Rude Astronauts (30 page)

“Uh-huh,” Shaw said. “But we’re still in trouble. If Weyler gets to the summit and doesn’t find his contact, he’ll dead-drop the Oz Chip. Find a tree knoll or a rock to stash it under, then find another way out. Someone else will come back and retrieve the chip later.” He shook his head. “There’s no two ways around it. We’re going to have to get Weyler on the mountain.”

Brim glanced up at the mountainside. “Great. How the hell are we going to do that?”

Shaw shrugged. “Only one way, bub.”

“We weren’t aware that you knew how to ski cross-country, Mr. Shaw.”

“I picked it up when I worked for the Denver field office, my first job for the Bureau. It’s a hobby. I never thought I would have to use it for an assignment.”

“Had you ever skied Wachusett Mountain before?”

“No. This was the first time for me.”

“That’s funny. How could you have known that there was a cross-country trail there, if that was the case? Wachusett is mainly known for its downhill runs.”

“Well … um, I had always meant to try out Wachusett. I just never got the chance, until this instance. Not that it really mattered, though. When I bought my gear in the ski shop, I got a good map of the mountain. That’s when I saw that one could reach the cross-country trails from the summit. That was a break, since otherwise I would have been trying to catch up with Weyler from the bottom of the mountain. Since he had a long head start, that would have been almost impossible. This way, all I had to do was head down the mountain and intercept him on his way up.”

“I see. Of course, you were able to equip yourself for the mission from your car trunk.”

“Uh-huh. Headset radios, the Heckler and Koch … they were in the trunk. All I had to get were the skis and the warm clothing. I had to buy that, since they didn’t have telemark cross-country skis in the rental shop. Um … I put it on my Treasury card, but if the Bureau wants me to reimburse it for the expense …”

“Don’t worry about it now. I’m curious about your radio trouble, though. Tango Station lost contact with you at one point. Why did that happen?”

“I dunno. I think I went out of range or something.”

When he had reached the intersection of the Summit Loop and the Administration Road trail, in the densest part of the forest about one-third of the way down the mountain, he stopped, impaled his poles in a drift and unlatched his heels from the skis. It was a relatively level slope from here on; now he needed to use Nordic techniques, rather than alpine.

The wind was broken by the trees, but he could still hear it whining through the snow-fleeced timber, softly creaking against the branches, sending heavy falls of snow plummeting to the ground from on high. Somewhere not far away in the forest something splintered and crashed. The woods were silent, if only for a moment, until the wind picked up again and the trees recommenced their death-rattle protests.

Shaw unzipped his parka, took off his right-hand glove and reached into the warm cavity next to his stomach. He found the tiny radio unit strapped near his waist. He raised his left hand and put it on the headset mike, and gently rubbed his forefinger against the padded mike pickup. “Tango, this is Frosty, do you copy?” he murmured, caressing the mike with his finger.

“Frosty … Skkhh … Tango, we … shhkk … please give your …” he heard through the headphones.

“Tango, this is Frosty, do you copy?” Shaw repeated. He listened to a few more garbled words, then he calmly switched off the radio, pulled the headset out from under his cap and laid it around the base of his neck. He pulled his poles out of the snow, pushed his right foot ahead, planted his right pole next to it, pulled forward as he pushed off with his left foot and pole, and continued his journey down the trail.

Shaw skied around a shallow curve in the snowed-over roadway and found himself at the top of a sharp rise. Far below was the top of a scenic overlook. Just beyond that, to the left, was the intersection of the North Road cut-off trail, leading to Balance Rock Road. He stopped here and scanned both sides of the trail before finding what he was looking for: a large boulder just off the right side of the trail, a perfect natural blind. He skied off the path to the boulder and checked its position. Perfect. He could see straight down the rise, but was himself concealed by the boulder.

He unlocked the toes of his skis, pulled his boots loose from the bindings, and carefully laid the skis and the poles against the side of the boulder. Then, kneeling behind the huge granite rock, he unshouldered the Heckler and Koch and assumed a sniper’s crouch, resting his right elbow on his knee, his right hand supporting the rifle’s plastic stock.

He switched on the built-in Starlight scope and peered through the eyepiece. An early twilight was falling on the mountainside, but the scope magnified the available sunlight filtering through the storm clouds, rendering the trail as clear as if it were noontime on an uncloudy day. Shaw spent a few minutes fine-tuning the sight, aligning the electronic crosshairs on a distant tree stump, then he switched the fire-control lever to single-shot and settled down to wait. The snow hissed around him. Except for the moaning wind, the silence was almost complete.

His timing had been good; he did not have to wait longer than fifteen minutes before Weyler made his appearance. It had taken him about this long to make his way uphill, from the first cut-offs on the lower trails at the base of the mountain to Balance Rock Road, then up the snow-packed roadway to the more difficult grade of the North Road trail. As Shaw watched, a lone skier emerged from the forest.

Charlie Weyler paused at the overlook, perhaps to catch his breath, then began to struggle up the sharp rise. Leaning forward, laboriously planting his poles in front of him as he herringboned his skis one step at a time, he forced his way up the trail. The wind rippled the loose red fabric of his ski parka and tossed the absurd orange pommel on the top of his cap. There was something dangling on a strap under his right armpit. Shaw could not clearly see what it was, but he had little trouble making a good guess.

Shaw waited until Weyler was about fifty yards from his position, studying him through the cross-hairs of his scope, before he decided that it was time.

“Weyler!” he shouted.

Weyler’s response was automatic. He dropped his poles, simultaneously kicked his racing boots out of his bindings, and hurled himself to the right, heading for the trees. Right move, maybe, but definitely in the wrong direction. Shaw let Weyler get a few feet, then he carefully swung his rifle to the right and squeezed the trigger twice. There was barely any recoil, little more noise than two loud grunts, but two caseless Dynamit Nobel rounds slammed into the trunk of a birch about three feet from Weyler.

Weyler stopped and whirled around, swinging up the Ingram MAC-10 submachine gun Shaw had figured he would be packing. Crouching low, Weyler swung the Ingram in an arch from left to right. The compact gun snarled and .45 calibre bullets chopped through the trees. A couple of shells ricocheted off the boulder in front of Shaw, but the FBI agent only ducked back a little. Weyler was firing blind.

“Are you through yet, Charlie?” Shaw shouted.

Weyler held his crouch, defensively moving his gun back and forth, but not firing. “Is that you, Shaw?” he shouted back.

“I want the chip and the disk, Charlie,” Shaw called back. “Drop ’em on the path and you get to live.”

Weyler was nervously glancing in Shaw’s general direction. “That was you in the garage, wasn’t it?” he said loudly. “What’s the matter, don’t you guys trust me?”

“You sold out to the Chinese, pal,” Shaw answered. “That was really stupid. I’m making sure you keep your first deal. Dump the chip and the disc in front of you, then you can take the trail down the other side to Harrington Farm. Your other car’s still down there, I checked for you this morning.”

Weyler was still hesitating, but now he was looking straight at Shaw’s boulder. He had focused in on the sound of Shaw’s voice. “Don’t be a jerk, Charlie,” Shaw said. “Do it now or you’re screwed.”

Shaw carefully flipped the fire-control lever over to full-auto. He watched through his scope as Weyler, keeping his right hand on his gun, carefully reached his left hand around to his right pocket. Ripping open the Velcro flap, he reached inside and first pulled out a small grey capsule. He slowly pulled it out and stuck one end into the snow, then he withdrew a 3.5-inch plastic computer diskette and dropped it on the ground next to the capsule containing the Oz Chip prototype.

“As I understand, we have yet to locate the Oz Chip or the diskette.”

“That’s correct. My guess is that Weyler managed to conceal them somewhere on the mountain before I found him.”

“Hmmm. Why do you think he did that?”

“Well, he probably figured that, with the nor’easter coming in, his handler wouldn’t be able to make it to the summit. So he must have dead-dropped them somewhere on Wachusett for another agent to retrieve later. Like I said, in a tree knoll or under a rock … God knows where they are now. They weren’t found on his body.”

Then, as Shaw anticipated, Weyler suddenly lunged to his left, bringing up his Ingram to fire in the direction of Shaw’s voice.

Shaw never gave him the chance to shoot. Keeping the cross-hairs centered on Weyler as he moved, Shaw squeezed the trigger of his rifle. The Heckler and Koch growled and ten rounds slammed into Charlie Weyler’s chest. Blood sprayed, and Charles A. Weyler, former director of marketing for Biocybe Resources and double-agent for the People’s Republic of China, was hurled backwards. His dead body hit the trail and rolled downhill several feet, leaving a bloody streak along the virgin snow. The echo of the gunfire was lost in the woodland before his corpse came to rest.

“He fired first?”

“That’s correct, yes.”

“How did it happen?”

“I warned him to stop, but he was armed with an Ingram MAC-10 and he immediately commenced to fire. I managed to reach a boulder off the trail, and I fired back once I was able to get a clear shot. I’m sorry, but I was not able to take him alive.”

“I see. You then searched his body and were not able to find the stolen items?”

“Yeah, that’s right. I then followed his path down the mountain, trying to find where he might have hidden them, but by this time it was getting dark and the snow had buried his tracks. In fact, I consider myself lucky that I managed to get down to the lodge without getting lost up there.”

“Yeah, that is lucky.”

“Has anyone found the Oz Chip yet?”

“No. We still have a team searching the mountain, but like you said, it could be anywhere. Four feet of snow buried everything.”

“Uh-huh. That’s unfortunate. But since he’s dead, the opposition can’t find it either.”

“That’s the upshot, isn’t it? Nobody gets the thing.”

“That’s right.”

Shaw slung the rifle back over his shoulder, picked up his skis and poles, and tramped out of the woods to the trail. He stopped next to where Weyler had been shot, knelt and picked up the Oz Chip and the computer diskette. He opened his parka and slid them both into an inside pocket where they were well-hidden by the jacket’s thick padding, then closed his parka and bent to put on his skis. It would take him only about an hour to return to the base of the mountain. By then it would be completely dark, and the snow was still coming down. His alibi would be perfect.

He latched down his heels, carefully stood and picked up his poles, then pushed off, gliding down the hill past Weyler’s body. He barely glanced at the other GRU sleeper as he passed, but favored him with a final piece of advice.

“Don’t mess around with Moscow, pal,” he murmured.

“I think that’s all for my questions, Mr. Shaw. Thanks for your cooperation.”

“My pleasure. I hope it’s been helpful.”

“It has been. Oh, and by the way, congratulations on your commendation. I understand you’re flying to Washington tomorrow to receive it from the Director.”

“Thanks. Yeah, it’s quite an honor.”

“Is there anything that goes along with it?”

“No pay raise, if that’s what you’re asking, but I am going to take a little vacation once I get through in DC I need to take a break.”

“I’m sure you deserve it. Any place special?”

“Italy. I’ve always wanted to see Venice.”

O
CCASIONALLY, ONE STUMBLES ACROSS
some fact about the natural world that boggles the mind, a fact which is not at all obscure, but still more overwhelmingly impressive than any manmade construct on the face of the earth. Suddenly, our own existence—which at times seems to fill the entire universe, distorting Galilean physics so that Sun, planets and stars revolve around the great Me—is put in its proper perspective.

An example of this is the distance between our planet and the nearest star besides the Sun, Alpha Centauri. The distance is 4.3 light-years, an easily graspable sum … until one realizes that this translates to approximately 25,800,000,000,000 miles. It means that even if a starship could travel at the speed of light (an impossibility according to the theory of relativity), it would take that ship more than four years to get to our solar system’s neighbor. When one further finds that the Milky Way galaxy, which we inhabit in a remote region of one spiral arm, is 100,000 light-years in diameter, and that this translates to approximately 600,000,000,000,000,000 miles … well, the ten trips that men have taken to the Moon, which is only about 240,000 miles away, no longer seem quite so impressive.

On the opposite end of the scale, there is the microscopic universe.

In the basement of one of the ten laboratory buildings at the Worcester Foundation for Experimental Biology is a means of seeing into the micro-universe, just as radio telescopes allow us to peer at the galaxy. This is a transmission electron microscope; it is used by the research scientists at the foundation to study a variety of organisms which exist on a range of size below that which normal optical microscopes can detect.

The electron microscope looks, and works, nothing like a normal microscope. It is a large cylinder, about a foot in diameter and about six feet in height, which is mounted above a wraparound console where the operator sits. Unlike an optical microscope, which focuses light onto a specimen, in an electron microscope a stream of electrons is shot from the top of the cylinder down through the specimen to be studied, which is mounted on a slide inserted in the middle of the scope. An image of the specimen is thus transmitted to a screen at the base of the microscope and can be studied through a magnifying eyepiece mounted in front of the screen. There is also a camera attached to the microscope so that photos may be taken of the specimen.