Dinosaurs & A Dirigible (34 page)

Vickers sprang upward, his left hand closing on the Englishman’s tunic and his right whistling in a punch that would have smashed his knuckles had it more than grazed the other’s head. Warren’s snake-skin-banded hat fell off. The barrel of the heavy machine gun was in Vickers’ way, blocking him from a closer grapple. His feet were on the seat and he was trying more or less unconsciously to climb through the gun and the bulkhead on which it was mounted. Prime Minister Greenbaum shouted an order as he and the soldier dragged Warren backward. The British guide had thrown an arm across his face. His expression was that of an awakened sleepwalker.

Under the pressure of the two Israelis, Warren surged back and over a chest of camera equipment. Vickers’ anger broke when his grip did. He steadied himself against the machine gun, panting. John Craig’s Uzi was six inches from Vickers’ left eye. The safety was off. “Put that goddamned thing away,” said Vickers wearily. “I’m no danger to you and yours.” He flexed his right hand. He had skinned the back of it somehow, probably by brushing the cal-fifty when he swung at Warren. “I’m no danger even to that shit, it seems,” he said. “Mr. Prime Minister, if you’ll keep him where I don’t see him for a while, I’d be obliged. We can go on now.” Vickers sank back into his seat. “We’ve had enough dirty laundry.”

The driver backed, ignoring the crunch of brush buckling under his treads. He cramped the front wheels sharply, steering toward a wall of thorns and vines to clear the triceratops dead across half the trail. As the soldier engaged forward again, a little utility vehicle with two persons aboard swung around a bend in the trail ahead. The man at the machine gun almost fired by reflex.

Everyone was cursing. The half-track clashed to a stop, more from unexpectedness than real danger of running over the aluminum pony. Stern was at the tiller guiding the vehicle awkwardly. Adrienne was far more experienced with the ponies, but shots had been fired and there was a triceratops making the earth shudder as its muscles continued to die. The blonde woman squatted behind Stern, trying to look in all directions at once and ready to respond instantly with a bullet from her Schultz and Larsen.

Stern jerked the tiller. To the men on the half-track, the smaller vehicle disappeared behind the bulk of the female triceratops. Moments later, Adrienne and the Israeli official scampered around the great carcass. “Came by a trail that put us ahead of you,” the woman explained loudly as she opened the door to the cab. “Move over.” In a voice that Vickers saw on her lips rather than heard, she heard, “We need to move fast. That dino isn’t going to last long.”

Stern was being handed into the back by one of the holographers. Secretary Cardway was speaking in a cold rage, though Vickers did not turn to see who the recipient might be. As the half-track moved forward again, he mouthed to Adrienne, “An overdose of dope? We could dick around in the brush and hope it’ll wear off.”

“Left at the next fork!” Adrienne shouted to the driver. Then, to Vickers under the rising whine of the diesel as they plowed through brush, “We brought it back in shackles, no drugs at all. You know, Avraham may be a desk jockey but he’s got enough guts for two.”

Vickers smiled, calmed by the scent and touch of his wife in the cramped cab. “I think he’s seen his share of fieldwork of one kind and the other,” the guide said. “He’s . . . a good soldier. Jesus, a good German. I think . . . I’m afraid that’s what we all are, good Germans doing our jobs and keeping quiet.”

The flash of lights and shadow as the half-track lurched down the trail was a peripheral distraction to Vickers and Adrienne as they faced each other in the close quarters. “Well,” she said, “the tyrannosaur’s about to become a good dinosaur. In the sense of being dead as one. They’ve figured out what the problem is when dinos come Topside: parrot fever . . . or bird fever in general, I guess. This one’s caught it just like the rest, and its lungs are already hemorrhaging.”

“What?” Vickers demanded, certain that he had not understood his wife correctly.

“Bird fever,” she repeated. She put a hand on her husband’s shoulder to steady her as the wheels bounced on a head-sized rock. “Ornithosis. It’s not a serious disease in birds today, ah, Topside. But dinos are close enough genetically to catch it, and they have no natural immunities. It’s like smallpox and the Pacific Islanders to them.”

Everyone on the half-track ducked involuntarily as the dappling of the vegetation blackened momentarily into solid shadow. The driver steadied on the wheel again. Vickers let out his breath and lowered the rifle he had been trying to clear with too little room to do so. The titanopteryx sailed on, barely faster and barely higher than the half-track. The straggling limbs of the brush hid the pterosaur again.

The responder on the guide’s wrist pinged twice, flashing red. They were within one hundred meters of the beacon and—God willing—of the tyrannosaur. Of the end of this charade of a safari.

“Stop, stop!” Vickers ordered, touching the driver on the forearm. They slowed to a halt with barely a quiver. As the driver thumbed dust from his instrument dials, the guide stood on the seat facing back toward the other men. “We’ve sighted fresh spoor,” he lied. “The trophy is very close. For the, ah, remainder of the stalk, one of the holographers and W-warren will ride in the cab. Mr. Secretary, you’ll stay where you are, if you please, and I’ll ride in the front on the other side of the machine gun. Adrienne, Mr. Stern, if you will take the back corners and watch your quadrants—”

“No,” said Secretary Cardway, bracing a hand on the bulkhead. “I’m not going to shoot it from a tank. I’m getting down.”

“Sir!” Vickers blurted, trying to come up with a suitable lie. He had almost said the truth, “That’s too dangerous to allow—” and that would have made the big Texan’s decision irrevocable.

Adrienne, swinging lithely out of the cab, supplied the right words before her husband or anyone else could use the wrong ones. “It’s not a matter of safety, Mr. Car—Mr. Secretary,” she stated matter-of-factly. “It’s visibility. That extra four feet of height gives you a shot the bush can’t block.” She began to climb into the back, her right foot on the fender and a hand raised to the one Stern outstretched to meet her. Warren and a PR man were getting out over the rear bulkhead as the Prime Minister watched with steel points in his eyes. “And besides,” the blonde woman said with an apparently absent glance at Cardway’s bodyguard, “on the ground you’d be between a charging tyrannosaur and all the other guns, that one—” she flicked a thumb at the cal-fifty as she stepped over the bulkhead—“included. Standing in front of one of those when you know somebody’s going to fire it isn’t the sort of courage that . . . brings back elephants.”

Craig leaned forward to whisper to his principal. His knuckles were white on the grip of the submachine gun. Cardway brushed him back with a scowl, still poised to climb down. The bodyguard’s face contorted. He shouted, “I won’t have it! I swear to God, I’ll blast the first man that aims near you! If you step down,
everybody
gets down or else disarms!”

Stern and Adrienne both shifted their stance, a change more mental than physical at the moment. Craig’s outburst appeared to bother even Secretary Cardway. The cabinet official opened his mouth for a curt retort, but he swallowed the words unspoken a moment later. He frowned. “All right,” he said, “goddammit. Let’s get this show on the road.”

Vickers used the gun mount as a grip to lift himself over the bulkhead. Not only was it faster, it kept him away from the sullen Warren standing by the cab door. The box of the half-track was still more crowded than Vickers liked when they were facing dangerous game, but he did not feel that he could safely unload the supernumeraries so near to a carnosaur either. “Real slow, now,” he said to the driver, settling the fore-end of his M14 in his left palm. “Dead slow.”

The squeal of bearings in several of the bogeys was high-pitched and in keeping with the alien atmosphere. Inevitably, the noise would announce them to the tyrannosaur, but Vickers was not concerned that it would frighten him away. It was the tyrannosaur’s world, and he was king in it. Perhaps the beast would stalk down the trail to investigate. That would give them the appearance of danger and a simple, no-deflection shot that the Secretary could be expected to make.

The half-track brushed through a slight kink in the trail. They were on the edge of a sharply defined clearing. The guide recognized it as being cut by the boundary of the intrusion field when a vehicle snapped back Topside with its immediate surroundings. Directly across the clearing, twenty meters away, sprawled the tyrannosaur in a field of white-leafed wormwood. The beast had probably not moved since Stern and Adrienne dragged it from the intrusion vehicle with a tractor. It lay on its belly, facing three-quarters of the way away from the hunters. Its hind legs were stretched back along its tail like those of a huge tadpole. Pulmonary blood had painted the beast’s jaws and muzzle, drawing a black mist of flies.

“It’s asleep,” the guide said sharply. “Quick, Mr. Secretary, put one through its chest and be ready for the charge!”

The titanopteryx was skimming toward them so low over the field of wormwood that the tyrannosaur’s haunches hid it. It pulled up to brake its flight like a parachute opening. The huge pterosaur seemed to lower its hind legs as it hung in the air, gripping the dinosaur’s hide as if its wings rode on something more tangible than air. The maneuver was so effortlessly graceful that Vickers would have gasped in delight—if it had not just made an obvious liar of him.

For a moment, no one said anything more. The diesel clattered. After glaring at the half-track, the pterosaur arched its neck and slammed its chisel beak into the haunch of the sprawling tyrannosaur. The flesh beneath the mottled scales rippled away from the impact, but the dinosaur as an entity did not move.

“You sons of bitches,” Secretary Cardway said. Deep-throated venom was thick on his voice. “You shot it yourself and dragged me here to make a fool of myself.” Cardway’s voice rose. “Did you have pictures of yourselves killing it, is that the idea? Wait till I was all over the national press with ‘my’ tyrannosaurus and then blackmailing me into supporting you? Was that it?”

No one was answering. Vickers turned toward his furious client, not because he had a response but because the anger had to be faced like any other catastrophe. The soldier between them at the cal-fifty was shrinking away, disassociating himself from a rage as inexplicable to him as an astrobleme was.

Cardway reached across the receiver of the big gun and slapped the guide with his right hand. “Go ahead and laugh, you bastard!” the Secretary shouted. “Laugh at how you played me for a fool.”

Vickers could not see for tears and the bloody rage that pulsed behind his eyes. “Look, here’s something for you to tape!” the Secretary was shouting. He raised the Mannlicher and fired. The bullet slapped dust from the tyrannosaur’s haunch, near the bloody gash the pterosaur had already torn. The winged creature screeched and hopped to the ground. Its beak quested for an adversary.

“You sons of bitches!” Secretary Cardway repeated. He jumped to the ground, stumbling as he hit. He used the butt of his rifle to brace himself and began to stalk toward the fallen dinosaur.

In the cab of the half-track, Thomas Warren was grinning like a madman. The two holographers were rolling tape, though they must have known it would probably have to be wiped. “Sir!” Avraham Stern cried. “You mustn’t—”

For an instant, Vickers saw everything with the clarity of inclusions in a crystal lens: the Secretary’s hunched shoulders; the incised margins of the wormwood leaves; the flicker of the tyrannosaur’s right eyelid. Then the whole world shrank to the front sight of the Ml4, with everything beyond it as blur as it was supposed to be when the guide’s fingers squeezed the trigger. He paused.

“I warned you!” Craig shouted.

Adrienne Vickers did not fire. There were too many people in too confined an area, and a 250-grain gilding-metal bullet from her rifle would penetrate everything it hit except perhaps the engine block. Instead, the tall blonde dropped the Schultz and Larsen and leaped a five-gallon thermos of water to tackle Craig as he shot. Adrienne’s right hand gripped the bodyguard’s throat, her left seized the Uzi at the juncture of barrel and front sight. Together, the pair of them cannoned into Vickers. Craig fired a six-round burst through the bed of the truck before Adrienne’s leverage broke his finger against the trigger guard. His screaming stopped a moment later when Avraham Stern leaned forward. With a short axial blow as if he were playing billiards, Stern brought the butt of his rifle down on Craig’s skull. The Israeli official kept the muzzle of his FAL vertical, just in case the shock jarred the hammer off its sear.

Vickers was jammed forward against the bulkhead while 9mm bullets blew splinters into his shins. He had not fired. The tyrannosaur’s head lifted an inch on its bed of wormwood. Its tail swept in an arc like a scythe, catching first the titanopteryx, then Secretary Cardway. The great pterosaur squawked and spun, hurled toward the carnivore’s thorax by the impact. That was accidental, however. The tip of the tail took the Secretary of State across the buttocks as the dinosaur had intended and flung him forward. The four-foot jaws were already open to receive him. When the jaws closed, they thudded like a casket dropping. The Secretary’s left arm flew off. His hand and chest disappeared into the carnivore’s mouth.

The Israeli driver stood up in the cab, waving a short-barreled grenade launcher. The gunner in the back of the half-track was gripping his weapon, despite the group struggling at his feet. Neither soldier shot. Mordecai Greenbaum leaned over the side of the vehicle and fired the cast-off Gibbs double twice into the chest of the tyrannosaur, still belly-down in the white-dusted foliage. The dinosaur stiffened. A tiny, two-clawed forefoot flicked up, too short even to pick the beast’s great teeth. Then the carnivore relaxed, its head falling back sideways to the ground. The jaws lolled open. The Secretary of State, impaled on a score or more of four-inch teeth, did not spill out. His body above the rib cage lay within the dinosaur’s mouth. The left arm and the borrowed Mannlicher, dropped when the tail struck, lay on the ground like storm wrack.