuming control of the facility’s interior grounds protection, even prohibiting access of Sword personnel to some of its buildings. And there already had been clashes of authority at the outer checkpoints that were supposed to be his team’s areas of patrol.