The Echelon Vendetta (41 page)

HE DID A THOROUGH SEARCH,
which delivered up no insight other

than that Moot Gibson ate only organic grain and home-tilled vegetables, that he had standing subscriptions to
Harper’s, The Atlantic Monthly, National Review, The Economist, Soldier of Fortune, Jane’s Defense Review,
and
Utne Reader,
that his taste in fiction ran to K. C. Constantine’s Mario Balzac books, and that he had $21,533.71 in the bank after a withdrawal of $500 at an ATM in a store called Picketwire Guns and Archery Supplies, according to scraps of ATM receipts he found in the half-burned trash outside the back door.

The trash also contained a tangle of knotted wooden twine and a bowl-shaped half of a hollowed-out gourd, on the surface of which had been painted a string of indecipherable pictographs: a sun, what looked like a daisy, little crosses. The figures had been executed with far more care than the drawings he had found in his global pursuit of Moot Gibson, but they shared the basic iconography of a crescent, a flower, and a cross. The underside of the gourd was coated with a thick black substance. He put the gourd to his nose and recoiled— the sudden flashing picture of the sunlit room in Venice and the spinning terra-cotta cylinder filled his mind and sent a bolt of terror through him.

He stuffed the gourd and the ATM receipts into a leather sack hanging on a chair in Moot’s bedroom, picked up the framed drawing, and left the house at far more than just a walk, with the muscles across his back tightening painfully and what felt like a hundred yards of gleaming hardwood floor to cross before he reached the shattered smoldering rectangle of the blown-open door.

He stepped out into the soft light of evening and found Delroy

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Suarez and Willard Fremont in the front yard, crouching solicitously over the trembling form of a large black-and-tan dog with a low blade-shaped head and teeth like a
T. rex.

The dog was panting heavily in between tentative sips of water taken from Fremont’s cupped palm and she watched Dalton coming with one white-rimmed eye.

“Micah, I’d like you to meet Irene. Irene, this is Micah.”

Dalton knelt down and after a guarded look at Suarez and Fremont, held out the finger he was least unwilling to lose to this slit-eyed, wolfish bitch.

She rolled her eyes, whimpered at him, and then sniffed at his knuckles. Her muzzle was hot and her breath was foul. She smelled of what she had been eating, possibly her kennelmates, but in her manner there was only an intense sense of gratitude and a readiness to please.

Suarez, standing up and walking Dalton a few yards away, nodded toward the dusty black Dodge pickup sitting in the front yard, and said, “I checked that truck out. There was a can of Sterno sitting under the engine hood. Flamed out a while ago, but it would have been burning around the time Nicky checked the satellite shots.”

“I found another Sterno can in the fireplace. It was still hot. How long does a can of Sterno burn?”

Suarez shook his head. “Never used it. But a big one like the one under the hood, set on low, might burn for a couple of days.”

They both watched Fremont stroking the dog, who had now stopped quivering and was smiling up at him, both of them happy to see each other. They looked like old retired pirates at a reunion.

“What do you think?” Dalton asked, after a silence.

“Think? I think we’ve been outthunk,” said Suarez.

“Looks like. Willard,” he said, “say good bye to the dog. We gotta go.”

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Fremont was standing up, his mouth open and formulating the first appeal on behalf of the dog (Dalton could see it coming) but Dalton was already on the com set.

“Nicky, you there?”

Fremont was walking toward them now, his face set and his manner determined. “Look, Micah, we can’t just leave—”

“Nicky, come in.”

“—her here to starve. She’s a good old—”

“Nicky...”

“—dog and she’ll be no—”

There was a hum, a definite humming burr, and a solid silvery flash. A heavy rifle round struck Fremont in midstride with a sound like a sledgehammer hitting a side of frozen beef.

The round blew him literally in half: his lower torso, legs still obscenely working, traveled another pace toward them while his midsection blew out to the left, an eruption of flesh and bone, guts, his belt buckle, three inches of spinal cord striking the wall of the house. The expression on his face as he died was shocked, indignant.

Then the sound of the shot, the deep reverberating boom of a .50-caliber rifle, came rolling across the desert from Baum’s position two hundred yards to the west.

Suarez and Dalton went for the house, Dalton a few feet in the lead, Suarez right behind him. Dalton heard Delroy Suarez clearly say “shit” just before something wet and hot and solid struck the back of Dalton’s neck.

Another crack of distant thunder.

The Remington clattered through the door as he crossed the threshold, tripping him up. He fell forward and rolled as another silvery humming blur cracked the air a foot over his head and the kitchen table in the back room exploded in a spray of splinters before the round punched out through the kitchen wall.

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A flash of motion darkened the door and Irene came racing in, her paws scrabbling on the hardwood floor just as a fourth round exploded through the wall just beneath the right-hand window.

Dalton could see a piece of evening sky through the gap. Then came a fifth round that carved a furrow across the floor before punching through it and smacking into the rocks beneath the house. Then... silence . . . and Irene huddled up next to Dalton’s leg, her body shaking convulsively, uttering tiny yelping whimpers.

Of course.

Five rounds in the magazine of a Barrett.

He’d be reloading now.

How many rounds did Nicky Baum say he had for his Barrett?

A box of match-grade rounds was what he said.

How many rounds in a box?

No idea. Probably fifty.

But there was nothing, not a single thing, not even the engine block of that Dodge pickup out there (even supposing Dalton could reach it), that would stop a round from a Barrett 50 at two hundred yards. Not the cinder-block walls, even if they were filled with gravel in an energy-absorbing matrix. Not the fieldstones of the small fireplace. And Irene’s touching faith in the round-stopping ability of Dalton’s body (she was now shoving her damp bloody muzzle deep under his thigh) was sadly misplaced.

If this shooter— Face it, Micah: Nicky Baum was lying out there somewhere with his throat cut; the shooter was Moot Gibson. And if Moot Gibson wanted to empty the whole box of rounds into this place he could
literally
tear it apart.

The Remington lay on the threshold, just a few tantalizing feet away. In a last ray of the dying sun he could see spatters of Delroy Suarez’s blood on the wooden stock.

He gathered himself, leaned into the opening, and snatched it

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back. Great. Now he could die with something to hang on to other than his dick.

He thought of the storm cellar, a stone-lined pit six feet deep under the floorboards in the kitchen. He decided against burying himself before he was actually dead. It seemed only fair that Moot would have to do the spadework, if that was how it turned out. One thing was certain, Moot Gibson was
not
taking him alive.

He looked at Irene, who had pulled her head out from under Dalton’s leg when the shooting stopped. He’d shoot her first, he thought, because God only knew what a thing like Moot Gibson would do to a dog that had gone over to the enemy.

He leaned back, breathing hard, and considered the flat ceiling above him. Fremont said the roof was steel plate, and flat to catch the rainwater. As dangerous as that 50 was, there was still only one of them out there, which meant that if he could get out by the defilade side and climb onto the roof, he could at least see where the rounds were coming from, and with the Remington he had a fighting chance of taking out the shooter.

It took him three minutes to get Irene into the root cellar and himself up onto the roof. He belly-crawled over to the western side and raised his head to look over the shallow concrete lip.

He got a brief glimpse of the flat plain in front of him, glowing in the starlight, the black mountains a sawtooth line against the stars, a soft wind playing in the brush.

He saw a flicker of bright white light at the top of a shallow defile about three hundred yards out. He cradled the Remington and rolled to his right as a heavy round smacked into the ledge, blasting out a hole the size of a rain bucket.

He set himself up, moving fast, laid the Remington on the lip, got the crosshairs centered on that distant point, and fired off three quick rounds, working the bolt, feeling the rifle kick, sighting in again.

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The rounds kicked up bits of stone and gravel in a tight circle around the spot where he had seen the muzzle flash.

Ten yards to the left of this spot he saw another white flare.

Moot had rolled away as soon as he had fired but it had taken him a few extra seconds to steady that oversized gun. The incoming round blew up a section of concrete about a foot from Dalton’s head. The distant rumble of the rifle shot rolled across the plain.

Then silence again.

The wind sighing in the brush, and Irene howling below.

No more rounds from Moot’s position, and therefore no returning fire from Dalton.

Given the tactical situation, the terrain, the absence of suppressing fire, Moot could not close in for a kill without exposing himself, could not fire without revealing his location, and could not stay where he was for long, since he had every reason to believe that Dalton would call for reinforcements.

In combat, a defender has the advantage, so long as he has food and water, morale, and ammunition. To attack requires three men for every single defender. Similar but not identical tactical problems now confronted Dalton.

Stalemate.

TIME PASSED.

The last glow of sundown faded away behind the Rockies. No more rounds came streaking in. No more cracks of distant thunder rumbled across the Bighorn Valley. Dalton stayed in place until it was completely dark, and then he climbed down off the roof and went in to comfort Irene, who had not ceased to howl since the firing had begun.

He showed a target, deliberately, to draw fire, if fire was to come,

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but in his heart he knew that Moot had pulled out a long time ago, probably a half hour after their final exchange of fire.

They came out of the house like the last two survivors of a plague, glad to be alive, afraid of what they would see, ashamed to be living among so many undeserving dead.

Irene, who seemed to be more of an optimist than Dalton, trotted over to Fremont’s crumpled body and began to lick his upturned face.

If Fremont had been alive when he hit the ground, Dalton thought, then the last thing he would have seen was that fading sunlight high up in that deep violet sky. The idea gave him some comfort, although it in no way masked his pervading sense of complete and utter failure, his bitter realization that he had been outthought, outfought, outmaneuvered, and that he had not only failed in his original mission, which was to keep Willard Fremont alive, but that he had managed to contrive the senseless and pointless death of two more good men at the same time.

Delroy Suarez was lying on his left side, a heap of distorted limbs in a lake of thickening blood, just to the right of the door. The wall had been spattered with what had been inside his chest and neck when the enormous round plowed through faster than the speed of sound. He reached out and touched Suarez on the shoulder.

Suarez was still blood-warm, which meant that he had probably died about an hour after he was hit, which was quite an achievement for a man who had just taken a .50-caliber round.

Behind him Irene lifted her head to the sky and began to howl at the gliding crescent moon. She was still howling when Dalton threw the first shovelful of gravel onto Willard Fremont’s upturned, staring face a long time later.

He buried Fremont and Suarez together, under the shade of the creosote shrub, and while he was doing it he took some grim satis

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faction in the three solid hours of brute suffering it required to open the stony ground deep enough and wide enough to keep the two men from being dug up and defiled by coyotes and crows, or worse.

He did not put up a marker, and he disguised the graves as well as he could. If he lived through the rest of the week, he’d know the place when he came back.

If he didn’t, he wanted to keep them safe from Moot Gibson.

After a rest, and a brief search, he found Nicky Baum’s body under a stunted sage about twenty feet away from his sniper position.

His throat had not been cut.

He had been shot in the back of the head from some distance away, a single tiny entrance wound just where the spine meets the brainstem. No exit wound.

Probably a silenced subsonic single-shot long-barreled .22 pistol (the Agency favored the Ruger Mark 2) firing a hollow-point round, a classic covert-ops weapon. Although Dalton scoured the area in a fifty-yard radius, he never found a piece of brass.

It took a long time to bury Nicky Baum where he lay.

The Barrett was gone. There were some slight scuff marks in the soil, but Dalton was no tracker. All he could say for sure was the shooter had been alone, he was a very big man, he moved lightly, he wore cowboy boots, and the heel on the left boot was worn down on the outward side, which meant the man had an ankle problem and his gait was slightly pronated.