Gideon's War/Hard Target (32 page)

“Um, sir?” the RO said softly, putting his finger next to the hole in the center of the target. “There are two grease rings here.”

Dahlgren came closer and glared at the hole. “Bullshit.”

“I’m just telling you how I see it, sir. Two shots in one hole. Mr. Davis hit him three times. It’s a thirty. Perfect score. Mr. Davis won.”

“You sure of that?” Dahlgren said. “Absolutely sure?” His question was etched with an unspoken threat.

The RO looked carefully at the target. It was a close call, no doubt. He swallowed, met Dahlgren’s eye for a moment, then said, “No, sir. I guess I’m wrong.”

“Excellent,” Dahlgren said. “Glad you see it my way. One hit, one clean miss. Right?”

The RO looked at Gideon apologetically, then shrugged in agreement.

Gideon shook his head in disgust.

Nancy Clement stepped closer. “Sir, witnesses at the scene strongly implied that he’d been kidnapped. Why would he have been kidnapped unless—”

“Strongly implied,” Dahlgren interrupted sharply. “What does that even mean?”

The usually outspoken Nancy fell quiet, so Gideon spoke up. “I don’t have a dog in this fighigh±€†t, but I think you’re making a mistake. I spoke to this guy, heard his recording, and I think there’s a strong possibility that he’s telling the truth.”

Dahlgren stepped back and raised his voice a little as he extended his hand toward Gideon. “Well, sir, I sincerely thank you for taking an interest. It’s always a pleasure to meet a public-minded citizen. You take care now, Mr. Davis. My assistant will see you back to the gatehouse.”

7

ALEXANDRIA, VIRGINIA

What is it?” Kate asked.

They’d been unpacking for an hour and Gideon hadn’t said much.

“I just can’t get this thing out of my head,” he said, pulling a stack of books out of a box and putting them on a shelf.

“You’re talking about this Mixon person.”

Gideon nodded. He had given Kate the details of his encounter with Mixon and his frustrating visit to the FBI with his old girlfriend, Nancy Clement, which she had taken surprisingly well. “If this guy is right, we could be looking at a major attack. He used the phrase ‘mass casualties.’ For all I know, he could be talking about another 9/11.”

“What does Nancy think about it?”

Gideon had a long conversation with her after they left Quantico. He couldn’t convince her to go around Dahlgren to pursue Mixon. “At the end of the day, she’s a loyal public servant. Her boss ordered her to let it go. So unless something surfaces, she needs to follow orders.”

Kate nodded, watching Gideon as he slid another book on the shelf.

“But I did a little poking around online,” he continued. “The militia group Mixon talked about live in a pretty remote part of West Virginia that’s filled with fringe types who live off the grid—militia guys, survivalists, end-timers, bikers, people trying to get away from everything and everybody.”

“Isn’t your brother up in West Virginia somewhere?”

Gideon hesitated. A thought had been growing in his mind since yesterday, a thought that had sunk its talons deep in his head. “Funny you should mention that . . .” he said finally.

Kate looked at him for a moment. “Seriously? Tillman lives in the same area as these people?”

“Their compound’s not far from him.” He paused. “My guess is, they’re holding Mixon there. Assuming he’s still alive, they’ll question him hard until he tells them what he told the FBI.”

His voice trailed off. He knew what he wanted to do. What he needed to do. He needed to go to West Virginia, hook up with his brother, Tillman, and find out precisely what the hell was going on with Ervin Mixon.

But it was only a matter of weeks until he and Kate got married. All the books on how to be a sensitive caring male in the twenty-first century told him the right thing to a mmmmid a do at this moment was to let it go and lovingly unpack the crystal together.

“Are you looking for permission from me to help out on this?” Kate said.

Gideon didn’t answer. He wasn’t asking for permission. Not exactly. He knew the consequences of what he was considering—not only the potential danger, but the legal mess that would inevitably follow—and he didn’t want to take it any further without Kate’s blessing.

“How did she look?”

“Who?”

“Don’t give me that hand-in-the-cookie-jar look. You know who. Nancy.”

Gideon shrugged. “Good, I guess.”

“Did she let you hold her gun?”

“Stop it. You’re not jealous, are you?”

“Should I be?”

“No,” Gideon said. “But the truth is, I think this guy had something.”

“And you think you can help?”

Instead of answering, Gideon reached into an open box and pulled out a book. “A Diplomatic History of Yugoslavia,” he read.

“You’re changing the subject.”

“Bear with me.” Gideon leafed through the book for a few seconds. Then he turned the book around and showed Kate an old black-and-white photograph of a nerdy-looking young man with a thin mustache and a sad expression on his face.

“Recognize this guy?”

“Looks very much like Gavrilo Princip,” Kate said.

“You read the caption.”

Kate smiled. “Busted.”

“Gavrilo Princip was a Serbian anarchist. One day he snuck up on Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, and shot him in the neck. One bullet, one angry little man. That’s all it took to start World War I. Four years later, nearly ten million people were dead.”

“I sense you’re making a point,” Kate said.

Gideon’s green eyes went serious. “What if you were the guy who said, ‘Aw, we get threats against the archduke every day. I wouldn’t take this one too seriously.’ ” He put the book on the shelf. “I mean one bullet really can change the world.”

“You’re saying you want to get back out there, follow this where it leads.”

“It could be nothing. It’s probably nothing. But what if it turns out to be something, and I could have stopped it?”

“Is that what this is really about?” Kate’s hair was still damp from her morning shower. It hugged the delicate curve of her neck.

“Of course. What do you mean? What else would it be about?”

“Come 821Á€†on, Gideon. You think I haven’t noticed how antsy you’ve been since we moved in together? Maybe . . .” Her voice trailed off, and she shook her head.

“Maybe what?”

After a girding moment, she turned to him. “Maybe this isn’t right for you.” She waved her hands at the boxes. “The house. The teaching. Me.”

“Kate—”

“It’s not you. It isn’t. But if I don’t follow this up I don’t know if I could sleep at night.” What he didn’t tell her was that some part of him had woken up on the Obelisk. And now that he was awake, he didn’t want to go back to sleep. “It’s just for a few days,” he said. “While I run this down with Tillman.”

She looked at him, and he wondered if she could read his uncertainty. Then she said, “I’ll pack you a bag.” She walked off toward the stairs.

Gideon watched her go, his heart thrumming with anticipation in his throat. It was a feeling—if he was totally honest about it—that he liked. No, not just liked. Loved.

As Kate disappeared from sight, he picked up his cell phone and dialed Nancy Clement. “Hey,” he said. “It’s me. I think I might be able to help find Mixon.”

“Gideon,” Nancy said, “I’ve been ordered off this thing.”

“I know. That’s why I’m going to help. If we do it right, you’ll have total deniability. If I find something useful, you can run with it. If not, nothing I do can be connected to you. But I’m going to need a couple of things from you . . .”

Kate poked her head over the railing of the stairs. “Honey, do you want the Glock or the SIG?”

Gideon put his hand over the receiver for a moment. “The SIG,” he called.

8

ANDERSON, WEST VIRGINIA

The big boar was nervous. The rest of the herd was busy shoving their snouts into the ground. But the boar kept surveying the area, ears twitching, the big ridge hairs on its spine sticking straight up. Tillman Davis crouched behind a stand of mountain laurel about thirty yards out from the nearest animal, his arrow nocked, the bow ready to draw, his heart beating fast. But he couldn’t move. Not without the boar catching the flash of motion.

Tillman had been tracking the herd for a couple of weeks. There were eleven of them—smart, fast, and mean, with sharp eyes and noses that rivaled any animal on four feet. Like a lot of feral hogs in the area, their bloodstock ran mostly to Russian wild hog. Same thick dark hair, same little ears, same aggressive temperament, same three-inch tusks.

The biggest male probably weighed close to five hundred pounds. Hogs were considered to be nuisance animals, not wild game. No hunting season, no bag limit. Nobody cared if they lived or died. A herd over in Bledsoe County had atta yaaaa D‡cked and disemboweled a child. They had been eating the kid alive before Grandma got her shotgun and started shooting. The little boy survived, but he was never the same after that.

If Tillman had been hunting the hogs with a gun, it would have been no big thing to take a couple of them. He’d figured out their feeding patterns, so he knew he could track them down easy enough. But he wanted to take the alpha boar with a bow. And to do that, he had to fool eleven snouts and twenty-two eyes. And once he’d made the shot, he needed to get away without ending up like the kid from Bledsoe County.

Thirty-two, thirty-three yards to the target. A hell of a long shot. He wasn’t shooting with a high-tech compound bow like most hunters used. This was a longbow that he’d made himself from yew, the same wood used by the English longbowmen who’d won the battles at Crécy and Agincourt. It was powerful but finicky. No peep sights, no counterweights, no carbon fiber arrows—just a stick and a string and a homemade arrow.

Tillman could feel his heart beating, a sloshing noise in his ears that seemed so loud that surely the hogs could hear it.

He breathed in slowly and concentrated on becoming invisible. Not that he believed he could actually become invisible. But he did believe it was possible to transport your mind so far from the moment that you gave off no signal of your presence—no motion, no sound, nothing that would attract attention. And in so doing you simply blended into the vegetation. He had done it in the jungles of Mohan, guerrilla fighters walking within ten or fifteen feet of him when he stood in plain sight—almost in plain sight anyway—and not seeing him.

His predatory focus on the boar dissipated and his mind spread out like ripples on a pond, taking in everything around him—the sharp tang of hickory and the softer smell of oak, the patch of warmth on his cheek as a shaft of sunlight found his face, the black tangle of bare tree limbs against the pale sky, the barely audible breeze-rustle of the few tenacious dry leaves that still clung to the branches overhead. And still there was the boar: every hair visible and sharp, every twitch of ear and snout, every exhaled breath.

Tillman was not one to give much credit to joy. But this, surely, was as close to joy as he had ever come.

His was not a life that had been exactly filled with pleasure. His father had murdered his mother and then shot himself when Tillman was sixteen, leaving behind a bankruptcy that stripped Tillman and his brother Gideon of every possession they owned. Then Tillman had fought in the army, seen friends die in distant places, uncared for by the people whose interests they served. After that, he had lived thanklessly in the jungles of Southeast Asia, prosecuting a minor CIA war. The failures of that war had ultimately resulted in Tillman being made into a sacrificial goat, serving two years in prison for mistakes that were not of his own making. Never a husband, never a father, no real relationships of any consequence other than the fraught and distant relationship with his own younger brother.

Come to me. Tillman closed his eyes and concentrated on the boar. Come to me, brother. The boar was getting old, scars visible on the armored plate of callus across its chest, muzzle rimmed with white bristles, a big chip out of its left tusk. It might have another few years in it yet, but it had sired its offspring, had ruled its small patch of woods—and maybe now was its time to return to its source. Hunter and hunted, ng Ñ€†arrow and flesh—these were things that were meant for each other, ends of a never-ending circle.

Sometimes Tillman wished he could have said the same for himself, that he could have taken a bullet back in that fight on the oil rig, the one that had drawn a curtain on his career. But he had been spared that—if spared was the right word. In the midst of his greatest failure, Gideon had come to his aid, saved his life, sparing him from drawing the circle neatly closed.

Every day the shame and pointlessness of his life pressed down on Tillman like a massive weight. He cooked his stew, he grew his corn and beans and turnips and carrots on his rocky little plot of land, he trapped his rabbits and hunted deer, he read his books, he tried fitfully and with little success to teach himself how to play bluegrass banjo. But on most days, it felt like a pathetic waste of time.

But there was still this. There was still the hunt.

For a moment the hog looked down. Tillman drew in one smooth stroke. There was a feeling of rightness that told him if he released now, his arrow would find its mark.

But just as his fingers loosened on the bowstring, he heard a loud noise behind him, a car gunning its motor on the dirt road that led up to his house. He couldn’t see it through the dense mountain foliage, but he could hear it.

The hog, startled at the noise, dropped to its haunches, as though prepared for an attack. As a result the once-perfectly aimed arrow caught it high, passing just above the lungs and heart, just to the left of the spine. It was still a certain kill. But not a quick one.

The car rattled on up the trail, the noise fading.

Goddamn it, Tillman thought. Who’s the asshole in the car?

But he didn’t have time to think about the question any further: The hog screamed, a primal noise of anguish and rage, then tore straight toward Tillman. There was no time for a second shot, no time to nock a second arrow, draw, fire.

The boar was running crazily. The arrow still protruded from its body, just inches from its tail. The big backstrap muscle running down the spine must have been ruined. But still, somehow, the pig found the will to attack.

No time to run, no time to climb a tree. The big boar would be on him in seconds. Tillman flung the bow to the ground, drew his knife. It was the same knife he’d carried for years, through the jungles of Southeast Asia and across the arid mountains of Afghanistan. He kept it sharp enough to shave with, and it had been with him for so long that now it felt like an extension of his hand.

The pig’s tiny, red-rimmed eyes were full of malice. There was none of that brotherhood-of-ancient-warriors shit there now. It just wanted to kill him, and rip his flesh with its tusks. A thin runnel of drool ran down one of its tusks.

It struck Tillman as ironic that after having been in gunfights on three continents, he might end up getting killed by a pig.

He grinned. “All right, you old bastard,” he said. “If that’s how it is . . .”

It charged straight at Tillman. Because of its wound, it couldn’t maintain a straight course and veered offtrack, just far enough to the left that Tillman waem"Ñ€†s able to sidestep and slash with the knife. The blade sliced deeply across the pig’s chest.

It was only after the blade sliced deep into the pig’s hide that Tillman realized he’d made a mistake. Wild boars develop a thick plate of callus several inches thick across their chests to absorb the tusks of rival hogs. So though the blade just sliced into the chest plate, the pig seemed to barely notice the wound.

It whirled with astonishing speed. With a quick flip of its head, the massive boar tossed Tillman. He flew through the air close to ten feet before crashing down in a low mountain laurel bush. The pig rushed the bush, but it had thrown Tillman so high that he had landed three feet off the ground, only his right boot dangling near the pig.

The boar gamely slashed at Tillman’s foot with one of its tusks. Tillman stomped the big pig in the face. It squealed and then thundered back around to take another swipe. Tillman tempted him with the dangling foot, then snatched it out of the way, like a toreador baiting a bull. And like a toreador, he made the animal pay for its charge, sinking his blade into the boar’s back.

The boar squealed and then ran off about ten yards with the knife before it came around, glaring at Tillman with its beady little eyes. Its flanks rose and fell as it panted. Blood was now pouring from all three wounds on its body. But it showed no inclination to quit the fight.

Again it charged.

Tillman dangled his foot again, hoping to duplicate his previous trick. But the boar was too smart; it slammed instead into the base of the mountain laurel. The shock of the collision was so great that the entire bush trembled. Tillman sensed himself slipping, and he felt a burst of fear mixed with admiration.

Thud! The pig hit the tree again.

Tillman figured it was better to seize the initiative than wait to fall on his ass, so he dropped out of the bush and hit the ground. His leg buckled, and he saw blood running down his calf. Apparently the boar had tusked him when he threw Tillman—though he hadn’t even felt it at the time.

He forced himself to his feet. The pain hit him for the first time. But he knew that he had to shrug it off and keep fighting.

The entire herd of pigs had filtered out from beneath the trees and were eyeing him and the boar uneasily, like a crowd gathered to watch a bar fight. They weren’t menacing him, just watching, waiting for a clue from their leader as to what they should do.

But the old boar wasn’t paying attention to them anymore. He only saw Tillman.

And Tillman had no weapon now. The pig screamed and screamed, eyes locked on Tillman. It was obviously losing strength quickly now. It stamped the ground with one hoof, lowered its head, and prepared to charge. Blood and drool leaked from its mouth, the lower lip working with fury or pain.

The bow.

Tillman saw the bow lying on the ground, three arrows left in the quiver. He edged toward the bow.

The pig shook its head, grunted.

Tillman knew he’d only have one chance. He dove for the bow.

The pig attacked. Everything seemed to slow down. "0eÑ€†Tillman felt the throb of his gored calf, heard the thud of the pig’s hooves on the ground. There was no time to be afraid. It was survival of the fittest.

His fingers closed around the bow’s leather grip, then his other hand scooped an arrow from the fallen quiver. There was another impact as the boar smashed into him. It was like being hit by the biggest football player he’d ever played against. Only worse. And without pads.

Tillman crashed to the ground and lay there, the breath momentarily knocked out of him, the bow gone, the arrow clutched in his hand. The boar came around again and faced him, grunting softly.

The herd of pigs had begun to close in around Tillman. They stank of stale urine and pig shit. The big hog lowered its head again, preparing to charge.

Instinctively Tillman brought up his last weapon, the arrow itself, interposing the razor-sharp three-pronged broadhead between himself and the pig. The arrow tip was the only part of his bow-and-arrow rig that he hadn’t made himself. It was a commercially made broadhead—basically a pointed spike of hardened steel, surrounded by three razor blades, ground, honed, and stropped to surgical sharpness. There was no way to shoot it. So he was going to have to turn it into a tiny little spear. He clamped his hands around the fletching and propped the nock against a button on the bib of his camouflaged overalls, then clamped the soles of his boots around the shaft of the arrow.

For a moment all he could hear was the squealing of the pigs around him.

Then the pig made its final charge. There was a massive shock as the huge boar slammed into the soles of Tillman’s feet. He felt himself catapulted end over end, landing facedown on the ground.

The old boar stood over him, eyeing him. The other hogs went silent.

Tillman momentarily felt the boar’s rank breath on his face as it lowered its head toward him, turning its head and peering at him with one eye.

“All right, then,” Tillman said. “Get it over with quick, huh?”