When I got out of the Chrysler I was greeted by a dog barking from inside the closest trailer—a vicious, rarely fed one by the sound of it.
Spotting a radio box next to the fence, I walked over and buzzed. There was no answer, and after a minute, I buzzed again.
Hmmm, I thought. No clients today, but there was the dog. This Haber guy must have gone somewhere but might be back soon. So I decided to wait.
There were no bars on my phone or any WiFi signal. I looked at the GPS on the car. There was no town on the screen where my blip was. Not even the road registered. I was just a blip in the middle of nowhere.
Chapter 19
After about an hour, when the last vestiges of my sandwich and coffee were gone, I decided to head back to town to ask around at the store or the church for Haber.
I was almost to the part of the gravel drive where I’d thought I was on a hiking path when I saw the truck. It was a late-model red Nissan Titan pickup, sitting kind of cockeyed in the road with its front end tucked into the brush.
As I pulled closer, I could see a guy crouching by the Titan’s rear driver’s-side tire, working a lug wrench. His back was turned so I couldn’t see his face, but he was short and stocky, wearing a camo ball cap and a black pullover hoodie and jeans.
“Hey, you okay?” I said, as I stopped the car, opened the Chrysler’s door and got out. “You alright?”
“You move and I’ll blow your spine out,” said a voice off to my right.
I turned to my right and threw up my hands. Because on the hill a little ways up beside my car, a big dude in a balaclava and sunglasses was casually pointing a rifle at my head. The rifle was an FN SCAR, a smooth, almost plastic-looking beige Belgian machine gun with a suppressor on it. The gun’s sight never moved an iota off my face as the big man easily hopped down onto the drive and came alongside my car.
Even with the gun pointed at me, I was actually more surprised than afraid. They were executives doing war game training or something, I decided. This was some kind of mistake.
“Whoa there, fellas. Everything’s fine. I’m a friendly. I’m a cop, okay? You can put the gun down. I’m investigating a case. I’m looking for a guy who might know something about it. Paul’s his name. Paul Haber. You know him?”
When I turned back toward the truck on my left, I saw the short guy suddenly right beside me. He was wearing a ski mask and sunglasses, too, and before I knew what was going on, he grabbed my shoulder and kicked my legs out from underneath me at the same time, and I landed hard enough on the gravel to knock the wind out of me.
Gasping for breath, I rolled to my right. My head banged off the hubcap of the Chrysler as I knelt up on all fours trying to get back on my feet. Then my Glock was ripped out of its holster as a big knee and a heavy weight landed on my neck like a sledgehammer, and I face-planted again back into the gravel.
I was stunned yet still trying to get up again when there was a familiar hollow clacking sound. My hands were ripped behind my back and a pair of handcuffs were ratcheted tight down on my wrists.
Still in shock, I heard an electronic beep.
“We just got him,” the big guy said into a Motorola. “I repeat. He’s under our control now. Over.”
There was some radio chatter reply, but I couldn’t hear what was being said. I was too busy lying there stunned as I felt my heart begin to double-time in my chest.
Just like that, in two seconds, I was out of it. Down and under the control of these two sons of bitches, out here in the middle of nowhere.
Just like that.
“Hey, you assholes, you better listen because I’m only going to tell you once,” I said, after taking a long hard minute to regain the last scrap of my composure. “I don’t know what you think you’re doing, but I’m a cop. If you don’t get these cuffs off me right now, you two are going to prison for felony assault on a law enforcement officer. That’s ten years minimum.”
“Ah, why don’t we make it an even twenty, Officer,” the short, stocky guy said as a Red Wing boot smashed into my chest.
“You want me to go for thirty or forty?” he said, kneeling down next to me as I fought for breath.
His voice right beside my ear was deep, hard as nails.
“Or do you want to shut the hell up?” he said.
I’m in trouble here, I thought as I stared up at the two hard, faceless men. I rolled over and lay gasping on the dirt road, staring out at the endless columns of trees.
Big, big trouble.
Chapter 20
There was some more chatter on the radio, and they put me into the truck, facedown on the floor between the rear seat and the front buckets. Shortie sat in the front with my Glock in his hand, while the big guy got behind the wheel, turned the truck over, and reversed it out of the ditch.
A fresh flood of fear rushed through me then as I suddenly realized who the big guy was. He was the guy who killed Eardley, who followed him up to the roof of the hotel and chucked him off.
They’re going to kill me, too, I thought, as my fear began to morph into a full-on paralyzing terror.
I couldn’t let that happen. To let that happen was to die, I knew. Training, training, you’re trained. What to do in a situation like this? Don’t let your mind run away and hide on you, I heard some long-ago instructor say like he was right there in the truck with me. Breathe, focus, and still yourself.
As we bumped along the dirt and gravel mountain road, I did just that. I took a breath and concentrated on just the air, and the way it felt coming in and out of my chest. After two or three breaths I actually felt much better—back to sheer panic instead of out-of-body terrified.
To keep myself from freaking out again, I forced myself to think.
I was still alive. Why? Why not just blow me away and bury me in the woods? Where the hell were they taking me?
They didn’t know what to do with me, I realized; or I would already be dead. They needed to find out what I knew. Another blast of fear rocked through me. They were going to torture me to find out.
As I lay there with the horror of this new realization rattling through me, I suddenly found it. I figured out my one advantage, how they had screwed up. I had one window. It was tiny, almost microscopic, but I needed to take it. I had no other choice.
“Ahhhhh!” I suddenly screamed as we went over the next pothole. “My back! Ahhh! I have a bad back! The pain! I need to sit up!” I said, getting up on my knees.
“You do and I’ll shoot you,” Shortie said, putting the gun to my head.
“Do it, then, you son of a bitch! Shoot me!” I yelled as I continued to rise.
I heard him rack my gun.
“Fine, do it. Put me out of my fucking misery!” I screamed as I got up and sat on the seat.
And proceeded to go absolutely berserk.
I began by rearing back into the backseat and kicking Shortie right in his chin with the heel of my right shoe. Damn, that felt good. As he screamed in pain, I reared back again and kicked the big bastard of the driver hard in the back of his head with the heel of my other shoe.
Then I double-kicked out with my feet toward the windshield between the front bucket seats, jammed both of my feet into the steering wheel, and started thrashing around like the trapped animal that I was.
The big guy yelled as he hit the brakes, and the little guy was hitting me in the side of the head with the pistol butt, but then we were off the road in the woods, the truck went to the left sideways, and we were toppling over.
I’d never been in a rollover before. In the spinning cab, I bashed off the ceiling and the seats again and again like a sock in a dryer. The driver-side window smashed in and then the windshield. We kept rolling.
When we came to a stop, what felt like a million years later, we were right side up. Shortie’s door was missing and so was Shortie. The roof on the right side had crumpled and come down about three feet. I looked to the left at the big dude, moaning, still belted in the driver’s seat behind th
e deployed air bag.
I noticed his left arm had an open fracture, the bone protruding below his sleeve. As I stared at it, something warm flowed down the right side of my head and began dripping off my chin. I couldn’t wipe at the blood because of the handcuffs.
I didn’t know how I was still alive, and I didn’t care. I wriggled away out the missing passenger-side door, dropped out of the crushed truck, and began to run into the woods.
Chapter 21
Devine waited in the outer office of the comm trailer at Black Hills compound, listening to the boss, Paul Haber, scream bloody murder into his phone on the other side of the closed door.
He had reason to be pissed. They’d been only half an hour away, coming back from New York, when they got the call from Therkelson that the cop, Bennett, had arrived at the base alone.
Toporski and Therkelson, going ahead of the rest of the team, were supposed to neutralize the cop.
But that hadn’t happened. As they came up the hill, they saw the wreckage in the ravine—Toporski squashed dead like a bug and his buddy Therkelson busted up and in critical condition. The cop was gone.
The only good news was that the cop seemed to have headed off in the direction of the state forest, hundreds of thousands of acres of uninhabited woods. He had a good forty-minute head start on them, but there was no one on this side of the mountain. They might be able to catch him still.
Haber had already gotten the hunting party started. Before making the necessary calls, he told Monroe to get the MH-6 Little Bird ready, then took down and doled out what he called his M&M packs—M4A1s with attached M203 grenade launchers—to all the men.
Haber, who had been a platoon sergeant in the 2nd Battalion, 6th Infantry, before joining Delta, wasn’t stingy with the ammo. He’d given everyone five full clips apiece, as well as grenade packs with star clusters and smoke and high-explosive rounds. He wanted this cop good and dead.
Devine sat on a plastic lawn chair staring up at the trailer’s dull metal ceiling as Haber screamed some more.
Ever since he was a little boy, he’d loved guns and hunting and the woods. His father was an avid deer hunter, as his father had been before him. Devine loved the cold, empty wilderness and the smell of gun oil and cordite, sweat, and leather.
But for the first time, he felt something was wrong about all this, something off.
There were only seven of them now. Haber, Irvine, Leighton, Willard, Monroe, and De Souza. And himself.
One little, two little, three little Indians, Devine thought as the boss’s door flew open.
Chapter 22
Haber stood in the doorway, a slender, sharp-featured thirty-five-year-old man with a shaved head, gray trimmed goatee, and cold, dark-brown eyes. He was dressed in Sitka Optifade camo bibs and jacket, with Crispi Italian hunting boots. The mission was bankrolled by some deep pockets, and Haber had insisted that he and the men be outfitted properly with the best that money could buy.
Even at rest, Haber had a stately presence. There was something old-fashioned about him. A hunter, an alpha. A born leader.
“Get in here,” Haber said, going back into the office, taking his own M&M pack out of the locker behind him and clunking it on his desk.
Devine watched Haber expertly load, check, and sight his automatic weapon. He did it with a skilled workman’s quick yet reverent efficiency. There was something pretty about it. Like watching a musician tuning his instrument, or a master chef honing his knife.
The inside of his office was as spare and rugged as the man. A cot and camp chair, coffeepot on a plywood shelf, a whiteboard tacked with aerial and topographical maps.
“Where’s Leighton? Here?” Haber said, tapping at the map.
“Yes. I have him on this perimeter,” Devine said, stepping over and drawing a line with his finger.
“So you definitely think he went south here?” Haber said, pointing.
“Yes. His track through the mud puts him on this downslope to the southwest right toward the state land. That’s our advantage. That’s some of the most uninhabited timberland in the state. In the northeast, probably.”
“Okay, good,” Haber said. “Why aren’t you on the bird yet?”
Devine winced.
“I wanted to talk to you in private, sir. I think we should medevac out Therkelson. We could have Monroe fly him over the hill and down to Chapman and call 911 anonymously.”
“C’mon, he has a broken arm,” Haber said. “Last thing we need is more heat.”
“I think his back is broke, too, sir.”
Haber glanced at him angrily.
“He’s stabilized, right?”
“But there could be internal bleeding.”
“Don’t give me ‘could be,’ Devine. Don’t be an old biddy. Therk is old-school tough. Just give him some morphine until we get this thing settled. Then we’ll get him completely patched up.”
“You sure, boss?”
Haber glared at him. Not a comfortable feeling. Yet he went on.
“I mean, maybe we should retreat, sir. Get out of here. Reassess. We’re starting to take some serious casualties now. We’re down to seven guys.”
“Not that I need to explain this to you, Devine, but I just got off the phone with our southern friends who are bankrolling the operation, and we’ve agreed to ramp up the schedule. We leave tomorrow. They’ll have good men at the airfield to replace the ones we lost. It’s all set up.”
“Tomorrow we go?”
“Yes, buddy, and we’re leaving here right away. After we bag the cop, we’re scrubbing this entire hill. Gone without a trace. Is that good enough for you, you worrywart?”
Haber smiled then as he pounded Devine in the arm.
Devine smiled back.
O Captain, my Captain, he thought.
“Sir, yes, sir,” he said.
Chapter 23
Bumping and tripping, sweating and bleeding, with my arms still handcuffed behind my back, I ran down the endless slope of the middle-of-nowhere Pennsylvania forest.
Crossing a narrow creek, I slipped and did another long roll that ended in a full somersault before I came to a painful, skidding stop in the wet forest leaves.
As I lay there spitting dirt out of my mouth, a memory surfaced from when I was a kid—when we’d play army in the woods of Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx, using sticks that looked like rifles as we patrolled. I fought back a desperate urge to start weeping.
Instead, I stood and continued southwest. I would have headed back toward the road I’d taken there, except I had no idea where I was in this damned woodland maze. I knew west by the hastily setting sun, but what the hell did that gain me? Which way was help?
The one thing I could do was pick a direction—southwest—and keep steadily moving to distance myself from the wrecked truck. Because whoever was on the other end of that big dude’s phone would be coming after me, and they were going to be pissed. I still didn’t know a damn thing except that these guys were killers, of the professional CIA-military variety; and I now, like a complete idiot, was in their home court.
After another quarter-mile, I came to a small cliff—three or four stories of angled gray rock. I could have run down it if my arms were at my sides, but I couldn’t risk tripping, so I had to inch down like an infant.
At the bottom, I looked to the left and saw something sparkle through the brush. It was a creek, I saw. I walked over to it. A stream heading the same way I was, southwest. It was wider than the one I’d tripped over; and running water would lead to more, bigger running water, wouldn’t it? That might mean fishermen, a boat, perhaps a bridge.
But as I followed the stream down, it began to slow. When I came to the foot of the wooded hill, I saw that it became a trickle that fed an enormous wetland swamp. “There goes my merit badge,” I mumbled. I went to the left, following the curve of the wide hill.
I was at the edge of the swamp, where it seemed to become dry land again, when I began to hear it. To the left
beside the swamp was a stand of tall, very skinny white trees with yellow leaves, and a lot of brush; and from the brush came the faint sound of chirping.
At first I thought it was a bunch of birds, but it was too consistent. It sounded mechanical. A weird kind of electronic beeping, like a smoke alarm or a truck backing up, which made zero sense.
I thought I was cracking up when I heard a dog bark from the same direction. Initially it sounded like the beast I’d heard from the trailer—but it was a friendlier bark.
“Help! Help me, please! Hello?” I yelled, running for the brush and the white trees.
I was about twenty feet into the stand, crashing through the brush, when through the tangle of vines and twigs I saw Day-Glo orange.
A moment later I recognized the bright orange color as two hunting vests—and hope leapt in my heart in a way I had never felt.
Chapter 24
They were grouse hunters. Joe Walke, a tall, heavyset, bearded man with glasses, and his granddaughter Rosalind, who looked no older than fourteen.
The beeping came from the pointing collar of their English setter, Roxie, a floppy pooch with brown, black, and white fur. Roxie would be let off the leash into the woods to find the grouse and, when she did, would assume a pointing position—triggering the electronic beeping of the collar.
But I learned that later. When I first saw the older man and his granddaughter, they were pointing shotguns at me as I burst out of the bush, handcuffed and covered in filth and blood.
“Please help me! A bunch of men are trying to kill me!” I yelled.
While I panted in terror, trying to speak, Mr. Walke lowered the gun and came over. He calmly sat me down and washed out my head cut with a bottle of water from his pack.
“It’s okay, son. Slowly now. What’s really going on? Are you a fugitive of some sort? Why are you wearing handcuffs?”