Shadows of Falling Night (46 page)

A quick tap on the tablet had produced more articles about multisided conflicts than she’d wanted to see or had time to read, including the usual massacres, double-dealings, reciprocal ethnic cleansings and convoluted feuds involving Circassians, Abkhazians, Dagestanies, Chechens, Georgians, Armenians, Russians, Turks, and a clutch of other ethno-linguistic groups mostly about the size of a moderate high school district. All with histories of mutual hatred stretching back to mythical times, and all wrapped in absolutely contradictory narratives, with each minute groupescule insisting with fanatical intensity that their version was the capital-T Truth. Most of the differences between them looked invisible or deeply trivial to an outsider, though you’d be well-advised not to say so.

Stalin had come from near here, and apparently the only time the locals weren’t bashing and knifing each other was when they all cringed together under the knout of some mad-dog tyrant and his secret police.

“That was clever,” Adrian said grudgingly, looking at the wreck of the ship. “But then, Harvey always was. There are no cargo facilities here. That puzzled me for a while, I thought this location might be
dyezinformatsiya
.”

“Subtle guy, Harvey,” Eric said.

“Blasting a hole in the side of the ship to get something out is subtle?” Peter asked.

“Yeah, it’s subtle
thinking
,” Eric said admiringly. “Outside the box, and how! Don’t confuse that with subtle
execution
. I’d like the guy, if I weren’t on the other side. Sorta.”

Adrian nodded: “If you just beach your ship and hack a great hole in the side, then it all becomes much simpler. Use the segment of hull as a ramp, then a skid as you drag it up with a truck…”

It was an hour after sunrise, and the weather was about like Pensacola at this time of year—humid and mild, above-freezing chilly at night, in the fifties right now and not likely to go much higher, windbreaker weather. The low coast was intensely green; as they got closer she could see dense pine forest, the mouth of a small river and what looked like a run-down orchard of some sort of fruit tree, small with round-trimmed tops. The undergrowth was waist-high at least, and a few of the trees were dead. There was open ground beyond, glimpsed through the vegetation, and then—

She gripped a stay and shaded her eyes with her right hand against the morning sun. Very far away to the north and northeast were the blue-and-white line of a range of snowcapped mountains, the peaks seeming to float in the sky; they reminded her of the Colorado Rockies, and must be immense to be visible at this distance. The sight was quite lovely, the white of the snow very faintly tinged with pink deepening to red as she watched.

It was all very pretty, and empty, and unutterably discouraging, a feeling like being very tired and having a lump in your stomach at the same time. She’d been hoping that they could catch Harvey at sea; the ocean was very big, but didn’t have many hiding places on the surface. That shore, that
land
, looked very big and very easy to hide in, and they were running out of time.

An image haunted her, of a human shadow cast forever on a concrete wall by the burst of nuclear fire that had vaporized its maker. When she’d seen it in a collection of photographs she’d been mainly interested in the aesthetics, the stark black-and-white formal composition. Now…

“The Caucasus,” Adrian said. A wry twist of the lips: “And the ancient homeland of my species, or close enough.”

“Where next?” Eric said.

“That is also clever. Harvey had a truck waiting here, but we do not because we were following him and didn’t know exactly where he would land. We can track it to the nearest road, and presumably they will be heading for Tbilisi…but walking after them is not really practical.”

“You can’t hex out the direction?”

Adrian nodded at Peter. “You did your work well. No, the bomb is a hole in the world. More than that; it is an
invisible
hole in the world. As is anyone standing within a few feet of it, particularly if they are touching the casing.”

Peter shrugged, smiled and blushed. “Hey, once I sussed out the principle, the applications sort of leapt out. Professor Duquesne did as much of the work as I did, or more.”

“So we need to get ashore, organize transport, and try and catch them before they get to the city,” Eric said.

He was apparently doggedly indifferent to discouragement. So was Cheba, who appeared on deck with the last load of the carefully selected gear and baggage she’d packed.

Okay, they can do it, I can do it. Never say die, until you die.

“Good man,” Adrian said softly, then nodded. “Let us be about it. I am focusing on Harvey himself as much as I can, but I am getting only a vague southeastward heading even when he is away from the device…he shields very well. Or he would have died long ago, fighting powerful adepts. Fortunately we know roughly where he is going.”

“Yeah, I want to get off the beach as fast as we can,” Eric said. “Let’s not be more obvious than we have to be, we’re sort of exposed. What about this ship? Want me to open the scuttling cocks?”

Ellen winced. The
Tulip
was a handsome enough product of human hands and minds that casually destroying it offended something deep in her; also there was an irrational reluctance to casually dispose of something that had served them well, even if it was only an inanimate tool. Also—

“Not much point,” she said. “The masts would be above water even if we did, and the other ship, Harvey’s, is right there and the only way we could get rid of it would be to burn it, which would be
very
conspicuous. And think of the time. I suppose eventually the police or whatever will figure something out, but by then it won’t matter one way or another. This is all going to be resolved in the next couple of days.”

So if there’s a world left by then, we’ll worry about it then.

“Yeah, not worth the trouble,” Eric conceded. “And you’re right, I don’t want to attract attention. The locals might get antsy at a bunch of mysterious armed Americans—”

Cheba gave a small snort, but continued stacking the gear.

“Hey, you wanted that green card bad,
chica
, so get used to it—Americans wandering around. Better to avoid them if we can. This isn’t
Expendables Twelve
.”

“And the people we rented the
Tulip
from can get it back if we just leave it here,” Peter said. “The ownership documents are still there in the cabin.”

Cheba grinned without looking up from her work. “Yes. Of
course
the officials and police here will send a boat worth lots and lots of money back to some foreigners…how do these what, Georgians, feel about Turks,
jefe
?”

“They hate them,” Adrian said succinctly. “Not as much as Armenians do, that would be impossible, but fairly emphatically.”

“Yes, back to some foreigners they hate if they find it with nobody
on board, with no permission, and they would
never
just throw the papers into the water. Those people we got it from knew they would never see it again, that is why the
jefe
paid so much.”

Peter winced. “You’re such a cynic, Cheba.”

“What is this place you lived in once where people act like that? I would like to live there too, except that there is no such place,” she replied.

Eric chuckled. “Translated: what planet do you come from, professor, and how many moons does it have? So, boss, we bug out right now?”

Adrian nodded as he stood with his hands in the pockets of his light waxed-cotton jacket, staring at something none of the rest of them could see. His children crouched at his feet, watching him with their heads cocked on their sides and identical frowns on their faces.
They
looked as if they were trying to follow something interesting but more complex than they could really grasp.

The
Tulip
’s equipment included a big yellow plastic cylinder that held an inflatable boat, and the rest of them unlashed it and pushed it over the side, anchoring it with a line secured to a ringbolt. Lettering on its side specified the contents.

“Woof,” Ellen said, dusting her hands. “That’s heavy!”

“Needs to be,” Eric said. “I recognize the type, it’s pretty much a CRRC. You want to do the honors?”

He handed her a line hooked to a little lever arrangement on the casing. She gave it a firm yank, and the ends blew off the tube and a seam along the top cracked open, all with hissing
brack
sounds, like an aerosol can in a fire. The boat within unfolded like a flower in stop-motion photographs, and in a few seconds it was a black rectangle about twelve feet long by six wide, bluntly pointed at one end. Peter went down the rope ladder and balanced expertly.

Eric looked slightly surprised, but handed down the outboard motor with the shrouded propeller as the other man reached up.

“Whitewater rafting,” Peter said by way of explanation, as he secured it to a plate at the stern. “The SEALs use these things; you ever try out for that?”

“
Mierda
! Do I
look
completely loco? You have to love to suffer and have a suicide complex to even apply for the teams.” A snort. “Actually I did apply, but I met my own personal IED before I could try for the qualifying course.”

Cheba and Ellen looked at each other and shrugged; the Mexican girl tapped a finger on her temple and wiggled the others. They formed a chain and handed the gear down into the boat; it didn’t take long, since they were carrying only essentials, mostly in knapsacks. Hopefully they could pass for backpacking tourists.

“Okay, ladies…hey, boss!” Eric called. “Ready to go?”

Adrian shook his head, a little as if he were emerging from deep water. “Very tangled…” he sighed. “There are too many powerful adepts gathering, too many already near. They…step on each other’s Sight, confuse the inner eye.”

He handed down the children, and Eric started the motor as he slipped easily into the boat. The engine burbled, and water foamed up behind the stern; spray came over the bows, cold in Ellen’s face. She put a hand on the cooler full of bagged blood that was her special responsibility; in its way it was as much ammunition as the half-moon clips of silver bullets in her pockets.

It’s odd,
she thought.
This is dangerous and uncomfortable, but there’s something comfortable
about
it…well, Adrian’s here, but…you know, I’m with all my best friends. Well, not exactly all my friends, there’s Giselle back in Santa Fe, but we’re all close somehow. It’s…not comfortable, it’s comforting.

Peter killed the throttle some distance from the land; the boat slid onto the shore with a
shrrrussh
sound as the fabric rasped over the gravel of the beach. Ellen braced herself against the forward surge. Eric hopped out and grabbed one of the loops at the bow, bracing himself against the greasy sideways motion of the flat bottom on the muddy gravel. Everyone else followed, and the adults all grabbed on and pulled the craft forward beyond the wet dirt. Then the backpacks and duffels were handed out and distributed. Eric and Adrian bent to examine the drag marks near Harvey’s beached ship.

“Yeah, you were right, they had some sort of rig with a winch,” Eric said. “See, that’s a spade jack’s mark where they planted it to brace the vehicle. Looks like they used a chain saw to crack the structural members from the inside, cut through on the top and most of the way on the bottom, then put a loop of the cable around one of the strakes and pulled. Then they switched the cable to drag the load out of the hold onto the section of hull, refastened it to that timber there and dragged the whole thing up like a sled, then switched the cable onto the container again and pulled it up onto the bed of the truck up a standard double ramp. Looks like a two-axle job to me, military from the treads, but not ours. Big but not huge, six-tonner maybe.”

“Agreed,” Adrian said. “They probably…yes, several local helpers. They would be hired, no knowledge of what the cargo is.”

He knelt by the track and extended a hand, closing his eyes and touching the ground lightly.

“You are right…I can See the truck before they loaded it…a GAZ model. Old, battered, the engine is knocking.”

“Yeah, not much doubt about that around here.”

“And a local…his interior dialogue is in Georgian…nervous,
afraid…he sees Harvey laughing…then the shield generator comes too close.”

“We can follow the tracks with the Eyeball Mark One,” Eric said. “That’ll get us to a road, at least.”

They trudged on up towards a narrow, overgrown lane with puddles standing in the ruts of the truck that had born the bomb. Leila took her hand and swung it as they walked. That led through the orchard, which turned out to be an orange grove, which from the look of it hadn’t been tended or harvested in a while, and the ground was dotted with the rotted remains of fruit, filling the air with an over-sweet scent. The field beyond was equally scruffy, though comely enough in a disheveled way, looking like neglected pasture; it was bordered and dotted with trees, and her art-student eyes identified oak, ash and hornbeam. There were a lot of birds, including a flock of a big finch with spectacular rose-red plumage and a group of pheasants that burst out of some bushes as they passed, skimming off across the landscape in a thrumming clatter of wings.

The overgrown lane from the water fed into a slightly less overgrown dirt road bordered by big plane trees. Adrian took a stance and murmured, the whining, grating syllables of Mhabrogast.

“There will be cars down this road, the first in about twenty minutes,” he said. “Even on local roads we could be in Tbilisi in a few hours. If we are not on the right side of the border, that could make for complications.”

“Can we get them to stop? They might not want to pick up so many hitchhikers,” Peter asked, then held up a hand. “Okay, okay, don’t laugh at me!”

None of the others did, though there was amusement in Eric’s voice as he said: “One way or another we will, professor.”

“Wait,” Adrian said. “There is something else…a Wreaking, it’s familiar but I can’t quite place…”