John Sandford - Saturn Run

From outside, the apartment complex might have been a tropical jungle: something painted by Winslow Homer on one of his Caribbean trips, he thought. The complex also had tight security, another benefit: he’d once been dropped off by a drunk friend, drunk himself and mostly naked, and when he’d tried to cross the wall, he found himself surrounded by armed guards in about six seconds.

They hadn’t been fooling around; they’d run a DNA check on him before they let him back in his apartment. He didn’t live in a place where you just dropped in.

Sandy hadn’t had that many moments to relax in the two previous weeks. After making his deal with Crow, he was flown to Maryland, to the Defense Information School at Fort Meade, where he was turned over to a harsh, hawk-nosed marine gunnery sergeant named Cletus Smith, who didn’t care for Jesus hair or burnt-orange GnarlyBrand pants or RhythmTech overshirts.

The gunny was not happy: “I don’t know exactly what’s up, Dingleberry…”

“That would be Darlington…”

“…Darlington, but I don’t like it. It wasn’t done right. I got some freshly made West Point asshole shoving security papers down my throat, I got the sergeant major yapping at me, my schedule’s screwed for the next six months, I was supposed to start an advanced vid class…”

The gunnery sergeant was wearing the usual uptight marine camo uniform, which had some kind of special marine name that Sandy didn’t remember, and as ex-army, really didn’t care about. He reached forward and slipped two fingers inside the placket on the sergeant’s shirt, and gave it a tug.

“Gunny, gunny, gunny,” he said, leaning toward the sergeant until their noses were only six inches apart. “Nobody gives a shit what you think or how inconvenient it is, or what Mrs. Cletus or the Cletus rug rats think. But you should give a shit what I think—because if you don’t have me up to Ultra Star vid status in two weeks, Major General Harrington will be down here with a fuckin’ power mower. Guess whose ass gonna be grass?”

Few marines had ever had their placket tugged; Smith was not one of them, and his nose turned white. “Get your fingers the fuck outa my…”

Sandy broke in: “…and if you ever give me any serious shit, I will personally take your skinny, ignorant peckerwood Marine Corps ass outside and stomp a new mudhole in it, to replace the mudhole you already got.”

Smith stared at him for a moment, then showed a very tight grin: “They didn’t tell me you’d been in the service, and the hair fooled me. Argentina?”

“The whole cruise,” Sandy said. The whole cruise was insider code for those who had been shot up.

“I was on that boat,” Smith said. He took a step back. “All right. You can call me Clete. Let’s take a look at your gear….”

Ten straight days of hard work—and a Marine Corps haircut: Jesus hair didn’t work all that well in weightless conditions.

Maybe he wasn’t Ultra Star when he finished, but Sandy was two thousand percent better than he had been, and he hadn’t been bad to begin with. Cletus Smith had been a combat videographer, and had actually filmed himself being shot down in a Marine Blackfoot IV helicopter; he rode the vid right into the ground, with commentary, although the commentary had been suppressed for the good of the Corps. Smith said, at the end of their last day, “Y’all come back: I got more.”

“Clete, I wish I could take you with me,” Sandy said, as they slapped hands. “Once I get some space under my feet, I’ll be looking for ideas.”

“Bring the vid. And boy, I’d love to go to Mars. If you can find me a slot…”

Sitting outside his condo, Sandy’s wrist-wrap told him that his ride had been held up on the 110, because some underclassman had dropped a bowling ball off a bridge. Traffic had resumed, and the underclassman was being pursued through the Avenues, where he wouldn’t be caught. Sandy hoped the cops were watching all available bowling balls. Having a sixteen-pound Brunswick blow through your windshield could seriously screw up your trip to Disneyland.

Eight or ten minutes later, his wrist-wrap told him his ride was turning the corner, and he got to his feet. A black limo, unmarked. The car hummed to a stop, and a driver got out of the front. A rear door slipped open, and the trunk lid popped. Sandy said, “I got it,” threw his bags in the back, kept the coffee, and climbed inside.

The driver got back in, the door slid shut. Sandy nodded at the woman who sat opposite him, and put the coffee cup in a cup holder.

The woman was a redhead, a spectacular example of the species, and it took only a moment for her name to register: Cassandra Fiorella, chief science editor for the Los Angeles Times , and the daily on-air science correspondent and producer for the biggest netcast on the West Coast.

She was stunning: red hair, green eyes, and the rest of the package wrapped in a slippery green-black jumpsuit. Her face showed none of the stress lines of plastic surgery; she was wearing a charm necklace with gold endorsement charms from Apple, IBM, MIT, Stanford, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, and EuroBank, and in the center, a big fat green diamond that matched her eyes. Crow had not told him that she was on board.

She didn’t introduce herself—you’d have to be an idiot not to know who she was—but gave him a low-wattage smile and said, “You’re Sanders Darlington.”

“Yup.”

“Where have you worked? Crow didn’t tell me much about you. Except for an assistant videographer’s stint on Naked Nancy , I couldn’t find your professional résumé.”

“Well, that’s about it,” Sandy said.

She frowned: “I don’t believe it. For this trip? There must be something else.”

Sandy had been outrageously rich since childhood, living in L.A. Some of the most beautiful women in the world had made the effort to say ‘hello’ to him. While he’d taken advantage of that, from time to time, he’d also learned that behind a certain percentage of great beauty, there lurked a wicked witch of the west. He got that vibration from Fiorella.

He said, “Well, I won the 2064 Oscar for the best manual projection of a naked producer into the Pacific Ocean.”

“I saw that, too.” Fiorella nibbled a little lip gloss from her lower lip, then shook her head. “You bought your way on.”

Sandy shrugged.

“This is absurd,” she said. “I will tell the President that. I’m supposed to be on-camera, recording this for the whole future of mankind, and I’ve got to work with an inexperienced daddy’s boy who’ll inevitably mess it up, and not only that, has a history of violence—”

“Hey, Cassie?” Sandy smiled at her and said, “Go fuck yourself.”

She blanched. Nobody talked to her like that. “What did you say?”

“I said, ‘Go fuck yourself.’ I don’t need any ego rages from the talent. You just get the makeup right, sweetheart, and practice reading without crossing your eyes, and I’ll see that you’re looking good. But I gotta tell you, this little rant just took you a step down from ‘looking great.’”

With her face bright red with anger, Fiorella crossed her arms and looked away from him. Sandy knew this wasn’t over. There’d be consequences. Someone with Fiorella’s creds wouldn’t take that lying down. Well, tough shit. As they headed up the 210, Sandy closed his eyes and dozed off.

The Mojave Spaceport was unseasonably cool: at 10 A.M., the thermometer was only slowly climbing past ninety-four. The sun, though, was starting to burn. Sandy let Fiorella haul her case out of the back of the limo—she wasn’t talking to him—and then threw his personal duffel on one shoulder and rolled the bigger equipment case along behind.