Cold War - Jerome Preisler [7]
Scarborough might have agreed that was the logical conclusion. Except the probe wasn’t there. And though a slew of possibilities had occurred to him, none convincingly accounted for its MIA status.
“We’ll keep going. See what’s what,” he said. “I wish I had a better plan.”
Payton thrust a hand at him, palm up. “Pass me the binoculars,” he said with derision. “I want to take a look. With my own eyes.”
Scarborough was tempted to suggest that Payton might also want to use his own field glasses, which were hanging in their case over the front of his parka. Instead he handed them to him.
“No problem,” Scarborough said. “Give ’em back to Shevaun when you’re done.”
Bradley nodded to Scarborough in a way he interpreted as sympathetic. It made him feel appreciated. And glad he’d curbed his irritation.
They waited as Payton studied the trail. A minute or two later he let the glasses sink to his chest.
“This isn’t possible, it—” He suddenly interrupted himself. “Wait. Do either of you hear that noise?”
Scarborough did. It was a kind of high metallic buzz that seemed to drill through the blanketing rush of the wind from an unresolved distance. He glanced at Bradley. The inquisitive tilt of her head revealed she was listening carefully to the sound, trying to pinpoint its source. While the reverberant acoustics of their surroundings made that hard, Scarborough thought it was issuing from the direction of the notch.
Payton evidently thought the same. He brought the glasses back up, aimed them at the yawning, jagged scar in the wall of the pass.
“What the hell is this?” he said. His voice was shaky. An instant later, his hands were too. “Scarborough, do your job. Will you do your goddamned job and answer me?”
Scarborough stared at the notch. At first nothing caught his attention. Then an object darted out onto the sand. From a distance it seemed a mere speck. But it was coming on at an incredible speed, growing larger in his vision with a quickness that matched.
Payton continued to stand beside him with his gloved hands trembling around the binoculars. Scarborough did not want to lose a beat getting his own set of glasses out of their case. The buzzing had grown louder and louder, filling his ears as it surged between the stone walls on either side of him. To his unaided eyes, the thing from inside the notch appeared to be a dark cloud of ground smoke churning around a solid and even darker core. At its present rate of acceleration it would be upon them in less than a minute. And he didn’t have a clue what it might be.
“I need the glasses,” he told Payton. “Hurry.”
The techie didn’t answer. He seemed oblivious to Scarborough, paralyzed with shock.
Scarborough reached out to take the binocs, but Payton’s grasp was unyielding. He pulled harder, snatched them from Payton’s petrified fingers, wiped the frost off them.
A glance through the eyepieces immediately told him what had induced Payton’s mental disconnect.
The cloud was not smoke but a storm of powdery reddish-brown sand. And the object kicking it up as it raced ever closer was something that should not have been in the pass, the valleys, nor anywhere on the continent. Not for any conceivable reason.
A storm, that’s it. Scarborough’s thought burst through the door of his memory with haunting irony. The fear arrived an instant later. A desert storm.
“Alan, talk to me.” Bradley had inched close, her arm brushing against him. “Tell me what you see out there.”
Scarborough held up a hand.
“Wait,” he said. “I need to be positive.”
But that was a lie. Scarborough knew what he saw in spite of his initial disbelief. What he really needed was to pull himself together.
When he’d served with the Corps in the Persian Gulf War, special forces units had used tricked-out dune buggies called Fast Attack Vehicles in advance recon and hit-and-run combat missions. Stripped down to their welded tubular frames and roll bars, their low-slung carriages left virtually no discernible signature for enemies to sniff and chase, which led to their reputation as the earthbound equivalents