“Got anything?” Nanci’s voice reached him, then her shadow filled the hatch behind him.
“Yeah,” he said as his fingers touched a rope ladder hung on the wall to his left.
The sound of the shot was muffled, far off, unimportant.
But it was followed by the noise of a body falling to the deck and then a scream.
Chapter Seventeen
Margaret Tabor had been preparing her armed mission to the north.
Aviation fuel was in such short supply that she was forced to compromise, eventually ending up with two Chinook CH-47Ms, each capable of carrying around fifty armed men with supplies for a week. But there was no knowing where the next gas stop might be, so one of them was partly loaded with high-octane fuel.
By juggling around with the figures, Margaret Tabor worked out that one of the Chinooks would have to be sacrificed along the line in order to get the other helicopter to the region of the Cascades. Then, if they found Aurora and purged it clean, they might come across more fuel stocks and be in a position to return safely to their Southwest base.
Even the loss of both choppers would be worth it, if it meant the end of Zelig and his swelling rebellion in the north. All the faceless, nameless heads of the Hunters of the Sun were agreed on that.
They had a total of sixty-eight men, all supplied with the best state-of-the-art weapons that the Hunters could give them. It meant depleting their armory to a dangerously low level, but the game had to be worth the candle.
“If we lose this one,” she had told the supreme council of the Hunters, “then we are all lost. Now and forever. This is the one throw of the dice. I say we will win it.”
There had been a couple of coded radio messages during the day of December 21 from the isolated part of the coast, north of the devastated quake zone. They related to the stealing of the boat and the sailing ship from Eureka the previous night. Communications across any distance in the new world were difficult, again because of immense problems over power. But these had found their way successfully through the network. Of necessity, both had been brief.
Both had been of considerable interest to the woman.
“Your warning correct. Four turtles from sea. One down. No problem. Ready to track remainder.”
When she read that, the Chief had nodded and smiled. The point of the entire costly exercise hadn’t been to try to chill all the survivors of the Aquila. It had been to try to locate them and then follow until they walked through the gates of Aurora. Then they could all be properly chilled.
The second message had arrived a few hours later and had come from a different source. It made her scowl. She crumpled up the paper and threw it into the shredder, but it chose that precise moment to malfunction, bringing a wave of blinding anger that even frightened Margaret herself.
“Flock of birds landed and one plucked. But hunting stopped. Perma—” A gap was followed by “Trail cold and lost. Will try but not hopeful. Snow.”
A part of the message had been lost, but it wasn’t hard to guess the broken word had been “permanent.” Nor was it hard for Margaret Tabor to read the unacceptable story between the thinly coded lines.
The first message had presented no problems. The small boat had reached shore, north of the massive new bay that had bitten a slice from the original coastline. Four people in it, which tied in with the other spies’ reports. And one of them had been killed in the incident, but the others were going to be tracked. That was all good news.
The second message was grim and made her doubt, for a few heartbeats, her own planning.
More of the survivors had landed, probably in the sailing ship from Eureka. One of them had also been killed by the waiting assassin who had probably seen them coming and chosen to wait before beginning to track them, letting the others go ahead. That was how she read it. But then something had gone squint on her. The hidden killer had himself been taken out of the game.