“Fish, Dad!” Heather yelled excitedly. “Look, loads of them, all jumping.”
“Salmon. And those are steelheads.”
“Steelheads?”
“Steelhead trout. The way they’re going up by those rocks means… Yeah, we could maybe fix us up some sort of net and trap one or two. They’d make great eating.”
Jim shivered as the coastal wind blew through the cathedral of unthinkably massive trees around them. He was possessed by an overwhelming sense of solitude, as if he and Heather were the only two people left alive in the universe.
JEFF THOMAS had decided that he was probably the only survivor from the Aquila.
That was what he’d told the interrogators who’d kept at him ever since his capture. Maybe arrest was a better word, since there was the total feeling of military control in the way the Hunters of the Sun ran their base.
He’d told them a carefully edited version of the truth, finding out early on that they knew about the crash landing and about the meet up at Calico. So Jeff invented accidents and killings to account for the rest of the crew since that was what the stone-faced questioners seemed to want from him.
He hadn’t mentioned Nanci Simms, and neither had his interrogators, which he regarded as probably being a good sign.
But it didn’t stop him thinking about her when he was alone in his Spartan cell, lying on his back, hands feeling below the single gray blanket to heighten his own arousal.
It was always the thought of her that set his groin prickling with a hot, disgusted longing.
Part of him was revolted at the pitch of excitement he could reach, thinking about the sixty-year-old woman, imagining her in her gleaming boots, standing astride him….
Afterward Jeff would lie panting in the darkness, loathing himself. No, he certainly couldn’t tell them about Nanci Simms. She was dead anyway.
Jeff had wondered about the man called Flagg, who seemed to have been the founder and once the leader of the Hunters. Nobody would talk about him, but it was obvious that the dude was dead.
Also nobody would talk about the man who’d taken over, referring only to “the Chief,” with so much awe and fear that it made the short hairs curl at the nape of Jeff Thomas’s neck.
He’d been losing track of time, but he thought it must be around December 5.
“WE CAME CLOSE,” said Angel, picking shreds of rabbit from between her back teeth.
“Yeah, but close isn’t good enough. Doesn’t hit the target. Doesn’t win the free vacation. Doesn’t get us to Muir Woods today.” Henderson McGill peered out from one of the windows of the big RV, shaking his head. “Snow’s getting worse and worse. If it had just held off for another couple of days, then we might just have made it.”
“How long do you reckon it’ll be now?” asked Pamela, pulling her dark hair back into a ponytail, helped by Jocelyn.
“God knows. There’s three feet on the ground and no ploughs coming through. Could make it in the other two vehicles but not in this. And we need this as a kind of movable home. I expect at least a week…maybe a while longer.” He shook his head. “Still, least we all made it through and we’re together. Probably nobody up there in Muir Woods anyway.”
WAY NORTH OF THEM General John Kennedy Zelig sat alone at his leather-topped desk and looked at the heavily annotated map. There was a small number of special groups of people that Operation Tempest had been trying to locate ever since the violent crumbling of society. People with special talents and skills. The survivors of the crew of the Aquila were just such people.
The trouble was that neither Zelig nor his agents knew where any of them now were.
There had been the momentary flash of hope when he’d received the news of Princip and Lynch, with the son of Romero, down with Abbey. One of his very best men.
But the patrol sent down there on December 4 had just reported that Caff’s Groceries was a charred heap of cold ashes. There was also a burned-out pickup in the parking lot, and one corpse, believed male, among the ruins.