Necessary Evil

Chapter 17

" It wasn't confirmed," the authoritative voice said.

Kier listened to Tillman tell his men about the way Oregon had phrased his last radio call. And of course, Oregon wasn't answering any longer.

"Target One wants us to think he's headed down the mountain without the Fed. Oregon's either dead or useless. He's probably dead. Do we have one man with the boy?''

''Negative that. Somebody came and got the boy; left California unconscious."

"Say again!"

Kier could hear the shock in Tillman's normally smooth voice.

"California is unconscious, the boy is gone. Only one set of tracks came into camp. We can't figure out how they jumped him. Whoever it was just walked right up to California."

"You are saying some unknown person walked into camp and left with this boy?"

"That's affirmative, sir."

''Tell California to stay at the cave. They may come back," Tillman said quietly. He had obviously reacquired his grip.

"This is California," a voice cut in. "I can't walk. They cut me."

"All the more reason to stay put," Tillman replied.

"Nevada and Arizona are on a track. By the look of it, it's Missy the Fed," another voice cut in.

Kier's jaw clenched and his fingers went tight around the automatic.

"Switch and answer after colors. Switch and answer after colors."

Colors? Kier shook his head. Another radio scrambling code.

"Red. Magenta. Green. Yellow."

There was a pause. "Black. Red. Blue. Orange."

No more talking. They had changed frequencies and he couldn't follow. Switching quickly back to the channel on which he had last spoken to Tillman, he waited to see if he might try to contact him. In seconds, he did.

"Medicine man, are you there?"

He debated answering, but reminded himself again that the signal could be triangulated, and that any broadcast would enable them to locate his whereabouts.

"You should be sensible and talk to us. You were exposed to almost every deadly virus and bacteria known to man. I know you must have figured that out. You and the woman need treatment." It puzzled Kier that Tillman admitted to having the disease organisms. But then Tillman's men were logged onto a different frequency. Perhaps he was trying to get Kier's trust by appearing candid.

Kier had moved away from the stripped body of Texas to listen to the radio and wait for the mercenaries that he knew would arrive. Crouching now in a dense grove of young red fir fifty feet from their grenade-riddled comrade, Kier could hear men coming.

Above him was a tan oak that was outgrowing the fir. Eventually, Kier knew, that in the fight for sunlight the fir would overwhelm the broadleaf. But able to survive in shade, the tan oak would still stand after it lost the race. Kier hoped for a fate at least as good as that of the tan oak.

Near the tan oak, a wild onion had found a little bare soil, and there was just enough of a root to make a walnut-sized tuber. The first bite took half. It had the crunch of a fresh apple but no sweetness and the dry, stinging tang of the most potent domestic varieties.

Then he heard the bang, bang, bang — like a fast vibration- of automatic-weapons' fire from farther down the ridge. They had found Jessie. Forcing himself to wait, he knew the soul-wrenching pain of being helpless.

As luck would have it, the two men were beyond the trail on the side opposite the grove where Kier hid, making it impossible for him to see them. All he could do was follow and wait for his chance. It was getting late. More than two hours had passed since he left Jessie. He would need to find her soon.

Moving quietly through the trees was almost impossible, even for Kier. Branches heavy with snow dumped their loads when he brushed by, making sound. Worse yet, he was leaving a trail that a half-blind man could follow. He had to stay away from them, and behind them, so they wouldn't accidentally cross his track. It was spooky, and very dangerous. If one of them got behind him, it would be a simple matter for them to follow, guess at his direction of travel, and use radios to trap him. If they got him before he got them, Jessie would be next.

The man code-named California sat with his head hanging almost to his chest. A sizable gash gaped open across the back of his scalp. His brown hair was matted with blood, and his hands shook as they continually touched the wound as if exploring the damage would make it better. Blood oozing from a severed Achilles tendon spread in a huge crimson stain through the fabric of his camouflage suit. Tillman strode back and forth in the snow, filled with rage at the neutered soldier in front of him.

"You gotta get me back down the hill," California said.

"You're a damn coward. What happened?"

"I never saw him. I'm telling you he came out of nowhere. I was doin' the kid like Brennan told me, but I was bein' careful and lookin' around. Then Oregon called. He sounded scared. Said I had to stop or he was gonna die, then wham! — something hit me. Then he cut me. I can't walk. I'm gonna die up here."

The soldier's voice was cracking. No dignity remained in the man. The intensity of Tillman's feeling stemmed as much from this man's cowardice as the collective failure to capture Kier. He continued pacing, conjuring his next move. Occasionally, he directed an icy gaze at the man in front of him.

"I was looking around. I swear."

Tillman cursed himself for getting so far from the cave. He had been making a circle, figuring he would cross Kier's track as Kier came to save the boy. Then Oregon had called on the radio, panicked. Within seconds, California's attacker had come like a quiet breeze in the night. From the mark in the snow it was obvious that only one man had crawled here on his belly after dropping from the rocks above. If it was Kier who had held Oregon hostage, then he could not have gotten the boy. And if Kier rescued the boy, he couldn't have captured Oregon. The FBI bitch was way down the ridge dispatching two of his other men, so she couldn't have done it.

Someone besides the Indian and the woman was out playing in the snow. And that someone was intimately familiar with the wilderness.

"Please, you gotta get me off this mountain," California said. Tillman noticed the man had unconsciously moved to his knees. Then he was literally clinging to Tillman's boots.

Revulsion filled Tillman. Ridding himself of this soldier would be like weeding a garden. Like General Patton, he had no appetite for coddling cowards. The Romans killed them outright. Alexander the Great made men brave or made them dead. He reached down and took the man by the hair. A calm came over him as he reminded himself that this man was the only one who could place him on this mountain. The others believed he was in Johnson City speaking through a relay transmitter at Elkhorn Pass.

There was no equivocation on Tillman's part as he sank his knife an inch into the man's neck, making sure to take out the vocal cords.

Kier and the woman were near, and he would hunt them down.

A battleship-gray rock scarp the size of several high rises protruded from the mountain at the place Kier thought to undertake his ambush. Where the granite was vertical and smooth, little grew except lichen. Here and there, where the stony surface was flat enough to hold a sprinkling of soil, there were dabs of deer fern, five-finger fern, bleeding hearts, and huckleberry. Now the plants were mere lumps in the snow. The top of this massive rock formation was overgrown with evergreens.

Kier positioned himself on a high ledge under a dwarfed wind-sculpted pine. From his vantage point, he looked out across a shallow canyon with steep sides going to ridges five hundred feet above him on the opposite side. Most of the canyon was covered in forest. Fifty feet below him, there was the shadow of the trail on which the men would come. They would move slowly and watchfully. They would be spooked by the booby traps and fearful of ambush. Down the trail a short way was the small cave in which he and Jessie had taken their shelter.

The two men who now approached would be easy to hunt. They were both of average build, less than 190 pounds, and not accustomed to the wild. They missed obvious detours around thickets, tending to go straight down, their eyes mostly focusing forward. They easily became boxed in by terrain and windfalls that forced them to backtrack. Leaving a wide trail, they made a lot of noise and had a poor sense of balance. If they stood still, it would never be in mid-stride, but always with both feet planted firmly on the ground-putting them at a considerable disadvantage.

When at last they appeared, he realized he could kill them several times over. They walked single file, with at least twenty feet between them. After every step or two, they would look, but they saw little. When he was about to shoot the trailing man in the leg, something told him to wait. Perhaps it was because of the way they moved, or maybe the lengthy unexplained delay in their arrival, or just a hunch that it was too easy. The man who directed these men understood how to hunt an enemy. Why were these two neophytes sent by themselves to follow a trail, even to walk into an ambush? Why weren't they circling away and coming back?

The man nearest drew closer. After a few minutes of this stop-and-go travel, he would pass beneath Kier and out of sight. The hair stood on Kier's neck. He kept the open sights of the M-16 near his target, but lifted his cheek from the stock of the gun and watched. On they came. There appeared to be no one else.

Kier's eyes roved the hillsides and the canyon, famished for a clue. After a time, he turned his head to look above and behind him. Nothing. There was only the inner voice, the sense that not all was as it should be.

Where do you want to look?

Grandfather's voice came to his mind just as it had that day in the dead frozen winter when hunger was overtaking him. He opened his eyes, looking again to the opposite hillside four hundred yards distant. A movement, then nothing. Waiting, he watched, uncertain as to where exactly he had detected the motion. The first man walked below him, then the second. Almost ten minutes had passed since he first saw them. Any minute now, they would be gone from his sight.

There was another glint of something on the hillside and his eye found what it sought-a white-suited man moving against the snow. This man was very good, doing exactly what Kier would have done. By stalking his own comrades, he would find the other stalker. This one moved with his head up, stopping irregularly, always looking.

Kier aimed for the torso, waiting for one more movement to define his adversary against the far slope. But it never came. The man must have dropped to his belly. Why? Kier slipped back a foot, lying flat on the rock in a depression that hid him from view.

Grasping a branch that hooked over the lip of the snow-covered granite, he moved it slightly. Smack! Smack! Smack! Three bullets spattered against the stone, followed by loud, echoing reports. The man across the canyon had found him, perhaps using field glasses. Obviously the man was in a hurry and unwilling to take his time shooting. That was good. That told Kier that Jessie had killed somebody. Perhaps they believed they were running out of men, out of time. Darkness would soon come and there could be few, if any, new recruits.

Kier sidled back to a cleft in the rock completely hidden from view, then looked slowly around the canyon. Across the white silence, he found no movement; on the far hillside, there was no sign of anyone's passing. In the spot where the man had been, he could see nothing. Undoubtedly the shooter would have moved on his belly out of sight. Again the snow was starting.

A deep, tunnellike groove in the cliff enabled Kier to descend to the canyon floor without exposing himself. By the time he reached the trail to the hut, snow was falling in sheets and the far canyon wall became just a memory. Using his radio, the shooter would have alerted everyone on the mountain to the white-clad figure that was Kier-including the two men ahead of him. They would be halfway to the hut, wondering about the trail left by Oregon that headed mysteriously down the mountain.

Kier crept quickly through the forest parallel to the trail, staying in the young stand of mixed conifers, hunting the same two men. On his flank, he knew, would be the other stalker, a man who knew the woods and how to conceal himself. But it would take that man time to arrive-and during those minutes, Kier intended to disable the bait.