Dinosaurs & A Dirigible (26 page)

“The public relations team with its cameras, the cook, and supplies for such supernumeraries will be inserted on the other vehicle,” Stern said.

The guide shook his head in disgust. “Christ,” he said, “I wish somebody’d talked to me while this was still being planned. It’s going to be a mare’s nest on site with all these untrained people running around, you know.” He ran his finger over the fresh rubber of the track beside him. The half-tracked vehicles themselves were at least forty years old, but Stern assured him that they had been rebuilt and re-engined for the intrusion. “I want Martinus Duisberg for the other guide,” Vickers said. “You must have a line on where he is, even though you’ve retired him.”

The official nodded. “Mr. Duisberg is on his farm outside Bloemfontein,” he said. “Unfortunately, he is not suitable for guiding safaris—and especially this safari—since his accident.”

The guide spun, popping the papers in his hand. “You want them safe?” he demanded. “Fine! I want them safe too. Cooch Duisberg is a crack shot and as steady a hand as you’ve ever had on your payroll. This accident you’re talking about—”

“There is more required, Mr. Vickers, than—”

“—this
accident
occurred when a client panicked and wrapped his arms around Cooch from behind! And he
still
dropped the megalosaur, even though it caught his face in its foreclaws before it died.”

Stern nodded in agreement. “Mr. Duisberg was not held responsible for the accident,” he said. “As you know, he was retired on full pension. But a guide whose face—shall we say, bears the stigmata of catastrophe?—is not a suitable advertisement for a sports activity. There is more required than skill in hunting. The client in this case
must
return satisfied. The other guide will be Mr. Thomas Warren, whose skill in the . . . client relations aspects is perhaps equaled only by your skills in the hunt itself, Mr. Vickers. You, of course, will be in charge.”

Vickers snorted. “Except,” he said, “that with the US Secretary of State and the Prime Minister of Israel present, we’re none of us in charge, are we? If Secretary Cardway has to be kept happy at all costs, then do I have the authority to say ‘no’ if he wants the helicopter to set down right in front of a carnosaur?”

“We have considered that point,” the official said, looking up at the lighted ceiling instead of meeting Vickers’ eyes. “The risk of a shooting platform failing while in the air is unacceptable on this hunt.”

“That was sabotage before. You know that.”

“Turbines can fail under field conditions in the Cretaceous,” Stern continued inexorably. “As you imply, we could not realistically deny the Secretary use of a shooting platform, a helicopter, if one were available. Therefore, the equipment for this safari does not include a shooting platform. These half-tracks”—he patted the steel side—“will carry the hunters. Each has a swivel for a heavy machine gun on the bulkhead behind the cab. That way there will be a pair of machine guns protecting the Secretary at all times. And the Prime Minister, of course.”

“Christ,” the guide muttered, “Christ.” He looked again at the long personnel list in his hand. “All right, this one—Craig, John C. Attendant. What the hell does that mean? And why is he starred as a ‘must include’ on the first intrusion with the brass?”

“Mr. Craig is a Secret Service employee, as I understand,” Stern said. He still would not look at his companion.

“A bodyguard,” Vickers said. “Marvelous, absolutely necessary on a safari—a bodyguard.” His voice was growing harsh in timbre without becoming louder. “Bloody tanks that’ll raise a racket and a dust cloud for miles around, no helicopter to locate game, and now I’m squiring around a bodyguard to keep me from assassinating somebody besides! Is everybody Topside gone crazy?”

Stern looked at him. With his right hand, the official rubbed his forehead and the edge of his gray, short-cropped hair. “Sometimes I wonder, Mr. Vickers,” he said at last. “But I soldier on despite that. I think you can appreciate the . . . attitude. As to the reason we did not protest at Mr. Craig’s presence . . . Well. Our understanding is that the request comes from the permanent officials—the civil service officials, that is to say—rather than from Secretary Cardway himself, who likes to perceive himself as being able to cope with anything. He is from Texas, I believe. But since the Secretary cleared the request, we thought it—impolite—to object to what others considered to be a necessary precaution. The Americans, you Americans, are understandably concerned about, yes, the possibility of assassination. And since the . . . unexpected can occur, we agreed.”

“‘We Americans,’” Vickers repeated disgustedly. “I voted for somebody or other when I turned eighteen, and that’s as much contact with politics as I needed to have in this life, Stern. I could do without what this hunt’s turning into.” The guide sighed and looked at the half-track again. The armor had been stripped off and replaced with sheet metal paneling on a tubular steel frame. “All right,” Vickers said. “Get a twelve-foot step ladder and weld it, open, to the bed of one of these trucks. No, that won’t take the stress when we run cross-country. Weld a series of brackets front and back and clamp the ladder into them. It’s got to hold when we’re going hell for twenty through the brush.”

The official blinked. “If you wish,” he said. “But God in heaven, why?”

“Because if we’re in brush ten or a dozen feet high,” the guide said, “we won’t be able to spot game without a shooting platform. With the ladder here, we’ll be able at least to see over anything but a proper forest . . . and that’ll be open lower down anyway. If your main job is to make Secretary Cardway happy, you’re not making it any easier on yourselves by leaving the bird Topside.”

“As you wish, of course,” Stern said. He looked around. “Are there any other changes besides the ladder you feel necessary?”

“Adrienne’s going.”

“No.”

Guide and official stared at each other, measuring, judging. “Mrs.—your wife,” Stern said at last, “is an estimable but self-willed person. This safari will not be a place for a—for another person who is self-willed.”

“I want a back-up gun I can trust on this one,” Vickers said flatly. “Adrienne’s quite attractive, she won’t scare anybody away. If you won’t send Cooch Duisberg, you’ll send her. Or I don’t go. I’m sorry, Stern, that’s the way it is.”

Stern frowned, but in perplexity rather than anger. The furrows cleared slowly. “You know, Mr. Vickers,” he said, “I believe you are concerned about your own safety.”

Vickers’ face was very still. His index finger probed an old boil scar on his left elbow. “That’s against the law?” he asked.

Stern shook his head abruptly. “No, on the contrary,” he said. “A man must be willing to take what risks are necessary—but I have never felt comfortable around those who would as soon be dead as alive. I sometimes have thought that you were in that category, Mr. Vickers.”

The guide did not smile. “Maybe I was. I’m not now. Does Adrienne go, or do I stay?”

“She goes, Mr. Vickers, she goes,” the official said with a sigh. “I will assume that you know what you are doing, unlike the remainder of us. Is there anything further?”

Vickers turned and turned back, his pale eyes flicking around the warehouse, empty except for the two of them and the piled stores. “This is very important, isn’t it?” he said, his words little more than movements of his lips. “Why, Mr. Stern? What is Israel about to do that absolutely requires the support of the United States?”

Stern’s lip quirked. He said, “Do you make that a condition of your cooperation, Mr. Vickers?” he asked with a sneer. “Is that what you are telling me?”

The guide shook his head. “No,” he said, “I’m sure I’m not supposed to know that. And God willing, Adrienne and I will be back in the Cretaceous before whatever happens happens. The thing is, it’s just possible that if I knew what you were trying to accomplish, I could help. But that’s your decision.”

“No, you are not to know that,” the official agreed. He smiled, an expression without humor but one with which Vickers could readily identify. “I thought you were going to try to force me to tell you. That would not have happened, of course.”

Vickers thumbed a track idler. He was not looking at Stern.

“Some three years ago,” Stern whispered, “an atomic weapon was shipped from Pakistan’s nuclear research facility outside Islamabad. Its intended delivery point was Tripoli, Libya. But there was an accident.”

“Israeli aircraft sank the freighter carrying the bomb in the Persian Gulf,” Vickers remembered aloud.

“That is correct,” Stern said, without expression, almost without sound. Vickers was watching his lips now. “It is our understanding that another Arab-developed weapon is about to be shipped. There will be another incident. But this time the weapon is to be carried by a Russian frigate.”

“Jesus Christ,” the guide said, and the words were not a curse. “And you think the Russians’ll roll over and play dead if the US is willing to back you—back you without reservation. With its collective finger on the button.” He paused again. “And I hear it said that Secretary Luther Cardway might as well be President, so far as foreign affairs go.”

The Israeli official shrugged minusculy. “The Secretary is known to view matters in a very—masculine—fashion. This hunt appeared to be an ideal way to broach the question to him. Because without American support . . . we cannot fight all Russia alone. And what chance is there for the State of Israel with nuclear weapons in Libyan hands?”

It was Vickers’ turn to sigh. “What chance is there for the rest of the world if nobody backs down this time?” he asked, but it wasn’t a question that anyone could answer yet. He kicked the track again. “All right,” he said, “I’ll do my best. But”—he looked down at the floor—“I’ve learned in my work not to ask questions that are too narrow.” Vickers caught the official’s eyes again. His voice took on the crisp certainty of a rifle chambering the next round. “You ask, ‘How can my client get that particular dino . . . ?’ and you wind up taking a chance. If you ask instead, ‘How can my client have a good safari and take home trophies that’ll knock their eyes out in Dubuque?’—that’s a different question. And it’s the right question. You’re asking, ‘How can we get away with sinking a Russian ship?’ and—” Vickers broke off abruptly, shaking his head. “But that’s your affair.”

During the rest of the afternoon, the two men spoke to each other only in monosyllables.

The exhaust boomed and paused, boomed and paused, then grunted in one final burst before the driver cut the engine. He had maneuvered the half-track atop the intrusion vehicle and parked it next to its twin. The ground guide who had directed him lowered his arms. The echoes were lost in the roar of the fans in the hangar ceiling. Intrusion Vehicle Beth and its hangar were both larger and far slicker than the prototypes which Vickers’ previous safaris had used. Instead of being completely open like its predecessor, the central area of Vehicle Beth could be closed behind hinged steel walls as a protection against all but the largest life forms that might encounter it. The fifty-caliber machine guns, mounted during the intrusion on all four corners, could handle anything that ever lived on Earth. Vickers felt uncomfortable around the stucco and sleek armor not because it was less functional than what it replaced but because it differed. Vickers knew he would have been happier a block away on cramped, rusty Vehicle Aleph—but of course, he needed to accompany the clients on the primary vehicle.

He wondered where Adrienne was.

A pair of men wearing field gear, one of them carrying a rifle, came through an access door across the hangar from Vickers. The older man was Stern, but Vickers recognized also the tall, sandy-haired fellow to the official’s left. The newcomer tilted back his snakeskin-banded bush hat, then waved and called, “Ah, Vickers, there you are! We’d been expecting you in the office, you know.”

Now that the two half-tracks were loaded on the intrusion vehicle, lines of workmen with forklifts were running up and down the ramp like columns of driver ants. Vickers kept a careful eye on the equipment as he walked toward Stern and his companion around the edge of the hangar. It would have been easier to stride under the pillarlike legs of the intrusion vehicle—but that was as bad a habit here as it had been in the Cretaceous. “Good morning, Mr. Stern,” Vickers said, shaking hands with the official. “And you’re Thomas Warren, I believe. I think we met a few years ago. A pleasure to work with you.” The guides shook hands. “But I don’t know,” Vickers continued, “why anyone expected me in the office. I’ve been here watching the loading, like always.”

“We thought perhaps a brief assembly away from the machinery,” said Stern over the background noise, “and the, ah, crowd, was desirable. Just yourselves and the main participants.”

“Umm, well,” Vickers said, agreeing not in words but by the fact he was following the other two men as they drifted back toward the door through which they had entered. “I hope,” he added to Warren, “that you’ve had a chance to check them out with their weapons. I just dropped in the day before yesterday, so to speak.” The other guide’s rifle was a heavy bolt-action, old but well-cared for. The cartridges in loops in Warren’s vest were larger than a man’s middle fingers. Judging from them, the rifle was chambered for .416 Rigby, a round no less adequate for being over eighty years old.

“I say, that would be a help, wouldn’t it?” Warren was remarking cheerfully. They were out of the hangar now. Most of the racket was absorbed by the door and the acoustic tile of the hallway. At that, they almost collided with a pair of harassed technicians pushing a laden utility cart toward the intrusion vehicle. “No chance of that, though,” the British guide continued as the cart squealed away from them around a corner, “what with the schedule fellows like that are on. Stern got me an interview with Cardway, thank goodness, and he told me that he had the very rifle his father had taken a big tusker with in 1927. That’s something, at least.”

“But can he use it?” Vickers demanded, scowling unconsciously at the floor as he strode along between the two bigger men.