Tyrannosaur Canyon (37 page)

"Well, well, what do you know," said Sally.

He stuck it in his own pocket. In a small musette bag buckled around the man's waist he found an extra magazine for the handgun. He glanced around, saw the gun lying on the ground where Sally had dropped it. He shoved it in his belt and buckled the musette bag around his own waist.

"You really think you're going to need that sidearm?" Sally asked.

"The guy might have a partner."

"I don't think so."

"You never know."

There was nothing else of interest on the man. Tom felt his pulse again. Thready, but still there. He wished the man were dead: it would make things simpler. It vaguely shocked him how he couldn't muster even the slightest pity for the man.

The man's rifle was lying on the sand a few feet away, and Tom retrieved it, ejected the empty magazine, and flung it away. There was a second magazine in the musette bag, which he emptied, scattering the bullets in the sand and tossing the magazine.

"Let's go," he said.

"And him?"

"The only thing we can do for him is get out of here and find help. If the truth be told, he's a goner." Tom put his arm around her. "You ready?"

Arm in arm, leaning on each other, they set off limping down the wash. For ten minutes they walked in silence, and then Tom halted in surprise.

A robed figure was striding up the wash toward them, hand raised. It was the monk-Wyman Ford.

"Tom!" the figure called, breaking into a jog. "Tom!" He was gesturing frantically, now running toward them. At the same time Tom heard a faint droning noise and saw a small, windowless plane with a bulbous nose come flying over the rim of the canyon, making a slow turn toward them.

5

MELODIE STARED AT the computer screen on which was scrolling the data from the last run of the microprobe. She blinked her eyes twice, rolled them around one way, then the other, trying to get them to focus. Strange how she felt both exhausted and wired at the same time, with a buzz in her head as bad as if she'd just downed a martini. She glanced up at the big clock in the lab.
Four o'clock
in the afternoon. As she gazed at the clock, the minute hand jerked a single minute forward with a faint clunk. She hadn't slept in over fifty hours.

She rapped a key and stored the data. She had done all the obvious research that could be done on the specimen and she'd answered most of the major questions. The only loose end was the Venus particle. She was determined to tie that one up before submitting her paper for online publication. Otherwise some other scientist would tie it up for her-and she was so close.

She selected the last of the prepared wafers, put it on a slide, and examined it in the polarizing scope. At 500x she could just barely see them, tiny black dots clustered here and there inside the cells. She removed the wafer, slipped it into a micro-mortar, and carefully broke it up, gently grinding it with water to a fine slurry, which she poured into a plastic beaker.

She went to the locked cabinet and removed a bottle of twelve percent hydrofluoric acid. It was unwise of her to handle such a dangerous chemical-one that would actually dissolve glass-after so much stress and lack of sleep, but it was the only acid capable of doing what she wanted done: completely dissolving the replacement mineral of the fossil without attacking the carbon coating of the Venus particles. She wanted to free the particles so she could take a look at them in the round, so to speak.

She brought the bottle over to the fume hood and placed it in the area marked

HF USE ONLY. Then she put on splash goggles, nitrile gloves, a rubber apron, and sleeve protectors. She lowered the fume hood to six inches to protect her face, turned it on, and began work, unscrewing the cap and pouring a small amount of HF into the plastic test tube containing the ground fossil, acutely aware that even a small spill on her skin could be fatal. She watched as it foamed and clouded, timing it to the second. When it was done she quickly diluted it fifty to one to stop the acidic reaction, poured off the excess, and diluted it a second and third time to get rid of the acid.

She held up the result to the light, a thin layer of mineral sediment at the bottom of a test tube, in which she knew must be present at least some particles.

With a micropipette she sucked up most of the sediments, dried them, and then, using a separation funnel and a solution of sodium metatungstate, floated off the lighter sediments from the heavier grit. A further rinse, and then she took up a small quantity of particles with a micropipette to let them drift over a grid-ded slide, the particles settling into the grids. A quick count at lOOx revealed about thirty Venus particles, largely intact, cleaned of miscellaneous grit and junk.

She zeroed in on one particularly well-preserved particle and upped the magnification to 750x. The particle leapt into clarity, filling the objective. Melodic examined it with growing puzzlement. It looked even more like the Venus symbol, a spherule of carbon with a long piece sticking out of it, with a crosspiece at the end tipped with what looked like hairs. She opened her lab notebook and sketched a picture of it.

When she was done, she sat back and looked at her drawing. She was deeply surprised. The particle did not resemble any kind of inclusion that might have crystallized naturally in the rock. In fact, it looked like nothing she had ever seen before-except, perhaps, the radiolaria she had once spent a couple of days examining and drawing as part of a high school science project. It was definitely of biological origin-she was sure of that at least.

Melodic removed a half-dozen Venus particles from the gridded slide and transferred them to a SEM stage. She placed it in a vacuum prep chamber, get-tine it ready for the scanning electron microscope. She pressed the button and a faint humming rose from the machine as the chamber was evacuated.

Time take a look at this sucker in the round, she thought.

6

F. P.MASAGO STOOD in the whitewashed computer room of the monastery, now

serving as the Ground Control Station for the Predator. His eyes were fixed on a flat panel video screen displaying the DLTV feed from the Predator's main camera. The rough wooden monastery table was covered with an array of advanced electronics, manned by three operators. The central operator was a Combat Controller from the 615th Special Tactics Group Wing Command, wearing a UAV FlightSim helmet. The console he worked displayed the basic controls a normal aircraft would have: yoke, throttle, airspeed indicator, heading, and altimeter, along with an F-16 style joystick.

Masago's eyes flickered away from the screen for a moment to the two CAG/DEVGU support operators. They were working intently, aware of nothing except the electronic world in which they were immersed. One worked the pay-load console, an array of screens, switches, keyboards, and digital readouts that controlled the surveillance and reconnaissance capabilities of the Predator. This 450-pound package contained electro-optical and infrared cameras, a synthetic aperture radar for flight in bad weather; a two-color DLTV television with a variable zoom and 955mm Spotter, along with a high-resolution Forward Looking Infrared Radar with six fields of view, 19mm to 560mm.

The D-boys were back with the chopper. Their turn would come later.

Masago's eyes moved to the second controller. He worked the UAVs three Multi-Spectral Targeting Systems with laser designation, range finder, electronic support and countermeasures, and a moving target indicator. The UAV had already expended one of its two Hellfire C missiles killing the monk.

Masago's attention drifted back to the video display. Suddenly he stiffened.

"Got something." The toneless voice of one of the operators murmured in Masago's headset.

Masago could see two people, and a third, approaching the other two, a hundred yards away. A quarter mile up the canyon, a figure lay supine.

"Zoom in to 900mm on the southernmost target," said Masago.

The new image jumped on the screen. A man, lying against the canyon wall. A large stain-blood. A dead man. He had known of the monk and these two from his debriefing of the cop, Wilier. But this third man, this dead man, was an unknown.

"Back out to 240mm."

Now he could see the three figures again. The one to the north had broken into a run. He could see his white upturned face for a moment. It was the CIA meddler, the so-called monk. Masago stared in surprise.

"Looks like we missed the girl in the dress," murmured the MTS controller.

Masago leaned intently over the picture, staring at it as if to suck out its essence.

"Give me a closer look at the middle target."

The camera jumped and the figure of a man filled the screen-Broadbent. The man he was looking for, critical to the plan. Broadbent had found the dying dinosaur prospector and he was therefore the one most likely to know the exact location of the fossil. According to Wilier, both the wife and the monk were involved, although how it all fitted together wasn't clear. Nor did it need to be. His goal was simple: obtain the locality of the fossil, clear the area of unauthorized personnel, get the fossil, and get out. Let some paper pusher assemble the details for the ex post facto classified report.

"Back me out to 160mm," he said to the payload console operator.

The image on the screen jumped back. The three had joined up and were running for the shelter of the canyon walls.

"Activating MTI," said the controller.

"No," murmured Masago.

The controller cast him a puzzled glance.

"I need these targets alive."

"Yes, sir."

Masago scanned the canyon. It was eight hundred feet deep with stepped-back walls, narrowing at a bottleneck before opening up to the big valley of stone. The few side canyons all boxed up. It was almost a closed area, and it presented them with an opportunity.

"See that point where the canyon narrows? About
two o'clock
on your screen."

"Yes, sir."

"That's your target."

"Sir?"

"I want you to hit that canyon wall in such a way to bring down enough material to block their route forward. We've got a chance to trap them."

"Yes, sir."

"Heading one-eighty, descend to two thousand," said the pilot.

"Tracking stationary target. Ready to fire."

"Hold until my signal," Masago murmured into his head set. "Wait." He could already see the drone was going to overshoot. The canyon rim loomed up and suddenly the targets were gone, hidden behind the thousand-foot wall of stone.

"Son of a bitch," the pilot muttered.

"Come around on a one-sixty heading," said Masago. "Get the vehicle down, follow the canyon."

They’ll see-

"That's the point. Buzz them. Panic them."

The scene shifted as the drone banked.

"Back me out to 50mm."

The scene jumped back farther to a wide-angled field of view. Now Masago could see both rims of the canyon. As the Predator came around, the three targets reappeared: three black ants running along the base of the sheer canyon walls, heading for the valley.

"Target good," murmured the operator.

"Not yet," murmured Masago. On his wide angle view he could see a turn in the canyon, then a straight stretch of at least four hundred yards. It was like running wildebeest from a helicopter. He watched the figures, which from that altitude seemed to be moving as slowly and helplessly as insects. There wasn't much they could do sandwiched between eight-hundred-foot cliffs. They cleared the bend, now running in the flat, still hugging the canyon wall, hoping it would provide cover.

"At firing," Masago murmured, "switch me to video feed from the missile."

"Yes, sir. Still locked on T."

"Wait. . ."

A long silence. They were running, faltering, clearly exhausted. The woman fell, helped up by the man and the monk. They were now four hundred yards from the target.
Three fifty
.
Three twenty-five
. . .

"Fire."

The screen jumped again as the video feed switched from the Predator to the camera onboard the missile, first a stretch of empty sky, then the ground swinging up, fixing on the left canyon wall, high up. The wall rapidly grew in size as the missile zeroed in with laser tracking. As the missile made contact the feed automatically switched back to the Predator's television camera, and suddenly they were back above, looking down-at a silent cloud of dust billowing upward along with soaring chunks of rock. The figures had dived to the ground. Masago waited. He wanted them badly shaken up-but not dead.

The movement of air in the canyon began to push the dust cloud away. And then the figures reappeared-running back the way they had come.

"Look at those sons of bitches go," muttered the controller.

Masago smiled. "Bring the UAV back to ceiling and keep tracking them. I'm putting the bird up. We've got them now, three rats in a hot tin can."

7

T0M RAN JUST behind Sally, the roar of the explosion still ringing in his ears, dust from the explosion boiling down the canyon toward them. They rested for a moment in the shelter of the canyon wall. Tom paused, leaning on the rock, breathing hard, as Ford joined them.

"What the hell is going on-?" Tom gasped.

The monk shook his head.

"What was that firing at us?"

"A drone. It's still up there, watching us. It's out of missiles, however. They only carry two."

"This is surreal."

"I think the drone fired only to block the canyon. They want to trap us."

"Who's they!"

"Later, Tom. We've got to get out of here."

Tom squinted up and down the canyon, examining the walls on both sides. His eye was arrested by a broad, sloping crack, at the bottom of which stood a long pile of talus. The sloping crevasse offered plenty of handholds and footholds, where falling rocks had jammed, creating natural climbing chocks.