She looked to be close to sixty, though her six-foot body was in terrific shape. Jim Hilton had shaken hands with her and he had felt steel and whipcord in the grip. Jeff had introduced her as a retired schoolteacher from San Francisco.
Jim hadn’t met many retired lady teachers who carried a 16-round, 9 mm Port Royale machine pistol across their shoulders and a pair of Heckler & Koch P-111 pistols on the hip. Greased and ready for action.
He shook his head.
The light was just beginning to fade away toward the west as the sun dipped behind the Sierras. Night came fast out in the desert. The fifteenth day of the eleventh month of the year was nearly over.
There’d been no sign of General John Kennedy Zelig. He’d been the senior officer in charge of the space mission. Now, with something mysterious called Operation Tempest, Zelig had left them a runic message to all meet together in the ghost town of Calico on November 15.
They were all there, the survivors, but nothing had happened.
Just the eight of them. He wondered what had happened to the other couple of crew members who’d survived the crash and the bloody attack on them back at Stevenson Base.
Henderson McGill and Pete Turner. Mac was the astrophysicist and, at forty-five, the oldest member of the Aquila’s complement. He’d also been Jim Hilton’s best friend. Pete had been second pilot, a thirty-six-year-old widower with no children. His wife had been murdered by muggers, years earlier, on the Lower East Side of New York. An expert in martial arts, Jim had reckoned Pete had a better chance than most at making it.
Mac and Pete had headed northeast, on much the longest odyssey of anyone. With no family, Pete Turner had been happy to travel with Mac, who had been married twice and had seven kids. One wife, Jeanne, lived up on Mount Vernon Street, in Boston. And Angel, the second Mrs. McGill, had a Victorian Gothic white frame house on Melville Avenue in Mystic, Connecticut. Jim knew the house, having visited it several times over the years.
But with winter closing in, there had always been a risk that the snows would catch them—if some other grinning death hadn’t gotten to them first.
They hadn’t come back.
Jim knew Mac. If he hadn’t returned to Calico for the agreed date, then something serious had stopped him. Something like no longer being alive.
Jim laid down the pencil, looking at the neatly written notes.
Out of the window he could see Nanci Simms leaning against the wall of what had once been the ice cream parlor.
Jeff was in front of her, and it looked as if they were having an argument. The journalist, half a head shorter than the woman, was shaking his finger at her, pointing behind him toward the rest of the township. Jim realized that they had no idea that they were being watched.
He looked away from them, whistling tunelessly between his teeth, glancing again at his notes and deciding that it hadn’t been a good idea after all. He scrunched up the brittle sheets of paper and dropped them to the splintered boards of the floor.
“What’s the point?” he asked himself. He stood up, stretching, hardly aware now of the thirty-five ounces of revolver on his right hip.
It was a GPF-555 Ruger Blackhawk Hunter. Six-shot, .44 caliber, full-metal jacket. Blued steel with cushioned grips and walnut inserts.
Jim had already lost certain count of how many people he’d killed with the gun.
Out of the open door he saw his daughter, walking slowly and wearily toward him, dragging her feet through the red-gold dust.
Behind him he heard the sound of a squeal of shock or pain, quickly muffled.
Before he turned to look, Heather called out to him. “Hi, Daddy!”
“Hi, kitten.” He grinned, instantly remembering. “Sorry. Forgot. Hi, Heather.”
Behind him came another strange yelping sound. Jim still didn’t glance around.
“I’m real tired, Dad.”
“Me, too. Best wait until full dark in case Zelig delivers on his message.”
The girl stood about fifteen yards away, scrawling with her toe in the rutted dirt. As the night came racing in, the temperature dropped like an iron bucket down a well. Jim could see the pale ghost of his daughter’s breath, frosting around her pursed lips.