Silent Thunder (21 page)

“Let me hear you say it,” the man in the tan suit told Hubert.

“Yes, sir.” He was holding a bloody handkerchief to his cheek and looking at his unconscious brother.

Colonel Seabrook—it had to be him, even aside from the deceptively youthful voice I had heard over the telephone—admired the Beretta. “An excellent pistol, although I prefer the old forty-five for aesthetic reasons. But you can’t fight the next war with weapons from the last. You were in Vietnam, weren’t you, Walker?”

“Yes, sir.”

“You don’t have to say that. As a matter of fact I wish you wouldn’t. You have a way of saying it I don’t like.”

“I didn’t like it much myself.”

“I was there too, of course. Lieutenant, First Battalion, Ninth Marines. We used to shoot tigers outside Quang Tri when things got slow. It was better sport than hunting Charlie. When a tiger starts eating villagers it means he’s too old to chase other game, but he’s smarter than the usual run because in a country crawling with armed men a tiger doesn’t grow old by being dumb; too smart anyway to go after a tethered goat. We used villagers.”

“Get many?”

“I sent home a dozen rugs.”

“I meant villagers.”

Jerry Darling, coming to, groaned. Seabrook ignored him. “You know what it was like. They didn’t care who won as long as the rice paddy wasn’t spoiled, and they’d help out either side if it meant the war would go down the road. It’s the same here. The true soldier fights for the fight’s sake. Certainly not for president or country, both of whom would rather he died over there once the thing’s done. As soon as they stop needing it they can’t take the machine apart fast enough.”

“Nice speech. I bet your cub scouts eat it up.”

“I trained these men myself. I didn’t have much to work with in the beginning. The current generation is only interested in making a lot of money so they can afford toys. I’d almost rather have those sniveling pups who set fire to flags twenty years ago; at least they had spirit. But I’m happy with the way these men turned out.”

“They’re as slick a band of burglars as I ever met,” I said.

“They’re soldiers. You of all people should recognize the breed.”

“I’m not a soldier.”

“Of course you are.” He held up the Beretta. “Anyone who straps on a gun for someone else who can’t or won’t is a soldier. The uniform is optional.”

“Is that why you Pearl-Harbored my car in the warehouse district?”

“That was a mistake. Separating the allies from the enemy isn’t as easy as it used to be.”

“Sturdy and the Shooter would agree.”

“Minor casualties.”

“You’re short a man,” I said. “He’s probably talking to the cops right now. I didn’t quite let all the blood out of him at Ma Chaney’s place.”

“He won’t say anything.”

I knew then that he wouldn’t, ever, even if he recovered and outlived his sentence. I changed tactics. There were too many automatic weapons in the room to give much thought to the tiny pistol in my pocket.

“You’re too tidy for your own good, Colonel. All I wanted in the beginning was a line on Doyle Thayer Junior’s activities in the gun trade, enough to convince a jury that his wife wasn’t doing society any great harm in killing him. If you hadn’t tried to ambush me I’d never have suspected you were involved in the home invasions or the other thing. You compounded the error by trying to take out Ma Chaney. She talks when she’s mad. Maybe she never sat in on any of your training sessions.”

“Who’d listen to a crazy old bat who’s also a known felon?”

“Nobody, until you made her worth listening to. Attempted murder is a great credibility builder.” I let him chew on it. “I won’t lecture you about Shooter. Doing him with my gun at the fairgrounds was somebody’s half-baked idea of getting in good with you. I guess you thought a show of loyalty would make the Colonel forget how quickly you ditched Ma for him, right, Hube?”

Hubert, still holding the handkerchief to his face, said, “Keep it up, champ. I ain’t forgot I still owe you one for the other day.”

“Even a big chief can’t know what all the Indians are up to all the time,” I told Seabrook. “But it wouldn’t have happened if your highly trained Hitler Youth had shot me instead of my car.”

“Water over the dam. I never waste time refighting old battles.” He stroked the Beretta. “I’m sorry I couldn’t meet you at your office. You hung up before I had a chance to explain that I always choose my own rendezvous sites.”

“You picked a good one. Who’d have predicted Mark Proust’s basement? Especially with elections coming up.”

Jerry had pried himself into a cross-legged position on the floor with his head in his hands. The man who had hit him had returned to his station at the door. Jerry’s labored breathing was the loudest thing in the room for a long moment.

Seabrook glared at Hubert. “I gave orders to blindfold him as soon as he was in the car.”

“We did. He didn’t see nothing the whole way.” He sounded afraid, which was a surprise. I hadn’t thought he was that smart.

“You should have covered my nose too,” I said. “I was here once before, although not in the basement. I’m not Elizabeth Taylor, but I know a horse farm when I smell one.”

The Colonel shook his head sadly. “I take back what I said before. You wouldn’t make a good soldier. You think too much.”

“It’s a fault. Sometimes I envy Hubert and Jerry.”

“They don’t think enough. But they’re useful, up to a point.” As he spoke, the Colonel removed the Beretta’s clip from his pocket, rammed it into the handle, and racked a cartridge into the chamber. He thumbed off the safety and shot Hubert Darling. The bullet pierced the bridge of his nose and took off the back of his head.

Hubert took a month to fall. His head came up as if someone had called his name. That pulled his split cheek away from the handkerchief in his hand, and in the instant of consciousness left to him he started to raise it to the cut. It never got there, because by then his knees were bending and he turned and sort of screwed himself down until his center of gravity changed and he fell the rest of the way with a flop. After that he lay as motionless as a sack of mud.

Jerry groaned. It was hard to tell if it was because of his brother or his own aching head.

“I should have done that when he executed Shooter against my orders,” said the Colonel, absently wiping the gun up and down one leg of his trousers. His voice sounded muffled in the echo of the blast. “I definitely should have done it after Stoudenmire. But I rather like the justice of it this way: He used Walker’s gun on Shooter, I use Walker’s gun on him.”

I thought of telling him it wasn’t my gun, but decided he wouldn’t appreciate it. What I did say sounded a lot like nothing. The air smelled of brimstone.

S
OMEONE BATTERED AT
the door. The noise was loud in the throbbing silence following the shot and Colonel Seabrook’s words. The Colonel’s eyes flicked over my shoulder to the man at the door. He nodded. The door was opened.

“What was that shot?” Proust barreled in past me, glanced down at Jerry Darling being sick on the rug, saw his brother lying on his face with the back of his head gone. He recoiled. “I said no killing. What did you do to me?”

“It doesn’t matter,” Seabrook said. “I told you the blindfold wouldn’t work. Walker guessed where he is.”

Proust looked at me, or rather through me. He was wearing a short-sleeved plaid sport shirt and tight jeans that emphasized his paunch. His face was grayer than usual. “I didn’t want him here in the first place. You should’ve taken him somewhere else.”

“You should’ve sent me packing when I proposed our partnership. But you didn’t, and I did, and that’s the big picture. A good commander doesn’t waste time wishing things were better. It’s beginning to smell in here.” He strode toward the door, avoiding the gore underfoot.

“What about him?” Proust was looking again at Jerry, who wasn’t looking at anything but what he’d had for breakfast.

“A man should be with his brother.” On his way out, Seabrook glanced at the man at the door.

The other two sentries came away from the wall. I turned and followed the Colonel out. Proust stumbled along at the rear. Behind us the third sentry’s M-16 burped briefly, like an engine starting and stalling. He came out a moment later, drawing the door shut. Blue smoke curled out with him.

We were in a larger room, paneled similarly, with a ceramic tile floor speckled like blue cheese and a furnace and a pool table in opposite corners. Rectangular windows along the ceiling let in light between blades of grass growing outside. The Colonel stood at the far end of the pool table with the first two sentries behind him, resting his hands on the corners of the table. He looked a little like Eisenhower studying a map of Normandy.

“Cut to the chase,” he told me. “Have you got it?”

“Would I be here if I didn’t?”

“You might, if my reconnaissance reports on you are reliable. You’re what we jarheads used to call a nighthawker. You go it alone and fight by your own rules. That’s fine when the nighthawker’s in command; he wins battles and seizes objectives no one dared count on back at HQ. When he isn’t, more often than not he gets shot for insubordination, if he comes back at all. Individual heroism’s good for the folks back home. It helps recruitment. On the front it just spoils the casualty projections.”

“I’m not a hero,” I said. “Just curious. What do you want it for?”

“Why should I tell you?”

“Call it a last request.”

“Are you planning on dying soon?”

I leaned on the other end of the pool table, imitating his pose. The little automatic shifted in my pocket. “You as much as told Proust just now I wouldn’t leave here alive,” I said. “The blindfold didn’t work, and anyway it was just a gesture to keep him from squawking too loud about using his house. What’s it matter whether I die before or after I hand over the stuff? I just don’t want to die ignorant.”

“You’re safe at least until I have the fissionable material. After that you’re on your own. But then you always were.”

“Fissionable material.”

His face twitched. It was as near as he would come to smiling when he wasn’t rereading Clausewitz. “Plutonium. Do you mean to say you have it in your possession and you aren’t even aware of the terminology?”

“Give some people a gun and they’ll shoot you with it. They don’t have to know how it was made. What are you planning to blow up?”

“That’s my secret.”

“So’s the place where I stashed the plutonium.”

“Do you think I can’t get that out of you?”

“You could have gotten it out of Sturdy the same way, but he took precautions, or told you he did. I imagine they took the form of a sealed envelope left with someone to be mailed to the cops in case of his death. It’s an old tune but it still holds up.”

“I don’t hear sirens.”

“The mail’s always slow on Monday. You could start hauling on my toenails, but that takes time. You were working against a deadline from the start or you wouldn’t have scheduled those home invasions so close together. You needed money fast to buy the plutonium from Sturdy. Sturdy’s been dead twenty-four hours and you still don’t have the stuff. Meanwhile, what amounts to a deathbed testimony by the man Hubert accidentally killed is on its way to someone who will listen. If time were gasoline you couldn’t get out of the garage.”

He straightened and locked his hands behind his back. He’d made a decision.

“There is a mountain in Zimbabwe,” he said. “The natives who have been to it come away with clay on their sandals. Diamond clay. So far no one knows about it beyond a dozen half-wild tribesmen and a handful of government officials, all of them in my pay. By Christmas the whole world will have heard about it, by which time I intend to be in control of the country.”

“A nuclear bomb is fairly heavy as mining equipment goes. Why not use picks and shovels?”

“It won’t be detonated anywhere near the mountain. A simple demonstration in the Kalahari Desert should be enough to convince the government of my ability to blow the whole place into the South Atlantic if the mountain isn’t deeded to me along with all mineral rights.”

“Jesus.” Proust had collapsed into an overstuffed chair whose upholstery was too worn for upstairs and was mopping his face with a lawn handkerchief. The gesture reminded me of Hubert Darling. “You told me you were raising money to buy arms to sell to African revolutionaries.”

“If I’d told you the truth you’d never have given me the safe harbor I needed in Iroquois Heights. You small-town crooks never think big enough. With that mountain’s resources at my command, in five years I can control two thirds of the continent of Africa; in ten years, the Persian Gulf. I’ll own four fifths of the world’s oil. And all thanks to a string of forgotten domestic robberies in and around Detroit.”

He didn’t foam at the mouth or throw himself down on all fours and start gnawing at the legs of the pool table. His voice retained its light youthful quality and his eyes were dead gray behind the prop glasses. Well, I hadn’t expected histrionics. They aren’t all like Hitler or the Ayatollah, except in the ways that count.

I said, “You’ve got the bomb?”

“Missile, to be precise. I have four Jupiters, outmoded but still quite effective. The technology is a matter of public record. All I need is the juice.”

“Who told Sturdy you needed it?”

“He came to me. Everyone around here knows there is only one person to go to with a cargo like that.”

“You’re underestimating him,” I said. “People did. He smelled something on the wind or he wouldn’t have started working on his brother-in-law to steal the stuff from Fermi Two. That kind of heist is never easy, but not as difficult when you’re with plant security. Myrtle didn’t figure he owed anything to the place he thought gave him cancer, so he agreed to try.”

“Try.”

That was a mistake. What I said next was another, but I was talking to keep him from thinking. “How much was Sturdy soaking you?”

“You were his partner; you should know. Or were you?” He took his hands from behind his back. One of them held the Beretta. He had stuck it inside his belt under his tan coat. “I was right about you being a nighthawker. I should have quoted you their depressing survival statistics.”