Under Siege (29 page)

“So what am I gonna be doing around here to thwart the forces of evil?” Toad asked.

“Officially you’re one of thirty junior officer interns. For a while, at least, you’ll be in my shop assisting me.”

“How about them apples!” Toad’s eyebrows waggled. “I’ll start by drafting up a memo for you to fire off to the Joint Chiefs: ‘Shape up or ship out!” Don’t worry, I’ll make it more diplomatic than that, take the edge off, pad it and grease it. Then memos for the FBI and DEA. We’ll-was

“We’ll start in the morning at oh-seven-thirty,” Jake said, rising from his chair. He looked around again, taking it all in. “What do you think of this place, anyway?”

“All these different kinds of uniforms, it looks like a bus drivers” convention.” Toad lowered his voice. “Don’t you think the Air Farce folks look like they work for Greyhound?”

“I’ll give you the same advice my daddy gave me, Tarkington, when he put me on a bus and sent me off to the service. Keep your mouth shut and your bowels open, and you’ll do okay.” Jake Grafton walked away.

Toad grinned broadly and settled back into his chair.

“I couldn’t help overhearing your insensitive remark, Lieutenant,” the lieutenant commander at the desk across the aisle informed him. Toad swiveled. The lieutenant commander reminded him of his third-grade teacher, that time she caught him throwing spitballs. She had that look. “I’m sorry, ma’am.”

“Our friends in the Air Force are very proud of their uniform.”

“Yes, ma’am. No offense intended.”

“Who was that captain?”

“Captain Grafton, ma’am.”

“He was very informal with you, Lieutenant.” The way she said “lieutenant” made it sound like the lowest rank in the Guatemalan National Guard. “Here at Joint Staff we’re much more formal.”

“I’m sure.” Toad tried out a smile. “This is a military organization.”

“I’ll try to remember,” Toad assured her, and stalked off toward the men’s head.

Henry Charon eased the car to a stop in front of the abandoned farmhouse and killed the engine. He rolled down his window and sat looking at the overgrown fields and the stark leafless trees beyond.

The dismal gray sky seemed to rest right on the treetops. The crisp air smelled of snow.

He had followed the dirt road for four miles, just a rut through the forest, and made it through a mudhole that he had explored with a stick before he tried it. There were tire tracks that he thought were at least a month old, left by deer hunters. Nothing fresh. That was why he had selected this dirt road after he had examined three others.

He was deep in the Monongahela National Forest, four hours west of Woongton in the West Virginia mountains. Henry Charon took a deep deep breath and smiled. It was gorgeous here.

He pulled on his coat and that and locked the car, then walked back along the road in the direction from which he had come. He inspected the remnants of an apple orchard and the brush that had grown up on a t plot that had once been a prden.

When he had walked about a mile, he left the road and

A’

“began climbing the hillside. He proceeded slowly, taking his time, pausing frequently to listen and look. He moved like a shadow through the gray trees, climbing steadily to the top of the ridge, then along it with the abandoned farm, which was somewhere below him on his left. He intended to circle the farm to ensure there were no people nearby. If there were he would hear or see enough to warn him of their presence. As he moved Henry Charon examined the trees, noting the place where doer had browsed, feeling the pellet droppings and estimating their age. This was his first outing in the hardwood forests of the eastern United States. He felt like a youngster again, exploring and ng new things with delight. He saw where the chipmunks had opened their acorns and he spent five minutes watching a squirrel watching tilde him. He examined a groundhog hole and ran his fingers along the scars in a young sapling that a buck had used to rub the velvet from his antlers earlier this autumn. He heard a woodpecker drumming and detoured for a hundred yards to glimpse it.

He had been in the fourth grade when he found a biography of Daniel Boone in the school library. The book had fascinated him and, he admitted now to himself as he glided silently through the forest, changed his life. The years Boone spent alone in Kentucky hunting wild game for furs and food and avoiding hostile Indians had seemed to young Henry Charon to be the ultimate in adventure. And now, at last, he was in the type of forest Boone had known so well. True, it wasn’t the virgin forest of two hundred and fifty years ago, but still …

He was thinking of Boone and the hunting years when he saw the doe. She was browsing and had her back to him. He froze. Something, instinct perhaps, made her turn her head and swivel her large ears for any sound that should not have been there.

Henry Charon stood immobile. The deer’s eyes and brain were alert to movement, so Charon held every muscle in his body absolutely still. He even held his breath.

The gentle wind was from the northwest, carrying his

scent away from her as she sampled the breeze. Satisfied at last, she resumed her browsing.

Slowly, ever so slowly, he stepped closer. He froze whenever her head position would allow his movement to be picked up by her peripheral vision.

He was only twenty-five feet or so from her when she finally saw him. She had moved unexpectedly. Now she stood stock still, tense, ready to flee, her ears bent toward him to catch the slightest sound. Henry Charon remained motionless. She relaxed slightly and started toward him, her cars still attuned, her eyes fixed on him. Surprised, he moved a hand. The doer paused, wary, then kept coming. Someone famed her, he thought. She’s tame!

The doe came to him and sniffed his hands. He presented them for her inspection, then scratched between her ears.

Her coat was stiff and thick to his touch. He stroked her and felt it. He spoke to her and watched her ears move to catch the sound of his voice.

The memory must have been strong. She seemed unafraid.

The moment bothered him, somehow. Man had changed the natural order of things and Henry Charon knew that this change was not for the better. For her own safety the doe should flee man. Yet he had not the heart to frighten her. He petted her and spoke softly to her as if she could understand, then watched in silence when she finally walked away.

The doe paused and looked back, then trotted off into the trees. She was soon lost from sight. Thirty seconds later he could no longer hear her feet among the leaves that carpeted the ground.

An hour later he arrived back at his car. He opened the trunk and got some targets, which he posted on the wall of the ramshackle farmhouse.

The pistols were first. All 9 mm, he fired them two-handed at the target at a distance of ten paces. There were four pistols, all identical Smith and Wesson automatics. He fired a clipful through each. One seemed to have a noticeably

bnvier trigger pull than the others, and he set it aside. When he finished, he carefully retrieved all the spent brass. If he missed one it was no big deal, but he didn’t want to Wave forty shells scattered about.

After he posted a fresh target, he took the three rifles and moved off to fifty yards.

The rifles were Winchester Model 70’s in$30-06, with 3x9 variable, scopes. He squeezed off three rounds from the fim checked the target with the binoculars, and adjusted rific the scope. All three bullets in his third string formed a group that could be covered with a dime. Charon carefully placed every spent cartridge in his pocket.

After repeating the process with the second and third rifle he moved back to one hundred yards. He fired three, checked the target, fired again.

The final group from each rifle formed a small, nickelsized group about one inch above his point of aim. This with factory ammunition. isfied, he wiped the weapons carefully and stored each in a soft guncase and repacked them in the trunk of the car.

The final item he carried several hundred yards up the hill. Then he came back to the car and backed it down the road past the first bend. From the floor of the backseat he took several old newspapers. He retrieved the targets from the wall of the house and added them to the newspapers.

On the side of the other hill, high up near the tree fine, was a fairly prominent outcropping of rock. Standing on the rock and using the binoculars, he could just make out the item he had left amid the trees and leaves on the other side of the little valley. At least three hundred yards, he decided. Closer to four hundred.

He used the targets and wadded up sheets of newsprint to build a small fire. To this he added sticks and twigs and a relatively dry piece of a dead fimb. Then he walked back across the valley. The weapon was in an olive-drab tube. Ridiculously simple instructions were printed on the tube in yellow stenciled letters. He followed them. Tube on right shoulder, eyepiece open, power on, crosshairs on the rock

ng-listen for the tone. There it is! Heat source uired.

Charon squeezed the trigger.

The missile left in a flash and roar. Loud but not terribly so. It shot across the valley triiiling fire and exploded above the rock ledge, seemingly right in the fire.

Carrying the now empty tube, Henry Charon walked back across the valley. The weapon had gone right through the fire and exploded against the base of a tree on the other side. The shrapnel had sprayed everywhere. The bark of the trees was severely flayed: one small wrist-thick tree trunk had been completely severed by flying shrapnel. The tree the missile had impacted was severely damaged. No doubt it and several other trees would eventually die.

Satisfactory. Quite satisfactory. The other two missiles should work equally well.

He put the remnants of the fire completely out, scattered the charred wood, and dumped dirt on the site where it had been.

Fifteen minutes later Henry Charon started the car. The empty cartridges and spent missile launcher were all in the trunk. He had found a likely spot to bury them on the way in, about two miles back. There was enough daylight left.

Smiling, thinking about the doe, Henry Charon slipped the transmission into drive and turned the car around.

Harrison Ronald Ford drove Mcationally’s old Chrysler that evening. Pure luck, he later decided. He picked up the guard at a Seven-Eleven at nine o’clock that night and together they drove to the old Sanitary Bakery warehouse on Fourth Street NE, on the edge of the railyard. The guard didn’t say much-he never did. About twenty-five or so, he called himself Tooley.

The window openings in the lower two levels of the ancient bakery warehouse were blocked up with concrete blocks. The windows in the upper levels showed the ravages of rocks and wind. A high chainbledink fence surrounded the property out to the Fourth Street NE sidewalk and the dirt street that ran along the north side. Inside the fence were about a dozen garbage trucks. Watching through the wire as Ford rumbled by were two Dobermans.

He pulled into the parking area on the south side of the building and walked toward the only door, which had steel bars welded over it, as Tooley trailed along. Two other cars sat in the empty lot.

Ford opened the door. Tooley never opened doors, preferring to let the driver do it. He was being paid to look tough and shoot, if necessary, and that was all he was going to do. Ike Randolph was there supervising the cutting and packaging operation, as usual. Mcationally had used this warehouse for only three days now, and in a few more, anytime the whim struck him, he would change to another location. Not that Freeman was or had ever been within a mile of the building. That’s what he hired Ike and the others for. If the cops raided the place, the hired help could take the fall.

“Okay,” Ike said and spread out a large map of the city. “Here’s the route tonight and where to take the stuff. Pay attention.” He traced the route he wanted Harrison Ronald to follow as Tooley and one of the guys from the chase car watched over his shoulder. Two deliveries. When Ike finished, Harrison then traced the route, calling out streets and turns, proving that he knew it.

“You got it.”

The gunnies from the chase car said little. In their early twenties, wearing expensive, trendy clothes, they looked, Harrison thought, exactly like what they were, drug guys with more money than they knew how to spend. Which was precisely the impression they hoped to create. In the world of the inner city these young men had spent their lives in, the druggies had the bucks and the choice ass-they had the status. Tonight, as usual, these two young gunnies stood around looking tough and with it.

The little sweet piece was also there, and Harrison Ronald flirted with her to keep up appearances. She flirted right back as Tooley watched, looking bored.

“She’s a hooker, man,” he told Harrison as they walked through the empty lower floor of the warehouse toward the entrance. Harrison carried the stufriend in a plain brown grocery bag. “Uses so much of that shit she’s cutting, Freeman charges her to work here.”

“So what’s your bitch, Tooley? She won’t go down on you?”

“Stick it in that, Z, and it’ll rot right off. You won’t have nothing left to Oiss through but some grotty ol” pubic hair.”

The guard at the door handed Tooley and the chase car crew Browning 9-mm automatics. As Harrison watched, Tooley popped the clip out, inspected it, then slid it home. He cocked the weapon, pulled back the slide just enough to glimpse brass, then lowered the hammer and put the pistol in his coat pocket. The other two men did the same, their evening ritual.

Now the guard handed Tooley an Uzi. He inspected the clip to ensure it was fully loaded, then pulled the bolt back into the cocked and ready position and engaged the safety.

Then he reached for the grocery sack the guard offered him and inserted the weapon in it. After checking their Uzis, the two gunmen put them under their coats and walked to their car as the guard watched through the one dirty window. Satisfied, he opened the door again and motioned to Tooley and Harrison Ronald.

Tooley got into the backseat of the Chrysler while Harrison Ronald slid behind the wheel and put the dope on the floor on the passenger’s side.