Necessary Evil

Chapter 5

" Stubborn damned Indian."

Jessie watched him run, marveling at the way he let the brush slip past him with long sure strides, even in the snow. Except for the obvious trail in the drifted mounds, he was as elusive as a wild creature in the forest gloom. He disappeared from her sight after running just forty or fifty feet.

She shuddered with cold, then fear. Putting together all that she had heard, and the little that she had seen, the man was the oddest mixture of scientist, mystic, and naturalist that she had ever met. Unfortunate that he lacked so in people skills.

Claudie said that when Kier was young he turned wild for a short time, running with a group of Indian radicals who undertook the survivalist way of life. They were socially aloof, a law unto themselves, fascinated with guns and knives and living off the land. They even plotted to take over the county seat, but it never got that far, despite the fact that Kier and his friends had obtained a frightening array of military hardware. Kier's rebellious phase had something to do with his father's death years earlier, but Claudie never understood the details. Fortunately, before Kier and his band did any irreversible damage, Kier's grandfather convinced him to break away from the group. If Claudie was to be believed, the only vestige of that experience that lasted was Kier's practice of the martial arts.

Beneath the forest canopy it was almost dark, the waning light turning everything a somber gray, which would linger in deathly, freezing, colorless, joyless tones. A purgatory if ever there was one, she thought, until the sun went down and it turned to hell.

Letting memory comfort her, she could almost feel her gray cashmere sweater, see the pearls that lay across it, smell the coffee, feel a yellow pad under her hand, and hear the soft hum of her computer, as soothing as a mother's heartbeat. She lived in seventy degrees, with carpets and Coke machines, bottled water, potpourri air freshener, ionizing filters, the gentle humor of intelligent colleagues, great challenges, but no danger. This freezing forest was not her world.

There were of course things that seemed worse than physical danger. Take Frank, her boss. A man you thought you could respect, a strong guy, a guy who by some miracle seemingly hadn't let the system, or criminals, steal his sensitivity. A man who was clever by anybody's definition, and wise about pain and cynicism and people, beauracratic or otherwise. Someone you could trust-someone she had trusted. Someone so smooth that he could explain how it was that he could have adulterous sex with another Bureau employee and still be the pillar of the office. Someone who could promise Gail marriage with his blue eyes brimming with sincerity-just before leaving on a trip for Hawaii with his wife.

The beauty of this hellish forest was that she didn't need to think about Frank and his threats to end her career-there was enough happening here without digging up that skeleton and worrying it some more. In fact, she'd stay alive longer if she dropped it, before she got to the really horrible part. Before she started in on all the whys. Why did her best friend behave so stupidly? How could Frank be so evil? Why did I have to discover it? And she slogged on.

Glancing back at Miller, she wondered what his name really was, where he came from, and what his mother was thinking at this moment. Did he believe he would die? For the second time in her life she thought she might.

One thing she knew for sure. She had to get to a phone and contact law enforcement right away, before anything worse happened to her sister, the boys, or even Kier, a man who might start a small war. In addition, there was the threat of an epidemic of some sort from that disease menagerie in the plane.

Only two hundred feet from where he left Jessie the ground became firmer. Sword fern gave way to bracken fern, like miniature tree stems with fronds atop, growing in every little opening, interrupted by dense clumps of Scotch broom and manzanita. Kier ran in a great arc, staying low, parting foliage by angling himself, letting his shoulders shrug off the clingy tendrils. Ahead a natural opening, dominated by grasses, left a blanket of snow that showed their old tracks like soil on white satin.

Kier knew that he needed to get close-very close-before Jones saw him. With luck, the man would believe he was Miller. Jones stood only a few feet from the tracks left by Kier and Jessie. Running through a last cluster of madrone, Kier kept low, hoping Jones wouldn't look his way. Sixty feet to go. The man seemed occupied with the traces of Kier's earlier passage. He turned as if to follow the imprints in the snow.

Uh-oh. Jones was using his radio again. Already it might be too late.

Kier bounded the last three steps straight at Jones. The man turned, pointing his gun. Kier willed himself to keep the automatic across his chest, his eyes riveted to the black, round bore of Jones's M-16. Jones stared, cocking his head.

He's trying to decide. He's spooked.

Kier swung the butt of his rifle at Jones's jaw. Jones fired. The rifle butt connected with a firm thud as, missing Kier by inches, the shot echoed through the forest, shockingly loud. Kier cringed, knowing the sound would make things infinitely more complicated. Even so, he was sure Jones had not got a good look at his face, obscured as it was by the fur-lined hood under the helmet.

"Jones, say status. Jones, say your status."

The man's radio lay in the snow. Jones had alerted the others, and now Jones wasn't answering.

"Switch Delta, Switch and answer Delta," came the radio command.

They would be scrambling frequencies, Kier knew. And the way it worked, Delta code would not be available on either Jones's or Miller's radio card. Checking Miller's card, Kier saw a series of names down the left side, in alphabetical order. Numbers followed most of the names. Delta was blank. No doubt the printed list was also in electronic form on the phone. Both these radios would now be useless unless they wanted to talk to him.

Kier dropped to the snow, scanning the trees, using Jones's unconscious body as a half-shield. In seconds, another man approached, moving low and fast, obviously casting about for his comrade. Kier slumped forward, lying atop Jones. Like a pointer, this new attacker froze, staring through the snow-laden air. His gun came up. Surely he wouldn't shoot downed men in the snow-especially when they gave every appearance of being his own kind. Kier slipped his hand over the butt of his pistol. From the corner of his eye he watched the man cautiously approach.

"Help, I'm hit," he groaned as the man got very close.

Nudging Kier with his gun barrel, the man bent over, apparently trying to see his face. Kier kept it buried in the other man's parka and moaned. He waited until he felt the man lifting his shoulder. Kier rolled and at the same time delivered a hard kick squarely to the man's chin. He was on his stunned enemy in an instant, choking him to unconsciousness, keeping him silent until his body slumped.

Visibility was improving slightly, but steady polka-dot sheets of frozen moisture still blurred the landscape. Kier did not want to kill. If only these people had not brought their destruction to this place.

Once again his mind went over the facts like a watchmaker sorting the parts of an old-fashioned timepiece. Even if he didn't understand the nature of the power that the scientists had given Tillman or the extent of Tillman's plans, he knew that these men were capable of wanton killing. Common sense told him that escape would require a profound subterfuge. He needed to make them think they had solved the puzzle of their disappearing comrade.

He took Jones's automatic, fished out the rest of his ammo clips, grabbed his radio, his light, and took his money. Then he turned to the second man, leaving his weapons, but taking his money, his knife, his light, more ammunition, and his grenades. Pulling off Miller's field pack, he quickly loaded the booty.

Cringing even as he did it, he turned the second man over onto his belly and aimed the M-16 at the fleshy part of the man's buttock, taking care that the shot missed bone. The single shot blew out a chunk of fatty flesh a little smaller than a walnut. It bled profusely, allowing Kier to smear blood over the back of the man's outer coat. He fired off some more rounds.

"Miller has turned, Miller has turned," Kier said into the radio in the whispered growl of a dying man.

"Code nine, say status, Jenkins. Code nine, say status, Jenkins."

In response Kier fired his automatic and made an ugly gurgling sound into the mouthpiece.

"Code Zulu, switch and answer Zulu."

Again they were scrambling.

He was reaching to pick up Jones's body when a flurry of snow from overburdened branches cascaded to his right, and out from a wall of frosted evergreen boughs stepped another of his tormentors. The man was a good distance away and looking in the wrong direction. Striding directly back up Jenkins's trail for at least twenty paces, Kier heard no shots until he was almost out of sight. He dived for an elderberry thicket, shooting a volley as he flew. Though wild, the bullets made his quarry duck. Kier crawled desperately for cover. Already rounds slammed into the brush around him, missing him by what he knew must be inches. Finding a log, he climbed over it and hunkered down. A tremendous explosion directly behind him numbed his ears and tossed the bushes around him like salad. Somebody was using hand grenades or a mortar. There was no sound but the pounding of his heart; his ragged, too-fast breath came not from fatigue. Panic pooled in him like a reservoir trickling through the cracks of a dam. He needed to calm his mind. Now he would need another unconscious captive to carry out his plan.

"I've got him at sector seven. He's near the northeast corner, south and east of the corner maybe twenty or thirty feet. Repeat. Sector seven. Northeast corner, south and east of the corner approximately twenty to thirty feet."

The man was actually shouting. Kier felt a different kind of chill as he heard the enemy radioing his position. In minutes, there would be armed men everywhere. He dropped and crawled into a dense windfall of criss-crossed fallen trees shot through with Pacific bayberry and overgrown with salal. In this thicket he was all but invisible. But he had not been there ten seconds before he discovered that he shared the spot with one of the enemy.

It was the heavy sound of Kier checking his clip that gave him away. Only a few feet of heavy brush lay between him and the man who now, in panicked tones, reiterated Kier's position. Kier had no illusions. He was in a deadly spot.

Panic in the man's voice meant he was rattled and might do anything, even something that could kill them both, like tossing a grenade in tight.

Lying flat, Kier squirmed forward a foot, sticking his head in the brush, peering through the crystalline corridors formed by snow on branches. Nothing. He couldn't see more than three feet. Again he elbowed forward. An almost imperceptible rabbit trail appeared in front of him. Without thinking, he had been crawling down it. Off to his right the shooter lay waiting. If Kier continued on his current path, he would crawl into the enemy's sights.

He pushed slowly to the right and detected nothing. It was not until the second move that he spied a small patch of white fabric, distinct from the snow because of its flat texture. Squinting, he turned his head right and left, trying to see more, to at least identify the torso.

The man a few feet away would be wearing Kevlar body armor that could easily be pierced by the combat rounds in the M-16. But the silenced pistol he had shagged from Jones would be much quieter. If he could bring himself to shoot this man, he would take a chance on the pistol to gain a soundless assault. Aiming the long, lanky handgun, he rose even higher, carefully discerning the white fabric from fallen snow.

Slowly he moved off his elbows to a crouch. Now he could feel his own fear like a hand on his throat. At any moment he could be seen. His eyes roved. Nothing. With his head buried in the brush, he rose still higher. Oh yes! There was his shooter, just six feet away, his legs under a massive Douglas fir log, his body flat to the ground. Incredibly, the man had removed his helmet, probably to listen. Kier aimed at the man's hooded head.

It was a useless gesture. He would not kill a man who lay unaware and frightened in the bushes. Without another second's hesitation, Kier uncoiled his body from its crouch and dived at the man, aiming the butt of the pistol at the man's temple. If it hadn't been for the tough fibrous vines, the strike might have landed before the man could roll.

As it was, he struck the man's shoulder. Recovering, Kier drove the palm of his left hand into the man's chin, then swung the butt of the pistol into the man's temple with such force he hoped he hadn't killed him. Kier watched the body quiver, waiting for more fight. Then there was no movement. Flopping him onto his back, Kier felt for a pulse and found it. The man was young, maybe early thirties, handsome, with a moon-shaped baby face.

Bullets raked the brush in time with the staccato chug of an M-16. Kier flattened himself.

"Cease fire, goddammit. Crawford, you in there?"

It was quiet. Kier felt blood under his fingers. His eye followed it to the man's chest and a lethal wound. They had hit their own man through an arm hole. At least he had the body he needed, albeit a dead one.

Crawford's radio crackled again. "Crawford, say your status."

He knew what he would do. If it worked, he might live.

He had minutes if he was lucky, but perhaps he had only seconds. They would be coordinating by radio, getting in position for a massive assault. Each one of them knew where he was. Their satellite navigators would lead them straight to his coordinates. There was only one thing they didn't know. They didn't know who he was.

Kier worked quickly, aware that any slip would cost him his life and probably Jessie's. Another Douglas fir log some distance away had the makings of what he would need. It had not been long since the tree had fallen.

Kier put Miller's radio card, stiletto, and money clip in the dead man's coat. Jones's knife and a couple of clips of his ammunition he put in Crawford's pack, along with Jenkins's compass, more ammunition, and money from both Jones and Jenkins. Last he took the index page from Volume One of the lab reports and hurriedly went about untying and retying Crawford's boot so that he could cram the document inside. Every one of these guys seemed to have a black field watch- nothing distinctive there. Even so, he put Miller's watch in a shirt pocket.

Now he would learn whether the fallen Douglas fir had what he needed. Picking up the body, he walked quickly. Between Kier and his goal at the butt end of the tree trunk lay sixty feet of pristine snow. It was completely open for about half the distance. The other thirty feet were heavy brush.

Kier hoisted Crawford onto his back. Leaving a single set of prints, he paused every couple steps to let blood from Crawford's oozing chest drip onto the virgin snow. He dragged one leg as if wounded.

The base of the trunk, which lay in a shallow swale, was propped off the ground by a fibrous wad of roots and earth. The giant root ball had been torn from the ground when the tree toppled in a high wind. As Kier expected, beneath the root mass lay a deep hollow obscured by drifted snow.

After sitting Crawford in the snow, he quickly burrowed into the crater where the roots had grown. If he hunkered down he could get his entire body a foot beneath the level of the ground.

He propped Crawford's body up against a root in front of the hollow and placed his M-16 across his chest. Using Miller's stiletto, he stabbed Crawford's thigh, making an ugly knife wound. Urgently now, he gathered snow and packed a wall between himself and Crawford, verifying that he could seal himself off and retreat under the log. He would not be visible behind Crawford unless somebody dug.

He dug back through his hole, emerging beside Crawford. In order to see the surrounding landscape, he crawled to the lip of the swale. Tense as a hunting cat, he lay on his belly and waited. They would send a team to surround the windfall area, which was maybe two hundred feet across. They would swarm it.

Kier didn't have to wait long. First, he saw a man in front, then one to the right, then one to the left. The three were crawling. He watched, checking the progress of each.

There would be more men on all sides hidden by the brush. His attackers would be confident. They would know that if he was still here, they had him. With any luck, they were certain that they were following a single wounded man and their eyes, as they studied the track, would be clouded to other possibilities. Kier waited until all three of the men in front were visible at once. Pressing his cheek into the hi-tech plastic stock of the rifle, he willed his finger to set off the first round. Controlled, precise shots exploded the tree trunk above the first man's shoulder.

From every side fire poured in, driving him back under the log. Shoving and packing snow madly, he sealed himself off behind Crawford's body. His movements dislodged a powdery dust. Since everything was frozen solid, there was no apparent moisture. Roots hung down around him, and the earth smell was strong. Plugging his ears helped. He could imagine what it must look like. Wood flew as every green thing was chopped to pieces. Grenade bursts that he could feel in his bones-one after another-shook the ground. Four, five, six. His closed eyes began to flash red behind his lids. The log shuddered overhead.

Soon they started with what he supposed was a rocket launcher. Explosions that seemed to bounce the log from the ground compressed the air. The breath of almighty God came roaring through the woods, withering everything in sight. Then, at last, it was quiet. There was no doubt that these men were capable of insane violence. They cared for nothing except to destroy those who opposed them. Quickly, he reinforced the crumbling snow that formed the barrier behind Crawford. A radio crackled when somebody turned the squelch too high, but the tiny speaker was still too far away for Kier to hear the words.

After a time he heard men stomping the brush.

"One body blown to hell. From the dogs, it's Crawford." After a moment came a different voice: "He's got Miller's stiletto and a second radio card. I.D. number twenty-six."

"That's Miller's," the voice came back over the radio.

"He's got an extra watch, and ammo clips."

"You don't suppose…" the radio voice began.

"He killed Miller?"

"He's got Jenkins's stuff," the third voice chimed in again.

"And Jones's," a fourth voice called out. "I know this knife belonged to Jones."

"He left a blood trail. Somebody stabbed him in the leg. Maybe Jones. There was only one set of tracks in here. Back there.. there was a lot, but you can't tell if this son of a bitch was the guy at the plane."

"It's too far for one guy…"

"But we don't know exactly where Miller was, and we don't know if Crawford is in this by himself." There was a long pause.

"He's got a paper in his boot. Some index."

"Read it to me." A much more authoritative voice cut in over the radio. A familiar voice. There was a pause.

" 'Atomic Force Microscopy,' then 'Nucleic Acid Sequencing Strategies,' then a whole bunch of subheadings, then 'Gene Reassortment,' and more subheadings. Then in Volume Two, 'AVCD4 Anti-virus trials,' and after that, in Volume Three… 'Cloning-' "

"That's enough," the voice said. "I'm coming out there."

The original voice returned. ''If Crawford was the guy at the plane, he just backtracked, is all… He just ran like hell, grabbed what he wanted, and left. The rest of us were walking slow." Another long pause. "Hell, there's tracks all through here."

There was more talk that Kier couldn't quite make out; then somebody raised his voice again.

"You got a better idea? God didn't drop Crawford here. Somebody shot our guys. He's got the paper in his boot proving he stole the stuff… Somebody wounded him and slowed him down… What's more…"

"Maybe we've all been shooting at each other. Hell, I don't know."

Another voice, close in: "If there was anybody else in here, they gotta be dead."

Still Kier waited. At any moment, his hunters might unplug the hole and see him. Every second hammered in his brain like a sledge on concrete. His nails were buried in the palms of his hands, but he had no sense of his own end until he pulled the pins on the two grenades. He did it with his teeth, but kept the handles depressed. They would all be on their feet, standing around Crawford. Doing what he supposed one should never do, Kier waited with live grenades, ready to throw if they pulled the snow from his hole.

Kier listened for more talk, but heard nothing. Perhaps the men were pulling back. He curled into a tight ball; he hadn't noticed the discomfort of his confinement until now. Water dripped from overhead-the ice melted by his body heat. Inactivity brought on chill. The heavy muscle in his thighs cramped. Tightness of body, the feeling of being closed in, began to occupy a place in his mind. The sense of being caged mixed with his adrenaline to form the beginnings of panic. He knew what to do. His mind went to a different time, to a different place, to the solace of Grandfather's lake. He replaced the pins in the grenades with his teeth and relaxed.

It is evening. No-see-ums swirl around his head, put off only by Grandfather's liberally applied bay leaf oil on his bare skin. Around the lake stand dense evergreens as old as anyone Grandfather can remember and far older still. They are fir, hemlock, cedar, and pine, forming a velvety fragrant thickness over the earth. Protruding into the water, like creamy brown natural leather, a sand spit simmers in the late-summer sun.

Near the spit there is a small clearing carpeted with spring-fed grasses and edged with the softer verdant hues of huckleberry and myrtle. In the midst of this meadow the cabin enjoys the shade of hand-planted mountain bilberry, the leaves tinged with the first autumn color. There is no breath of wind. The water, soft as satin, glistens under the bursting yellow-reds of sunset.

Grandfather stands beside him and puts a strong hand on his shoulder. Kier wants to understand the power in this touch, a better touch than he has ever felt, a healing salve to his loneliness. His father is dead. For many days there was little feeling. Life on ice. Now a sense of loss has eaten a giant hole out of his middle. All that stands between him and the incomprehensible abyss is Grandfather's hand.

A fish hawk rises on the wind. Kier watches his namesake, and something about the bird stirs him. There isn't a way to say what he is experiencing except that it is a longing. So he lets the sense of this go through him without trying to understand it. There is a gentle squeeze on his shoulder and once again he is aware of the hand. It is as if it is guiding him to the bird.

"A man might know the currents on which he glides and then he would be free," Grandfather says.

As Kier waits and remembers, he wonders about the currents. In his mind is a puzzle, the pieces of which are strewn about- very few of them put together. There is his mother and her iron will. That is part of the puzzle. His dead father. That is a bigger piece.

Immediately after his father's funeral, his mother had moved them another ten miles from the Tilok reservation. Before this precipitous relocation, they had been a good two miles outside the reservation and on the outskirts of Johnson City. Their new house was in the forest to the far side of town and surrounded by white people. His mother said only that the world was mostly white and not red and mat he better "get used to it." She worked for a local groceryman and was said to be very good at keeping his books.

Kier went to a public school and worked by the lamplight every night under his mother's tutelage. Grandfather moved off the reservation in order to be with them, and with him, Kier escaped to the forest to learn Indian ways. Tracking became a passion. His mother tolerated that part of his life, maybe even in her own way encouraged it, but it was always subserviant to his studies, always trivialized.

Nathaniel Wintripp, Kier's father, was a half-blooded Tilok Indian whose own father had been of Spanish descent. By trade Nate was a stonemason. He had been the most prolific and artistic craftsman in the rural areas nearest mountainous Wintoon County. But Nate Wintripp had a certain reserved aloofness about him. He'd grown up with his grandparents and struck out to live on his own at age seventeen. Although he ably supported himself through two years of Chico State University, he quit after the second year to work full-time in his growing business.

Kier had struggled to know his father. He wanted to get beyond the pats on the head to something undefinable, to something he didn't understand. On October 12, 1969, his father flew into a rage, banged Kier's wrists on a washbasin, stalked out the door, and never came back. A month later, Nate Wintripp was dead, never having let his son, Kier, find the bond that he so fervently pursued.

After his father walked out, a quiet desperation seemed to grip Kier's mother. It ran so deep that for years he couldn't bear the thought of stepping from the groove that she was charting for him. Although she was pure Tilok, he could not determine what she wanted to be-except for one incontrovertible opinion that she held with utter conviction. Even though he must be a success in the white man's world, even though he must have the best university education, even though he must bear no trace of his lineage in his speech, he would marry an Indian woman or certain calamity would befall him. After all, Nate, her own husband, being half white, could never really accept an Indian. How would a white woman ever accept Kier?

In the secret places of his soul, Kier wondered if his father could ever have accepted him. Or if his father accepted no one. Or if Kier wanted something from his father that was not to be found on this earth. It seemed to Kier that just before his father's death, they had been somehow reaching for each other. There was, he had imagined, a peaceful joy that lay just beyond his reaching fingers, that was forever snatched away at the very moment of his most profound awareness. He could not reconcile the shame he felt when he thought of his father.

He did not try to create this missing bond of communion with his mother. Theirs was a union fashioned from the mutuality of their struggle to survive on little income in a mountain town and from their shared tragedy.

Kier did not sort out the cauldron of emotions that he buried in a place in his mind and covered over with layers of keen intellectual musings. When he met his first wife-a white woman-the uneasy feeling was passed off by the simple observation that he had never made a genuine friend nor found a genuine love. He knew only male comrades in adventure and female partners in sex. This he supposed was a good and sufficient reason for the temporary loss in equilibrium. When he reached to grasp and share his new bride's love, he floundered as if drowning, with no concept at all of swimming. It frightened him.

Now he relived the feeling. His breaths grew deeper and there was tightness inside him. He felt the shame. His mother's raw determination still felt like a dead weight crushing his soul. This stew of old emotions had brought him to a place where he could not taste certain of life's flavors. He could not, it seemed, taste the flavor of love or savor it with another. What he didn't know was why.

Jessie had heard nothing during the several minutes since Kier had left. Then she heard a single shot. As Kier had suggested, she put Miller in the lead, with his hands cuffed behind, and backtracked on Miller's trail. Shortly they heard more shooting.

"Tonto's a bullet-ridden carcass," Miller said.

"Shut up," she said, wondering if he was right and feeling a lot more than she expected. They traveled easterly, then angled to the north, heading away from Claudie's and the Volvo, until they came to the creek. Finally, leaving Miller's track, they turned south down the creek. Jessie understood Kier's logic. New tracks that took a different direction heading off toward the Donahues' would need explaining.

Walking in the water, she discovered a torture more exquisite than any she had known-save one. The pain was bluer than the dead blue of a particular glacial lake that would forever stand in her memory. The sensation spreading in her feet was like the lifeless cold of that pristine water: A horrible, bone-deep ache that would, she knew, eventually cut her feet from her body. She had thought they would simply go numb; well, they did, but only after pain like a twisted gut. Kier's strategies and this wilderness seemed to demand suffering.

At first, as she and Miller walked, Jessie thought of survival, of spotting the next paramilitary trooper before he spotted her.

After a time, though, as the sounds of the battle receded and the frothy air and dense forest closed in around them, her mind departed the macabre of Wintoon Mountain for the ordinary macabre of her office, of her nightmare with Frank. Tears came to her eyes and she cursed herself. How, when she was barely alive, when she had come here to this godforsaken brush patch at the other end of the United States to escape-with this place turning into a war zone, people maybe dying-could she think about Frank and his sick friends?

She wasn't going to do it. The one thing that had to remain hers was her mind.

As she began to wonder whether Kier were dead or alive, something crashed in the distance, the woods resounding with numerous explosions and the staccato of automatic weapons. More firepower than she would have thought possible was unleashed in the next minute. She felt unusually alone.

Using a small stick between fingers that still clenched a grenade, Kier cleared a hole at the far edge of the log. It seemed from the conversation that at least two men had remained with Crawford. They had walked a little way up the hill now, by the sound of their receding voices. Kier listened as best he could. After a time, he heard nothing. Still, they could be watching. It would be more dangerous to come out slowly.

With a quick thrust of his elbows, Kier cleared away the snow, rising in silence, and bursting from the hollow. Go ahead, think about the guys who just tried to kill you. His mind prepared itself for slaughter. Hands ready to rise from his sides, biceps straining, and pectorals tight with anticipation, his breath rushing from his throat-at the last instant he held the grenade handles tight. He didn't throw. There was no one within sight, though Kier could now hear someone talking nearby.

They had taken the bait. The leader hadn't arrived. The men were assuming Crawford was a safely dead enemy and Miller was one of his victims.

Kier slithered away on his belly.