Dreamcatcher(69)

Yet somehow Perlmutter held Kurtz's gaze. Looked into the absence. He was not off to a good start here. It was important  -  it was imperative  -  that the slide be stopped before it could become an avalanche.

'All right, good. Better, anyway.' Kurtz's voice was low but Perlmutter had no problem hearing him despite the overlapping chunter of the helicopters. 'I'm going to say this to you Just once, and only because you're new to my service and you clearly don't know your ass**le from your piehole. I have been asked to run a phooka operation here. Do you know what a phooka is.

'No,' Perlmutter said. It caused him almost physical pain not to be able to say No sir.

'According to the Irish, who as a race have never entirely crawled from the bath of superstition in which their mothers gat them, a phooka is a phantom horse that kidnaps travelers and carries them away on its back. I use it to mean an operation which is both covert and wide open. A paradox, Perlmutter! The good news is that we've been developing contingency plans for just this sort of clusterf*ck since 1947, when the Air Force first recovered the sort of extraterrestrial artifact now known as a flashlight. The bad news is that the future is now and I have to face it with guys like you in support. Do you understand me, buck?'

'Yes, s . . . yes.'

'I hope so. What we've got to do here, Perlmutter, is go in fast and hard and utterly phooka. We're going to do as much dirtywork as we have to and come out as clean as we can clean yes, Lord, and smilin . . .'

Kurtz bared his teeth in a brief smile of such brutally satiric intensity that Perlmutter felt a little like screaming. Tall and stoop?-shouldered, Kurtz had the build of a bureaucrat. Yet something about him was terrible. You saw some of it in his eyes, sensed some of it in the still, prim way he held his hands in front of him . . . but those weren't the things that made him scary, that made the men call him Old Creepy Kurtz. Perlmutter didn't know exactly what the really scary thing was, and didn't want to know. What he wanted right now  -  the only thing he wanted  -  was to get out of this conversation with his ass on straight. Who needed to go twenty or thirty miles west to make contact with an alien species? Perlmutter had one standing right here in front of him.

Kurtz's lips snapped shut over his teeth. 'On the same page, are we?'

'Yes.'

'Saluting the same flag? Pissing in the same latrine?'

'Yes.'

'How are we going to come out of this, Pearly?'

'Clean?'

'Boffo! And how else?'

For one horrible second he didn't know. Then it came to him. 'Smiling, sir.'

'Call me sir again and I'll knock you down.'

'I'm sorry,' Perlmutter whispered. He was, too.

Here came a school bus rolling slowly up the road with its offside wheels in the ditch and canted almost to the tipover point so it could get past the helicopters. MILLINOCKET SCHOOL DEPT was written up the side, big black letters against a yellow background. Commandeered bus. Owen Underhill and his men inside. The A-team. Perlmutter saw it and felt better. At different times both men had worked with Underhill.

'You'll have doctors by nightfall,' Kurtz said. 'All the doctors you need. Check?'

'Check.'

As he walked toward the bus, which stopped in front of Gosselin's single gasoline pump, Kurtz looked at his pocket-watch. Almost eleven. Gosh, how the time flew when you were having fun. Perlmutter walked with him, but all the cocker spaniel spring had gone out of Perlmutter's step.

'For now, Archie, eyeball em, smell em, listen to their tall tales, and document any Ripley you see. You know about the Ripley, I assume?'

'Yes.'

'Good. Don't touch it.'

'God, no!' Perlmutter exclaimed, then flushed.

Kurtz smiled thinly. This one was no more real than his shark's grin. 'Excellent idea, Perlmutter! You have breathing masks?'

'They just arrived. Twelve cartons of them, and more on the w - '

'Good. We want Polarolds of the Ripley. We need mucho documentation. Exhibit A, Exhibit B, so on and so forth. Got it?'

'Yes.'

'And none of our . . . our guests get away, right?'

'Absolutely not.' Perlmutter was shocked by the idea, and looked it.

Kurtz's lips stretched. The thin smile grew and once more became the shark's grin. Those empty eyes looked through Perlmutter  -  looked all the way to the center of the earth, for all Perlmutter knew. He found himself wondering if anyone would leave Blue Base when this was over. Except Kurtz, that was.

'Carry on, Citizen Perlmutter. In the name of the government, I order you to carry on.'

Archie Perlmutter watched Kurtz continue on toward the bus, where Underhill  -  a squat jug of a man  -  was climbing off. Never in his life had he been so utterly delighted to see a man's back.

2

'Hello, boss,' Underhill said. Like the rest, he wore a plain green coverall, but like Kurtz, he also wore a sidearm. Sitting in the bus were roughly two dozen men, most of them just finishing an early lunch.

'What have they got there, buck?' Kurtz asked. At six-foot-six he towered above Underhill, but Underhill probably outweighed him by seventy pounds.

'Burger King. We drove through. I didn't think the bus would fit, but Yoder said it would, and he was right. Want a Whopper? They're probably a little on the cold side by now, but there must be a microwave in there someplace.' Underhill nodded toward the store.