Dinosaurs & A Dirigible (30 page)

The driver’s obedience caught the Secretary himself by surprise, as it turned out. The half-track had ridden rough at part throttle; opened up, there was literally danger that everyone would be thrown out of the box. The trail they were following would have seemed smooth enough at a walking pace, but at 40kph it was like going through the rapids in a canoe—sideways. Vickers was clinging to the sidewall with one hand and trying with the other to keep his slung M14 from pounding him to death. Cardway had dropped the Mannlicher and had both arms around the waist of the soldier at the machine gun. The gunner was holding on for dear life to the spade grips of his weapon. When the half-track yawed, the gun pivoted and made an absurd conga line of the pair.

“Slow down for Chrissake!” Vickers screamed. The vehicle pitched abruptly enough to snap both legs of the ladder just above the topmost braces. Then the half-track broadsided to a stop as brutally abrupt as the previous ride had been.

“Threw the left track,” the driver said in the sudden stillness. Vickers and his wife stood up, Adrienne unslinging her rifle.

In their crazy rush, they had gained on the dryptosaurs. Their quarry was forging well ahead now, however. The other vehicle seemed to be on a converging course, but it had fallen considerably behind. Perhaps the carnivores thought they were being pursued by a pair of the biggest ceratopsians they had ever met. In any case, they showed no sign of slacking off.

Adrienne leaped over the cab to the hood of the half-track. “What’s she doing?” demanded, in Hebrew, the photographer in the front seat. His fellow in the box had unlimbered a holocamera. With a professionalism Vickers could appreciate, he had mounted the stump of the ladder and was rolling tape.

Adrienne’s shot was sharp and clean, coming as it did on the heels of a racket so loud that it had been felt rather than heard. Secretary Cardway rose, holding the .458 by the pistol grip. To fire, he would have had to aim through the blonde woman. Vickers’ own free hand closed over the forestock of the Mannlicher. He kept the muzzle slanting upward despite all the pressure the bigger man could bring to it.

“Goddammit, she missed!” Cardway shouted.

Five hundred yards downrange, the leading dryptosaur turned a cartwheel and fell. The remaining pair of carnivores leaped its body and continued to run.

Adrienne clicked the safety on as she turned toward her audience. “Not too bad for iron sights,” she said coolly. Reslinging her rifle, she lighted a small cigar.

Secretary Cardway’s face was a study in gray savagery while they waited for the other vehicle to reach them. Cardway had said nothing more after the dryptosaur tumbled, but to say he had relaxed was to ignore his eyes. Those eyes were directed toward the oncoming half-track, but their focus was somewhere deep in the politician’s imagination. Both Craig and Vickers watched the Secretary sidelong, each for his own reasons uncertain how to react if worse came to worst.

They had taken the Rome Plow blades off the half-tracks as soon as the campsite had been cleared. Warren’s vehicle might have found the brush-shearing blade handy now, as it cut across the plain to reach its disabled consort. Vickers’ driver had already dismounted and was morosely surveying the track. It had been flung from the left-hand bogeys when it skewed on a root at excessive speed. He and his mate, the gunner, would have to straighten the heavy track and then carefully back the bogeys over it before it could be repinned. Vickers felt sorry for the gunner, facing a dirty job that was none of his making. As for the driver, the guide could imagine without a qualm that fool doing the whole job alone in the sun.

The other half-track struggled through the last of the separating brush like a lifeboat in the surf. It turned and stopped on the trail just ahead of the disabled vehicle, the dust it raised still retaining enough forward motion to drift across the passengers. “A bloody fine shot, Mr. Secretary!” Thomas Warren was shouting from the back. Behind him, Stern and Greenbaum were trying to conceal anxious expressions. “I saw the dust fly from its hide at your second shot,” the British guide lied enthusiastically, “right over the brisket. That’s why it was lagging behind, you see. In fact, old boy—” Warren leaned over the bulkhead matily—“I shouldn’t be a bit surprised to find it was your ball alone that put paid to him. They can run quite a distance when hit hard, you know.”

“Yes, that’s so,” Vickers managed to say. He had noticed the other guide salvaging a pair of .458 bullets from the hadrosaur when they butchered it the previous night. At the time, he had wondered why. Now Vickers realized that one of the big bullets would be “found” in the fresh carcass as proof of the Secretary’s marksmanship. Warren really
was
very good—at what he did. Stern had probably made a mistake in wanting Vickers along at all.

Secretary Cardway was blooming like a moonflower at dusk. “Well,” he said, “the way it took off, you know, I thought it was just wounded. I’d hate to lose a wounded animal that way.”

“Bloody sporting!” Warren agreed. “But say, it still may be thrashing around, you know. Let’s hop aboard this one while your crew puts your own lorry ship-shape.”

Adrienne had jumped down from the hood and was already stepping to the other vehicle. “Ah, Adrienne,” Vickers said in a bright voice.

She turned to her husband with a genuine smile. “Oh, I’ll be good,” she called. “Mr. Cardway’s shot the biggest dryptosaur I’ve ever seen, is all. I’d just like to look at it up close before it’s mounted.”

“Levi, Asch,” Stern said to the PR men on Vickers’ half-track, “you will stay here. Two photographers are enough for our needs.”

The vehicle was crowded, but Stern had obviously directed the driver to take it slowly no matter what anyone else might say. Several times Vickers called a halt while he and Warren climbed onto the hood to take bearings. The dryptosaur had disappeared when it fell, and its high-striding companions were already over the horizon. In the end, it was hearing and not sight that guided them to their quarry. While they paused, with the diesel engine only a background whine, Vickers heard the throaty wheeze of the carnivore.

Both guides turned to the right. In the box of the half-track, Adrienne and Stern leveled their rifles toward the noise. A moment later the politicians followed suit. The holographers capered in the background trying to get a vantage of what was about to happen without jostling the line of gunners in front of them. Vickers felt the muzzle of the heavy machine gun stir the air past his hips as its crewman rotated the weapon to bear.

Twenty feet from the vehicle, the dryptosaur crawled through a clump of mimosa. It hissed with murderous fury, but its head was barely raised to the level of the knee-high scrub still separating it from the humans. The great jaws champed and ground, clicking the serrated teeth together as if they had flesh between them to shear.

“Its back is broken,” Adrienne said. She lowered the butt of her rifle, sure now that there would be no need of a quick shot at a charging killer. “It’s just dragging itself along on its forelegs.”

“All right, Mr. Secretary,” said Thomas Warren, “now remember, you don’t want to damage the skull. Anywhere through the body, that’s the ticket.”

“Luther?” interjected the Prime Minister. He held the double rifle, its heavy barrels looking much too big for his slight form. “Might I join in—finishing the death of your trophy? I would like to think of this as a bond between us, as statesmen and as men.”

“Yeah,” said Cardway in a drugged voice, looking down the sights of the Mannlicher. Then, more sharply, “Go ahead, goddammit,” and fired himself.

The recoil of the Gibbs pushed Greenbaum backward as if the Israeli had caught an overlarge medicine ball, but he did not need the restraining hand Adrienne had unobtrusively raised between his shoulder blades. Beside him, the American cabinet official rocked as he fired, lowered his weapon to work the bolt, and raised it to fire again. As before, Cardway emptied the magazine on the struggling dinosaur; but the shots died away sooner this time because he had forgotten to reload after the two distant attempts. His rifle empty, the Secretary swung his leg over the side of the half-track.

“Christ, wait!” Warren shouted in sudden concern. “It may not be—”

Vickers fired his M14 once. After the blasts of the elephant guns, the crack of the military rifle was as sharp as a heartbreak. The ejected case sailed in a flat arc, back over the heads of the rest of the party. The dryptosaur had squirmed under the repeated impacts of the heavy bullets. Now all its muscles relaxed with a shudder, their strain transmuted to the purposeless quivering of dropped gelatin. Everyone stared at Vickers.

The guide lowered his rifle. A little defensively he said, “I pithed it. The little hole this makes in the skull”—he tapped the barrel of the M14—“won’t be a problem in mounting. And if you’ve
got
to get close to a dino this fresh, you’ve got to destroy the brain first. Or it’s apt as not to snap.”

Without speaking, Secretary Cardway stepped from the tread to the ground. Stern and Craig leaped down instantly, more in a determination to die at their posts than in any realistic hope of saving the Secretary from whatever danger he might get himself into. Warren, Vickers, and the Prime Minister joined them more circumspectly, while Adrienne and the soldiers kept watch from the vehicle. If the PR cameramen were frightened, they submerged their fears in an orgy of concentration on their view finders.

And the dryptosaur was indeed well worth taping. It was a female, lacking the spinal fringe of the males, but it was certainly the thirty feet in length that Vickers had initially estimated. Had it not been in company with two smaller adults, Vickers would have suspected it was of a different species despite the markings. “This is, well, it’s unique,” the guide said honestly. “I don’t believe there’s another specimen so fine been taken . . . unless in the past two years?”

“My God, look at the ticks,” muttered Craig.

At a distance, the rims of the dryptosaur’s eyes and the webbing of its three-clawed forepaws appeared to be red. Close up, the color could be seen to be that of the masses of gorged ticks, each individual the size of the first joint of a man’s thumb. The bodyguard looked down and began convulsively to rub at his booted ankles. It was the first time Vickers had seen the man apparently forgetful of the Secretary of State.

“I’ve never found them to be a problem with human beings,” the guide said sympathetically. “As for those particular ones, the stabilization chamber back at the compound should take care of them. The sealant clogs their breathing pores, of course.”

“When do you find me a goddamn tyrannosaurus, Mordecai?” Secretary Cardway asked.

“Soon, Luther, I am sure,” the Israeli Prime Minister responded calmly. “This—mighty creature here that you have felled, this is a magnificent thing too, of course.”

“Not what I came for, not what you promised,” said Cardway, staring as if toward the horizon. “And it better be soon, old buddy, because this is the last night I spend here.” The big Texan spun suddenly, as if to strike Greenbaum. “One thing I learned early—if somebody’s got it, he’s got it; and if he doesn’t, giving him more time or money’s just pissing down a rat hole. I’ve pissed away about all the time you’re going to see.” The Secretary of State marched back to the half-track. “All right,” he called over his shoulder, “let’s get this show on the road, shall we?”

“Right,” said Vickers, not looking at anyone. “We’re carrying a collapsible sled in the other track. We’ll get that and drag the dryptosaur back to camp—”

“Screw that. Let’s get moving,” Cardway said.

“May as well have the other crew earn their keep, eh Vickers?” Thomas Warren suggested, his smile fluffing the tips of his moustache. “They can take care of this when they get the lorry running again. We’ll take a look where all these trails seem to be going. I dare say that line of trees to the west means water, and that should mean sport.”

A shadow razored across the straggling group of humans. All looked up. The pterosaur that had been a dot in the far heavens an hour before was now only a hundred feet above the ground, a monster with the wingspan of an F-86. The fur of its lower surfaces was a dirty blue-gray. The upper side of its wings, visible as the creature banked, was a white dazzling with the sun it reflected. Skimming in a silence that belied its size, the great carrion-eater turned and swept back at an even lower altitude. Its beak was a yellow chisel the length of a man’s forearm.

“Titanopteryx,” Vickers said. “Saw the dryptosaur go down and wants a meal. Always wanted to send back a living one to see—”

Adrienne’s Schultz and Larsen slammed. Both the twenty-foot wings collapsed upward and back as the muscles controlling them relaxed. Inertia carried the heavy reptile over the heads of the onlookers. Its limbs and long neck spun as gravity accelerated what was no longer a glider. When it struck the ground a hundred feet beyond the half-track, brush crackled and a pall of dust rose.

“Nice shot!” said one of the holographers.

“Why on Earth did you do that?” Vickers asked, trying to keep the concern out of his voice.

“It’ll be an hour before the other track gets here,” the blonde woman said. Her voice seemed calm. She was already reloading the rifle with one of the cartridges from her tunic loops. “I didn’t want the flying belly over there chopping up the . . . Secretary’s trophy before then. That dryptosaur is a trophy”—she slung her rifle and stepped up to remount the vehicle—“to be proud of.”

They drove westward toward the trees at the same deliberate pace that had brought them to the fallen carnivore. There was much to discuss, but there was no way to do so while Cardway and his bodyguard were in such enforced propinquity to the staff. As a result, the only speech on route was Vickers’ radioed directions to the crew of the other half-track, telling them how to home on the beacon he had left and how to load the carcass when they got there. The Secretary’s disinterest was obvious, though he seemed to have accepted without question that he had brought down the dryptosaur himself.