Randolph Calverhall - Serpent's Walk

Lessing peered at the frost-furred legend stamped onto the plastic. I tread “GD-74.”

Nerve gas. One of the later and most lethal varieties.

The container had cushioned spaces for twelve round objects, but only eleven shiny, plastic spheres glittered gold against the charcoal-hued packing.

“Now what?” Cheh asked, reasonably enough.

He did not mention the nerve gas. Instead, he moved swiftly back into the outer office and bent over the corpse. It was as he suspected: the air-conditioning duct had been opened, its grill work slimed with dried, blackish blood. The fingers of the young man’s left hand were a rigid maroon-and-white spider clenched upon the cream-colored metal frame.

“You need a torch?”

“A…? Oh, a flashlight. No… no. I think I understand—”

“What?”

“Which way was the wind blowing when we came… yesterday… today?”

“Umm… to the northeast, I think. Fairly steady breeze. Why?”

“That’s why we’re alive. And why those people upstairs and out in the yard are dead. Nerve gas: a single globe of it dropped into the air conditioner.”

Cheh goggled at him. “What? Nerve gas? They were killed by… by…?”

“One of the GD series. Advanced as all hell. A milligram on your skin or in your lungs, and you’ve got barely time to lie down. Then you’re history.”

White-faced, the girl stared at her own fingers as though they were somehow contaminated. “Gawd! No…! Wait… how… why? Why here? Nerve gas doesn’t need refrigeration, does it?”

“Just stored here, I think. After the base was deactivated. All sorts of stuff stacked away down in a convenient hole where nobody would find it and raise hell.”

Cheh had another thought. “But wasn’t the bloody stuff a binary? Two separate compounds that had to be combined to be lethal?”

“Right But the Bom-Agains got antsy during the missile crisis of 2013. They put GD gas into double-chambered ampoules that could be dropped from the air.”

“But those were supposed to be lough — near unbreakable unless you threw ’em out of a plane or off a buildin’. Bloody hell.”

“This boy here knew that if the drop down the air-conditioner shaft wasn’t enough to crack the shell, then the fan blades at the bottom would do it.”

“But… why?”

It was coming together. “Somebody… a staff member, a guard, a technician… was the weasel. He had access to the keys. Then he cut out the security system with the hummingbird Kopper and his staff were probably sloppy about it. The weasel came down and took what he wanted. This boy” — for some reason his subconscious mind refused to think of the twisted corpse as an adult — “caught him at it, probably in the refrigerator room. The weasel shot the kid and left him for dead. Meanwhile Kopper came into the communications room upstairs, saw the hummingbird, and tried to wire past it to get out a call for help. The boy probably never knew about that at all. The weasel blew the power plant as he was leaving, to keep the locals confused.”

“And once the weasel was gone,” Cheh cut in, “the kid came out of shock enough to get a globe of… of the gas… and crawled over and potted it down the shaft. He must’ve thought he was savin’ the bloody world!”

“Maybe he was.” Lessing stood up. He found that his hands were shaking. “Important enough, anyway, to kill not only the weasel but himself as well… plus his own people and any ranchers, tourists, or goddamned sheep who happened to be in range downwind! ” The idea was terrifying; he backed into a desk, laid his rifle on it with a clatter that sounded like a tank rolling off a cliff, and leaned against the cold metal to keep his legs from trembling.

“The… the woman upstairs, them out in the compound?”

“Us, too, if the wind had been blowing to the southwest.”

“Great bleedin’ Christ! What… what’s to the northeast?”

Lessing shut his eyes, rubbed the bridge of his nose. “I don’t know. I’ve never been in this state before. Magdalena? Socorro? Not much population between here and there. Some ranches, some Indians, some resorts… livestock. God knows what the range is. I don’t think it’ll reach Albuquerque. Jesus!”

Cheh put up shaking fingers to pat her dust-colored hair. “And this was what the weasel wanted? This nerve gas?”

Lessing shook his head. Gomez had told him little, but he could guess. “Worse, I think.” He gave the girl a hard stare. “The weasel got what we were sent for. And don’t ask me what that is or what it does, because the players don’t tell their goddamned pawns a damned thing. And don’t ask me why the weasel decided to act just a day or two before we were set to arrive! I don’t know.”

Gomez would have some explaining to do. Son of a bitch! Had he used Lessing and his squad as dummies? What did they call it — red herrings? Patsies to take the fall for raiding a top-secret American installation? While the real thief was supposed to get away with the goodies?

They had to get out. Lessing snatched up his rifle and ordered the surprised girl back to the elevator shaft

On the way back up, Cheh panted, “And now?”

Lessing thought and said, “If we find the weasel dead in the yard, we finish our mission. If not, we look for tracks… they’ll show up on the snow… and if the weasel’sgone north or east there’s a chance we can still catch up, if we can find a car.”

“Catch up? Now? After a day or more?”

“If he headed out in the direction of the wind, there’s a very good chance he’s as dead as these people. We can only follow and see. If he went some other way, into the wind, he’ll be long gone by now. Then we can give it up.”

Cheh shuddered. “Not sure I want to catch ’im, even though we get only half pay for comin’ home empty-handed!” She furrowed sparse brows in sudden thought. “Wait — how long is the gas active, then? What’s the risk to us?”

“Not much. It’s airborne, as I recall — dissipates after a few hours.” He strove to remember the article he had read during one of his flights to — or was it from? — Angola. “It evaporates quickly, combines with things in the atmosphere, and becomes inert… harmless. By now it’ll be gone.”

“Jesus. I hope so.”

“If it isn’t, we’ll hardly know it.”

“You’re a cold sod, Lessing. Christ!”

“My name is ‘Ek,’ remember? On this mission I’m Ek.”

Cheh snorted, wiped her stubby nose with equally stubby fingers, and said no more.

The sunshine, weak and pallid as though Filtered down through a shallow sea, provided unabashed relief. Lessing met his squad at the front door of the house.

“None of the corpses got anything on dem,” the man Lessing had named Panch reported. “No bombs, no veapons. No bulletholes either… some kind of gas must’ve got dem. Look like dey vas from de staff here.” Panch was Swedish, a gaunt and bony man who looked like he ought to be plowing rocks in some tiny field beside an arctic fjord. Lessing had worked with him before, during the Baalbek War in Syria. Together they had managed to save a village full of Arab refugees from an over-zealous Israeli tank commander who had wanted to flatten the place.

He mustn’t think of the past now. “Transport?” he inquired gruffly.

“Little four-wheel-drive Dceda Outdoorsman,” Char replied. “Over there in a shed behind the garage. No boobytraps. I checked.”

“I’m surprised the weasel didn’t disable it,” Lessing said, “since he went to the trouble of blowing the power plant”

“Then the kid dropped the plum into the bleedin’ puddin’,” Cheh added. It took several minutes to explain the probable sequence of events to the others.