Thunderstorms stalked the night over northwestern Komars, and wind lashed the forest. The civilian-clad troopers were soaked but not much chilled. They'd been alternately jogging and walking the forest road they followed, and the exertion warmed them. It was a good road, a major forest road, wide enough that, at night, light reached it from the sky. They could make out its edges and avoid the ditches on each side.
It was their second night on the march. They'd holed up during the day, laid low in a dense stand of young growth. They weren't ready to be seen yet. They'd already broken up into three groups, to find and follow three different roads east. This group was the larger, two squads, led by Lieutenant Mesvik.
Mesvik whistled a signal, and the men slowed to a brisk walk. Thunder rolled like some great bowling ball across the sky, to be answered by another, and another. Trees thrashed, genuflecting before the wind.
Varky Graymar paused for a moment on the shoulder to relieve his bladder; he could catch up easily enough. As he stood refastening his pants, lightning split the sky overhead, striking a tall tree, shattering it while thunder burst the night. The top snapped out. Pieces flew. The branchy top, hurled by the wind, crashed through other treetops and fell onto the roadside. A limb struck Varky, knocking him unconscious beneath it.
It had been no passing convection storm. An unseasonable cool air mass had moved in, undercutting muggy, unstable air, and the storm had continued for hours. Near dawn it blew over, and the lesser moon shone through the trees, though they still dripped. The jogging troopers looked forward to the sun and a chance to get dry. Dawn had paled the eastern sky when they came to the forest's edge, and Mesvik called a halt. In front of them was farmland, open and nearly level.
"This is where we split up," he said. "You know your partners, and your order of march. Urkwal and Graymar, when the sun comes up . . ." He paused. "Where's Graymar?" There was a looking about among the troopers. Mesvik looked back down the road and raised his voice. "Graymar?"
Nothing. "Anyone got a clue where Graymar is?" No one answered. "When's the last time anyone noticed him?"
It turned out that no one had since he and Urkwal had talked on a break before the storm began. In the storm and heavy darkness, the men had talked scarcely at all with each other, and mostly couldn't see who jogged or walked beside them.
"All right," Mesvik said. "Immeros, you and Smit will lead off instead. The rest of us will move off to the south a hundred yards or so and try to get some rest in the edge of the woods. Urkwal, go back up the road and find Graymar. If you haven't found him by ten o'clock, come back. If all of us have left when you get here, catch a nap and carry through with your orders. That's it. Go."
Urkwal acknowledged and jogged off. Mesvik watched him leave. Not a promising start, the lieutenant told himself. Interesting but not promising.
When the sun rose high enough, it aligned with the road and shone down on Winn Urkwal's pack, and the back of his leathery neck. He hiked on, jogging enough to keep warm. A truck passed him headed east, loaded with logs, and after a while another. Later he heard a vehicle coming headed west, cut off from view by the brow of a low hill behind him. On an impulse he left the road, hurrying to cover behind a sapling thicket. It passed him, a sky-blue carryall with a decal on the front door. He returned to the road then and continued. Shortly a log truck passed empty, also headed west. Urkwal simply stepped off the road for it.
Minutes later he heard another vehicle coming, from ahead this time, and again he hid, now behind a convenient roadside deck of logs. It was the same carryall as before, traveling faster now. And he knew, knew as if he'd seen him, that Varky Graymar was inside, although the only visible occupants were strangers in the front seat.
He hiked on anyway, until just beyond a storm-felled treetop, he saw tire tracks where a vehicle had pulled off onto the saturated shoulder of the road. Turning, Urkwal examined the treetop. Some large branches had been chopped from it and thrown aside, their leaves only starting to wilt. Foot tracks told him that two men had carried something between them to the vehicle.
Winn Urkwal had no doubt what had happened: the treetop had struck Graymar, knocked him out and injured him. The two men had seen him beneath it as they'd passed, and had picked him up. And Varky's pack held incriminating contents: a submachine gun, broken down inside a waterproof bag; a holstered pistol; a roll of det cord; and half a dozen blocks of takite; all buried beneath a blanket, some food, spare socks. . . . If someone dug through it, an alarm would be raised.
Perhaps . . . Urkwal knelt where the branches had been cut away, to scrabble beneath limbs and foliage. And here—here was the wrapped SMG, shoved back beneath some branches and weeds. And here the bagged explosive. And here the det cord! Varky'd managed to get his pack off, rummage through it, and at least somewhat conceal the dangerous stuff.
But where was the pistol? He crawled further, groping, and found it too, in its holster. But the magazine was missing. He hunted for it awhile longer, then gave up, put the other things into his own pack, and started back eastward down the road.
Before long he saw where a tree had been uprooted by the wind. He went to it, and with his hands dug in the soil where the root disk had been tipped up. Then he buried all but the det cord and takite. He had use for them later.
That done, he trotted back to the road, and eastward to his rendezvous.