He snapped orders. The militiaman reached behind him and passed Laura a flak jacket and a black, hooded robe. "Put these on," Sticky said.

"All right." Laura buckled the bulky jacket over her work shirt. "What's this bathrobe?"

"It's a chador. Islamic women wear them. Real modest

... and it'll hide that blond hair. There been spy planes where we're going. I don't want 'em seeing you."

Laura tunneled into the robe and pulled the hood over her head. Once inside the baggy thing, she caught a lingering whiff of its previous user-scented cigarettes and attar of roses. "It wasn't the Islamic Bank--

"We know it's the Bank. They been running spy planes in every day, puddle jumping over from Trinidad. We know the plantation they're using, everything. We have our own sources-we don't need you to tell us anything." He nodded at the map compartment. "You might as well put on your TV

rig. I've said everything I'm saying."

"We don't mean to hurt you or your people, Sticky. We don't mean you anything but good-"

He sighed. "Just do it."

She pulled the glasses out. Emily screeched into her ear.

["What are you doing!? Are you all right?"]

"I'm fine, Emily. Cut me some slack."

["Don't be stupid, Laura. You're gonna damage our credi- bility in this. No secret negotiations! It looks bad-like they might be getting at you. It's bad enough now, without people thinking that you're going through back channels offline."]

"We be goin' to Fedon's Camp," Sticky said loudly, liltingly. "You listenin', Atlanta? Julian Fedon, he was a

Free Coloured. His time was the French Revolution and he preach the Rights of Man. The French smuggle him guns, and he take over plantations, free the slaves, and arm them. He burned out the baccra slaveocrats with righteous fire. And he fight with a gun in his hand when the Redcoats invade... it took an army months to break his fort."

They had come into a broken bowl of hills-ragged, vol- canic wilderness. A tropical paradise, dotted with tall watch- towers. At first sight they looked blankly harmless, like water towers. But the rounded storage tanks were armored pillboxes, ridged with slotted gun slits. Their gleaming sides were pocked with searchlights and radar blisters, and their tops were flat- tened for helicopter pads. Thick elevator taproots plunged deep into the earth-no doors were visible anywhere.

They drove uphill on a tall stone roadway of hard, black blasted rock. Excavation rubble. There were mounds of it everywhere, leg-breaking dykes of sharp-edged boulders, half hidden under bird-twittery flowering vines and scrub... .

Fedon's Camp was a new kind of fortress. There were no sandbags, no barbed wire, no gates or guards. Just the ranked towers rising mutely from the quiet green earth like deadly mushrooms of ceramic and steel. Towers watching each other, watching the hills, watching the sky.

Tunnels, Laura thought. There must be underground tun- nels linking those death towers together-and storage rooms full of ammunition. Everything underground, the towers mush- rooming from under the surface in a geometry of strategic fire zones.

What would it be like to attack this place? Laura could imagine angry, hungry rioters with their pathetic torches and

Molotov cocktails-wandering under those towers like mice under furniture. Unable to find anything their own size- anything they could touch or hurt. Growing frightened as their yells were answered by silence-beginning to creep, in muttering groups, into the false protection of the rocks and trees. While every footstep sounded loud as drumbeats on buried microphones, while their bodies glowed like human candles on some gunner's infrared screens... .

The road simply ended, in a half-acre expanse of weedy tarmac. Sticky killed the engine and found his polarized glasses. He peered through the windshield. "Over there,

Laura. See?" He pointed into the sky. "By that gray cloud, shaped like a wolf s head... "

She couldn't see anything. Not even a speck. "A spy plane?"

"Yeah. From here, they can count your teeth on telephoto.

Just the right size, too.... Too small for a stupid missile to find, and the smart ones cost more than it does." A rhythmic thudding above them. Laura winced. A skeletal shadow crossed the tarmac. A cargo helicopter was hovering overhead.

Sticky left the jeep. She saw the shadow drop a line, heard it clunk as it hit the hard top of the jeep. Latches clacked shut and Sticky climbed back in. In a moment they were soaring upward. Jeep and all.

The ground fell dizzily. "Hold tight," Sticky said. He sounded bored. The chopper lowered them atop the nearest tower, into a broad yellow net. The net's arms creaked on heavy springs, the whole jeep listing drunkenly; then the arms lowered and they settled to the deck.

Laura climbed out, shaking. The air smelled like dawn in

Eden. All around them mountainsides too steep for farming: green-choked hills wreathed with ink-gray mist like a Chinese landscape. The other towers were like this one: their tops ringed by low ceramic parapets. On the nearest tower, fifty yards away, half-naked soldiers were playing volleyball.

The chopper landed, stuttering, on the black trefoil of its pad nearby. Rotor wind whipped Laura's hair. "What do you do during hurricanes?" she shouted.

Sticky took her elbow and led her toward a hatchway.

"There are ways in, besides choppers," he said. "But none you need to know about." He yanked the twin hatch covers open, revealing a short flight of stairs to an elevator.

["Hold it,"] came an unfamiliar voice in her ear. ["I can't handle both of you at once, and I'm not a military architect.

This seaside stuff is weird enough... . David, do you know of anyone in Rizome who can handle military? I didn't think so..Laura, could you kill about twenty minutes?")

Laura stopped short. Sticky looked impatient. "You won't be seeing much, if that's what's stopping you. We goin'

down fast."

"Another elevator," Laura told Atlanta. "I'll be going offline."

"It's wired," Sticky assured her. "They knew you were coming."

They dropped six stories, fast. They emerged into a striated stone tunnel the size of a two-lane highway. She saw military storage boxes stenciled in old Warsaw Pact Cyrillic. Sagging tarps over vast knobby heaps of God-knew-what. Sticky am- bled forward, his hands in his pockets. "You know the

Channel Tunnel? From Britain to France?"

It was cold. She hugged her arms through the chador's baggy sleeves. "Yeah?"

"They learned a lot about tunnel making. All on open databases, too. Handy." His words echoed eerily. Ceiling lights flickered on overhead as they walked and died as they moved on. They were walking the length of the tunnel in a moving pool of light. "You ever see the Maginot Line?"

"What's that?" Laura asked.

"Big line of forts the French dug ninety years ago. Against the Germans. I saw it once. Winston took me." He adjusted his beret. "Big old steel domes still rusting in the middle of pastures. There are railroad tunnels underneath. Sometimes tourists ride 'em." He shrugged. "That's all they're good for. This place, too, someday."

"What do you mean?"

"The tankers are better. They move."

Laura matched his stride. She felt spooked. "It reeks down here, Sticky. Like the tankers... "

"That's tangle-gun, plastic," Sticky told her. "From war- game drills. You get hit by a tangle-gun, there's a funny stink while the plastic sets. Then it's like you're wrapped in barbed wire... .

He was lying. There were labs down here somewhere.

Somewhere off in the fungal darkness. She could feel it. That faint acid reek .. .

"These are the killing grounds," he said. "Where the invaders will pay. Not that we can stop them, any more than