Dark Rivers of the Heart

north-northeast of Vegas, in desert flats northeast of Pahroc Summit and northwest of Oak Springs Summit. Middle of nowhere, like I told you."
        "It's an E.P.A satellite we're using," Roy reminded him. "Could have been an E.P.A employee trying to up-link to get an aerial view of his work site beamed down to a computer there. Or a spectrographic analysis of the terrain. Or a hundred other things."
        "E.P.A employee? But it's the middle of nowhere," Hyckman said.
        He seemed stuck on that phrase, as though repeating the haunting lyrics of an old song. "Middle of nowhere."
        "Curiously enough," Roy said with a warm smile that took the sting out of his sarcasm, "a lot of environmental research is done in the field, right out there in the environment, and you'd be amazed if you knew how much of the planet is in the middle of nowhere."
        "Yeah, maybe so. But if it was somebody legitimate, a scientist or something, why terminate contact so fast, before doing anything?" . "Now that is the first shred of meat you've provided," Roy said.
        "But it's not enough to nourish a certainty."
        Hyckman looked bewildered. "What?"
        Instead of explaining, Roy said, "I)What's with the bull's-eye?
        Targets are always marked with a white cross."
        Grinning, pleased with himself, Hyckman said, "I thought this was more interesting, adds a little fun.") "Looks like a video game," Roy said.
        "Thanks," Hyckman said, interpreting the slight as a compliment.
        "Factoring in magnification," Roy said, "what altitude does this view represent?"
        "Twenty thousand feet."
        "Much too high. Brin us down to five thousand."
        "We're in the process right now," Hyckman said, indicating some of the people working at the computers in the center of the room.
        A cool, soft, female voice came from the control-center address system:
        "High-magnification view coming up.
        The terrain was rugged, if not forbidding, but Valerie drove as she might have driven on a smooth ribbon of freeway blacktop. The tortured Rover leaped and plunged, rocked and swayed, bounced and shuddered across that inhospitable land, rattling and creaking as if at any moment it would explode like the over-stressed springs and gearwheels of a clockwork toy.
        Spencer occupied the passenger seat, with the S.I.G 9MM pistol in his right hand. The Micro Uzi was on the floor between his feet.
        Rocky sat behind them, in the narrow clear space between the back of the front seat and the mass of gear that filled the rest of the cargo area all the way to the tailgate. The dog's good ear was pricked, because he was interested in their lurching progress and his other ear flapped like a rag.
        "Can't we slow down a little?" Spencer asked. He had to raise his voice to be heard above the tumult: the roaring engine, the tires stuttering across a washboard gully.
        Valerie leaned over the steering wheel, looked up at the sky, craned her head left and right. "Wide and blue. No clouds anywhere, damn it.
        I was hoping we wouldn't have to make a run for it until we had clouds again."
        "Does it matter? What about the infrared surveillance you were talking about, the way they can see through clouds?"
        Looking ahead again as the Range Rover chewed its way up the gully wall, she said, "That's a threat when we're sitting still, in the middle of nowhere, the only unnatural heat source for miles. But it's not much good to them when we're on the move. Especially not if we were on a highway, with other cars, where they can't analyze the Rover's heat signature and distinguish it in traffic."
        The top of the gully wall proved to be a low ridge, over which they shot with sufficient speed to be airborne for a second or two.
        They slammed front-tires-first onto a long, gradual slope of gray-black-pink shale.
        Slivers of shale, spun up by the tires, showered against the undercarriage, and Valerie shouted to be heard above a hard clatter as loud as a hailstorm: "With a sky that blue, we have more to worry about than infrared. They have a clear, bare-eyed look-down at us."
        "You think they've already seen us?"
        "You can bet your ass they're already looking for us," she said, barely rs of shale that voile ed beneath them.
        "Eyes in the sky," he said, more to himself than to her.
        The world seemed