Cantina Valley (A Ben Adler Mystery Book 1) (34 page)

“So, you contacted Grankin yourself.
 
What did you plan to accomplish?”

The foreman sat dejected.
 
Finally, he said, “I was going to kill Grankin before he killed me.
 
That was until I saw both cars pull up behind my vehicle.
 
Then I knew I was outgunned.
 
I had no choice but to escape into the mountains.
 
This is much like my home in El Salvador.
 
Of course, much colder.”

As they sat, a cloudy mist of fog rolled in from the west, enveloping the Siuslaw in obscurity.
 
Ben would see and then not see the two Russians below him hiding among thick hemlocks and Douglas Firs.

Getting on the radio again, Ben pushed the talk button and whispered, “Are you almost with us?”

He waited and watched the foreman, who looked more afraid than when he had been getting shot at by the Russians.

“I hate the fog,” Carlos said.
 
“It’s God’s camouflage.”

Finally, Ben’s radio squawked twice, meaning Lester couldn’t talk.
 
Ben guessed his old high school friend had his radio turned down low and was closing in on the others.
 
The fog obscured not only the scene in front of him, but Ben’s mind as well.
 
He was starting to question the reality of his situation.
 
It was as if the fog had put him in a spell.

36

First came muffled sounds of Russian, echoing through the mist.
 
Then came movement in the fog, large and dark and shuffling as if they had lived on the mountain their entire life.
 
But Ben couldn’t be sure about any target, so he couldn’t pull the trigger.

When shots finally rang out again, Ben raised his rifle toward the flashes, unsure if he should fire back.
 
He shoved his back against the rough bark of the fir and saw that Carlos lay on the ground in a fetal position with his hands over his ears.

His radio squawked and Ben turned it up and said, “Say again.”

“They’re all firing at me,” Lester said.
 
“Fire only once with your AR so I know where you are.
 
I’ll return fire with one shotgun blast.”

“Roger that,” Ben said.
 
Then he raised his gun barrel and shot once in the air toward the west.
 
A second later and Lester fired his shotgun.

As soon as the shotgun blast stopped echoing in the mist, the Russians opened fire.
 
This time they aimed at both Lester and Ben.
 
He could hear bullets striking the other side of his tree.

Ben looked around the right side of the tree, the red circle of his holographic sight finding the muzzle flash.
 
He pressed the trigger five or six times and then scooted back behind the tree.

His breathing heavy, Ben glanced at Carlos, who now sat back against the hillside, his eyes wide with fear.

“Did you see them?” Carlos asked.

“Yes.
 
That’s why I shot.”

“No, I mean the creatures.”

“It’s hard to see much of anything in this fog,” Ben said.
 
“We just have to hold this position long enough for backup to get here.”

“No, no,” Carlos said, his head shaking wildly side to side.
 
“The creatures are here.”

The man was delirious, Ben thought.
 
He knew that some were prone to wild imagination during stressful firefights.
 
He had seen it before in soldiers.
 
The mind sometimes can’t process the inevitability of impending death.

Suddenly, someone screamed below.
 
Followed by more shooting.
 
Ben glanced around the tree trunk and saw what he thought was a large, dark figure moving swiftly below.
 
He had worked with snipers in the war, wearing ghillie suits for camouflage.
 
Was it one of those?
 
Then it was gone.

Then came more yelling and screaming below.
 
First it was almost a painful wail, like a bear that had been shot and was giving one last breath before dying.
 
That was followed by a burst of Russian.
 
And finally, the Russian morphed into English.
 
The men said they were dropping their weapons and giving up.

“It’s a trick,” Carlos said.

Ben wasn’t sure what to think.
 
He got on the radio and talked with Lester.
 
“What do you think?”

“I don’t know,” Lester said.
 
“I keep thinking I see things.
 
I’m confused.”

Thinking about his own view of what happened, Ben couldn’t be a hundred percent certain.

Then, just as quickly as the fog had rolled in, it dissipated and drifted to the east.
 
Now Ben could see the men below, standing together with their hands on their heads.

Ben swapped out a partially-used magazine for a full 30-round one, and then he stood up and helped Carlos to his feet.
 
Together they wandered down the hill toward the Russians, Ben keeping his AR-15 at the ready.
 
From the east came Deputy Lester Dawson, his shotgun aimed at the men.

The man Ben had shot was sitting on the wet forest floor.
 
One other man, the bald man who had been with Grankin, lay behind the men.
 
He was either dead or simply knocked out.

Ben covered the Russians as Lester collected guns.
 
Then the deputy found zip ties in his backpack and strapped their hands behind their backs.
 
There were five men.
 
Three without any wounds.

Once the men were zipped and sat on the ground, Ben checked on the unconscious man.
 
The bald man had no pulse.
 
But he also had no bullet wounds.
 
Ben rolled the man from his stomach to his back, and finally saw the wounds on his face.
 
It looked like the Russian had been hit with something—like a huge stick.
 
His nose was crushed and his jaw was out of place by a few degrees.

“He’s dead,” Ben said to Lester.

Vlad Grankin finally said, “Did you see them?”

“See who?” Ben asked.

The Russian shook his head.
 
“Never mind.”

Lester called in their GPS position on his SAT phone.
 
But he quickly switched from that phone to the radios, since the backup was close enough now.

Nodding his head for Ben, Lester drifted away from the Russians.
 
Ben followed.

Lester said, “I don’t know how to say this, Ben.
 
But I saw some strange shit here.”

“The fog?”

“It wasn’t just the fog.
 
It was something or someone in the fog.”

Ben tried to think about his own recollection, and he was having a hard time discerning his own thoughts.
 
“I saw movement, but I couldn’t shoot.
 
I had no idea of the target.
 
Not until I could aim at the shots being fired.”

“Same here,” Lester said.
 
“And that’s what’s going into my report.”

“What about the dead Russian?” Ben asked.
 
“Who did that?”

Lester shook his head and shrugged simultaneously.
 
“He must have been running and fell.”

“Fell hard,” Ben said.
 
“Or his own men took him out.”

Ten minutes later and a full SWAT unit poured in from the east, their weapons at the ready.
 
The SWAT team leader came up to Ben and Lester.

“We found a guy back on the trail a ways,” the SWAT team leader said.
 
“I left one of my men with him.”

“Long gray beard?” Ben asked.

“Yeah.
 
He took a fall and was delirious.”

And high as a kite on mushrooms, Ben thought.

It was a long walk back to their vehicles.
 
Ben escorted Marlon ahead of the SWAT team and Deputy Lester Dawson.
 
The sheriff’s deputies had patched up the man Ben had shot in the shoulder, so he could walk on his own.
 
But the man who had died mysteriously had to be carried out on a make-shift stretcher.
 
Because of their slow pace, Ben and Marlon had gotten back to the vehicles before anyone else.

Marlon was still tripping like an early 70s hippie at a rock festival, his mumbling to himself incomprehensible.

Ben made sure to take Marlon’s keys.
 
The man was in no condition to drive.

Once Ben got Marlon’s vehicle pulled out of its position blocking the road, they were safely on their way down the mountain.

“You believe me, right?” Marlon said.

“Believe what?”

“Weren’t you listening to me?”

Was the man actually trying to convey information to Ben?
 
“I’m sorry, Marlon.
 
I was preoccupied trying to figure out this case.”

“I told you, I saw Bigfoot up there.”

Ben turned to look at the former professor and then back to the muddy road.
 
“Say what?”

“Just after you left me alone in the forest,” Marlon said.
 
“Sasquatch appeared in front of me.”

“Was that before or after the fall?”

“Just after.
 
But I was not impaired by that.”

“What about the mushrooms?” Ben wanted to know.

“The mushrooms just enhanced my senses.
 
They didn’t make me see something that wasn’t there.”

Okay.
 
How did Ben process this?
 
The Russians had also seen something out of the ordinary.
 
And not just them.
 
Carlos had also seen something.
 
The same with Lester Dawson.
 
Although they didn’t really discuss the possibility of what they actually saw, everyone on that misty, foggy mountain saw something out of the ordinary.
 
Truth be told, even Ben couldn’t entirely describe properly the fast-moving images he saw during that firefight.

“You still don’t believe,” Marlon said.
 
“Yet, you can’t deny those things that the Air Force pilots told you.
 
You can’t discard the possibility of aliens.
 
So why can’t you trust your own eyes and see the truth before you?”

A strange thought streaked through Ben’s mind.
 
What if Lester was one of them?
 
What if he had shifted long enough to take out the Russians?
 
Naw.
 
That was crazy.