Hunting Season (35 page)

When she came to, her whole body was buzzing with pain. She wasn’t able to get a good breath because of her side, and she was dimly aware that there were sounds around her she couldn’t quite hear. Her eyes were stuck shut by a coating of concrete dust. When she was able to get them open and focus, she could see that the whole industrial area had been wrecked, with great mounds of concrete rubble piled everywhere—in the street, between the shattered buildings, even on top of the buildings that were still standing. The last two buildings in the row had been partially knocked down, and where the power plant had been, there was only the stump of the main smokestack presiding over two piles of twisted metal that must have been the boilers. She saw Ransom come staggering out into the street from somewhere, his clothes

torn to ribbons, bleeding from the head, eyes, ears, and mouth. He tripped over a mound of rubble and went down like a sack of flour, lying motionless in the street. She was horrified to see a rod of metal sticking out of his head like a feather less arrow. A great cloud of dust hung over the entire area, thick enough to turn the daylight yellowish brown.

She looked around for Whittaker, but he was nowhere in sight. Her knees felt like they were on fire, and she looked down and saw that she had skinned the knees of her pants down to two bloody patches of road rash.

She tried to get up, but there was a large piece of concrete with its re bar still embedded lying on her right leg, and her right hand didn’t seem to be working. She tried calling out for help, but all she managed was a whimper, and that turned into a coughing fit, which hurt her lungs.

Then someone was there, levering the big chunk of concrete off her leg. It was one of the surveillance squad agents—Harris, she thought his name was, pretty sure that’s what it was—and he was saying something to her. She absolutely couldn’t hear him. She pointed to her ears and shook her head, which turned out to be a big mistake. She experienced a major lance of pain, followed by a cool rose haze that enveloped her consciousness, and then, blessedly, it all went away.

When she regained consciousness the next time, she found herself inside an ambulance, but the vehicle was not moving. Her whole body felt awash in some soothing balm, and she was hooked up to IVs in both arms.

A young paramedic was talking urgently on a telephone down near her feet, and she could see out the back doors of the ambulance that it was parked on the main street of the industrial area, looking down toward what had been the power plant. She was shocked by what she saw: The power plant was essentially gone, with nothing remaining but the wrecked boilers on the wide concrete expanse of what had been the floor.

The two large buildings at the far end of the street nearest the power plant had been mostly destroyed, with only their uphill side walls still intact. The streets were littered with pieces of concrete, big and small, and there were two body sheets lying out on the street between her and the open space in front of what had been the power plant. The medic turned around and saw that she was conscious. He said something into the phone, which she could not hear, and then hung up. Then he was talking to her, but she could barely hear him. She shook her head, much more carefully, but couldn’t move her arms. She was able to read his lips.

“Can you hear me?” he was asking.

She winced and mouthed the word no. Her lips felt twice their normal size.

“Can you breathe all right?”

She tried out her lungs. It hurt to inhale, and her ribs were throbbing under the warmth of the painkiller, but she nodded.

“How many fingers am I holding up?” he asked. Three she mouthed, and then she said it out loud: “Three.”

“Okay, good.” She realized she could hear him now, although his voice was still distant. He saw that she could understand him.

“Your vitals are okay,” he said.

“Your pupils are a little bit dilated, and I think you’ve cracked a couple of ribs and maybe your right wrist. I’m guessing a mild concussion, but otherwise, I don’t see anything major, okay? The IVs are for pain and shock, and we’ve got you on a monitor. Just relax. We’re gonna transport in just a few minutes.”

“What happened?” she croaked.

“Looks like an A-bomb to me, lady. There’re a million cops out there right now.”

“What about… them?” she asked, pointing with her eyes to the body sheets down the street.

“Don’t know, ma’am. I mean who they are. The cops in suits are pretty pissed off, though.”

At that moment, Farnsworth’s head appeared over the medic’s shoulder.

His face was a mask of shock and concern. He saw Janet looking at him and tried for a smile. It was ghastly, Janet thought.

“Hey, boss,” she said weakly.

“Thank God,” he said.

“Can she talk to me?” he asked the medic.

“Yeah, but she can’t hear so good,” the man said, and then crawled out of the way so that Farnsworth could climb partially into the ambulance.

“Janet, can you tell me what happened?” he asked, and then swore.

“Listen to me: Are you okay? Are you hurt badly?”

“I took a flying lesson,” she said, trying for a little wisecrack to get that mortal look off his face.

“We were standing next to some building, down there, called Nitro Fixing. Then the world ended. I don’t know what happened.”

“The surviving team members said the power plant blew up,” he said.

“One of them was in the doorway of a building when it went up. Said the whole fucking thing literally disintegrated in a fireball. No warning.”

“Who—” she began, looking past him into the street.

“Ken Whittaker is dead, and definitely one of the rent-a-cops, if not both of them. They were out in the street, we think.”

Janet felt her stomach go cold. But Farnsworth wasn’t finished.

“Ransom is … well, it’s gonna be touch-and-go, I’m afraid. He had a bastard of a head injury. They’ve heloed him out already. Our guys who were up the street inside buildings are pretty much okay. But, listen, we have a development.”

“What?” Despite the pain medication, her side was beginning to really hurt, and it was getting harder to breathe. She tried not to panic. Development?

“The state police pulled Lynn Kreiss out of that last building down there. She’s injured but alive, Janet. She was able to tell us that two guys have been holding her here since those kids disappeared, but then she became incoherent. Started babbling about Washington and a hydrogen bomb. Then she passed out. This is all secondhand—I wasn’t here yet.

But now we have to find out what the hell happened here.”

“Is aTF taking over?”

“Oh, hell yes, they’ve taken over. In force. They’re de laminating about Whittaker. Their lead guy is foaming at the mouth about why Washington never told them they suspected this place of being a bomb factory.”

“Brilliant,” Janet muttered.

“This whole place was a bomb factory.”

“Sir?” the medic said, looking at his monitors.

“I think you’re all done here, okay? We gotta transport now.”

Farnsworth nodded and withdrew.

“Get well quick, Janet,” he called as the attendant began shutting the doors.

“Fucking Kreiss—he was right!”

he added.

And Kreiss had known a lot more than he had been letting on, she thought as the attendant slid forward and rapped on the window to the driver. She wondered if Kreiss was out there among all the rubble, or still in pursuit of these people who had been building—what out here, a hydrogen bomb She was no explosives expert, but she knew that wasn’t possible.

No way. But assuming Kreiss was alive, somebody did need to tell him that they’d found his daughter. That he could stop chasing the phantoms of the arsenal and come in and talk to them. The ambulance was rolling and the attendant was doing something with one of her IVs. She suddenly felt very sleepy. Have to remember that, she thought as she slipped off again.

Browne waited until dark to go back to the Waffle House on Route 11 to retrieve his pickup truck. Earlier, he’d driven the propane truck out

to the interstate and five miles north to the big TA truck stop, where he’d parked it among a hundred other big trucks that were idling out at the back of the cinder lot. He’d cooled his heels for an hour at the truck stop before hitching a ride back down 1-81 into Dublin, south of Ramsey. From Dublin to the Waffle House on Route 11 had been a four mile walk. He’d seen all the emergency vehicles running up and down Route 11, so somebody must have finally opened the door to the power plant. His suspicions were confirmed when he went into the Waffle House for a cold drink and everyone was talking about the big bang out at the arsenal.

As he drove his pickup back to Blacksburg, he was satisfied that any evidence of what they had been doing out there for all those months, including the retort, the pumps, the generator, and even the acid tank were now somewhere in low earth orbit. He’d also put enough acid down that tunnel to obliterate any trace of the security truck and any number of intruders.

Leaving the girl… well, he’d done what he had to do. Regrettable, but necessary. That nitro building’s big vertical expanse of concrete wall facing the power plant should have taken care of the girl once the explosion occurred. Keeping her had been a dumb idea all along, he thought now. It was just that he had never been quite able just to shoot her. He was ashamed about Jared fooling around in there. He should have known that would happen. He would go out to Jared’s this afternoon, find out why that oversexed young pup hadn’t shown up. William had been headstrong, but he would never have taken advantage of the girl that way.

The thought of his dead son stole some of the satisfaction out of what had happened out at the arsenal. The radio was talking about aTF agents.

These were the same federal cops who’d killed William. But two weren’t enough. The goddamned government, with all its alphabet soup of cops, was out of hand. Killing women and children in the name of the law, sending snipers to gun down women with babies in their arms, then lying through their collective teeth about it, then being exonerated in court.

He’d followed the Waco standoff on the television, but had missed the exact moment when they drove their tanks into the building and burned those deluded bastards out. He was convinced that there was the mother of all coverups in place over Waco. William, William, William, he thought sadly. Why did you have to go down there? Why did you join up with such a bunch of misguided fools? I lived for the day I could get you back. And now you’re nothing but a pile of greasy ashes out in some dusty field near Waco.

He took a deep breath to calm himself. Remember what you’re going to do, he told himself. You’re going to show those bastards that they’d killed the wrong man’s son. The arsenal was just the beginning.

His plan now was to wait twenty-four hours to let the hubbub surrounding the arsenal explosion subside, and then he’d head north with the propane truck for the final stage. There was only one thing that could link him to what happened out there, and for that, they’d have to go through every one of the nine hundred ammo bunkers out on the back reservation.

Bunker number 887 looked like every other bunker—partially buried, 150 feet long, 40 feet wide, and 20 feet from floor to the top of its curved ceiling.

It contained his post-attack getaway stash: cash, clothes, passport, food and water for two weeks, and even a car. Assuming he got clear of what he was going to do in Washington, he would come back here, hide out in the bunker for a while, and then disappear. There were people in splinter groups of the Christian Identity network who would help him hide.

What he had to do right now was to make jared understand he needed to keep his head down and his mouth shut from here on out, no matter what happened up in Washington. He’d deliberately not told jared specifically what he was going to do with the hydrogen. What the boy didn’t know, he couldn’t tell. The propane truck was safe for the moment—just one more truck parked at a truck stop, right out in plain sight, which effectively made it invisible. The only other person who knew anything was dead. Just like his William. Fair was fair.

He crossed the New River bridge and headed north toward Blacksburg.

He decided he would go directly to Jared’s trailer before going home. See if the dummy had disentangled himself from his current whore long enough even to know about what had happened out at the arsenal.

Kreiss ended up going back to his cabin. He had driven down Canton Street where Browne McGarand lived and had seen the house. It was a medium-sized two-story brick house on a half-acre lot in a well-kept, heavily treed neighborhood. He had spotted a detached garage at the back of the house, and the yard looked well attended and free of trash. An elderly man had been raking his lawn next door when Kreiss drove by. He had glanced at Kreiss’s truck, but he had not really looked up. One more pickup truck going down the street was apparently not remarkable. There were other people about, and he heard some dogs barking when he stopped at the corner, as if checking a set of directions. There had been

no sign of the tanker truck. He turned at the next corner and discovered an alley that ran behind the houses on Canton Street and the houses on the next street over. The property lines were marked by clusters of metal trash cans standing guard along the alley.

He had decided not to go past twice, not with that geezer out there.

Old people noticed things, and, unless Kreiss was willing to stop and go knock on the door, he didn’t want to be remembered. It looked like a quiet middle-class neighborhood, which told him absolutely nothing about the occupant of number 242 Canton Street. He would come back tonight and try for that alley. He might need to create a diversion of some kind. If the neighbors were mostly elderly, there would be people about, not to mention dogs. A NEIGHBORHOOD WATCH sign emphasized the point. He saw what looked like a mom-and-pop corner gas station one block down from Canton Street where he might be able to park when he came back at night.