The Apocalypse Troll

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

"I don't know what they're going to do! But whatever it is, I don't have enough men to stop them." Bill McCoury, Buncombe County's sheriff, glowered at Jeremiah Willis and Hugh Campbell, Asheville's Chief of Police.

"Bill's right, Jerry." Campbell rubbed his eyes wearily, then replaced his glasses and regarded the mayor levelly. "Neither of us do. I'd hoped refusing them a permit would stop them, but it didn't. As for this-" he waved a copy of the court injunction against any assembly "in Buncombe County, in the State of North Carolina, by the Appalachian White People's Alliance and/or the Ku Klux Klan and/or the American Nazi Party and/or any individual members of those organizations, however styled" "-I don't see any way to enforce it. Not without an awful lot more manpower."

"I know." Willis sighed. "All right. I guess we all knew it had to start somewhere. I'll call the Governor."

"Mordecai?" Morris looked grubbier than ever, and he felt it as he looked up and saw Jayne Hastings-as immaculate as ever-in the door of his office. At least he had an excuse; he hadn't stopped moving, one way or another, in the thirty-six hours since his return from Camp Lejeune.

"Yes, Jayne?" He waved at a chair heaped in computer printouts, and she moved them carefully to the floor before she sat. "What have you got?"

"I'm not positive," she said. "Has Milla gone up yet?"

"She's due to go tomorrow-if Dick doesn't convince himself he can't afford to risk her." Morris shook a cigarette from a pack. "Why?"

"We swung one of the Hydra multi-sensor birds to cover the Southeast last night. Exhausted her maneuvering mass to do it, too. I've been looking over the data." She shook her head. "It's amazing what the new systems can do."

"I know." Morris nodded. "I don't have your technical background, but I'm always amazed by how steadily the quality of satellite data keeps going up."

"Well, I think I found something," Hastings told him, and he leaned forward over his desk.

"What?"

"Look." She laid an oddly murky photo on his littered blotter and adjusted his desk lamp carefully. "See this?"

She used a pencil as a pointer, tapping with the eraser. Morris leaned a little closer and saw a bright, hair-thin line that snaked across the photo and ended in a small, crescent-shaped smear of equal brightness.

"That," Hastings told him, "is the road up Sugarloaf Mountain. It's not much of one-only one lane of macadam to an abandoned logging area."

"So?" he asked.

"The brightness," Hastings said, "is heat, M&M. Lots of heat."

"Heat?" He frowned. "Sunlight soaked up during the day?"

"No way. First, there's too much of it. Second, a lot of this road's pretty heavily shaded. See these brighter sections? They're from direct sunlight, all right, but this almost equally bright section here's an oblique into an area under heavy tree cover. Nope, Mordecai. Only one thing could account for this-" her eraser tapped the second area for emphasis "-and that's traffic. Lots of traffic."

"What sort of traffic?"

"I don't know, but it was headed here." She drew out another photo, this one in bright, artificial colors-obviously a computer-generated and enhanced enlargement of a portion of the first. The thin line was a broad ribbon, and the crescent at its end had refined itself into several regularly spaced heat sources.

"These are buildings in an installation of some sort," she said quietly. "A good-sized one, judging by the number of people we're picking up." Her eraser tapped again, indicating a dusting of tiny, individual heat sources scattered about the buildings. "They're moving around too much for us to get a hard count, even with the Hydra's IR sensors, but there are lots of them. And look at this." She laid out another photo, this one of peaceful green trees, just begi

"No."

"You should. It's a daylight shot of exactly the same area, and a lot of traffic went into it. According to this one-" she indicated the computer generated enlargement again "-it stayed, too. As I say, we can't get a hard point source count, but our minimum estimates puts hundreds of people in the area-hundreds, Mordecai. So where are they?"

"Hmmm." Morris took a powerful magnifying glass from his drawer and examined the bland photo minutely. "I don't see a thing," he confessed.

"Neither can any of the photo analysts," she agreed, pulling out yet another computer print, "so we did this spectroscopic shot on the next pass." The blur of colors told Morris absolutely nothing, but the light in her green eyes said it told Hastings a lot. "This area here-" her eraser circled and then stabbed "-is the same area as the IR shot, and it doesn't match its surroundings." Morris looked up at her, and she gave him a thin, sharklike smile. "It's a fake, Mordecai. All this greenery here-" she tapped again "-is a fake."

Morris was silent for a long moment, looking back and forth between the photos while his mind raced.

"You're positive?" he asked eventually, and she nodded.

"Something else turned up on the enlargement, too. Look here." She drew his attention back to the infrared shot. "See this little dot?" He nodded again. "That's up the mountain above the installation, and it's another hot spot. Intermittent-it only shows on a few of the shots-and a lot smaller and cooler than the others. Not only that, the vegetation on the slope is exactly the same kind of fake as the rest of it."

Morris rubbed his nose as he pondered. The regularly spaced oblongs of heat formed a horseshoe-shaped arc, its ends sweeping back to touch the steep mountain face on either side of the small heat source. Like a shield, he thought. A shield hiding what? And composed of whom?

"What do you make of it, Jayne?" he asked finally.

"It could be lots of things, I suppose, but that's part of Pisgah National Forest, and according to the records, there's nothing there at all. My opinion? It's a military camp. The point sources are way too dense for a good count, but there could be an entire battalion in there."

"A battalion?" Morris shook his head, trying to clear it. "Damn." He thought for a moment longer, then reached for the secure phone and started punching numbers. The phone at the far end was answered quickly.

"This is Commander Morris," he said. "Get me Admiral Aston."

"They're right, Governor," Melvyn Ta

"I know." Governor Farnam toyed with the pen stand on his desk. "But if we call out the Guard, we show just how alarmed we are. I purely hate giving a bunch of racist psychos that much satisfaction," the great-great-grandson of one of his state's largest slave-owners said grimly.

"Maybe so, but it's your responsibility to maintain order and protect public safety when the local authorities can't."

"All right," Farnam said finally. "Draw up the proclamation. And get me a line to the Justice Department."

"What do you make of it, Milla?" Aston asked. The two of them were bent over a table studying the photos Morris had transmitted to them by secure land line.

"I think it's him." Ludmilla spoke with obvious restraint, controlling her own exhilaration. "It fits."

"But where'd he get the manpower?"

"Dick, you've seen the kind of hate he can whip up. If he can do that, why can't he recruit a small, elite force under his direct control?"