Ghostwalk

After he topped the rise, Brigid turned to Kane, her eyes glittering with anger. “There was no need to be so hard on him. He only wanted to pull his own weight.”

“Brewster is an academic,” Kane shot back coldly. “And every time he goes out into the field, something like this happens to him. If we weren’t around to pull his ass out of the various fires he falls into, he would have been dead years ago.”

“But this time,” Grant interjected, “he gave us away to the millennialists.”

Brigid pursed her lips thoughtfully. “Not intentionally. Somebody recognized him. Whoever it was would have recognized us, too. It was just Brewster’s bad luck to be spotted first.”

“Yeah,” Grant grunted, “and either they didn’t think Brewster was worth wasting a bullet on or they wanted to save all they had to settle a larger problem.”

“Like what?” Brigid challenged.

Kane started forward. “Let’s go see, why don’t we?”

The three people marched swiftly toward the immense pinnacle of rock, noting the rubble piled high around its base. Brigid estimated it as nearly three hundred feet in height. As sunset progressed, the deep fissures scoring the surface of the gigantic monolith became fathomless black shadows. Alert for sentries or motion detectors, the Cerberus warriors didn’t speak. The only sound other than the scrape of their feet against sand was the thin piping of the wind around the rocks.

Brigid Baptiste’s steady gait suddenly faltered, then she trotted ahead. An unusual shape humped up from the ground. A small wave of sand had all but buried it, but in the dim light metal glinted. She picked up the rectangular power analyzer, a device designed to measure, record and analyze energy emissions, quality and harmonics.

“At least we don’t have to charge this back to Brewster,” she commented wryly.

She swept the extended sensor stem back and forth in short left-to-right arcs, then pointed it toward the mesa. The device’s LCD glowed steadily and the readout indicated the energy signature was very strong.

“Whatever it is,” Grant murmured, “we’re almost on top of it.”

The Cerberus warriors started walking again, scaling a shale-littered slope that led to a flat summit. They dropped to their hands and knees, then belly-crawled to the top. They stared for a long time in the fading light.

They saw a cuplike crater nestled at the base of Phantom Mesa, bracketed by broken edges of butte rock on the far side. The depression covered several acres and was surrounded by the remains of a chain-link fence. The floor of the crater was board flat. A road led toward a dark defile at the foot of the mesa. It was blocked by a metal gate.

Part of the open field was sheltered by a rooflike overhang of rock, jutting out from the side of the mesa. Metal gleamed under the roof, and a half dome of translucent Plexiglas reflected the dimming sunlight. The transport helicopter was parked near it, the rotors spinning.

Kane focused his attention on a large steel plate at the bottom of the shallow crater. Several people clad in dun-colored coveralls stood around it, as if they were waiting for something to happen. On the far side of the crater, men bustled about with a military precision.

Suddenly, Brigid Baptiste put her mouth close to Kane’s ear and breathed, “Hear something—”

Brigid Baptiste’s warning whisper came a split second before Kane heard the grate of boot soles against rock. Kane turned his head slightly as a tall shadow stretched up to the lip of rock. He carried a sleek black Calico M-750 subgun, outfitted with a long noise suppressor.

Chapter 5

Kane remained flat on the ledge of rock as the man in the dun-colored coverall reached the summit. He paused and sneezed.

Swearing beneath his breath, the man juggled the Calico as he wiped his nose on the sleeve of his garment. Kane rose silently and slammed his Sin Eater-weighted forearm against the back of the man’s head.

The sentry’s breath exploded from his lips and he staggered, half-turning to topple off the rim. Kane caught him by one arm and yanked him forward. The Calico clattered on the rock and Brigid snatched it up. The man fell heavily on his face, only a few inches away from Grant.

The Cerberus warriors waited quietly for a handful of seconds, watching and listening for a general alarm to be raised. Men down in the crater shouted to one another, and the sound of the chopper’s vanes increased in volume. The helicopter rose, the rotor blades whipping eddies of dust all over the crater. Swiveling, the aircraft’s nose pointed eastward, banked to port, then arrowed away.

“I wonder who—or what—is aboard the chopper,” Grant muttered. “They seemed to be in a hurry.”

Brigid didn’t answer. Moving swiftly, she removed a set of nylon cuffs from a pants pocket and slipped them over the unconscious man’s hands, snugging his wrists tightly together. Grant fashioned a serviceable gag from a bandanna and knotted the ends at the back of the man’s neck.

Kane gazed down at the activity in the depression, noting the swarthy complexions among the people standing around the gleaming metal plate. “It looks like they’ve got the locals busy.”

Grant rose to a knee, his eyes narrowed. “Busy doing what?”

“I get the feeling they’re packing up and moving out.”

Brigid checked the Calico. “Should we stroll down and ask what they’re up to or wait for the rest of the team? I’d like to avoid a firefight, if at all possible.”

“Yeah, so would I,” Kane replied.

Grant looked up at the sky. “No wonder our satellites couldn’t locate this place…shielded by the rock this way, we could fly over it at a couple of hundred feet and never know the place was here.”

Although most satellites had been little more than free-floating scrap metal for well over a century, Cerberus had always possessed the proper electronic ears and eyes to receive the transmissions from at least two of them.

The Vela-class reconnaissance satellite carried narrow-band multispectral scanners. It could detect the electromagnetic radiation reflected by every object on Earth, including subsurface geomagnetic waves. The scanner was tied into an extremely high resolution photographic relay system.

The other satellite to which the Cerberus redoubt was uplinked was a Comsat, which for many months was used primarily to track Cerberus personnel when they were out in the field. Everyone in the installation had been injected with a subcutaneous transponder that transmitted heart rate, respiration, blood count and brain-wave patterns. Based on organic nanotechnology, the transponder was a nonharmful radioactive chemical that bound itself to an individual’s glucose and the middle layers of the epidermis.

The telemetric signal was relayed to the redoubt by the Comsat, and the Cerberus computer systems recorded every byte of data.

Suddenly the air filled a painfully loud high-pitched whine, like a gigantic band saw. “Down!” Kane exclaimed, falling flat to the lip of rock.

The whining grew louder just as what was left of the sun’s glow vanished below the horizon. But the crater was splashed by a multicolored shimmer. Down below, the laborers pulled aside the metal plate in the ground and then ran toward the gate at the base of the mesa. From a round aperture in the crater floor, a slender metal column rose straight up, pointing like a steel finger toward the sky.

“What the hell—?” Grant began.

The whining noise climbed to an eardrum-piercing crescendo. The top of the metal finger sprouted gleaming armatures, webworks of steel mesh unfolding and stretching outward. They formed shallow, disk-shaped dishes. The column continued to rise until it towered fifty feet above the crater floor.

Kane lifted his head, seeing activity by the gate at the base of the looming mesa. Movement shifted at the corner of his eye and he saw a man wearing the standard dun-drab coverall climb up to the ledge. A Calico was slung over his left shoulder and he stared downward at the crater.

As soon as Kane saw him, the millennialist turned his head and spotted Kane. Their eyes locked for what seemed like a long time. The sentry’s mouth worked as he yelled something, but his voice was completely smothered by the electronic whine from below. He struggled to bring his Calico to bear, but the long sound suppressor made swift movement impossible.

Kane launched himself from the ground as the guard unslung his weapon. He slashed the noise suppressor at Kane’s head, missed and hit his right shoulder. A fireball of pain exploded in Kane’s shoulder socket and then he knocked the man down. They rolled and bumped down the slope, hitting big rocks with bone-jarring impacts.

They thrashed together down to the base of the slope, the man’s breath hissing in his ear. Kane tried to hit him, but his right arm was numb, barely responsive. He grabbed the silencer of the Calico with his left hand, and the sentry twisted over with a steel-spring convulsion of his body. He threw his weight against the subgun, pressing the barrel across Kane’s neck, pinning him against the ground.

Kane tried to break free by arching his back and bucking upward, but the sentry was heavy and surprisingly powerful. His teeth bared in a grin of triumph as he put more pressure on the metal across Kane’s throat.

Kane glimpsed a shifting movement and even over the screeching whine from the crater, he heard a solid thump of metal colliding with bone. The millennialist cried out, went limp and fell half on top of him. Brigid stood over the man, feet spread, her appropriated subgun reversed in her hands. She had used to the blunt stock to club the man into unconsciousness.

Breathing hard, Kane elbowed aside the unconscious man. He staggered to his feet, rubbing his throat. “Thanks, Baptiste.”

From a pocket he produced his own set of nylon cuffs and bound the man’s wrists. While he worked, Brigid asked, “Why didn’t you just shoot him?”

“Because you said you didn’t want to start a firefight.” He picked up the millennialist’s Calico.

“Now we have a matched set.”

As they began climbing up the crater wall again, the mechanical whine ended. When they reached the top of the slope and rejoined Grant, they saw that the slender metal tower was slowly rotating, the disks made of mesh angling downward.