And then finally the crest of the hill was above him. And his right arm was over it. His left arm. His chest. His legs. And almost to his own surprise, he was standing beside Oskaboose, and both were giving Seybold a hand up, the rest of his party appearing in ones and twos and threes, helping each other gain the final bit of ground, gathering there atop the rise overlooking the blockish spread of the Earthglow facility.
They had allowed themselves only a brief period to catch their breath before starting the climb down. Two or three minutes, as Ricci recalled. They had made progress, yes, but that wasn’t the same thing as having achieved their objective. Not nearly.
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The job they had come to do was still ahead of them, and there was no time whatsoever to lose.
They descended the hill as they had started up its opposite side, in single file, and again the elements proved equal parts advantage and handicap.
Open to the constant force of wind and storm unlike its basin wall, the hill’s western slope was almost scrubbed of vegetation and bore the insults of constant battery: crumbling juts of granite, craggy scars and pockmarks, and deep gouges that looked as if they were bites taken out of its stony hide by some great, vicious set of jaws. Any of these could have been serious pitfalls for someone who didn’t know the territory. But to Os- kaboose they represented options: handholds, footholds, covered niches where his teammates could take momentary respite.
The drawback was that the weather-blasted pieces of hillside had nowhere to go but down, an inevitable consequence of gravity that gave Oskaboose his full share of problems for the last fifteen or twenty yards of the descent toward its base. Picking his steps over and around tumbled boulders, pulverized rocks, and slippery cascades of pebbles, snow, and ice was a strenuous challenge complicated by his mindfulness of having to select a path that would be least difficult for those behind him.
The guide’s effort was not lost on Ricci. When his boots touched ground, a glance at the tritium dial of his wristwatch showed that over two hours had passed since his group had left camp. Longer than he’d expected, maybe, but thanks to Pokey Oskaboose, they had gotten this far without a single injury worse than a bump or bruise.
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And straight ahead of them now was Earthglow, its shadow deeper than the black of night.
The dangers were supposed to seem real during tac exercises, and indeed they had to an outstanding degree. But there were parts of the mind that refused even voluntary surrender to illusion, and the spilling of simulated blood did not equal loss of life, no matter how true its shade of red.
Pressed against Earthglow’s windowless back wall, Ricci watched Rosander nose his telescoping probe around its corner with a powerful sense of deja vu. Still, he was acutely aware that Cape Green had been little more than a stage set: Africa one day, Balkan Europe the next, Motor City if you wanted it to be. The here and now was what it was, and it never would be anything else, he thought. And this time the men who fell under his watch would not rise to joke, complain, or be chastised about it afterward.
“Picture any clearer on your HUD?” Rosander asked. He fingered a rocker switch on the probe’s pistol grip handle to adjust its nonvisible IR illumination level. “I’ve maxed the output, can’t get better res past about ten yards in this darkness.”
“It’ll do.” The image superimposed on Ricci’s field of view by his visor display showed a pair of guards in hooded parkas, goggles, and wool scarves taking relaxed strides along their patrol of the building’s north side. Their shoulder-slung FN P90 assault weapons fired the same ammunition as his Five-Seven pistol: small rounds, big punch. “Get rid of the sound, though. I don’t need to hear their horseshit about boffing townie high school girls.”
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Rosander pressed another switch to cut his rod’s surveillance mike.
“These guys go down fast and quiet,” Ricci said. The comlink’s acoustical gain was set to output his whisper as a normal speaking voice to his team members. “Can’t let them get off a shot. Rather we don’t have to, either.”
He reached into his belt pouch for the DMSO, looked quickly over his shoulder, then gesture^ for Seybold to produce his canister.
“On my signal,” he said, raising his fist.
Seybold nodded to him, and they edged up beside Rosander.
They waited. The guards appeared to be in no hurry to complete their rounds. Just a couple of gun-toting chums on a leisurely stroll through the meat-locker cold of night in the Canadian Shield.
After what seemed an age, they approached the corner of the wall.
Ricci’s arm came up like a semaphore.
Seybold moved with him at once. They rounded the corner and got right in the guards’ faces with their canisters, knowing the high-pressure spurts of fluid would not disperse in the wind at close range and that the permeable fabric scarves wrapped around their mouths would do nothing to stop the sedative from acting instantaneously.
Silently and painlessly kayoed, the guards hit the ground unconscious and then were flex-cuffed and dragged into the shadows at the base of the hill. They would be out for hours.
Ricci turned to his men.
“All right,” he said. “Let’s hit the gatehouse.”
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Pokey Oskaboose’s guidance had been a blessing for more reasons than his familiarity with the physical terrain. He had also imparted a critical tip about area transport during the mission’s planning stage: Pretty well everything that made its way to and from the rest of the world was conveyed three times weekly via Toronto on the wilderness train. A single train. Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. Like other outposts located many miles from the nearest railway depot, Earthglow would need to connect with the station by truck over the Trans Canada Highway. There was simply no other practical means.
Of course, Oskaboose hadn’t known the facility’s specific shipping and receiving schedules. But that hadn’t been necessary. These were the boonies, last stop on the civilization express. Conduct the insertion in the long, murky period that bridged Thursday and Friday-say at two, three, four o’clock in the morning-and you could safely assume that the delivery gate would be manned by a skeleton crew. Warm bodies, if the expression was applicable here at world’s end. You could also figure they would go on shift expecting to do little more than gulp coffee and pick their noses. Because not for a million bucks would a driver try rolling his wagon over the frosted local roads at such an hour, especially the black, winding spools of blacktop off the main highway, where painted lanes were nonexistent, and you had to sort of guess whether you were in danger of getting smacked by opposing traffic. Well, maybe for a million bucks, Oskaboose had reconsidered. But far as he knew, nobody had gotten offered that amount yet.
It was now a few ticks of the minute hand short of three a.m., and Ricci was thinking that Oskaboose’s
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skinny had been worth a fortune and more.
The gatehouse was nothing fancy. A lighted, heated modular steel booth designed for a small handful of personnel, it could have been lifted from where it stood and dropped at the entry to any commercial building anyplace, maybe a factory that manufactured fountain pens, or fan belts, or soda bottles, or zippers for ladies’ skirts. It was hard for Ricci to imagine it as a breeding farm for a killer germ of a type never before known to man. Hard for him, sometimes, to remember that the shape of evil could be so drummingly bland and commonplace. The devil as the guy next door.
Hugging the north wall of Earthglow about a hundred feet from the gatehouse, his men drawn up behind him, Ricci could see three guards through the plate glass windows of the booth. Two were seated behind a control panel with a bank of video monitors on it, talking, neither of them apparently paying attention to the screens. A third was dozing on a chair behind a desk or counter, legs stretched, arms folded, head tucked to his chest.
Ricci thought a minute. The door was on his side of the booth, a magnetic swipe card reader on the frame. It would automatically lock when closed, but these prefab housings weren’t designed to store the crown jewels. He was sure one good kick would take care of it.
He called four men over to him. Grillo, Barnes, Car- lysle, and Newell. The rest would stay put. This would have to be perfectly coordinated, and he wanted experience with him.
His instructions took seconds: Fast, quiet. The guards at the other perimeter posts had to remain oblivious.