Part 18 (1/2)

”Okay, it rolls over the top of this small town here, Hikurangi, and ends up in Whangarei.”

Crawford joined them, the rotors of the Knighthawk slowly winding down behind them.

Crowe pursed his lips and nodded, then looked up. ”Any luck finding those kids?”

Mandy shook his head. ”No leads as yet. The local guys are currently reviewing the security camera footage from the lab. Going back a couple of weeks. See if the cameras noticed anything suspicious in the days leading up to the...accident.”

”What about the days when the scientists disappeared? What do the cameras show on those days?”

”Nothing. Not a thing. The image is completely fogged for a couple of days. Some kind of jamming equipment perhaps.”

Crowe looked at the high bank of fog a short way up the highway and said nothing.

Manderson straightened up to his full height and stood next to Crowe, facing the mist. He said, ”Something's been worrying me, Stony.”

Crowe said nothing but looked at the big man.

Manderson continued, ”How did those kids get from their submarine onto the island without us noticing?”

”They swam.” Crowe frowned.

Manderson shook his head. ”Crawford was overhead in the helicopter the whole time. He would have seen them on the heat-scope.”

Crawford said, ”I saw nothing until they appeared at the end of the wharf.”

”Underwater!” Crowe realized.

”But they had no air tanks when we picked them up,” Manderson noted.

Crowe said, ”Get some men back to the island. Search around the wharf.”

Evans said suddenly, ”Skipper, the mist!”

Crowe swung around back to the wall of fog in front of them. It was glowing.

”What the h.e.l.l...?” Manderson drawled.

Crowe wasted no time. ”All teams, seal masks and get up here now. Set your fields of fire and kill zones. Be ready for anything.”

Jackboots sounded all around them as the members of Red and Blue Teams fanned out across the road, dropping to one knee or even lying on the roadway, their special-issue XM8 automatic weapons trained on the glowing mist.

The glow slowly split in two and gradually resolved itself into two distinct lights, brightly luminescent in the mist.

”It's a car!” Crawford said.

”No,” Crowe said, ”the lights are too large, too far apart. It's a truck.”

It was crawling toward them. Just rolling slowly forward through the mist. The lights brightened, yard by yard.

The dark bulk of the truck gradually materialized through the ethereal white clouds. It was big, an eighteen-wheeler.

The long snout of the truck now poked its way out of the wall of the edge of the fog. The name SLIPSTREAM WARRIOR SLIPSTREAM WARRIOR was painted in bold lettering across the front of the hood. was painted in bold lettering across the front of the hood.

”Hold your fire,” Crowe called. ”We may have a survivor.”

At a painfully slow crawl, the big truck rolled forward out of the fog, past the WHANGAREI WHANGAREI sign, and gathered momentum down a short slope before a small bridge across a stream. It was no more than fifty or sixty yards in front of them now. sign, and gathered momentum down a short slope before a small bridge across a stream. It was no more than fifty or sixty yards in front of them now.

”They're not in a hurry, are they,” Evans murmured.

”Stay alert,” Crowe ordered.

As it turned out, there was no need. For alertness. The truck failed to take the small bridge on a mild bend in the highway. It never turned. It never tried to turn. It just rolled forward in a dead straight line and hit the railing of the bridge on an angle.

The concrete wall of the bridge disintegrated under the impact of the ma.s.sive truck, and the juggernaut toppled slowly off the side of the bridge and crashed down, nose-first, into the small stream below.

The back wheels of the cab and the large trailer remained on the highway. The wheels of the truck continued to grind for a few seconds; then it stalled with a huge shudder that ran through the body of the truck like that of a dying animal and was still.

”Crawford, Manderson,” Crowe said tersely, ”check it out.”

The two men ran in a crouch over to the dead body of the beast, sliding down the embankment beside the bridge and peering in through the shattered winds.h.i.+eld of the truck.

”It's empty.” Crawford's voice sounded in his earpiece. ”No driver.”

”Stranger and stranger,” Crowe said.

”Around here, if you ask me, 'strange' is pretty normal,” Manderson said.

Crawford spoke again, his voice suddenly low and serious. ”Crowe, you'd better come and look at this.”

”Evans, don't take your eyes off that fog,” Crowe said, running across to the edge of the broken bridge. Crawford and Manderson were crouched over something on the bank of the stream. Crawford turned and looked up at him, and then he could see past the man, to the object they were crouching over. It was a body.

Crowe slithered down the embankment and splashed through the stream to where the other two crouched. His heart wrenched. It was the body of a small boy, half in the water, faceup in the mud. The body was covered in mud, and it was incredible that even the eagle-eyed Crawford had spotted it.

The boy couldn't have been more than four. It was all Crowe could do to say, ”Get the body back to the lab.”

Manderson said, ”Let me do it,” and Crowe remembered that Mandy had a five-year-old son of his own. More than any of the others, he would be feeling the anguish of the little boy's death.

Manderson stowed his weapon and carefully, respectfully, worked his hands into the mud underneath the neck and knees of the tiny body. He lifted and the body came free of the mud with a sucking sound.

The boy opened his eyes, took one look at Manderson's black suit and face mask, and screamed his little lungs out.

A police doctor went back in the ambulance with the boy. They still called him ”the boy” because he had been unable to tell them his name.

He had done nothing but scream until the ambulance had arrived. The U.S. Army Bioterrorism Response Force soldiers in their black combat biosuits must have looked a fearsome sight to a half-drowned, terrified four-year-old.