SIX PEOPLE WERE ATTIRED in tricolor desert-camouflage BDUs and thick-soled, tan jump boots. All of them carried abbreviated Copperhead subguns attached to combat webbing over their field jackets. Under two feet long, with a 35 4.85 mm steel-jacketed rounds. The grip and trigger units were placed in front of the breech in the bullpup design, allowing one-handed use.
Optical image intensifier scopes and laser autotargeters were mounted on the top of the frames. Low recoil allowed the Copperheads to be fired in long, devastating, full-auto bursts. Four members of Team Alpha also carried XM-29 assault rifles.
Grant strode up to Gray and stared down at him, his eyes shadowed by heavy, overhanging brows. He towered six feet five inches tall in his thick-soled jump boots, and his shoulders spread out on either side of a thickly tendoned neck like massive planks, straining at the seams of his field jacket.
Although he looked too huge and thick-hewn to have many abilities beyond brute strength, Grant was an exceptionally intelligent and talented man. Behind the fierce, deep-set eyes, the down-sweeping mustache, black against the dark brown of his skin, granite jaw and broken nose lay a mind rich with tactics, strategies and painful experience. Like Kane, he had lived a great deal of his life surrounded by violence. He had been shot, stabbed, battered, beaten, burned, buried and once very nearly suffocated on the surface of the Moon.
Kane nodded to Gray. “Gray, this is Grant. Grant, this is Gray.”
“I know who he is,” Gray snapped. “The consortium is very thorough when it comes to identifying its enemies.”
Grant regarded him with no particular emotion on his face. In his lionlike growl he intoned, “All of you millennialists look like you were mass-produced. Same build, same haircuts.”
“And you usually say the same things when we meet any millennialists,” said a well-modulated female voice, purring with an undercurrent of humor.
“I almost forgot.” Grant nodded to Gray and said almost apologetically, “I hate you guys.”
Brigid Baptiste stepped between Grant and Kane, gazing down at Gray with bright emerald eyes. She was a tall woman with a fair complexion. Her mane of red-gold hair fell down her back in a long sunset-colored braid to the base of her spine. Like the other members of CAT Alpha, she wore desert camouflage. A TP-9 autopistol was snugged in a cross-draw rig strapped around her waist.
Kneeling down beside Gray, she lifted the lid of a square medical kit. “I think we can dress your injury a bit more properly.”
Gray gave her a beseeching look of gratitude. “Something for the pain, too, please. I’m really hurting.”
“I don’t doubt it,” Brigid replied sympathetically. She busied herself with the contents of the kit, then paused. “Of course, you’ll have to give me something in return.”
The expression of gratitude on Gray’s face turned to resentment. “Like what?”
“What do you think, dipshit?” Edward barked. The ex-Mag from Samariumville marched forward and prodded Gray roughly in the ribs with a boot.
“Information.”
Edwards, whose head was shaved, wasn’t as tall as Grant, but he was almost as broad, with overdeveloped triceps, biceps and deltoids. He usually served as the commander of CAT Alpha in the absence of Kane and Grant.
“I don’t know anything,” Gray retorted. “I’m just a grunt.”
“That’s the pat response we expected,” Grant rumbled. “I’m sure you can guess our response.”
He positioned his right boot over Gray’s bandaged ankle and, balancing on his heel, slowly began exerting downward pressure.
Gray swallowed hard. “Okay, okay.”
Grant lifted his foot, but kept the thickly treaded sole hovering over the millennialist’s ankle. “Okay what?”
“If you’re here at all, you probably know as much as I do about the operation.”
Kane repressed the urge to exchange meaningful glances with Brigid and Grant. In truth, Cerberus knew very little. The information about sudden and suspicious activity on the outskirts of the little settlement near Los Alamos had reached them by the most inefficient of means—by word of mouth.
The information had been conveyed along a chain of Roamer bands until it finally reached the ears of Sky Dog in Montana. He in turn had brought it to the Cerberus redoubt, cloistered atop a mountain peak in the Bitterroot Range.
“Tell us what you know, anyway,” Brigid said smoothly.
Gray gestured vaguely in the direction of the sand dunes and mesas. “You’re familiar with the mandate of the consortium, right?”
Grant nodded brusquely. “Yeah. To dig out old predark tech, polish it up and try to figure out a way to use it to enslave your fellow human beings.”
Gray frowned at him. “If you want to believe that about us, go ahead. It’s not true, but keep on believing it if it’ll make you feel better.”
“Thanks,” Grant retorted. “I will.”
“Get back to the subject,” Kane said impatiently.
“Like for instance, why were you patrolling out here with a silenced weapon?”
Fear flickered in Gray’s eyes. “We didn’t want to draw attention if we had to shoot at something.”
“Whose attention?”
Gray shifted uncomfortably, fingering the bandage around his ankle.
“Whose attention?” Kane asked again, a steel edge in his voice.
Gray inhaled deeply through his nostrils, fixed an unblinking gaze on Kane’s face and whispered, “The ghost-walkers.”
Chapter 3
“What the hell does that mean?” Kane demanded.
Mr. Gray swallowed the pentazocine tablet handed to him by Brigid before answering, “I don’t really know much. Just what I was told.”
“Which was?” Grant challenged.
“We’ve had reports from the locals that when anybody starts digging around Phantom Mesa, ghosts show up.”
“Ghosts?” echoed Brigid, casting glance over her shoulder at the rock formations. “Which one is Phantom Mesa?”
“Third from the left…your left. The reports say the ghosts walk around like they’re guarding the place. Supposedly they even kill people who defy their orders to leave.”
“Folklore,” Brigid stated matter-of-factly. “The whole history of the Southwest is a patchwork of legends and superstitions.”
Mr. Gray flashed her a fleeting, appreciative smile. “That’s what our section chief thought, too. But I figure it’s called Phantom Mesa for a reason, right?”
The
