Part 7 (1/2)
”Come! Why do you fear the moment when it's at hand? We've discussed this over and over. Do it for me.”
He was almost in tears, but he knew he had to give her the truth of his deepest fears.
”I-I am afraid that what the captain said might be true.”
”Then we will be healed, isn't that right?”
”And separated in some strange, unknown place!”
”If I am healed, I will find you. Come. My pain grows with each moment, and no matter what he said, this thing could close at any moment. Go right and just walk ahead.” She suddenly pushed the joystick.
The wheelchair lunged forward and lurched to the right, and both chair and occu-pant vanished into the darkness, leaving only silence.
”Anne Marie?Anne Marie !”His fear of losing her over-came all other thoughts. He turned right and walked straight ahead.
And without warning, he felt a sensation of falling.
Back on the paved mountain road above Rio, the dark hexagon winked out and the meteor began to undergo a dramatic transformation. The other facets, which had pulsed with an a.n.a.log of a living circulatory system, began to fade; circulation failed, patches of decay began to appear, finally spreading over the surface of the object.
Its purpose accomplished, the Watchman and all others evidencing a desire to do so having pa.s.sed through, the de-vice had no other reason to exist, and very quickly it died. By the time the first of the curious and investigators reached it, shortly after dawn, it resembled a huge, irregular lump of granite or gneiss laced with enormous veins of ob-sidian.
Rockfall: Upper Amazon
theresa perez was not amused. ”what in h.e.l.l areyoudoing here?” she asked Juan Campos acidly. ”There is no room on this plane for you two. We have to work.”
Campos grinned evilly at her. ”So? We give you our hos-pitality and you would then deny me seeing this great sight? Even my father thought that we were owed this.”
”What's the problem?” Maklovitch called, squeezing into the plane. He saw Campos and the bodyguard. ”This wasn't part of the agreement,” he noted with irritation. ”We're on a tight schedule here and even tighter quarters.”
”The agreement has been changed,” Campos responded. ”We are staying right here. If you choose not to take off, then sit. My father believes one of the family should be aboard.”
Maklovitch thought fast. Right now the deadline out-weighed all else, and in this plane Campos was as much at their mercy as they were at his. ”All right-you come.He goes, and now!” the newsman added, pointing to the body-guard.
”Ramon goes where I go.”
The newsman thought a moment, then decided to call the bluff. ”Very well. Terry, get on the horn and tell them that Don Campos has insisted on placing two armed men aboard. Because this exceeds our weight and room limits, we cannot go. Tell them the Campos file is to air rather than be sent to Don Campos. Understood?”
The gangster jumped. ”Now, wait one minute.What file? You-b.i.t.c.h! You radionothing without my permission!”
”Too late,” she told him with a smile. ”We're already live to the studio. They're hearing every single word we say. Are you ordering me to switch us out, knowing that it means that here, on live audio, you are forcibly kidnapping us?”
This was getting a little too complicated too quickly for Juan Campos.”What file?”
”Your father knows,” the newsman responded. ”Why do you think we were offered his hospitality? I thought you told us that you really ran things around here.” He paused a moment. ”Now, since we're going nowhere, shall we all go see your father and explain the situation?”
Campos suddenly didn't know what to do. His first im-pulse was to take them all out and shoot them, but he was in fact acting on his own and he was not at all certain how his father would react when word of that came down. No-body had said anything about a deal, but it explained much.
”All right. He goes, I stay.”
”And you give him your pistol and stay in that seat as long as we're in the air,” the newsman said firmly.
He looked at his watch. ”Better make up your mind right now or it won't make any difference. That meteor won't wait.”
Campos threw up his hands in disgust, then handed a pistol over to the bodyguard and told him to get off and wait. The bodyguard, hesitant and not without some protest, complied.
None of them were fools enough to believe that Campos didn't still have various weapons on him, but at least it was one less. Now, with the bodyguard out, Lori climbed on, looking confused, and they took their seats.
The technicians had been working steadily since they'd arrived. Gus now had a console bolted in the center rear of the plane through which he could control several exterior cameras and see what each showed on small black-and-white monitors. The pictures were being recorded in a com-partment beneath the cabin and also being sent by a computer-controlledku-band satellite uplink mounted atop the aircraft that would relay them back to the U.S. studio if, of course, conditions were right and the aircraft was level. A similar microwave system was mounted on the plane's underside and might work for pickups in Manaus or at the makes.h.i.+ft hacienda uplink site. Provided that either system worked, directors far away in the States would pick the feed and also give Gus general direction.
”Probably none of it will work,” Gus grumped, ”which is why we're also taping, but it's worth a try.”
Audio wasn't a problem, and Terry had on a headset that connected her by radio with the studio. Both Maklovitch and Sutton also had similar headsets, but those were on a different frequency and would be used mostly for contact and commentary to the live anchor desk.
They roared off into the night, climbing through a low cloud layer that b.u.mped them around a bit and caused hor-rible noise on the audio. Then they broke free and had the clear sky above and all around them, with a tremendous view of the stars.
”I've got us on course and ready,” the pilot reported. ”We should be in position with, no thanks to the delays, about ten minutes to spare. For a region with cleared air-s.p.a.ce, though, there's a fair amount of traffic on the radio. Not just the two science planes and the Brazilian Air Force tracker, but it seems there's a number of small civil aircraft up in violation of the clear airs.p.a.ce order. Two air force jets are trying to track them and force them down, but there's alot of d.a.m.ned fools up.”
”Yeah, and probably all three U.S. networks and a dozen others,” Terry commented. ”Wonder what would happen if they shot down an anchor or two.”
It was very dark but very busy in the plane's cabin as ev-erything was checked out one last time, and they even did a last-minute on-air audio report to the news desk. Every-body tried to forget about Campos, who at least was just sitting there uncharacteristically behaving himself. Still, the time dragged impossibly.
Lori felt keyed up but also suddenly very tired, almost drained. It was the waiting, she decided. She wanted things to start. Theyall wanted things to start.
”Contact! Visual contact by Science One!”the pilot re-ported excitedly. Science One was the combined Brazilian-Smithsonian research plane about 350 miles out in the Atlantic. ”If what they're reporting is true,” the pilot added, ”then we're in for a dizzingly fast lalapalooza! Buckle in tight! She's coming down dirty!”
”What does he mean by 'dirty'?” Juan Campos asked, breaking his long silence.
”Shedding,” Lori told him. ”Coming apart. Raining big, hot rocks.”
The plane turned slowly and then reduced speed. Maklovitch was already on the air, and Lori knew now that she, too, was live.
”We should be seeing it any second now,” the newsman said with a professional calmness his tense face belied. ”It's coming right over Rio.”
”There! Got it!” Gus cried. ”Oh, my G.o.d! What a whop-per!”
Things changed in an instant; the horizon suddenly turned from night into a creeping twilight, then, suddenly, it was there, coming straight for them for all they could tell.
”Madre dios!”Juan Campos breathed, and crossed him-self.
Lori watched with a mixture of awe and fascination as the huge object sped toward them and then was suddenly past. It looked like some enormous flaming lump of char-coal, the size of a dozen full moons, blazing a yellow and white-hot tail.
”Wahoo!”Gus roared from his console, apparently very pleased with the pictures. It was only later that Lori real-ized that the man was so intent on his screens that he never actually saw the meteor.
The plane banked sharply and took a course perpendicu-lar to the meteor's path so they could see it go down. The pilot's reactions were good, although suddenly the entire aircraft was rocked as if shaken by a giant hand, and unse-cured items went flying. There was a roller coaster-like sen-sation of falling for what seemed an eternity, and then the pilot boosted power and pulled out of it.
”Did you get it? Did you get it?” Terry called repeatedly.