Hunting Season (26 page)

Once they were out of sight, she went back and tried the combination.

She unlocked the padlock, slid one side of the big chain-link gate back on its wheels, and then brought the car through. She closed the gate but left the heavy padlock unlocked, dangling on its chain. As far as she was concerned, this was a federal reservation and she was federal law. She wasn’t about to answer to two postadolescent assholes from some podunk rent-acop organization. She put her stuff in the trunk, got back in the car, looked quickly at the map, and drove down the main road toward the industrial area.

Kreiss toyed with the idea of splicing together a voice message from jared to the other man, in which Jared would agree to meet him at the site Saturday night after all. That way, the other man would get there and wait, which would make it easier for Kreiss to take him. But then he discarded the idea: It would take some specialized equipment and a lot of time to lift Jared’s voice and words from the recorder and kludge together a workable message. He would just go out there three hours before sunset and set up in the area of the rail gate. And stay away from the steel plates in the main street of the industrial area, he reminded himself.

In the meantime, he’d learned that the second man was probably a relative.

He had looked up the name McGarand in three local phone books and found, in addition to Jared, a B. McGarand located in Blacksburg, with the same phone number intercepted by the recorder. The man had sounded much older. A grandfather? Uncle? The listing gave him an address in Blacksburg, and he toyed with the idea of going over there and starting early. But there was too much he didn’t know: Would there be family members? Children? A crowded neighborhood? He didn’t want another Millwood, which ordinarily meant that he would have to do a lot of reconnaissance. No, it made more sense to wait for the man at the remote arsenal, in the darkness after sunset. There was always a chance that B. McGarand might call Jared back to convince him to make the rendezvous, but he doubted it: The older man had sounded genuinely angry.

That left only one remaining complication: someone discovering Jared’s body under the trailer. He thought that unlikely, at least in the next twenty-four hours. The mailbox was up at the head of the dirt road,

and unless Mr. B. McGarand went out there himself, Jared would stay put until the buzzards gave him away.

He spent the early afternoon checking the perimeter of his property for any sign that the Agency people had come back. Then he re swept the cabin for delayed-action bugs. He even went over to Micah’s to see if he’d seen or heard anyone creeping around, but Micah said he had people watching and that the woods were empty. If anything federal showed up on the roads or in the woods, Micah would give him warning. He checked out his truck again, but he found nothing other than Special Agent Carter’s pager on his front seat. It was just a small black box with an LED readout window. He scanned it for a carrier signal, but it was a receive-only device. He started to turn it off, but then he thought about it: He was probably closer to finding Lynn than they were. But Carter might have another warning for him about the Washington contingent. If he’d successfully swept out all the tags, they might try to come find him.

He was so close to recovering Lynn that he would do everything in his power to avoid them just now. So he left the pager on but threw it into the glove compartment. That way, if there was a transmitter in it, being in the glove compartment would attenuate the hell out of any signal that little thing could produce. Then he went back to the cabin to prepare for the night’ sops

Janet had driven around the entire Ramsey Arsenal for almost two hours, seeing mostly bunkers, more bunkers, and pine trees. Hundreds of bunkers and thousands of pine trees, to be exact. She had crossed and recrossed a creek that must have transected the entire installation, but that seemed to be the only moving thing on the entire reservation. The steel doors on all the bunkers were rusted and securely locked, with no signs or labels to indicate what had been stored there. By four o’clock, she was back at the industrial area, pausing on a street in front of what looked like the site’s power plant. Around her, there were dozens of buildings, sheds, tanks, and towers scattered around a maze of streets, alleys, and rail-siding lines.

Okay, she thought, if this is Site R, it might have made an interesting afternoon exploration for three college kids on a camping expedition. But so what? She could well believe that the EPA had listed this site, based on the fact that nothing green was growing within a hundred yards of any of the buildings. Even with the air conditioning going, she

could detect the chemical smell in the air. Could the kids have gone into one these big buildings and locked themselves in by accident? She hoped not—it had been four weeks now, and even with some camping supplies, they would be on their way to mummy status by now. None of the buildings appeared to have windows of any kind, and those doors looked like they had been made to restrain powerful forces. That dark kid said they were going to break into Site R. Break into. So, it fit. Maybe the thing to do was to call out the Army or whoever owned this mausoleum and search every bloody building. She thought of Edwin Kreiss, pictured him sitting out here on the curb and watching a bunch of soldiers search the buildings. It was not a pretty image. Plus, there was all that bomb-cell theory the Washington people had been talking about.

Hell with it. This was pointless. Her assignment was to get close to Kreiss, see what he was doing. Find a leverage point. And then she thought once more about the mysterious bombers. She looked around again. Now that would make sense. The aTF was right: This would be an absolutely perfect place to set up a bomb lab. But they’d been through the place and found nothing. Assuming aTF knew what a bomb lab looked like, she was not likely to find something they had not. So go home, regroup. Get a line on Kreiss. Have a drink. Find a life.

She put the car in gear, went up the street in front of the power plant, turned left, and drove up the hill on what appeared to be the main drag.

The car banged noisily over huge steel plates that were spaced every fifty feet or so. She slowed down so as not to hit them so hard, and she was reaching for her purse when the car suddenly banged on something and then tilted down at an impossible angle. She slammed on the brakes, but it was too late—the car was plunging down into a black hole. She started to scream, but the air bag smothered it as the car hit bottom with an enormous crash and all the side windows blew out in a shower of safety glass.

The engine shut down at the jolt, and it sounded as if some major components had fallen off the underside of the vehicle.

She took a moment to recover her breath and to get her hands disentangled from the air bag. The skin on her face and wrists stung from the air bag, and the seat belt had damn near cut her into three pieces. She couldn’t see much through a cloud of dust, and then she realized she was in darkness, or semidarkness—there was a cone of light coming from above. The windshield was intact but out of its frame. The concrete flanks of what appeared to be an immense tunnel rose up on either side of the car. Her ribs hurt and her shins were

bruised, but she didn’t think she’d sustained any major injuries. The car, on the other hand, felt very wrong.

It was sitting too low upon whatever it had landed. And the angle was odd, with the back significantly lower than the front. She was in some kind of tunnel, and it felt like the tunnel sloped down behind her. She saw the rungs of a ladder embedded into the concrete wall to one side, so at least there was a way out of here.

As she reached to release the seat belt, the damn car moved! Backward.

She reflexively stomped down on the brakes, but nothing happened except that the brake pedal went all the way to the fire wall. The car gathered velocity and the cone of light, now in front of her, became fainter as the car rolled down an increasingly steep incline. A horrible scraping and screeching sound came from underneath, as if the car was dragging its drive train or exhaust system over concrete. She tried to turn around in her seat, but the damned belt had tightened a lot and she had to fight hard even to get her neck turned, trying to see behind her, but of course it was pitch-black. She yelled almost involuntarily as the car slid faster, but the noise from underneath was incredible—a cacophony of scraping and grinding metal that drowned out even her thoughts. Then came the giddy sensation of launching off a cliff as the car went airborne for a second before crashing down again on something very hard and then slewing sideways and down into—water!

The vehicle stopped with a whooshing sound and then tilted ominously toward the driver’s side, admitting a tidal wave of ice-cold water over the windowsills. Amazingly, the second impact had activated the cabin dome light over her head, and Janet tried to see where she was as she mashed the seat belt button and rose up in the front seat. The black water engulfed the interior in an incredibly few seconds. Outside was utter darkness, but Janet had no choice. She ejected herself through the driver’s side window as the car filled completely and went down behind her, sucking at her legs as she scrambled to get away from it.

The water was frigid. It went up her slacks and gripped her bare legs and thighs like an ice pack. Her chest felt squeezed and she had trouble catching her breath as she water in the darkness. Both her arms and her right leg stung from small cuts. She thought she saw the glow of the dome light beneath her, but then it was gone. She splashed around in the darkness for a minute before getting control other panic and slowing everything down. She regulated her breathing and made her strokes more deliberate. Two huge invisible bubbles burst onto the surface nearby, the second one bringing up the stink of gasoline. She

felt one other shoes go and she kicked off the other one. The Sig in her shoulder rig felt like a brick, but she wasn’t ready to get rid of that quite yet. Then she remembered her lifesaving courses and took off her slacks. Treading water with just her feet, she brought the waist of the pants up to her face, zipped the zipper, and closed the button. Then she tied an awkward knot in the bottom of each leg of the pants, took a deep breath, ducked her head, and exhaled into the billowing waist of the slacks. She did this five more times before the pants legs inflated enough to hold her up. She moved between the two puffed-up trouser legs and relaxed, bobbing gently in the utter darkness. She caught the smell of gasoline and oil again as the drowned car began to give up some more of its fluids. She yelped when something large moved under the water, but it was just another air bubble. Then there was only silence.

She tried to determine whether or not she was moving, but, without any visual references, it was impossible to tell. Probably not, she thought—that air bubble had come out of the car from almost directly beneath her. She called out, then listened as her voice reverberated from unseen walls. She knew there were flashlights in the car’s trunk, but she had no way of knowing exactly where the car was beneath her, and she was definitely not going to let go of her life preserver in this darkness. From somewhere above her and far away, she heard what sounded like a large piece of sheet metal falling onto concrete. Then silence.

No, not quite silence. There was the sound of falling water somewhere nearby. Not a huge stream, but certainly a steady one. Dropping from a substantial height. She couldn’t tell where the sound was coming from.

She began dog-paddling in what she hoped was a straight line, and within a minute, she bumped into what felt like a concrete wall. She stopped and felt the surface. It was smooth and slippery, as if covered in moss. She felt her way along the wall for several feet but encountered no other features.

The sound of falling water seemed to be louder in this direction, but still far off. Her limbs were beginning to tremble in the cold, and she knew she had to get out of the water before hypothermia set in. She stopped to think. If this is a tunnel, then the opposite side ought to be straight across from this side. She flattened her back against the wall and then shoved away across the surface, her eyes closed as she tried to visualize a tunnel.

She paddled for what seemed like forever before her fingertips touched a hard, slippery surface.

She stopped. Had she gone in a circle? No, the falling water sound was coming from a different angle. Or at least she hoped so. She

started her search again, this time bumping along the wall to her left, hand over hand, looking for a pipe or a ladder or steps—any protruding feature she could use to get her shivering body out of this water. She realized her chin was in the water, which meant it was time to refill her trouser legs. She bobbed under and exhaled five more times until she got her makeshift water wings back. Then she rested. Which way had she been going? The first tendril of despair wrapped around her gut and she wondered if she was just going to drown down here, alone, in this stygian blackness. She reached out for the wall, but it was gone. A lance of panic shot through her and she kicked out forcefully, only to bang her forehead on the wall.

She reached out with both hands, bending forward into the Y of her inflated trousers, and rested again.

Think, she told herself. This is a manmade tunnel complex. The car had been climbing a hill when it had fallen through one of those metal plate sections. The tunnel obviously conformed to the hill’s slope, which meant it ran down to some bottom or collection point. The tunnel had been big enough to accommodate a Crown Vie, so there had to be some ladders down here somewhere, some means by which the tunnel could be inspected or cleaned out. All she had to do was find one, then climb up out of the water. If she could get back to the original tunnel, the one under the main drag, she could get back to the point where the car had fallen through. After that—well, first things first.

She continued her hand-over-hand search, stopping to listen and look for light. Finally, she realized she could no longer hear the sound of falling water. For some reason, that worried her, so she reversed course and went back the way she had come, going faster now, since this was wall she had already covered. Her legs were getting numb and her feet weren’t there at all. She tried to ignore what this meant and kept going. At last, she heard the falling water again, and this time she headed for that sound.