Necessary Evil

Chapter 10

When Kier hit the ground, he started crawling like a mouse under a rug. He had been visible for a split second against the light of the flames, but since there had been no bullets, he assumed he hadn't been seen. A small pump house stood forty feet from the blaze; he stopped there and hid the fifth volume.

He examined the tree line, looking for the safety men- those who would stay well back to assist the hunters nearest the cabin. He would disable the reinforcements first.

The snow still fell in great sheets, blown sideways by a piercing wind, the cold soothing his burns that, despite the pain, were minor. His primary concern now would be frostbite. Kier was immediately conscious of the bone-aching pain of bare hands on snow. Soon they would feel like dead flesh. Wearing only his long underwear, pants, a shirt, and a sweater, he could not stay out for long without more insulation. He lay on his belly, sinking down into a couple of feet of fluffy snow.

Slowly crawling past one tree trunk at a time, he scrutinized every outline in the night. Sometimes he tested with his rapidly freezing fingertips, feeling for leather or fabric. A cacophony of wind noises, the creak of the trees, the howl of the air around every edge, the rustle of every leaf, the swish of every branch, the crackling roar of the nearby fire: all made sound an untrustworthy ally.

After many minutes, he didn't know how many, he reached for yet another outline in the night. The touch was almost casual, as he expected another tree. He felt the roughness of bark. But right next to it, planted at the sapling's base, lay something smooth-too smooth. It was a boot. Kier's weary body came alive. He had found a soldier's foot. Moving again, he put the boot between himself and the fire. Yes-there was a silhouetted leg against the light from the burning cabin.

By the position of the heel, he verified that the man faced away from him. Kier rose slowly, absolute stealth imperative. He could not risk a miss or a struggle.

He waited, letting his breath run over his hands, warming them from the horrible, tingling pain. After many seconds, he heard a raspy breath like a quiet sigh. Slowly he put his hand out into the night wind-listening, feeling, waiting. Then he cupped his hand back toward himself. In an instant he felt a snow-capped dome-a helmet-icy-smooth plastic on the leeward side. It was the Up at the back of the man's neck. Fast as a cat's paw, Kier's hand drove under the man's helmet, chopping the bony knot at the base of his skull. At the same time, he grabbed the man's chin, yanking it upward.

In one motion, he applied a chokehold. The man's arms windmilled as he struggled vainly against the silencing of his mind. Finally, he sagged. A small body for a professional thug, Kier thought.

He expected to find a duplicate of Miller's equipment, and he was not disappointed. First he put on the man's down-filled mitts. Only the trigger finger had an independent sleeve, and they were very warm. In seconds he had the all-important pair of handcuffs. Although there was no stiletto, a sharpened knife hung on the man's belt. Trying not to think of what he was about to do, he pulled off the mitts just long enough to untie the heavy laces of the man's right boot. With some difficulty, he removed the boot, along with two pairs of socks. Holding the man's heel with his left hand, he took the large combat knife and held it against his Achilles tendon.

How deep should he go? Certainly he needn't go all the way to prevent the man from following and make him worthless as a soldier. He couldn't see; fishing through the man's pockets, he found his flashlight. It would be suicide to turn it on in the open, so he hunkered down. In the instant he could see, he sliced into the flesh, cutting well into the tendon, but not completely through. With utter disgust, he crammed the man's foot back into the boot, not bothering with the socks. If he didn't die of the cold, it would be weeks or months before the man walked unassisted.

Now Kier had a two-way radio, a penlight, an automatic weapon, four grenades, a 10-mm. pistol with a silencer, and several ammo clips. He stripped off the man's thin overcoat, which would provide Kier some slight additional protection. There was no time to remove the insulated body suit, and he didn't want the man to die.

The odds were starting to change. Running his mitted fingers over the automatic rifle, he knew it was not an M-16. These guys were not even pretending to be National Guard. Pulling back the bolt, he quietly ejected a shell, the sound a slight click, lost in the wind. Feeling the round, he knew immediately that they had the latest in technology. He couldn't remember what it was called, but this gun left no empty casings. Hundreds of shots could be fired without a trace. The powder was solid and affixed to the bullet. Next he found the bolt release and the safety. Without a sound, he continued his crawl along the tree line.

"Bulldog-silver. Boxer-gold." The unconscious man's radio crackled. "Pitbull-iron. Poodle-quartz. Shepherd- copper. Basset-" Silence. "Basset-" Kier said nothing. "Basset, say the code."

The burning roof now created a brighter light, and the snow did not fall as thickly. Kier moved into the forest, continuing in a circle around the cabin, which was rapidly becoming a pile of his smoldering treasures.

In case Jessie tried to emerge as the fire began dying, Kier had to get these men away from the cabin or disable them all quickly. Knowing every square inch of the terrain was about the only thing in his favor. It wasn't enough. The others would be much more cautious now, nervous that he was hunting them. They would not stand in the open, nor would they hide in obvious spots like the tree line. He needed a radically different strategy.

He had an idea.

"I want to live my last few days in peace," Kier spoke into the radio. "Since the 'chemical,' as you call it, will kill me anyway, why worry about it?"

He began to run even as he spoke, hoping they couldn't immediately locate him from the transmission. It was a risk.

"Stay here and you'll die one by one. Unlike you, I have nothing to lose. I'm dead any way you slice it. I know the ground. You don't."

"You'll be a sorry son of a bitch if you don't give up. You'll die slow," an angry voice replied.

"Stay with procedure." It was Tillman's calm, authoritative voice.

"Some of your men aren't taking to these mountains." Kier ran through the trees toward the cabin's front. "Tillman, can you hear it in his voice? Your man's moving off-center. Maybe we should all start lobbing grenades around in the dark." Kier chuckled into the radio.

"Whatever you might have we can fix." Tillman again. "If we agree to pull back, we want your promise that you'll stay and negotiate."

"I'm a doctor. I'm not going to leave and risk spreading something around."

"Make sure you don't then. We're withdrawing. We'll hold our fire. After we pull out, I'll call you. We'll meet."

It was what Kier had hoped for-a misguided attempt to trap him on his own turf. If he were lucky, at least some would make a show of leaving. Nearing the road, where he expected to find the snowmobiles, he moved slowly in a crouch, alert to every shadow, every vertical line or hump that might be a man. Then he stopped.

There would be someone with the snowmobiles, at least one guard. He crawled in a serpentine pattern, first approaching the driveway, then moving away. Time and cold were working against him, but he knew his edge lay in patience. Animals stayed hidden because they spent minutes and hours without moving, oblivious to the disquiet that the passage of time created in humans. Pausing frequently to put his head above the snow, squinting against the tiny wind-driven flakes, Kier found no one. Surprised, almost bewildered, he drew to within fifty feet of the road. Still he remained alone.

Something-he didn't know what-told him to backtrack. It made sense since he was leaving prints in the snow, but mentally, turning around was tough. After only a few feet, he saw two shadows and a small light. They were following his trail. He vigorously shook a tree, and night tracers lit the air over his head, the bullets chopping the tree in half. Some trace. In a blink, he touched off a dozen rounds of his own. The two men disappeared like chaff in the wind. He had aimed high, over their heads, but it would keep them down for the seconds he needed.

Now the race was on in earnest. Most of the men would be nearby, coming down the driveway to the waiting snowmobiles. They would be right where he wanted them. Turning, he ran carelessly, knowing there was no way to make it safe. His legs churned through the snow, and in seconds he could feel the stress. His muscles burned, and the air frosted his throat.

He made an angle for the road. By coming back from the north instead of east from the cabin, he hoped to have a split-second edge on the guard. The man would be watching in the direction of the cabin.

Kier hit the public road at a dead run. He didn't see the parked two-man vehicles until he was almost on them, didn't see the guard until the man turned to fire. Kier dived, bullets tearing past him. The muzzle blast flashing in the night made an easy target. Kier rolled and killed him.

He went to the first snowmobile, his fingers searching wildly. There was no key. And he knew without looking that the rest would be the same. Only seconds stood between him and several men with automatic weapons. No time to search the body. His last chance to carry out his plan would use up the precious remaining seconds. He would do with his feet what he had intended to do on a machine, and it would be the most important footrace of his life.

He fired a wide volley toward the cabin, hoping to slow his pursuers, and ran. Not with measured strides or with an eye toward pacing himself, but full out.

"Catch me if you can, assholes," he shouted into the radio.

It was some six hundred yards to where he was going- about three-eighths of a mile-but it was in deep snow and far enough that his pursuers could easily reach sixty miles per hour by snowmobile.

Staying to the edge of the road, sometimes to a trail just off it, made him a harder target. Still, why would a man run down a road? Hopefully, they wouldn't think about it much. He didn't. Instead he focused upon the pain dancing in his mind; fire, burning up and down his legs; lungs that were melting butterfly wings; and a body that couldn't get enough oxygen. He wanted air. He wanted away from the pain. But he could only run.

He had gone almost a quarter mile-he recognized a tall pine-when he saw the first lights behind him. For a moment, he almost slowed at the hopelessness of what he intended. They would catch him in one hundred yards unless he stopped to fight or slunk into the woods.

There were six lights, a pack. It was all or most of them, and they hung relatively close together.

He jumped off the road just before the first bullet came. When he fired back, one man went down. The lights scattered and the firefight began. Events were developing all wrong. And it would have stayed that way except for their one miscalculation.

The enemy was also patrolling the road. Around the corner, from the opposite direction, a snowmobile roared into Kier's sights. The gunrack across the front told him enough. He crouched. At the lights from the pursuing vehicles, the new man slowed, presenting an easy shot. Kier fired right into the man's steel breastplate, literally blowing him off the seat, and ran for the careening machine. He was on it before his startled pursuers fully grasped what had happened. Kier turned off the lights and exulted in the power of the machine. He revved the engine in neutral from behind a tree, sending an unmistakable message.

"Catch me if you can," he shouted again into the radio before taking off.

He sped away from them at forty miles an hour in low gear, wanting it to sound like sixty. Two bends and he saw the small side road that was critical to his plan. He went straight ahead instead of rounding the third bend, down into an old creek bed and skid trail used to slide logs to the river in the early 1900s.

At night, up was not so easily discerned from down as one might think. At night in a snowstorm, up from down was even harder to perceive. On a steep grade it was even more difficult to determine. Kier knew the chute grew steeper as it went. And it only went down.

He lay flat on the machine, barely able to glimpse the occasional light in the rearview mirror. He dodged and weaved around the curves, jinking up and down the banks of the gully like a luge in a track. He could barely hold his speed to forty in a dead coast. Now he was dropping like a plummeting bird. Wind whipped in his face. He clutched the snowmobile between his legs as if it were part of him. They were gaining on him. He screamed his mirth into the radio.

At the last possible second he rose on his machine, jumping clear to the side and up the bank. He felt like a pebble falling down the mountain. He tried to slide, but bounced terribly. The earth, his mountain, pummeled him. Snow-covered brush whipped him. Frantically, he grabbed and dug in, first with his feet, then with his hands and elbows. He cartwheeled in the blackness, slapped and thrown like a child in the clutches of a monster.

But it slowed him. He stopped on the lip of the chute, out of the slick, as the first machine passed by with its engine dead and the driver screaming at the horror of the abyss. A second man shot by with only the sounds of shifting gears. Kier lost count of the machines that reached the end of the chute and flew the fifty to one hundred feet to the river's bottom. There was a big, deep stretch at the head of a rapids into which the unsuspecting would fall. They might survive, but it would be a struggle to make it through the rapids, and it would be hours before any survivor could make it out of the canyon a couple of miles or more downstream.

Walking back to the cabin driveway was an ordeal. Frozen to the skin, numb from cold, his muscles no longer did his bidding, his fingers worked only minimally, and a shrapnel burn irritated his leg. He needed rest.

Fear formed in his gut. When Jessie freed the trapdoor, she'd be dead if any of the remaining killers saw her. That spurred him on. When he reached the driveway to his cabin, he pulled out the radio.

"This is your new leader. Wanna talk?"

Nothing. He could not believe that every last man had followed him. Slowly he advanced along the tree line, looking for any shadow in the falling snow. The cabin still burned.

He moved back into the trees, keeping the cabin barely in sight until he was behind it, near the now-burned back porch. As he emerged from the trees, Kier saw a form backlit by the firelight next to the pump house. He moved forward, stealthily at first, then stood, relieved. He knew it was Jessie from her size and form. Silently, she raised her pistol, pointing it at him. He stared intently and raised a hand to waive. Pfffft. The silenced shot missed his head by mere inches and made a hollow thunk behind him. Kier whirled to see a man fallen in the snow. Jessie had shot him in the face.

She came forward with her pistol still leveled in his direction. Her demeanor telegraphed her anger. As she closed the gap between them, she finally began lowering the pistol. He found himself sighing in relief.

Tillman sat quietly in the Donahue kitchen, his large hand wrapped around a sizable mug. He squeezed the ceramic vessel rhythmically as if his hand were a beating heart. His men were spread around the house, leaving him alone except for Doyle, who sat nearby, seemingly engrossed in an old magazine.

Tillman had twenty men left, a formidable group with him in the lead. What stopped him from undertaking a manhunt around the burned cabin was the fact that he didn't want to underestimate the Indian's resources again. Eight men were now dead or incapacitated. Sheer numbers would accomplish nothing for Tillman unless he could outthink Kier Wintripp. He now expected the Indian to flee to the mountains he knew so well. It was what Tillman would have done. Troops could block roads and search cabins easily. It was tougher to find a trained survivalist in the wilderness.

From his reading, Tillman knew that the Tilok was historically a highland, not coastal, tribe. Before Europeans arrived, they had been hunter-gatherers, living in the mountains and migrating to the high country in summer. Kier's ancestors were people hardened by migration and living off the land. Any man could learn what Kier knew, but if heredity counted, Kier had a better beginning than most.

Tillman had to remind himself that he had bigger responsibilities than killing this Indian for his own satisfaction. Admiration for the man's skill was all well and good. A sporting sense and its attendant need for victory were as normal as Monday Night Football. But this hunt was about none of those things. The Indian and the woman had to be neutralized.

Lesser men allowed petty concerns to overcome common sense or anger to compromise their morality. It would not be so with Jack Tillman. A living, breathing Doyle was proof of that. He glanced at Doyle, who still held his eyes on the magazine.

"Order the men on the road to move to the area around the Indian's cabin. They should be there in five minutes. Tell them I'd prefer the Indian and the woman alive, but I'd rather have them dead than escape. Leave the men around the plane in place. Leave two here. I'm taking five men with me to the cabin. You and Brennan follow me in ten minutes with the rest. Radio to Crebbs at Elk Horn to hurry up and get me the helicopter. I want to know the minute they have one lined up."

Doyle had that puzzled look.

"The weather won't stay like this forever," Tillman said. "The minute it changes, we can use the chopper. This Indian is going to be more difficult than you might imagine. I can feel it."

Doyle nodded as if the mystery had been solved. "I wonder how long he can survive," he said.

"You mean you wonder if he's a match for me."

"I wouldn't underestimate Brennan either," Doyle said.

"Of course, you wouldn't. He's your superior officer."

Tillman was amused at the subtle maneuvering. He knew he had thrown Doyle a bone by telling him the plan first and letting him tell Brennan. Soon he would do the reverse for Brennan. Competition was good. It kept men from becoming complacent.

"We're going to need some food. Tell the men to butcher that damn llama. And tell the men who stay here to search through those family albums over there. Have them figure out which one is Jessie. There must be pictures. I want to see what she looks like."

"I've already done that." Doyle walked to the counter and returned with a picture.

Tillman turned the photo in his fingers. She was a brunette. Proud and confident, she showed a slight cockiness in her understated smile. This was a woman who might stir him.

For as long as he could remember he had been attracted to such women. They were the opposite of his mother-a short, bespectacled, obsequious person who always acted afraid. She had been a shadow over his life. He hated her and frankly admitted it to himself. Early in life Tillman had understood that identifying such unconscious hostilities was an important part of growing up.

Probably his most vivid recollection of his mother was of her cowering in a corner as his father ranted and raved in a drunken fit. He was nine at the time. Shortly thereafter he'd been sent to a boarding school. He never saw his mother again. She disappeared one night and his father never mentioned her name or acknowledged her existence. After age eleven, Tillman missed a lot of school in favor of hunting trips. He spent a cumulative total of three years in Africa before his eighteenth birthday.

From the beginning Tillman had known he must be his own parent. At eighteen, he joined the military; at twenty, officer's candidate school, followed by army intelligence training and secret ops in Cambodia after Vietnam.

As comfortable as he had felt at war, army life did not ultimately suit Tillman. Its structure became for him a mental straitjacket. Business and science, he decided, were his calling, and he used the GI Bill to earn an MBA and a degree in pharmacology. Still, his military training and hunting experience proved useful more than once in his business life. Now it would help him catch the Indian.

And with luck, the woman.