Cold War - Jerome Preisler [89]
Granger turned to the man beside them in the little dorm and shook his hand. In fact, he wouldn’t feel remotely okay sleeping in that bed. Knowing what happened to the rover’s S&R team, the idea of it gave him the horrors.
“This must be a tough spell for you,” he said to Cruz. “Hope I’m not being too much of an imposition.”
“No, no, please,” Cruz replied. He was dark-complected, wavy-haired, with a strong grip. “It’ll be good for me to have some company.”
Granger had noticed the humorous marker-inked rendering on the closet door across the room. He glanced at the words above it.
“Prisoners of Fashion,” he read aloud.
“Blame me for that one,” Cruz said. “Megan lets us juvies amuse ourselves by making a mess of our quarters. It’s sort of an in-joke I’ll explain to you later.”
Granger manufactured another smile and plucked at his synthetic thermal vest.
“Think I already get it,” he said.
A half hour after stalking out of Megan’s office, Nimec beckoned the manager of base security over to the same paneled workstation he’d seized for his ultimately wasted planning session with Granger.
“I want to conduct a site security check while there’s an opportunity,” he told him. “Tour the installation so I can get a close-up sense of things.”
And feel like I’m doing something marginally constructive with my time, he thought but did not say.
The Sword base chief nodded. He was a burly guy named Ron Waylon, with a thick walrus mustache and a head that was shaved smooth except for a gladiatorial nape lock reaching to the middle of his back. The lock of hair was bound with a leather cord down its full length. Some sort of body tattoo peeked above his shirt collar on the right side of his neck. The silver earrings he wore on both sides were shaped like long swords, an interesting but questionably appropriate variation on the organizational badge. Or maybe they were supposed to be daggers and Nimec was reading too much symbolism into them.
Whether or not that was the case, he’d found dress and appearance codes to be pretty damn lacking at Cold Corners. Hadn’t the base chief been clean-cut when he was hired? Or was his recollection about that also off the mark?
“Yes, sir,” Waylon replied now. His road-warrior appearance belied a disarming mild-manneredness. “I’m thinking I should mention CC’s probably different from other locations, where the emphasis would be to harden it against corporate spies, armed intruders . . . human threats to property and employees. Here we try to prepare for emergencies shaping out of natural events. Like, say, the storm that’s headed toward us. If any of our personnel become sick or injured when we’re snowbound, it could be a long spell before relief arrives. So we push real heavy on self-sufficiency, and drill a crisis-and-escalation checklist into everybody’s minds. We try not to ignore perimeter defense. But rescue transport, triage, stopgap equipment repair . . . I guess they’d be stressed over it.”
Nimec nodded, itching to make himself useful.
“Understood,” he said. “How soon can we do this?”
“Be ready in a jiff, sir. We just need to suit up.”
Nimec rose from his chair. He gave the big man an after-you gesture.
“Lead the way and I shall follow,” he said.
Megan Breen stared at her computer screen feeling strangely under assault from the e-mail messages in her queue. Turn on the machine, and there they were demanding attention, zipped through electronic space from scattered points of origin around the world. Amsterdam, Johore, Tokyo, New Delhi, San Jose, Washington, D.C. . . .
There were two, no, three, waiting to be answered from Bob Lang in Washington, D.C.
She sighed. It was stupid, she knew. An armadillo’s reflex to roll up behind its head and tail shields. But when the boss had first