The Apocalypse Troll

"Did you bring a copy of your map?" Wilkins tried to keep his voice as normal and professional as possible.

"Here." She produced a photocopied map and unfolded it on his desk, tracing the rough circle she'd scribed upon it. It was centered on the North Carolina-Te

"See?" she said. "Why should rural West Virginia or southern Ohio exhibit exactly the same pattern as Atlanta or Columbia, South Carolina? And if Columbia's going crazy, why isn't Raleigh? Or Charleston? And do you see how the incidence just stops at the edge of the circle?" He nodded silently, and she went on with quiet urgency.

"There's something else I don't think many of the locals have had enough data to notice, Dolf. A new organization. It's so well hidden we still don't even know its name, but it's there, and its members use a really weird 'secret' identification symbol: a skeleton on a white horse."

"A what?" Wilkins blinked in confusion.

"A skeleton on a horse," DuChamps repeated, then shrugged. "I know, it doesn't make any sense. Doesn't relate to any known group's symbology, as far as we can determine. Weirdest of all, it definitely seems linked to all this racial unrest, but it appears to be more of an anarchist group, and we've identified members from several different races. And," she added more grimly, "it's violent as hell. The North Carolina SBI seems to have lost a four-man undercover team that got too close to just one member of whatever it is."

She shook her head slowly, stroking her folder.

"I don't know what's going on, Dolf, but some one outfit is pulling the strings. There's a common thread, some strategy I can't quite put my finger on. You just don't get this sort of pattern without someone creating it. I couldn't prove it in court, but that's the only explanation that even half-way makes sense-only that's crazy, too!"

"Maybe, Alley," he said, then paused; Allison DuChamps did not possess the critical alpha spike. He cleared his throat. "Keep an eye on it and put your pla

"We need more than that, Dolf," she said. "Recruiting rallies are starting to pop up-big ones, with some ominous alliances behind them. The KKK and the Nazi Party plan to formalize something called the 'Appalachian White People's Alliance' at a joint rally in Asheville this week, and that's just the start of it. Rumbles of opposition rallies by nonwhite militants are already turning up, too, and if something breaks, we won't begin to have the manpower to deal with it on a reaction basis. We've got to put somebody inside, see if we can't get a handle on who's setting it up. And we've got to do it fast."

"I'm inclined to agree," he lied, "but give me a little while to think about it. And leave me a copy of the map, if you can."

"Certainly. This is your copy of my report." She laid the folder on his desk and headed for the door, then paused and looked back. "But, Dolf," she said softly, "don't think too long, okay?"

"Okay, Alley," he said, never taking his eyes from the map.

"Good."

The door closed behind her, and he reached for his phone the instant the latch clicked. He punched in a long-distance number and waited, fingers drumming nervously on the desk, until it was answered.

"Commander Morris?" He spoke quickly, urgently. "Dolf Wilkins. Look, don't get your hopes up, but I think we've found Grendel... . Yes, that's right, found him. Well, within thirty or forty square miles, anyway." He paused and listened for a long, taut moment. "Bet your sweet ass I can," he said with a savage grin. "I'll grab Stan Loren and be there within two hours if I have to carry the damned plane on my back!"

A bevy of tilt-rotor MV-22 Ospreys swooped out of the hot September sun in a hurricane of dust and flying debris to disgorge the first echelon of Company T. The fixed-wing planes had come roaring in at three hundred knots, then slowed sharply and rotated their wingtip engines through ninety degrees to descend vertically. Side and rear cargo hatches opened before they touched down, and three fully equipped squads stormed out of each aircraft, heading for preselected firing positions. They carried their usual personal weapons, M249 SAW (Squad Automatic Weapon) machine guns, and an astoundingly high number of antiarmor weapons. In addition to extra issues of the single-shot Predator SRAW (Short Range Assault Weapon) which had replaced the AT-4 and the even older LAW (Lightweight Anti-Armor Weapon) as the standard light antitank weapon of the Corps, each platoon contained an extra antiarmor squad equipped with three Dragon heavy man-portable tank-killer launchers equipped with the new Superdragon II fire-and-forget missile upgrade which had become standard Army issue but had not yet reached the Corps.

Rear Admiral Richard Aston watched Major Abernathy's men deploy, racing through the waist-high grass while their aircraft lifted out to clear the landing zone. The moment the LZ was clear, C-130Js rumbled in just above the ground to drop palletized eight-wheeled LAVs (Light Armored Vehicles) with their turreted, twenty-five-millimeter autoca

He glanced at his stopwatch, then at Ludmilla. They'd managed to shave off another few seconds, but in a sense they were just marking time. They had no idea what sort of terrain or tactical situation would obtain when they finally found the Troll, so they were ru

He looked up, frowning, as the whacking sound of fresh rotors came from behind. They were ru

The Blackhawk transport came over a rise, headed directly towards them, then flared and settled like a giant, dust-breathing dragonfly, glittering in the hot sunlight under a whining halo of rotor blades.

Aston and Ludmilla turned curiously to watch the hatch open, but when a familiar, pudgy form in the uniform of a Navy commander jumped out their curiosity became tension. They glanced at one another and then, without a word, moved quickly to meet him.

Morris waded through the grass towards them, waving for them to wait where they were, and they stopped. He toiled over to them, sweating heavily in the heat, and his expression was taut.

"Mordecai! What are you doing here?" Ludmilla demanded before Aston could get a word in.

"It's Grendel," Morris said in a low, fierce voice. "We've got him, Milla! We've pi

"I don't know, Mordecai," Aston said unhappily, rubbing his bald pate while he stared down at the map on which Morris and Jayne Hastings had further refined Allison DuChamps's data. They'd narrowed the possible area to a circle no more than ten miles across and plotted it on a large-scale topographical map, but it was a rough ten miles. "Okay, I agree he has to be more or less in here-" he tapped the circle in which the lines co