Strangers

repeatedly typed "the moon" on his word processor? A thousand questions crowded Dom Corvaisis' mind, and he had no answers to any of them. Worse, at the moment, he could see no way even to seek answers. The situation was so bizarre that there was no logical direction for his inquiries to take.
        For two months, he had thought that his sleepwalking was the strangest and most frightening thing that had ever happened - or ever would happen - to him. But whatever lay behind the somnambulism must be even stranger and more frightening than the nightwalking itself.
        He recalled the first message he had left for himself on the word processor: I'm afraid. What had he been hiding from in closets? When he had started to nail the windows shut while sound asleep, what had he hoped to keep out of his house?
        Dom saw now that his sleepwalking had not been caused by stress. He was not suffering anxiety attacks because he feared the success or failure of his first novel. It was nothing as mundane as that.
        Something else. Something very strange and terrible.
        What did he know in his sleep that he did not know when awake?
        

    6.
        

    New Haven County, Connecticut
        
        The sky had cleared before nightfall, but the moon had not yet risen. The stars shed little light upon the cold earth.
        With his back against a boulder, Jack Twist sat in the snow atop a knoll, at the edge of pines, waiting for the Guardmaster armored truck to appear. Only three weeks after personally netting more than a million dollars from the mafia warehouse job, he was already setting up another heist. He was wearing boots, gloves, and a white ski suit, with the hood over his head and tied securely under his chin. Three hundred yards behind him and to the southwest, beyond the small woods, the darkness was relieved by the light of a housing development; however, Jack waited in utter blackness, his breath steaming.
        In front of him, two miles of night-clad fields lay northeast, barren but for a few widely spaced trees and some winter-stripped brush. In the distance beyond the emptiness, there were electronics plants, then shopping centers, then residential neighborhoods, none of which was visible from Jack's position, though their existence was indicated by the glow of electric lights on the horizon.
        At the far edge of the fields, headlights appeared over a low rise. Raising a pair of night binoculars, Jack focused on the approaching vehicle, which was following the two-lane county road that bisected the fields. In spite of the leftward cast of his left eye, Jack had superb vision, and with the help of the night binoculars, he ascertained that the vehicle was not the Guardmaster truck, therefore of no consequence to him. He lowered the glasses.
        In his solitude upon the snowy knoll, he thought back to another time and a warmer place, to a humid night in a Central American jungle, when he had studied a nocturnal landscape with binoculars just like these. Then, he had been searching anxiously for hostile troops that had been stalking and encircling him and his buddies…
        

    ***
        
        His platoon - twenty highly trained Rangers under the leadership of Lieutenant Rafe Eikhorn, with Jack as second in command - had crossed the border illegally and gone fifteen miles inside the enemy state without being detected. Their presence could have been construed as an act of war; therefore, they wore camouflage suits stripped of rank and service markings, and they carried no identification.
        Their target was a nasty little "re-education" camp, cynically named the Institute of Brotherhood, where a thousand Miskito Indians were imprisoned by the People's Army. Two weeks earlier, courageous Catholic priests had led another fifteen hundred Indians through the jungles and out of the country before they could be imprisoned, too. Those clergymen had brought word that the Indians at the Institute would be murdered and buried in mass graves if not rescued within the month.
        The Miskitos were a fiercely proud breed with a rich culture that they refused to forsake for the anti-ethnic, collectivist philosophy of the country's latest leaders. The Indians' continued loyalty to their own traditions would ensure their extermination, for the ruling council did not hesitate to call up the firing squads to solidify its power.
        Nevertheless, twenty Rangers in