Sans headlights, with the dashboard instruments fully dimmed, Radley Dubose drives the big 800-horsepower VelociRaptor into the glowing green night.
Also wearing night-vision goggles, Carter Jergen rides shotgun, faking an enthusiasm for the position that he doesn’t feel. Venting his frustration would achieve nothing, except give pleasure to the West Virginia vulgarian.
Although daylight might better facilitate the search, they are able to detect signs of the Land Rover’s passage: a length of tire tracks through softer earth; a swath of broken weeds the width of a vehicle; here, parallel lines of crushed grass; and here, chunks of sod torn out where tires briefly spun for purchase.
The problem is that no uninterrupted trail of spoor exists. The signs are scattered along the route the Washingtons have taken, but between them are long stretches of hard and barren land where only a legendary Indian scout of another century might be able to discern evidence of their passage. It is easy to misread a spoor and turn in the wrong direction, vainly seeking another tire track.
Which is where the night-search helicopter comes in handy. With both look-down and look-ahead night-vision cameras that display on the advanced-glass cockpit, the copilot is able to scan for traces of the Land Rover’s progress, zoom in as mere goggles can’t, and capture even subtle telltales.
In addition to its night-vision cameras, the chopper has the ability to sweep the terrain below for infrared sources, which also display on the cockpit glass. Because the day had been merely warm, because an overcast had formed during the afternoon, and because nightfall is hours behind them, the land has given up most of its stored heat; it does not present a bright, distracting background to the copilot. The heat signatures of coyotes are easy to distinguish from those of deer, and those of deer from those of any human being on foot. If the helicopter gets close enough to scan the Land Rover, the vehicle’s heat signature will be a blazing beacon in this otherwise untraveled wilderness.
Both the helo and the VelociRaptor are equipped with special FM receivers and transmitters operating below the standard commercial band occupied by radio stations, tuned to an unused spot on the dial. In addition to his night-vision headgear, Carter Jergen wears an earbud on which he receives guidance from the crew of the helo, and he passes this along to Dubose. His role is important, but it doesn’t compensate for being aced out of the driver’s seat.
He consoles himself with the knowledge that if they get this right, they will be heroes of the Arcadian revolution forever. They will rise high in the ranks to positions of greater privilege, even if only one of them deserves to be rewarded.
He and Dubose must try to avoid killing the Washingtons, so that the husband and wife can be injected, controlled, and questioned as to everything they know about the Hawk bitch and about who else might have been helping her. Her precious cub, Travis, will become their hostage, and mama bear will be given damn little time to surrender or else be responsible for his suffering.
A hundred yards ahead of them, the helo hovers, identified by an illegal minimum of running lights that register as three small points of green fire, as well as by a pale haze produced by the luminous displays of its night-vision cameras on its cockpit glass. Nothing of its real shape can be perceived, so that the imagination can make of it a levitating sphere or even a saucer-shaped vessel.
If Jergen didn’t know what lay before him, he might be persuaded that it is a ship from another world.
The copilot of the helo reports, “Disturbance patterns in an otherwise uniform slope of scree. Could be from a vehicle.”
“We’ll check it out,” Jergen replies.
When he turns to Dubose and passes on the message, the big man’s face is green and, in Jergen’s judgment, brutish, even a bit Neanderthaloid, and he is reminded of another comic-book figure, the Hulk.
“This light really messes with your head,” Dubose says. “I feel as if I’ve fallen inside the virtual reality of a video game, one of those early ones where the VR wasn’t as realistic as it is these days. It’s eerie, isn’t it? ‘Obscure and lonely, haunted by ill angels only.’?”
Jergen recognizes the reference to Poe. He is unsettled by the entire character of Dubose’s little speech, because it does not seem to be anything someone of his rustic bloodline would say, even after an education at Princeton, if education is the right word for what that institution confers on its students.
They speed across a largely barren area, where the scattered clump grass struggles for existence and is so twisted and ragged from winds of other days that whatever damage even the VelociRaptor does to this flora could not be taken as signs of its passage. They come to a short declining slope and a wide swale, beyond which lies a long upward grade. While the helo hovers a hundred feet overhead, Dubose drives down and stops in the shallow trough.
Through the windshield, Jergen can just barely make out where the ghostly rising slope of gravelstone has been disturbed, although nothing as clearly defined as tire tracks can be seen.
He is grateful to have a reason to take off his night-vision goggles and get out of the VelociRaptor before Dubose might quote another poet and thereby require a complete reassessment of his nature and his mental capacity. The downdraft from the rotary wing of the chopper tosses Jergen’s hair and flutters the collar points of the Diesel Black Gold denim jacket against his throat, as if the embroidered scorpions have come alive and crawled up from his chest.
He carries an LED flashlight with which he sweeps the slope ahead. It is a broad expanse of deep scree that time and weather have combed into an even texture, except for a nine-or ten-foot-wide section that appears to have been disturbed by something. A small seismic event would likely have affected the entire face of the slope, so this might in fact be the work of the Land Rover.
Bent forward, studying the mass of small stones, he works his way up the slope with some effort, the scree shifting treacherously underfoot, the rhythmic whump-whump-whump of the helo timed like an amplification of his heart’s systole. At about the halfway point, something glistens in the beam of the flashlight. A brownish-black glob. He wipes up a bit of it with his forefinger. Studies the stuff. Smells it. Axle grease.
2
The coyotes lost interest in the Land Rover, whidding away into the moonless dark, on the track of some irresistible scent.
In this part of California, it was possible to proceed in a twisting route through contiguous stretches of unincorporated scrubland, protected state wildernesses, national forests, and national monuments, skirting even the smallest population centers, passing under little-traveled county and state roads that bridged the canyons, all the way to the Mexican border, where they could leave the U.S. discreetly either at Tecate or Calexico-Mexicali. Alternately, because the Rover had a spare fuel tank, they could venture overland into southern Arizona.
However, it wasn’t Gavin’s intention to spend the entire night off-road or to leave California. In consultation with Jane, he and Jessie had developed a plan in anticipation of a day when they might have to go on the run for a while, until this Arcadian conspiracy was blown up, which it would be because it must be.
Considering that they were fleeing from a murderous cabal and might be leaving their comfortable life behind forever, he felt surprisingly confident. Not lighthearted. Not full of breezy good cheer. He was buoyed by the kind of sober-minded high spirits that warriors knew after a successful operation, an exhilaration tempered by being well-acquainted with death.