I moved close enough to have seen him breathing, had he been. I moved in and rolled him over. One high on the right shoulder, two high on the right chest. Probably not instantaneous. He had probably faded away while I was counting.
“The iceman,” I said aloud, and the sound of my voice starded me. No need to lose your wits, McGee. No need to talk to yourself in the forest deep. It was a pleasure to be McGee again. McGraw had been a tiresome fellow. Dogged and unresponsive.
I searched them both. I switched weapons. I kept Barry’s small pack, Chuck’s ammo belt, grenades, intricate wristwatch, whistle cord and whistle, all the clips, both sets of keys, and their combined treasury of forty-two dollars. Though the dead seem to shrink in size, it is hard to get into their pockets. They seem to offer a stolid resistance to personal invasion.
I kept a close watch upstream while robbing my brothers. My knee was coming back. I had
The Green Ripper progressed from a hobble to a “imp, and from experience I could tell that if I kept moving, it would work itself out the rest of the way.
There was an assumption to be made. Somebody had probably been near enough to the area to hear the distinctive net drumming of the Uzi in a wasteful burst of about ten. It would be reasonable for them to suppose that Brother Chuck and Brother Barry had come upon Brother Thomas and cut him down in the snow. Since they had been trained in exactly this sort of thing, pursuit and murder, it was not reasonable to suppose the murderee had turned the tables. And I had given them cause to feel a certain professional contempt for the abilities of Brother Thomas. So now they would be waiting for Brother Chuck and Brother Barry to come back out to the road and report. Persival, Alvor, Ahman, Haris, Sammy, Nena, and if they had found her and untied her~tella
Assume somebody on the gate and one person way down the road in the van or off in the van to pick somebody up. Four left on top of the hill. Five counting Stella. So go in the least likely direction. Back to camp. The hard way. Up the slopes, well away from the road.
By now there was such a confusion of tracks, I doubted they could be easily read. Also, in places where the snowfall on the ground had been light because of the trees, it was melted enough to show the brown carpet of needles.
After a time I came to familiar terrain where we had been on the exercises, on the training missions. I stopped and listened for a long time and heard nothing. Then I heard five spaced shots well below and behind me, very probably from where I had left the bodies. Five was Brother Chuck’s emergency signal on his whistle, taken, no doubt, from the marine emergency signal, five quick ones on the ship’s horn.
Probably two down there, one at the gate, one in the van, three on top of the hill, counting Stella. One with, as Persival himself had pointed out, very bad wheels. Alvor, Persival, and perhaps Stella.
All of them were convinced of the absolute correctness of their training, their dedication, their mission. A true zealot can be a fearsome engine of destruction. I worked my way up the slope. The small shattered trees were off to my left. I stretched out and inched forward until I could see all the way down the length of the small plateau. It was seven or eight hundred feet long, three or four hundred wide, with the structures grouped at the far end.
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As I watched, I heard a motor. It was the van, coming up the hill, approaching rapidly. The road came out onto the plateau a hundred feet to my right. It bounced up over the final ridge so quickly I could not tell if there was one person in it or two.
It rolled to a stop near Persival’s motor home and, as Sammy or Ahman got out of it I couldn’t tell which one it was at that distance, close to six hundred feet Persival and Alvor came out of the motor home. They stood and talked. I could guess that it was excited talk. The newcomer was waving his arms and pointing back the way he had come.