37
The fog was thinning, but visibility was still no more than about a quarter of a mile.
Standing with Tessa in the middle of the circle of cars, Sam heard the choppers shortly after ten o’clock, before he saw their lights. Because the mist distorted sound, he could not tell from which direction they were approaching, but he figured they were coming in from the south, along the coast, staying a couple of hundred yards out to sea, where there were no hills to worry about in the fog. Packed with the most sophisticated instruments, they could virtually fly blind. The pilots would be wearing night-vision goggles, coming in under five hundred feet in respect of the poor weather.
Because the FBI maintained tight relationships with the armed services, especially the Marines, Sam pretty much knew what to expect. This would be a Marine Reconnaissance force composed of the standard elements required by such a situation: one CH-46 helicopter carrying the recon team itself—probably twelve men detached from a Marine Assault Unit—accompanied by two Cobra gunships.
Turning around, looking in every direction, Tessa said, “I don’t see them.”
“You won’t,” Sam said. “Not until they’re almost on top of us.”
“They fly without lights?”
“No. They’re equipped with blue lights, which can’t be seen well from the ground, but which give them a damned good view through their night-vision goggles.”
Ordinarily, when responding to a terrorist threat, the CH-46—called the “Sea Knight,” officially, but referred to as “The Frog” by grunts—would have gone, with its Cobra escorts, to the north end of town. Three fire teams, composed of four men each, would have disembarked and swept through Moonlight Cove from north to south, checking out the situation, rendezvousing at the other end for evacuation as necessary.
But because of the message Sam had sent to the Bureau before Sun’s links to the outside world had been cut off, and because the situation did not involve terrorists and was, in fact, singularly strange, SOP was discarded for a bolder approach. The choppers overflew the town repeatedly, descending to within twenty or thirty feet of the treetops. At times their strange bluish-green lights were visible, but nothing whatsoever could be seen of their shape or size; because of their Fiberglas blades, which were much quieter than the old metal blades that once had been used, the choppers at times seemed to glide silently in the distance and might have been alien craft from a far world even stranger than this one.
At last they hovered near the circle of light in the park.
They did not put down at once. With the powerful rotors flinging the fog away, they played a searchlight over the people in the park who stood outside the illuminated landing pad, and they spent minutes examining the grotesque bodies in the street.
Finally, while the Cobras remained aloft, the CH-46 gentled down almost reluctantly in the ring of cars. The men who poured from the chopper were toting automatic weapons, but otherwise they didn’t look like soldiers because, thanks to Sam’s message, they were dressed in biologically secure white suits, carrying their own air-supply tanks on their backs. They might have been astronauts instead of Marines.
Lieutenant Ross Dalgood, who looked baby-faced behind the faceplate of his helmet, came straight to Sam and Tessa, gave his name and rank, and greeted Sam by name, evidently because he’d been shown a photograph before his mission had gotten off the ground. “Biological hazard, Agent Booker?”
“I don’t think so,” Sam said, as the chopper blades cycled down from a hard rhythmic cracking to a softer, wheezing chug.
“But you don’t know?”
“I don’t know,” he admitted.
“We’re the advance,” Dalgood said. “Lots more on the way—regular Army and your Bureau people are coming in by highway. Be here soon.”
The three of them—Dalgood, Sam, and Tessa—moved between two of the encircling cars, to one of the dead things that lay on a sidewalk bordering the park.
“I didn’t believe what I saw from the air,” Dalgood said.
“Believe it,” Tessa said.
“What the hell?” Dalgood said.
Sam said, “Boogeymen.”
38
Tessa worried about Sam. She and Chrissie and Harry returned to Harry’s house at one in the morning, after being debriefed three times by men in decontamination suits. Although they had terrible nightmares, they managed to get a few hours’ sleep. But Sam was gone all night. He had not returned by the time they finished breakfast at eleven o’clock Wednesday morning.