Dinosaurs & A Dirigible (3 page)

Vickers pointed in the direction of the now-hidden laager. “What’s going on?” he asked, raising his voice to be heard.

The tilt-rotor wasn’t noisy compared to the Buffalo which flew Vickers from Kuching—but the Buffalo sounded like the interior of a metal garbage can rolling down a rocky hillside. The tilt-rotor’s engines were inherently quiet, and in forward flight the props’ thrumming no longer reflected from the ground, but to save weight the cabin walls weren’t soundproofed.

Louise grimaced. “Indonesian politics,” she said. “It’s the Javan Empire, really. This doesn’t have anything to do with us if it’s what I think it is. But we’re going to be in the middle of it anyway.”

She turned to look out the window behind her, using the expanse of forest canopy to settle her mind. Vickers looked also, though from curiosity and to be companionable rather than because of any pleasure the sight gave him. The forest’s variety surprised him. There were a dozen identifiable shades of green, as well as patches of orange, red, and even violet. He didn’t know whether the latter were trees in bloom or simply flushes of new leaves which lacked the chlorophyll of mature growth.

“Logging will start,” Louise said in the flat voice of a radiologist pointing out a cancerous mass to other physicians. “The Indonesians will move troops in under a claim of protecting the Borneo Scheme. Then their troops will take over the entire island before anyone can stop them.”

She shrugged and wiped her eyes with the back of a hand. Vickers pointedly avoided looking directly at her. “What they really want is Brunei for the oil, of course, but they’ll take the rest as well. Eventually I suppose they’ll take the whole South Pacific.”

“But that logging operation is Indonesian, isn’t it?” Vickers said in puzzlement. “That was what—”

“Yes, clever, isn’t it?” Louise said bitterly. “If Malaysia does manage to react quickly enough to stop the logging, Indonesia will invade to protect its citizens from foreign brutality. Otherwise, Indonesia will invade as a guarantor of the Borneo Scheme. If it’s the latter case, there’s at least a chance that Jakarta will leave the Scheme in place after it’s absorbed the island. Less whatever Nikisastro has managed to strip, of course.”

“I—” Vickers said. Gray haze spread across the forest immediately below: cloud, not smoke. They were crossing a hidden valley deep enough to trap water vapor even this late in the morning. The sight threw Vickers’ thoughts temporarily out of the course they had been following.

“What do the Indonesians have to do with your tyrannosaurus escaping?” he resumed. The cloud below gave him an uneasy feeling even though it was not the mark of destruction he had first thought.

“Nothing,” Louise said. “Except that bad luck never comes alone.”

She gave a brittle, hacking laugh. “If it comes in threes, I can’t imagine
what
else is going to happen. Maybe an asteroid will hit Borneo.”

The aircraft banked to port and began to circle. Vickers couldn’t see a landing strip below, but glinting metal drew his eyes. Chromed fittings fastened a network of solar collectors to the treetops. A road, visible as a linear pattern beneath the upper canopy, crossed through the same vicinity. Nearby was a circular clearing no more than a hundred feet in diameter. O’Neill pivoted the rotors upward into hover mode again.

“Louise . . .” Vickers said as the tilt-rotor began its vertical descent. “We’ll get your tyrannosaurus, no problem. And for the rest, it’ll work out all right. Nowadays the world will never stand for the sort of flat-out invasion you’re worried about.”

The aircraft settled past masses of leaves tufting out from branch tips. The cabin interior darkened because foliage cut off much of the light. The landing site was minimal even for the tilt-rotor. Vickers understood the desire to preserve the habitat being studied, but it seemed to him that the Scheme had carried the principle rather too far.

Louise glared at Vickers. “Won’t stand for it, Henry?” she repeated. “The world stood for it when Javans massacred two hundred
thousand
ethnic Chinese, didn’t they? They stood for it when Javans machine-gunned unarmed civilians in Dili who were mourning victims of a previous army massacre. They stood it when Javans invaded West Irian and the Moluccas and killed any of the natives who protested. Oh, the world will stand for this too, never doubt!”

They touched down so lightly that Vickers scarcely felt the landing-gear struts compress. Over the dying whine of the turbines, Vickers heard a brassy
bong-bong-bong.
He couldn’t tell whether the signal was animate or mechanical.

“But I’ll worry about Nikisastro later,” Louise added, more mildly. “First we absolutely
must
recapture the tyrannosaur.”

It was hot and muggy and the air didn’t move. Louise lifted the satchel before Vickers could stop her. He followed her out of the aircraft with the rifle case.

O’Neill looked at Vickers with a grim smile. “Nice tan you’ve got,” the younger man said ironically. “You’ll lose it quick enough here, though. The rain forest is like nothing you’ve ever seen.”

A house forty feet by twenty stood at one side of the clearing. It was of local construction, pole-framed with platform floors and a roof of leaf thatching. There were no walls. Very similar to those in the hinterlands of El Salvador . . .

“I’ve seen rain forest,” Vickers said softly. “It was a long time ago, but I’ve seen it. I just didn’t like it very much.” Didn’t like the things he’d done there, rather, but the environment and the actions were bound together in Vickers’ memory. He wouldn’t let it make a difference.

Louise was already inside, opening one of the large chests there. Natives—two men, three women, and a pair of ambulatory children plus a babe in the arms of its mother—appeared from the forest, chattering cheerfully. Vickers heard pigs squealing nearby and smelled the sharp pungency of hog feces.

Louise and the pilot both began to talk with the natives. Vickers walked into the house and set his rifle case down on the table of poles lashed across the railings in one corner of the structure.

The road Vickers had deduced from the air passed through the landing strip. At the margin of the forest near the point they joined stood a small metal shed and a four-hundred-gallon tank marked diesel fuel only, with a further legend below in Malay script. The cap was secured by a heavy padlock.

Louise and O’Neill separated from the natives and returned to the shelter. “None of this would have happened if we hadn’t gotten involved in animal experimentation,” the pilot said.

“That wasn’t our option, Tom,” Louise replied as she took a series of electronic devices from the chest she’d opened: satellite phone, fax, and notebook computer. “And besides, the treatment of AIDS would justify a greater compromise with my principles than what is in fact required.”

Louise plugged each piece of equipment into a power strip on the end of an orange extension cord. Such low-draw devices couldn’t justify the extensive solar array Vickers had seen in the canopy. He wondered what else the station used electricity for.

“So we’re whores and now we’re just haggling over price, is that it?” O’Neill gibed.

Louise gave her subordinate a level glance. “Tom,” she said, “I have some messages to answer. While I’m doing that, would you please show Henry the compound and explain the situation to him.”

The words formed a question which was absent from the flat tone. The implicit rebuke made O’Neill’s face squinch in something between a frown and a grimace. “Sure,” he muttered. “Come on, Vickers.”

Vickers put his hat on, then took it off and tossed it onto the rifle case before he followed the younger man. Humidity and the enveloping green dimness made him nervous as a caged cat.

“Look,” he said, “this really
is
a tyrannosaurus we’re going after? And you found it in the forest?”

“No, no,” O’Neill said. “Or rather, yes, it’s a tyrannosaur, but it doesn’t come from here. Its natural habitat would be veldt or pine forest, nothing like this jungle.”

They were following a path from the rear of the shelter. The undergrowth had been cut back within the past few days, but fresh shoots already stretched in from either side. Vickers couldn’t imagine how anything managed to germinate. There was scarcely more light than there would be in a cave.

“That’s one of the reasons it’s so cruel to keep the beast here,” O’Neill said. “They did it just for secrecy. There was already a construction road here to Site IV, but the only westerners present were whoever came on the weekly run for the specimens the Punans—the forest nomads—had collected. Louise and I now split the runs between us, so nobody else in the Scheme knows anything about it. In the field, that is. Some of them do in New York, of course. It was New York’s idea.”

Vickers set his feet with care to avoid tripping on exposed roots or sliding despite the cleats on his ankle boots. The forest floor was damp, and the thin layer of loam slipped easily over the substratum of clay.

It occurred to him that Louise had picked O’Neill of all her subordinates to share the secret of the tyrannosaurus. And he was a
very
good pilot.

The leaves of the undergrowth tickled Vickers’ limbs. Narrow-crowned trees stabbed sixty to a hundred feet up into the twilight, while above them stretched a nearly-solid blanket of green, the main canopy. It was almost like being under water.

Vickers wished he’d brought the Garand instead of leaving it cased in the shelter. The rifle would be of only psychological purpose at this stage in the proceedings, but he could use a security blanket.

“Here’s the pen,” O’Neill said. “Don’t come any closer than you are until I shut off the field.”

They’d arrived at a double gate in a twelve-foot chain-link fence. A second, similar fence stood sixty feet inside the first. The intervening space had been cleared of undergrowth, but the trunks of forest giants rose unaffected by the construction. The canopy remained unbroken, perfect camouflage against aerial surveillance.

“How big is the fenced area?” Vickers asked.

“About an acre,” O’Neill replied. He unfastened the padlock which held the gate’s crossbar, a six-inch I-beam, in place and put his weight against the bar.

“Don’t,”
he repeated as Vickers instinctively stepped forward to help. “The outer fence is protected by a low-frequency generator that’ll knock you out unless you’re wearing a cancelling device.” He patted a case the size of a cigarette pack clipped to the right epaulet loop of his shirt. Vickers had taken it for a communicator of some sort.

O’Neill left the gate open as he walked to a switchbox on the inner gatepost. The scale of the project suddenly struck Vickers. Two thousand feet of fencing—minimum—plus the heavy beams required to support it, trucked into the middle of the jungle and erected. Then the fifty-foot-long lizard had to be brought in the same way . . .

And just where had that lizard come from to begin with?

O’Neill threw the main switch on the side of the box. “All right,” he said. “You can come in now. Not that there’s anything to see. The gates were open the night the tyrannosaur escaped, although the low-frequency generator was operating and the inner fence was properly electrified.”

He looked at Vickers in cold challenge. “The Javans let him out. That’s the only possible explanation. They did it to sabotage the Scheme.”

A tunnel of half-inch steel sheeting penetrated the inner fence beside the gateway. The tunnel was sharply conical, only a foot in diameter on the near end but widely flared inside the compound.

O’Neill noticed Vickers’ questioning glance. He rang his knuckles on the tunnel wall. “For feeding the tyrannosaur,” he explained. “That is, for drawing the beast into position with hog carcasses so that the bottle which collects pituitary hormone can be changed.”

O’Neill thrust his clenched fist through a hole in the side of the tunnel near the small end. “Could be changed, that is.”

“Where . . .” Vickers asked carefully, “did the tyrannosaurus come from?”

“That’s a secret,” O’Neill said. He opened the inner gate, similar to the outer one. “From me, at least.”

“I’ve heard,” said Vickers, “that the Israelis have a time-travel project.”

“The fellow in charge of the team trucking in the tyrannosaur was named Stern,” O’Neill said. “Not that that means anything. The Scheme’s General Secretary is a Hirschfeld, after all, and he comes from Montreal.”

Vickers knelt to look at tracks in the gateway. “I don’t suppose it matters,” he said.

Which was a lie. If this involved something that the Israelis considered top secret, then . . . Louise Mondadero might be at risk of losing more than her job.

A male Punan stepped out of the forest. “Appeared” would have been a better description, because Vickers saw no movement, just a squat, dark man wearing blue Adidas running shorts and a sheathed bush knife on a belt of rattan fiber.

The native smiled at Vickers, but he waited to speak until O’Neill noticed his presence. The two talked in a quick exchange.

“This is Pa Teng,” O’Neill explained to Vickers. “He’ll track the tyrannosaur for us. He’s a great hunter.”

“Ask him what these are,” Vickers said, pointing at the marks in front of which he squatted.

“What?” said O’Neill. “The tyrannosaur’s tracks, of course.”

“Not them,” Vickers said drily. The tyrannosaur’s huge clawed feet gouged deeply into the dense soil at each ten-foot stride. There was no mistaking them. The marks that interested Vickers were faint and slender, pressed against the clay when it was wet and remaining as vague hints now that the surface had dried. They appeared to be the tracks of something four-toed and too delicate for a human with a foot so long.

“We looked at those,” O’Neill said dismissively. “Louise says they’re the outlines of leaves driven against the soil by rain. Otherwise maybe the Javans or their agents disguised their prints when they opened the cage.”

Pa Teng squatted beside Vickers. He probed delicately at one of the markings with a leaf stem, then spoke in his own language.

Vickers raised an eyebrow in query toward O’Neill. The pilot frowned and said, “He says they’re from a monitor lizard. I suppose that’s possible. I’ve seen monitors more than six feet long in the forest.”