was half flung from the machine, only his safety harness keeping him from being dashed to the ground below. The missile tracked so close to the helicopter that Alan could feel heat from its vapor trail.
Gunfire and explosive flashes were everywhere in the gathering darkness below. Hands—Del Stringfellow’s— pulled at him and Alan was fully returned to the cabin. “Thanks! Let’s get that fucker!”
“Yes, sir! You heard Mr. Naile! Turn this crate around.”
“Wilco that, Del.”
The helicopter described a steep arc and swooped toward the ground. “He’s mine,” Alan declared, checking his safety belt and leaning out the starboard side of the fuselage. This time, his M-16’s strap was twisted round his left arm in the classic Hasty Sling. The Lakewood man threw his empty missile tube to the dirt and ran, firing an MP-5 submachine gun blindly upward and behind him.
Alan drew his weapon’s trigger back, and a long burst chewed into the ground behind the Lakewood man, then stitched up along the length of the man’s body as the helicopter overflew. The Lakewood man tumbled down dead in the mini-cyclone of sand that rose in the helicopter’s wake.
Alan looked ahead. Brilliant, ephemeral flashes of yellow-orange rose and fell in the darkness.
Stringfellow’s voice came through the headset again. “It’s estimated that resistance is over ninety percent neutralized. Enemy personnel encountered have been permanently neutralized. Estimating maybe a little over a dozen Lakewood personnel. One pocket of resistance remains near what appears to be the time-transfer control station, a capsule near it.” There was a pause, and Alan looked over at Stringfellow. Short, slight, blond, with a jaw like a rock, the security man’s ice-blue eyes flickered up from an aerial shot showing on the screen of a laptop. With his right thumb, Stringfellow made a downward sign three times. “The last of the Lakewood personnel have been permanently neutralized, Mr. Naile.”
“Let’s get down there,” Alan ordered, letting out a long breath that was almost a sigh.
The dry lake bed below them was an enormous valley, what had once been its shoreline—David had no idea how long ago, but the time would be best reckoned by a geologist—forming the rugged higher ground wherein they had concealed themselves. Through the predawn hours they’d waited. Beyond, to the east, the sun relentlessly climbed. It would be hot this day.
“The bad guys are over there,” David said, addressing the nine troopers with him. He had driven the Suburban through the night on the calculated guess that this was Kaminsky’s probable destination. The guess was correct. “Very bad guys,” he reiterated, jerking his thumb toward the center of the lake bed, where there was pitched an enormous tent. Sand-colored and large enough to shelter a small circus, the tent had been erected with additional canopies adjoined to it. Maybe folding chairs hadn’t yet been invented, or maybe a more elegant look was sought, but elaborate-seeming wooden dining-room-style chairs with cushioned seats and raised arm-rests were ranked under the canopies. Overstuffed chairs with exposed wooden trim and love-seat-sized sofas of the same construction formed a semicircle of grand proportions beneath the tent itself. At what was the exact center between the two main verticals around which the tent roof was erected were buffet tables. Several portable generators were providing power for electric chandeliers and a bank of bar-sized refrigerators and at least two refrigerated serving tables.
It was a credit to Anglo-American cooperation— strained occasionally during these times, David knew— that there seemed to be no representation for Great Britain. There was, of course, none for the United States. The French, the Germans, the Russians—they were the expected bidders and they were present. David could tell from the uniforms of the military personnel, his knowledge based on old movies his father had pretty much coerced him and his sister into watching. The Germans had the most businesslike and military-looking uniforms, and these were field gray. The French uniforms were certainly the most stylish and their headgear was the flat-topped, almost ball-cap-looking thing called a kepi. The Russians had extremely elaborate helmets, apparently not trusting to ordinary hats of any kind.
Many of the civilians—the diplomats—wore swallow-tailed coats and striped pants and tall, narrow-brimmed, shiny black silk hats. The other men—there was not a single woman visible—were evidently assistants, male secretaries and the like, attired in uncomfortable-looking suits and less formal hats, derby-or Homburg-style. Ranked socially lower still were coach drivers and footmen, exiled to nether regions beneath more spartan canopies and near where the luxurious carriages and less