Part Two

GRAYBOYS

Chapter Ten

KURTZ AND UNDERHILL

The only thing in the cps area was a little beer n deer store called Gosselin’s Country Market. Kurtz’s cleaners began arriving there shortly after the snow began to fall. By the time Kurtz himself got there, at ten-thirty, support was starting to appear. They were getting a grip on the situation.

The store was designated Blue Base. The barn, the adjacent stable (dilapidated but still standing), and the corral had been designated Blue Holding. The first detainees had already been deposited there.

Archie Perlmutter, Kurtz’s new aide-de-camp (his old one, Calvert, had died of a heart attack not two weeks before-goddam bad timing), had a clipboard with a dozen names on it. Perlmutter had arrived with both a laptop computer and a Palm Pilot only to discover that electronic gear was currently FUBAR in the Jefferson Tract: tucked up beyond all recognition. The top two names on the clipboard were Gosselins: the old man who ran the store and his wife.

“More on the way,” Perlmutter said.

Kurtz gave the names on Pearly’s clipboard a cursory look, then handed it back. Big recreational vehicles were being parked behind them; semi trailers were being jacked and leveled; light poles were going up. When night came, this place would be as well-lighted as Yankee Stadium at World Series time.

“We missed two guys by this much,” Perlmutter said, and held up his right hand with the thumb and forefinger a quarter of an inch apart. “They came in for supplies. Principally beer and hot dogs.” Perlmutter’s face was pale, with a wild pink rose blooming in each cheek. He had to raise his voice against the steadily increasing noise level. Helicopters were coming in two by two and landing on the blacktop lane that eventually made its way out to Interstate 95, where you could go north toward one dull town (Presque Isle) or south toward any number of other dull towns (Bangor and Derry, for starters). The helicopters were fine, as long as their pilots didn’t have to depend on all the sophisticated navigational equipment, which was also FUBAR.

“Did those fellows go in or out?” Kurtz asked.

“Back in,” Perlmutter said. He could not quite bring himself to meet Kurtz’s eyes; he looked everywhere but. “There’s a woods road, Gosselin says it’s called the Deep Cut Road. It’s not on the standard maps, but I have a Diamond International Paper survey map that shows”

“That’s fine. Either they’ll come back out or stay in. Either way, it’s fine.” More helicopters, some unshipping their.50s now that they were safely away from the wrong eyes. This could end up being as big as Desert Storm. Maybe bigger.

“You understand your mission here, Pearly, don’t you?” Perlmutter most definitely did. He was new, he wanted to make an impression, he was almost jumping up and down. Like a spaniel that smells lunch, Kurtz thought. And he did it all without making eye contact. “Sir, my job is triune in nature.”

Triune, Kurtz thought. Triune, how about that? “I am to a, intercept, b, turn intercepted persons over to medical, and c, contain and segregate pending further orders. “'Exactly. That’s-''But sir, beg your pardon, sit, but we don’t have any doctors here yet, only a few corpsmen, and-”

“Shut up,” Kurtz said. He didn’t speak loudly, but half a dozen men in unmarked green coveralls (they were all wearing unmarked green coveralls, including Kurtz himself) hesitated as they went double-timing on their various errands. They glanced toward where Kurtz and Perlmutter were standing, then got moving again. Triple-time, As for Perlmutter, the roses in his cheeks died at once. He stepped back, putting another foot between himself and Kurtz.

“If you ever interrupt me again, Pearly, I’ll knock you down. Interrupt me a second time and I’ll put you in the hospital. Do you understand?”

With what was clearly a tremendous effort, Perlmutter brought his gaze up to Kurtz’s face. To Kurtz’s eyes. He snapped off a salute so crisp it almost crackled with static electricity. “Sir, yes sir!”

“You can quit that too, you know better.” And when Perhnutter’s gaze began to drop: “Look at me when I’m talking to you, laddie.”

Very reluctantly, Perlmutter did so. His complexion was now leaden. Although the noise of the helicopters lined up along the road was cacophonous, it somehow seemed very quiet right here, as if Kurtz traveled in his own weird air-pocket. Perlmutter was convinced that everyone was watching them and that they could all see how terrified he was. Some of it was his new boss’s eyes-the cataclysmic absence in those eyes, as if there were really no brain behind them at all. Perlmutter had heard of the thousand-yard stare, but Kurtz’s seemed to go on for a million yards, maybe light-years.

Yet somehow Perlmutter held Kurtz’s gaze. Looked into the absence. He was not off to a good start here. It was important-it was imperative-that the slide be stopped before it could become an avalanche.

“All right, good. Better, anyway.” Kurtz’s voice was low but Perlmutter had no problem hearing him despite the overlapping chunter of the helicopters. “I’m going to say this to you Just once, and only because you’re new to my service and you clearly don’t know your asshole from your piehole. I have been asked to run a phooka operation here. Do you know what a phooka is.

“No,” Perlmutter said. It caused him almost physical pain not to be able to say No sir.

“According to the Irish, who as a race have never entirely crawled from the bath of superstition in which their mothers gat them, a phooka is a phantom horse that kidnaps travelers and carries them away on its back. I use it to mean an operation which is both covert and wide open. A paradox, Perlmutter! The good news is that we’ve been developing contingency plans for just this sort of clusterfuck since 1947, when the Air Force first recovered the sort of extraterrestrial artifact now known as a flashlight. The bad news is that the future is now and I have to face it with guys like you in support. Do you understand me, buck?”

“Yes, s… yes.”

“I hope so. What we’ve got to do here, Perlmutter, is go in fast and hard and utterly phooka. We’re going to do as much dirtywork as we have to and come out as clean as we can clean yes, Lord, and smilin…”

Kurtz bared his teeth in a brief smile of such brutally satiric intensity that Perlmutter felt a little like screaming. Tall and stoop-shouldered, Kurtz had the build of a bureaucrat. Yet something about him was terrible. You saw some of it in his eyes, sensed some of it in the still, prim way he held his hands in front of him… but those weren’t the things that made him scary, that made the men call him Old Creepy Kurtz. Perlmutter didn’t know exactly what the really scary thing was, and didn’t want to know. What he wanted right now-the only thing he wanted-was to get out of this conversation with his ass on straight. Who needed to go twenty or thirty miles west to make contact with an alien species? Perlmutter had one standing right here in front of him.

Kurtz’s lips snapped shut over his teeth. “On the same page, are we?”

“Yes.”

“Saluting the same flag? Pissing in the same latrine?”

“Yes.”

“How are we going to come out of this, Pearly?”

“Clean?”

“Boffo! And how else?”

For one horrible second he didn’t know. Then it came to him. “Smiling, sir.”