No Immunity

though the door. The worried look on the woman’s face assured her this incident wouldn’t be forgotten soon.
    She climbed into the cage. The seats were stiff with cold and the fear-drenched sweat of every’ prisoner who had ever been tossed in there. Like the boys would be when Fox caught up with them. Sick and terrified, if they weren’t already dead. If they took their “foreign fever” to the grave the only civic reaction would be relief. A shiver shot down her spine. She pressed against the seat back, but there was no warmth there. The boys. Deaf and mute from an impoverished land, she knew what that meant. Without language, without the understanding of how society works, even their own society. Life constantly overwhelming, odds stacked sky-high against them. And then dragged into a foreign country. The awful aloneness of it overwhelmed her.
    Turning to the window, she spotted Tchernak in the back of the last car, too far away to signal. The heater was off, and she looked longingly at her bloodied jacket before tossing it onto the floor. In the space between the motel and the cafe she could make out a line to the east. The black was lightening to dark gray. In an hour it would be dawn. She couldn’t stop the shaking and she knew’, as she had rarely known before, that sunup would bring nothing but a lack of cover,
    It was fifteen minutes later when Fox climbed into the driver’s seat, swung the car around, and pulled out onto tire highway heading north. She looked out the rear window for Tchernak’s deputy’s car. The road was empty. There could be reasons for the delay in bringing him to the station, but she didn’t bother guessing at them. She leaned her head against the cold seat and prepared herself for the Gattozzi jail forty-five minutes straight ahead.
    Ten minutes down the road, Fox turned off.

CHAPTER 46

    “Where are you taking me?” Kiernan demanded from the back of the sheriff’s car. The road was paved, but the desert sand and scree had almost covered it. In the dawning light it was a pale streak on the harsh desert floor. To the sides there was nothing but dirt and short, wiry tumbleweed.
    “Fox, where are we going?” Kiernan waited through only a moment of his silence before whipping off her belt and clattering the buckle against the mesh.
    “Hey, cut that out!”
    “Where, Fox?”
    “Okay, okay. You’ll know soon enough. See that sign way up ahead?”
    no admittance unauthorized vehicles turn , it announced in bold print. In smaller letters beneath, it read u. s. naval facility. No guard station or gate reinforced the sign. “The Admiralty of the Sands? Is that it?” Fox started to speak, and caught himself.
    “You, Fox, are you the captain of the dinghy?”
    “It’s smart-asses like you that cause problems.” It sounded lame when he said it, and Kiernan suspected he had censored himself mid thought.
    “And those boys; they weren’t goading anyone. They were minding their own business. Aliens, without any language at all, minding their own business was all they could do. Why did you bring them here?”
    “I didn’t say I did.”
    “Why here, Fox!”
    “Because, goddammit, we can’t have aliens bringing foreign plagues on our people. If you’re bleeding out from God knows what, this is the one place around here where they blow about those microbes.” He slowed at a kiosk long enough for the uniformed man to recognize him.
    “Morning, Captain.”
    “Captain! Are you on duty here?” she demanded, but Fox busied himself with the dance of greetings before stepping on the gas. “You’re on duty at this secret installation and you’re pretending to be the county sheriff?”
    “I am the sheriff.”
    “Sheriff reporting to whom? What are you, Fox, a spy, spying on your own people? Making sure they don’t get wind of the nuclear waste here and kick up a fuss about deadly poisons in their ground?” Jeff Tremaine, with all his environmental connections, must have been the primo pain. But the boys, how did they fit it?
    Of course nuclear-waste burial was only a theory. This place could house Intelligence or anything else.
    The road ran so straight, Fox could have taken a nap at the wheel. After another ten minutes he turned left, following the arrow pointing to biological and chemical agent detection system facility .
    “Detection!” Kiernan cried. “What are you detecting? Incoming warheads? I don’t think so. So, what, Fox?” Before he could speak, she