24
Monday, June 13th
Gakona, Alaska
It had been a long time since Howard had done any real hunting, and even the most realistic VR scenario was not the same as creeping through the woods and sneaking up on a vehicle that might or might not contain unfriendlies. In this case, it had to be done by feel—it was so damned dark he ran a real risk of smacking his face into trees if he didn’t go slow. He couldn’t use his flashlight, that would be way too easy to spot, and he didn’t even want to think about bumping into some hungry critter bigger than he was.
His advantage was that if he couldn’t see them, they probably couldn’t see him. Even if there were a couple of bad guys in the SUV and they had starlight scopes, he’d be hard to spot unless they were looking right at him, and unless they had eyes in the backs of their heads, or just happened to have their scopes pointed at the rearview mirror, they weren’t apt to be looking right at him.
Once he’d left the edge of the woods and moved in deeper to circle around behind the vehicle, it took a few minutes to crawl up behind it. He inched his way forward in the old knees and elbows locomotion, until he was only a couple of meters behind the black SUV, a Ford Explorer. The thing had tinted windows so dark he probably couldn’t have seen inside even in bright sunshine, much less the near-pitch night out here. Nobody inside smoked cigarettes to reveal themselves with a telltale glow, there was no radio playing, nobody talking. No sign that the Explorer was anything but empty. And wouldn’t he feel stupid if it turned out he was stalking an empty car?
Yeah. But worry about that later.
He inched closer, until he was right at the back bumper. He had in mind listening very carefully, maybe making a little noise to see if there would be any kind of response, but he didn’t get that far. A man’s voice said, “I gotta piss.”
“We’re supposed to stay in the car until we see the signal.”
“F*ck the signal. I can see it just as well taking a leak as I can from in here.”
The passenger door opened, but the dome light didn’t go on. The door stayed open and the sound of footsteps approaching on dry fir needles got louder fast. The guy was walking around to the back of the truck!
Even this dark, he’d likely see or hear Howard if he tried to crawl away.
Howard flattened himself fully prone and used his knees to push himself under the Explorer.
Three heartbeats later, the sound of a stream of urine splashing against the side of a tree came loud in the night. It went on for a long time, and Howard could even hear the man’s pants’ zipper going back up when he was done.
The peeing man was halfway back to the car door when the driver said, “There it is! Come on, get in!”
From his vantage point under the vehicle, Howard couldn’t see much, but he was able to catch a glimmer of light from across the road.
That would be the signal.
Who was giving the signal and what exactly it meant, well, that wasn’t altogether clear, but the gist of it was fairly evident to Howard. Somebody was on the other side of the fence that surrounded HAARP, and these two were there to meet whoever it was. His money was on that somebody being Morrison, otherwise it was going to be one hell of a coincidence.
The Ford’s engine cranked, and that was incredibly loud from where Howard lay, his head directly under it. He heard the clunk! as the driver shifted the transmission from park into gear.
If the guy swung any kind of sharp turn when he pulled out, he’d feel a big bump at the same time John Howard felt the back wheel crush him. He took a deep breath—
The driver pulled straight out, and across the road before he wheeled the big SUV into a tight right turn broadside to Howard. The peeing man jumped out and ran around the car toward the fence, Howard could see him in the red glow of the brake lights. He was carrying what looked like a big pair of hedge clippers, and it took a second for Howard to realize that the tool wasn’t for trimming
bushes but was actually a pair of bolt cutters.
This was definitely a bad business, whatever it was.
Howard came up, pulled his revolver and started across the narrow road toward the Explorer, crouching low as he moved. There would be at least three of them, maybe more, and covering them all would be a bitch, but what choice did he have? He couldn’t just let them drive away—at least not until he knew what was going on.
The plinks! of the cutters snipping the chainlinks sounded crisp in the night.
Howard had almost made it to the Ford’s passenger door when the driver looked up and saw him.
“Incoming!” the driver screamed. “Incoming!”
Howard zigged to his left, toward the car’s rear, just as a gunshot exploded inside the Explorer. An orange tongue of fire reached from the driver, the passenger window shattered, and the bullet passed somewhere to his right, close enough so he heard it whistle by.
Bad guys—no goddamned doubt about it.
The noise inside the SUV must have been deafening. The driver took his foot off the brake, and the brake lights went out, plunging the scene back into darkness.
Howard still had the after-image of the gunshot seared into his retina, and his rods and cones or whatever weren’t doing their job. He rounded the back of the Explorer, dropped prone, and looked for a target.
“Move the car,” somebody said. They didn’t sound the least bit excited.
The driver stepped on the gas. The smell of burned tire filled the air as the Explorer screeched and lurched forward.
Howard’s central vision was still fogged, but he turned his head to the left and caught a peripheral movement. They had shot at him, therefore they were bad guys. He hesitated for maybe a quarter second, then lined the revolver up on the movement and squeezed the trigger. He remembered to close his eyes as the shot went off, to save what vision he had left, and then he rolled to his left as fast as he could, three complete revolutions.
Somebody screamed, and somebody returned fire. The dragon’s tongue muzzle blast lit the scene just enough for Howard to see there were two men standing next to a hole clipped through the fence, a third man lying on the ground. A bullet spanged off the road where he had been and the ricochet whined off into the trees.
Howard scraped his elbows on the road as he swung the revolver sideways and pointed it where he’d seen the flash—
“Move,” a man said, insistent, but not panicky.
Whoever he is, he’s a lot calmer than I am—
The scream of brakes forced Howard to glance away from his target zone just as he cranked off two more shots. He rolled again, and saw the Explorer’s headlights flash on as the SUV did a rubber-burning one-eighty.
The driver was going to put some light on the subject, and that was bad—
An answering pair of shots spewed more orange, and two more bullets hit the road inches away. If he hadn’t rolled, he’d have eaten both of them, and even so, the shooter had almost anticipated enough to hit him.
Howard leaped up. He had to get off the road before—
Too late. The SUV’s headlights found him. He took three steps then dived for the side of the road, hit in a sloppy shoulder roll, came up, and ran for the trees. More gunshots reached for him, but missed. The roar of the SUV’s engine increased as it headed back in his direction. The driver angled the vehicle, trying to find him with the light.
Howard slipped on something, fell, and rolled, ending up on his back, feet facing the oncoming Explorer. He pulled his feet toward his butt, propped the revolver on top of his left knee, got a nice clear sight picture outlined against the oncoming headlights. He aimed at the windshield on the driver’s side. The SUV was fifty meters away and closing. He pulled the trigger, one, two, three, four—
The gun stopped shooting after three times, clicked empty, but the SUV slewed off the road and angled into the fence, bowing a big section before it took out a post and stopped.
His piece was empty, and there was still too much reflected light out here; he felt like a bug under a microscope. He scrabbled up and into the trees, managed to run into one with his right shoulder and spin himself around, but at least he was hidden. He dropped to the ground on his butt, thumbed the cylinder latch, shoved the cylinder out with his left hand, hammered the extractor rod with the palm. Empty shells flew. He grabbed a speed strip and started to reload. One, two, three—
The SUV’s motor raced, and there came the sound of metal tearing. The motor roared louder, the tires screamed—
He must have missed the driver. Either that, or the other two had gotten to the SUV.
Load, load, come on, come on—!
—four, five, six!
He snapped the cylinder closed and crawled toward the road. As he reached the edge of the trees, the Explorer roared past, accelerating away.
“F*ck that!” Howard yelled. He scrambled up, ran into the road, and whipped his gun up in both hands. The SUV was really moving; it was eighty, ninety meters away as he cooked off all six as fast as he could, closing his eyes to avoid the muzzle flashes—
Again the SUV squealed into a one-eighty turn, and the lights came around to find Howard. But the car didn’t start back, it just sat there. Ninety meters—okay, okay, he had time to reload again—
The SUV’s door slammed shut. Somebody got out?
Howard ejected the empties, reached for another speed loader. Plenty of time—
He saw the muzzle flash, felt the kick in his belly from a heavy boot as he went down, then heard the boom! from the weapon.
F*ck! He was shot and his gun was empty. His side burned, over his right hip. Get up, John, get up, now!
He half-crawled, half-rolled off the road and back to the woods. In the trees, he kept moving, his fist jammed over the bullet wound. He got as far as he could before his legs just quit working. He sat, fumbled for his virgil, managed to trigger the distress signal as he felt himself graying out. His last thoughts as he lost consciousness were of disbelief: How could somebody have hit a target at ninety meters like that? With a handgun, and only the headlights of a car in the dark?
Hell of a shot ...
Gakona, Alaska
“What the hell happened?” Morrison said again and again. “What the hell happened?”
The cool night air whistled through the car from the three holes in the windshield. Morrison, in the back, was probably in shock, but at that, he was a lot better off than Ventura’s two men. One of them was dead on the seat next to him, slumped against the passenger door; he’d taken one right between the eyes. The other man was lying next to the fence back at the pickup point, and he was just as dead, one to the heart. Nice work.
The black man had done it. Ventura didn’t know who the hell he had been, but he’d screwed things up pretty good. How had the black guy managed to find them and set up his ambush? That had been a good trick. Still, it didn’t matter. He was probably dead or dying himself by now. Ventura had put one solidly into him; he wasn’t going to be causing any more trouble. If he was the Chinese’s primary attack, he’d failed, even though he had caused a lot of trouble. He should have been wearing a vest. Odd that he wasn’t. Ventura had his on.
The client was alive, and they would rendezvous with more of Ventura’s team in a couple of minutes. Nice try, but no cigar.
“What the hell happened?”
“Relax, it’s okay now. They tried, but they failed. We’ll regroup and wait for them to contact us.”
“Are you crazy?”
“Listen, you can’t take this personally. It’s just business. They tried, they missed, so now they’ll deal. Nothing has changed.”
“I could have gotten killed!”
“And you still could. But none of this matters. What matters is that you aren’t dead now. You still have something they want, and they are still going to have to pay to get it. You move on.”
“This is madness,” Morrison said.
“Way of the world, Doctor. If you don’t want to get hit, don’t step into the ring. You’re here now, so we have to make the best of it. Think of it as a great story to tell your new friends someday.”
He saw Morrison in the rearview mirror, his face dimly lit by the instrument lights. The man looked as if somebody had just told him there was a rattlesnake in his pocket.
Ventura watched the road, his pistol in his lap. Amateurs just didn’t understand how the world worked. They took everything so personal.