Conquistador (56 page)

“Thank you, Major Mattei,” Giovanni said.

The note of the engines changed, a lower growl as they crossed the Sierra heights and began their drop toward the landing strip. Giovanni made conversation, nearly certain the Russian knew nothing of his nervousness—it would not do to lose face.

There was a jolt as the plane's wheels touched down, and a juddering rumble as it slowed, then a jerk as the parachute brake deployed. The aircraft slowed to a halt, then taxied for a few minutes on the long dirt strip. There was a whine as the rear ramp descended; then hot, dry air cataracted in as the rear doors of the lounge were opened. Giovanni walked forward, squinting a little against the harsh bright desert sunlight; his cotton bush jacket stuck to his skin for an instant as the heat set sweat flowing, then sucked it up.

A Hummer was waiting beside the ramp, and beside it a tall blond man in uniform. He saluted and kissed the hands of the Primes.

Batyushkov embraced him. “Yuri Alexeievich!” he said. “It is good to see you once more.”

“Colonel Garshin,” Giovanni said more coolly, nodding politely but maintaining a proper distance.

They climbed into the hardtopped Hummer; two more of the open-topped model preceded and followed them, with machine guns at the ready. The lodge stood a few miles north of the shore of Lake Salvatore, a long, low ranch-style dwelling of adobe, with wooden galleries on both sides. North of that was something new: several hundred acres of tilled land, tall green corn and potato vines and wheat stubble, fed by furrows diverted from the river that ran down from the high sierras to the west. Those stood along the horizon like teeth reaching for heaven, towering fourteen thousand feet above the flat sagebrush-covered valley floor; scattered near the lake and the settlement were herds of cattle tended by mounted cowboys. From the buildings a new road drove south and east, into the Inyo range, more barren and bitter than the sierras, the outliers of deserts as stark as any on Earth.

Dimitri Batyushkov waved his hand at the mountains on both sides as they drove past the lodge and turned southeast, along the lakeshore and toward the lower peaks that separated the Owens from Death Valley.

“An excellent protective barrier, and an even better location for surveillance radar,” he said jovially.

Giovanni nodded; that emphasized the primacy of the Colletta contribution to the enterprise.

“How does the training progress?” he asked Colonel Garshin.

“Fairly well, sir,” the man replied; his English was thickly accented but fluent enough. “The men are of fairly high quality for black-arsed savages; the main problem apart from teaching them a civilized language is that they are wholly illiterate and unfamiliar with the simplest machines—with wheelbarrows, even. You will understand that this renders the most elementary training more difficult and time-consuming. Certainly they are ferocious enough. Their main complaint is the lack of liquor and women.”

“I trust you can maintain discipline,” Giovanni said.

The Russian officer smiled thinly; he had a broad, high-cheeked face with slightly slanted eyes of cool blue, below cropped hair the color of birch wood.

“Oh, we maintain a fine discipline, you will find, sir,” he said. “Basic infantry training is complete, and we have moved on to the specialized segments. Within broad limits, the more time we have for those, the higher our chances of swift success when we strike.”

It was only twenty miles to the site of the mine, but that meant climbing nearly eight thousand feet in the last eight miles; they began by bumping and jouncing up a wash, and then up a poor excuse for a road that wove drunkenly along the mountainside. The air felt chilly and thin by the time they reached their destination nearly three hours later. Dun wilderness stretched away to the west and north and south; they were nearly at the crestline, on a gently sloping plateau below a much steeper section of the mountainside. As they turned, the road seemed to disappear; the blue surface of Lake Salvatore glinted like a great turquoise jewel set amid the dun-green sage; the lodge was barely visible, the runway a brown thread drawn with a ruler, and the cultivation a postage stamp on a land that extended for infinite blue distance.

Barracks built of fieldstone mortared with mud sprawled about the camp; the entrance to the false mine hid the main armory, and the crisp new lines of a great square building were supposed to contain crushing mills and smelters. Smoke did pour out of a stack; what the Russians called
maskirovka
—not just camouflage, but concealment that actively misled.

And at the edge of the camp, on an X of great timbers, a naked brown man hung in chains spiked to the wood.

“As you can see, we take energetic measures to maintain good order,” Garshin said. “This man attempted to desert.”

“Well, that ought to teach them the consequences of failing to make a clean break,” Major Mattei said, his voice and face carefully neutral.

“Indeed,” the Batyushkov agreed happily. “Now, you are proceeding to more specialized training?”

“Yes, sir,” Garshin said. He pointed to the larger, newer building. “That is our duplicate of the Gate complex. All units have been through the assault training at least once, and we are stepping up the pace. Things go faster, since the unteachables have been eliminated. I anticipate little further attrition; no more than one or two percent.”

Roy Tully nodded warily to the big Afrikaner as he walked through the gardens at the rear of the Seven Oaks manor house. Piet Botha returned the gesture with a control that showed he returned the same cautious respect, untinged with anything so sentimental as liking. That told Tully something in itself: The bigger man was smart enough not to let the contrast in their sizes fool him into underestimating a possible opponent.

That is one serious badass,
Roy thought.
If the time ever comes, there won't be any “Freeze” or “You're under arrest” bullshit. I'll just put a clip right through the center of mass—and then a couple of rounds into the head to be really sure.

Adrienne had “suggested” that he report to the stable boss, since he'd been emphatically uninterested in helping took the shocks, or whatever you called throwing parcels of wheat around. That was one advantage of
not
being a big muscular slab of beef like Tom: People didn't automatically look at you and think of all the work you could accomplish. He managed to find the laneway to the stables, a strip of hoof-marked dirt under the cool shade of an avenue of pepper trees. But it was blocked by people and two horses bearing pack saddles, each carrying a pair of wooden barrels; the crowd included several kids of around ten or so and one extremely good-looking young woman in jeans and checked shirt and western hat. She was black-haired and full-figured, and leading the animals with easy competence.

“Hi!” Tully said brightly. “Looking for the stable boss.”

“You're looking at her,” the young woman said. She transferred both leading reins to one hand and shook with the other. “Sandra Margolin.”

“Roy Tully,” he replied. “I'm supposed to report to you.”

“Thank God,” she said. “Henning's taken all my people for the harvest and I'm trying to do six men's work with myself and a bunch of kids. You know anything about horses?”

“They're big and they've got four legs and they eat grass,” Tully said helpfully, grinning. Sandra smiled broadly herself. “Well, hell, that's honest,” she said. “You're the other FirstSider, right? Here. You lead one of these. We're taking some water out to the harvest gangs, me and these imps of Satan here.”

He took one of the leading reins, holding it the way she did—the slack in the left hand, and the right close to the horse's chin, ignoring the way it slobbered slightly. The powerful earthy, grassy smell of the animal filled his nostrils as they took a right turn onto a graveled lane that fronted the houses that stood south of the manor.

“So, Sandra,” he said, “how did you get to be stable boss?”

Yelling and spreading your tail feathers worked wonders for peacocks, but it had limitations for humans; a lot of guys didn't realize how much women liked it when a man
listened
to them. He suspected that that went double for New Virginia.

Well, this is a new experience,
Tom thought, leaning on his fork and watching the tractors pull away from the group of workers.

The fork was a shaft of polished ash nearly six feet long, topped by two thin, elegantly curved steel tines—the original style of pitchfork, nothing like the digging implement. The overnight fog had lifted since they returned from Rolfe Manor, except for banks that hung like drifting mystery among the thick riverside forest—perhaps the fervent prayers he'd heard, interlarded with equally heartfelt curses, had something to do with it. The sun was clear of the Vaca hills to the east and gave promise of a long, hot, cloudless day; he was grateful for the big-brimmed straw hat he'd been given. Everyone was wearing one, or a cloth equivalent; most of the women had bandannas tied around their heads beneath.

Four tractors were pulling their side-mounted reaper-binders through the ripe wheat, the first vehicle's wheels running along a grass verge that lined the inside of the fence. The others were in a staggered line, each ten yards back from the one in front, with the tractor moving through the stubble left by the machine in front, its reaper out in the grain. The long creels turned, pushing a swath of grain backward over the cutting bar; the tying mechanism bound the straw into sheaves and dropped them in a neat, closely spaced row. The noise of the tractor's diesel and the clattering rattle and buzz of the reaper made him suddenly conscious again of how quiet it was here—no background hum of machinery and traffic and aircraft and voices, so the sound of the harvester echoed distinct and solitary.

“Wait a minute,” he said as another tractor came up pulling a flatbed trailer with an outward-slanting frame fastened to the front and rear, ten feet high; several more followed it. “Why do you have to get all these sheaves up right away? It's not as if you've got to worry about summer rains here!”

Adrienne looked up from where she was conferring with Henning. “Well, you may have noticed that we have a lot of birds here,” she said, nodding upward.

Tom looked up. There
were
a lot of them there, even by local standards. More waited in chattering flocks in the cypress trees that ran into the distance along the side of the wheat field, or in the boughs of the occasional valley oak left amid the cultivation: rock doves, band-tailed pigeons . . . Even more birds were scrambling or flying out of the path of the reapers—great explosions of ring-necked pheasant going
kaw-kwak!,
and even larger coveys of brown California quail, chicken-sized birds looking a little as if they'd been squeezed between the leaves of a book, the males with an absurd little feather plume dangling over their noses, and all of them going
chi-CAH-go
at the tops of their voices.

“And deer,” Henning added. “Nocturnal, but they can clear these fences easily enough. Ditto mule deer, elk, and a couple of those new types of antelope. There's one not much bigger than a rabbit that's a bigger
pest
than the rabbits.”

“Dik-diks, that's what they're called,” Adrienne said. “Not to mention bear, black and grizzly. And rabbits . . . The only ones that don't like wheat are the cougars and leopards and wolves. Even the coyotes will eat grain. Not to mention grapes, but that's another story—everything loves grapes.”

Henning nodded. “If we let the sheaves lie out more than a couple of days, we'd lose half the yield,” he said. “No way we could stand guard on three hundred acres for months.”