43

Eye in the Sky

I drove to the first public terminal I could find and logged on as Major Duke Anderson. I had his code number and I had his password.

Duke still had a clearance. Amazing. I accessed the West Coast Satellite Eyeball Reconnaissance file. I ordered a complete set of frames covering the last twenty-four hours.

Maybe Jason was right. Maybe Jim McCarthy couldn't lift a weapon against the Tribe. But Major Duke Anderson certainly could. I just asked myself how Duke would handle this and bent to the terminal.

I studied the wide-angle shot just long enough to locate Monterey Bay, then dialed down to the Santa Cruz area. Using the joystick, I centered on Family. The peninsula was a tiny dagger sticking southward. I dialed down on it, then moved forward in time to this afternoon. As the screen flashed through the framesthey had been taken one minute apart-the shadows shortened and pivoted and lengthened. Their angles changed as the Earth turned before the sun.

There.

At the north end of the peninsula, just below the hiking ridge, walking distance from the unfinished worm fence, a Jeep was parked. A man was sitting in it holding a torch.

That was me. Guarding the barn after the horse was stolen.

I moved back in time to the beginning of the attack.

Four worms and thirteen humans came across the rocks, around the end of the fence, along the ridge and down the slope, where they entered the north end of the park.

I moved the joystick and followed them through the park. Here on the west side was a group of children. There I was, just walking past them.

There. The worms burst from the park. I paged through the frames.

The worms plowed through the children.

And I turned and ran for my Jeep. The worms turned south-

- I moved forward in time.

Someone in a van was battering at one of the worms with it. Three of the worms piled on the van and peeled it open.

The fourth worm was already moving around the south curve, and facing a Jeep. There I was. There was Little Ivy. We burned the worm.

I moved through the frames.

The rest of the worms came around the curve. We fled through the park. There-we came out on the opposite side and turned around to attack the worms from the rear.

There. I blew a worm to pieces against my house.

There. The worms dashed into the park, flowed over Jack and Dove.

There. We followed.

The worms were lost in the park. I couldn't see all of what happened.

I saw the explosion that killed Little Ivy. I saw the Jeep come barrelling out of the park. It turned north toward the hiking ridge. There-I saw two worms come out of the park and flow up the slope. There were people running with them.

There. The Jeep took its position. Where was the last worm?

There was still one worm on the peninsula. Three worms had dashed into the park. Two had come out.

My God.

It had been on the peninsula with us all afternoon long. Maybe it was still there.

I reached for the phone. No, wait.

I moved forward in time. There was B-Jay getting into the Jeep. There was the Jeep moving off.

And there was the last worm and one human being moving across the road and up the slope.

The whole time I'd been sitting there, they'd been in the park watching me. Jason and Orrie.

They could have killed me.

No, they couldn't. I'd been sitting there with the torch in my lap, ready to fire.

It had been a standoff. I'd cut off their escape and hadn't known it. Shit.

But I knew something now. I knew they'd been on the peninsula until sunset. That meant they couldn't be far.

I moved back in time until the Jeep appeared to back away from its position. There were two bright red smears moving across the road. There were people with the worms too. I began moving forward in time again, this time following them up the slope and over it. I moved northward on the peninsula with them, one frame at a time.

They moved down the opposite side of the hiking ridge, across the wide plateau, through the rough and crumbled area, and across the rocks to the coast highway. I followed them from above. They couldn't know I was watching from sixteen hundred kilometers above and six hours away.

They moved northward on the road for a half-kilometer to a place where it bordered a wide field. They went inland then, two worms and thirteen humans. They were still moving on foot. Where were their vehicles?

Once they were out of sight of the highway, they turned north again. I flashed through the frames and watched them jump from moment to moment; the effect was of a strobed and jerky movement. The meadow they were on ended at a belt of trees bordering a narrow canyon road. They turned up the canyon road. And then they were gone.

The slopes of the canyon were heavily forested. The road showed through only in patches.

I moved forward in time and widened the angle. No, they hadn't come out at the bottom end of the road where it met the main highway.

I superimposed a state map on the frame and followed the road inland. No, nothing here.

They were gone. "Shit."

I leaned back in my chair and stared at the screen in front of me. It was an industrial high-resolution monitor, with 5,000 real lines of video information and another 5,000 lines of extrapolated data, all repeated 120 times a second. There were 25 million pixels of data per frame. The system could be used for anything from the most sophisticated kind of military reconnaissance to finding lost golf balls.

But I couldn't find two worms in a leafy canyon.

If they couldn't be seen from the sky, they couldn't be tracked. I leaned forward again. I typed in a search program. I ID'd one of the worms as the target and set parameters. A ten-kilometer radius, from this moment until dusk. I hit ENTER and let the program scan through the frames for me.

Nothing.

The computer couldn't find them either.

All right. So that was that. They weren't visible from the air, not as worms.

I went back to the moment where I'd lost them at the canyon road.

I followed the road north and east as it wound upward through the canyon. It came out on the crest of a ridge and joined up with a ridge road that headed mostly north.

If they were traveling by truck, it would be dusk before they got this far. They wouldn't show up on the video.

All right. No problem.

I moved back through the frames, back in time to the moment of attack. I saw the worms-four of them now-coming down the slope with their human companions. I followed them backward across the same course, up the hiking ridge, across the plateau, across the rocks, up the road, across the field, and into the trees. And of course, they disappeared.

Now, I had the time. They had been moving into position at the very same moment I had been arguing with B-Jay.

I moved to the place where the canyon road met the ridge road and scanned backward in time. No traffic up here-until a convoy hacked out of the canyon road. Three motorcycles, three trucks, and two vans.

Bingo.

I tracked with them, moving backward through the day.

The ridge road wound northward for miles. A couple of times I lust them in the foliage, but I just moved farther north and waited for them to show up again on the frames. There they were. I followed them backward until morning.

I almost missed the turnoff. I thought I'd missed them and kept going north, but then I hit Interstate 5 and I knew I'd gone too far.

Jason didn't like to use the Interstates. Too much traffic. And certainly not during the day.

I moved back to the ridge road to the first moment that the trucks appeared on it. Ahh, I see. They turned onto it from this side canyon. I followed them back up the side canyon. It dead-ended.