Dinosaurs & A Dirigible (29 page)

Vickers stood up slowly, porting his rifle. “Splendid trophy, sir,” he said.

The Secretary was lowering the muzzle of the Mannlicher. “Yes,” he said in a thick voice. “Goddamn it, yes.” Behind him, the brush quaked to pass his wild-eyed bodyguard.

Time safaris always held an element of danger, Vickers thought. Usually, however, the greatest danger was from the local wildlife.

“Right,” said Thomas Warren, as if he were an amateur magician demonstrating card tricks. “Here’s the culprit.”

The lock-work of the Gibbs double was strewn on the linen tablecloth in front of the British guide. Around him sat Vickers and his wife, Stern, Greenbaum, and Cardway. The audience wore expressions of interest and, in the last case, considerable impatience. Craig, the bodyguard, stood stiffly a pace behind the Secretary. He continually moved his head in nervous jerks to check behind him. “The sear, you see,” Warren continued, prodding the little piece again with his index finger. “Not worn, really, just polished down a little too closely in the final assembly. These big express chamberings give quite a jolt—as you know, old chap, as you know. In this case, it’s enough to jolt the left hammer spang off its sear when the right barrel fires. Sometimes, at any rate. More common a problem than you might think with these old darlings—” the guide rapped the joined barrels with his fingernail. “One reason I’ve always kept to a magazine rifle.”

“Well, fix the goddamn thing, then!” Secretary Cardway snapped. “You’re not on the payroll to run your mouth.”

Adrienne’s hand, resting companionably on her husband’s shoulder, tightened. Warren’s smile, however, appeared to be quite genuine as he replied, “Well, you see, old boy, that’s the problem. Short of fitting another sear, there’s not a great deal to be done. Not a bloody thing, really. Use it as a single shot, that is. Or I dare say, there’s a spare gun or two about the camp—isn’t that so, Vickers?”

Henry Vickers had a good idea of how the Secretary would react if he were offered the camp gun—a functional but very battered Ruger in .375 H&H. Fortunately, Prime Minister Greenbaum forestalled him by saying, “Luther, when I held your gun, I found that it suits me far better than the one I purchased for myself. I would appreciate it no end if you would agree to exchange with me.”

Adrienne got up, muttering something under her breath. The support crew was sprawled around the campfire, a discreet ten meters from their betters at the table. A pair of startled soldiers made room for the blonde woman when she tapped them on the shoulders.

“All right, that’s settled,” the Secretary was saying as if he had just made a concession. “Now,” the Texan continued, poking an index finger across the table at Vickers, “I’ve got another bone to pick.
You
told me that I was going after a tyrannosaurus this morning.”

The guide’s fist clenched in his lap. “Ah,” he temporized, “your hadrosaur is really an exceptional trophy.”

“I’m not wasting my time here to bring back a goddamn duckbill!” Cardway said, jabbing with his finger as if it were a pistol. “You lied to me once and you won’t do it again, hear? I want a tyrannosaurus rex.” He stood abruptly and strode toward his private tent. His back was straight, his carriage in every way that of a leader. Craig followed him at a respectful distance.

Vickers was pale. Stern said softly, “He has a very—selective—memory. I suppose we can hope that if matters in the long run turn out to his liking, his memory will select the positive aspects of the hunt as well.”

In an equally low voice, looking at Vickers, the Prime Minister said, “I am not a hunter, you understand. It does not matter what gun I carry or indeed if I carry one. But if I
did
hunt, if I were as keen on the chase as, as you are, as anyone could be—I would still have done the same thing I just did.” The little Israeli took a deep breath and continued, his whispered words freighted with genuine concern. “I am here to be the dutiful child, you see, the child who does whatever his papa pleases and is therefore rewarded with a treat. Only this time, the treat is his . . . his right to exist, his life. You see? I regret what I must bear, and what I must ask able gentlemen like yourselves to bear; but there is no choice.”

Vickers shook himself. “It’s all right,” he said, looking at his hands. “Only . . . only, I don’t see how anybody that—abrasive—expects to get elected
anything.
But they say he was almost President in the last election and he probably
will
make it the next time.”

The Prime Minister’s smile was tired. “Oh, you must not think Mr. Cardway is this way at all times. Only with people who must accept the behavior, underlings, dependents. If the United States needed a concession from Israel, he would be in a very different temper with me, with us, I assure you. Though he would still treat his own aide like dirt.” Greenbaum paused, shaking his head ruefully. “I sometimes find myself giving speeches even in the shower,” he said. “Well, gentlemen, good night.”

Stern watched the smaller man walking to the tent the two of them shared. “Best I go as well,” the official said. “Otherwise I will disturb him when I enter. A man of great courage, that one. Great courage.” He stood.

“But not great enough courage to refuse to start World War III,” Vickers said.

Stern looked down at the guide for a long moment, but in the end he walked off without responding.

The whole compound area was covered with a tent of mosquito netting, suspended from high poles. The covering must have been manufactured for the hunt. Reflected light brightened the inner face of the net to opacity, except where insects clung and fluttered on the exterior. There appeared to be a breed of hawk moth with wings the size of a man’s hands. Vickers had seen no flowers impressive enough to justify such a monster, but perhaps they were night-blooming. He hadn’t trained himself to observe flowers, anyway. He’d never guided a client who wanted to kill a rose.

There was laughter from the group around the fire, half-stilled at a sergeant’s gruff order. Adrienne’s liquid trill choked off a moment later. “Quite a lady, your wife,” said Thomas Warren. He was fitting a screw into a sideplate. “Must prove quite a—” his eyes flicked sideways, toward Vickers—“handful for you.”

“Instead of worrying about that,” Vickers said, “you might give some thought to how we’ll keep Cardway from running into the brush after his first carnosaur, the same as he did with the duckbill this morning.” Then, “I’m going to bed.”

Warren whistled between his teeth as he finished reassembling the rifle. His face bore the smile of a death-camp guard.

# # #

The ten-inch lizard racing down the center of the game trail actually gained on the half-track momentarily. Then the little creature’s burst of energy gave out. It faltered, an olive shadow against the gray soil. From Vickers’ vantage point, clinging to the front rail of the truck box beside the gun, it looked as if the front wheels would inevitably crush the lizard. At the last instant, however, the reptile spurted sideways into the shade and safety of the brush. Vickers found he was unexpectedly pleased at that.

“Hold it up here,” he said on his cordless throat mike. There was no point in trying to speak directly to the driver while they were in motion. Even though the cab was open-topped, the treads and the racket of brush clanging constantly on both sides of the vehicle provided a background of deafening white noise.

Obediently, the soldier driving slowed the half-track to a stop. He shared the cab with one of the propaganda staffers who looked a little green. Not only was the ride a rough one for anyone not accustomed to it, quite a few of the higher branches were slapping the wind screen. Its Plexiglas held despite deep scarring, but masses of six-inch thorns at eye height were bound to be disconcerting. The ponies, the little diesel carts which time safaris ordinarily used, would have slipped down the trails with less noise and infinitely greater comfort, but you couldn’t mount a fifty-caliber machine gun on one of them.

Well, it had yet to be proven that you could hunt dinos from these monsters.

“Give me those binoculars,” Secretary Cardway said. He pushed past Vickers as the guide started to mount the ladder. The cargo area of the half-track was cramped. Besides the gear and the braced ladder, there were six people: Vickers and his wife, Cardway and his bodyguard, the soldier manning the machine gun, and a holograph cameraman like the one in the cab. Only the fact that too many people were in the way kept Adrienne from jerking the Secretary back by his collar.

“Adrienne,” the guide cautioned in an undertone, hoping the cold-eyed Craig had not interpreted her brief tension correctly. “Here you are, sir,” he continued, handing up his binoculars. With luck, Cardway would not drop them. “There’s sign of ceratopsians—ah, that’s triceratops and the like, the horns—and, ah, duckbills, hadrosaurs, all around. With the ladder, it should be possible to pick out a number of nice trophies. We’ll ring them with the other track, then, and move in.”

Secretary Cardway had climbed a few steps and begun to scan their surroundings in a cursory fashion. The air was almost dead still. The plume of dust raised by their passage lay behind them like a still picture. A kilometer to the right hung a frozen ridge of gray, the track of the other vehicle more or less paralleling their own progress on another trail. That half-track stopped as well. Though it was not fitted with a ladder, Vickers could see Warren standing on the hood to eye the plain.

“Look, I’m tired of this dicking around,” Cardway said as he dropped to the bed again. He allowed Vickers to retrieve the binoculars and scramble up the ladder, but he did not seem interested in what the guide was doing. “I didn’t come to get duckbills and what-have-you,” the Secretary continued, “and I didn’t come to get my kidneys pounded out on some goddamn antique. If this is the best you Jews can manage, maybe the Arabs ought to get a crack at it.”

“Not only will a ceratopsian head make an elephant’s look like something the cat caught,” Vickers said, glad for their sakes that Stern and the Prime Minister were in the other vehicle, “but the meat is a first-rate way to lure the big carnosaurs—like tyrannosaurus—in. We didn’t dare use the hadrosaur carcass that way—I’m not about to toll a tyrannosaur to within fifty yards of where I’m sleeping. But when we drop a triceratops a reasonable distance away, it’ll bring meat-eaters from horseflies to as big as they come on land.” He waved skyward. “The big ones follow those,” he added, waggling his index finger cryptically without taking the glasses from his eyes.

Adrienne stepped onto the side bulkhead, using the ladder to steady her. She caught the look of bafflement on Cardway’s face as he stared upward. He was uncertain whether Vickers had been pointing or merely gesturing. “What look like little dots up there,” explained the tall woman, “see them? Those’re pterodactyls the size of airplanes—heavier than a man is, at least. They have eyesight to shame a condor, and a ten-ton carcass draws them from a hundred miles. The carnosaurs follow, unless they’re on a fresh kill of their own.” As an afterthought Adrienne said, “That’s how we captured a tyrannosaur alive, you know—followed them to a kill. Just Henry and I.”

“I don’t care what you’ve—” the Secretary began.

“Hush!” snapped Adrienne, her body suddenly rigid. She leaned into her own binoculars as if bracing against their recoil. “Henry,” she said in a tense, quiet voice. “Between us and the others, just ahead. Doesn’t that look like . . . ?”

Vickers looked down to be sure of the bearing, then found the target with his naked eyes. Targets, three of them—he raised and refocused the glasses—sure enough, dryptosaurs or a carnivore damned similar, and the leading one had to be ten yards long.

“Mobile One to Two,” Vickers said urgently into his lapel mike.

“Go ahead,” crackled Warren’s voice from both the unit on Vickers’ shoulder and the console in the cab. The words were slightly out of phase, echoes of themselves.

“We’ve got three carnosaurs between us, just three hundred meters ahead and quartering across our front. See them?” The dryptosaurs’ heads were flexed back on serpentine necks. From the withers rearward, the beasts’ spines were straight and parallel to the ground save for the slight hump over the hip joint. The long bodies flexed from side to side but not vertically as they cut through the brush. The vegetation was sparser here than it was near the camp, but it still should have been more of a hindrance to the beasts’ progress than it seemed to be. The dryptosaurs trotted through the brush like cruisers on a calm sea, only their heads and backs visible to the watching hunters. Their hides were dun, splotched with maroon as dark as dried blood.

“Give me those!” Cardway said.

“Go buy your own binoculars,” Adrienne retorted. “
I
did.”

“Yes, by God,” the radio said. “I’d say we were in a bit of luck, wouldn’t you? Shall we—”

The rest of Warren’s words were lost in the unexpected crash of a rifle. Vickers looked down, open-mouthed. The PR man in the cab had bent over as if clubbed. His hands were covering his ears—too late. Secretary Cardway was still ajar from the recoil of the Mannlicher. He ejected the spent case and raised the weapon for a second shot.

Three-hundred-yard accuracy with an elephant gun was a task beyond most experts; it was assuredly beyond the Secretary of State, shooting off-hand with a weapon he had not sighted in himself. The carnosaurs paused in their lazy striding, cocking their heads back to seek the source of the noise. The gunshot had not panicked them, for it was unique to their experience.

“Hold up!” Vickers said, staring at the Secretary but keying his lapel mike as well. He was too late in both cases. Cardway’s rifle boomed again, and the other half-track lurched toward the dinosaurs in a fresh spray of dust. The three animals jerked their heads forward and leaped with the unanimity of a flock of birds.

“Follow them!” the Secretary was screaming. “We’ll run ’em down!”

The driver let out the clutch without waiting for Vickers’ orders. The guide had to jump down from his perch. Only Adrienne’s hand kept him from smashing painfully into the back bulkhead.