“Huh?” said Jocelyn. “Sometimes sounds like you swallowed a whole word-teaching vid, Nanci.”
“It used to be called ‘educated,’ young ignoramus,” the old woman replied tartly.
“Now don’t get calling names to my children, Nanci, or you and I’ll fall out.” Jeanne warmed her hands at the blaze, careful not to meet the other woman’s eyes so that Nanci couldn’t see how frightened she was of her.
“Wouldn’t want that, Jeanne. Not at all. Good thing about this weather is that it means the Hunters of the Sun can’t hope to track us down. Longer we keep away and the farther north we get, the safer we can feel.”
“Think they’ll chase me, Nanci?” asked Jeff Thomas. The heat brought out the livid scar from right eye to the corner of his mouth, making it flush crimson. He was conscious of it and kept tracing the weal with his finger.
“Possibly. Depends on what the Chief might think that you know. I wouldn’t want to be in your shoes if she believed you’d held back information.”
He winced at the threat, even though Nanci had softened it by stroking a finger down his cheek.
The tumbling flakes of snow fell into the flames with a gentle hissing sound. Mac leaned back and smiled. “I guess things could be worse. Least we’re all together and safe—for the time being. Warm. Enough gas to get us a way farther. Food. And a fine scene like a Christmas card.”
“God bless us, one and all,” said Pamela McGill. “That’s out of a book by Dickens about Christmas.”
There was a sound like a pistol shot, making everyone jump. But it had been one of the logs exploding in the fierce heat of the fire, spitting sparks out. One landed on Paul McGill’s leg, and he brushed it away.
“Think that there’ll be anyone off the Aquila in the town, Dad?” he asked.
“If Jim Hilton says a place and a time, then there’s only one thing’ll stop him being there.”
“What stops him, Daddy?” said Sukie, frowning with the effort of trying to follow the strange convolutions of the grown-ups’ conversation.
“Big man in a black cloak, honey, with a sharp scythe over his shoulder.”
Nanci laughed. “How about a gang of paramilitaries with a golden arrow and silver sun on their uniforms? How about the Hunters of the Sun, Mac?”
“Comes to about the same thing as the man with the scythe, doesn’t it?”
She nodded. “Guess that’s right, Mac.”
IT TOOK three days for the underground message from Dorian Langford to reach the desk of General Zelig. At last he had a real clue to the possible location of some of the missing crew of the USSV Aquila, but by then events had moved on at such a rate that the information was obsolete. However, it enabled him to shift the location of one of his white pins. He stuck it carefully into the coast of California, near where there’d been several reports of serious earthquake activity. Close to the town of Eureka.
Chapter Eleven
In the cold, misty weather that prevailed, with flurries of snow riding in off the sullen rollers of the Pacific, Heather Hilton looked like any other child in Eureka. Huddled inside a quilted anorak, the hood pulled over her face, she found it easy to slip through the indifferent guards. The rusting roadblocks had been there for far too long, the handful of men on duty lazy and careless. Heather simply walked a hundred yards or so into the flat fields, climbed over a single fence, and was inside the suburbs of the township.
It had been her own idea to go in.
Jim had opposed it from the start, though Carrie had taken the girl’s side.
“Nobody’ll notice one more kid,” she said. “You or me… we’d stand out like a mag flare at midnight. We need to know if there are boats and what their security is like. Heather’s best fitted to do that, Jim.”
Reluctantly he’d agreed.
She was back about two hours later, in the middle of the morning of the twentieth day of December, scrambling noisily between the dead elm trees in the small grove on the southwestern outskirts of Eureka, the place they’d picked for their camp. She called out of the mist in a low, breathless voice.