Yet somehow Perlmutter held Kurtz’s gaze. Looked into the absence. He was not off to a good start here. It was important-it was imperative-that the slide be stopped before it could become an avalanche.
“All right, good. Better, anyway.” Kurtz’s voice was low but Perlmutter had no problem hearing him despite the overlapping chunter of the helicopters. “I’m going to say this to you Just once, and only because you’re new to my service and you clearly don’t know your asshole from your piehole. I have been asked to run a phooka operation here. Do you know what a phooka is.
“No,” Perlmutter said. It caused him almost physical pain not to be able to say No sir.
“According to the Irish, who as a race have never entirely crawled from the bath of superstition in which their mothers gat them, a phooka is a phantom horse that kidnaps travelers and carries them away on its back. I use it to mean an operation which is both covert and wide open. A paradox, Perlmutter! The good news is that we’ve been developing contingency plans for just this sort of clusterfuck since 1947, when the Air Force first recovered the sort of extraterrestrial artifact now known as a flashlight. The bad news is that the future is now and I have to face it with guys like you in support. Do you understand me, buck?”
“Yes, s… yes.”
“I hope so. What we’ve got to do here, Perlmutter, is go in fast and hard and utterly phooka. We’re going to do as much dirtywork as we have to and come out as clean as we can clean yes, Lord, and smilin…”
Kurtz bared his teeth in a brief smile of such brutally satiric intensity that Perlmutter felt a little like screaming. Tall and stoop-shouldered, Kurtz had the build of a bureaucrat. Yet something about him was terrible. You saw some of it in his eyes, sensed some of it in the still, prim way he held his hands in front of him… but those weren’t the things that made him scary, that made the men call him Old Creepy Kurtz. Perlmutter didn’t know exactly what the really scary thing was, and didn’t want to know. What he wanted right now-the only thing he wanted-was to get out of this conversation with his ass on straight. Who needed to go twenty or thirty miles west to make contact with an alien species? Perlmutter had one standing right here in front of him.
Kurtz’s lips snapped shut over his teeth. “On the same page, are we?”
“Yes.”
“Saluting the same flag? Pissing in the same latrine?”
“Yes.”
“How are we going to come out of this, Pearly?”
“Clean?”
“Boffo! And how else?”
For one horrible second he didn’t know. Then it came to him. “Smiling, sir.”
“Call me sir again and I’ll knock you down.”
“I’m sorry,” Perlmutter whispered. He was, too.
Here came a school bus rolling slowly up the road with its offside wheels in the ditch and canted almost to the tipover point so it could get past the helicopters. MILLINOCKET SCHOOL DEPT was written up the side, big black letters against a yellow background. Commandeered bus. Owen Underhill and his men inside. The A-team. Perlmutter saw it and felt better. At different times both men had worked with Underhill.
“You’ll have doctors by nightfall,” Kurtz said. “All the doctors you need. Check?”
“Check.”
As he walked toward the bus, which stopped in front of Gosselin’s single gasoline pump, Kurtz looked at his pocket-watch. Almost eleven. Gosh, how the time flew when you were having fun. Perlmutter walked with him, but all the cocker spaniel spring had gone out of Perlmutter’s step.
“For now, Archie, eyeball em, smell em, listen to their tall tales, and document any Ripley you see. You know about the Ripley, I assume?” “Yes.” “Good. Don’t touch it. “’God, no!” Perlmutter exclaimed, then flushed. Kurtz smiled thinly. This one was no more real than his shark’s grin. “Excellent idea,
Perlmutter! You have breathing masks?” “They just arrived. Twelve cartons of them, and more on the w-”Good. We want Polarolds of the Ripley. We need mucho documentation. Exhibit A, Exhibit B, so on and so forth. Got it?” “Yes.” “And none of our… our guests get away, right?” “Absolutely not.” Perlmutter was shocked by the idea, and looked it. Kurtz’s lips stretched. The thin smile grew and once more became the shark’s grin. Those empty eyes looked through Perlmutter-looked all the way to the center of the earth, for all Perlmutter knew. He found himself wondering if anyone would leave Blue Base when this was over. Except Kurtz, that was.
“Carry on, Citizen Perlmutter. In the name of the government, I order you to carry on.”
Archie Perlmutter watched Kurtz continue on toward the bus, where Underhill-a squat jug of a man-was climbing off. Never in his life had he been so utterly delighted to see a man’s back.
2
“Hello, boss,” Underhill said. Like the rest, he wore a plain green coverall, but like Kurtz, he also wore a sidearm. Sitting in the bus were roughly two dozen men, most of them just finishing an early lunch.
“What have they got there, buck?” Kurtz asked. At six-foot-six he towered above Underhill, but Underhill probably outweighed him by seventy pounds.
“Burger King. We drove through. I didn’t think the bus would fit, but Yoder said it would, and he was right. Want a Whopper? They’re probably a little on the cold side by now, but there must be a microwave in there someplace.” Underhill nodded toward the store.
“I’ll pass. Cholesterol’s not so good these days.”
“Groin okay?” Six years before, Kurtz had suffered a serious groin-pull while playing racquetball, This had indirectly led to their only disagreement. Not a serious one, Owen Underhill judged, but with Kurtz, it was hard to tell. Behind the man’s patented game-face, thoughts came and went at near light-speed, agendas were constantly being rewritten, and emotions were turning on a dime, There were people-quite a few of them, actually-who thought Kurtz was crazy. Owen Underhill didn’t know if he was or not, but he knew you wanted to be careful around this one. Very.
“As the Irish might put it,” Kurtz said, “me groin’s foine.” He reached between his legs, gave his balls a burlesque yank, and favored Owen with that teeth-baring grin.
“Good.”
“And you? Been okay?”
“Me groin’s foine,” Owen said, and Kurtz laughed.
Now coming up the road, rolling slowly and carefully but having an easier time than the bus, was a brand-new Lincoln Navigator with three orange-clad hunters inside, hefty boys all three, gawking at the helicopters and the double-timing soldiers in their green coveralls. Gawking at the guns, mostly. Vietnam comes to northern Maine, praise God. Soon they would join the others in the Holding Area.
Half a dozen men approached as the Navigator pulled up behind the bus, with its stickers reading BLUE DEVIL PRIDE and THIS VEHICLE STOPS AT ALL RR CROSSINGS. Three lawyers or bankers with their own cholesterol problems and fat stock portfolios, lawyers or bankers pretending to be good old boys, under the impression (of which they would soon be disabused) that they were still in an America at peace. Soon they would be in the barn (or the corral, if they craved fresh air), where their Visa cards would not be honored. They would be allowed to keep their cell phones. They wouldn’t work this far up in the willywags, but hitting REDIAL might keep them amused.
“You plugged in tight?” Kurtz asked.
“I think so, yes.”
“Still a quick study?”
Owen shrugged.
“How many people in the Blue Zone altogether, Owen?”
“We estimate eight hundred. No more than a hundred in Zones Prime A and Prime B.”
That was good, assuming no one slipped through. In terms of possible contamination, a few slips wouldn’t matter-the news, at least so far, was good on that score. In terms of information management, however, it would not be good at all. It was hard to ride a phooka horse these days. Too many people with videocams. Too many TV station helicopters. Too many watching eyes.
Kurtz said, “Come inside the store. They’re setting me up a “Bago, but it’s not here yet.”
“Un momento,” Underhill said, and dashed up the steps of the bus. When he came back down, he had a grease-spotted Burger King sack in his hand and a tape recorder over his shoulder on a strap.
Kurtz nodded toward the bag. “That stuff’ll kill you.”
“We’re starring in The War of the Worlds and you’re worried about high cholesterol?”
Behind them, one of the newly arrived mighty hunters was saying he wanted to call his lawyer, which probably meant he was a banker. Kurtz led Underhill into the store. Above them, the flashlights were back, running their glow over the bottoms of the clouds, jumping and dancing like animated characters in a Disney cartoon.