Cobra Strike (11 page)

He was in a hurry, having a long way to drive, and so he did not go into the show itself. Three different guys in the parking
lot had secondhand MAC-10s for sale. Since they were not new, no government paperwork was involved. Anyway, presumably they
had been illegally converted from semi to full automatic; certainly the silencer that came with the one he bought was a homemade
job. He also bought a thousand rounds of .45 ACP for the gun and some spare thirty-round detachable box magazines. He was
on the road again in less than a half hour and drove north on Route 5 to Oakland, crossed the Bay Bridge to San Francisco,
and took the Golden Gate Bridge north again without stopping. It was dusk when he turned west off Route 101 toward Garberville,
which was the only sizable town fairly close to Alderpoint.
He found himself a motel, ate a meal, and let a local cadge drinks off him in a tavern. He heard about how the federal government
had been financing raids on the local pot growers: For the past two summers cops in fatigues and bulletproof vests carrying
automatic weapons had been ferried by choppers into the hills to cut and burn the illegal crops.

“It's too early yet for you to see them,” the man at the bar said, “ ‘cause the plants ain't growed enough yet for them to
spot. But even this early in the year we have undercover types floating in and trying to find out what's going on.” He paused
and gave Lance a long look, as did a couple of other men in peaked caps along the bar.

“It's fine with me if you want to talk about baseball,” Lance said.

“We don't have much ball between Frisco and Seattle,” the man grumbled. “I wouldn't cross the road to see a game.” Lance said
nothing, and the man was soon back on his favorite topic. “You see any garden supply stores coming into town?”

“No. It was near dark when I got in.”

“When I first arrived here near twenty years ago, there was only one garden supply store. Now there are thirteen. Who do you
reckon is doing all this cultivating in' a place like this with nothing but mountains and pine trees? Dang right, it's them
that used to be hippies, came up here in rags without a dollar or an acre of land to their name, and now they're driving Cherokee
wagons and flying planes while they grow that stuff on public land. You stay away from them if you're planning on staying
on here for a spell. Some of them's flower children and wouldn't harm no one, but there's others that'd cut your throat as
soon as look at you. They got million-dollar businesses out there on those state and federal lands. They been a whole mess
of hikers disappearing in these hills in the past few years. There's some who reckon maybe they saw something they weren't
meant to see. Hell, you couldn't get some of those game wardens to set foot
near
some of those places back in the hills—and it ain't the grizzlies they're afraid of.”

Lance played the dumb tourist a while longer, left before he attracted attention, and got a good night's rest. He drove
back toward Route 101 shortly after seven the next morning, and then he took the small, winding blacktop road east off the
main highway. Alderpoint was in about twenty miles, on the Eel River, deep in what was known locally as the Green Triangle.
The road wound around the mountainsides, and Lance got some nice views down hundreds of feet over the edge. Valleys filled
with redwood and pines nestled between jagged peaks. Alderpoint itself was no more than a general store and a tavern named
the Bum Steer, along with a few cabins. Lance kept driving till he saw a bearded man in a work shirt and jeans standing by
the road, doing nothing in particular. Lance braked. “Noddy's?” The man pointed down the road. Lance waved.

Since hardly anyone lived around this area, it took him some time to inquire and finally get to Noddy's, down a pair of wheel
tracks to a cabin deep in the woods. He stayed in the car with the engine running, and after a while, when nobody showed,
he tapped the horn lightly a few times. A barrel-chested man with a long mustache came out on the veranda, a shotgun cradled
in his right arm.

Lance called out the window, “You Noddy?”

“Could be.”

“I'm up from L.A. I'm looking for an opportunity to invest.”

“We don't need no investors up here, mister.”

Lance smiled. “Tell Tony Wood that an L.A. investor is here.”

“Does this Tony Wood know you?”

“Tell Tony the guitar man sent me.” Lance took a chance with this, figuring that if Tony was mad at his father, he would not
have mentioned him much to anybody. “Where you staying?”

“I spent last night in Garberville. Some nosy people there. I don't think I'll go back.”

Noddy twirled his mustache. “How come you came to me?”

“Man, you're famous.”

Noddy could barely repress a pleased smile. “Drive around, then come back in an hour.”

Lance drove back along the tire tracks a ways until he saw
a stand of heavy brush where he could hide the car. He beat the ground with a branch to hide his new tire tracks cutting
away from the old. Taking the MAC-10 from the trunk, he pushed a loaded magazine into the magazine well in the pistol-grip
handle of the .submachine gun. After that he screwed on the silencer and slipped three other full magazines into his pockets.
Then he headed back through the trees toward the cabin, keeping off the car tracks.

Before he was near enough to see anything, he heard someone yelling and pleading. Lance quickened his pace through the trees.
Noddy sat on the veranda steps, his shotgun across his knees, placidly watching a squat, burly man beat and kick a skinny
youth who was shouting that he didn't tell anyone to come to this place and didn't know any guitar man. Lance recognized him
from photos he'd seen.

Noddy didn't stir when Lance walked into the clearing with the MAC-10 ready to go. The squat man quit beating the kid and
waited to see what was going to happen now. Lance saw the heavy revolver stuck in his waistband, and he guessed that Noddy
might be carrying slugs instead of bird shot in that shotgun. They probably had other men in calling distance, and that was
a long, dangerous walk back to his car through the trees. Lance thought about killing them but decided it would be dumb to
do so with the kid as a witness, in case he decided later, for some reason, to turn on his rescuer.

Lance said to the kid, “You and I are getting outta this place and we're both going to forget we've ever been here.”

“They have my money.” The kid was getting snotty now that he saw the respectful attention Noddy and other man were giving
this dude with the submachine gun. “Make them pay me back before we leave.”

“Forget your money, kid,” Lance said. “Write it off to experience. You don't remember a thing about this place. Anything that
goes wrong here, they will blame you for it, and you may not be as hard to find as you think.” Lance said this loud enough
for Noddy and the other man to hear. He wanted them to understand that he intended to make this kid keep his mouth shut so
there was no need for them to pull some kind of dumb attack to prevent them from
leaving. “You learned you shouldn't deal with folks like Noddy, and he learned you got connections and can't hold you here
against your will. Both of you are damn fools if you don't let things rest like that.”

Noddy didn't move a muscle or say a thing.

But the kid was furious. He said in an undertone to Lance, “Three weeks ago Noddy had an argument with a twenty-year-old guy
from Cleveland. We were out in a growing area at the time, putting in seeds. Noddy knocked him down and beat him to death
with a stone. One side of his head was all stove in. They left him out in that field till we had finished planting it, as
a warning to the rest of us. The body was out there four days, and each morning we'd see more of it gnawed away by animals
during the night.

“Noddy picked on me to bury the head and bones and other pieces. He made me do it by myself, which made me figure that maybe
I was a marked man too. They might have used me as a slave laborer till harvest time if I didn't give them too much trouble,
then get rid of me. We got a flat in the pickup on the way in to Garberville to get supplies, which is how I got to use the
roadside phone to call my pop. If they had seen me, they'd have killed me then for sure. I know where that body is buried
and I seen Noddy do it. He ain't going to let me walk out of here with you.”

Lance had a decision to make. He had been satisfied up to this point with how things were going—saying to himself that even
Mike Campbell couldn't have handled things more smoothly and professionally—and he was hoping to extract the kid without bloodshed.
In and out without a shot fired, that was what Mike said always to aim for, but that was a hard thing” to achieve. Lance hoped
that Noddy would have the good sense not to interfere, but if what the kid said was true, and Lance believed it was, Noddy
was not going to continue resting on his ass on the veranda steps while they tried to leave. He could probably radio ahead
to someone as well as give chase himself, after picking up some serious weapons to match the MAC-10.

“Bring over that pickup,” Lance ordered the kid. Noddy put down his shotgun when told to and the second man lifted the revolver
from his waistband with two fingers and
dropped it at his feet. Lance had them sit in the truck bed with their backs to the driver's cab. He sat on the tailgate,
covering them with the submachine gun, and waved to the kid to drive forward. Lance had the kid stop the pickup and go into
the trees and fetch his Volvo. When the kid was back behind the wheel of the truck, Lance spelled it out for all of them:
“You two stay put while the kid drives. If you try to jump out, you better be fast as greased lightning because I'll be driving
right behind you, and some bushes and branches won't be enough to protect you from a stream of .45 bullets from this gun.”

The two men sat quietly as the pickup bounced over the trail through the woods. Lance stayed close behind. As soon as the
pickup was out on the blacktop, the kid speeded up and went too fast for them to jump out. The pickup suddenly slowed at one
sharp corner where the side of the road dropped off in a precipice. Lance had to brake the Volvo to avoid hitting the rear
of the truck. He was wondering what was happening when he saw the pickup door swing open and the kid try to take a running
jump out of it and instead bury himself in the tar surface of the road. The pickup went over the edge. Last thing Lance saw
was the surprised look on Noddy's face as he sank out of sight.

The kid was cut and bleeding, but he had no broken bones. Lance didn't bother to cuss him out since he himself would probably
have done something similar under similar circumstances. However, he didn't relax until after he reached the San Francisco
airport, bought him a ticket to L.A., called the boy's father to meet him at LAX, and waited to see him on the plane. Then
he dialed his home number, used the tone while his recorded announcement answered, and picked up the messages from the answering
machine. No name was given with one message, but he recognized Andre Verdoux's New York City number.

Colonel Matveyeva smoothed her fair hair and looked down to see that her knee-length military skirt was straight before entering
the general's office. She knocked and went in. He was sitting behind his desk. He had a big head with short, grizzly hair,
and bulbous eyes that ogled her body.
Colonel Matveyeva let him enjoy himself by strutting a little before his desk. She saluted. He smiled and waved her to a chair.

“Comrade Colonel,” he began, “I have been busy, as you can imagine, explaining the circumstances of the heavy losses we took
at the forward helicopter assault post in Gul Daoud's territory. Moscow was particularly critical, because only last week
I was reporting progress on the runway there and being a bit overly optimistic, it seems. The fact that the three Americans
were almost certainly personally involved, as well as supplying the missiles used, makes their capture essential. I managed
to keep your name out of the disaster.”

“Thank you, Comrade General.” She sighed with relief to show him she knew what he had done for her. To have her name tied
to a sizable slaughter of Soviet soldiers would mean the end of promotions and a job out on the taiga, steppe, or tundra.
She supposed she would be working off this favor to the general on her back for as long as she was posted to his staff. Still,
it was worth it.

“These three American adventurers have teamed up with these Afghan bandits,” the general was saying. “This time there is no
way for me to protect you further. You must catch these three men. And Moscow wants them alive.”

“All escape routes for them to Pakistan have been cut behind them. They used up all the missiles in that attack. It will be
only a matter of time before we capture them. If I didn't have to take them alive, I could have eliminated them already.”

“Moscow will not accept that explanation, Comrade Colonel.”

“They won't have to accept any explanation. I will deliver those Americans, and Gul Daoud as well.”

“That would be a glorious day for the Red Army,” the general said, beaming. “But before you start on those endeavors, I hope
you are free tonight so I can toast you from our new vodka shipment. Will you come, Yekaterina?”

She smiled her assent. She never called him by his first name while he still had his uniform on.

*   *   *

The two jet bombers circled as their pilots tried to make visual contact with the village they knew from their maps to be
somewhere below. On the ground the Afghan men, women, and children raised their faces to the sky and stood still, knowing
that movement could give away their presence. The small houses, made of mud bricks, were not easy to see from the air—something
that had preserved them from attack up until this. But now things were different. The planes had come to find them specially
and would stay up there circling, beyond the reach of their rifle bullets, until either the pilots found what they were looking
for or just dumped their bombs somewhere in pretense of following orders. The people had been warned. Other villages through
which the Americans had passed were being bombed.