Nanci carried her new Krieghoff Ulm-Primus rifle over her shoulder, the machine pistol hanging from her hip. The surviving Heckler & Koch automatic was safely holstered.
Sukie McGill was fretful, crying constantly, repeatedly asking where her big sister, Pamela, had gone. The little girl was running a temperature. Her face was flushed, and the glands in her neck slightly swollen.
Carrie Princip had done some training as a backup medic to Bob Rogers on the Aquila and she tried to check out the child. But Sukie wriggled and slapped out at her, inconsolable.
“Just some sort of a bug,” said Carrie. “Her temperature feels quite high but not dangerous. I don’t know. I didn’t do much pediatrics.” She caught Nanci Simms’s eye. “All right, all right. I didn’t do any pediatrics.”
“She can travel?”
Carrie nodded. “No choice, is there, Nanci?”
“None. Let’s go. And try to keep the child quiet, or it could mean trouble.” She didn’t specify precisely whom the trouble might be for.
THE SQUAD of armed men approached the abandoned cabin about two hours after Jim Hilton and his party had left it.
They wore camouflage uniforms in mottled shades of dark blue and gray and black, and each of them had the tiny sun-and-moon insignia on their collars. Their weapons were a mix of American M-16s and Russian Dragunovs.
There were ten of them. Three came down from the highway, having checked out the stiff corpse of Burnette. Three more had circled around to the north in an inflatable dingy. The other four came in out of the ocean mists in a second inflatable, the electric engine almost soundless.
Though the hut looked deserted, they didn’t take any chances. Anyone good enough to take out the marksman on the elevated bridge a couple of miles south wasn’t going to be someone that you took casually.
But the birds had flown, leaving no clues as to how many of them there’d been. Tracks led into the steep ravine behind the cabin, deep in the soft mud. But they were so trampled and overlaid that reading the trail was impossible. A little higher up the treeless slope the snow had fallen, covering everything in a slushy blanket.
“We’d best report what we didn’t find to the Chief,” said the senior noncom.
“It’s good we’re a thousand miles away from her,” the young officer added with a nervous grin.
IN FACT, the distance was rather less than that, as the pair of Chinooks flew in a tight formation, closing in on their destination. The clouds were gathering over the Sierras, forcing them to keep to the east, rumbling along below a thousand feet.
Margaret Tabor sat in the copilot’s seat, listening to her favorite old Carpenters tape on her Walkman. Every now and again she pulled the miniature cans from her ears and leaned forward, tapping her fingers on the windshield, studying the deteriorating weather.
“Might have to put down if the ceiling drops any lower, Chief,” said the pilot, the crackling of the throat mike disguising her nervousness.
“Your decision.” Tabor’s voice was neutral, not giving the woman any clue as to what she really wanted.
She inserted the earphones again and hummed along with “We’ve Only Just Begun.”
ZELIG’S navigational plan had been to head southeastward on 1-82 out of the Cascades. Then they would try to find a cut-through to 1-84 and then down onto 1-5, depending on the meteorological reports.
The main problem was going to be circling around the devastated ruins of Portland.
His recon team had already gone in under cover and checked out the environs of the conurbation, reporting that there had been a massive fire. It had engulfed thousands of stranded vehicles and burned out a swathe to the east of the city that was twenty blocks by fifteen.
There had also been a number of fierce freak electrical storms’ in the past three or four days, accompanied by savage blizzards, which had made any sort of radio communication difficult, even over short distances.
Zelig was perched uncomfortably on the edge of his seat in the rattling M113, peering out through one of the ob-slits in the armored flank of the vehicle. There had been a high wind that had tended to sweep the narrow blacktop clear of snow, banking it in the corners of fields in soft drifts that were ten feet high in some places.