Ravenous Dusk (57 page)

Greenaway saw a riderless snowmobile go airborne not ten feet ahead of him and smash into a tree, saw the runner cut across the road lit by the halogen spots above the windshield, and then he was gone well ahead of Rhino's spray of panic-fire.

The 406 blazed them a trail with Hellfire missiles and Hydra 70 rockets, but the woods were still alive with Keoghs, darting between trees and pacing the runner on snowmobiles or on foot, black shapes he could see by the glint of their eyes. They were after the runner, and seemed not even to notice him.

Greenaway glimpsed the runner again across a gentle, treeless slope midway down the mountain. The gorge yawned on their right, and the runner made for it, shooting targets cleanly in the head at a dead run with a converted Kalashnikov.

Count Chocula hovered over them as Greenaway slowed down inside the trees. He spotted something coming up behind them faster than the runner, gaining on the APC though he sped up to a reckless fifty on the winding, icy road. The pursuer closed the distance in seconds and came clear in a fleeting bar of moonlight. It was another running man, taller and rangier and longer of leg, and he carried no one. He held a Barrett Light 50 sniper rifle spot-welded to his shoulder as he ran so fast he was in free-fall. His rifle barked as he passed, and Rhino disappeared from the shoulders up. The cabin of the APC popped and shook with armor-piercing rounds as long as Greenaway's middle finger. The sole surviving comm geek danced around singing ricocheting bullet shards, screaming, "I've got blood in my eyes! What's happening? What the fuck is happening out there, sir?"

Greenaway's feet and hands propelled the APC down the mountain, but his eyes were glued to the running sniper, who darted across the road behind them and disappeared in his right-side blind spot. Greenaway whipped his head around as if to find the sniper inside the cab with him. He reached for his M16 on the shotgun seat, but the comm geek, the last man alive under his command, stumbled into the space between him and the window. "What the fuck—"

The right side "bulletproof" window-slit shattered and too many fifty-caliber bullets punched into the comm geek. Greenaway was trying to look through him, reach around him for his gun and steer around a particularly dense stand of trees when the insanely terrified young man's face bulged and split open and light shone through his brains into Greenaway's face.

The shot caromed off Greenaway's helmet and smashed into the side window, starring, but not breaking through it. He saw the shell, suspended there like a dino-mosquito in amber, and had time to think,
that was made for me
, when the road went out from under them.

His right arm went limp. His mouth flooded with bile. His chest caved in.
God damn you, God!
he screamed without breath.
A heart attack, now?

A smooth path of open snow lay before him. The APC's knobby all-terrain tires gripped the hard-packed, iced-over snow so long as he maintained a more or less straight course, which would add speed to his already suicidal rate until it swept him over the lip of the gorge. He fought it with his functional arm, howling silently as his lungs seemed to go flat. His eyes strayed down to the lip of the gorge, where he saw the runner with the girl in his arms.

He stood there, contemplating something below, when into Greenaway's vision swam the other runner, the sniper, who skidded to a stop on a promontory overlooking the gorge. Bracing against a tree, he fused with it and drew a perfect arc down to the runner, who backed away from the edge now and then began running at it so fast he looked as if he would fly away.

The sniper and the tree got larger, and Greenaway saw a lot about the motherfucker very quickly as he grew. Black spots bubbled up in his vision, but he stared through them and time seemed to slow down to let him take it in. He saw a bow and quiver slung on his back, and he saw the motherfucker wore old jungle camo and a flak vest, circa 1968. He knew without seeing the face that it was not Keogh, this time. It was somebody he saw only yesterday, but dismissed as a bad fucking speed daydream, and maybe he was dreaming him now, because what sane God would let something like that still walk the earth, when so many good men died over there? What were these mutants, that something like this walked among them?

Not invincible, I hope
, Greenaway thought, and steered the APC into him.

The sniper got very large indeed in the windshield, filled it for an instant before the APC introduced him to a deeper relationship with the sturdy piñon pine tree he braced against. Greenaway was too engrossed in his own experience with arrested inertia to take notice. An airbag(!) bloomed and smacked him silly, then deflated as the APC glanced off the shattered pine tree and skated down the open slope on its passenger side.

Greenaway fought to hold onto consciousness, unsnapped the safety harness and toppled out of his seat. He took a moment to reorient himself and noticed with relief that he hadn't had a heart attack at all. Bullet fragments from the shots that killed the comm geek studded his right arm and chest. One of his lungs felt sore, and his arm didn't really work, but his ticker was sound. That, at least, had not failed him.

He dragged himself out through the shattered forward window-slit and lay very flat in the snow. The stillness reasserted itself, sprinkling snow on the scant evidence that anything had happened here at all. The windshield and grill of the APC were sprayed with blood and puckered from the impact with the tree, but of the sniper, there was no sign. Likewise the runner, whose trail vanished at the rim of the gorge.

He heard the 406 setting down on the other side of the APC, and he reached for his sidearm. It was time to go. There was nothing here he wanted to live through. But of course, Burl had taken his gun when he—

Greenaway pressed his face down in the snow and wept. Once, he had been strong and smart. Once, his enemies had feared him. Once, being human had been enough.

Throughout his career in the FBI, Cundieffe had always assumed that the open contempt for local law enforcement espoused by many, if not most, Bureau agents—his father included—was the kind of ignorant animal tribalism and territoriality that hindered the pursuit of a truly just and ordered society. After today, he had learned that, in the case of the town of White Bird, Idaho, at least, the ignorance was his.

He hid for nearly half an hour at the Heilige Berg slaughterhouse, nervously peering around the corner of the shed at the civilians who gathered in their pickup trucks to watch the blaze. Proper procedure raced around in his mind, but the sniper who shot up his car and the billboard in the field made him think better of it. No one seemed to spot him, and he did nothing to call attention to himself. This was hostile territory, a war zone, and he had no idea who the enemy was, or who might just shoot him out of spite.

By the time Sheriff Manes and two deputies arrived on the scene, the fire had engulfed the entire structure, the last of the exterior walls tumbling into the conflagration with great spires of sparks and gray smoke. Two Idaho County Volunteer Firefighters' trucks followed close behind and sprayed the blaze, while the Sheriff organized the crowd of spectators into a shovel brigade, dumping snow on the leeward flank of the flames. Cundieffe broke cover and ran to the Sheriff, but he could think of nothing to explain himself that did not sound patently insane. "I've been shot at," he told the Sheriff, "and my car and phone are disabled. This situation is going to require a much larger federal presence."

"It's just a barn fire, Special Agent," Manes replied. "Get them all the time." The jaundiced look in his eyes made it plain who the prime suspect in setting it was.

"Sheriff, perhaps you arrived too late to hear the secondary explosions, but this barn was an ammunition dump. The soldiers on the mountain are in grave danger, and I demand that you return me to town immediately."

The Sheriff complied, not immediately, but soon enough, and Cundieffe found himself back at the station house in White Bird, but no closer to getting through to the powers that be. AD Wyler was still in conference and unavailable, likewise Brady Hoecker. The Boise field office pledged to send two agents and a forensics team to look at the fire the next morning. A bank robbery with hostage fatalities had taken place in Nampa only the day before, and all available agents were on-task there.

He was left with little room for doubt that he was being defecated upon in recompense for circumventing Bureau procedure. He should have paid a visit to the Boise office, or at least have had AD Wyler contact the SAC there to brief him on the outsider's business in their area. Not doing so made him look like a rogue agent from headquarters, trampling on their area of responsibility, making messes they'd have to answer for to the state authorities. Which was exactly what he was, and they smelled it through the phone.

The local sheriff's deputies and state police could handle sealing the area to look for the shooter. The barn fire was just a barn fire, and the Heilige Berg militia had evacuated the area, as per the Boise agents' surveillance report. The Bureau had been notified of a routine Army National Guard maneuver taking place in the area, but knew nothing about a private mercenary force participating, or about a Radiant Dawn hospice community in the area. They knew nothing of any agents Macy and Mentone, or any others except himself operating in the area. The shooting he was involved in, they told him, was an accident, and when Cundieffe tried to correct them on this, they were suspiciously adamant that he was mistaken. "Have you ever been shot at before, Agent Cundieffe?" If anyone was trying to kill him out there, he was told, he'd be dead, and by whose authority was he out here, again?

Manes hadn't heard from Macy or Mentone since they left for Grangeville with Karl Schweinfurter. Grangeville General didn't show Schweinfurter as having been admitted to the hospital, and calls to every other hospital in the county turned up nothing.

Manes told Cundieffe that he'd called the local doctor, who may or may not be out of town for the weekend, and left him a first aid kit, with which he cleaned and applied adhesive bandages to his hand and face.

He began to see what he was coming to, but kept making calls and sending faxes and e-mails back to headquarters and the Boise office for hours before he gave up. He hogged the NCIC database, accessing what he could of Pentagon records to learn something about Specialist Four Gibson Holroyd, but he got nowhere. As far as his limited official clearance allowed him to check, no such person had ever served in the Army. Calls to the world's largest bureaucratic edifice yielded only ineffectual excuses from night file clerks and grudging promises to have somebody poke around in the paper file annexes in Arlington for him in the morning.

The only party who seemed to appreciate the gravity of the situation was the rental car agency, which would be sending an insurance claims investigator down this afternoon. The investigator called seconds later, introducing himself as Lou Duckworth in a flat, crushingly unimpressed voice, jowls flapping explosively with each syllable. Because Cundieffe was a government agent, the rental agency wanted to get to the bottom of this immediately, if not sooner.

At seven, Cundieffe threw up his hands and walked out of the office in which he'd barricaded himself. Sheriff Manes was adamant about not going up the mountain, with or without state police escort, until the maneuver was over. He'd been on the phone with Major Ortman and Heilige Berg's landlord. All were in agreement that everything was perfectly normal. In not so many words, he informed Cundieffe that if he'd been shot at while up there, it should go to show him not to go gallivanting around on his own in the middle of nowhere while a military exercise was on.

Lou Duckworth called then to report that the car was not in the field where Cundieffe had alleged that he left it. He really would like to sit down with Cundieffe and take a statement. Cundieffe gave it over the phone, omitting the parts that would beggar the agent's hard-nosed skepticism. Party or parties unknown had shot repeatedly at the vehicle as he was negotiating a particularly difficult mountain road, causing him to crash. The car was totaled, and unlikely to have gone anywhere on its own. He wanted to scream at the estimable Mr. Duckworth that he was an FBI agent, and that he had been attacked by a superhuman assassin and was lucky to have escaped with his life, that he'd nearly been killed again in an encounter with an unspeakable abomination which took more killing than a whole platoon before he destroyed it, but he refrained. Despite chronic seizures of panic that clogged his heart with ice, everything around him told him he was delusional, and he really had nothing better to do than dicker with the insurance investigator. Besides, something told him Duckworth would only care if his employer also insured Heilige Berg's slaughterhouse.

He hung up and returned the blank stares of the deputies loitering around the office until they all, one by one, returned to shuffling makework and left him sitting alone.

At eight, Sheriff Manes packed up and offered to drive him out to the Travelodge on the highway, and Cundieffe, sensing that nothing was going to happen where he was sitting, agreed.

The ride was awkward, the Sheriff blotting out the threat of conversation by blasting a call-in show pundit who continually warned his listeners that bloody civil war with the "federal Gestapo" was both inevitable and imminent. Cundieffe winced at the tinny AM demagogue's elementary logic-twisting. Apparently having forecast the bloody advent of the NWO for the previous Thanksgiving and/or during the upheaval of Y2K, the glib doomsayer had his rabid audience trained to view the relatively quiet passing of the holidays as proof that his vigilance had carried the day and pushed the New World Order into cowardly retreat. Sheriff Manes nodded now and again and muttered assent under his breath, like a church deacon at a holy roller's revival.