The Daisy Ducks (32 page)

Kaunitz and I went uphill for forty minutes. We
didn't walk; we climbed. It was so steep we had to hunch over low to
keep the weight of our packs over us and not fall backward, and we
grabbed saplings and branches to pull ourselves up. We slipped a lot
on the damp clay and loose stones. It was very hard work. Once atop
the ridge, however, the vegetation thinned out. There were more large
trees spaced wide apart, with fewer thickets and less brush. Kaunitz
soon found a game trail that made easy walking. I couldn't see the
trail; it was invisible from above, since it was mostly used by
small, four-legged creatures. But the ground beneath the vegetation
had been worked clear of undergrowth and snuggly vines by hundreds of
tiny feet and teeth, so that walking was easy. Most people think a
game trail is used only by deer and bear, and resembles a path in a
forest preserve. Not so. It's so small you can hardly see it, but
your feet know the difference. The fact that Kaunitz could find these
trails almost every step of the way revealed his long experience in
the wilderness. He paused often to drop silently to a squat, and he
would remain motionless for half a minute, looking and listening.
Then, without speaking, he would rise and resume walking. We made
absolutely no sound except for the inevitable swish-swish of our legs
parting leaves and small branches. But the racket kicked up by the
birds and falling water drowned out this noise. After an hour we
stopped to rest, our backs against a gigantic tulip poplar tree with
lichens on it the size of dinner plates. He held a finger up to his
lips and spoke so softly I had to cock my ear to hear him. And I was
less than two feet away.

"A bass voice can carry three hundred yards,"
he said, taking a tiny sip from his canteen, "or at least a
hundred in vegetation like this. Did you see anything of interest?"

"No."

He shrugged his huge shoulders. "Same here. Now
the road that runs past the farm is down the other side of this
mountain. The small road you saw Royce drive up, the one with the old
mailbox, should join it just about where we come out."

"Why didn't we take the road around instead of
climbing over?" I asked. I wished I could take off my boots and
fan my feet, but I had a hunch I wouldn't be able to get the boots
back on.

"They're watching the road, that's why. From a
place we can't see. This way, we've got a guaranteed blind insertion.
Ready?"

I took to my feet, and they wished I hadn't. We moved
on, walking silently through the woods, then began to go down the far
side of the mountain. A creek roared and sang on our right. The cool
mist that blew from it felt good. We walked faster alongside the
creek; Kaunitz had told me that running water masks noise. Still, we
were careful, because it can work against you too. We made good
progress walking twenty feet parallel to the creek. Moss and lichens
covered all the ground and rocks. Big swatches of ferns brushed us.
We worked our way down the far side of the mountain in the cool, damp
air. At its base was a road, the same one that ran by the Royce farm
a couple of miles to the south. But sure enough, as I peered across
it I saw again the old white mailbox marked Spivey and the tiny road
that snaked up and away from it. Kaunitz had set us down right on the
money, just as he'd done in the Mooney in Texas. We squatted, resting
our rifle butts on the clay between our feet, and watched the road
for a long time. Kaunitz swept the opposite bank and forest with his
glasses, and I kept a sharp eye all around us at closer range. It
seemed there was nobody else but the birds and squirrels. We waited
almost twenty minutes, my legs killing me, before we broke out of the
forest, took a final peek up and down the road, and dashed across,
hiding ourselves on the opposite side in a kudzu thicket. Kudzu! The
most unpopular Asian import since the Hu. In a patch of that snarly
tropical vine you could hide a football stadium and nobody would
know. Kaunitz kept looking at his watch. We were supposed to contact
Summers and Desmond at four, and it was ten till.

At four exactly they contacted us, saying they'd
found nothing. They were turning north, heading back up toward where
we were. Kaunitz answered that we were going to work our way up the
road, and we'd let them know if we saw anything. Otherwise, we'd be
in touch again at five, which would be an hour from sunset and time
to start back. We left that kudzu thicket on all fours, crawling on
hands and knees for forty yards through the green tangles. It wasn't
fun, but it was the only way out.
 

22

FRED KAUNITZ and I started making our way up the
little winding road. We proceeded parallel to it, walking silently
and slowly ten yards to the left of the shoulder. On this leg of our
trek he instructed me to fall back and follow him at five yards. I
noticed that he now held his rifle at port arms rather than slung
across his back. Trusting his alertness and marksmanship, I kept mine
slung. Twenty minutes later Kaunitz froze, then motioned me up with
slow waves of his arm. He was looking at something just ahead of him
on the path. A snake? He didn't move his head. I crept up behind and
looked over his shoulder. He pointed his finger at something I
couldn't see.

"What?" I asked.

He pointed closer and almost touched a pale filament
that stretched across our path.

"Monofilament fishing line," he whispered,
"about eight-pound test. Damn near invisible, especially in the
afternoon light. Shit. It's a good thing I know the guy we're
stalking. Don't forget: Royce and I've been through exactly the same
training. Let's see what it's connected to . . .”

He followed the line to the left, where it was
anchored to a locust tree. To the right, it terminated at a
clip-style clothespin.

Here was the setup: the clothespin was fastened
securely to a tree by a tenpenny nail driven through the bore of the
pin's coil spring. The jaws of the clothespin were facing toward the
path. Two wires were fastened to the wooden pin: one along the top
jaw, the other underneath. The exposed ends of these wires were
crimped around the jaws but weren't touching because a wooden golf
tee had been inserted in the spring jaws, holding them apart. The
monofilament line was tied around the fat end of the golf tee. The
two wires met at a coffee can wired to a tree. One of the wires ran
through a dry cell battery.

"Ha! What do you think, Doc? We pass through
these woods at dusk and the point man walks into the line. The line
pulls out the golf tee, the clothespin snaps shut, the two wires
meet. Current goes through the wire and into the can. Let's look at
the can."

The back of the coffee can was stuffed with a
puttylike substance that Kaunitz identified as C-4, a military issue
plastique explosive. Stuck into the center of it was a detonator with
both the wires attached to it. The can was originally blue, but now
was mostly covered with swirls of brown spray paint.

"In the bottom of the can, which is now the
front end, are probably nuts, bolts, nails, or whatever. You can see
it's aimed right at the trail. And from this distance, about twelve
feet, I would guess it'd kill the point man and severely injure those
following closely. Man oh man—that coffee is definitely what I'd
call bad to the last drop. Okay Doc, from now on we increase our
distance from each other. You've been following at five yards. We'll
increase it to ten. That way, if I walk into one of these, at least
you won't get greased along with me. And we'd better not try to come
back this way in the dark. No telling how many of these nasty things
they've laid out for us."

Kaunitz considered the situation and decided to
disconnect the wires from the dry cell battery, which disabled the
device without destroying it. We walked on, even more alert than we'd
been previously. No doubt Royce was confident that the booby traps
would slow us down. And while it seemed rather odd that a man would
try to kill his old war buddies, I considered what had happened to
Bill Royce, especially his feelings of betrayal and abandonment and
the fact that we were messing on his turf, and it became a little
more understandable. But I followed Kaunitz with a growing lump in my
throat. What would Mary think of that little booby trap? Roantis had
promised both of us I wouldn't be involved when things "got
hot." Maybe so, but I was apparently in some danger already, and
things hadn't even begun to simmer yet.

We wound our way up and up, and the tiny road thirty
feet off to our right was made almost invisible by the undergrowth
and thick stands of timber. Kaunitz kept his rifle ready and seemed
constantly to scan the hillside above us with his glasses. Finally,
at the foot of a particularly steep incline, he paused and turned to
face me, placing his open left hand over his face, clutching at it
with a claw grip. He had taught me earlier what the sign meant:
ambush ahead. I felt my skin crawl, my knees start to tremble
slightly. He motioned me forward with very slow waves, and I
proceeded accordingly. When I finally got up to him, he leaned right
into my ear and whispered very low.

"See that bright slab of granite up there? Now
look through your glasses directly below it."

I did and saw a strange motion in the trees: a brown
circle that came and went, came and went, seeming to wave back and
forth. I kept studying it until I suddenly realized it was a bush
hat, just like the kind we were wearing. Next to the hat appeared a
face, a young man's face, which had strawberry blond hair and small
eyes. He looked young—too young, in fact, to be toting the
bolt-action sniper rifle with long scope that he cradled in his lap.
He sat under a pine tree, fanning himself with the hat. Kaunitz
settled back against a tree and squinted his eyes.

"Question is," he whispered, "do we go
around him or take
him out?"

"What do you mean, ‘take him out'? Remember,
we're only here to watch."

"I won't hurt him. I'll just take him out,"
he said, laying his FAL on the ground carefully and loosening the big
bandanna from around his neck. He removed his radio and backpack too.
He stripped down to his clothes and knife. "Now don't you go
anywhere, Doc. Stay low and quiet. I'll be back."

He slipped away into the bush in a low crouch. I sat
back against the same tree he had used, drew up my knees, and held my
Colt across them. I pulled my hat down low, raised my binoculars, and
watched the young sniper on the mountainside above me. I watched him
for maybe fifteen minutes before a pair of hands flashed down over
his head from behind and snapped backward with blinding speed. The
sniper grabbed for his throat, which had the bandanna stretched
across it. I heard the clatter as the rifle fell from his grip. In a
second he had disappeared. Had Kaunitz killed him? No, because five
minutes later he was back. He gathered his equipment and motioned me
forward.

"What happened to the kid?"

"You'll see. I've got him right up here. Come
on."

We made our way up the mountain to where he'd left
the kid. He was sitting on the ground, his arms thrust backward
around a beech tree. Kaunitz had tied his hands, and the boy's mouth
was gagged with the bandanna. Kaunitz put his hand on the boy's
shoulder—the boy was plenty scared—and told him not to worry,
that we'd be back to pick him up in a little while and we weren't
going to hurt him.

"That is, unless you don't answer the questions
we're going to ask you when we get back, son. Then I'm going to hurt
you real bad. You hear? I want you to think about this while we're
gone."

So we left, and kept climbing. I couldn't help
feeling sorry for the kid, who looked as if he were about to cry. It
was twenty to five and growing dark when we reached the top of the
mountain, which was actually not a peak but the beginning of a long,
flat plateau. The vegetation had thinned a bit toward the summit, as
it tends to do, and the road off to our right was much easier to see.
We crept along the fringes of the bush, keeping a sharp lookout. It
wasn't long before we came up to an ancient railroad spur, which
swung in from the right. We followed this along the flat ridge,
keeping to either side in the thinning cover. I noticed that the very
tops of the rails had a faint shine to them, a narrow band of fresh
metal. That meant they'd been used recently, but apparently for light
loads. But without a heavy locomotive, how did the wheels move?

Just coming up to five o'clock, we spotted some
ruined wooden structures up ahead. One was quite tall. We slipped up
closer to the place and glassed it from the bush. Kaunitz worked the
place over well, skipping nothing. We waited and watched, watched and
waited, in silence.

Finally he whispered, "Old log depot and
sawmill. Spur goes down to town, I bet. Hasn't been used, but did you
notice the rails?"

"Yeah. Been used for something. Not trains."

"Uh-huh. Let's go up softly. Keep your safety
off, but don't shoot at birds. Make sure first."

We got up to the place with no disturbance. I noticed
two tall towers with big cables and drum winches fastened to them. At
their base were the old gasoline donkey engines to work the winches.
They winched the logs up and over to the mill, then loaded them onto
flatcars or sawed them up. But all that had been a long time ago,
according to the ranger, Jack Gentry. It was back in the twenties and
thirties, before the logging gave out and all the toppers, buckers,
and choker setters packed up their cork boots and peaveys and headed
out to Puget Sound. Now all that was left were old forgotten railroad
spurs and ruined sawmills, like the one we were looking at. Kaunitz
raised Summers and Desmond on his field radio. They said they weren't
very far from us, and moving closer. Kaunitz mentioned our sniper
friend and the can of bad coffee.