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man was blind, and Quantrill let them. He liked to study other predators, too.
    Free natural predator and captive synthesized predator studied each other a long while, until a familiar voice spoke in his helmet commset. He replied: "You again, Grenier?" The foxes, startled, vanished into scrub.
    "CenCom said we could haul you in. Sorry." Grenier's apology sounded real. "Got an MP South of you; fishing, probably turned an ankle. Mind giving us some help?"
    "It'll take me a little time to deflate my sack," Quantrill lied. He hadn't taken the gas-insulated mummybag from stowage.
    "Give us a rough fix from our original DZ. I'll be there in about, ah, fourteen minutes."
    "I'm about a klick, true heading three-forty degrees or so, from the DZ and I'll have my beacon on, bearing one-sixty to the DZ. If you can miss me, Grenier, you gotta be trying."
    The strength of Grenier's signal was already gaining. "OK if I set her down? I'd rather not use floodlights; we'll need our night vision in a half-hour."
    "Quicker if you just hover and snatch me by cable. Ground winds aren't bad enough to bounce me off the hatch, and I won't have to eat as much dust if you stand off twenty meters."
    "It's your hide." Cable retrieval was tricky in darkness, even with image intensifiers. Quantrill had suggested a quick pickup that made him slightly more vulnerable. His motive was the training exercise, but Grenier misread it as a friendly gesture. "You're good folks, Quantrill," he murmured.
    "Ram it." Quantrill's reaction was instant, un-heated. It brushed away the hand of friendship in pure reflex action. It made his life bearable by constraining his worries within his own skin.
    Too many of Quantrill's friends had died. The Sanger connection was—well, a potential problem. Though their shared embraces never extended to spoken pledges, too often their bodies spoke tenderly. He told himself that Marbrye Sanger would be repelled by spoken tenderness. Besides, Sanger claimed other partners on occasion—and Quantrill pretended to. Sanger was a rover, and a damned good one. She could take care of herself.
    In thinking Sanger direct and uncomplicated, he underestimated her. He chose not to consider that she might long for an open outpouring of his love, even while knowing it might destroy them both.
    Presently, striding through fragrant grasses on his promised heading, Quantrill heard a familiar soft drone in his helmet sensors and, almost at the same moment, "Gotcha," from Grenier in his commset. Moments later he was snapping carabiners, exhaling slowly through his nose to keep swirling grass chaff out of his personal pipes. A sneezing fit was a common hazard when you ran beneath a sprint chopper. The snatch was clean; Grenier did not accelerate until Quantrill had been winched entirely within the fuselage and the belly hatch indicator winked out.
    The rover found a litter awaiting him; all three couches were occupied by a team of regulars, all lighthearted, all disgustingly fresh for the night's work. Quantrill snapped on his harness and tried for a few minutes of sleep. Sanger was not among the crew, but he had not really expected that pleasure.

Chapter 6
    Ralph Gilson's disappearance might best be blamed on midlife crisis, that recurrent panic provoked by bald spots, occasional impotence with a wife who is munching celery in bed, and the fear that one's mistress can honestly ask, 'Ralph
who
?' two weeks after he dies.
    In Gilson's case there was no mistress and no bald spot—though his wife chewed gum at the
damnedest
times. In 1997, Ralph Gilson had been S/Sgt. Robin Gilbert, one of a hundred thousand troops who had survived the Bering Shoot and refused to stop retreating in Alaska.
    For the first time in his life Gilbert had rebelled; had put Army training to its ultimate test, making his way back through Canada to California by shank's mare and cadged rides. But he found Mexican citizens occupying most of the California coast, and rumors that they