Read Gideon's War/Hard Target Online
Authors: Howard Gordon
He wormed himself across the ice over to the chair. Getting back into the chair took nearly five minutes of struggle. But curiously he didn’t feel daunted or angry or depressed the way he’d always felt doing therapy back at Walter Reed. In fact, he felt a steely determination, the same quality he thought had been blown away in the explosion.
Finally he settled back into the chair and moved down the walk, the nubby tires of the chair biting into the ice and snow with surprising efficiency.
Jesus but it was cold.
He’d put on a coat before leaving the house, but now his chest and hair and legs were wet from the snow he’d been lying on. And he should have worn a hat.
Nothing to do but keep moving.
He powered on down past the stables and onto the trail heading back into the forest. He was about five minutes down the trail when the first snow started falling. Within another ten minutes, the snow wa“0et=”s coming down so hard that he kept having to knock the flakes off his eyelashes in order to see. Visibility was down to thirty or forty feet.
He didn’t feel nervous, though. The wheelchair actually started riding better once half an inch of snow had accumulated. Soon, however, he was shivering.
But he was on a mission. He didn’t have gloves, but he’d pulled his ruined hand back inside the sleeve of his coat.
The snow was beautiful, sifting down out of the sky in fat gray-white lumps. Every sensation felt bold, sharp, clear. Even the cold and the lump on his head where he’d whacked himself in the fall lifted his spirits, made him feel complete for the first time in a long time.
Why the hell had he been sitting around feeling sorry for himself all this time? Yes, it sucked having no legs. Yes, it sucked having to rely on Nurse Margie. Yes, it sucked having a face like Freddy Krueger. But there were guys who didn’t make it back, who would never again feel the clear, bracing cold of a day like this.
He hummed to himself as he bumped down the trail. He realized the place was farther than he’d thought. The chair was all charged up, so it would be able to make it there and back. But still, as he got deeper into the forest, he couldn’t help feeling this was not the smartest thing he’d ever done in his life.
Finally, he came around a bend, and there it was: a large metal building that seemed unusually high. To the left was another structure, lower but longer than the first. Between them was some sort of massive air-conditioning unit, connected to the building by huge steel ducts. There seemed to be nothing going on, though. No African women, no vehicles, no steam coming from the chimneys, no lights. It was completely desolate.
He rolled to the taller building, found the door locked. There was a small window, but he couldn’t see in. He rolled to the second building. The door to this one was open. He looked inside. In one corner lay a very large pile of what appeared to be sweet potatoes. The rest of the building contained a variety of industrial machines. Judging from the work flow, it looked like the potatoes were going into some sort of masher, which piped something to large stainless steel vats, which then led to a number of smaller vats or cookers. There was a lot of stainless steel piping.
Could he have been wrong about his suspicions? Sweet potatoes, he knew, yielded even more ethanol than corn. Was that all that was going on out here? How stupid he had been. A wave of shame crashed over him as he realized how susceptible he’d been to some imagined conspiracy between Collier and his father. He wished he could call his father now and apologize for his misguided fears.
Evan turned his wheelchair around and went back outside. The wind had picked up a little. He touched his hair, found it frozen solid. He was shivering pretty hard now.
This was not so good. He needed to get back to the house.
He rolled out behind the two buildings, using them to shield himself from the wind. By the edge of the second one he found his father’s Cat D8 parked in the snow. Dale Wilmot had started in the business driving a Caterpillar, and he enjoyed using it around the property, knocking shit down or flattening ground. Like everything he did, the old man was a perfectionist with the Cat. Whether moving a pile of earth or digging a trench, his work was meticulous.
But here was a mess of broken earth, lumps and piles scattered here and there that hadn’t been entirely covered with snow. Since his father couldn’t have done this, he realized it must be Collier’s handiwork. But what had he been doing here? It looked like he’d been burying something. Maybe some kind of industrial residue that his father didn’t want dumped in the stream where he occasionally fished.
Evan rolled out over the lumpy ground, trying to get back onto the main path to the house. He pushed the chair sideways, spun it around, and then pushed it forward. For the first time since he’d left the house, the chair got stuck.
He backed up, then rolled forward, then backed up again. He cursed. The bottom of the chair had snagged on something. He rocked it back and forth, and felt a kindling fear in his belly.
If he got stuck out here, he was well and truly screwed. He leaned over and tried to look under the chair. But he couldn’t lean too far without the danger of pitching over, which would only make a bad situation worse. Now that he’d stopped, he noticed this his entire body was trembling from the cold. It was a deep, biting, bone-deep cold that felt raw and burned.
He tried to spin the chair around, but the tires wouldn’t grab the ground. The snow was coming down heavier, so hard that he could barely make out the Caterpillar, only five yards away.
Suddenly the chair broke free. He paused and turned to see what had caught him. It was a root, poking out of the ground.
Then his eyes widened. That was no root. It was a delicate black hand. A woman’s hand, dusted with frost.
He moved closer and could see the fingers curled, as if the woman had been trying to dig herself out of her frozen grave. It was one of the African women who had been working with Collier. Now she—and maybe everyone—was dead, judging from the size of the frozen bed of earth that surrounded him. What he’d discovered was far worse than his initial suspicion would have led him to imagine. But he still lacked the context to understand why this had happened or what Collier and his father were up to.
He blasted forward, heading back toward the metal buildings—or what he thought were the metal buildings. But when he reached the vague dark shapes rising above him, he realized it was just the edge of the woods.
He looked around and realized he’d lost his bearings. All he could see was the trees and the snow. He pushed forward along the tree line while the snow absorbed all sound around him. It was almost as if he were enduring some diabolical sensory deprivation experiment. The tires of the wheelchair spun as they tried to grip on the slippery surface. He halted momentarily, then pressed on.
A minute later the tires spun again. He jiggled the joystick, waiting for them to catch, but they just kept spinning. He looked down and saw that the wheels had cut a trench. The initial friction had melted the snow—which then refroze into a solid glaze of ice.
His heart was pounding now. He jiggled and rocked and yanked on the wheel with his hand. But nothing worked. Nearing panic, he pressed the joystick to the forward limit. The tires made a soft buzzing sound on the ice. But the chair didn’t move. And after another minute, he could hear the frequency of the wheels’ buzzing begin to lower slightly. He was running spat down the batteries.
“Help!” he called. “Margie! Can you hear me?”
But the deep silence of the forest was his only answer.
A sudden resolve eclipsed his fear as he realized that there was only one thing left to do. He unstrapped the Velcro straps from his legs and slid to the ground.
The cold ground burned the stumps of his legs. Since coming home, he’d refused to do the therapy that would have prepared his stumps for prosthetics, and as a result, they were uncallused, thin-skinned, and sensitive.
He began to crawl.
Once he’d been a football star and soldier and a horseman, proud of his body and what it could do, the punishment it could endure without giving out on him. But now? It wasn’t just that he’d been blown all to shit. It was also that he’d lain there feeling sorry for himself, letting his body weaken.
He still had the will, though. However different he and the old man were, Dale Wilmot had bequeathed him that one thing: will.
I’m not gonna die out here.
He crawled on and on, pushing himself, working through the fire that shot up through what remained of his limbs until they became completely numb.
I’m not gonna die out here.
After several hundred yards, he stopped in the middle of the trail to rest. Although the snow was still coming down, it had slackened a little, falling gently on his face and on his eye and on his outstretched tongue. It was peaceful, and the cold was like a blanket, and he closed his eyes so he could sleep.
29
WASHINGTON / IDAHO
A light dusting of snow covered the ground when the plane landed at Spokane International Airport in Washington State, just over the Idaho border. The airport was barely large enough for four gates, and Nancy Clement suspected its claim of “international” status was an exaggeration. Because of its size, however, she was able to purchase a last-minute ticket that she paid for at Dulles airport with her personal credit card, and to walk directly from landing to the Budget Rent A Car counter. The man at the counter was a morose-looking Indian guy who was missing all his upper teeth, giving his speech a lisping quality.
“Could be a vide out,” he said, nodding his head as though in support of the notion that the worst possibilities are always the ones that actually come to pass.
“A what?”
“Vide. Out.” He saw she was looking at him blankly. “A videout blizzard. So much snow you can’t see your hand in front of your face, so please drive carefully.”
“Thank you. I will.”
He smiled a broad cheerless smile, showing off his gums. “Have a good day.”
With that cheery send-off, she began driving north toward the address she’d found for Dale WilmotR a t="0e17;s estate. The GPS showed the distance as only thirty-five miles, so she hoped she could get there before the roads became impassable.
The first part of the drive along US 90, wasn’t bad. It was snowing hard, but the traffic kept the right lane relatively free of snow. The car felt stable and sure-footed, even at highway speeds. But then she swung off onto a rural route that wound upward into the higher elevations toward Priest Lake, and the conditions quickly deteriorated. Within minutes of turning off the highway, she began to feel a relentless tick of nervousness. Soon she was driving through four or five inches of virgin snow, not a single tire track on the road. She had rented a four-wheel-drive vehicle, a Toyota Land Cruiser, but still the car occasionally came unglued as she cornered, and once she even drove off the road far enough to worry about plunging down a hillside.
After that she drove with more caution.
To make matters worse, the map she carried was not very detailed, and the GPS in her car seemed to have no record of the road she was traveling on. She had finally switched it off after the condescending English-accented female voice had said “Turn around as soon as possible” for about the ninetieth time.
The wipers were going full speed, and the heater was blasting, but the windshield was getting clogged with snow. And even in the brief seconds when the wiper blades cleared it, she was unable to see more than a few feet in front of her. She found herself driving five miles an hour, more or less completely blind, up a mountain road. The notion that she might have to pull off the road and sit for a while started to seem entirely plausible, and the possibility made her hungry. She had eaten a nasty little ham and cheese sandwich in Las Vegas before changing planes. But that was six and a half hours ago.
And now the world had turned to an impenetrable gray mass. Finally, she gave in, stopped the car, got out, and stood in the snow. She had never seen anything like it before in her life. Raised in Tennessee, she had never even felt a snowflake on her cheek before she joined the FBI.
She would have thought that a whiteout blizzard would have been pretty and soft and white. But instead it had a grim grainy quality, like the soot from a crematorium.
She could more or less tell where the road was because the dim, black shapes of trees loomed over her, half visible through the snow. She glanced at her watch. A little after four o’clock. The sun would be going down pretty soon, which would only make matters worse. She’d probably be stuck there for the night.
For the first time she began to feel something that edged toward panic, when suddenly, mercifully, the snow let up. Perched on a hillside not more than a mile or two away, she saw a massive post-and-beam lodge, a house so big it almost could have been a hotel.
That was it. It had to be.
Five minutes later she was pulling up in front of the house. She climbed out and knocked on the door. But no one answered. Nancy looked around the house, trying to see inside, but there was no sign of life. Then, in the dimming light, she made out a dark figure trundling up a path, bundled in a heavy coat. It was a woman, a good four inches taller than Nancy, who outweighed her by at least a hundred pounds. She wore pale green scrubs beneath a huge parka. Nancy followed her inside. Framed by the furry hood, the woman’s expression was tight with panic. Nancy showed the woman her identification.
“How did you know?”
“Know what?”
“That Evan is missing.”
“Who’s Evan?”
“Mr. Wilmot’s son. I was just about to call the police.”
“I didn’t come for Evan. I came to talk to John Collier.”
“He’s not here. He’s with Mr. Wilmot. They flew out together earlier today, but I need to find Evan. He’s in a wheelchair, so he can’t have gone far. My God, Mr. Wilmot will kill me.”
“Slow down and tell me what happened so I can help you,” Nancy said, trying to calm the frantic woman.
The nurse explained that she’d been given explicit instructions to keep Evan inside. He was not well, and might try to defy her, but for his own safety and health he needed to avoid the cold outdoors. Now she feared he might be dead from exposure. She was close to a nervous collapse. She had picked up the phone a dozen times to call Mr. Wilmot but had hung up every time.