Crooked River

53

As he pulled out of the car rental lot at the Tallahassee airport, Special Agent Coldmoon resisted the urge to stomp on the accelerator. He knew where he wanted to go, but he didn’t know how to get there, and he needed to take a moment to map his route and — just as important — organize his thoughts. He stopped in a sandy turnout just beyond the airport and took out his cell phone, firing up Google Maps again and zeroing in on the location of the old sugarcane processing plant. It stood about a quarter mile from the banks of the Crooked River, in the middle of a large, uninhabited area with the crazy name of Tate’s Hell State Forest.

It was a straight shot to the coastal town of Carrabelle, an hour and fifteen minutes away. From there, he’d have to turn north on Highway 67, skirting the edge of Tate’s Hell, and find a way in. But there didn’t appear to be any marked roads into the forest, beyond what looked like a few old tracks, overgrown and probably closed off. Presumably they had led to moonshine stills or something else he’d rather not know about. He could also see the extensive outline of the sugar plant, with what looked like two perimeter fences and a gate. But it was hard to tell where the road passing through the gate originated. He was just going to have to wing it.

With the jeep still idling, he reached back and unzipped his traveling bag. He pulled out the marine “butt pack” in woodland green camo he’d prepared for the trip to Guatemala, his FBI radio, Ka-Bar knife, and a pair of cuffs. Working fast, he yanked off his jacket, checked his Browning, found it clean, and reholstered it. He slipped two additional magazines into the knapsack, along with the knife, cuffs, water bottle, parachute cord, flashlight, binocs, and a rain shell. On second thought, he removed the cuffs — unnecessary weight.

The place was likely to be fenced and gated. Damn, if only he had wire or bolt cutters. He felt his heart racing as he thought about what might be happening to his partner — assuming he was still alive. But he tried to reassure himself by focusing on Pendergast’s resourcefulness. The man had as many lives as a cat: he’d seen it for himself.

He lowered the windows, breathing deeply of the muggy air, trying to clear his head. A storm was coming for sure, but he hoped to make good time before it hit.

If you go in there without me, you’re going to regret it — regret it severely. Constance’s words, spoken with conviction, still rang in his head. Was that a threat? It sure sounded like one. Coldmoon had heard a million threats in his life... but this one, he sensed in his bones, wasn’t idle at all. That outrageous bitch would carry it out — he knew she would.

Those thoughts were for later; right now, he had to focus on one thing: saving his partner. Leaving the radio on the seat next to him, ready to call off any cops who tried to pull him over, he gunned the engine, spinning the wheels in the gravel as he rejoined the road. He picked up speed, accelerating steadily, the wind roaring in the open window. The map said an hour and fifteen to Carrabelle, but he had to do better. The only problem was that the Jeep, designed for off-road travel, wasn’t nearly as fast as he liked. He was able to push it up to about a hundred, but at least the traffic on Route 319 south was light and he could maintain that speed in the fast lane.

The land on either side of the road was flat and featureless. Lightning flickered on the distant northern horizon behind him. Within forty minutes, making good time, he bypassed Carrabelle, blew past a gigantic prison, and merged onto Highway 67. This was an even lonelier road, a straight-as-an-arrow two-lane highway running through a scrubby area of abandoned slash pine plantations, interspersed with cypress swamps. The sky was now covered with dark clouds and the wind was picking up, the trees on either side of the road thrashing and swaying.

He passed a weather-beaten sign indicating he was entering Tate’s Hell State Forest. And hell was exactly what it looked like — swampy, dense, and unsettlingly dark. In another ten miles he would have to start looking for a road going west into the forest, toward the old sugar plant. He slowed down, passing a couple of logging roads blocked with berms and dense brush. Finally, he came to what appeared to be a better-maintained road, heading off at right angles to Highway 67. It, too, was blocked — this time by a metal pipe gate, too heavy to ram through, with a barbed wire fence running on either side. He stopped and, shining his headlights down the old road, examined the ground. It was covered with weeds, but it nevertheless looked drivable. And it was headed in the direction he wanted.

He got out and walked along the barbed wire fence to a spot where the trees were spaced wide enough for him to drive through. He returned to the Jeep, put it in four-wheel drive, eased it down the highway shoulder, and then put the hammer down. The car hit the fence, which sprang apart with a satisfying twang. He maneuvered the Jeep through the trees until he reached the road. It ran in a broad curve into the dark forest.

He stopped to check his GPS. He only had one bar and felt pretty sure he was going to lose that, too, so he took screenshots of the Google Maps images showing the web of old logging roads leading in the direction of the sugar plant and stored them for future reference.

As he drove on, the road became a nightmare, gullied by rain, with loose rocks, potholes, and stretches of weeds taller than his Jeep’s hood. He drove as fast as he dared, hardly able to see where the road went, half-blinded by the glare of his own headlights reflecting off the wall of weeds in front of him. A few times he almost got caught in muddy spots, but thanks to the Jeep he bulled his way through even the worst muck holes. Growing up on the rez, Coldmoon had experienced his share of horrendous dirt roads, and he had an innate sense of how to handle them. It wasn’t that different from driving in fresh snow. The number one rule was to keep going, never stopping or easing up, powering through.

The abandoned slash pine plantations soon gave way to a swamp of cypress trees with knobby trunks and feathery branches. As expected, he lost his GPS, but he continued navigating using the screenshots, estimating his position with dead reckoning and keeping his cell phone’s compass always pointed west. Where logging roads crossed or divided, he tried to take the better one, but he sometimes found the roads completely washed out and was forced to backtrack. And then, quite unexpectedly, he came out on a freshly graded road — one with recent tire tracks. It was well hidden beneath tall, arching cypresses. This was it, he felt sure — the road to whatever had taken the place of the old sugar plant. He turned onto it, heart pounding; then stopped, killed his headlights, and stepped out to reconnoiter. Far off, where the road headed, he could see a faint glow in the night sky, reflecting off the gathering storm clouds. He estimated it was four miles ahead.

That was where they had taken his partner.

Getting back in the car, he proceeded slowly, keeping his headlights off, holding his flashlight out the window to illuminate his way. Gradually the glow brightened until a smattering of lights could be seen rising above the treetops. He stopped and took out his binoculars. It looked like a prison: a single concrete tower with roaming klieg lights, behind which sat a low industrial structure, maybe three stories high, punctuated with the yellow squares of windows. Next to the tower was a central cube of a building, brightly lit. That, he thought, must be the heart of the operation, situated as it was in the center of the complex. Coldmoon felt his guts constrict to think of his partner in there. The bastards.

Feeling his anger rise, he reminded himself once again to focus. This was a large complex and there would be a lot of people in there, alert, armed, and well protected. The place had the definite smell of government about it. Once again, he was glad he had not followed his first impulse to call Pickett. Aside from the time it would take to organize an assault, even using a Critical Incident Response Group, there was no telling where the information might be transmitted — and the still unidentified mole had done enough harm already.

He continued on and turned off the flashlight: the glow from the facility provided enough light to see ahead. That, of course, meant they could probably see him. He felt certain that at some point there would be a manned checkpoint in the road, with a gate and a fence.

He’d better ditch the Jeep.

He eased the vehicle to the edge of the road. There was really no place to hide it, except by sinking it. He hesitated just a moment. Then he rolled down all the windows and left the driver’s side door open; then, shifting into four low, he drove it hard into the water and muck beyond the shoulder, gunning the engine to get as much inertia as possible. As it finally got stuck and began to sink, he hoisted his pack and stepped out into the warm, murky water. The Jeep bubbled and hissed, sinking into the muck with surprising rapidity. He realized he was sinking, too, and, in a sudden panic, he thrashed and wallowed his way back to the road. His last glimpse of the Jeep was of the air rushing from the open windows, with a gurgling sound and flurry of bubbles as the black waters closed over it.

He returned to the roadbed, shook off as much mud as he could, and stared at the complex. This was insane. It was going to be a bitch just getting in there. He’d better come up with a plan, because just barging in would be pointless and stupid — not to mention suicidal.

As he looked at the concrete tower, his thoughts turned unexpectedly to his grandfather Joe Coldmoon, who had fought in the Pacific with XXIV Corps, Seventy-Seventh Infantry Division, during World War II. “We’re a warrior people,” he’d once told Coldmoon, explaining that his grandfather Rain-in-the-Face had put the fatal arrow into George Armstrong Custer at the Battle of the Greasy Grass. It had seemed at the time like a crazy contradiction, his grandfather’s patriotism and love of country combined with pride in killing Custer, but there it was. Many houses on the rez had a wall of photographs devoted to family members serving in the military.

We’re a warrior people. During the invasion of Leyte, Joe and his company were hunkered down in trenches opposite the Japanese, not two hundred yards of no-man’s-land between the adversaries. On the darkest nights, with no moon, his grandfather would leave his gun behind, strip down to his skivvies, put a knife between his teeth, and crawl out across that no-man’s-land. When he returned an hour or so later, his buddies would ask him, “How many, Joe? How many?” He never spoke, just held up fingers — one, two, three. Once Coldmoon asked his grandfather how he did it. After the longest and most uncomfortable silence he’d ever endured, his grandfather finally said: “Your spirit goes outside your body, and you become a ghost that nobody can see.” He had refused to say anything more.

Those words came back to Coldmoon while he stared at the complex. He had never quite understood what they meant: to be outside your own body, become a ghost that nobody could see. If only he could manage that now.

He shook his head. That old superstitious nonsense wasn’t going to help him get inside.

Or would it?

He started walking down the road.