The Fury and the Terror (2 page)

At the end of a Jeep road two-thirds of the way up the valley, Zephyr recognized the hexagon of Colonial-era white buildings with their pagoda-like roofs that she had seen in reconnaissance photos.

Darkfeather keyed her mike. "Designated Hitter, do you have visual on our position?"

"Affirm, Mamba Leader. We see you."

"Say your situation."

"Still calm. No movement inside the—okay, couple of lights just came on. I see a face in a window, second floor. They've made you, Mamba Team."

"Dreamtime is over," Darkfeather said scornfully. "Light up the LZ and go for the Avatar. Say again, you are go for the Avatar."

Then it was happening so fast Zephyr had difficulty keeping track of all the action. Two of the helos circled behind the cloister, searchlights blazing as doors flew open below. Men and women, most of them apparently roused from their beds and wearing little clothing, ran in panic toward the rain forest fifty yards away. They were met by a unit of the infil team that had been lying in wait at the forest perimeter. Members of Mamba Team fast-roped down from the hovering helicopters to assist in the roundup. There was little resistance. A couple of the younger, swifter runners had to be overhauled and thrown to the ground. Other members of the strike force were storming the cloister. All helicopters remained aloft.

Portia Darkfeather had tucked her cat into a pouch on her vest. She scanned the faces of the captives, who had been made to lie on their backs in a circle, feet touching, hands behind their heads. Their eyes were squinched shut against the searchlight dazzle.

Zephyr recognized several of the older telepaths from surveillance photos. Ivy Papillion. Ping Lee. Noorul Meskerem.

"I don't see Cheng," Darkfeather said.

"She wouldn't run with the others," Zephyr told her. "She's too smart for that. She'd have another way out planned. Tunnel, maybe."

"Scanning now," Darkfeather said, looking at the infrared screen. Thermal imaging would reveal any sign of human life in subterranean passages. She keyed her mike. "Mamba Leader to Designated Hitter, give me a status, over.

The voice of DH leader, coming from inside the cloister, was muffled and rushed. "Roger; Mamba Leader. We're clearing the second floors of Alpha and Bravo buildings. We have not made contact with the Avatar. Blue Leader, report."

"Roger that. TI scan negative, cellar is clear. Nothing down here but vintage wine."

"Negative on tunnels and caves," Darkfeather advised.

Zephyr slipped into an old habit, grinding her back teeth. No way to treat all those expensive crowns. She made herself relax.

"Could she have skipped early?"

"DH has had a lock on the place for the last six hours."

"Unless she peeped them," Zephyr objected. "And Kelane's like a wraith."

"The best T-blockers we've ever trained are on the DH team. No leaks there, I'd bet my sweet pussy on that. And I don't mean Warhol."

"Then she's down there. Okay, assume I'm Kelane Cheng. I have a little warning, then all hell is busting loose outside. I know I have—what, less than a minute? How do I handle it? I've always been good, but I need to get lucky."

"Maybe I know where you're going with that," Darkfeather said after a few seconds. She keyed her mike.

"Designated Hitter, recall all units
now
. I want a head count."

"Say again, Mamba Leader?"

"Account for all personnel immediately."

Members of the faculty of the cloister and several initiates were being herded from the buildings into the glare of helicopter searchlights. The German shepherds were patrolling. One feisty old gent wearing a toga had to be gigged to calm him down.

Two more members of Designated Hitter appeared from a side door, away from the throng on the lit-up lawn. They were carrying between them a sheet-wrapped body, small, probably female. Unconscious, or dead. Zephyr put the glasses on them.

"Portia? Upper left quadrant of the lawn, by that stand of overgrown lobelias."

"Roger." The faces of the DH team, a bulky man and a woman half his size, were unseeable behind deflector shields as they put the wrapped body on the lawn. Then they turned and walked away from the lighted perimeter, ignoring the recall orders that were crackling over the radio. They didn't hurry, but they didn't have far to go to reach the edge of the forest.

"One of them has to be our gal Key-lawn-ee," Zephyr said, with a shiver of excitement. "The big hunk is probably Romanzo."

"They must have brain-locked a couple of our guys and stripped them."

Darkfeather changed the angle of the helo's searchlight and said to the flight leader, "Get over there." She keyed her mike. "Designated Hitter, the Avatar is wearing ops gear! Mamba Flight Leader is in pursuit!"

When the light hit the pair on the ground, illuminating them against the forest wall, they split up and ran into the trees. Dogs were racing across the lawn after them.

Kelane Cheng stumbled at the river's edge, looking back at the incoming helicopter, just above the treetops. She froze momentarily, then started across the waist-deep river.

"Wait a minute!" Darkfeather yelled. "Something's wrong!"

"What do you mean?" Zephyr yelled back.

"That isn't Cheng!"

"Looks like her!"

Darkfeather shook her head curtly but otherwise didn't argue. She swung a keypad to a position at lap level and began working the keys. "The little bitch jerked a knot in our tail. That's Cheng's doppelganger down there. The dpg and Romanzo carried Cheng out of the cloister, wrapped in that sheet." To the flight leader she said, "Black light going hot. We're locking on the dpg."

"Roger, locking the dpg," the baffled flight leader said. "What does black light do?"

"What does Kryptonite do to Superman? Also, black light is the only sure way to tell a dpg from the homebody. They don't show up on thermal imagers."

The flight leader glanced across a bank of instruments and glowing screens to confirm.

"How about that? Spooky."

"But they have body heat," Zephyr said, being in a position to know.

"One of those little mysteries we haven't worked out yet," Dark-feather said.

"Where does the doppelganger come from?" the flight leader asked.

"According to folklore, we all have them," Darkfeather said. "You ought to get in touch with yours, sometime."

"Hell no!"

Darkfeather laughed. "Just ragging on you. Producing a double is a feat for adepts like the Avatar. It's a left-handed art."

In the middle of the shallow river the runaway doppelganger, caught in the beam of black light, struggled against the river rapids, unable to advance. A German shepherd leaped into the water and swam toward the dpg. Kelane Cheng's doppelganger reacted by sluggishly raising its hands in an attitude of terror.

"They're also scared shitless of dogs." Darkfeather swiveled in her seat as the helicopter hovered, and keyed her mike. "All air and ground units, this is Mamba Leader! Cheng is in the forest." To the flight leader she said, "Put us down. Praetorians, get ready to deploy with the giggers."

"Roger," said one of the ops behind Zephyr, and there was a shifting of bodies, the clicks of harness being released.

The lead helicopter dropped to the river's edge, two feet above the ground. Portia Darkfeather leaped out first, crouched, sent the Praetorians who followed her into action with curt hand signals. Then she turned to help Zephyr out into the maelstrom stirred up by the rotors. They scrambled up the bank as the helicopter rose again, searchlight flashing on the scene in the middle of the river: three ops from Designated Hitter and the German shepherd dog had surrounded Kelane Cheng's doppelganger and were prodding the look-alike toward shore.

Two more helicopters were stationary above the forest, torching it with their lights. Ops from Multiphasic Operations and Research Group were at full scramble amid the exotic trees, in pursuit of Kelane Cheng.

Darkfeather paused to receive a report, grinned broadly as she turned to Zephyr.

"Got her!"

Zephyr trembled from the release of a year's worth of frustration, took in a deep lungful of the heavenly Hawaiian air.

"Yeah baby! What about Romanzo?"

"Nothing yet."

The capture zone was a clearing containing a scum-covered pond. Zephyr and Darkfeather followed a boar path illuminated by light sticks and emerged from the Ohia trees to see Kelane Cheng lying on her side near the pond, in an auroral glow from the sky. The tops of the trees thrashed in the wind from the helicopter directly overhead. Darkfeather waved it off.

Cheng had left the bed sheet behind; she was naked. She had been gigged twice, in the hip and below a shoulder blade. She lay motionless but not comatose from the pharmacopeia fed to her by the CO2 darts. There were tears on Cheng's cheeks; her lips were parted but she breathed normally. She didn't look at anyone.

"What did you gig her with?" Zephyr asked Darkfeather. She was gasping a little from the headlong pace. Obviously she'd skipped too many of her aerobic kickboxing sessions the past couple of months, because of the heavy travel schedule as a stand-in for her ailing husband.

"Depakote works best on telekinetics. What effect it has on brain-lockers is an open question, so we hedge the bet with Trazadone and Klonopin. Rest assured she'll behave."

Zephyr stared at Cheng while she was catching her breath. Such a waif-like creature, probably not more than five feet, ninety pounds. Tiny lacquered pearls of toenails. She wore her hair long, strands of it falling across her petite breasts. Zephyr told herself that she didn't need to be afraid; Cheng looked so harmless in her downfall. But what strength still lay in her mind, in spite of the brain-numbing drugs?

"Can I talk to her now? I don't want to waste time. I want her on that plane to Plenty Coups before dawn."

"She'll hear. Doesn't mean she'll cooperate when the dope wears off."

"That's something you
don't
want to bet your sweet pussy on."

Darkfeather grinned, showing off the dimples Zephyr liked so much. Too bad they were going separate ways in a short while. Zephyr thought of the sybarite's bath in the Presidential Suite at her hotel, Portia's long body awash in aromatic bubbles. Rona sometimes swung both ways; but (as an AC-DC distaff member of the British royals had confided after their tryst) when it came to sex, "things go better with bloke."

Zephyr sighed, her pulses quickening.

"Let's do it," she said, and led Darkfeather to Kelane Cheng.

Darkfeather pulled her pistol from the utility holster—room for a Sig Sauer P220 model semiautomatic, a Ka-bar fighting knife, and extra magazines for her Sig—that was strapped to her thigh. She kneeled by Cheng's head and placed the muzzle gently over one ear. Cheng gave no sign that she noticed. Zephyr kneeled where the Avatar could see her. Nothing changed in the dark slanted eyes.

"History in the making," Zephyr said gleefully. "Here, tonight. We've been gentle. Maybe a sprained ankle, some bruises, but nobody's gotten really hurt yet."

Zephyr thought she saw a smile. "So unlike you," Cheng said, barely above a whisper.

Zephyr said, "Your karma, baby, has just hit you in the face. We're not going to prolong this. You know who I am. You know what we want you to do. It will be done."

"Never. He must die."

"No, darling. I want you to consult the practical side of what little brain we're allowing you to keep for now and think about what may happen if you continue to be wrongheaded. Think about Portland, Key."

Kelane Cheng reacted with horror and loathing.

"Hey, Kelane? I blame you for Portland.
You
caused a thousand people to vaporize and thousands more to suffer by refusing to save
one
life. And Portland was a relatively low-yield device. Portland will recover, in time, if anyone cares to live there anymore. But the terrorists who nuked Portland may have something a little larger in store for—well, where do you think it could be, next time? Albuquerque? Wichita? Frightens me to think about it. We can fight these monsters, Key. We need more help, however. We need Robin Sandza."

"Your own dying will last ten thousand years."

"Oh, Kelane. So judgmental."

"Deaths on a thousand worlds too primitive for fire, where the only luxury is a dirt cave."

"Spare me. All I really care about is my country. But the Sino-Islamic coalition will bring us down if we don't have strong hands at the helm of the ship of—"

There was a commotion at the edge of the clearing. Zephyr, interrupted in the flow of her rhetoric, looked around. Three members of Mamba Team had arrived with a captive, who, even though he had been gigged, still had some fight in him.

Zephyr rose and looked down at Kelane Cheng. "Frank's here," she said happily.

Cheng's small shoulders drew together; she closed her eyes briefly. "There's nothing you can do to Frank. Nothing you can do to me. We will never bring Robin Sandza back."

"I want Romanzo over here," Zephyr said sharply. Portia Darkfeather, still holding the muzzle of her semiautomatic pistol against the Avatar's glossy head, gave Zephyr a look. She liked knowing the game plan in advance, and Zephyr apparently was going to improvise.