The Fury and the Terror by John Farris Read Free Book Online Page B

to—but there's no time anyway. We—Excuse me. There's no time . Now please just do what I tell you."
    In the tenth row of the stands Riley said in amazement, " That's her valedictory address?" while at the same time Geoff McTyer whispered dismally, "Lost it. She's buggin'."
    Eden's voice, stronger than it had been, echoed around the stadium as she glanced again at the western sky.
    "I'm not sure just what it is. But it's coming. Right now. We all have to evacuate, in an orderly fashion—please, just be calm, get up, walk out of the stadium. Go to the other side of the campus. I think—I'm sure that it's far enough away; you'll all be safe there. But go. Now ."
    "Totally wigged," Geoff lamented.
    Betts shot him a look, then reached past the stunned bulk of her husband and shook Geoff hard.
    "Don't sit there moaning like a ninny. Help her! You're a cop. Use your authority. This is real, Geoff! She's seen something. Help Eden get this crowd out of here."
    Onstage the Chancellor with the pompadour was trying to steer Eden back to her seat. He was smiling. Great good cheer in the face of her inconvenient nervous collapse. This will just take a moment, folks. Eden the athlete easily pushed him aside, nearly into the lap of the Congresswoman, and rushed back to the microphone. Dean Bettendorf closed in, denying her. Now now now, Eden, why don't you just—Moments of frenetic struggle, hand-to-hand grappling for possession of the mike, which picked up grunts, wordless exclamations, strenuous breathing. The Dean, who had long legs and a high center of gravity, lost his balance. Alphabetized diplomas on a long table were swept to the floor. A couple of male grads, anonymous in a restless sea of blue gowns, raucously voiced encouragement, as if they were at a bar fight. Nearly everyone else in the stadium was tense from apprehension or embarrassment. A child whined in a loud voice. The two cameramen from a local video service who were recording the commencement exercise zoomed in on Eden. A metallic keening from the audio system rent the uneasy air of the stadium and suddenly people were rising everywhere, in a tentative but ominous herd response to the fears Eden had awakened. Portland. Too charred to touch. Coming this way.
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    P ortia Darkfeather had the usual blind faith in the physics of manned flight and the competence of military transport pilots. She parachuted from numerous C-130s. Day and night. The night drops were wicked. Miss the DZ, which was commonplace, anything could happen. Her worst mishap had been a cracked shinbone. You thought about it while you were up there droning through the dark, then put the thoughts of injury or death out of your mind. Plummeting through darkness suspended from a fragile parafoil was part of the job description.
    O ne thing she'd never thought about was the possibility that one of the old workhorse planes might crash. They shook constantly. They vibrated, groaned, yawed, bounced around in turbulence. But they stayed in the air.
    The flight of TRANSPAC 1850 over northern California was, in contrast to some of the night training missions Darkfeather had been on, eerily peaceful. The weather was good, only a little clear-air turbulence from the Coast Range. Yet they continued to descend at a steady three hundred feet per minute, airspeed also dropping. Now at nine thousand feet, dollops of cloud hanging just below them, they were cruising over redwood country, immensely green. Medium-sized mountains. Nothing higher than forty-one hundred feet in their vicinity. Pocket lakes glinted in the sun. There had been two more course corrections at the whim of the autopilot, which, technically, should not have been operative at all. Captain van der Veek had the fuse in his shirt pocket.
    Presently they were fifty-two miles west of the Innisfall municipal airport, which had an air traffic control tower and the airport on the edge of the Cal Shasta campus, eleven miles south of the