ALMOST TO THE SECOND of her saying that, the leading Chinook was being hand-flagged away from the desert base of the Hunters of the Sun.
The long rotor blades thumped at the dark air, sending the echoes clear across the desert, through the arroyos and dunes and ghost towns.
In a sun-bleached shack at the end of the main street of one of those derelict mining settlements, Hopeful Gulch, a young woman was jerked awake by the sound. She stepped out into the predawn cool wearing only panties and a faded T-shirt and peered across the wilderness with her Swiss-made night-glasses.
She watched as first the one Chinook, and then its twin, rose ponderously into the star-sparkled sky and headed off on a course that would take them roughly north by northwest.
It hadn’t been possible to see from that distance what the logistics were of the Hunters’ operation, but she guessed, when she sent her radio message, that the way the choppers took off indicated full loads.
The crucial message eventually reached Aurora through a number of cutoff intermediaries, later that same morning, December 22.
But by that time Zelig himself was already on the road.
GAS WAS a serious problem for Operation Tempest also, bidden away in the mighty heart of the Cascades. Zelig didn’t have the manpower or the weaponry of the Hunters of the Sun at his disposal. There were no big CH-47 Chinooks, though they had one each of the Huey, the Bell Kiowa and the Huey-Cobra. The smaller military choppers.
For his recon southward to try to pick up the survivors of the Aquila before someone else got to them, Zelig had chosen to rely on land transport.
Bearing in mind the deep-winter weather that was gripping the Pacific Northwest, ordinary trucks weren’t likely to be a whole lot of good.
That meant relying on the half-dozen trusty M113s that they had up in Aurora.
The tracked vehicles had a road speed, on open highway in good repair, of over forty miles per hour, with a water-cooled six-cylinder diesel engine that produced over two hundred brake horsepower at nearly three thousand revs. They didn’t have a terrific range, but Zelig had allocated some of their precious supplies of gas to be towed in two tanks behind a pair of the armored personnel carriers.
They would normally carry a crew of two plus a dozen infantrymen. But to travel and be self-sufficient for a thousand miles or more meant packing a whole lot of supplies.
Zelig’s total force consisted of forty-seven men, moving steadily southward, toward the last report of the Aquila’s crew.
He knew, as soon as he finally heard the crackling message from the abandoned ghost town, that he would be too slow and too late.
“Lastest with the leastest,” Zelig muttered to himself.
Chapter Twenty-One
“The closer we stick to the coast, the less severe the snow will be.”
The fire in the hut was cold and dead, and the air itself seemed damp, close to freezing. Every time anyone spoke, their breath plumed around their face. The snow had eased, only falling intermittently, mixed with a steady drizzle of rain. Visibility was poor, sometimes down below fifty yards. Every now and again the wind would rise, and it was possible to see a quarter mile or so out across the leaden Pacific.
Nanci spoke again. “But we’ll need to move on land. I had considered the feasibility of stealing another craft. Should they come after us and the weather clears, then it’ll be like shooting fish in a barrel.”
“Steal a wagon?” said Paul McGill.
The older woman nodded. “With eleven of us, we have to go for something substantial.”
“Or two smaller vehicles,” offered Jeff Thomas. “Wouldn’t that be better, Nanci?”
“No. Double the theft and you simply quadruple the risk.”
Jim Hilton scratched his chin. “We need something that’ll get us through deep snow. No ploughs out. Highways will be close to impassable.”
“There are plenty of farms around here.” Nanci stepped into the doorway. “Tractors. Get you through most weather.”
“A tractor will take us forever.”
“No, Jeanne. Being dead takes forever.”
Without settling on a specific strategy, they packed everything.