"I should come on by tonight and relax you. But, come to think of it, we"ll have to make it another time. I"m on the gate midnight to dawn. What"s the matter with you? You act down. Is anything wrong?"

"No. Everything is just peachy. Help me figure out what to cook up."

"Get out of the way. Let me see what we"ve got. Boy, there isn"t much. But there"s two less for lunch, and Brother Persival and Brother Alvor will be back later on with fresh supplies."

"Who"s down on the gate?"

"Brother Sammy, I think."

"Should somebody take something down to him?"

"He can eat after he"s relieved."

"I don"t even know who runs the duty roster."

"Brother Chuck, mostly. Unless Brother Persival wants something done different. Have you been studying your book?"

"The Loving Heart? It sure isn"t easy reading."

"You can say that again. You know, there are parts I have to skip every time."

"What I was thinking, if I could read some of it into a tape recorder, one of those little ones I saw, I could learn it faster."

"Oh, I can get you one of those. We"ve got two in our trailer. And lots of empty tape. Want it right now?"

"Why not?"

She gave me a warm look and a loving smile and went trotting off, leaving her pack weapon, and belt in the corner of the kitchen area. I moved close enough to it to see that the Uzi clip was full up. They get used to having you around. Good old McGraw. He"s getting plenty of exercise, enough food. We"ve got his money and we"re supposed to be hunting for his daughter. Keep an eye on him, of course, but n.o.body is exactly worried about him.

I had tried to give myself another advantage too. During the field exercises I had tried to keep going when it called for endurance, but I had dogged it when it was something calling for quick. I had blundered around when the order was for silent approach. When we ran the improvised obstacle course, I arranged to finish almost last every time. In unarmed combat, I let the men drop me with a certain amount of fuss and trouble. I was rounding off into top shape, putting on a nice edge. As I clumsied along, I studied each of them to see their flaws. Barry was muscle-bound from too much body building. Haris was very quick but without adequate physical strength. Sammy was too wildly energetic. He didn"t plant himself for leverage, and he tried to move in too many directions at once. Ahman was quick and strong and crafty, once he had made up his mind, but he was p.r.o.ne to fatal hesitations. Chuck was the best of them, without a weakness except perhaps a tendency to exhibit more grace than was required, to turn his best profile toward an imaginary camera, to leap a little higher, spin more quickly than the exercise required.

Stella came back with a little cardboard box, silver-colored and battered, and repaired with tape. The Olympus Pearlcorder and accessories were in a jumble inside the box, along with extra tapes and batteries.

"Everybody will have to use one when we get the a.s.signments," she said.

"How?"

"You have to memorize every word of your a.s.signment, and you have to be able to start anywhere, in the middle, toward the end, anywhere. So what you do is read it onto the tape, and then before you go to sleep and when you wake up, you play it and say it right along with yourself, over and over and over. It has to be so much second nature that you don"t have to think about it when you go out on an operation. They"re very, you know, complete. "You will get off at the corner of Main and Central. You will walk quickly north on Main on the right-hand side of the street. When you get to the bus stop at ft southeast corner of Main and Pearl, you will wait there until precisely fourteen hundred hours. You will turn and enter the General National Bank Building, take the first available elevator, and ride up to the fifteenth floor. You will turn left when you exit the elevator, follow the corridor to the fire door at the end." And so on. That was only part of a practice operation I did. There were two more pages of orders. By the time I started it, I never had to think of what to do next. I knew. I was like some kind of machine, you know?"

I took the recorder back to T-6 and left it on the bunk and came back and helped her with the tneal. Since it was the last day of the year, Persival had canceled all afternoon exercises and given orders for solitary meditation and rest. I acquainted myself with my tape recorder. There was an attachment to screw onto the bottom of it which worked as a voice-actuating device. I tested the sensitivity. I put a tape in and read some of The Loving Heart.

"Just as white reflects all colors and black absorbs all colors, the Lord both reflects and absorbs all the thoughts and desires which pa.s.s through our mind. When you know that your thoughts are turning negative, that you are losing faith in your own faith, you must become one with a trusted Brother or Sister who loves you, and through that person renew and restore each other to the positive glory of the Church."

I listened to it come back, with little clicks where it had turned off by itself and come back on again at the sound of my voice, sometimes eliminating the first syllable after the pause.

It amused me to think of what Meyer would say about this mishmash. Though perfectly willing to pursue the philosophical concept to the furthest thicket of his mind, he has no patience with imprecision of thought, looseness of expression.

I read the tattered Pearlcorder manual again and pondered where to place the device. Persival and Alvor were the ones I wanted to tap. Alvor had a little square cement house of his own. It resembled him. Persival lived in the most elegant accommodation of all, a fat tan motor home with bulbous rounded corners and six soft but not flat tires. In the evenings he would confer with Chuck or Alvor or both of them in his motor home. It had obsolete Arizona plates and was not readily visible from the broad flat area of the stony plateau.

One side of one tape was good for thirty minutes. Planting the machine was no good if I had no way to retrieve it.

The quality of the light had changed. I opened my door. Snow was falling, big fat flakes, melting as they fell, coming down in ever greater quant.i.ty; dimming the sky. As I stood there I heard the van coming. It stopped near the warehouse, and I went out to see if I could help, shoving the recorder into my pocket. There were some small heavy wooden boxes in addition to the supplies they had gone after. Chuck appeared, and as he and Alvor carried the boxes into the warehouse, I was detailed to move the provisions to the kitchen. It took four trips, and when I went back to the van, Brother Persival was standing, grimacing with pain, beside one of the small boxes which had fallen into the snow.

"I shouldn"t have tried to carry it," he said. "Would you take it to my quarters, please, Brother Thomas? I"ll be along in a few moments."

It was very heavy for the size of it and contained, according to the label, some sort of electronic equipment. The motor home was locked. I rested the box on the step. Just to the left of the door there. was a metal grid held in place by simple plastic thumbscrew devices, two of them. I guessed it was to vent heat from the back of the refrigerator. I took out the recorder, set the sensitivity, put it on Automatic Record, undid one thumbscrew, pulled the flimsy metal out a few inches, and shoved the recorder into the small s.p.a.ce inside and closed the grid again. It had been an almost instinctive reaction. I did not know how or when I was going to retrieve the recorder. I did not know if it would do me any good. Maybe, if the refrigerator was running, I would merely get thirly minutes of compressor effects. If Stella wanted the recorder back I would have to say I lost it in the snow or the creek or somewhere.

Within moments I was wishing I had it back, but Brother Persival came along to open the door. He did not invite me in. He told me to reach in and set the box on the floor. He thanked me, and I went away. I went to a spot where I could see who might be going in and out of the motor home. First Alvor and then Chuck. Then Alvor came out and went to his own place. Chuck stayed inside until it was time to start fixing the evening meal. Celebration. Among the supplies was a batch of barbecued chickens, needing only to be heated up. And there were several halfgallon jugs of Gallo Hearty Burgundy, and ice cream packed in dry ice. End of the year. Hooray for the New Year. Hooray for terrorism, for death and fire and confusion. We were all smiles and fun as we ate. Even Ahman was pleasant to me. Persival and Alvor ate at the big table with the rest of us. The snow was staying on the ground.

With no better plan, I managed a wine drunk. I sang. I kissed the ladies. I was a figure of fun. McGraw, the funny fisherman. Dads, we call him. I whacked Alvor on the back. It was very like whacking the side of his little cement house. And it got just as much reaction.

Suddenly I stopped and stood, weaving back and forth, a hand clapped across my mouth, eyes wide with consternation, cheeks bulging. I Plunged to the door and went out into the snow, leaving them laughing.

I made sure I left erratic tracks, but the tracks took me right to the motor home. I had just fastened the thin metal grille back in place when Sammy yelled, "You! Hey! Get away from there! What are you doing?"

I wheeled around and stumbled toward him, arms wide. "Good ol" Brother Sammy. Never knew I was gonna have a Chinese brother."

He tried to elude me, but I embraced him and began a horrible retching cough that panicked him. He struggled free and I fell to my hands and knees and said, "Gotta go home. Help me, old buddy. Can"t find old T. Six. Somebody moved it on me." He helped me up, and I staggered a zigzag course along the direction in which he was leading me. I mumbled thanks and crawled into my trailer. Five minutes later, when I looked out, there was no one in sight. I undressed and got into the bunk under the blankets. The tape had been used up. I rewound it. I used the ivory ear b.u.t.ton to listen to it.

It was very indistinct. I experimented with the volume controls, trying to clear it. The voices sounded too much alike. It was Alvor, Persival, and Chuck, talking about people I didn"t know. And they were too far from the recorder.

Alvor left the conversation. I could more readily distinguish between Chuck"s and Persival"s voices. They both were m.u.f.fled, but Persival spoke in slower cadence. -three more here... Ireland... woman thirty... late January..."

"-about another vehicle?"

"Later. Maybe at the same time." Mumble "..."

"-tentative approval... liked the basic idea. Oil tankers too... longer delay... arrive tomorrow... description of McGraw... take a personal look... coming up from... go back with him... you in charge."

And that was all I could get out of the half hour. The rest was all fragmentary blurred, distorted. I played those parts over and over, trying to get an other word or two. Somebody was coming on New Year"s Day to take a look at their Mr. McGraw. As a card-carrying pessimist, I could expect nothing good from that. With such a big, careful, patient, rich organization, they would have sent somebody to check out the expired Florida driver"s license with my face thereon. Probably sent the license itself. Maybe their Mr. Toomey or Mr. Kline took a look at the license. I had been too tricky. Always keep things simple as possible.

It meant I would have to choose one of my sorry options sooner than I had expected. The most attractive one was to take off in the snowstorm while they thought me drunk. Get to a phone somehow. Call the number memorized at the request of Max and Jake. Hope they would believe me. Hope they would move fast enough.

I dressed warm. Poncho on last. I moved to the door, and just as I got there, it opened and Stella came in out of the snow and ran right into me.

"Hey, where are you going?"

"Me? I"m going back to the party."

"That party"s over." She grinned. "And now we"ve got our own private one. You know, there isn"t supposed to be this much snow here this time of year, staying on the ground." She gave me a push. "Back to the sack, lover. I got taken off the gate detail, and Nena has some company, so I"ve got to stay. Here, let me help you get that off, Brother Tommy. Honey, are you too drunk to make it? We"ll find out. Don"t worry about it. I got lots of ways to help you. Sit down, sweetie. I"ll get your shoes off. There. Don"t you worry about a thing."

When I saw the first faint pallor of dawn at the window, I made my move. She was asleep on the inside; face to the wall. I had to believe she had been told to stay close to me until tomorrow"s visitor could check me out. I got up as quietly as I could and began dressing. Suddenly she rolled over and sat up and said, "Hey? Where you going?"

I held my finger to my lips and shushed her. "What"s going on?" she whispered.

I leaned close as if to whisper in her ear. When she lifted her chin, I popped her on the corner of the jaw with a right that traveled about six inches. In my tension and apprehension, I had hit her harder than was necessary. It bounced her head off the wall behind her and she sprawled face down into the pillow, motionless. I ripped her heavy twill shirt into strips, tied her up securely, poked a wad of shirt material into her mouth, and used the last strip to hold it there, with the knot at the back of her neck.

It was a very still morning, the first day without wind since I had arrived. Welcome to the New Year. The temperature was up, the snow begin ning to melt. It made for bad footing. I knew I couldn"t risk going too fast. Too many chop blocks in the old days had stretched the knee tendons almost to the point of surgery. I could land on something under the snow that would shift or turn, and from then on I could be caught by a reasonably spry turtle.

My plan was to get down the road as fast as I could, cut off the last bend, and come up behind the lean-to. I was fifteen yards from the beginning of the road when there was a yell behind me. I turned and saw Barry back near the kitchen building, alone and unarmed. So I began to move a lot faster, hoping for the best. I had made a slippery hundred yards down the hill when I heard three s.p.a.ced shots behind me and a long screeching blast on Chuck"s whistle. I knew that would alert whoever was at the gate, so that plan was shot.

I turned off the road at an angle to the right, hoping to make a wide half circle around the gate and come back onto the public road. I soon realized I wasn"t going to give them much trouble. It was very rough country. I couldn"t try to brush away my tracks. The snow was too soggy. I couldn"t go as fast as they would. They had good knees. I couldn"t wait for the d.a.m.n snow to melt. The only thing I could possibly try would be to make a circle, intercept my own trail, and ambush them. With s...o...b..a.l.l.s, perhaps. And they would realize that this was my only option and would be careful to take the elementary precaution of s.p.a.cing themselves a hundred feet apart and searching the snow on either side for tracks.

While thinking, I was making as good time as I dared. And I studied the terrain, trying to evolve some kind of plan. There would be at least two, and they would probably be Barry and Chuck and they would have those little Uzis. I slid down a steep bank into a tumbling brook and scrambled up the rocky ten-foot slope on the other side, picking up a rock a little bigger than a baseball and tucking it into the slit pocket of the poncho, where it proceeded to chunk me on the hip every third step. But it was better than a s...o...b..ll.

I came to a second, smaller creek. It was shallow enough, so I went downstream, stumbling on the stones, splashing water up to my knees. It dipped downhill abruptly, spilling over the rocks in a mini-waterfall. I had to sit down to negotiate the drop. Around two curves I came upon a place where the racing water had gouged a chunk out of the bank and toppled a big pine across the brook. It had happened many months ago. The pine had wedged itself against two large living trees on the other bank and rested at about a 20-degree angle, crossing the brook fifteen feet above my head.

I stopped and studied it a few moments, then hurried on down the creek and around two more bends, climbing out on the right-hand bank, making no attempt to disguise my exit across the fresh snow. In fact, I purposely went down to my knees and left them a clear handprint to give them confidence. I made a circle back upstream, and when,I was away from the rushing water, I stopped and listened. I could hear distant shouts. Then I heard the van and a.s.sumed it was going down past the gate, to take up a position on the public road to cut me off if I went that way.

As I neared the fallen tree, I tried to conceal my footsteps as much as possible. I stepped close to the base of trees. I took long slow stretching strides. I crept out along the fat trunk of the fallen tree on my hands and knees, trying to dislodge as little of the snow as possible. The thick dead limbs started at mid-creek, sticking out at right angles from the trunk. I was able to settle myself against two of them, my chest resting on one, my thighs on another, out of sight behind the trunk from anybody coming downstream. By lifting my head I could look upstream. I dislodged a little snow on the trunk so I would not have to lift my head any farther than necessary.

I changed position enough to find a limb I could hook my ankles over. It helped. The position was uncomfortable. I could expect that they, if there were two of them, would both come downstream. It was my logical escape direction. I hoped they would be well spread out. I hoped the one in the lead would not stop and turn around, once past the tree, look back for his friend, and glance upward.

It seemed certain they would come down the creek itself. The terrain was so difficult they would be endlessly slow if they tried to walk beside it, each taking a bank and staying opposite each other. I guessed the temperature had moved up into the high 40s. The woods dripped. Clots of heavy snow fell off the pine boughs. I rehea.r.s.ed my drop, thinking out each move. There was no time to practice.

It was taking longer than I expected. Suddenly I heard the heavy splashing sound of somebody walking swiftly down the creek. He pa.s.sed under me. Brother Chuck. He moved well, knees slightly bent, keeping his balance, holding the Uzi in his right hand by the trigger a.s.sembly, swinging it to point at one bank and then the other as he swiveled his gaze back and forth. I did not breathe until he was out of sight. I waited for the next one. I hoped there was a next one. Then I heard the screech of Chuck"s whistle. Two long blasts, carrying well in the morning stillness, piercing the sounds of the brook, the sounds of dripping from the trees.

So either he would be off and running along my trail, or he would wait there to be sure his number two didn"t miss it. I wished I had made it more difficult to see.

Along came the splashing, more rapid than before. I couldn"t risk a look. I jacked my feet up onto the limb on which my thighs had rested. I braced myself with my left hand against the limb which had been under my chest. I held my comforting rock in my right hand. When I caught the first glimpse of Chuck"s number two emerging from under my tree, I slid my feet off the limb and dropped. I had turned slightly to my right, hoping to land with my feet on the back of his shoulders and pitch him forward into the water. I landed behind him and slammed the rock squarely on top of his skull. I went down, floundering to get up, expecting him to be ready to cut me in half. When I came up gasping, he was face down in fifteen inches of black water, the current slowly turning his feet downstream. I saw the glint of metal and picked the weapon out of the icy water, wondering if it would fire. My right knee would barely support my weight. I shifted the weapon to my left hand, grabbed Barry by the tough clothing at the nape of his neck, and dragged him out of the brook and up the bank to the left.

I had no idea how fast Chuck would be in getting to my tree: I knew he would be thinking as he ran, and as soon as he saw where my trail was going, he would think ambush. When I climbed up on the high bank, he wasn"t in sight. Not yet. I looked at Barry. He had an ugly jellied depression half the size of my rock in the crown of his head. But I had no time for Barry. I saw movement. Chuck was coming fast through the trees. Too fast for me to risk jumping up and trying to hobble to shelter. Barry was at the top of the bank, on his back. I sat him up and lay p.r.o.ne behind him. I held him in position with the fabric between his shoulder blades bunched in my left hand. I checked the Uzi. It seemed to be on full automatic. I shoved it forward, under Barry"s right arm, and found I could line up the sights.

Chuck disappeared behind the uptilted root structure of the big tree, then came back into view, very tense, crouched, swinging the muzzle from side to side. He looked over and saw his partner sitting on the bank, head on his chest, soaking wet, and I knew his first impulse would be concern, but his second reaction would be to jump back into the cover he had just left. He was quicker than I expected. I caught him in midjump and apparently hit him quite high-as he began a back flip before disappearing. I scuttled to my rear and hid behind a tree. When I let go of Barry, the body pitched forward and slid down to the edge of the creek.

I counted up to a reasonable number twice, and then once more for good measure. I circled, went back and crossed the creek above the little waterfall, came around, and finally saw Chuck on his face in the melting snow, his weapon a yard away from his right hand, resting against a rotting stump, as naturally as if he had placed it there.

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 startled 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 wrist.w.a.tch, 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 progressed from a hobble to a gimp, and from experience I could tell that if I kept moving, it would work itself out the rest of the way.

There was an a.s.sumption to be made. Somebody had probably been near enough to the area to hear the distinctive flat 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-Stella.

a.s.sume 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 s.p.a.ced 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 side.

Fourteen.

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.

I had the general idea of using the keys to get into the big warehouse building and then making as much all-around h.e.l.l as I could with whatever I might find there. But my chances of doing that would be improved if I could keep the locals indoors.

There didn"t seem to be too much danger. in loosing a single shot in their direction. I set my little machine to Single Fire, according to the logo by the small k.n.o.b. I did not know how much accuracy I could expect. But it did seem a useful idea to make a serious attempt to wing one of them. Alvor struck me as being the most ominous of the three. I aimed as carefully as I could at a spot six inches over his head and squeezed the trigger. The one who was Ahman or Sammy, three feet to Alvor"s right, bent over abruptly and fell to the ground. The other two ducked into the motor home. The figure on the ground struggled to get up, then hitched along like a broken bug until he was out of sight around Brother Persival"s dwelling. Splendid shooting! Aim at one, hit another. The slug flew three feet low and three feet to the left. I had had no real expectation of knocking anybody down at that range. The flat little smacking sound of the shot had seemed inadequate and potentially ineffective.

How now? I didn"t want to lose my luck. It goes like that, like a giant c.r.a.p table. One day in a firefight, you never see anybody. You keep falling down, jamming the weapon, drawing fire, and if you do see people, you"re convinced you couldn"t hit within fifteen feet of them. And a week later, fifty miles away, everything works. The grenade takes a home-team bounce, you spin and shoot from the hip and luck out. You get back and check yourself over and find a hole in your sleeve but none in your arm, and realize you never felt the tug or heard the whispery crack.

We used to call them the John Wayne days. It does not pay to get overconfident, but you have to ride your luck while you have it. Because it can turn on you.

It had all been a long time ago. The scene had a deja vu quality. I had been here before in another lifetime, and had killed people I hardly knew.

There was another oncoming sound, a roar, and an airplane came in and flew low and slow, checking the plateau. I eased back down the slope. Even though the paint job was yellow and white instead of the more familiar red and white of Bob Vincent"s Cessna at Lauderdale, I knew the model. It was an old utility 206, the Super Skywagon, a durable workhorse with a single Continental 10-520A, fixed tricycle gear with fat tires, able to take six people a thousand miles on eighty-four gallons of fuel, if you babied it along at ten thousand feet at a hundred and thirty miles per hour. I saw two heads through the windshield. I could read off the number on the rudder. N8555F. I could remember Bob bragging about being able to get in and out of a fivehundred-foot strip with a light load.

With no perceptible breeze to worry about, the pilot went around again and came in. The wheels touched, and he went bounding and braking, kicking up slush, bouncing on the rocky ground. He came to a stop down near the buildings, and I saw Persival and Alvor on the other side of the plane, hurrying toward it. Alvor had his arm around Persival"s waist, apparently supporting most of the frail man"s weight as he rushed him to the plane. The prop was still turning. I thought they both got in, but could not be sure. There was a pause, probably for shouted explanations, then the plane swiveled around fast and began accelerating down the field for takeoff. Alvor watched it go, then scuttled back to shelter.

I jumped up and ran out. I had both pack straps over my left shoulder, so I could reach into the pack as it dangled under my arm. I reached in for one of those grenades, pulled the pin, and hurled it, trying to lead the airplane, trying to get the grenade out in front of it. I think the pilot saw it and knew what it was. He swerved and lost a little momentum, then picked it up again. The plane bounced one last time and lifted off the rocky stretch.

If I had to guess what happened, I would say that the pilot decided he had lost just enough speed and lift so that he wasn"t going to clear the tops of the pines which grew on the downslope beyond the far end of the plateau. The grenade made a harmless crumping sound and a small cloud of dingy smoke far behind the plane. Perhaps it made the pilot nervous, and he started his turn too soon. He wanted to turn left, toward an opening in the trees. Maybe a gust of wind came along just then. The wing tip touched the ground, and that changed the flight att.i.tude of the aircraft. The tail came up a little. He yanked the wing back up, but the plane went down and almost touched wheels again before he tried to lift it over the pines. At the last minute he tried to slip it through but, in slow motion, he sheared the right wing, thick strut, and right wheel off the machine, and it went plunging through the trees, turning, disappearing, then making a prolonged thudding, grinding sound far down the slope. I waited for the sound of gasoline igniting, but it didn"t come. If he had the presence of mind, he would have had time to cut the switch.

Alvor had run out of the motor home. I dropped and rolled over and over and over, hugging my weapon in my arms, over the edge of the plateau and down the slope, hearing the fading banshee scream of a ricochet as I came to a stop. I did some scuttling of my own, moving to my right toward the road. I heard a shouted order, unexpectedly close. I moved beyond a thick tree and stood up. Ahman, Haris, and Alvor were running toward the spot where I had rolled down the slope. They were spread out, about twenty feet separating them, but they were converging. Alvor was making excellent time. They all had weapons at the ready. I guessed they had come up the road just in time to see Alvor fire at me. I clicked my little piece of machinery to full automatic fire. There was enough snow left on the slope so they could track me. I didn"t like the idea of lighting out at a dead run for the buildings, hoping to make it. And I had a very brief moment to do some shooting without being shot at. I put as little of me as possible outside the protection of my tree and sprayed them, as with a garden hose, Ahman, the nearest, went down at once, falling hard, losing his weapon. Haris, beyond him, wavered, staggered, and turned, firing in short bursts in my general direction, firing toward the sound before he spotted me. I got behind my tree, snapped a new clip into the weapon, leaned out again; and found Haris shockingly close, lurching like a drunk but firing as he came. A very b.a.l.l.sy performance for a thin man with at least one slug in him. My burst took him squarely in the chest, hammering him back up the few feet of slope and onto the flat, where he fell backward, dead before he could comprehend that finality. A far more authoritative projectile chunked into my tree, and I could imagine that Alvor had one of the a.s.sault rifles. I looked around the other side of my tree, a very quick look indeed, but time enough to see Alvor running like a fullback toward the buildings, cutting, feinting, fooling the tacklers. I was moving out to take a chance at him with a long high burst when I saw movement out of the corner of my eye and fired at it immediately, with no pause for conscious thought. Ahnian had retrieved his weapon and had been bringing it to bear on me, with every good chance of sending me to join Haris. The burst took him in the higher shoulder, and out of momentary panic I kept the weapon on him, rolling him over and over, a ragged bundle spraying blood and tissue.

A lot of it was luck. A lot of it was having a John Wayne day. But some of it was that old training which eliminates the last hesitation. Death comes while you are struggling with your application or lack of application of the Judeo Christian ethic. While you work out the equation which says, If I don"t kill him, he will kill me, so even if I have been taught not to kill, this is an exception-while you are working that out, he is blowing chunks of bone out of your skulI. The quick and the dead is an ancient allusion. They were quick and I was quick and lucky. There was some cunning involved, of course. Being able to see how I might use that tree over the water. Coming back here instead of heading off at a full run. Remembering to scuttle far away from the place where I had rolled out of sight off the plateau. Using Barry as a shield, to shock Chuck momentarily into inaction. So they were gone. Chuck and Barry. The almost-forgotten Nicky. And Persival and the two who had arrived in the plane-probably all dead, from the sound of the impact. Now Haris and Ahman too, leaving only Alvor and the two women. A veritable ma.s.sacre. A bloodbath. Butchery. I kept the horror bottled away. There would be time to examine that later on. Right now there was the high-riding pleasure of doing some difficult thing far better than you expected to be able to do it. I had been as slow and clumsy as I dared during the exercises. How many of them had died with a feeling of disbelief, frustration, anger? With the ghastly toothy grin of the skull-head of death looking over my shoulder, I was intensely alive. I was alive in every thready little nerve fiber, every capillary. I was tuned to quickness, the world all sharp edges around me, my ears hearing every small sound in the world.

Push the luck. Keep pushing. But the women? I somehow did not think I could open fire from ambush on them, as I had on the others. Had I been as hesitant about the others, I would now be as dead as they were.

I moved along to the head of the road, discarding the nearly empty clip, mounting another. I wanted to be in better position to kill the Dodge van if Alvor should decide to hop in and make a run for the gate. I could guess that he was reasonably certain there was more than one of me. He"d heard the report to Persival about the killing of Chuck and Barry. And he knew the airplane had gone down. Ahman and Haris lay on the thin wet skin of the last of the snow. Rivulets of water ran off the plateau.

I moved across the head of the road and took shelter on the other side. I tried to sort out the people, guess at their a.s.signments. If Ahman and Haris had gone looking for Chuck and Barry, then Sammy was the one I had knocked down with the single slug meant for Alvor. And if they had left somebody on the gate, it would have to be Nena. It was possible Stella was still tied up, that n.o.body had looked for her in T-6. It was possible that Sammy was waiting for me, armed. Make it four to one, two of them women. But no special advantage to me there-they were as quick and well-trained and toughened as the men had been.

I heard a sudden motion, a slipping sound, then a heavy thud and a grunt, and then a woman said, venomously, "Sonnab.i.t.c.h!" I moved farther back. Sister Nena-I recognized her voice-had been coming up the road and had slipped and fallen. My luck was holding. Water was running down the road through slush and mud. She was watching her footing, but she held the weapon at the ready as she rounded the final bend. I could have shot her then. I held on her and thought of the savage slaughter of the innocent she was quite willing to undertake. I thought of the connection between her and the silvery little sphere which had been used to slay my woman.

I dug a grenade out of the pack. I did not pull the pin. I lobbed it with a slow sidearm so that it would arch over her head and fall on the roadside beyond her. The moment it was in the air, I was on my feet, weapon on the ground. The grenade hit and she spun toward the sound, and I charged her. She heard me coming, but she was caught for a frozen moment in a dilemma of choice. Run from the grenade or turn and cut me down. She ran several steps down the road, tumbled and rolled in expert fashion, and ended up in the p.r.o.ne firing position, getting off one wild shot before I kicked the Uzi out of her hands to turn in the air and land in the shallow wet ditch. I grabbed her, and she came up popping me under the chin with her head so hard the world was full of stars and lights. I turned and took a hard kick on the thigh that could have disabled me. Then she tripped me, somehow, and got loose and went scrambling away, running in a strange fashion on her hands and her feet with her rump high in the air. She had registered that the ring was still affixed to the grenade, and she went after it instead of the Uzi. I tried too fast a start and slipped and went down again. She s.n.a.t.c.hed up the grenade, standing and turning as she did so, yanking the pin, releasing the handle. I saw her lips moving as she counted. Her face was screwed up by the intensity of thought, like a child with a puzzle.

I couldn"t get to her. She was moving backward quite rapidly, up the hill. She held her arm back, ready to throw. Whichever way I went, she would lead me, and she was nearing her count. I feinted one way to draw the throw and ran the other way. Just as she tried to throw it underhand, both feet went out from under her and she sat down hard in the slush. She had thrown it and I couldn"t see it anywhere. She had a dazed look. I saw it suddenly, coming down. The fall had made her throw it straight up in the air. It hit behind her and bounced off stone, almost as high as her head, before it went off. I weaved my way over to the other ditch, crossed it, and held on to a small tree. It was a good time for Alvor to have happened along, had he only known it. I found my weapon and picked it up, checked it out. I wondered if I was going to be sick. I knew I was not going to look at what was left of Sister Nena. Not now.

How much luck remained to me? I had needed it more with Nena than with any of the others. Her timing had been perfect. A very accurate count. She was planning on an air burst right in my face.

I had the feeling that this had been a warning to me. This is the way they had used up the very last of my luck. All at once. Good-by, John Wayne. I went around the side of the plateau, around the end, through very difficult country, staying well below the level of the plateau, moving as quietly as I could. Chuck"s complicated wrist.w.a.tch said it was ten o"clock. I had thought it was at least three in the afternoon. I had lived through more bad hours than the watch would admit. Cover and concealment. The day was overcast, and the misty rain began. I had muddied my face. I worked my way up the slope behind the warehouse, walking my forearms along, digging with the toes, watching everything, listening to the dripping eaves, the rain, the silence. It seemed strange to me that I had never heard any birds up here. There should be birds.

Now what would I do if I were old Alvor-Brother Alvor with the broad meaty shoulders, the square gray face? Why, I would set up in a good place. I would set up on a high place. I would, by G.o.d, set up on a roof, not necessarily the highest roof around, but one where I could lie doggo, and then pop up suddenly and blow the fisherman to fishbait bits. I looked around very carefully. I backed down the slope and came up in a new place and looked around some more.