Landing in a spot that was as thick with nuclear missiles as a porcupine’s back with spines! He had to keep . reminding himself that the paradoxical advice had come ., from Turpin, who ought to be reliable if anyone was. Ac- -. cording to him a reserved area was the safest choice pro-
vided the submarine didn’t trigger the automatic firing . mechanisms, because Americans were almost superstitious
about such places and nobody would be within miles.
Thus far the advice had proved sound. Sheklov noted the fact in the tidy mental card-index of data about Turpin that he was compiling.
His knees touched bottom. He found his footing, and abruptly the buoyancy of his suit converted into weight: Not a great weight. He stood up with sea around his legs and looked the scene over.
Nothing moved except branches and man-made litter bobbing on the wavelets.
He went up the sand looking for the tidemark, and found that the full tide. due soon after dawn, would erase all but a few of his footprints. When he gained the protection of the first bushes, he opened his suit and peeled it off. Underneath he wore authentic American leisure clothing, smuggled via Mexico or Canada.
He laid the suit down in a wind-sculpted hollow and hit the destruct switch on its shoulder. Faint smoke drifted up, and the plastic began to deliquesce.
Waiting for the process to go to completion, he used a fronded branch to scuff over the three footprints he had left above the high-water mark. On his return to the suit: he found only a puddle of jelly, already beginning to soak into the sand. He shoveled more sand over it with a bit, of jetsam and tossed miscellaneous garbage on top of the’ little pile. Then, with a final glance out to sea to confirm that the submarine had vanished, he headed inland.
Danty rose from his boulder and faded into the undergrowth again. He kept pace, discreetly.
Sheklov found the dirt road easily. The captain had been laudably precise in his navigation. He walked by its edge-carefully, because it had rained here within the past few hours and the ground was soft-until he came within sight of a car: an expensive make that he recognized from his briefing. Waiting beside it, a man raised his arm in hesitant greeting.
Continuing at a neutral pace, Sheklov studied him. He wore a dark jacket and pants, by Russian standards rather old-fashioned. He was about fifty, above medium height, plump-cheeked. paunchy, sweating a little-from nervousness, presumably, because the night was cool. . . Yes, this was Turpin okay. Either that, or someone had gone to a lot of trouble to prepare a duplicate.
Now the man spoke in a wheezy whisper, saying, “Holtzer?”
Sheklov nodded. For the time being, he was indeed Holtzer.
Turpin let go a gusty sigh and mopped his forehead with a handkerchief. “Sorry,” he said, the word muffled by its folds. “The strain of waiting was beginning to get to me. Uh-did you have a good trip?”
“Well, the water was pretty dirty,” Sheklov said, and tensed for the answer. It was conceivable something had gone wrong, at the receiving if not at the delivering end. But Turpin’s response was word-perfect.
“Still, the air around here isn’t too bad.”
Sheklov let a thought form in his mind.
t made it!
The realization hit him with almost physical violence, so that he did not immediately react when Turpin opened the car door and motioned for him to get in. Belatedly he complied, noting the decadent luxury of the vehicle’s interior . . . and then the sullen inertia of the door as he closed it.
Armored, of course. The thing must weigh six or seven tons. And in plain sight next to the radiation-counter: a gun, its muzzle snugly inserted into a socket on the dash, its butt convenient for the driver’s right hand.
Well, he was going to have to get used to that kind of thing.
“What about tracks?” he said, thinking of how deeply so much weight could drive tires into the ground as soft as he had just been walking on. Turpin started the car and bean to turn it around. It was equipped with manual con- trols. naturally. He’d had it dinned into him that over here people liked to gamble with each other’s lives on the roads.