Monster Nation(93)

Clark breathed out a long sigh of dissatisfaction. To get so close' 'I take it there's no sign of any females. That's not a question that needs an answer.' The girl had literally been right there, right there no more than an hour prior, probably even less. Clark was almost ready to stage his offensive on the mountain location, the Epicenter. He had the troops, he had the supplies. Until he understood the girl's place in the Epidemic, until he knew what she meant, he would never be psychologically ready, though. You didn't go to war without all the facts. The girl was one last question and he needed an answer. 'You don't have any good new for me, do you? She didn't leave anything behind that might help us find her?'

'No, sir,' the soldier responded. No one had expected there would be. 'Except' permission to add something, sir.'

'Granted, of course.'

The Guardsman bit his lower lip. 'There's no vehicles here, sir. I don't know how these two bodies could have got here without a vehicle. Maybe somebody dropped them off, but I wouldn't want to be stuck out here so far from town without a way out. Not with dead people wandering around loose out here, and all. Sir.'

Clark actually smiled at the young man. Not very professional but he couldn't help it. He jumped down from the helicopter body, slapping the Guardsman on the shoulder, and jogged into the AO. Soldiers were busy sealing up the bodies in type II human remains pouches and sifting through the sand looking for forensic evidence. This had been a standard mopping-up exercise following a failed rendezvous. It was about to turn into something quite different.

He came up on a group of soldiers near the cave mouth and asked if any of them were hunters. One of them was, an eighteen-year-old female from Littleton who used to go hunting with her grandfather. 'Do you see any tracks around here, the kind a vehicle might make?' he demanded. It wasn't necessarily the kind of thing a deer hunter would know how to look for but he needed data right away.

'Maybe, something, I guess' there are some tire tracks, they're pretty vague, right through here, sir,' she said, and waved back and forth with her hands. Indicating a path between the cave and the highway. At his nod she trotted downfield and then came right back, slightly out of breath. 'It looks like somebody peeled out. There's rubber on the road, headed east.'

'Sergeant Horrocks,' Clark shouted, and the Platoon Sergeant lifted his shaggy white head to look. 'Get these soldiers ready to move out'we have a target to chase.' He didn't stick around to observe as his staffer made order out of chaos. He needed to be back in the helicopter'back where he could be on top of things.

A car or a van or a truck'a ground vehicle. It would stick to the roads and there was only one road nearby of any consequence: the highway. The bodies they found in the cave had still been warm, even on a cold night.

They still had a chance.

Ten minutes later and a hundred feet up in the air The Civilian upended a tiny silver flask into his mouth and peered out through the helicopter's windows at the darkness below. 'I can't see ass,' he said, irritably.

The copilot leaned back to face the two of them. 'Sirs, we had visual confirmation of the target vehicle on the highway but it's gone now. It must have gone off-road, sirs.'

'Get the ground teams in place. Sweep this area with infra-red and image enhancement.' It wouldn't find her, of course. She was dead and wasn't generating any body heat, so IR imaging would be useless. As for night vision goggles, well, they helped you see things in the dark but not things that could make themselves invisible.

Thank God he had an ace up his sleeve. This was going to be next to impossible as it was.

Adrenaline shot through the muscles of his back, making them ache a little. He hadn't been this excited since the fall of Denver.

'So what exactly is she going to do for you once you find her?' the Civilian asked.

'I'm hoping she can tell me.' An imaging window opened on Clark's laptop, piped through from the infra-red cameras. 'Put us down at this location, specialist,' Clark said, pushing forward between the crew seats of the pilot and copilot. 'It looks like the target vehicle has come to a complete stop.' The van lay on its side, dressed up in false colors where it was warm and cold. It looked wrong, broken.

When the helicopter's passenger door slid open the cold night air of the Utah desert bit at Clark's face and hands. He ignored it and stepped out into the darkness. He threw a hand signal at the pilot and listened to a flare being shot from a vehicle maybe half a kilometer away. One of his Hum-Vee's. A few seconds later the desert lit up with sizzling white light that reflected dazzlingly from the abandoned van's crumpled roof.