The Sword of God - John Milton #5 (John Milton Thrillers) (29 page)

Two miles was nothing to Walker’s dogs. They had a great spoor from the clothes in the bag, and their noses were so sensitive that Milton would never be able to lose them. He could be ten miles away, but, for all the good that would do him, he might as well be just behind the next tree. The hounds were anxiously tugging the leash, yapping to each other in excitement, and if they were to be released, Lundquist didn’t doubt that they would sprint right to him like arrows to a target.

The path wound left and right and up and down, skirting the trunks of bigger trees and sending them through the middle of the underbrush. Lundquist was older than the others, but he made a point of keeping himself in shape, and his habit of taking a run first thing in the morning was starting to look pretty smart now. He settled into an easy stride, his waist angled down and forwards a little so that gravity could give him a friendly boost in the right direction. Even Michael and the other younger men were beginning to blow, but Lundquist knew he would be able to keep going for another half an hour without having to think about stopping to catch his breath. That brought a smile to his lips.

They reached a stream that ran through a small meadow. The leash went slack as the dogs stopped and started to circle, their noses to the ground.

“What are they doing?” Tom Chandler asked.

Walker reached down, unfastened Blue from the master leash, and handed her off to the younger man.

“They’ve lost the scent. You ask me, he went through the water to put them off.” He pointed to the other side. “Take Blue over there.”

“Aw, Lieutenant, do I have to?”

“Get over there,” he snapped.

Chandler did as he was told, splashing through the thigh-high water with the dog swimming determinedly beside him. They emerged on the other side, and Blue immediately put her nose to the ground, scuffled at the grass with her paws, and then started to bark.

“She’s picked it up again.”

The other dogs were agitated, keen to follow their sister over to the other bank, and Walker led them into the water. It was icy, the current was strong, and the footing on the bed was treacherous. Lundquist stepped carefully, submerged deep enough at one point that his balls were in the water, the cold taking his breath away, and then he was out. The dogs clambered after him, shaking their coats dry and then pulling urgently at the leash.

They set off again. The terrain started to climb, and they slowed their pace.

Lundquist jogged alongside Leland.

“This guy is serious, isn’t he?” the younger man asked.

“He’s military.”

“How do you know that?”

“He told Lester. British Special Forces.”

“Shit, Morten.”

“So what? There’s ten of us.”

Leland didn’t reply.

“You get anything else on him?”

“I ran the prints that Lester took when he had him in overnight.”

“And?”

“Got one hit. He was arrested in Texas three months ago.”

“For what?”

“Assault. Another bar brawl.”

Lundquist clucked his tongue against his teeth. “You’d think he’d learn his lesson.”

“Maybe not.”

“They get anything else on him?”

“File said that the feds came and claimed him the day after. This is where it gets real interesting, though. The sheriff down there, he wasn’t on duty when Milton was arrested. He came in the next day, heard the story about the FBI and why his deputy had let him out of his custody, thought he’d check it over, and called the local office down there. Turns out there was no record of Milton on any of their active cases. When he described the female agent who got him out, they said they didn’t have anyone there who even halfway fitted the description.”

Lundquist shook his head. “What are we dealing with here?”

“I’ll leave the thinking to you,” Leland replied. “It’s not what I’m good at.”

“Enough with the sass,” Lundquist said, but he was too intrigued to be irritated for more than a moment. “Maybe he works for the government?”

Leland jogged on, breathing heavily.

The government? Maybe he did. Wouldn’t that be something? Did it change anything? Only if they let him get out of the woods alive, and Lundquist did not intend to allow that. Perhaps there were complications involved here, but, at the end of all of it, they would just say that John Milton had killed Lester Grogan, Lars Olsen, George Pelham, and the agent. He had killed them, fired on the rest of them, and then run.

What else were they supposed to do? Let him go?

God had placed John Milton in Lundquist’s path. A final obstacle to clear. A final test before the glory of what He had instructed him to do.

The dogs pulled harder on the lead, and Walker’s arm was soon pulled straight, parallel with the ground. “Good dogs,” he called down to them. “
Good
dogs. You take us to him.”

JOHN MILTON RAN.

He stopped only to drink from the river and to eat. He saw an elderberry bush, and he stopped next to it, plucking off a handful of berries and stuffing them hungrily into his mouth. The juices were sweet and acidic, the tang making his mouth water. He hadn’t eaten properly since the venison two nights ago. That was going to have to be remedied sooner rather than later. He wouldn’t be able to run forever on an empty stomach.

He took off his shirt and wrapped it around his waist. He wanted to let some air get to the wounds on his arm. The pain was still there, and he had been reminded of it by the jolt that greeted every upward swing of his arm. He turned back and tried to assess how far he had travelled. Two miles in the last hour? The arm had compromised his stride. He was covering much less ground than he would have liked.

He set off again, pushing himself harder, gritting his teeth to ignore the pain. After another twenty minutes, though, the pain got worse. He couldn’t ignore it.

He stopped by the water’s edge, dunked his face, and then took off his jacket and sweater and examined his arm again.

The entry wound in his bicep, neat and circular, was healing. He had plucked out the worst of the debris. That wound would heal without the need for too much intervention, at least for the next few days.

He turned over his arm. His tricep was worse. Much worse. The flesh around the edges of the hole had become blackened and necrotic. It was dead, and unless he did something about it quickly, he would develop a fever, and that would stop him dead in his tracks. Worse, if left untreated, the wound would eventually become gangrenous, and he might lose the arm. He had to deal with it.

HE SMELLED the deer before he saw it. The body was just a short distance from the path, slumped down in the brush with a large bite taken out of its hindquarters. A wolf, Milton thought. It reeked of rot and decay, and he had to fight the urge to gag. He covered his mouth with the sleeve of his jacket and crouched down next to the body. He looked at the sticky, fibrous remains. A mess of white and brown maggots, each of them the size of half a fingernail, wriggled and seethed.

Maggots. Milton knew his battlefield medicine, and he knew his military history. It had worked for injured soldiers in the Napoleonic Wars. Maybe it would work for him. And, he knew, maggot therapy had gained credence recently. Doctors were using them again to clean the gangrenous feet of diabetics, saving them from amputation. The cleanliness in those circumstances couldn’t have been much more different than this, but beggars couldn’t be choosers. He didn’t have much choice.

Milton plucked out a couple of them and held them in the palm of his hand. They looked like blowfly maggots. That would do. He reached back down to the carcass and picked out twenty of them, held them loosely in his fist and then rinsed them in the river, shaking them gently to clean them as best he could. They were far from sterile, but that was out of the question today. He’d risk the
possibility
of infection against the
certainty
that things would get worse if he let the wound continue to fester.

He winced at the thought of what he was about to do, chided himself for his squeamishness, and dropped the maggots into the wound. He fixed the dressing and wound the bandage around it again.

LUNDQUIST LOOKED up into the sky and knew, with a local’s sure and certain knowledge, that the storm would be back again before the hour was out. The clouds were the deepest and angriest blacks, solid blocks of ink that gathered at the horizon and then rolled at them as though they were the outriders of a hurricane.

“Where is he?” he said in frustration, louder than he had intended.

“Can’t be far,” Michael said.

Lundquist ground his teeth. He had been saying that since they had started.

The dogs had stayed on his scent all morning. There had been no obvious attempt to lose them. His track led them along the banks of the little river, climbing ever upwards into the slopes that led to the larger hills and then, eventually, to the shallow peaks. There had been no more attempts to go through the water to lose the dogs. It was if he had stopped caring.

Yes, Lundquist had been surprised that Milton was still ahead of them. He was wounded, and they had moved quickly, barely stopping. The men had been running with their weapons ready for the last two hours, kept alert by Lundquist’s barked exhortations should their focus waver.

Milton had killed four men already.

Damned if he was going to kill any more.

They had been following the gentle upward slope, and Lundquist was feeling it in his legs and buttocks. Leland Mulligan had been blowing hard for the last hour, and Walker Price was damp with sweat. Michael was the fittest of them all, though. He had loped ahead of them, outpacing the dogs on occasion, diverting a few feet from the path in the event that Milton had left a more obvious sign that he had passed through.

The path dropped into a hollow that was bordered by slopes of loose shale. They followed a stream up the other side, the incline becoming steeper and steeper, the water sheltered by the steep shoulders of a ravine. The dogs pulled harder, and Lundquist recognised in their agitated behaviour that they were close.

“Weapons ready!”

Lundquist looked around. He knew the woods, and he remembered this spot. They called it the Whitefish Trail. The climb that faced them was steep, but there was a narrow path that cut upwards that could be accessed without too much difficulty.

He tightened his grip on his rifle.

Tom Chandler was up front. “Hey!” he cried out. Walker hauled the dogs back onto their haunches.

The dogs had led them to the face of the ravine on the right hand side. They had found an outcrop that reached out from the rock wall.

Lundquist hurried across. There was a thatched screen propped against the rock face. Chandler was on his haunches behind it, poking at the remains of a fire with a stick. Walker settled down next to him and looked.

“What do you think?” Lundquist said.

“Yes.” Walker nodded. “Look at that. He’s been here.”

Milton had dug a fire pit and lined it with rocks. The pit was full of ashes, and there were the unconsumed remains of a larger log that had been pushed away to die down. Walker disturbed the ashes all the way down to the bottom of the pit, but there was no sign of life at all. The fire had died out two or three hours ago, but that didn’t matter.

Milton had been here.

Lundquist stood, his knees complaining a little, and turned back to the others. They were gathered around the outcrop.

Lundquist was about to speak when there came a tremendous thunderclap. He looked up: the black clouds had sealed off the last square of blue sky and now rolled black and unending as far as he could see. The temperature had plunged, and then, just as he crammed his wide-brimmed hat onto his head, the rain started again.

“All right, men,” he called out, watching as they prepared their clothes for the change in the weather. “This is where he camped last night.”

“How’s he stayed so far ahead of us?” Michael called out.

“Pay attention!” Lundquist called out. “The dogs have a good scent. They’ve had a good one all morning. Maybe he stayed here for less time than we thought he did, maybe he’s just ahead of us. Maybe he isn’t as badly hurt as I think he is. I don’t know. It doesn’t matter. What I do know is we are going to find him, and, when we do, we’re going to make him wish he didn’t drag us out in this weather.”

“What are we doing now?”

“We stick with it. We keep going until we find him.”

Tom Chandler groaned.

“What?” Lundquist said. “You want to stay? You forget what he did back in the field before we came after him? Think it’d be a good idea to wait here on your own? Don’t be so stupid.”

Chandler looked away, chastised. Lundquist adjusted his hat, working the brim down, and nodded to Walker Price. The dogs leapt to follow the spoor again. Milton’s scent might as well have been painted on the path in fluorescent paint. He wasn’t far ahead, Lundquist knew it.

HE KEPT RUNNING.

A large ridge loomed up out of the trees, a sudden protrusion of sixty feet of bedrock granite that cut through the green with no obvious way around. Milton kept running towards it, pounding across the boggy trail. He heard the sound of the water from half a mile away, a shushing hiss that grew in strength the nearer he came to it. It became louder: a murmur, to a groan, to a roar. The trail cut through a stand of trees. Milton followed it, tracing a path around a gentle oxbow to the left and then to the right, and then he came to the waterfall.

He stopped and looked up.

He found himself in a little hollow, the river pooling in the bottom before draining away in the direction that he had come. It was verdant and fresh, with stands of ash and fir gathered on the shallow slopes. The ridge shot up ahead of him, more of a sheer cliff now that he was closer to it, blocking his way. The river rushed over the top. The falls consisted of two separate drops spaced about two hundred yards apart. The upper falls dropped about sixty feet; the lower about forty. The soft, layered, river rock was worn and sculpted, finished almost to resemble hand-rubbed pewter. It was formed into a number of channels, ledges, potholes, and other unique configurations. The river was funnelled between two sheer rocky lips and then was sent gushing out over the steep drops to crash against the rocks below.