Denver Strike (2 page)

James Hawker took a deep gulp of the thin, cold air. Breathing was the biggest difference, though—
trying
to breathe. Climbing over the rugged hillside, the vigilante forced himself to move slowly, to take it easy. True, the sun was floating toward the mountain's crest; nightfall was coming fast. But he still had to take his time. In this oxygen-poor air, hurrying would leave his lungs burning, his legs shaking.

He had to move slowly, deliberately, if he were to succeed.

Hawker dropped down off a rock ledge and landed by the corpse of the man he had just shot. The man lay on his stomach, his hands frozen around the nub of aluminum arrow that protruded through his neck. The vigilante used his foot to roll the man over: long, hippie-length black hair, a bluish beard, a meaty, acne-scarred face, khaki pants, hunting boots, a Smith & Wesson .38 strapped to his hips, a red nylon satchel filled with ammunition for the Remington 700 and for the sawed-off shotgun that lay beside him in the grass.

The vigilante used his hands to search for identification, but he found none.

He did find, however, a pocket-size UHF transceiver in the man's jacket. Hawker took the radio and touched the transmitter button twice, hoping the static would bring some reply.

It did.

“Come back, red team. Is that you? Still waiting for your sound, red team, still waiting for your sound. Is game still in sight?”

The sound the speaker was waiting for was, of course, a rifle shot.

Hawker held the radio far from his lips. “Still waiting for clear view,” Hawker said. “Standing by.”

The man with the other radio had spoken just enough for the vigilante to use the antenna as a direction finder and get the general direction of the speaker's whereabouts.

He was the one who had frightened the crows nearby.

Hawker pulled the arrow from the man's neck, wiped the razor-sharp killing blade in the grass, then stuck the radio in his pocket.

He began to work his way slowly along the ridge, stopping occasionally to survey the trees ahead. Twice the radio squawked, startling him, so he finally turned it off.

When he judged that he was very near the second man, though, he halted in the brush and switched the radio back on. He touched the mike key twice, spun the volume down, and listened.

He could hear nothing from the radio, but he could hear the faint voice of a man talking nearby.

Hawker raised the scope of the Cobra crossbow to his right eye and looked.

Hidden in a pouch formed by rocks and a fallen pine were two men. They were out of the same mold as the man he had just shot: long, greasy hair, hunting clothes, shotguns at their sides, handguns in holsters. Hawker had never met them, yet he knew their type all too well. These were the modern guns-for-hire. You found them among the vicious motorcycle gangs or in the drug-trafficking or porno rings. They were sadists, and they loved their work. A high percentage of them were drug addicts, and they would do absolutely anything to make money so they could support their habits. If killing a woman and her two children paid big, then they would do it without the blink of an eye.

The vigilante lowered the crossbow, wondering just how he should go about it. How could he eliminate both of these men without making noise? There was at least one more man—but probably more—on the other side of the valley. Hawker had seen the glitter of metal earlier. If he used the Colt Commando assault rifle that he carried across his back in a sling, the noise would frighten off the rest of his quarry. And he wanted them all. He didn't want any to escape.

But if he used the crossbow, one of the men would certainly have time to cry out or to get off a couple of shots with the Winchester model 12s they carried.

Hawker decided to take a closer look.

Leaning into the mountain, he moved down the hill sideways, his hands gaining purchase from bushes, taking great care not to start any small rock-slides that would give his position away.

When he was within forty yards of the men, he stopped. The biggest advantage Hawker had was the fact that the men he was hunting had absolutely no idea that they were being hunted.

That gave him an idea. No longer trying to be silent, Hawker got to his feet and walked innocently toward their hiding place. He actually began to whistle. For all the men knew, he was a tourist lost in the mountain wilderness.

Hawker kept the Cobra at his side in his right hand, cocked and ready—just as he held the Colt Commando, safety off, in his left hand. When he got close enough to see the men, he smiled mildly and, still walking toward them, said, “Hey, you guys don't know where I can find a phone booth, do you?”

Hawker expected at least a moment of uncertainty from the two men. They were startled all right—but there was nothing uncertain about them. They knew exactly what they wanted to do. Hawker saw them both lift their weapons at the same time, but he never gave them a chance to fire. He had no alternative. He raised the Cobra, fired too quickly, and the aluminum shaft buried itself in the side of the man closest to him.

The man gave a horrible scream that echoed through the mountains. But his scream was not nearly as loud as the quick burst from the Colt Commando assault rifle that Hawker used to kill the second man.

The report of the automatic weapon seemed to echo forever through the hills.

Damn it!
Hawker snarled beneath his breath as he stooped over the corpses of the two men. He could practically hear the men on the other side of the valley scrambling to safety. He went through the pockets, finding cigarettes, candy bars, matches, money, and a Glad-Wrap bag full of marijuana, but no identification of any kind.

Hawker tried to get the arrow from between the ribs of the man he had shot with the Cobra. But the arrow had disappeared inside his chest cavity—another reason for Hawker to be angry at himself.

He had bungled the job—thought too slowly and shot too quickly.

Blame it on the high altitude, he thought. Your brain isn't getting enough air.

What brain, dumb shit? he railed at himself.

Hawker picked up the second radio and touched the mike key. “All teams come in; come in all teams.”

Silence. If the man or men on the other side of the valley had a radio, they weren't about to answer.

Hawker stood and looked at the cabin. He could see the woman, now clothed, standing in the doorway staring in his direction. There was a look of fear and confusion on her face. What had made the terrible sounds she had just heard?

Hawker began to make his way quickly down the hillside—but then a terrible thought entered his mind. The orders of the first man he had killed had been to shoot one—or maybe both—of the children.

Maybe the man or men on the other side of the valley had been ordered to shoot the woman.

The vigilante sprang onto a great wedge of rock. “Lomela!” he yelled. “Get inside!”

The mountains threw his voice back at him over and over again.

The woman looked up, startled. She touched her hand to her forehead, straining to see.

“Lomela, get inside the cabin!”

Shaking her head, the woman stepped back just as the entire door seal was blown off by some heavy-caliber weapon. She had so narrowly escaped being hit that Hawker stood frozen for a moment—but then rocks near his feet exploded as the rifleman turned his weapon toward Hawker.

The vigilante jumped to the ground, rolled, and zigzagged into the brush. Twice more, the rifleman shot at Hawker, once severing a branch from over his head. But the vigilante continued to make his way around the rim of the valley toward the place where the rifleman must be hidden. The sun was behind the western snowy peaks now, and a frigid wind blew down from the ice capped heights.

It was ridiculous to look for a lone man in these thousands of acres of woods, but the vigilante ex-cop continued. There was a chance—however slim. And he had to take it.

Finally, he was near. He knew he must be near. He could see the eastern side of the cabin now, could see that the woman was too frightened or too smart to show any lights inside. He pictured her and the two children huddled in a corner beneath a blanket, the way pioneer women had waited in terror for Indians so many generations before.

Hawker stopped on the mountainside, waiting. Below him, the valley, the river, the wild flowers, and the log cabin became a fantasy world of rich light as the sun set—then ever-weakening light until the sun was gone, leaving the valley in a cold and lonesome afterglow.

From his canvas backpack he took a pair of Steiner military binoculars and searched the hillside. The Steiners were the best nonpowered night vision glasses in the world. The wide lenses sucked in all available light, highlighted detail, and transformed grays to whites so that looking through them at dusk was like looking through normal glasses at midday.

Hawker saw the man then: a lone figure standing against an aspen tree, his rifle resting on a low branch as he aimed toward the cabin in the distance.

Obviously, the man was waiting for one last shot, hoping, perhaps, that the woman would light a lamp and cross before a window.

But now it was Hawker who had the last shot. Quickly, he put the Steiners away and raised the Cobra crossbow—but he didn't fire. Through the binoculars, the man had been clearly visible. Now, looking through the narrow hunting scope, he couldn't find the man, who was invisible in the gloomy dusk.

Damn
, Hawker whispered.

He would have to get closer if he wanted a shot. Much closer.

The vigilante slipped the backpack over his shoulder, adjusted the Colt Commando, then set off slowly down the mountainside. The temperature had fallen with the sun. His hands felt clumsy in the cold, and his breath fogged before him. Every few dozen yards he would stop and look through the Steiners again to make sure the gunman had not moved.

The gunman stood immobile, confident that he could not be seen.

Finally, when Hawker was sure he was close enough, he stopped behind a great tall pine and put the backpack and the crossbow on the ground. He took up the binoculars in his left hand and steadied the assault rifle in the other. The Colt Commando could fire its twenty-round clip in the blink of an eye—eight hundred rounds per minute, if you could feed it fast enough. All Hawker had to do was get a rough sighting through the binoculars, then spray the darkness with the Commando. The gunman would not survive.

Hawker peered through the Steiners, ready to fire—but the assassin was gone. The vigilante swept the glasses back and forth, hoping he had searched the wrong tree or the wrong ledge.

No, the gunman had definitely left.

Shaking his head in disgust, Hawker reached to retrieve his backpack—then threw up an arm against the dark shape that was descending upon him.

The man had been waiting for him, waiting in the shadows on a head-high ledge, and he jumped on Hawker with a jarring impact, driving him to the ground. Then they were rolling, the two of them tumbling down the mountainside in the darkness, fighting for their lives.

The man had a knife, a dark-bladed hunting knife, in his left hand. The vigilante got his own hands up in time and locked them around his attacker's wrist, unable to do anything but hold the knife inches away from his face as they rolled down through brush, over rocks. Then there was another terrible impact, and the vigilante was floating free; then he landed with a
whoof
on the other side of the shallow precipice that the two of them had hit.

Hawker got painfully to his feet just in time to duck the savage kick that the assassin threw at his head. The vigilante timed the next kick and caught the man's leg in midflight, twisting and lifting at the same time. The assassin gave a little squeal of fear as he flew through the air, landed, and rolled upright. Hawker went after him immediately. In the darkness, the man's face seemed grotesquely wide; it made a skin-slap sound as Hawker drove his right fist into it again and again.

The man swung a looping left hand at Hawker's stomach, swung so slowly that Hawker almost didn't bother to move—but then he felt a deep electric pain explode in his left arm: the man still had the knife!

Hawker ripped the knife free, kicked the man savagely in the stomach, then drove the knife deep into his back as he buckled over. The man threw himself grotesquely onto the ground, clawing at his own back. Within a few moments, he moved no more.

Hawker stood, bent at the waist, hands on his knees, fighting to get his breath. It seemed impossible to breathe in these mountains. How could anyone live up here!

Then he walked wearily back up the hill and found his backpack and the assault rifle. From the backpack he took his tiny Tonka flashlight, twisted the cap, and inspected his left arm. The camouflage material of his jump suit was blood-soaked. He ripped the material away and saw that the knife had only gouged a chunk of meat from the underside of his arm. It didn't seem like a serious wound, but he was bleeding steadily, and Hawker knew he needed help.

He took a handkerchief from his pack and wrapped it snugly around his arm. Then he remembered he had left the knife in the back of the man below—the knife with his fingerprints all over it. With a growling sigh of disgust, he backtracked, yanked the man's knife free, and carried it halfway down the mountain with him before he wiped the steel clean and hid it under a rock.

At the edge of the clearing, fifty yards from the cabin, he stopped. The woman had still lighted no lamps, and Hawker felt a pang of sympathy for the frightened woman and her two children. For all they knew, death was waiting right outside their door.

“Lomela! My name is James Hawker. Can you hear me? A policeman friend of yours in Denver sent me—Tom Dulles. I'm here to help!”

Hawker listened to his own echo fade into silence. A great cold moon was lifting over the snowy peaks now, casting a milky light over the gurgling river and the still fields. Hawker felt the beauty of it like a pain deep inside him, and he realized he must be giddy with shock, maybe even in danger of blacking out. He had to hurry; he needed the woman.