The Sword of God - John Milton #5 (John Milton Thrillers) (10 page)

Milton looked at the map again. The farmer’s field was perhaps a mile long and a mile wide. They would need to head north, crossing the field before getting to the start of the woods. He had no idea how fast Mallory and Ellie would be able to travel with their packs, but, assuming a decent pace, he figured they would be able to make a good start into the woods by the time they had to camp. Three or four miles ought to be possible today.

“This will be fine,” Milton said. “You might as well stay inside while I get the gear ready.”

Milton reached behind him for his pack and took out his waterproof trousers and jacket. He pulled them on.

He opened the door and stepped out into the rain. It was as heavy as he could ever remember, save the storms he had suffered through the Asian monsoon season, and he was grateful for his waterproofs. His boots sank down an inch into the quagmire and the mud sucked hungrily as he lifted his feet to step around to the back of the Cadillac. He opened the back and, after taking out what he needed from his pack, he attended to his rifle. He fitted the scope cap tightly to the sight and wrapped the muzzle with electrical tape, sealing it, so that it was reasonably watertight. He wasn’t keen on the rifle getting wet, but there was nothing that could be done about it in weather like this. As long as he maintained it carefully when they got under cover again later, he was happy enough that the gun would fire reliably when he needed it to.

He prepared the packs for Mallory and Ellie and called for them to come around.

“I’m just going to call the bureau,” Ellie called back. “Two minutes.”

Mallory struggled through the slop and came to stand beside him. Milton took her pack and worked it around so that she could easily slip her arms through the straps, but rather than do that, she paused. She opened the ties at the top and then reached into an inside pocket of her jacket. He watched dumbly as she withdrew a .45 calibre pistol from her pocket and slipped it into the mouth of her new pack.

“What is that?”

“What does it look like?”

It was a Ruger P90 with a custom grip, and it looked enormous in her small hand. “What are you doing with a pistol like that?”

“My father had lots.”

“You’re not taking it.”

“Mr. Milton, those boys are murdering dirt bags. What if I need to defend myself?”

“That’s what I’m for, Mallory. Me or your FBI friend. Give it to me. I won’t go out there with you if you’re taking a gun.”

“I’ll go with Ellie, then.”

“I’m pretty sure she’ll say the same thing. You want me to ask?”

She looked at the gun, then at Milton, and, seeing that he was not bluffing, she held it by the barrel and passed it to him. It was the stainless manual safety model. He popped the magazine and checked it, seeing the full seven-shot load. He pushed the magazine back into the gun, equipped the safety, and put it into his pack. He didn’t have a handgun with him. Maybe it would come in useful, but there was no way he was going to let her anywhere near it.

Ellie stepped out of the Cadillac and shut the door behind her. She grimaced up into the slanting rain as she came around to the back. “Everything all right?”

Mallory looked at him, her eyes expressive.

“We’re good,” he said. “Speak to them?”

“No signal,” she reported. “This weather, I guess.”

“We get storms like this,” Mallory said, struggling to make herself heard over the rain. “It’s not unusual that it takes the network down.”

“Is it important?” Milton called.

“It’ll keep.”

He held up her pack for her to slide her arms into the straps.

“Ready?” he asked them both.

“Yes,” Ellie said.

Mallory nodded, still a little sullen at the confiscation of her weapon.

“This way,” Milton said, pointing to the field. “I reckon we’ve got three hours before we need to stop.”

He led the way.

ELLIE FOLLOWED at the rear of their small little convoy. Milton was at the head, setting a brisk but not hurried pace. Mallory was in the middle, bent over a little. She reached up to the straps of her pack with a frequency that suggested she was struggling. Ellie wasn’t surprised. Mallory was smaller than she was, and she was finding the pack difficult to carry.

They left the car behind them and started into the field. The crop reached well over her head, but there were narrow paths through it that had been left to allow access for the farm’s machinery. The path was rutted, the trenches filled with water and mud, and the ridges slick and treacherous underfoot. By the time they were halfway across the field, it felt as if they had been cut off from Truth and the rest of the world. The stalks bent down at them as the wind whistled around, and Ellie began to feel her mood change, an oppressive atmosphere taking hold. She thought of Orville, the way he would have driven back to Detroit in his Denali, listening to his god-awful country and western, drumming his fingertips on the wheel in that annoying way he had. She started to wonder. Had she done the right thing when she put the hammer down on him like that? He was still her supervising officer, after all. There would have been better ways to let him down. She could have stomached one more dinner with him.

The rain kept falling, and the thick clouds piled up overhead. Ellie’s boots were watertight, and she was thankful for that. But the leather was stiff, and she could feel it as the upper on her left foot began to abrade the skin. God, a blister, and they’d hardly started. That was going to be embarrassing. She pulled the peak of her hood as far over her face as she could, rubbed the water from her eyes, and continued on, following Mallory deeper into the field.

They reached the northern end, stepping out from between the high shoulders of the corn. The track at this end had been bolstered with a top layer of asphalt for the first few yards, but then, as that petered out, it became a sodden, waterlogged mire. They followed it for a hundred yards until they were at the start of the trees. Milton stopped in the limited shelter of an oak to consult his map. He seemed satisfied with their progress, considered his direction, and then shouted over the roar of the deluge that they needed to follow the animal trail that had been beaten into the undergrowth towards the northwest.

Ellie pressed on. This was not what she intended to do today. She thought of Orville again. He would already be back in Detroit, maybe even home with his wife. She could have been home, too, at the little apartment she was renting. She could have drawn a bath and submerged herself in it for an hour with a glass of wine and a book. A good long soak would help to drive away the chill that had seeped into her bones even before they had set off on this pursuit. Orville had confided in her that he couldn’t stand Truth or the Upper Peninsula, that he had no time for the people, and that the sooner he could get back to civilisation, the better. Ellie told him that she thought he was being condescending. That had started another argument, and he told her that she could do as she liked. He added that she had been gulled by a little girl, that the trip would be a wild goose chase, and that he was still going home.

Milton allowed them to stop at five o’clock, but only for five minutes. He had identified an area on the map that he wanted them to reach by sundown.

Sundown
, she thought.
How would they tell?
It was already dark with the thunderclouds overhead.

Milton forged on, picking a path that led them around the fallen boughs and the worst of the vast swathes of nettles and bracken and, very soon, the track was invisible behind them. All they could hear was the sound of the rain on the trees.

Ellie thought of Orville again and her mood began to curdle. She thought of the four boys that they had been chasing for the last six months. They were young and reckless, but they weren’t stupid. They had been the subject of a full-court press from the bureau after the security guard had been murdered in Marquette, but they had seemingly just melted into thin air. She knew that they had been in Truth, there was too much independent corroboration of that for it not to be true, but she had no idea where they were now. No one did, unless Mallory was right. She looked up, rain smearing into her eyes, and stared out into the gloom between the trunks of the trees. Was she right? Were they in these woods? It was possible, she supposed. Possible enough for her to have agreed to come and tramp out here in this godforsaken weather, anyway.

Ellie thought about Mallory’s story. It was possible, although they had looked into her brother’s history and discovered, with very little effort, that his was not the most reliable testimony they would ever hear. The locals they spoke to about him all said the same thing: sweet boy, simple and trusting, but prone to making things up. He was clearly something of a local institution, and Ellie had detected cruelty in the anecdotes about the things that he had done. Some of the locals had told them jokes, bitter little punch lines that said more about them than they did about him.

Orville had allowed himself to be swayed by the prevailing opinion, that he was not to be trusted, and had effectively drawn a line through the middle of his testimony.

Ellie had not been so hasty.

How had he been able to identify the picture of Tom Chandler if he was unable to read? Orville dismissed that, too, saying that someone must have told him who it was, but as she spoke with Mallory, Ellie couldn’t bring herself to do that. There were a lot of what-ifs that needed to be tested. If the only way to do that was to follow her up to the Lake of the Clouds, then that would be what she would have to do.

THEY TREKKED north through the trees for another two hours. The terrain sloped gently upwards, and Milton explained as they walked that they would need to ascend around a thousand feet to get up to the lake. The trail widened a little as they worked their way along it, thick banks of ferns on either side before the tightly packed trees. Ellie recognised beech, scrub oaks, and maples. They forded narrow streams of crystal clear water, and then they emerged from the bush just a little way downstream of a shallow collection of falls. It consisted of a half dozen chutes arrayed across a rocky ledge that spanned the width of the stream, sending the water crashing over a shallow drop into a wide pool at its foot.

“How much farther until we can stop?” Mallory complained.

“Another mile.”

They climbed the gentle face at the side of the falls and continued ahead, back into the dense foliage. The path drew in tight and then disappeared altogether. Milton retraced his steps, found a suitable alternative route, and followed that instead.

After another thirty minutes they broke through the wet ferns and stepped into a small clearing. The space was littered with discarded machinery and equipment: a coil of heavy cable, chains, pulleys, a large wood stove, assorted cast iron fixtures, and parallel runners for a horse-drawn sled. A huge eastern white pine stood sentry over the junk.

“What’s all this?” Ellie said.

Milton rapped his knuckles against the upturned stove. “My guess is that this is an old logging camp. I doubt any of this has been moved for fifty years.”

“Can we stop here?” Mallory asked. “I’m exhausted.”

Milton paused, took out his compass, and cut an azimuth up to another big tree a mile or two distant. He looked up into the dark sky.

“It’ll do,” Milton said. “We camp here for the night, get up early tomorrow and press on.”

“How have we done?” Mallory’s beanie was sodden with water, and she looked miserable, like a drowned rat.

“Not too bad. We’re about a quarter of the way there.”

Ellie looked around. She had no real experience, but it looked like a good place to bivouac. She removed her pack from her shoulders and stretched.

“How many miles?” Ellie asked Milton.

“About four.”

It felt like more. Ellie was fitter than most of the other agents that she worked with, and she was certainly fitter than Orville, but pounding a treadmill in an air-conditioned gym was one thing and struggling across rough terrain in weather like this was quite another. Moisture had seeped into her expensive boots, she had been bitten by chiggers, her legs were slathered with claggy mud, and she was cold.

Milton took out his tent and moved across to a patch of higher ground, avoiding the dips and depressions that would be more likely to gather water. He stretched out the flysheet and then fed the poles through the appropriate sleeves and bent them into the shape of the tent. He pinned them into place, pegged out the structure with tent pegs, attached the guy lines, working at one end and then moving quickly around to the other. He kept the tension as equal as he could as he battled the wind.

Ellie took out her own tent and got most of it up by the time Milton had finished with his. He came across and helped her to secure the inner skin and the attachable groundsheet, then went around and knocked the pegs more firmly into the wet earth.

It took twenty minutes to erect both tents.

“I’m just going to get some firewood,” he said when he was done.

Mallory frowned dubiously. “How are you going to make a fire when it’s as wet as this?”

“You’ll see.”

There was a fallen tree at the edge of the clearing. Milton took a small bag from his pack and walked across to it.

“Are you all right?” Ellie asked the girl.

“Wet and cold.”

“Me, too.”

Ellie’s tent was larger than Milton’s. “You want to crash with me?” she asked her.

“Sure.”

They hauled their packs inside and sat down, watched the rain as it dripped over the lip of the door and listened to it as it drummed against the outer skin. Milton was crouched next to the fallen tree and, using a utility knife that he had taken from his pocket, he started to scrape the blade up and down on the underside of the trunk.

“You think he knows what he’s doing?” Mallory asked.

“He knows about being outside.”

“What about when we find them?”

“You saw what happened last night. He knows how to handle himself. More than that? I don’t know.”