Arc Riders (28 page)

Carnes got to her feet. Weigand tried to help her. She thrust herself out of his grip. She could see well enough by the throbbing
light that projected her shadow across the disabled APC.

Burning jet fuel woke ruby reflections from the wire snaking through the bamboo stockade. The guard stood in the gateway,
waving his machine pistol and calling out. Carnes wasn’t sure the words were in a real language.

A mortar shell screamed from the night and landed directly at Carnes’ feet. She opened her mouth to shout in final surprise.
The bomb, its tailfins blown off by the explosion that sent it skyward, was part of the 504th’s stored munitions.

It hadn’t exploded when shells around it did. It didn’t go off now, either.

Watney shot the raging guard twice in the face. As the man spun into a gatepost, Watney fired twice more into his back.

The Chinese rallier thrashed in death. His foot kicked Watney’s wounded leg as the colonel limped past. Watney cursed and
shot the dead man a fifth time.

The team stumbled through the gate. Sirens wailed. There was a white flash half a mile away and, seconds later, the
crump
of the explosion. Another mortar shell, thrown farther than the one that had narrowly missed Carnes, the fuse this time still
in working order.

“Head for the 96th,” Carnes directed. Her eyes hurt with the constriction of the tears that wouldn’t flow. “We’ll have to
walk, I guess. Val will find us beds.”

“There’ll be emergency personnel in a few minutes,” Watney said. He was reloading his revolver. “But if we stay by the side
of the road they won’t bother with us. They’ll have enough on their minds already.”

Carnes started down the gravel-surfaced road toward the hospital a half mile away. Another mortar shell went off in the distant
night.

Behind the team, a pillar of fire rose above the compound of the 504th Provisional Company. Parts of the helicopter were magnesium,
and their white glare blazed at the core of the burning fuel.

March 19, 1967

T
he two targets were primarily a man named Geoffrey Alden Bates and secondarily a woman named Lucille Rhone. Their abstracted
CIA dossiers gave no hint of how hard it would be to find them in the antique environs of Washington, outside of walking into
Bates’ office and confronting him.

Grainger had Bates and Rhone’s home address, home phones, work phones, car license plates and descriptions, and no idea how
to proceed without the superior data processing capabilities of TC 779 or even the hard suits. So they were out here in back
of Embassy Row, where the expensive real estate was, staking out Bates’ house as if they were two in-digs or actors in a period
play.

They had rented an internal-combustion auto with a standard shift called a Thunderbird or T-Bird, which was reputed to be
state-of-the-art but had no telecommunications equipment whatsoever. In it, they had sat outside this house arguing for far
too long, waiting for the man whose picture CIA had given them to show up.

Roebeck had her membrane down and was scanning for any sign of high-technology activity which would violate the parameters
of the time period, either from Bates’ house or anyone from Timeline B Central who might be surveying it. The unaugmented
EM band was unremarkable, at best, on this horizon. If anything significant was happening, it would stand out like a dinosaur
in these environs.

Grainger had his acoustic pistol on the split seat between them and was monitoring for other telltales—even those of human
activity inside the house. If he could just sight on Bates for seven heartbeats or seven respirations, he could lift a signature
that was as unique as a fingerprint. Then the ARC Riders could track Bates at will, wherever Bates went, whatever he did that
was within their equipment’s range of 1,000 meters. It would be easy to keep watch on the perpetrator until the man was accessible.
Grainger’s millimeter wave target locator was carrying a bio-attuned microwave radar that fixed on the target’s combined heartbeat
and breathing pattern.

But he had to find the guy to get a bioradar fix.

You couldn’t just break into that house and wait, not in this neighborhood. Especially because there was at least fifty pounds
of canine animal in there, which Grainger’s bioradar scanner had identified as completely conscious and alert.

If they couldn’t get a fix on Bates tonight, they’d have to go to the guy’s office, which was also too public a confrontation
for Roebeck’s taste. Grainger thought they could pull it off.

“Look, Nan, it’s the dark ages. A virtual police state. Why don’t we just show up at this guy’s place of work tomorrow, put
everybody we meet to sleep with tranks as we go in, and take his ass? Make him tell us where he’s got the device stashed—”

“We’ve been through this, Tim. I don’t want to scare him into running. He might run anywhere, or, for all we know, anywhen.
We can’t tag him well enough to follow if he can leave the temporal locus, and we don’t know he can’t. We’ve got time.”

They were reasonably safe burning days here, so far before the critical March 1968 time frame. He hoped. Every time you lived
through a temporal interval you locked yourself out of it. No revisitation was survivable. If somewhere else on this planet
something critical was happening right now, Tim Grainger could never come back here again to fix it.

He thought about the DDI whom they’d met at the NSC, who wanted the remains of the equipment for analysis. If that happened,
this timeline would go even more haywire. Tim Grainger understood the time-honed rules of his former profession well enough
to realize that if he and Roebeck were out here hunting Bates, purportedly seconded to CIA from DOE, then at least one other
homegrown agency team was out here looking, too. Perhaps more than one. You could have CIA, DIA, FBI, and maybe a half dozen
other acronymous agencies all keeping Bates under surveillance and waiting to strike. Roebeck and he were probably risking
interdiction by any one or all of them. So there were multiple undefined threats in this carbon-monoxide-laced night.

Grainger kept scanning through his membrane for any car he’d seen before, using enough light intensification to make sure
he could recognize number plates if he saw them again, storing car colors and faces in his memory. Lucky it was a quiet street.

Then it wasn’t so quiet, not for Grainger.

“Nan,” he said, “I know it’s real close to Embassy Row, but what do you think about a car full of Orientals coming around
this block twice?”

“Interested in us?” Roebeck snapped to seated attention.

“Us or the house. Could be either. Could be neither.”

“Get out of here. Key this thing, or whatever you do to make it go.”

“Okay,” he said with a grin. It was fun to drive the T-Bird, almost like visiting AmericaLand Theme Park. But the grin quickly
faded as the Orientals in their black car drove slowly by, clearly looking at them with more than casual interest.

“Damn, we’re being scanned. Move.”

Grainger’s membrane, in passive detection mode, was already corroborating Roebeck’s words.

He slammed the clutch in and out, ground the stick into reverse, and tried to wheel the crude auto out of its parking slot.
It took both hands.

The acoustic pistol was beside him on the seat…. Why didn’t Roebeck grab it?

“Nan, don’t wait to be sure—”

His eyes were aching. His stomach was cramping. He could barely feel his hands. He was filled with an overwhelming need to
drop his head between his knees and puke his guts out onto his shoes. Then he needed to shit. Bad.

He couldn’t let go of the wheel. He had to move the ancient automobile out of range of the Orientals. He slapped the clutch
into a forward gear and grabbed, nearly deaf and blind, for his own acoustic pistol to counter the acoustic fire he was taking.

But Nan Roebeck knocked it out of his hand. “Go,” she shouted in his ear. “Go!”

He wanted to shoot back, but he couldn’t see. Anyway, both his hands were fully occupied.

He could barely make out the road’s white dotted line through his tears. He headed for it, foot pressing the gas pedal to
the floor of the car.

The auto leaped forward with a squeal of acceleration, hit something hard with its left fender, shuddered, and careened toward
the intersection ahead.

His stomach twisted once more and he gasped for air. His body wanted to void everything he’d eaten or drunk in the last six
hours from every appropriate orifice. He held on to the steering wheel to stay upright, nearly chinning himself against it,
just driving forward.

Beside him, he felt Roebeck moving around, and suddenly the assault on his senses stopped. His ears and eyes cleared. His
muscles unknotted. His intense need to void his bowels diminished.

He blinked. There was a terrible honking in his ears. Then he realized he was halfway into the intersection, blocking other
vehicles, which were sounding their horns.

He continued on through, taking a left turn across two lanes of traffic, before he looked at Roebeck. She had a piece of brown
paper in her hands. She was wiping vomit off herself and her equipment. The
SOUND CANCELLATION ENGAGED
light was blinking happily from her pocket terminal.

“We’re going to be apprehended now,” she said dolefully, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand.

“Where?” Then he saw it.

He’d thought she meant the Orientals, the Timeline B natives from Central. But she didn’t mean that.

A police car with District of Columbia markings was flashing its lights at them. If the sound cancellation hadn’t been engaged,
its wailing might have been deafening.

“What now?” Roebeck said accusingly.

“I had a traffic accident. We ate some bad food. My girlfriend has food poisoning. I’m trying to get her to the hospital.”
He pulled over to the side of the road. “Maybe you and I know better, but you sure look—and stink—like a girlfriend who has
food poisoning. Otherwise, I’d have dumped you out of the car by now. Wish we had ‘Smell Cancellation.’”

“I just saved your ass, you ungrateful bastard. What more do you want?”

“I wanted you to shoot those sons of bitches. That was the plan, remember? Since this auto requires two hands, I was going
to drive and you were going to shoot. Take out any emerging threats. Incapacitate them if possible. Kill for self-preservation
if necessary. But shoot! Solve at least one of our problems, since you had a target of opportunity. But no. You’ve got to
be nonviolent. If I’m going to face arrest and need to use my CIA-given clout, it ought to be for something more than smashing
up some diplomat’s automobile.”

Roebeck didn’t answer. Instead, she groaned and covered her mouth. Then she retched again miserably. She’d been closer to
the infrasound device than he, the way their T-Bird had been parked on the one way street.

And then he had to roll down his window as the policeman came up with flashlight in hand. The smell of vomit billowed out
the open window.

The officer took a step backward. “What’s going on here?” he asked, wrinkling his short, broad nose.

As Grainger talked his way through their hastily devised scenario, he hoped to hell that the Orientals hadn’t gotten more
of a fix on him than the license numbers of this automobile. If they had a bioradar unit with them, he and Roebeck weren’t
going to be safe anywhere on this horizon.

Which meant to Grainger that, as soon as he got through with the local police, he was going to insist they call back TC 779
and debark for elsewhen.

They could still do this mission from another horizon, a week or a month or six months from now.

With those Orientals alerted, they were going to have to.

Timeline B: August 17, 1991

W
eigand watched Kyle Watney with impassive concern. The revisionist lay on the steel springs of a bunk in a ward of the 96th
Evacuation Hospital, disused for want of staff. There were no mattresses. Watney didn’t appear to care or even notice the
lack.

Weigand stood, his back to a partition wall. He didn’t worry that Watney would lie to them. Weigand trusted his instincts
to notice conscious deceit, even without Gerd’s biométric analyses to support those instincts.

Beyond the row of beds were screened windows. The night rocked with the sound of small arms and occasional explosions. Tracers
rose lazily into the air, a rope of red beads so far across the base perimeter that the sound of the machine gun firing them
was indistinguishable from the background noise.

“An attack is reported,” Barthuli said. He raised an eyebrow to show that he was asking confirmation rather than merely stating
a fact.

“God knows what they’re reporting,” Watney said, his eyes on the darkness which the single hanging light bulb threw above
the edge of its reflector shade. “There’s no attack, though. Just scared people shooting at nothing because they think what
happened at the compound was an attack.”

“Ah,” said Barthuli. “Though it was an attack of sorts. We were.”

The problem with Watney was that he was completely insane. You couldn’t trust anything he said, because what he believed and
consensus reality were so different.

“There were six of us,” Watney said to the ceiling. “Me and Krieghoff, sent here to Vietnam. Bates and Rhone in Washington,
the District of Columbia.”

The revisionist’s tongue savored the words like a gourmet tasting a perfectly seasoned dish.

“He was the leader, I suppose,” Watney continued in a tone of wonderment at himself and the world. “Bates was. Rhone never
led anything but the way to the bar, and she led there often enough. Domini and Douglass stayed in Denver and sent the rest
of us back.”

“May we attach induction inputs to your temples to get physical descriptions of your associates?” Weigand asked politely.
They didn’t need Watney’s agreement to hook him to the recorder/computer, but he had to be conscious for the system to work.
Barthuli’s equipment would only fumble across a subject’s surface thoughts. Best that Watney be agreeable.