Well, where else could Gunther hide, when you came to think of it? Cut up as he was, he wouldn't want any part of the ruckus in the tower. In the truck was stuff that could be torn up for bandages, a means of escape if he had the strength, bedding to keep him warm if he didn't.
I heard a low, shuddering moan from inside the truck. I looked in. Even in the semi-darkness, it wasn't hard to tell that Gunther was more dead than alive.
"Matt, look!"
I turned impatiently. Gail was pointing. The shooting had stopped. Up in the tower, the bowl-shaped antenna had ceased tracing its tricky scanning pattern. For a moment, I thought Romero, below in the church, had managed to cut off the power; then I saw the thing was still moving, but very slowly, tracking something high and distant and invisible coming up fast from the south. It sounds silly to say so, but the gadget had that intent, vibrant, triumphant look that a good quail dog gets when he has the covey located without a shadow of doubt.
Well, it was Romero's problem, and he'd indicated he knew how to deal with it. He'd said get clear. Left and out, LeBaron had said. If I didn't watch myself, I was going to get in the habit of leaving pretty good men behind in awkward situations.
"Come on," I said. "Let's put it on the road, such as it is.,'
I yanked the white canvas off. They'd left us the keys, which was nice of them. I had to make a swing towards the church, since they'd parked the truck facing that way, but nobody shot at us. They seemed to be very busy up there. Then we were heading up the slope away from the place.
"Matt," Gail said, "you've got to understand-"
"I know," I said. "You told me before. You're a proud woman."
"When you left me like that, after the way I'd humiliated myself trying to help you-" There was a pause while the engine roared and the gears screamed and the tire chains fought for traction on the snowy slope. We came over the shoulder of the hill and dropped behind it, following the mountainside to the left. The road was just a snow-covered ledge with a deep ravine to the right. Scattered pines thrust upwards from the steep drop.
Gail laughed softly. Her hand touched my arm. "Anyway, you came back," she said.
I saw the thing coming. I've been told you don't usually see them; that when they're passing at full thrust they go too fast for the human eye to pick up at close range, but there's also something called peripheral vision… Anyway, I saw it out of the corner of my eye, sharp and clear for an instant, a wicked, wedge-shaped thing striking out of the sky.
"Hit the basement," I said.
I grabbed her in my arms and dove for the floor, letting the truck take care of itself. I had a moment of regret for the sturdy old vehicle, as it wavered, untended on the steep road; then the shockwave picked it up as if it were a toy and tossed it into a ravine.
XXVII
With the usual Washington logic, the underground test in the Manzanitas was postponed. The threat of sabotage was past, the desert roads were passable again, so they put it off another week over Rennenkamp's screams and howls of protest.
Experts were called in, and they could detect no harmonic vibrations in the earth's crust. They stated firmly that the North American continent was no more subject to massive instability, whatever that might be, than any other, and that no continent was in the slightest danger of suffering collapse under the stimulus of such a relative fleabite-compared to real geologic forces-as the explosion of a nuclear weapon anywhere, aboveground or below. The kindest view was that Naldi had simply flipped, poor fellow. There were also less charitable attitudes in evidence.
Well, all that was none of my business. I spent the week in and around Alamogordo, getting bawled out by people in and out of uniform. They admitted that it might be unreasonable to expect me to produce a complete circuit diagram of a mass of electronic equipment I'd only seen the outside of for about a minute, under fire, but they couldn't understand why the hell I couldn't at least produce an accurate sketch of the antenna.
Somebody turned up a report on Peyton and Bronkovic, two loyal and experienced security men who had been brutally assaulted in a motel room registered in my name. This odd circumstance got quite a play until the official word on the matter came through and the whole subject was dropped into the pool of embarrassed silence reserved for inter-departmental boo-boos.
The final verdict in my case was that I was probably a well-meaning cluck, but that a man who could retain so little useful information was one hell of an intelligence officer to be working for Uncle Sam. I didn't bother to point out that I wasn't an intelligence officer and that my training hadn't been along the lines of retaining information.
They let up on me gradually, but warned me to hang around in case they thought of anything else to ask, so I was stuck in Alamogordo. I was drinking alone in the motel bar when a young lieutenant came up. His face looked vaguely familiar; he'd been hanging around in a minor capacity through the interrogations.
"I guess we gave you a pretty rough time, sir," he said. "May I buy you a drink by way of apology?"
"Sure," I said. "After the past few days, I'll take anything I can get free from the Army."
He laughed as he ordered the drink. "That friend of yours," he said. "Romero. Even if he was sure he was dying, it must have taken a lot of nerve for him to pull a stunt like that. Reversing the polarity so that the bird would home in on the beam instead of…
Anyway, he gave me some technical jargon that sounded like that. I sipped my drink and remembered Wegmann telling me: We can steer it towards us, or away across the valley. There hadn't been much time, and Romero had had the tracking instruments downstairs with him. There had been no way for Wegmann, up in the tower, to tell that the great bird of death had turned the wrong way.
He would have had no warning until he looked up at the last instant, if he did look up.
"I don't know why they're so hot to learn all about that gizmo, anyway," the young lieutenant said. "After all, it was obsolete. It still worked fine on an old missile like the Wotan, but obviously the new guidance systems had it licked. We haven't had that kind of a malfunction in over a year. I figure that's why Wegmann and the people above him decided to blow the works as spectacularly as they could."
"Just how do you figure that?"
"Why, if it was still good, they'd have kept it a secret, wouldn't they? But they saw we were getting ahead of their interceptor devices, so they decided to get themselves some hot scary publicity while there were still a few missiles flying around that they could work on. At least that's the way I see it… Well, excuse me, sir, there's my target for tonight."
I hadn't known that corny old wartime phrase was still being used, or did he think he was originating a new and bright turn of speech that would take the country by storm? He was young enough, and I watched him go to meet a girl who was just as young, in very high heels and a short wide dress bouncing on top of a lot of frilly petticoats. When I was a kid, it practically killed a girl to have her slip show, but nowadays girls seem to consider themselves undressed without a few lingerie ruffles on display.
Well, if they wanted to show off their pretty underwear, that was their business; I was thinking like an old-timer bemoaning the passing of the beautiful bustles and high-button shoes of his youth. I looked at myself in the mirror and didn't like what I saw. Sure, the job had got done, and I suppose that was the main thing, but a guy named LeBaron had died bailing me out of one hole, and a guy named Romero had died bailing me out of another-all I'd done was talk tough and mean and run like hell.