Once they'd crossed the Canadian border, Lampi reduced their altitude. Then, over a section of shore away from any road or habitation, he turned off the De Haviland's running lights and swung eastward over Lake Superior. Soon he was flying at less than a hundred feet, the ice beneath them transparent over night-black water, looking as if it could not possibly stand the weight of a landing plane.
Jerry Connor peered out a cabin window and sorted his responses to the situation. He felt alert and intense, yet calm. His body, overall, felt excitement, anticipation. There seemed to be no fear—not as he'd known fear in the past. His stomach and bowels were reasonably calm.
For a while they flew almost parallel to the island at what Jerry decided must be a distance of eight or ten miles. Then the plane banked, dropped lower, and briefly flew straight at it before Lampi cut back the engine and landed smoothly on the ice. For the next fifteen minutes they taxied, Lampi reducing their speed and sound as they drew nearer to the island, which now loomed as a fronting ridge, darkened with forest.
To Jerry the term cove meant a small bay with a wide opening to the sea. McCargo Cove, however, resembled a great ax cut through the fronting ridge, a narrow cleft between rocky bluffs. In the cove, the ice was old and snow-covered. As they taxied slowly up the cove's two-mile length, he watched for whatever might be seen, but especially for any sign of watchers—the embers of a fire, the spark of a cigarette, a movement among the trees. There were none of these. Finally he saw a concrete dock ahead, jutting out from the beach, its snowcap showing the depth of snow here. It lay about three feet thick, he judged.
A short distance past it, at the head of the cove, Lampi stopped the plane, came back through the cabin, and undogged the door. "This is it," he told them, and stood waiting. Frank and Paul jumped out, sinking crotch-deep, and tramped down a small patch of snow for a place to unload gear. The others handed the packs out, along with the snowshoes, then got out themselves. Lampi got out last, his face sober.
It didn't seem terribly cold, but Jerry could feel his nostril-hairs stiffen as they froze, tugging slightly at his nasal membranes.
"Look," said Lampi, "I ain't going back to Duluth tonight. It's too damn far, and I'm worried for you guys. I'd stay right here, but I'd be a sitting duck—no good to anyone except for a target. So I'll wait at Grand Portage, half an hour from here. If everything goes okay, radio me when you're ready to start back, and I'll meet you right here. But if you get in trouble and got to run for it, you might want to head south through the bush, down Greenstone Ridge, and follow the creek down to Siskiwit Lake. I can be there before you are, and pick you up."
"Right," said Vic, then surprised the Finn-Indian with a hug.
And he's grinning, Jerry thought, observing the psychic. Is he that confident? Faking seemed out of character for Vic, and it occurred then to Jerry that it was neither confidence nor a front. The man would go all out to win, but he could have it either way, win or lose! He really could.
And it occurred further to Jerry that he didn't feel all that heavy about it either—which he found remarkable, considering what they were trying to accomplish and what might easily be waiting for them.
Lampi was hugged by each of them in turn, then they watched him get back in the De Haviland and taxi slowly away. It was reassuring that the plane was so quiet at that speed.
The cold was beginning to penetrate their heavy clothes; it was time to start moving. Diacono knelt, putting on first his snowshoes, then his pack, the others following his example. When they were ready, Frank led off. Even though he wore forty-inch trail shoes, he sank halfway to his knees, breaking trail for the others. He carried the biggest pack, too, a bulky Duluth pack with Vic's sleeping gear and the radio Lampi had rented them, along with his own stuff.
The night was perfectly still, and they walked through a cloud of their own breath. Jerry brushed at his eyes with a thick mitten, then realized that what he was brushing at was moisture from his breath, frozen on his eyelashes. He turned to look back at Vic, following him; the man's bristly brows were frosted, his grizzled black beard already coated white with rime. This was, Jerry decided, something to tell his grandchildren about—if he lived to have any.
The trail left the cove, plunging into forest, paralleling a strip of brushy swamp where a snow-covered creek could be glimpsed, with occasional small beaver ponds. After a bit they passed through a dense alder swamp on a trail consisting of planks laid end to end on low trestles, so narrow it was difficult even to snowshoe across. Snowshoeing at all had been awkward at first, but not as difficult as he'd thought it might be. His body, even his hands, had warmed with the exertion, and before long the showshoe stride became automatic, invigorating, the feel of the silent forest strange and beautiful. He decided he'd like to do this in the future, as sport—assuming they salvaged the present reality.
Jerry's sense of time became strange: Subjectively, much or little could have passed, though he suspected it might have been an hour when Chickenbone Lake came into sight ahead on their left. They all looked at it as they mushed along, but no one spoke. Then, near where the trail left the lake, Frank stopped them with a gesture, and pointed. Jerry's gaze followed the pointing arm to a low, white, domelike tent, about fifteen feet in diameter, humped among birch trees beside the trail, perhaps a hundred and fifty feet ahead.
Together they gazed at it, hardly breathing. Its unobtrusive presence carried a sense of silent threat, and without a word, Frank led them from the trail to circle past it out of sight.
Yet even the feeling of threat had not sparked strong fear in Jerry Connor, or, Jerry sensed, in any of them. But there was alarm: Their mission was to disconnect the surprise generator, and here was threat of failure.
And he could sense other feelings there, which he sorted among as he snowshoed between tall slender aspens. Part of what he sensed, he realized—part of what he felt as threat—was the varied emotions of their intended murderers, of men waiting to kill who had not even created a rationale for their act. It was a subtle psychic miasma blended of apathy and hostility, with an overlay of glee.
Correctly identified, it lost what effect it had had on Jerry Connor, became a datum.
In silent unity, the six threaded their way among trees, around sapling thickets, through brush, each alert, feeling the night. Shortly, Frank led them back to the trail, and almost at once it began to climb.
Gracco had worked furiously, contracting with a suitably criminal chopper contractor, selecting suitable personnel from the men Olson referred him to, then getting everyone equipped and briefed for the ambush. The men were a mixed lot—some good, some only adequate. One requirement was experience on snowshoes, which drastically reduced the supply of eligibles, for most young hoods known to the Olson machine were city-bred.
Shark had been riding the grid. At that stage there was nothing to monitor, of course, but he was available and on watch. Mostly he chewed his nails, figuratively, reviewing his mistakes, fearful that Merlin would still somehow make it. As the gridman now, he would know instantly if the surprise generator was taken off-line; he would feel it psychically through the matrix.
Finally, the preparations had been complete. Gracco had landed his ambush parties, and still the surprise generator was emitting its pulses of chaos. It became possible then for Gracco, and especially for Shark, to take a deep breath; the odds seemed heavily in their favor again.
But Merlin had fooled them too often, and neither Gracco nor Shark had relaxed. Gracco stayed at Lake Harvey with the mobile strike force, while Shark, riding the grid, had spent the last eighteen hours with his viewpoint 500 feet above Greenstone Ridge, at a point a mile east of the gate. From there he would be able to see a plane miles away, approaching any of the feasible, or even unfeasible landing lakes from any direction. And if he could not hear with his own ears, he remained psychically attuned to the hearing of Gracco, even when Gracco was asleep, alert for any sound of a plane.
For eighteen hours Shark had watched, and nothing had happened. It was hard to stay awake and alert, and twice he had dozed, for moments only, wakening with a start and a thudding heart. Caffeine tablets had been of little avail. If something didn't happen soon, he might have to try Hardman's amphetamines, something he hated to do because they impaired the judgment.
He paused in his orderly scanning of the night to look at the distant lights of Thunder Bay, Ontario, some thirty miles north. That wild Canadian shore seemed to him a strange place for a city of a hundred thousand. But minerals and natural harbors were wherever the matrix put them, he reminded himself, and man was hungry for both. The business of minerals was itself a major game for beings to play, with many roles, as well as being a necessary background element for most other games on the Tikh Cheld Matrix.
Shark resumed his scanning then, rotating his viewpoint clockwise away from Thunder Bay, around to the east, the south, the west, with nothing to see in any of those directions except night and nature. No sign of man, no plane, no lights except the silent stars in a sky from which all moisture had been frozen.
What caused him to direct his viewpoint downward then, he did not know, but look downward he did. And below him in the starlight he saw what had not been there before—tracks, the tracks of snowshoes along one of the windswept openings that make up much of the crest of Greenstone Ridge. For a moment his heart seemed to stop, as fear gripped within his chest. Then his intention kicked in, and he swept his viewpoint westward along the trail while his panicked mind trumpeted an alarm to Gracco.
The six were in a wooded saddle when they felt it, though only Vic and Ole knew at once what they felt. Just ahead was another stretch of open crest.
"We've been found," Vic said quietly. "Or our tracks have. Not by someone on the ground; it's our monitor again."
"Vic," said Ole, "you know best v'at to do inside the gate. You sving down through the voods vith Frank and Paul. The rest of us vill go ahead on the trail v'ere he can see us easier. Maybe he'll vatch us and von't see you."
No one argued. Ole's group went on, Jerry leading them, breaking trail out into the opening, hoping that night and the leafless crowns of birch and aspen would hide the other group from above. Meanwhile, it couldn't be too much farther to the gate, and on the open crest, the windslab let them walk faster.
Shark saw the three move into the open and felt a surge of exultation. This find too he called to Gracco. But there should be two or three more down there somewhere. There had to be, and they too had to be stopped. So he reached to find them, not just looking with the remote viewpoint but reaching out himself, psychically.
In that act of reaching, he was vulnerable, and they hit him, those invisible enemies he had not known of, and at that moment he realized what had happened to Hardman. Shark was stronger than Hardman had been, and lashed back violently, but they were too many, coming at him on too many vectors. For several seconds he fought, then jumped from the grid seat to sprawl wet and shaking on the floor.
With Shark's first psychic yell, Gracco had shouted, waking his men, who'd been sleeping fully clothed in their arctic tent. The pilot and copilot scurried out and started their engine, already warmed electrically by a gas-powered generator. They made a swift pre-flight check while Gracco and his two gunners secured for flight. Then the machine swung up from the snow cover on Lake Harvey's edge. Meanwhile, the second call had come from Shark, and immediately afterward a confusion of psychic violence that had driven Gracco's attention back; after that, Shark's presence had been gone.
"Where to?" said the pilot as they lifted.
"They're on top of Greenstone Ridge," Gracco said. "East of point zero. They got by us somehow; I guess my observer never saw their plane."
But how? Gracco wondered. He'd had a sound pickup outside the tent on a tree trunk. They should have heard.
He directed the pilot toward the location of the second call, a location which the call had psychically imprinted on him. It took only three minutes to get a sighting—of three figures half running along the ridge crest, somewhat strung out. Gracco didn't know whether they were in the neutral zone or not, but he didn't hesitate. The two gunners were already leaning out the doors in their safety harnesses, grotesque in bulky arctic coveralls, their masks and gloves electrically heated, heavy automatic rifles in their hands. He ordered them to shoot.
The chopper swung across the snowshoers' path and paused, the sound of an automatic rifle a counterpoint to the racket of engine and vanes. Bullets churned the snow around the targets, and Gracco craned in the cockpit, trying to see the results. The graceless craft pivoted almost in place, rotating to let the gunner on the other side fire his magazine, then pivoted again.
Below, all three figures were down. The one who'd been in the lead tried briefly to get up, then fell back. Gracco ordered his gunners to continue, nonetheless; this time he would not be outfoxed.
Frank had led Vic and Paul some distance down the ridge into forest, curving through soft powdery snow and a patchy undergrowth of young conifers, making considerably less speed than the three on the crest. They heard the chopper, then the firing, afterward dimly glimpsing the machine, like some ungainly Jurassic reptile flying through the night. Frank did not need to ask Vic. He knew. Ole was dead, and Carol, and Jerry; he could feel it. And despite knowing what he'd come to know about the nature of death, he felt loss, and momentary anger.
He slowed only long enough to shed his pack, the others following his example, then lowered his head and snowshoed on as fast as he was able, leaving Vic and Paul to keep up as best they could. Paul was very strong and almost heedless of fatigue, but in mediocre condition. Vic was lean and wiry, but he was more than fifty, and a smoker. Both had tired severely over the miles. Now they dug in, pushing themselves in the wake of Diacono's powerfully driving legs.
Gracco strained as if effort could enable him to see better. The ones they'd killed must have been a lead group; there were no tracks ahead of them. The others must have fallen behind. He backtracked a mile before he realized what had happened, and ordered the pilot to turn west again. Along here the south slope was the gentlest, the side the others had probably taken, and they flew along it at low speed. Gracco told the gunners what they were looking for, and all eyes sought to penetrate the shadows of the leafless canopy.
And they might indeed have sighted them, had it not been for the numerous young firs and spruces standing black beneath the naked aspen and birch.
The chopper flew as far as the gate, then swung back. In a glade, Gracco spied the quarry's snowshoe trail, called for another turn, and told the gunners to fire at random into the woods.
Frank heard the renewed firing and looked back toward Vic and Paul. They were in sight, not far behind; Vic paused and waved Frank on. The chopper made its next turn just ahead, and again the blind firing on the return swing was behind them, but near enough that they could hear slugs clipping branches, hitting tree trunks. Frank lowered his head and continued. Twenty seconds later the chopper came back again; there was more gunfire, but now Vic was waving him to go up the ridge.
Angling toward the crest, Diacono broke heedlessly out of cover into an opening with only scattered scrub birch and young spruce. He was seen almost at once, and once more the chopper swung around, coming at him low. Again the guns played their drumbeat of death, but no bullet struck him, though the snow churned all around. He paused to stare as the machine circled, and saw Vic and Paul surging up behind. Somehow Vic was grinning, even as he gasped for breath.
Then Frank knew. The guardian was protecting them, as Vic had thought he would if they got close enough—got within those ridiculous welcome legalities of the Tikh Cheki Matrix which applied around gates.
He let Vic and Paul catch up, and they stood there in a joined cloud of their own heavy breathing, watching the helicopter circle, watching the snow churn around them again. Then the chopper drew off, and they looked at each other. Vic was grinning, and Frank was surprised that he too felt no anger.
"You lead," he said to Vic. "I still don't know just where the gate is."
Shark stayed on the floor of the grid room for several minutes, then got up and staggered into the adjacent bathroom, where he was repeatedly sick. His head hurt fiercely, his face felt like an inflated balloon, and he trembled violently. When he was able to return, he got weakly into the grid seat but did not at once reconnect with the search. Huddled like an old man, he dialed a Coke. A tray extruded from a service cabinet beside him, the drink on ice, and Shark drank avidly, then sat gathering his willingness.
At last he sat back, pushed reset, typed in the general coordinates, then view. His viewpoint returned to a location far above Lake Superior, zoomed down to overview the central section of Isle Royale from a mile up, then zoomed down again to 300 feet above the gate. Snowshoeing toward it were three figures, while the helicopter circled well away. Shark realized with dull shock that the quarry—the dream wreckers!—had escaped into the neutral zone. He watched until they stopped, almost directly beneath his viewpoint.
That was it. They were at the gate. There was nothing further he could do except wait and hope—hope that they could not carry out what they were there to do.