Carrion Comfort (87 page)

The helicopter came in over the clearing two hundred feet high at 70 m.p.h. The black van was parked in the open, its rear doors open. Near it, a heavy four-wheel-drive sheriff’s vehicle sat empty. “Where the hell is the deputy?” snapped Haines.

The pilot shook his head and tried to raise Dusty on the radio. There was no answer. They circled the clearing in a widening spiral. Haines raised the M-16 and watched between the trees for a sign of movement or color. Nothing. “Take it around again,” ordered Haines.

“Look, Captain,” said the pilot, “I’m not a police officer or federal agent or a hero and I’ve served my time in Nam. This machine’s my livelihood, friend. If there’s a chance of it or us sprouting bullet holes, you’re going to have to rent a different whirlybird and driver.”

“Shut up and take it around again,” said Haines. “This is a matter of national security.”

“Yeah,” said the pilot, “and so was Watergate. I didn’t care much for it neither.”

Haines swiveled so the rifle rested across his knees with the muzzle toward the pilot. “Steve, I’ll ask one more time. Take it around again. If we don’t see anything, you’re going to put it down on the south side of the clearing.
Comprende?
”

“Yeah,” said the pilot, “
yo comprendo
. But not because you’ve got that fucking M-16 looking this way. Even federal assholes don’t shoot pilots unless they can fly the machine themselves and are damn sure somebody’s not going to fall on the controls.”

“Land it,” said Haines. They had circled the clearing four times and he could see no sign of the deputy or anyone else.

The pilot brought the small craft in low and fast, actually having to lift it over the tree line before flaring out and setting it solidly on it skids precisely where Haines had designated.

“Out,” said the FBI agent and gestured with the rifle. “You have to be fucking kidding,” said Steve. “If we have to leave in a hurry, I want to make sure we leave together,” said Haines. “Now
out
before I put a hole or two in your livelihood.”

“You
are
fucking crazy,” said the pilot. He pushed his cap back on his head. “I’m going to raise a stink that’ll have J. Edgar Hoover crawling out of his grave to get at your ass.”

“
Out
,” said Haines. He took the safety off and set the weapon on full automatic.

The pilot made adjustments on the center console, the rotors slowed, and he unbuckled himself and stepped down. Haines waited until the pilot was thirty feet from the aircraft, standing near the edge of the woods, and then he undid his own straps and ran toward the sheriff’s Bronco, moving in a crouching, weaving jog, weapon half raised. He crouched behind the Bronco’s left rear quarter panel, scanning the hillsides for a flicker of movement or a glint of sunlight on metal or glass. There was nothing.

Haines carefully raised his head. He checked out the backseat, and then slid along the driver’s side until he could see that the front seat was empty. There were brackets for two rifles on the metal screen between front and back seats. Both racks were empty. Haines tried the front door. It was locked. He dropped to one knee and inspected the hillsides in the 120 degrees of arc he could see.

If the stupid deputy had gone traipsing into the woods, against orders, it made sense he would take the rifle and lock the doors behind him. If. If there had been only one rifle racked. If there had been any rifle. If the deputy was still alive.

Haines peered around the front of the Bronco at the van twenty feet away and suddenly wished he had stayed airborne until Swanson and his team had arrived. How long until they should be here? Ten minutes? Fifteen? Probably less, unless the lake was farther from the highway than it had seemed from the air.

Haines had a sudden literal image of Tony Harod’s head on a platter. He smiled and ran the twenty feet to the side of the van.

The back doors were wide open. Haines slid along the hot metal of the van’s side until he could peer in. He knew he was a perfect target to anybody with a rifle in the hills on the south side of the clearing, but there was little he could do about that. He had chosen to come from that direction because with the exception of the fringe of woods where the pilot still stood, the hillside was mostly grass and small rocks with little opportunity for concealment. Haines had seen nothing in the trees during their four passes. He held the M-16 at his hip and stepped around behind the van.

Boxes, a litter of cables and electronic equipment. Haines recognized a radio transmitter and an Epson computer. There was no place large enough for a man to hide. Haines stepped into the interior of the van, and poked through the equipment and boxes. The box in the center held what appeared to be sixty or seventy pounds of gray modeling clay, carefully wrapped in separate plastic packets. “Oh, shit,” whispered Haines.

He no longer wanted to be in the truck. “Hey, Captain, can we get going now?” called the pilot from thirty yards away.

“Yeah, warm it up!” shouted Haines. He let the pilot walk back toward the machine before he began his crouching, dodging run to the open door on the right side of the Plexiglas bubble.

He was halfway there when a voice too loud to be human bellowed, “HAINES!” from the north slope. The first shots came a second later.

S
aul and Natalie had not driven fifteen minutes when they saw the first roadblock. It was a single police car pulled broadside across the highway with flares marking narrow lanes on either side. Four cars were stopped on the eastbound lane, three in the westbound lane facing Saul and Natalie.

Natalie pulled the van to the shoulder at the top of a hill a quarter of a mile from the tie-up. “Accident?” she said.

“I don’t think so,” said Saul. “Turn around. Quickly.”

They drove back over the summit of the pass they had just traversed. “Back down the canyon the way we came?” said Natalie.

“No. There was a gravel road about two miles back this way.”

“Where the campground sign was?”

“No, a mile or so past that on the south side of the road. We may be able to bypass the roadblock to the south.”

“Do you think that policeman saw us?”

“I don’t know,” said Saul. He pulled a cardboard box out from behind the passenger’s seat, extracted the Colt automatic pistol, and made sure it was loaded.

Natalie found the gravel road and they turned left, passing through thick pine forests and a few grassy meadows. Once they had to pull to one side to let a pickup pulling a small trailer pass. Several side roads left the main track, but they appeared too narrow and unused to go anywhere, and Natalie kept the van on the fire road as it degraded from gravel to dirt and wound south and then east and then south again.

They saw the police vehicle parked in the clearing two hundred yards below them as they descended a wooded hill on a series of steep switch-backs. Natalie stopped the van as soon as she was sure they were out of sight. “Damn!” she said.

“He didn’t see us,” said Saul. “I caught a glimpse of the sheriff or whatever he was, out of the vehicle, looking the other way through binoculars.”

“He’ll see us when we cross that open space going back up,” said Natalie. “It’s so narrow here that I’ll have to back up the hill until we get to that wide area two turns back. Damn!”

Saul thought a minute. “Don’t back up,” he said. “Go on down and see if he stops you.”

“But he’ll
arrest
us,” said Natalie.

Saul rummaged around in the back until he came up with the balaclava and dart gun they had used with Harod. “I won’t be in the truck,” he said. “If they’re not hunting for us, I’ll rejoin you on the other side of the clearing where the road turns east to go over that saddle.”

“And what if they are looking for us?”

“Then I’ll rejoin you sooner. I’m pretty sure this guy is all alone down there. Maybe we can find out what is going on.”

“Saul, what if he wants to search the truck?”

“Let him. I’ll get as close as I can, but keep him occupied so I can get across that last bit of clearing. I’ll come from the south side, behind the van on the passenger’s side if I can.”

“Saul, he can’t be one of
them
, can he?”

“I don’t see how he could be. They must have the local authorities involved.”

“So he’s just . . . sort of an innocent bystander.”

Saul nodded. “So we have to make sure that he doesn’t get hurt. And that
we
don’t get hurt.” He looked down the wooded slope. “Give me about five minutes to get in position.”

Natalie touched his hand. “Be careful, Saul. We only have each other now.”

He patted her cool, thin fingers, nodded, took his gear, and moved quietly into the trees.

Natalie waited six minutes, started the van, and drove slowly downhill. The man leaning against the Bronco with county markings seemed startled when she pulled into the clearing. He pulled his pistol from its holster and braced it by laying his right arm across the hood. When she was twenty feet away, he called to her through an electric bullhorn he held in his left hand. “STOP RIGHT THERE!”

Natalie shifted into park and left her hands in clear view on the top of the steering wheel.

“SHUT IT OFF. GET OUT OF THE VEHICLE. KEEP YOUR HANDS IN THE AIR.”

She could feel her pulse in her throat as she killed the engine and opened the van door. The sheriff or deputy or what ever he was seemed very nervous. As she stood by the van with her hands up, he glanced into his Bronco as if he wanted to use the radio but did not want to relinquish either gun or bullhorn. “What’s going on, Sheriff?” she called. It felt funny to use the word sheriff again. This man looked nothing like Rob; he was tall, thin, in his early fifties perhaps, with a face etched in wrinkles and lines as if he had spent his life squinting into the sun. “QUIET! MOVE AWAY FROM THE VEHICLE. THAT’S IT. KEEP YOUR HANDS BEHIND YOUR HEAD. NOW LIE DOWN. ALL THE WAY DOWN ON YOUR STOMACH.”

Lying in the brown grass, Natalie called out, “What’s the matter? What did I do?”

“SHUT UP. YOU IN THE VAN—OUT! NOW!”

Natalie tried to smile. “There’s no one but me. Look, this is some mistake, Officer. I’ve never even gotten a parking . . .”

“QUIET!” The law officer hesitated a second and then set the bullhorn down on the hood. Natalie thought that he seemed a little sheepish. He glanced toward his radio again, seemed to make up his mind, and came quickly around the Bronco, keeping his revolver trained on Natalie while he nervous ly watched the van. “Don’t move a muscle,” he shouted at her as he stood behind the open driver’s door. “If anybody’s in there, you’d better tell ’em to get the hell out now.”

“I’m all alone,” said Natalie. “What’s going on? I haven’t done anything . . .”

“Shut up,” said the deputy. In a sudden and awkward movement, he lunged into the driver’s seat, swept his pistol toward the interior of the van, and visibly relaxed. Still half in the vehicle, he aimed his gun at Natalie again. “You make one move, missy, and I’ll blow you in half.”

Natalie lay uncomfortably with her elbows in the dust, hands behind her neck, trying to look over her shoulder at the rangy deputy. The pistol he was pointing at her seemed impossibly large. A place on her back between her shoulders physically ached with the tension and the thought of a bullet striking her there. What if he
was
one of them?

“Hands behind your back.
Now!
”

As soon as Natalie’s hands touched above the small of her back, he loped over and slapped handcuffs on her. Natalie’s cheek went into the dust and she tasted dirt. “Aren’t you going to read me my rights?” she said, feeling adrenaline and anger beginning to burn away the semi-paralysis of fear.

“To hell with your rights, missy,” said the deputy as he straightened up with an obvious release of tension. He holstered the long-barreled pistol. “Get up. We’re going to get the FBI up here and see just what the hell’s going on.”

“Good idea,” said a muffled voice behind them.

Natalie twisted sideways to see Saul in the balaclava and reflecting glasses coming around the front of the van. The Colt automatic was extended in his right hand and the blocky-looking dart gun hung at his left side.

“Don’t even think about it!” snapped Saul and the deputy froze in mid-motion. Natalie looked at the pointed weapon, the black mask, and the silver, reflecting glasses and felt fear herself. “On your face in the dirt.
Now!
” commanded Saul.

The deputy seemed to hesitate and Natalie knew that his pride was warring with his sense of self-preservation. Saul racked the slide of the automatic back, cocking it with an audible click. The deputy got to his knees and dropped to his stomach.

Natalie rolled away and watched. It was a tricky moment. The deputy’s pistol was still in his holster. Saul should have had him throw it away before having him lie down. Now Saul would have to get within grabbing distance to remove it.
We’re amateurs at all this
, she thought. She wished Saul would just shoot the deputy in the butt with a tranquilizer dart and be done with it.

Instead, Saul moved quickly forward and dropped onto the thin man’s back with one knee, forcing the wind out of him and pressing his face forward with the muzzle of the Colt. Saul tossed the deputy’s pistol ten feet away and then threw a ring of keys to Natalie. “One of them will undo those handcuffs,” he called to her.

“Thanks a lot,” said Natalie as she struggled to get her hands under her behind and to pull her legs through one at a time.

“Time to talk,” Saul said to the deputy and pressed harder with the pistol. “Who organized these roadblocks?”

“Go to hell,” said the deputy.

Saul stood up quickly, took four steps backward, and fired the automatic into the dirt four inches from the man’s face. The noise made Natalie drop the keys.

“Wrong answer,” said Saul. “I’m not asking you to reveal state secrets, I’m asking who authorized these roadblocks. If I don’t get an answer in five seconds, I’m going to put a bullet in your left foot and start working my way up your left leg until I hear what I want to hear. One . . . Two . . .”

“You sonofabitch,” said the deputy. “Three . . . Four . . .”

“The FBI!” said the deputy. “Who in the FBI?”

“I don’t know!”

“One . . . Two . . . Three . . .”

“Haines!” shouted the deputy. “Some agent named Haines out of Washington. He came on the radio about twenty minutes ago.”

“Where is Haines now?”

“I don’t know . . . I swear.”

The second shot kicked up dust between the deputy’s long legs. Natalie got the smallest key in and the cuffs fell away. She chafed her wrists and scrambled to retrieve the deputy’s gun from the dust where it lay.

“He’s in Steve Gorman’s he li cop ter, flyin’ along the highway,” said the deputy.

“Did Haines put out descriptions of people or just the van?” snapped Saul.

The deputy raised his head and squinted at them. “People,” he said. “Black girl, in her twenties, accompanied by male Caucasian.”

“You’re lying,” said Saul. “You would never have approached that van if you knew there were two people wanted. What did Haines say we did?”

The deputy mumbled something. “Louder!” snapped Saul. “Terrorists,” repeated the deputy in a surly tone. “International terrorists.”

Saul laughed behind the black cloth of the balaclava. “How right he is. Put your hands behind you, Deputy.” The mirror lenses turned toward Natalie. “Handcuff him. Give me the other gun. Stay to one side. If he makes any move toward you at all, I’m going to have to kill him.”

Natalie snapped the handcuffs on and backed away. Saul handed her the long gun. “Deputy,” he said, “we’re going over to the radio and make a call. I’ll tell you what to say. You have a choice right now of dying or calling in the cavalry and getting a chance to be rescued.”

After the charade on the radio, Natalie and Saul led the deputy up the hill and handcuffed him with his arms around the bole of a small, fallen pine sixty yards up the south-facing slope. Two trees had tumbled together, the trunk of the larger one falling onto the top of a four-foot-high boulder. The proliferation of branches concealed the rock and made for excellent cover and a good view of the clearing below.

“Stay here,” said Saul. “I’m going back down to the van and get syringes and the pentobarbital. Then I’ll get his rifle out of the Bronco.”

“But Saul, they’re
coming
!” said Natalie. “Haines is coming. Use the tranquilizer dart!”

“I’m not pleased with that drug,” said Saul. “Your pulse was way too high when we had to use it. If this fellow has a heart condition, he might not be able to handle it. Stay here. I’ll be right back.”

Natalie crouched behind the boulder while Saul ran to the Bronco and then disappeared into the van.

“Missy,” hissed the deputy, “you’re in a shitload of trouble. Undo these cuffs and give me my gun and there’s a chance you’ll get out of this alive.”

“Shut up!” whispered Natalie. Saul was running up the slope carrying the deputy’s rifle and the small blue knapsack. She could hear the sound of a helicopter in the distance, growing closer. She was not afraid, only terribly excited. Natalie set the deputy’s pistol on the ground and thumbed off the safety on the Colt automatic Saul had handed her. She practiced bracing her hands on the flat rock in front of her and aiming at the van, its back doors open now, even though she knew it was too far away for a pistol shot.

Saul burst through the screen of branches and dead needles just as the helicopter roared over the ridge behind them. He crouched, panting, filling a syringe from an upended bottle. The deputy cursed and protested as he was injected, struggled for a moment, and slumped into sleep. Saul pulled his balaclava and glasses off. The helicopter circled again, lower this time, and Saul and Natalie huddled together under the roof of branches.

Saul dumped the contents of the backpack out, setting aside a red and white box of copper-jacketed shells and feeding them into the deputy’s rifle one by one. “Natalie, I am sorry I didn’t confer with you before doing this. I could not pass up the opportunity— Haines is so close.”

“Hey, it’s OK,” said Natalie. She was too excited to stay still, moving from one knee to a squatting position and then back to her knees. She licked her lips. “Saul, this is
fun
.”

Saul looked at her. “I mean, I know it’s scary and all, but it’s
exciting
. We’re going to get this guy and get out of here and . . .
ouch
.”

Saul had grasped her shoulder and squeezed very hard. He set the rifle against the rock and put his right hand on her other shoulder. “Natalie,” he said, “at this moment our systems are full of adrenaline. It
seems
very exciting. But this is not tele vi sion. The actors will not stand up and go out for coffee after the shooting is over. Someone will be hurt in the next few minutes and it will be no more exciting than the aftermath of an automobile accident.
Concentrate
. Let the accident occur to someone else.”

Natalie nodded.

The helicopter circled a final time, disappeared briefly over the ridge to the south, and came back to land in a cloud of dust and pine needles. Natalie lay on her stomach and pressed her shoulder against the rock as Saul lay prone with the rifle against his shoulder.