Cold Wind

10

“Faster, faster,” Nate said to Alisha, who was throwing her clothing into her bag.

She looked up with fear in her eyes and swept her arm around the interior of the cave. “What about all this? You can’t just leave it.” She meant the furniture, gear, books, and electronics he’d amassed in his three years there.

He shrugged as he took his shoulder holster and the.454 down from a peg in the wall and put them on the table. “All I need is this,” he said. Then: “And my birds. In fact, I’m going to go get them hooded up so we can take them with us.”

She rolled her eyes. “You need more than a gun and your birds.”

“And you,” he said, misunderstanding.

“No,” she said. “You need clothes. And your satellite phone. Here,” she said, grabbing an empty duffel bag and placing it on the table. “I’ll pack them while you get the birds ready.”

He nodded, and turned for the opening. As he did, the receiver for one of his motion detectors chirped. Nate froze and stared at it. It was the uppermost sensor.

“Okay,” he said. “We’ve got to hurry.”

Johnny said, “I think I see it.”

“Where?”

“Over there. On the other side. Follow my arm.”

Drennen stood shoulder-to-shoulder to Johnny and bent so he could rest his cheek on Johnny’s bicep. He squinted down the arm, past the pointer, across the canyon.

“It’s kinda dark,” Johnny said. “It looks like a half-moon behind some bushes. It don’t look like one of those caves in the cartoons. It’s more like a slash in the rocks.”

After a beat, Drennen said, “Okay, I think I see it.”

“Keep your eye on it,” Johnny said. “Let’s move down the trail a ways. If we can see the cave, that guy can see us. So let’s move until we can get hid.”

Johnny carried the AT4 by a handle that swung up from the top of the barrel. He crouched and picked up his pace, his cowboy boots clicking against loose rocks. Drennen ducked and followed, keeping his hands out in front of him in case he slipped on the loose gravel. He plucked the beer bottle from his back pocket, twisted off the cap, and threw the cap aside.

Johnny didn’t slow down until there was a thick wall of sharpsmelling brush on the left side of the trail that obscured the view from the cave entrance. When Drennen caught up and joined him, Johnny put the AT4 down and gently parted two stiff boughs. “See it?” he asked.

“I lost it,” Drennen said, then took a long drink that made his eyes water.

“Put that beer down and use your binoculars. That’s what they’re for.”

“Fuck you,” Drennen said, but he did as he was told and placed the bottle between his boots. He raised the glasses to his face.

Johnny waited while Drennen adjusted the focus on the binoculars. He watched his friend, trying to read him.

“Okay,” Drennen said finally. “I found it again.”

“What do you see?”

“Well, it looks like the top of the cave. There’s a bunch of brush hiding the lower half, but the hole looks tall enough for a man to walk in and out of without bending over. I can’t see inside-it’s dark-but it looks like there are blankets or some such thing tied back on each side.”

Johnny nodded and drew out the map from his back pocket. He unfolded it and held it out in front of him, matching the features in the drawing to the canyon itself.

“Yeah,” Johnny said, “Where we see that opening is where Patsy has the X.”

“Hot damn,” Drennen said, chuckling. “This is gonna be the easiest fifteen grand we ever made.”

“We ain’t made it yet,” Johnny said. “Keep your eyes on that cave. See if you can see him. I’ll get ready, and if you see that son-of-a-bitch, you tell me. We may not get another chance.”

The mews for Nate’s falcons was eight feet tall and six feet deep and was located twenty yards west of the cave opening. It was constructed of dried willow branches gathered near the river, and although it was in the open, the construction material rendered it almost perfectly camouflaged. Inside, he started with the peregrine while the eagle watched imperiously. He slipped a leather-tasseled hood over the hooked beak of the bird and fastened it in back. The hoods inured the raptors from reacting to outside stimuli and blinded them so they wouldn’t try to fly while being transported. Each bird had a custom hood sized for a tight fit.

He paused after the peregrine was hooded to glance through the willow branches toward the opposite cliff face. He could see no movement, and he knew how often a wandering deer or bobcat unknowingly strolled through the motion detector. Unfortunately, there were several dense stands of mountain juniper hiding portions of the trail. He watched for a few seconds to see if anyone-or anything-emerged from them. Nothing. But his sense of urgency didn’t diminish and the hairs on the back of his neck were pricked.

Nate turned back to his birds and hooded the red tail. She didn’t object and it took less than a minute. He looked at the eagle, who was sizing him up as well, and sighed. The eagle didn’t take to a hood, and it was often a struggle. He said, “Cooperate just this once.”

The eagle shifted its weight back and forth on the thick dowel it perched on. Its talons were black, long, and diabolical. Even through the thick welding glove Nate wore when he carried the eagle, she was capable of clamping down with power that practically took him to his knees. Now, he thought, is not the time for any foolishness.

He raised the large hood to her head deliberately, so she could see what he was doing. “Come on,” he said gently, “come on. ”

Outside the mews, Alisha called to him. “Nate, another one of these boxes went off.”

Sensor number two, he thought. Jesus. “Get back inside,” Nate called back. “I’ll be there in a second. Stay out of sight, Alisha, please.”

“Okay,” she said, chastened.

“ Oh shit,” Drennen squealed. “I see somebody.”

Johnny took a deep breath. He was both excited and more than a little nauseous.

“Make sure,” Johnny said, raising the rocket launcher to rest on his right shoulder. He snapped the sights into place and leaned his cheek against the tube. He could see the top of the cave in the distance, and when he fit the scope against his eye, it leapt into view. There was movement, but he couldn’t make out what it was. Whoever had been at the opening had gone back inside.

“I saw somebody move,” Johnny said.

“I can see better,” Drennen said. “He’s in the shadow of the cave, but I can make him out. Long hair, Patsy said. Long black hair. It’s him.”

“Are you sure?” Johnny asked, suddenly getting cold feet. “Are you fucking sure? Didn’t Patsy say he had blond hair?”

“That was him, goddamn it,” Drennen hissed. “Shoot, shoot, shoot! Now!”

“Fuck,” Johnny said. “I forgot the stupid cocking lever.”

“I knew I shoulda done it,” Drennen said, now hopping from foot to foot, barely able to contain himself. As he hopped, he moved back farther on the trail but kept the binoculars up.

“Okay,” Johnny said, raising the AT4 back up.

“Dumb shit,” Drennen said, still moving back and inadvertently slipping behind Johnny. “Don’t forget those other two switches.”

Then Nate realized how quiet it was outside. The birds and rodents seemed to be holding their breath. And almost imperceptibly, he heard a sound, a sharp if distant metallic click.

He knew that sound, it was a sound from his past, and he roared in reaction and wheeled inside the mews and threw open the door as the roar and the whoosh filled the canyon.

For Johnny, the muscular thrust of the rocket was exhilarating, and the flash and roar of the explosion inside the cave took his breath away. The heavy boom echoed back and forth from canyon wall to canyon wall, and the sheer power of it seemed to wash over and engulf him and open his pores. The vapor trail hung in the air as if frozen there, a white snail’s-track of smoke that extended from the juniper stand midair over a tumbling river far below and straight into the mouth of the cave.

Nate saw it: a lightning bolt of smoke and light streaking his direction from a thick stand of juniper halfway down the trail.

The rocket vanished into the opening of his cave. The explosion a split second later threw him back into the mews, flattening it, and he crashed to the ground in a sharp tangle of broken willows, broken skin and bones, and panicked falcons.

Johnny jumped to his feet and threw the tube aside and howled, “Jesus! Did you see that? I got him, Drennen! I got that son-of-a-bitch with a perfect shot. Did you see that?”

His ears rung and his hands shook and white-hot adrenaline shot through his veins and he thought it was better than sex, better than money, better than anything. He wished he had a camera with him to get a snap of that vapor trail and the huge gout of smoke rolling out of the cave. He’d put it on his Facebook page.

Then he turned around and saw Drennen writhing on the trail. Drennen’s clothes were on fire, and so was his hair. Acrid black smoke haloed his head. His face was black and swollen and looked like charred meat. He’d stepped right in into the back-blast.

“She told you not to do that,” Johnny said.

Drennen squealed like a little girl, the sound coming from inside his throat. Johnny watched as Drennen rolled in the dirt until the flames were out.

Behind him, a golden eagle lifted up from the smoking debris and caught a thermal and rose into the cloudless blue sky. Johnny turned and tracked it as it rose, mesmerized.