The Zenith Angle - Bruce Sterling [63]
Tony shrugged. “Well, everybody really needed the money.”
“Then the sickness came to America. Not in England’s cattle. In America’s wild animals. ‘Elk wasting,’ it gets a new name here.”
“Well, yes, I guess that’s all true, more or less.”
“And then that Western sickness struck down Tom DeFanti himself! Because the owner of this land fed his animals that evil poison. Then he ate their flesh! Now the madness is inside his own body! The world’s great master of high-tech media is a sad, mad beast!”
“Don’t talk that way about him.” Tony tightened his grip on his rifle. “He was my guru.”
“Sorry, bhaiyya.” Sanjay seemed touched. “Really sorry. It’s just . . . that is such a wonderful script for a horror movie. Very modern. Very Ramgopal Varma.”
Tony gritted his teeth. “I never told you that story, Sanjay. You never heard that story from me. Nobody ever talks about Tom that way. Nobody asks or tells.”
Sanjay shrugged, and fixed Tony with his brown, lambent gaze. “The man is my host! Why would I talk against him? I ate his salt—although, thank God, I never ate his meat.”
“Right.”
“I’ve been around the world many times. I’ve seen stranger things than the fate of your guru. The world is strange, these days.”
“Tom’s life was always strange.” After a moment, Tony decisively jacked a round into the chamber. “Sanjay, all these elk must be destroyed.”
“What, all of them? Now? Today?”
“Yes. Because elk wasting is a contagious disease. It’s an unclean herd. The Colorado tourist trade doesn’t talk about it much, but for obvious reasons, they’re at war with this.”
Sanjay considered this for a long moment. Slushy snow fell from the height of a tree. “What a beautiful hunting trip you have offered me here in America,” he said at last. “Look at the huge head on your fine beast here. What’s that word?”
“Antlers.”
“Antlers, yes. Fantastic antlers. Another fine trophy for my hunting club in Ootacamund.”
“Let the head be, Sanjay. You don’t want a taxidermist touching that brain matter.”
Six more elk, stumbling together in a clump, entered the clearing. The elk had their muzzles down, as if sniffing along. They were thudding into each other’s flanks as if they found comfort in it. They were graceless and dirty. Some were drooling.
Tony snapped off a shot. It was hard to miss at this range. A cow went down and lay in the grass, thrashing. The herd panicked at the sound of the shot, but they could not see to flee. They just stumbled, crashing and ripping their hides against the underbrush.
Sanjay deftly shouldered the heavy Winchester. The rifle boomed again and again and more elk buckled, jerked backward, and collapsed. When the heavy-grain bullets took them at the base of the neck, the elk went down as if guillotined. Sanjay was an excellent shot.
One surviving elk thrashed into the undergrowth. It wouldn’t be hard to track. Sanjay put a final shot into a crippled cow.
He gave Tony a brotherly pat on the shoulder. “You don’t worry about this, Tony. Because yes, I understand. I can help you with problems like this.”
“Just as long as it’s quick, Sanjay. And kept quiet.”
Sanjay swung his chiseled chin in a nod. “We’ll get my very best boys! And your very best guns.”
CHAPTER
EIGHT
WASHINGTON–COLORADO, FEBRUARY 2002
The CCIAB had a difficult relationship with America’s spy satellites. Spy satellites were critical infrastructure of intense and lasting importance to national security. Since the satellite programs also had a huge black budget, everybody naturally wanted in.
The little CCIAB was in no political position to make any bold grab for these crown jewels of orbiting spookdom. As Tony Carew had cynically pointed out, the likeliest role for the CCIAB here would be “fall guy.”
And yet, on a stark, technical level, the KH-13 satellite was badly broken. Obviously, some really gifted technician ought to fix the thing. Nobody seemed to be getting anywhere with it. If the KH-13 failed, that would be a massive disaster. An economic, industrial, technical, and military mess. Van felt that preventing a massive disaster