“That man is an exceedingly skillful copter pilot of many years experience, and I thank God for the fact, else I’d likely not be here talking to you now. The winds up in those mountains, in and over the small, deep canyons we had to fly into, then lift out of, seemed to know just the best ways in which to see us crash into a wall of rock and seemed to do their utter damnedest to see us dead somewhere up them. I can’t recall ever being so damned scared in my life, I mean it, every word of it.
“After that, after we’d gotten back safely to the project and I was outside a very stiff drink, I left the pilot nursing one of his own, met with the others in private and explained just how much the man was demanding for the services of his men and his copters, how hazardous was the area in which they would have to operate. I said that having flown in and out of there, I felt the astronomically steep price to be cheap, all things considered, did we feel it necessary to get those bovids out alive at all.
“Drs. Baronian and Marburg were of the opinion that we should just cut our losses there and then, and allow the rangers to put all the exotic strays down and, if nothing else, have a barbecue of wisent and yak up them. But, of course, Drs. Stekowski and Singh felt that as we had been responsible, at least in part, for having the animals imported to this area, we owed them all possible protection. whereupon Dr. Marburg took Dr. Stekowski’s side and Dr. Baronian and I were outvoted.
“So I went out and signed a contract and gave over a check for a healthy deposit, then contacted the rangers—who, of course, would’ve been happiest had everything been done yesterday if not before—and we all went about setting up schedules, tentative ones, naturally, tricky as the weather can be that high up.
“The copter people got out the heavy-duty cargo nets they had used to transport some of the animals up to us with, before we’d acquired the big truck. Dr. Baronian and I tested the two carbon-dioxide-powered anesthetic rifles, and she carefully measured the doses for each syringe of dope. Then, on the appointed day, we jeeped back up there, rode and walked in, and put that damned killer of a wisent bull out first, then had to do the same for the nursing cow before we could even get close enough to wave in the copter and the men who’d help us get him in the net.
“To make a longish story a bit shorter, we did get all the big beasts out of that high canyon and back down to our plateau, though it ended up taking us two days and therefore costing us a good bit more, but that was the fault of the devilish weather and couldn’t have been avoided. The only one we lost was that biggest wisent cow. Being sedated twice in two days was apparently more than her constitution could take, and she never woke up after she was back on the plateau, so I just had her skinned, dressed, butchered and hung … waste not, want not, you know. Besides, it was that much less flesh I had to buy for the cats, not to mention far fresher and far less likely to be full of chemicals and hormones.”
“The native buffalo … ahh, bison, gave you no trouble, then?” asked the senator.
The younger man grinned. “Not really, no, though they did get into the way a lot, whenever the copter came in low and hovered. But, as the rangers explained, in really bad weather up there, the mountain bison herd is dropped bales of hay from choppers, so they’ve learned to associate the sounds of a low-flying or a hovering copter with food drops; they just thought it was chow time and were jockeying to be first in line. But compared to the damned wisents, the bison are almost tame as milk cows.”
The senator nodded, smiling. Then, suddenly, he raised his eyebrows and snapped his fingers. “By the way, James, something you’d better know early on about that piece I gave you is this: the second, third and fourth round in each of those magazines is loaded with a very special bullet, a purple load.”
“Purple load?” queried the younger.
“Explosive,” replied his uncle. “Explosive on impact against anything hard, explosive very shortly after penetration of flesh or muscle. They’re supposedly safe until fired and thereby armed—at least, so the manufacturer avers. Nonetheless, be very careful about dropping them or the magazine in which they’re loaded, eh?”
James Bedford hissed between his teeth. “And this weapon came out of your private arsenal, Uncle? By God, you play hardball … and for keeps, don’t you?”
A grim look came over the senator’s patrician face. “James, you have spent precious little time in cities of past years. or you’d know whereof I speak. The entire megalopolis here, from Boston to Norfolk, is become a jungle. Even with police and security people thick as flies hereabouts, still there exists all too often a real need for self-protection if one appears at all afluent, and that is not even to mention the plots of one or another sort always bubbling somewhere in some embassy or terrorist group. Yes, I do have personal bodyguards, quite a few of them, but sometimes they might not be sufficient. Therefore I go armed, well armed, at all times and in almost all places, day and night. And now that it is made clear that some one has targeted you, you must quickly learn to emulate me in regard to self-protection.
Furthermore, the problems never seem to improve, only to get worse and even worse, everywhere … and those are only the problems of which almost everyone is aware, things that can be easily seen, experienced, read in everyday life. There are other things, however, things of bone-chilling terror, which I am forbidden to impart to you or most people due to my security oaths, and seemingly there is nothing that the Congress, the Executive or any others can do to halt or even slightly ameliorate these things.
“My boy, I am deeply fearful. I am fearful that we now are living out the last days, weeks, months, possibly years of civilization as we know it. I feel a sense of foreboding, of an impending doom looming, glowering, gathering closer and ever more closely around us all … and I, I just feel so utterly helpless. With all my wealth, despite all my power, I feel completely alone sometimes, and as defenseless as a day-old baby. I can only pray that I be proved wrong.”
Riffling back through the read pages until he found a date, Milo shook his head sadly. “No, you weren’t wrong. Senator. Only a few more years prove your forebodings with a vengeance. And you were helpless to stop it, by then. Of course, no one will now ever know exactly who started that last, deadly exchange, not that it is of any importance; it just happened, and a whole world, billions of its people and ten thousand years’ worth of cultural accretions, went down the tubes in mere weeks of elapsed time.
“The Russians of course thought we, the U.S., had started it, and we immediately assumed that they had, but from what little I was able to pick up over that powerful private radio setup, other persons around the world had other culprits in mind. A few of them suspected China, though how they could’ve gotten their relatively short-ranged missiles to points as far distant as Cairo and Rome or why they would’ve targeted such cities to begin, no one seemed able to imagine, not even their accusers.
“Some accused the Union of South Africa, too, but here again the distances and targets would’ve been unreal for South African equipment and motives. Not a few thought it to have been Cuba, but if so it was most odd that some of the earliest strikes were on a couple of far-southern Russian areas. The same is true as regards Iraq, too. Why would Iraq have struck at its longtime ally and armorer?
“A good deal of suspicion, from a good many quarters, fell on Israel, and with good reason. For decades, by then, they had been growling a nuclear-tipped threat at all their neighbors while their so-called Defense Forces gobbled up a bit of land here and a strip of land there from neighboring states for ‘purely defensive purposes.’ Had they for any reason or none at all come to feel threatened? Well, both their civil government and their military had full quotas of hotheads who could’ve launched at all real or imagined enemies. Others suspected India and/or Pakistan, too. But the weight of opinion was that it had been done by an aging, megalomanic Moslem dictator in North Africa—a man who had been so meddlesome and erratic over the years that even most of his own coreligionists had ended by virtually outlawing him and his country, and after a brief flirtation following his illegal seizure of power, not even the Kremlin or its satellites would have any more dealings with him than selling him military hardware for hard cash on the barrelhead. And what in hell could this United States senator have done to halt such an act of hatred and madness from so totally unexpected a quarter? What could anyone have done?