Dinosaurs & A Dirigible (28 page)

“Mr. Warren,” Vickers said to the other guide, “if you’ll lead the Prime Minister to Side 3, we’ll begin boarding. Mr. Secretary, you and I will stand on Side 1, that’s the one with the ramp. Mr. Stern, Side 4; Mr. Craig—”

“Side 1,” the bodyguard said flatly. “With Secretary Cardway.”

“I hope you never get a chance to see what a charging carnosaur would think of that toy you carry,” Vickers said.

“Look,” Craig retorted, “I’ve got orders, I’ve got a job to do, and I’m going to do it.”

The guide shrugged. “All right,” he said, “since you’re unarmed, it won’t affect the vehicle’s safety no matter where you stand. Shall we go?”

It was going to be a great hunt, Vickers thought as he waited for the others to board. But he had known that from the beginning.

The insertion was flawless, a textbook job. The indirect lighting on the sand-finished ceiling of the hangar suddenly flared into a blue-white sky with the sun directly overhead. Simultaneously, a volume of landscape and Cretaceous atmosphere replaced the intrusion vehicle in what had been the present but now was the future 65,000,000 years removed.

Secretary Cardway grunted. Vickers glanced at him after a quick scan indicated there was no danger immediate to the vehicle. The Secretary looked as if his elevator had dropped the last ten feet. Time intrusion always involved sensory scrambling, but that was momentary. Already the big politician had regained his composure and was staring out at his new surroundings with his rifle near his shoulder.

The vehicle had been inserted onto a plain extending across the arc of Vickers’ eyesight. It was covered by a brushy mixture of evergreen and spiny succulents. The foliage was made duller and paler by a coating of dust. From the slight vantage of the intrusion vehicle’s height, it was possible to see that game trails webbed the brush, meandering as dark shadows against the blurred reflectance of the shrubs they separated. And all across the plain, sunlight flashed on scales as dinosaurs lifted up to see what had caused the sudden noise.

Eighty yards from Secretary Cardway one of the misnamed duckbills, a saurolophus, raised its head. It sniffed the air while its teeth continued grinding what looked like fronds of Spanish Bayonet. The dinosaur’s lower jaw was ratcheting back and forth, pulling in more of the fibrous mass at each stroke. The motion was bizarrely alien to men subconsciously expecting the creature to slide its jaw sideways as a cow does when chewing. The saurolophus’ beak was bright red, and the beast’s head bore a hollow, bony crest faired to the back of its neck by a flap of azure skin. It was an adult male, a large one, and an excellent trophy.

But Vickers did not expect to hear the Secretary say,
“Goddamn, a tyrannosaur!”
the instant before he loosed off his right barrel at the herbivore.

Dust leaped from nearby foliage stricken by the muzzle blast of the rifle, but the windless plain drank all echoes of the shot. The dinosaur lowered its head, untouched by the bullet. Neither the sound nor the human scent caught by its keen nostrils were labeled as threats by the creature’s brain. It had simply returned to its meal.

Secretary Cardway broke his rifle open. The automatic ejector spat out the empty case, leaving the live round in the left breech to gleam like Odin’s eye. Fumblingly, Cardway reloaded. “Goddamn, first shot and I got a tyrannosaur!” he was saying. “Goddamn, it was easy. Goddamn, I wish the old bastard was alive now to see what I’ll have looking down at his goddamn elephant!”

“Of course, they’re devilish brutes to kill,” said Thomas Warren from nearby. Vickers’ breath caught. The other guide had left his station, walking around the platform to attend what was going on. It was only a slight mitigation of his offense—what if a
real
carnivore had sprung onto the side of the platform Warren was supposed to be covering?—to note that he had brought Prime Minister Greenbaum with him. “I think Henry or myself need to go down and crack the blighter again, just to be on the safe side,” the Englishman continued, winking at Vickers past the Secretary’s turned head.

“It was a saurolophus,” Vickers said, his left hand as tight on the forestock of his rifle as he wished it could be on Warren’s throat. “And what the—”

“Nobody finishes my kills without me!” Cardway said, snapping closed the breech of his Gibbs. “Come on, then.”

“Wait!” cried three voices simultaneously, Vickers joined by Stern and Greenbaum. The Secretary of State had already taken a step forward while Vickers cursed himself mentally for positioning the damned fool on the side with the ramp. “Ah,” the guide said, “we’ll crank up one of the trucks and go down in it when we get the machine gun remounted. I don’t like to enter this brush on foot.” Behind Warren, Stern’s head was nodding vigorously, like a donkey engine.

“Like hell we will!” Cardway retorted. He gestured with his rifle at the walled center of the intrusion vehicle. “It’ll take a goddamn hour to unpack one of them—” and that was, Vickers knew, a conservative estimate. Cardway’s heavy rifle slashed back like a saber, tracing a line across the guide’s chest with its double muzzles. “Come on, Mordecai. You and I can show ’em what men are like if they’re too pussy to walk fifty feet!”

Vickers’ mind clicked over possibilities like beads of an abacus. All anger—all emotion—was gone. If there had been carnivores in the immediate vicinity, the plant-eaters would not have returned to feeding so soon after being aroused. The worst danger, therefore, was the chance that one of the herbivores would bolt out of the brush and trample the hunters. That was not a risk the guide cared to take, but the alternative appeared to be clubbing the Secretary of State and carrying him back Topside unconscious. “All right,” Vickers said. “Mr. Secretary, you and I will—”

“And Mordecai!”

The Prime Minister nodded without enthusiasm. Vickers swallowed and continued, “The three of us will go down after that saurolophus. Warren, you’ll stay up here where there’s enough height to warn us if necessary. And for God’s sake, stay where you belong this time!”

“Mr. Vickers,” said Stern, “I am under your orders if you desire another gun.”

The guide’s mouth opened, but he bit off the response frustration had intended when he realized that Stern was armed after all. The official had obviously had his rifle waiting on the intrusion vehicle instead of carrying it around the Tel Aviv facility like the rest of them. It was a Browning FAL, for many years the Israeli service issue. Seeing it reminded Vickers in a rush of Dieter Jost, who had carried a similar weapon . . . and who, had he survived his last safari, might have been present now in the place of Warren.

Stern caught the stare and misinterpreted it. His heavy face darkened in something like a blush. “I am not boasting that I am a crack shot like you and need only the small bullets, Mr. Vickers,” the official said. “This I carried in the Sinai—better than a weapon I do not have time to learn, though it was many years ago.” He raised his chin. “My nerve will not fail.”

Vickers quirked a smile that was half-embarrassment. “Neither would your good judgment, Avraham,” he said. “Stay up here with Warren and the troops, and yell if you see trouble coming.” To the pair of officials he continued, “We’ll follow the trail we’ve landed in the middle of, cut through the brush if we have to when we get close. You’ll have the shot, Mr. Secretary, so you’ll lead if it gets tight. I’ll be right behind you, and—”

“I’ll be right behind him,” said the bodyguard, “and look, I don’t like the idea of anybody firing past the Secretary. You can—”

“Craig, shut the hell up!” Cardway snarled impatiently before Vickers could form a response. “Come on, let’s go!” The bodyguard, blank-faced and clutching his Uzi like a reliquary, brought up the end of the short column.

Secretary Cardway reached the bottom of the ramp, took two steps further along the game trail, and paused. He had realized for the first time what a difference the intrusion vehicle’s height had made. The brush on which dinosaurs could be heard browsing was only about eight feet tall. The trails, worn through it by the hips of the great beasts, were broad but often not cleared to the sky. To either side the brush grew gnarled and spiky, as inhospitable as a barbed-wire entanglement. The effect was less that of standing in a grape arbor than it was walking down the center of a subway tunnel, listening to the tracks hum.

Vickers started to move forward. The trail was wide enough for two to walk abreast. The Secretary began to move again, with more determination at each step. “Sir,” the guide whispered, “not so fast. We don’t want to—we want to have time for a good shot.”

Cardway looked puzzled. Vickers had forgotten that their quarry was supposed to be wounded. The Secretary slowed from the near run toward which he had been building, however. The guide glanced back to check Greenbaum and Craig. They were all right, though Craig seemed to be crowding the Prime Minister somewhat. Vickers could no longer see the men on the intrusion vehicle through the dappled tanglings of brush. He should have thought to bring along a wand with a pennon for this sort of situation. Of course, if he had expected the situation, he might have refused to take out the safari after all. The millstone-crunching of a dinosaur’s teeth was becoming very loud. Hadrosaurs, like the beast they were after, were not carnivorous, of course, but neither was a threshing machine carnivorous; and threshing machines had killed their share of the unwary over the years.

The bush to their right was a multi-stemmed clump with leaves like green glass teardrops. It shuddered as something pulled a huge mouthful out of the other side. Cardway raised his rifle. Vickers touched the politician’s shoulder for attention and shook his head. Then he knelt and used the fore-end of his own weapon to gently press a line of sight between the bush and its neighbor. A male saurolophus, possibly even the one Cardway had fired at, was facing them within spitting distance.

The dinosaur was chewing with its short forelegs lowered but not quite touching the ground. Its neck was raised at right angles to the straight, horizontal line of its back and counterbalancing tail. If it saw Vickers, it ignored him. The guide leaned his head back out of the way. With his free hand he motioned Cardway forward into the gap he was holding open. Then Vickers tapped himself on the breastbone with index and middle fingers to indicate the proper aiming point. Secretary Cardway knelt with a set expression, advancing his rifle.

Vickers knew the shot would be deafening, but the reality was stunningly worse than he had expected. Cardway spun over on his back like a sacked passer, losing his grip on the rifle. The meat-axe
smack!
of the bullet was lost in the muzzle blast, but the ground shook as the stricken hadrosaur fell.

Vickers backed a step. He leveled his own rifle one-handed toward the brush in case the saurolophus burst through. Then he picked up the Secretary’s weapon as well. Vickers’ head rang. His first thought had been that the old Gibbs had exploded, either because metal had crystallized or because of trash in the bore. The big weapon was apparently undamaged, however, except for the dirt that now clung to its exterior. Vickers thumbed the locking key. The breeches clicked open and the ejectors kicked out both the cartridges, empty. The rifle had doubled, shock of the first discharge firing the second barrel almost simultaneously.

The Secretary was rising groggily to his knees. Vickers thrust the empty Gibbs at him. His hearing was beginning to return. The wounded hadrosaur was kicking on the ground close by. “Load one barrel,” the guide shouted. “It’s firing both together.”

“Goddamn if I do!” Cardway replied. His mouth was shouting, but his words rang through a long tunnel. “Give me yours!”

Vickers twisted his M14 away from the hands spread to grasp it. “No,” he said, “just load one round.”

“You worthless sonofabitch!” snarled the white-faced politician. “You give me that gun now or you’ll regret the day you were born!”

The guide’s knuckles tightened on the Gibbs, held now in bar rather than in offering. The surface of his mind was slick as glass. The instant before Vickers might have acted, Prime Minister Greenbaum stepped between the two men. He held out his Mannlicher, saying, “Here, Luther. I’m sure this will finish the job.”

Cardway’s rage evaporated. He snatched the bolt-action rifle from his colleague without a word. Instead of kneeling again to fire beneath the spreading foliage, the big Texan began thrusting himself between the bushes. He seemed oblivious of the thorns that ripped at his coveralls.

Vickers paused momentarily, but he could neither restrain his client nor allow him to go alone. Throwing himself on his belly, the guide squirmed on knees and elbows around the other side of the bush past which they had fired. He cleared the obstacle an instant before Cardway could. The hadrosaur lay on its side, its spine toward the hunters. Its tail was flailing sideways, cracking against the earth on every downward stroke. The brush was splashed with bright arterial blood, further evidence that at least one of Cardway’s bullets had been a solid hit.

The dinosaur was only six feet away. Vickers aimed at the beast’s spine but did not fire. He prayed that if it became necessary to shoot, the grit on the bolt of his M14 would not jam it. The magazine was loaded with modern armor-piercing rounds, penetrators of depleted uranium which could drill through an inch of steel. Anyone can miss a shot, however, no matter how short the range; and the nineteen rounds remaining in the magazine might as well be on the Moon for all the good they would be to a jammed rifle.

Secretary Cardway forced through the brush with thorns hanging from his sleeves and the backs of his hands bleeding. He aimed the Mannlicher and emptied it with five point-blank shots as quickly as he could work the spoon-handle bolt. The recoil of the big rifle—it was chambered for .458 Magnum—did not appear to bother him, despite the bruising his shoulder must have taken when the Gibbs doubled. Vickers watched his client carefully. The look on the Secretary’s face as he fired was chilling.

The crashing shots ended when Cardway ran out of ammunition. The struggles of the hadrosaur had disintegrated into a quivering as lifeless as the collapse of a house of cards. Splotches of blood gummed the dust that obscured the patterning of the beast’s back-scales.