Glass Tiger (17 page)

The last was a sniper’s dream, a narrow V-shaped slot between two granite walls camouflaged by stunted pines. The floor was dry packed dirt. Behind, a narrow mountain torrent rushed down slope from the melting snow lingering in shaded areas far above. Good escape route for Corwin after the shot.

But the distance: over 1,200 yards! Twelve football fields laid end to end down the mountain face. Your slug would drop some twenty-five feet while the swirling, unpredictable winds of the 7,500 foot elevation played games with it. Utterly impossible.

Still, this was Corwin…

Day after tomorrow, Thorne was quite sure, both he and Corwin would be working their way over the summit and going down the far side toward the meadow. Two reluctant killers, one bent on murder, the other bent on stopping him. Stopping him how, if it actually came to that? With his Randall Survivor?

Reluctant as he was, Thorne had no choice: Hatfield had mesmerized himself and all the president’s men with the idea that if Corwin showed at all, he would try wet work, up close and personal. He also remembered Sean Connery’s scorn-filled line in
The Untouchables
about bringing a knife to a gunfight.

In a downtown Hamilton gun store, Thorne professed total ignorance so the clerk could sell him a bolt-action Winchester Standard Model 70 in .30-06 caliber with a Weaver
K
-4 scope. Thousands were sold every year. No waiting period, no papers to sign. Just another guy who liked to go out in the woods and blast away. Nothing to alert Hatfield’s men if they even bothered to check.

At four-thirty a.m. on speech day, Corwin checked out of his motel. He needed time to hide the 4-Runner and walk back. Afterwards, he’d call Janet’s cell to find out where to leave it. He’d be in everybody’s cross-hairs until they figured he had died or disappeared for good, but she would be well and truly out of it. As long as he was in her life, she would never find a man of her own.

For a moment, his resolve flickered. Today, he planned to commit murder. All those countless nights full of grotesque dreams and memories came back to him full-force. Would he have the seeds for any more killing?

Two rangers from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service were working with two college students from the Wildlife Biology Program of the University Of Montana’s School of Forestry at Missoula to release a young male grizzly named Smokey, and a female, gender-misnamed Winnie the Pooh, into the wild. Not that the bears knew they had names. They were wild, and wanted to be.

‘Just two lousy bears being released,’ groused Laura Givens. She was twenty and earnest.

‘It’s a start,’ objected Ranger Rick mildly – yeah, his name really was Ranger Rick, Rick Tandy. He was twenty-two, and more interested in getting into Laura’s pants than arguing with her.

Sam Jones, the other ranger, was thirty-five and secretly sided with the ranchers on this one, as did many
in Fish and Wildlife. More grizzlies they didn’t need to pull down and maul their livestock.

‘Just two-hundred and seventy-eight bears to go,’ he said.

‘It should be six-hundred and twenty-eight bears to go,’ exclaimed Laura, eyes flashing. ‘That’s how many we need for a full recovery of the population.’

Sean McLean was twenty-five and completing his PhD. He said in support, ‘There are sixteen-thousand square miles of virgin territory here – just a couple of highways and a few unimproved roads through. Enough land for our bears to reproduce, and eventually bridge the gap between the existing populations. But you Feds are giving us only the area north of U.S. Highway 12 to work with.’

‘So two bears is a great sufficiency,’ said Sam. ‘What do you say to that, everyone?’

Neither Laura or Sean spoke. The bears, stalking their cages, growled in unison.

The press was in the back of Air Force One, the players were in the front. Wallberg distractedly riffled the pages of his speech. He and his entourage would be choppered from the Air Force base near Missoula, to an LZ near the speech site, and then motorcaded in armored limos to the meadow where the grizzlies would be released.

‘The grizzly bear is a keystone species, with stringent habitat requirements. They serve as a natural barometer of ecosystem health for hundreds of other species…’

The pages fell to his lap. Corwin had assumed mythic proportions in his mind. Thorne said Corwin would be here. He believed Thorne. He raised the speech, tried to concentrate.

‘Grizzlies cannot survive if their remaining habitat is broken up into small chunks through reduction and isolation…’

Superimposed on the pages was Corwin’s face from The Desert Palms Resort last fall. If only the Secret Service had been a few seconds quicker, had shot a little straighter…

‘Since the pockets of grizzlies in Yellowstone and the surrounding wilderness areas are not contiguous, they are not enough to maintain the population at a viable level…’

That night in the California desert, Corwin had no idea why Mather had tried to kill him. But before election night he must have found out: Mather was dead, and now he wanted Gus Wallberg.

Looking down at the distracted President, Jaeger felt only contempt. A man fearing for his life would hide that fact.

‘Mr. President.’ Wallberg looked up, startled. ‘Before you mount to the podium, you will shake hands and trade quips with the college kids who worked with the bears. Then you will move over to the cages, talk knowledgeably with the rangers…’

‘Uh… what sort of crowd will we have?’

‘Small, probably vocal, maybe hostile – they don’t see it as an environmental issue, they see it as a land-use issue. But with half the Washington Press Corps and all four networks right there, your speech will be on everybody’s dinner-time news.’

Wallberg rubbed his eyes. ‘That’s what counts.’

‘Hatfield and O’Hara have the site sewn up tight. If Corwin should be there and somehow got a shot, your Kevlar vest would stop the bullet cold. Any danger is minimal—’

‘I don’t care anything about any on-site danger,’ Wallberg blustered. ‘I’m trying to concentrate here.’

The man didn’t even try to hide his fear. ‘Sorry, sir.’

Wallberg pulled himself together enough to read aloud:

‘By releasing these two symbolic bears, Pooh and Smokey, into the wild, we will provide a biological corridor to link our nation’s last grizzly populations for genetic interchange…’

He lowered the speech. ‘I see the cage doors opening, the bears hesitating, then ambling forth, touching noses, maybe, then, realizing they are free, trotting off into the forest…’

‘It will bring down the house, Mr. President.’

Walking down the aisle, Jaeger remembered his first sexual humiliation after Nisa Mather had turned him down following Wallberg’s exploratory fund-raiser at Olaf Gavle’s house. Jaeger had pulled Nisa into a bedroom, started groping her. She slapped his face, hard, and stalked away with blazing eyes.

How different it all would have been if she had succumbed to his advances! She hadn’t, so, frustrated and vengeful, he had sought out a campaign worker named Kirsten who had milkmaid breasts, rounded hips, strong thighs, and was blonde all the way down. Then he couldn’t get it up, not even with her naked on a motel room bed. It had never happened to him before. After that night, it started happening to him a lot.

LA was their last stop on this trip: maybe give Sharkey a call. Get a blonde who looked a little like Nisa Mather…

He felt himself stiffen slightly at the thought. His mind was miles away from presidential security concerns.

Shayne O’Hara’s mind was filled with presidential security concerns. He was a russet-faced fifty-year-old who looked as if he should be leading the parade on St. Paddy’s Day clad all in green, shillelagh in hand. But under that bluff good-guy exterior was a shrewd, ambitious man who brooked absolutely no fuck-ups.

Terrill Hatfield said, ‘My men are in place, seven-hundred-fifty yards out, ready to do the necessary.’

‘Seven-hundred-and-fifty yards? Jaysus, Terrill, Al-Qaeda has no expertise at long-distance assassination.’

‘But some survivalist who hates the President might,’ said Hatfield. It sounded weak to his ears, but O’Hara nodded.

‘Well, with your men covering distant threats, and my boys covering for close work, we’ll be fine. I’ve kept four-and-a-half Presidents alive, starting with the elder Bush and counting our newly-elected Wallberg, and haven’t lost one yet.’ He checked his watch. ‘Home Plate’s speech starts at three p.m.’

You won’t lose one today, Hatfield thought as he walked away. Not with his own boys 750 yards out, all the hardware and all the jargon of the trade in place. In his ear receiver, he could hear their pre-op adrenaline-charged chatter. To him, they sounded like a pack of coyotes warming up for the hunt.

Franklin’s voice. ‘Ray One to TOC. Request Compromise Authority and permission to move to Code Yellow.’

Yellow: the penultimate position of cover and concealment before Code Green, which meant, in this case, if they got visual on Corwin. Green was the moment of truth. Hatfield, Tactical Operations Commander for this operation, spoke into his bone microphone – called a ‘mic’ by the troops.

‘Copy, Ray One, stand by.’

Walt, ever eager to use his weapon, broke in, ‘Walter Two. Is that an affirmative on Compromise Authority?’

Compromise Authority was a euphemism for permission to open up with their
MP
5 machine guns, their snipe rifles, their flash bangs, their .40 Glock semiautomatics. All the toys. This was what his boys lived for, and he loved them for it.

‘Copy, Walter Two. Affirmative on Compromise Authority if the situation moves to Code Green.’

They would protect the president, all right. But not from threats by the towel-heads and survivalists O’Hara was worried about. From the Halden Corwin whom Thorne had warned them would be there. Like Wallberg, Hatfield believed Thorne.

But his men were not facing out and up, as Thorne wanted, but in and down. If Corwin was fool enough to show, he wasn’t fool enough to set up beyond five hundred yards out. Hatfield’s men would nail him. Hatfield would rub Thorne’s nose in the take-down – before he had the bastard deported back to Kenya to rot in prison while Jaeger made sure that the President thought Thorne was in Tsavo.

Hal Corwin would be dead. Thorne would be out of the picture. With the man who would be next Secretary of State as his ally, Terrill Hatfield would be the next Director of the FBI.

Thorne went in light: his scope-mounted rifle slung across his back, his binocs hung around his neck, a handful of shells in his coat pocket, his knife and canteen on his belt. He also went in slow. Working his way up the valley between flanking stands of blue spruce, he began to feel that maybe Hatfield was right. No vehicle hidden under the trees. No tire tracks, no footprint, no broken branch. If Corwin wasn’t here now, he wasn’t coming.

Maybe Thorne could relax a bit. Hatfield, despite all of his obstructionist bullshit, would have his men 750 yards out, scanning the tall crags behind them.

Thorne briefly checked out the bird and animal sign under the reeds edging the pond. Soft-padded mink tracks, pattering mouse tracks, a dozen long-toed coyote tracks beside the cattails with their brown heads just starting to form. Tiny coins of duckweed floating on the surface with their filaments of root trailing down into the water. Pondweed, punched down into the mud by sharp-edged mule deer hoofs…

He stopped dead.

Among the deer tracks, a single human boot print, water seeping into it. The track pointed north, toward that edge of the massif. The direction he had always thought Corwin would take, the direction he had taken himself when scouting sniper sites on the other side of the ridge.

Thorne came erect, scanning the massif. Movement
caught his eye, right at the edge of the open ridge face. He fumbled out his binoculars, raised them, adjusted them.

Too late. Nothing. Had there been? Bighorn? Elk? Man?

He began trotting up the rising terrain toward the northern edge of the ridge.

Corwin had come in an hour before, also light. Binocs around his neck, canteen and old Smith and Wesson .38 revolver on his hip, cased and loaded rifle over his shoulder, in his pockets his cellphone in a waterproof case to call Janet when it was all over, an empty plastic water bottle, and a roll of masking tape.

Above to his right, the sheer rise of granite; below to his left, a sheer thousand feet of freefall. Out of habit, he checked his backtrial before rounding the northern edge of the massif on those few yards of exposed bare rock.

Someone! He slithered behind a plate of stone, jammed his binoculars to his eyes. The figure by the pond sprang into tight focus, just coming erect, staring up at the rock face, raising his own binocs. Scanning. Now moving. Starting up from the valley floor, coming fast. It was the hunter who had uncovered his practice sites, who had ferreted out Mather’s ambush site.

Corwin belly-crawled around to the other side of the ridge, into the cover of the pines, shrubs, and broken expanses of rock, adrenaline pumping. The tracker was at least fifteen years younger than he, hard and fit and fearless. No way to outrun him. He cursed his shortened leg, damaged knee, splinting in his chest.

Corwin took the revolver from his belt, from his anorak pocket took the empty plastic water bottle and the masking tape. He taped the mouth of the bottle over the gun’s muzzle.

An unmuffled shot might just carry too far in this thin mountain air despite the fact that his pistol fired a .38 short, a relatively low-powered round without a lot of punch or noise. The plastic bottle would trap the escaping gases of his shot, muffle the sound without impeding the bullet’s flight in any way. It was a home-made silencer, good for only one shot, up close.

Thorne went around the end of the massif in a rush, dropped to the ground in thick cover. Waited, panting, for his pulse to slow. The worst kind of a stalk, where you weren’t sure the prey was even out there. The movement he had seen from below could have been a deer, a bighorn sheep, a chimera.

But he knew it was Corwin. Dorst had been right. Alison and Eden receded in his interior ladscape, replaced by the need to match himself against this master woodsman, whatever the outcome. He went down through the scattered tree-growth, slowly, silently. Whenever he passed anything that might conceal a man, he scouted the possible ambush from the side before moving on.