Shadowfires (43 page)

“Quiet!”
Sharp whispered furiously. Over his shoulder, he looked back angrily at Peake. His face was unnerving: eyes wide and wild, skin flushed, nostrils flared, teeth bared, jaw muscles taut, the arteries throbbing in his temples. That savage expression confirmed Peake’s suspicion that since spotting Shadway the deputy director had been out of control, driven by an almost maniacal hatred and by sheer blood lust.

They pushed through a narrow gap in a wall of dense and bristly brush decorated with poisonous-looking orange berries. They stumbled into a shallow dry wash—and saw Shadway. The fugitive was fifteen yards farther along the channel, following it down through the forest. He was moving low and fast, carrying a shotgun.

Peake crouched and sidled against the wall of the channel to make as difficult a target of himself as possible.

But Sharp stood in full view, as if he thought he was Superman, bellowed Shadway’s name, pulled off several shots with the silencer-equipped pistol. With a silencer, you traded range and accuracy for the quiet you gained, so considering the distance between Sharp and Shadway, virtually every shot was wasted. Either Sharp did not know the effective range of his weapon—which seemed unlikely—or he was so completely a captive of his hatred that he was no longer capable of rational action. The first shot tore bark off a tree at the edge of the dry wash, two yards to Shadway’s left, and with a high thin whine, the second slug ricocheted off a boulder. Then Shadway disappeared where the runoff channel curved to the right, but Sharp fired three more shots, in spite of being unable to see his target.

Even the finest silencer quickly deteriorates with use, and the soft
whump
of Sharp’s pistol grew noticeably louder with each round he expended. The fifth and final shot sounded like a wooden mallet striking a hard but rubbery surface, not thunderous by any means but loud enough to echo for a moment through the woods.

When the echo faded, Sharp listened intently for a few seconds, then bounded back across the dry wash toward the same gap in the brush through which they had entered the channel. “Come on, Peake. We’ll get the bastard now.”

Following, Peake said, “But we can’t chase him down in these woods. He’s better dressed for it than we are.”

“We’re getting out of the woods, damn it,” Sharp said, and indeed they were headed back the way they had come, up toward the yard behind the cabin. “All I wanted to do was make sure we got him moving, so he wouldn’t just lie in here and wait us out. He’s moving now, by God, and what he’ll do is head straight down the mountain toward the lake road. He’ll try to steal some transportation down there, and with any luck at all we’ll nail the son of a bitch as he’s trying to hot-wire some fisherman’s car. Now
come on
.”

Sharp still had that savage, frenetic, half-sane look, but Peake realized that the deputy director was not, after all, as overwhelmed and as totally controlled by hatred as he had at first appeared. He was in a rage, yes, and not entirely rational, but he had not lost all of his cunning. He was still a dangerous man.

Ben was running for his own life, but he was in a panic about Rachael as well. She was heading to Nevada in the Mercedes, unaware that Eric was curled up in the trunk. Somehow Ben had to catch up with her, though minute by minute she was getting a greater lead on him, rapidly decreasing his hope of closing the gap. At the very least he had to find a telephone and get hold of Whitney Gavis, his man in Vegas, so when Rachael got there and called Whitney for the motel keys, he would be able to alert her to Eric’s presence. Of course, Eric might break out of that trunk or be released from it long before Rachael arrived in Vegas, but that hideous possibility did not even bear contemplation.

That monstrous picture shook Ben so badly that he dared not dwell on it. If he gave it too much thought, it would start to seem like an inevitable scenario, and he would be unable to go on.

So he resolutely refused to think the unthinkable, and he left the dry wash for a deer trail that offered a relatively easy descent for thirty yards before turning between two fir trees in a direction he did not wish to pursue. Thereafter, progress became considerably more difficult, the ground more treacherous: a wild blackberry patch, wickedly thorned, forced him to detour fifty yards out of his way; a long slope of rotten shale crumbled under his feet, obliging him to descend at an angle to avoid pitching headfirst to the bottom as the surface shifted beneath him; deadfalls of old trees and brush forced him either to go around or to climb over at the risk of a sprained ankle or broken leg. More than once, he wished that he were wearing a pair of woodsman’s boots instead of Adidas running shoes, though his jeans and long-sleeve shirt provided some protection from burrs and scratchy branches. Regardless of the difficulty, he forged ahead because he knew that eventually he would reach the lower slopes where the houses below Eric Leben’s cabin stood on less wild property; there he would find the going easier. Besides, he had no choice but to go on because he did not know if Anson Sharp was still on his tail.

Anson Sharp.

It was hard to believe.

During his second year in Nam, Ben had been a lieutenant in command of his own recon squad—serving under his platoon captain, Olin Ashborn—planning and executing a series of highly successful forays into enemy-held territory. His sergeant, George Mendoza, had been killed by machine-gun fire during a mission to free four U.S. prisoners of war being held at a temporary camp before transfer to Hanoi. Anson Sharp was the sergeant assigned to replace Mendoza.

From the moment he had met Sharp, Ben had not cared for him. It was just one of those instinctive reactions, for initially he had not seen anything seriously wrong with Sharp. The man was not a great sergeant, not Mendoza’s equal, but he was competent, and he did not do either drugs or alcohol, which put him a notch above a lot of other soldiers in that miserable war. Perhaps he relished his authority a bit too much and came down too hard on the men under him. Perhaps his talk about women was colored by a disquieting disrespect for them, but at first it had seemed like the usual boring and only half-serious misogyny that you sometimes heard from a certain number of men in any large group; Ben had seen nothing evil about it—until later. And perhaps Sharp had been too quick to advise against contact when the enemy was sighted and too quick to encourage withdrawal once the enemy was engaged, but at first he could not have been accurately labeled a coward. Yet Ben had been wary of him and had felt somewhat guilty about it because he had no substantial reasons for distrusting his new sergeant.

One of the things he had disliked was Sharp’s apparent lack of conviction in all things. Sharp seemed to have no opinions about politics, religion, capital punishment, abortion, or any of the other issues that interested his contemporaries. Sharp also had no strong feelings about the war, either pro or con. He didn’t care who won, and he regarded the quasidemocratic South and the totalitarian North as moral equals—if he thought about it at all in moral terms. He had joined the Marines to avoid being drafted into the Army, and he felt none of that leatherneck pride or commitment that made the corps a home to most of the other men in it. He intended to have a military career, though what drew him to the service was not duty or pride but the hope of promotion to a position of real power, early retirement in just twenty years, and a generous pension; he could talk for hours about military pensions and benefits.

He had no special passion for music, art, books, sports, hunting, fishing, or anything else—except for himself. He himself was his own—and only—passion. Though not a hypochondriac, he was certainly obsessed with the state of his health and would talk at length about his digestion, his constipation or lack of it, and the appearance of his morning stool. Another man might simply say, “I have a splitting headache,” but Anson Sharp, plagued by a similar condition, would expend two hundred words describing the degree and nature of the agony in excruciating detail and would use a finger to trace the precise line of the pain across his brow. He spent a lot of time combing his hair, always managed to be clean-shaven even under battle conditions, had a narcissistic attraction to mirrors and other reflective surfaces, and made a virtual crusade of obtaining as many creature comforts as a soldier could manage in a war zone.

It was difficult to like a man who liked nothing but himself.

But if Anson Sharp had been neither a good nor an evil man when he had gone to Nam—just bland and self-centered—the war had worked upon the unformed clay of his personality and had gradually sculpted a monster. When Ben became aware of detailed and convincing rumors of Sharp’s involvement in the black market, an investigation had turned up proof of an astonishing criminal career. Sharp had been involved in the hijacking of goods in transit to post exchanges and canteens, and he had negotiated the sale of those stolen supplies to buyers in the Saigon underworld. Additional information indicated that, while not a user or direct seller of drugs, Sharp facilitated the commerce in illegal substances between the Vietnamese Mafia and U.S. soldiers. Most shocking of all, Ben’s sleuthing led to the discovery that Sharp used some profits from criminal activity to keep a pied-à-terre in Saigon’s roughest nightclub district; there, with the assistance of an exceedingly vicious Vietnamese thug who served as a combination houseboy and dungeon master, Sharp maintained an eleven-year-old girl—Mai Van Trang—as a virtual slave, sexually abusing her whenever he had the opportunity, otherwise leaving her to the mercy of the thug.

The inevitable court-martial had not proceeded as predictably as Ben hoped. He wanted to put Sharp away for twenty years in a military prison. But before the case came to trial, potential witnesses began to die or disappear at an alarming pace. Two Army noncoms—pushers who’d agreed to testify against Sharp in return for lenient treatment—were found dead in Saigon alleyways, throats cut. A lieutenant was fragged in his sleep, blown to bits. The weasel-faced houseboy and poor Mai Van Trang disappeared, and Ben was sure that the former was alive somewhere and that the latter was just as certainly dead and buried in an unmarked grave, not a difficult disposal problem in a nation torn by war and undermined by unmarked graves. In custody awaiting trial, Sharp could effectively plead innocence to involvement in this series of convenient deaths and vanishings, though it was surely his influence with the Vietnamese underworld that provided for such favorable developments. By the start of the court-martial, all of the witnesses against Sharp were gone, and the case was essentially reduced to Ben’s word—and that of his investigators—against Sharp’s smug protestations of innocence. There wasn’t sufficient concrete evidence to ensure his imprisonment but far too much circumstantial evidence to get him off the hook entirely. Consequently he was stripped of his sergeant’s stripes, demoted to private, and dishonorably discharged.

Even that comparatively light sentence had been a blow to Sharp, whose deep and abiding self-love had not permitted him to entertain the prospect of any punishment whatsoever. His personal comfort and well-being were his central—perhaps only—concern, and he seemed to take it for granted that, as a favored child of the universe, he would always be assured of unrelieved good fortune. Before shipping out of Vietnam in disgrace, Sharp had used all of his remaining contacts to arrange a short surprise visit to Ben, too short to do any harm, but just long enough to convey a threat: “Listen, asshole, when you get stateside again, just remember I’ll be there, waiting for you. I’ll know when you’re coming home, and I’ll have a greeting ready for you.”

Ben had not taken the threat seriously. For one thing, well before the court-martial, Sharp’s hesitancy on the battlefield had grown worse, so bad on some occasions that he had come perilously close to disobeying orders rather than risk his precious skin. If he had not been brought to court for theft, black-marketeering, drug dealing, and statutory rape, he very likely would have been arraigned on charges of desertion or other offenses related to his increasing cowardice. He might talk of stateside vengeance, but he would not have the guts for it. And for another thing, Ben was not worried about what would happen to him when he went home because, by then, for better or worse, he had committed himself to the war until the end of it; and that commitment gave him every reason to believe he would go home in a box, in no condition to give a damn whether or not Anson Sharp was waiting for him.

Now, descending through the shadowy forest and at last reaching the first of the half-cleared properties where houses were tucked in among the trees, Ben wondered how Anson Sharp, stripped of rank and dishonorably discharged, could have been accepted into training as a DSA agent. A man gone bad, like Sharp, usually continued skidding downward once his slide began. By now he should have been on his second or third term in prison for civilian crimes. At best, you could have expected to encounter him as a seedy grifter scratching out a dishonest living, so pathetically small-time that he did not draw the notice of the authorities. Even if he had cleaned up his act, he could not have wiped a dishonorable discharge off his record. And with that discredit, he would have been summarily rejected by
any
law-enforcement agency, especially by an organization with standards as high as those of the Defense Security Agency.

So how the hell did he swing it? Ben wondered.

He chewed on that question as he climbed over a split-rail fence and cautiously skirted a two-story brick and weathered-pine chalet, dashing from tree to tree and bush to bush, staying out of sight as much as possible. If someone looked out a window and saw a man with a shotgun in one hand and a big revolver tucked into the waistband at his back, a call to the county sheriff would be inevitable.