John Varley - Mammoth

Howard thought about it for almost a full minute. Then he smiled.

"Darling, I've finally found a woman as smart as me."

"Smarter," Andrea said.

Howard laughed, and picked up the phone. "Captain, we're joining Mr. Warburton at Sea-Tac Airport, as soon as you can get clearance." He punched another button. "Warburton, pull everything you've got out of Oregon and California. Concentrate the search in the Seattle metro area, but most of all along the Canadian border. I want teams at every crossing, and continuous helicopter patrols from Puget Sound to Montana. I'll tell you about it when I get there."

Then he stood up, pulled Andrea from her chair, and kissed her.

THE lady is pretty smart, Warburton admitted to himself after Howard called back to explain Andrea's reasoning. Both of them were. He wouldn't have thought of it; his mind didn't work that way. He wouldn't embark on a project knowing he would get caught... but it seemed the best possible outcome, in Susan's terms. Warburton didn't like Susan, didn't like Andrea even more—she was always getting in his way. Warburton didn't really like anybody very much, not even Howard. He didn't have much of a life outside his job, but the job satisfied him and had made him quite wealthy over the years. He was a born problem solver, that was his thing, and he had very few scruples. Fuck the rules of engagement. He was enough of a realist to know that pointing a gun at two people and shouting Freeze! was worse than pointless unless you were prepared to use it. He would shoot to wound, the leg or the foot, if he could. But if worse came to worst he would do what he had to do. Like any cautious cop, he carried an untraceable piece-of-shit throwdown weapon to put in the hand of an awkward corpse. He had killed men twice before—only when he had to; he was not a maniac. He had suffered no nightmares. He knew he could do it.

The other assistant was the owner and operator of the company, a white man fully as big as Blackstone and bald as an egg, though not by choice, by the name of Crowder. He claimed to be the best at urban environments. Warburton wasn't quite so sure about him. They were looking at a wall-sized electronic map of Washington State and lower British Columbia. Locations and unit numbers of all the aerial and ground search teams currently in operation were displayed. There were a lot of them. A whole lot of them. Maybe even enough to do the job...

The dots and numbers representing searchers moved every few seconds, adjusted by the GPS units each team carried. Most of the air units and many on the ground were now converging on the border.

"Legal crossing points at Blaine, the big one," Blackstone said. He moved a controller and highlighted as he spoke. "Then here at State Road 539, here at Sumas, and not another until way over here, at Lenton Flat. Pretty rough country through there. I wouldn't want to climb it with a mammoth."

"Hannibal crossed the Alps with war elephants. Patrol it anyway."

"Sure. Then there are seven more before you get to Idaho. You figure they'll try to drive across, or follow one of these roads close to the border and walk it?"

"Hard to say. Either way will be tough."

"Here in the west it's fairly flat, farmland, they'd stick out like a sore thumb. Fewer people in the eastern part, a lot of it's pretty arid. Desert. I wouldn't go that route, myself."

"What would you do?"

"Given what you told me? I'd try to drive up to one of the crossings out here in the boonies, go right up to the customs station and turn myself in."

"They've got to cross first. Do we have a team at all of them yet?"

"We will in fifteen more minutes. Stopping them could be awkward, though. U.S. Customs will probably object if you shoot out their tires this side of the line."

"Loud and clear."

"Crowder, you'll continue looking in the Seattle area on the ground, and we'll give you a few helicopters to screen the freeways, but send most of the teams into the country up north. I want somebody in a four-wheel drive within ten minutes of every logging road in that forest, every dirt trail in that desert. I want at least one cross-country motorbike in the back of every vehicle. They have to leave the trailer on a road somewhere if they try to cross on foot. I don't think they'll try to cross at Blaine, I understand there are traffic jams up there."

"They can stretch for miles," Crowder agreed. "We've got three teams there, and we can stop them before they even see the border."

"Good. When it gets dark we'll get the satellites to work, and I'm betting we spot them somewhere out in the wilderness within an hour. We have to be ready to move on them. Anything else?"

"What about ferries?" Crowder said.

"Ferries?"

Crowder touched the keyboard and the map view zoomed in on the waters of the area, from the entrance to the estuary at the Georgia Strait, running between the Olympic Peninsula and Vancouver Island, to Olympia at the south end, and the city of Vancouver to the north. There was a lot of water, and a lot of islands. A spiderweb of lines appeared, running all over the water.

"We've always had good ferries up here."

"Never been on one," Blackstone said with a grin. "I get seasick in the bathtub."

"Last ten years they've been adding more. Federal grants or some shit like that, ease the freeway congestion, not that it did a damn bit of good. There's three times as many ferries now as when I was a kid."

"How many go to Canada?"

Crowder touched the keyboard again, and most of the lines disappeared.

"You got your B.C. ferries, and you got your Washington State ferries. One from Port Angeles, on the peninsula, to Victoria, on Vancouver Island. From here at Anacortes to Sidney and Vancouver. Also from Bellingham to Vancouver, and from Everett to Victoria and Vancouver."

"It'd be a dumb way to go. Sometimes you can wait for hours to get aboard."

"Cover them anyway. It would be a perfect place to catch them quietly."

"Will do."

Warburton leaned back and sighed. He realized he hadn't eaten yet today, and it was almost evening. He asked someone to have a pizza delivered.

We'll catch them tonight. The satellites will find them.

MATT left the unit at eight that morning, and saw the rain had stopped and the sky was beginning to clear. Bad luck. He walked to the truck and pulled the trailer around the block and into the storage yard. Susan was waiting to direct him, and they lowered the ramp.

Susan had noticed that most places like this were virtually deserted most of the time. This one had half a dozen rows of buildings with garage doors facing each other. Her two units could not be seen from any road or house in the area. There was always a chance somebody would pick that morning to visit a unit close to theirs, but if that happened they would just have to wait.

Matt walked to the end of the row where he could see the entrance gate. He signaled to Susan, and she opened the garage door and led Fuzzy out and up the ramp, and closed the ramp, then the door. Thirty seconds, total.

Matt hurried back and entered the trailer through the side door. Susan was strapping a leather harness around Fuzzy's middle. She attached it to each side of the trailer with heavy chains.

"He traveled a lot before Fuzzyland opened, you know," she said. "He had his own private train. He's been in the back of trucks, too, going to and from the shows. Pachyderms are pretty good at keeping their balance, a lot better than you'd think. But we always used an arrangement like this as a sort of seat belt. I'd appreciate it if you tried not to stand on the brake, though, okay?"

"I'll keep way back from the cars ahead."

They went back outside and carefully peeled off the red contact paper Susan had applied in a big red swoosh after painting the rig a uniform beige. She grimaced as she touched the long indent where a tree branch had scraped the side.