Necessary Evil (8 page)

He knew what he would do. If it worked, he might live.

He had minutes if he was lucky, but perhaps he had only seconds. They would be coordinating by radio, getting in position for a massive assault. Each one of them knew where he was. Their satellite navigators would lead them straight to his coordinates. There was only one thing they didn't know. They didn't know who he was.

Kier worked quickly, aware that any slip would cost him his life and probably Jessie's. Another Douglas fir log some distance away had the makings of what he would need. It had not been long since the tree had fallen.

Kier put Miller's radio card, stiletto, and money clip in the dead man's coat. Jones's knife and a couple of clips of his ammunition he put in Crawford's pack, along with Jenkins's compass, more ammunition, and money from both Jones and Jenkins. Last he took the index page from Volume One of the lab reports and hurriedly went about untying and retying Crawford's boot so that he could cram the document inside. Every one of these guys seemed to have a black field watch— nothing distinctive there. Even so, he put Miller's watch in a shirt pocket.

Now he would learn whether the fallen Douglas fir had what he needed. Picking up the body, he walked quickly. Between Kier and his goal at the butt end of the tree trunk lay sixty feet of pristine snow. It was completely open for about half the distance. The other thirty feet were heavy brush.

Kier hoisted Crawford onto his back. Leaving a single set of prints, he paused every couple steps to let blood from Crawford's oozing chest drip onto the virgin snow. He dragged one leg as if wounded.

The base of the trunk, which lay in a shallow swale, was propped off the ground by a fibrous wad of roots and earth. The giant root ball had been torn from the ground when the tree toppled in a high wind. As Kier expected, beneath the root mass lay a deep hollow obscured by drifted snow.

After sitting Crawford in the snow, he quickly burrowed into the crater where the roots had grown. If he hunkered down he could get his entire body a foot beneath the level of the ground.

He propped Crawford's body up against a root in front of the hollow and placed his M-16 across his chest. Using Miller's stiletto, he stabbed Crawford's thigh, making an ugly knife wound. Urgently now, he gathered snow and packed a wall between himself and Crawford, verifying that he could seal himself off and retreat under the log. He would not be visible behind Crawford unless somebody dug.

He dug back through his hole, emerging beside Crawford. In order to see the surrounding landscape, he crawled to the lip of the swale. Tense as a hunting cat, he lay on his belly and waited. They would send a team to surround the windfall area, which was maybe two hundred feet across. They would swarm it.

Kier didn't have to wait long. First, he saw a man in front, then one to the right, then one to the left. The three were crawling. He watched, checking the progress of each.

There would be more men on all sides hidden by the brush. His attackers would be confident. They would know that if he was still here, they had him. With any luck, they were certain that they were following a single wounded man and their eyes, as they studied the track, would be clouded to other possibilities. Kier waited until all three of the men in front were visible at once. Pressing his cheek into the hi-tech plastic stock of the rifle, he willed his finger to set off the first round. Controlled, precise shots exploded the tree trunk above the first man's shoulder.

From every side fire poured in, driving him back under the log. Shoving and packing snow madly, he sealed himself off behind Crawford's body. His movements dislodged a powdery dust. Since everything was frozen solid, there was no apparent moisture. Roots hung down around him, and the earth smell was strong. Plugging his ears helped. He could imagine what it must look like. Wood flew as every green thing was chopped to pieces. Grenade bursts that he could feel in his bones—one after another—shook the ground. Four, five, six. His closed eyes began to flash red behind his lids. The log shuddered overhead.

Soon they started with what he supposed was a rocket launcher. Explosions that seemed to bounce the log from the ground compressed the air. The breath of almighty God came roaring through the woods, withering everything in sight. Then, at last, it was quiet. There was no doubt that these men were capable of insane violence. They cared for nothing except to destroy those who opposed them. Quickly, he reinforced the crumbling snow that formed the barrier behind Crawford. A radio crackled when somebody turned the squelch too high, but the tiny speaker was still too far away for Kier to hear the words.

After a time he heard men stomping the brush.

"One body blown to hell. From the dogs, it's Crawford." After a moment came a different voice: "He's got Miller's stiletto and a second radio card. I.D. number twenty-six."

"That's Miller's," the voice came back over the radio.

"He's got an extra watch, and ammo clips."

"You don't suppose . . ." the radio voice began.

"He killed Miller?"

"He's got Jenkins's stuff," the third voice chimed in again.

"And Jones's," a fourth voice called out. "I know this knife belonged to Jones."

"He left a blood trail. Somebody stabbed him in the leg. Maybe Jones. There was only one set of tracks in here. Back there . . . there was a lot, but you can't tell if this son of a bitch was the guy at the plane."

"It's too far for one guy. . ."

"But we don't know exactly where Miller was, and we don't know if Crawford is in this by himself." There was a long pause.

"He's got a paper in his boot. Some index."

"Read it to me." A much more authoritative voice cut in over the radio. A familiar voice. There was a pause.

" 'Atomic Force Microscopy,' then 'Nucleic Acid Sequencing Strategies,' then a whole bunch of subheadings, then 'Gene Reassortment,' and more subheadings. Then in Volume Two, 'AVCD4 Anti-virus trials,' and after that, in Volume Three. . . 'Cloning—' "

"That's enough," the voice said. "I'm coming out there."

The original voice returned. ''If Crawford was the guy at the plane, he just backtracked, is all. . .He just ran like hell, grabbed what he wanted, and left. The rest of us were walking slow." Another long pause. "Hell, there's tracks all through here."

There was more talk that Kier couldn't quite make out; then somebody raised his voice again.

"You got a better idea? God didn't drop Crawford here. Somebody shot our guys. He's got the paper in his boot proving he stole the stuff. . . Somebody wounded him and slowed him down. . . What's more . . ."

"Maybe we've all been shooting at each other. Hell, I don't know."

Another voice, close in: "If there was anybody else in here, they gotta be dead."

Still Kier waited. At any moment, his hunters might unplug the hole and see him. Every second hammered in his brain like a sledge on concrete. His nails were buried in the palms of his hands, but he had no sense of his own end until he pulled the pins on the two grenades. He did it with his teeth, but kept the handles depressed. They would all be on their feet, standing around Crawford. Doing what he supposed one should never do, Kier waited with live grenades, ready to throw if they pulled the snow from his hole.

Kier listened for more talk, but heard nothing. Perhaps the men were pulling back. He curled into a tight ball; he hadn't noticed the discomfort of his confinement until now. Water dripped from overhead—the ice melted by his body heat. Inactivity brought on chill. The heavy muscle in his thighs cramped. Tightness of body, the feeling of being closed in, began to occupy a place in his mind. The sense of being caged mixed with his adrenaline to form the beginnings of panic. He knew what to do. His mind went to a different time, to a different place, to the solace of Grandfather's lake. He replaced the pins in the grenades with his teeth and relaxed.

It is evening. No-see-ums swirl around his head, put off only by Grandfather's liberally applied bay leaf oil on his bare skin. Around the lake stand dense evergreens as old as anyone Grandfather can remember and far older still. They are fir, hemlock, cedar, and pine, forming a velvety fragrant thickness over the earth. Protruding into the water, like creamy brown natural leather, a sand spit simmers in the late-summer sun.

Near the spit there is a small clearing carpeted with spring-fed grasses and edged with the softer verdant hues of huckleberry and myrtle. In the midst of this meadow the cabin enjoys the shade of hand-planted mountain bilberry, the leaves tinged with the first autumn color. There is no breath of wind. The water, soft as satin, glistens under the bursting yellow-reds of sunset.

Grandfather stands beside him and puts a strong hand on his shoulder. Kier wants to understand the power in this touch, a better touch than he has ever felt, a healing salve to his loneliness. His father is dead. For many days there was little feeling. Life on ice. Now a sense of loss has eaten a giant hole out of his middle. All that stands between him and the incomprehensible abyss is Grandfather's hand.

A fish hawk rises on the wind. Kier watches his namesake, and something about the bird stirs him. There isn't a way to say what he is experiencing except that it is a longing. So he lets the sense of this go through him without trying to understand it. There is a gentle squeeze on his shoulder and once again he is aware of the hand. It is as if it is guiding him to the bird.

"A man might know the currents on which he glides and then he would be free," Grandfather says.

As Kier waits and remembers, he wonders about the currents. In his mind is a puzzle, the pieces of which are strewn about— very few of them put together. There is his mother and her iron will. That is part of the puzzle. His dead father. That is a bigger piece.

Immediately after his father's funeral, his mother had moved them another ten miles from the Tilok reservation. Before this precipitous relocation, they had been a good two miles outside the reservation and on the outskirts of Johnson City. Their new house was in the forest to the far side of town and surrounded by white people. His mother said only that the world was mostly white and not red and mat he better "get used to it." She worked for a local groceryman and was said to be very good at keeping his books.

Kier went to a public school and worked by the lamplight every night under his mother's tutelage. Grandfather moved off the reservation in order to be with them, and with him, Kier escaped to the forest to learn Indian ways. Tracking became a passion. His mother tolerated that part of his life, maybe even in her own way encouraged it, but it was always subserviant to his studies, always trivialized.

Nathaniel Wintripp, Kier's father, was a half-blooded Tilok Indian whose own father had been of Spanish descent. By trade Nate was a stonemason. He had been the most prolific and artistic craftsman in the rural areas nearest mountainous Wintoon County. But Nate Wintripp had a certain reserved aloofness about him. He'd grown up with his grandparents and struck out to live on his own at age seventeen. Although he ably supported himself through two years of Chico State University, he quit after the second year to work full-time in his growing business.

Kier had struggled to know his father. He wanted to get beyond the pats on the head to something undefinable, to something he didn't understand. On October 12, 1969, his father flew into a rage, banged Kier's wrists on a washbasin, stalked out the door, and never came back. A month later, Nate Wintripp was dead, never having let his son, Kier, find the bond that he so fervently pursued.

After his father walked out, a quiet desperation seemed to grip Kier's mother. It ran so deep that for years he couldn't bear the thought of stepping from the groove that she was charting for him. Although she was pure Tilok, he could not determine what she wanted to be—except for one incontrovertible opinion that she held with utter conviction. Even though he must be a success in the white man's world, even though he must have the best university education, even though he must bear no trace of his lineage in his speech, he would marry an Indian woman or certain calamity would befall him. After all, Nate, her own husband, being half white, could never really accept an Indian. How would a white woman ever accept Kier?

In the secret places of his soul, Kier wondered if his father could ever have accepted him. Or if his father accepted no one. Or if Kier wanted something from his father that was not to be found on this earth. It seemed to Kier that just before his father's death, they had been somehow reaching for each other. There was, he had imagined, a peaceful joy that lay just beyond his reaching fingers, that was forever snatched away at the very moment of his most profound awareness. He could not reconcile the shame he felt when he thought of his father.

He did not try to create this missing bond of communion with his mother. Theirs was a union fashioned from the mutuality of their struggle to survive on little income in a mountain town and from their shared tragedy.

Kier did not sort out the cauldron of emotions that he buried in a place in his mind and covered over with layers of keen intellectual musings. When he met his first wife—a white woman—the uneasy feeling was passed off by the simple observation that he had never made a genuine friend nor found a genuine love. He knew only male comrades in adventure and female partners in sex. This he supposed was a good and sufficient reason for the temporary loss in equilibrium. When he reached to grasp and share his new bride's love, he floundered as if drowning, with no concept at all of swimming. It frightened him.