"Where do you think? Did you think your pals would be able to stay out of sight forever? We've got them pinpointed, bomb and all."
He was almost dragging me down the corridor, toward a courtyard. I limped out into the bright morning and blinked. The court was swarming with armed expediters, clambering into personnel-carrying copters marked with the vivid truce-team insignia of the Company. Gogarty hustled me into the nearest and the jets sizzled and we leaped into the air.
I shouted, over the screaming of the jets, "Where are we going?"
Gogarty spat and pointed down the long purple coastline. "To their hideout—Pompeii!"
XII
No one discussed tactics with me, but it was clear that this operation was carefully planned. Our copter was second in a long string of at least a dozen that whirled down the coastline, past the foothills of Vesuvius, over the clusters of fishing villages and vineyards.
I had never seen Pompeii, but I caught a glimpse of something glittering and needle-nosed, up-thrust in the middle of a cluster of stone buildings that might have been the ruins.
Then the first ten of the copters spun down to a landing, while two or three more flew a covering mission overhead.
The expediters, hard-pellet guns at the ready, leaped out and formed in a skirmish line. Gogarty and a pair of expediters stayed close by me, behind the line of attack; we followed the troops as they dog-trotted through a field of some sort of grain, around fresh excavations, down a defile into the shallow pit that held the ruins of first-century Pompeii.