Dinosaurs & A Dirigible Read online

  The police were blandly indifferent. The third Malaysian official got up from his hammock and smiled at nothing, watching the one-sided discussion out of the corners of his eyes.

  As Vickers reached the near margin of the road, Louise Mondadero put a restraining hand on the pilot’s arm. He broke away from her and stepped directly into the path of an oncoming flatbed. The truck’s engine was still lugging on the slight grade. The driver managed to stop short of the human obstruction without fishtailing.

  The pilot opened the cab door and shook his fist in the driver’s face. Following vehicles had to stop, creating a traffic jam in the middle of nowhere.

  A white mini-pickup pulled out from the end of the line. It accelerated toward the blockage.

  Vickers eyed the leading truck. The pilot had been saved from having to jump—or worse—by the fact this vehicle’s cargo consisted of four turboprop engines and skeletonized alloy girders, a bulky load but not especially heavy. When joined, the girders would form the framework of a gigantic aerostat to float pallets of logs from the jungle more efficiently than tractors could drag them. The next truck in line carried the folded gas bags and the tanks of pressurized gas for inflation.

  Vickers waited for the dust to settle—literally—before he joined the pilot and now Louise at the truck cab. The truck cast a gritty shroud forward when the driver braked his wheels. The cloud was reddish and opaque, more like a desert sandstorm than a human phenomenon.

  Of course the moonscape to which logging operations reduced the land was inhuman as well . . .

  Louise got the pilot down from the truck’s running board by a combination of cajoling and her actual weight dragging on his wrist and shoulder. The name tag pinned over the pilot’s left breast pocket read tom o’neill. He was a short man in his mid-twenties, with black curly hair and a handsome face now distorted by an Irish temper.

  Since the pilot was under control, Vickers turned to face the white pickup as it skidded to a stop. The driver and the two men in the open box were soldiers in dark green utility uniforms without markings of any kind. They carried Heckler & Koch submachine guns.

  The passenger in the cab wore a dark business suit and an open-necked silk shirt. A pale blue handkerchief matching the shirt protruded from his breast pocket in a neat triangle. The man’s hair was straight and black, and his dark Malay features would fit any age from Vickers’ forty to sixty or older.

  “Yes?” he said in English. “What is the trouble here, please?”

  “Are you in charge here?” O’Neill demanded. He wasn’t in the least cowed by the man facing him, which did nothing for Vickers’ opinion of the pilot’s common sense. The gunmen were cheap muscle, a type common in or out of uniform. The man in the suit was something else again, and a great deal more dangerous.

  “I am Mr. Nikisastro,” the man said. “I must ask you to leave my trucks alone, yes? Our permits are in order. If you—”

  O’Neill bunched his right hand into a fist. A soldier lifted his submachine gun to strike with the extended butt. Another racked back the bolt of his weapon to charge it for firing.

  Vickers grabbed the collar and shoulder of O’Neill’s shirt with his left hand and jerked the pilot backward. Vickers was only a little above medium height and slim, but there was deceptive strength in his flat muscles. He pivoted so that he stood with his back to the logging official and guards, facing O’Neill, whose shoulder he still gripped.

  “You Javan land-rapers have no business here!” O’Neill shouted. “All the forest here is controlled by the Borneo Scheme!”

  “We are not in the forest,” Nikisastro said. “And may I call to your attention the fact that your Borneo Scheme is not a government but rather a pact among several governments—of which mine is one. If you have a problem with our presence, your headquarters in New York should take it up with the proper officials in Jakarta—or with the government in Kuala Lumpur, since this is Malaysian territory.”

  “Tom,” said Louise Mondadero, “we have business to attend to. Let’s go. Now.”

  O’Neill grimaced. He swatted at Vickers’ hand. Vickers let go of the pilot and eased a half-step back.

  O’Neill had to let off steam somehow, and he’d calmed down enough that he wasn’t going to hit a man who might have him shot. Therefore he chose Vickers as a target, which was fine. That’s what the guide was for, to take the anger of paying customers so that they wouldn’t let it out on one another.

  Vickers supposed he was going to be paid for this. It wasn’t something he’d asked about when Louise called him in a panic across seventy degrees of longitude.

  “You think we don’t know what you’re doing, but we do!” O’Neill said. “And we’re going to stop you!”

  The trucks of the last half of the column were now jammed bumper to bumper, all the way down the last switchback before the border crossing. Diesel engines rumbled and pinged in a background as loud as ocean surf. There must be forty vehicles in all, counting those which had passed earlier.

  “Tom . . .” Louise said, but O’Neill was already on his way back to the tilt-rotor. Vickers and Mondadero followed the pilot.

  One of the guards called a gibe in Malay. Nikisastro silenced his man with a command as sharp as a whiplash. The first of the stopped trucks clashed back into gear.

  “Good to see you again, Louise,” Vickers said in a neutral voice.

  Louise stopped with her hand raised to lift herself into the aircraft’s cockpit. She laughed, took off her hat, and wiped beaded sweat from her face with the woven brim. “Henry, I’m glad to see you, too. Things are in a hell of a mess, a hell of a mess, but I’m really glad to see you.”

  She banged the cockpit door closed and walked around to the cabin to join Vickers instead. O’Neill lit his right turbine. Warm air puffed from the downturned exhaust.

  Louise clicked two adjacent seats out from the fuselage. Vickers strapped his satchel and gun case to the cargo net furled on the opposite side of the cabin. Louise looked over.

  “That’s all you brought?” she asked.

  “All I need,” Vickers agreed. “I was surprised that you were able to get me visas and permits so quickly. I had no trouble at all.”

  “That was the Scheme’s New York staff,” Louise said with a smile of pleasure. “Sometimes they make me crazy, but they’re really very good.”

  O’Neill had both turbines spinning. He looked back into the cabin. “Are you . . .” he began. He saw the gun case. “That’s your gun, is it, Vickers?” he said.

  Vickers nodded. “Yep,” he said. “I was telling Louise that I didn’t have the problem I expected getting it through the various customs.”

  “Too bad,” said O’Neill. “Well, maybe the baggage handlers will have broken it.”

  He turned back to the controls. The turbine whine increased to a throbbing howl. The tilt-rotor lifted straight up without the short run-out Vickers had expected. Vickers sighed. This wasn’t a new problem either. There was always somebody on a photo safari who didn’t understand how dangerous and unpredictable large animals could be. He, or more often she, objected to the rifle the guide carried just in case.

  But it wasn’t a problem Henry Vickers had expected in the present circumstances, when the beast being hunted was a tyrannosaur.

  The tilt-rotor swung smoothly into transition mode. The wings and the engine nacelles on their tips pivoted so that the props pulled the aircraft forward through the air rather than up into it. O’Neill didn’t have the sunniest personality of Vickers’ acquaintance, but his handling of the controls was deft. Vickers could forgive a lot if somebody did his job well.

  The tilt-rotor banked slightly to turn toward the standing forest. The highway formed one division of the Borneo Scheme, a ragged red pencil mark separating variegated two-hundred-foot treetops on one side from scrub and gullies on the other. The boundary was as obvious from the air as it would have been on a map.

  The Scheme was an intergovernmental compact.
Under its terms Malaysia, Brunei and Indonesia agreed to halt the destructive exploitation of much of the interior of Borneo in return for billions of dollars in development aid from the West. The money wasn’t a significant factor in the agreement of tiny, oil-rich Brunei, but its sultan enthusiastically supported the creation of an internationally administered buffer between Brunei and his larger neighbors.

  The forest canopy provided a deceptively even cap over broken terrain. When the protective cover was gone, heavy rainfalls ripped down the hillsides and clawed ravines through the soil.

  On the other side of the highway, the Borneo Scheme administered medical and biological research funded by the West, though there was no attempt to bar the indigenous natives. Nomads continued to wander and hunt in the rain forest as they had done for tens of thousands of years, and after debate the more settled farming tribes had been permitted to remain as well. So-called slash-and-burn agriculture as the natives practiced it was a sophisticated long-fallow system of successional farming which didn’t involve primary forest.

  The logging convoy had halted within a mile of the international border. The leading trucks had started to unload their heavy equipment. Vehicles escaping from the traffic jam snorted down the road to join them. Louise stared at the encampment through the cabin window opposite until the aircraft leveled out and hid the scene.

  Vickers pointed in the direction of the now-hidden laager. “What’s going on?” he asked, raising his voice to be heard.

  The tilt-rotor wasn’t noisy compared to the Buffalo which flew Vickers from Kuching—but the Buffalo sounded like the interior of a metal garbage can rolling down a rocky hillside. The tilt-rotor’s engines were inherently quiet, and in forward flight the props’ thrumming no longer reflected from the ground, but to save weight the cabin walls weren’t soundproofed.

  Louise grimaced. “Indonesian politics,” she said. “It’s the Javan Empire, really. This doesn’t have anything to do with us if it’s what I think it is. But we’re going to be in the middle of it anyway.”

  She turned to look out the window behind her, using the expanse of forest canopy to settle her mind. Vickers looked also, though from curiosity and to be companionable rather than because of any pleasure the sight gave him. The forest’s variety surprised him. There were a dozen identifiable shades of green, as well as patches of orange, red, and even violet. He didn’t know whether the latter were trees in bloom or simply flushes of new leaves which lacked the chlorophyll of mature growth.

  “Logging will start,” Louise said in the flat voice of a radiologist pointing out a cancerous mass to other physicians. “The Indonesians will move troops in under a claim of protecting the Borneo Scheme. Then their troops will take over the entire island before anyone can stop them.”

  She shrugged and wiped her eyes with the back of a hand. Vickers pointedly avoided looking directly at her. “What they really want is Brunei for the oil, of course, but they’ll take the rest as well. Eventually I suppose they’ll take the whole South Pacific.”

  “But that logging operation is Indonesian, isn’t it?” Vickers said in puzzlement. “That was what—”

  “Yes, clever, isn’t it?” Louise said bitterly. “If Malaysia does manage to react quickly enough to stop the logging, Indonesia will invade to protect its citizens from foreign brutality. Otherwise, Indonesia will invade as a guarantor of the Borneo Scheme. If it’s the latter case, there’s at least a chance that Jakarta will leave the Scheme in place after it’s absorbed the island. Less whatever Nikisastro has managed to strip, of course.”

  “I—” Vickers said. Gray haze spread across the forest immediately below: cloud, not smoke. They were crossing a hidden valley deep enough to trap water vapor even this late in the morning. The sight threw Vickers’ thoughts temporarily out of the course they had been following.

  “What do the Indonesians have to do with your tyrannosaurus escaping?” he resumed. The cloud below gave him an uneasy feeling even though it was not the mark of destruction he had first thought.

  “Nothing,” Louise said. “Except that bad luck never comes alone.”

  She gave a brittle, hacking laugh. “If it comes in threes, I can’t imagine what else is going to happen. Maybe an asteroid will hit Borneo.”

  The aircraft banked to port and began to circle. Vickers couldn’t see a landing strip below, but glinting metal drew his eyes. Chromed fittings fastened a network of solar collectors to the treetops. A road, visible as a linear pattern beneath the upper canopy, crossed through the same vicinity. Nearby was a circular clearing no more than a hundred feet in diameter. O’Neill pivoted the rotors upward into hover mode again.

  “Louise . . .” Vickers said as the tilt-rotor began its vertical descent. “We’ll get your tyrannosaurus, no problem. And for the rest, it’ll work out all right. Nowadays the world will never stand for the sort of flat-out invasion you’re worried about.”

  The aircraft settled past masses of leaves tufting out from branch tips. The cabin interior darkened because foliage cut off much of the light. The landing site was minimal even for the tilt-rotor. Vickers understood the desire to preserve the habitat being studied, but it seemed to him that the Scheme had carried the principle rather too far.

  Louise glared at Vickers. “Won’t stand for it, Henry?” she repeated. “The world stood for it when Javans massacred two hundred thousand ethnic Chinese, didn’t they? They stood for it when Javans machine-gunned unarmed civilians in Dili who were mourning victims of a previous army massacre. They stood it when Javans invaded West Irian and the Moluccas and killed any of the natives who protested. Oh, the world will stand for this too, never doubt!”

  They touched down so lightly that Vickers scarcely felt the landing-gear struts compress. Over the dying whine of the turbines, Vickers heard a brassy bong-bong-bong. He couldn’t tell whether the signal was animate or mechanical.

  “But I’ll worry about Nikisastro later,” Louise added, more mildly. “First we absolutely must recapture the tyrannosaur.”

  It was hot and muggy and the air didn’t move. Louise lifted the satchel before Vickers could stop her. He followed her out of the aircraft with the rifle case.

  O’Neill looked at Vickers with a grim smile. “Nice tan you’ve got,” the younger man said ironically. “You’ll lose it quick enough here, though. The rain forest is like nothing you’ve ever seen.”

  A house forty feet by twenty stood at one side of the clearing. It was of local construction, pole-framed with platform floors and a roof of leaf thatching. There were no walls. Very similar to those in the hinterlands of El Salvador . . .

  “I’ve seen rain forest,” Vickers said softly. “It was a long time ago, but I’ve seen it. I just didn’t like it very much.” Didn’t like the things he’d done there, rather, but the environment and the actions were bound together in Vickers’ memory. He wouldn’t let it make a difference.

  Louise was already inside, opening one of the large chests there. Natives—two men, three women, and a pair of ambulatory children plus a babe in the arms of its mother—appeared from the forest, chattering cheerfully. Vickers heard pigs squealing nearby and smelled the sharp pungency of hog feces.

  Louise and the pilot both began to talk with the natives. Vickers walked into the house and set his rifle case down on the table of poles lashed across the railings in one corner of the structure.

  The road Vickers had deduced from the air passed through the landing strip. At the margin of the forest near the point they joined stood a small metal shed and a four-hundred-gallon tank marked diesel fuel only, with a further legend below in Malay script. The cap was secured by a heavy padlock.

  Louise and O’Neill separated from the natives and returned to the shelter. “None of this would have happened if we hadn’t gotten involved in animal experimentation,” the pilot said.

  “That wasn’t our option, Tom,” Louise replied as she took a series of electronic devices from the chest she’d opened: satellite ph
one, fax, and notebook computer. “And besides, the treatment of AIDS would justify a greater compromise with my principles than what is in fact required.”

  Louise plugged each piece of equipment into a power strip on the end of an orange extension cord. Such low-draw devices couldn’t justify the extensive solar array Vickers had seen in the canopy. He wondered what else the station used electricity for.

  “So we’re whores and now we’re just haggling over price, is that it?” O’Neill gibed.

  Louise gave her subordinate a level glance. “Tom,” she said, “I have some messages to answer. While I’m doing that, would you please show Henry the compound and explain the situation to him.”

  The words formed a question which was absent from the flat tone. The implicit rebuke made O’Neill’s face squinch in something between a frown and a grimace. “Sure,” he muttered. “Come on, Vickers.”

  Vickers put his hat on, then took it off and tossed it onto the rifle case before he followed the younger man. Humidity and the enveloping green dimness made him nervous as a caged cat.

  “Look,” he said, “this really is a tyrannosaurus we’re going after? And you found it in the forest?”

  “No, no,” O’Neill said. “Or rather, yes, it’s a tyrannosaur, but it doesn’t come from here. Its natural habitat would be veldt or pine forest, nothing like this jungle.”

  They were following a path from the rear of the shelter. The undergrowth had been cut back within the past few days, but fresh shoots already stretched in from either side. Vickers couldn’t imagine how anything managed to germinate. There was scarcely more light than there would be in a cave.

  “That’s one of the reasons it’s so cruel to keep the beast here,” O’Neill said. “They did it just for secrecy. There was already a construction road here to Site IV, but the only westerners present were whoever came on the weekly run for the specimens the Punans—the forest nomads—had collected. Louise and I now split the runs between us, so nobody else in the Scheme knows anything about it. In the field, that is. Some of them do in New York, of course. It was New York’s idea.”