In the green dark, the helo quarters west to east, east to west, while moving steadily southward. If they don’t find something in the next fifteen minutes or so, they’ll have to retreat northward through territory already searched, to be sure they haven’t missed anything.
This scrub desert is not arid all year long, not in its every contour, especially not here at the end of the rainy season. They arrive at the brink of a deeper canyon than any they have thus far searched. About two hundred feet below, a wide, fast-moving stream, born of snowmelt in the distant mountains and swelled by rain in the foothills, slips over such a smooth course that it appears to flow without cataracts or counterflux. Above the dark-green water spread lighter-green shapes of mature trees that form cloisters in which sections of the stream disappear, and this side of the trees is the still paler green of the rocky canyon floor.
Jergen and Dubose wait in the VelociRaptor at the edge of the canyon and watch as the helicopter slowly quarters more than a mile to the east. Then it moves back toward them, past them, before hovering above the stream at a point at least half a mile to the west of their position.
The copilot reports, “We have a heat source under the tree cover. No clear profile. Diffused heat. Might not be them.”
When Jergen repeats this message, Dubose says, “Damn right it’s them. Parked in the running water, engine off, hoping the Rover will cool down so the trees can fully screen it.”
The canyon wall is without vegetation and not an easy slope, steeper in some places than in others.
When it seems that Dubose is about to angle off the brink and down, Jergen says, “Wait, wait. It’s too precipitous here. Go west a little way.”
“It’s not too precipitous,” Dubose says.
“Yes, it is,” Jergen insists.
“Don’t go fully pussy on me.”
This bumpkin’s cloddish rudeness offends Jergen. “I’ve never gone fully pussy in my life.”
“Maybe not, but you’ve got the tendency,” says Dubose, and drives off the brink, onto the precipitous slope, along which they descend at such a perilous angle, rollicking over such forbidding terrain, that the night-vision picture, already alien to the eye, becomes a meaningless jumble of leaping shapes in shades of green, as if they are hapless characters in an outer-space movie, rocketing through a meteor storm.
To prove his mettle, Jergen never cries out on the way down, nor does he reach for the grab bar above the door, nor does he raise his feet to brace himself against the dashboard. He relies solely on his harness even though at moments it seems the truck has slipped the bonds of gravity and that he will float out of his seat.
5
VelociRaptor hulking on the deep canyon floor, engine off, both front windows open, and to the port side, silhouettes of trees and then the stream like magma pouring from a wound in the earth, such a scene as a sleeper might imagine after a highly spiced dinner…Night air wafting cool into the truck, the chuckle and susurration of fast-moving water, a sweet licorice-like fragrance evidently issuing from some plant along the stream’s edge and the fainter limy scent of wet stone, all things green on green with shadows deep…
Dubose has parked about three hundred yards from where the helo is hovering and has switched off the engine.
He says, “They know they’ve been found, so if they were gonna give up, they’d have shown themselves already. We’ve gotta take the boy alive. But with the other two, we only make our best effort.”
“Instructions were all three alive. Inject the Washingtons and interrogate them.”
“Thanks for refreshing my memory,” Dubose replies with heavy irony. “But these two, they’ll be better armed than anyone in your average Quentin Tarantino movie.”
“Maybe they will be. On the other hand, with the boy to think about, maybe they won’t.”
“They’re ex-military. They’ll have a damn arsenal, and with their training, they won’t be pushovers.”
“We’ve been trained, too,” Jergen says.
“Law-enforcement training and Army Special Forces training are different worlds. You read this tough bastard’s service record? And the bitch lost both legs from the knees down, but still competes in marathons.”
“Ten-K runs,” Jergen corrects. “Not marathons anymore.”
Again with the unnecessary irony, Dubose says, “Oh, that’s a whole different story, then. What kind of wimp is the bitch, able to run just ten K without legs?”
“Let’s say they are carrying big-time.”
“We don’t have to say it. They are carrying.”
“If this turns into a firefight, how do we avoid killing the boy, collateral damage?”
“To keep the kid safe, they don’t want a firefight,” Dubose says. “So they’ll try to get the drop on us and take our weapons or pull some other cute shit. All I’m saying is, they’ll hesitate, and we won’t. Blow the shit out of them on sight.”
“What if they’re using the boy as a shield?”
“Man, to get a degree from Harvard, do they make you minor in cynicism? These aren’t the kind of people who use little kids as shields.”
“People are never the kind of people you think they are.”
“Then there’s every reason to blow the shit out of ’em on sight.”
They get out of the VelociRaptor and close the doors.
The chopper is hovering high enough above the trees to avoid being an easy target, but it remains stationed over the heat source to guide the ground team and to unnerve the Washingtons with noise.
Jergen and Dubose are armed with belt-carried 9 mm Sig Sauer pistols, but not with rifles, because this is going to be a close-up fight if it is any fight at all.
Thigh-high waterside grass and a variety of trees, which Jergen can’t identify in the current light, offer them what cover they will have. The helicopter is an adapted civilian-model medium-twin craft with high-set main and tail rotors, and it produces enough noise to cover any sounds they might make.
The stream is about twelve feet wide. There must be a high concentration of calcium carbonate in the runoff from these hills, because over decades the seasonal rains have laid down a flowstone bed, accounting for the smooth, swift movement of the water, which proves to be about two feet deep when Dubose wades to the farther bank.
Because the night lacks stars and is brightened only by cloud-filtered moonlight, Jergen doesn’t expect the darkness to be much deeper under the trees, but it is. Without the NVGs, they would be nearly blind.
Given Gavin Washington’s background, there is a possibility that he is equipped with goggles of his own, though they won’t be MIL-SPEC Generation 4 gear with eighty-thousand amplification, but rather Generation 1-plus. Hunter and hobbyist models ranging from a few hundred bucks to a couple thousand dollars will not serve Washington nearly as well as their headsets will serve them.
Jergen and Dubose proceed at a matched pace, moving from tree to tree, pistols in a two-hand grip. They are wary of the tall grass and the trees ahead, which offer cover to the Washingtons if they have chosen to get out of their vehicle and establish a forward position in an attempt to set a trap.
This is unlikely. For one thing, they will assume that their body heat will betray them. And chances are they will stay with the boy. They have been counting on the cool water of the stream and the canopy of trees to mask the Rover’s heat signature. Now that they realize this ruse didn’t work, they won’t have had time to plan another.
In retrospect, Dubose’s preference for killing the Washingtons on sight in favor of capturing just the boy does not seem to be as ill-considered as Jergen first thought. He certainly doesn’t want to die here tonight—or anywhere on any night. Better to act first and decisively. All they really need is the boy. With him, they will have Jane Hawk by the short hairs.