Kathleen was subdued and distant in the morning.
She breakfasted early and lightly and headed for the coast to do some sightseeing. She wanted to get as far away from Fayetteville/Fort Bragg as possible. The entire area seemed to be making an industry out of preparing to kill other humans, and she found it all depressing. Even the hotel pool offered no relief. During the day it was used to demonstrate equipment by Navy SEALs.
The military presence was unrelenting. And they were all so damned cheerful and gung-ho about it. She was awash in camaraderie and male bonding, and if she was not careful she would drown.
She loved Hugo and would endure what was necessary given their situation, but it was not her world. She understood that Fitzduane did not enjoy being under threat either, but there was a fundamental difference. Hugo was comfortable with his world of weapons. He was not confined to it, but he functioned supremely well in it. It was something of a shock seeing him this way. In Ireland, on the island, Hugo trained with the Rangers, but it was somehow more subdued. Here it was very American and very extroverted, and she felt the whole damn thing was being rammed down her throat.
She had heard that much of the North Carolina coast was very beautiful. Some totally civilian scenery would be nice. She savored the word civilian. It had always seemed such a dull word. Now it carried with it an ethos her heart cried out for.
"You look vaguely shook, Hugo," said Kilmara cheerfully as he found Fitzduane alone having breakfast. "The wife been beating you again, or is it the prospect of yet another warm sunny day? It's disorienting for us Irish. We're like certain types of plants. We expect to get rained on regularly but unpredictably."
Fitzduane did not wear his heart on his sleeve, but Kilmara was someone who was very close to him.
He smiled. "Kathleen is not a happy lady, which is unusual. She awoke not in good form and headed as far away from uniforms and military hardware as possible. I think she plans to roam and sunbathe along the North Carolina coast."
"Lucky North Carolina," said Kilmara. "If you don't mind me commenting on your wife, Kathleen looks sumptuous in a swimsuit. Also, she is right. All this military stuff is bullshit. It's fun, but it's ridiculous. And it gets people killed. If I wasn't a general, I would jack the whole thing in. And hell, man, you don't want a wife who wears jump boots in the kitchen."
Fitzduane did not reply to this sally, which was unusual. He normally enjoyed Kilmara when he was being outrageous. There was something else to all this.
Kilmara gave his friend space and focused on his scrambled eggs. Soon enough, Fitzduane spoke.
"Out of the blue, for no reason that I could think of, Kathleen asked me if I ever thought of Etan. Well, the question was so unexpected, I did not dissemble in any way. I told her the truth."
Kilmara was silent under the cover of hunting for some marmalade. He did not really understand American breakfasts.
He was also very fond of Etan, Boots's mother, and had been quite upset when she had opted for a career ahead of Fitzduane. Particularly when she still loved the man. But people were nothing if to perverse. He was also very fond of Kathleen. He thought his friend had excellent taste in women. A Japanese name also came into his mind, but he could not quite recall it. That was the trouble with these military conventions. Soldiers all drank as if there were no tomorrow. Of course, sometimes they were right.
"Some men can sleep with a woman and then wipe the encounter from their mind as if it was of no consequence," said Fitzduane. "You can do that, Shane. I can't."
"Sometimes it is of no consequence," said Kilmara. "Sex should not be confused with romance, though I admit they can overlap. But if you carve the name of every woman you have slept with on your body, you'll end up looking like an old oak tree on lovers' lane. Well, I like my bark pristine. I also believe in concentration of effort. Remember only the good ones – and for heaven's sake, be quick or selective."
Fitzduane smiled.
"So what did you tell Kathleen when she asked about Etan?" Kilmara asked.
Fitzduane took his time replying. "I think about Etan every day," he said. "She is the mother of my son. Every time I see Boots I am reminded of her. I think of what might have been – of what should have been. And it makes me a little sad. She was my lover and she was my friend. I've adapted, but I miss her."
Kilmara's cup of coffee was frozen in midflight. "You said all that, Hugo?" he said. "Holy shit! Someone is going to have to lock you up." He rolled his eyes. "Basic training: Women do not like to be reminded of other women unless you have a menage a trois. What am I going to do with you!"
"I also said that I have never been happier than with Kathleen and I love her with every atom of my being," said Fitzduane quietly. "And that's true also."
Kilmara waggled his hand and beamed. "Well, for an idiot you recover well." He frowned. "And you did this all over breakfast? Now, that is ridiculous."
Fitzduane smiled and then changed the subject. "Where is Maury?" he said.
"In his mobile home," said Kilmara. "He has got an encrypted mobile phone that he talks to Lee Cochrane with. Mark my words. Those guys are plotting."
"What about?" said Fitzduane.
"Think of them as travel agents," said Kilmara. "I think they are still planning to get you to Mexico. They have this thing about Tecuno, and they think you are the best man for the job. Kind of flattering in its way."
"Not a chance," said Fitzduane. "I have enough firefighting to do at home."
"With Kathleen?" said Kilmara, slightly taken aback.
"With Boots," said Fitzduane with a smile. "My sweet little five-year-old son. You know, the one who was found playing with your loaded service automatic the last time you were staying. He nearly got it into action, too."
Kilmara went pale. He remembered all too well. Terrorism was something he was used to dealing with, but a curious five-year-old was a higher order of threat altogether. And television made the kids familiar with safety catches and the like. Boots had found he was not strong enough to work the slide and had been experimenting holding the weapon in a vise and using two hands when he was caught. He was an ingenious little monster.
"You've got a point," Kilmara said with some feeling.
About fifteen minutes away from the main exhibition, live-firing demonstrations were being given in a converted quarry. You could evaluate weapons just so far in a booth.
Fitzduane and Kilmara took the shuttle bus over. They had not told either Dana or Texas, so they felt a little bit like kids dodging school. On the other hand, it would have been a foolish terrorist indeed who tried anything.
The passengers were equipped with every conceivable kind of weapon to try out on the range. In addition, both men were armed, though automatics were as nothing compared to the exotic firepower they were surrounded with. Fitzduane reflected that the domestic pop-up toaster might not have seen much development over the last half century, but certainly weapons manufacturers had not stunted their ingenuity.
It was hot in the quarry, and a blazing sun in a clear blue sky indicated that it was going to get hotter still.
About forty attendees were gathered in a rough semicircle behind the firing line. Perhaps a third were uniformed, and the rest wore every from black T-shirts emblazoned with slogans – matched with fatigues bloused into combat boots – to suits and ties. More than a dozen were women.
"I don't know whether this is fun or horrible," said Fitzduane.
"Watching things go bang. This is fun," said Kilmara cheerfully. "When the quarry starts to shoot back… that is horrible."
There was movement at the firing line, and a man dressed in well-worn but starched fatigues faced the gathering. He wore a DI's flat-brimmed hat as if it had grown with him in his mother's womb.
"My name is Cutler," he said. "You're about to see a demonstration of the Brunswick RAW – Rifleman's Assault Weapon. It's an unusual weapon."
A 5.56 FN Minimi light machine gun, bipod extended, was positioned on the ground beside him with its muzzle pointed toward a sandbag bunker two thicknesses thick about three hundred meters away.
In front of the bunker and leaning against it was a heavy steel armor plate.
"The trouble with the bad guys," continued Cutler, "is that they are not always willing to stand up and be shot at. They don't play fair. They get behind cover like bunkers or reinforced concrete positions that your itty-bitty rounds can't penetrate, and then what the fuck do you do? It's downright embarrassing."
There were smiles from the assembled group.
"We already have rocket and grenade launchers," Cutler went on, "but rocket launchers are bulky and the 40mm grenade does not quite have the punch for a strongpoint. And so they came up with the RAW. Essentially, it is a spin-stabilized elongated ball five and a half inches in diameter – a teardrop shape – that you fire from a launching mechanism that you attach under the muzzle of your personal weapon."
Cutler opened a compact clamshell container and clipped the mechanism and then the projectile in place. The entire exercise took less than ten seconds.
"With the RAW in place, you can still use your weapon as normal. The interesting thing is that for three hundred meters, the projectile's trajectory is virtually flat. Using your rifle sights, where you point it will hit. At longer ranges we're talking indirect fire, but it will go up to fifteen hundred meters."
Cutler picked up the Minimi with the RAW now attached. "As I said, there is no recoil or backblast, so you can fire it standing or sitting or however you want. The bipod is not necessary except to steady your aim."
He then reached out his hand, turned the RAW activator switch, aimed at the bunker, and fired.
The projectile hissed from its nest under the barrel and then accelerated rapidly.
It looked harmless, thought Fitzduane, more like a well-spun ball than a weapon. But after its initial acceleration, it was extremely fast.
The distant bunker protected by its armor plate could be clearly seen.
And then it just disintegrated, the explosion startlingly violent and more like a heavy artillery shell than a grenade. It seemed an extraordinary amount of destructive power from such a small sphere.
"Well, I'm buggered," said Kilmara. "That little thing does all that damage by itself? You must have set off some explosives in it. You're pulling a fast one, Sergeant."
Cutler grinned. "No, sir," he said. "What you saw is what you got. The RAW is one effective sucker. Ain't technology a wonderful thing. In destructive power, the grapefruit is equivalent to a 105mm howitzer shell."
"Suppose that grapefruit catches an incoming round?" said Fitzduane.
The fact that the RAW had neither recoil nor backblast had caught his imagination. You could use it in a confined space and mount it near anywhere.
"Good question," said Cutler, "but not to worry. The explosive used is insensitive. If it gets too hot it won't explode, and the same applies if it takes a round. We tested it with a. 50, and nada."
"Any more tricks?" said Fitzduane.
Cutler nodded. "There is also a dual-purpose projectile that combines anti-armor or bunker busting with antipersonnel capability. You set the range at which it will explode with a built-in display and then it will fire three thousand tiny tungsten balls that will kill or injure everything an arc with a radius of about a hundred and sixty square meters. The balls have an escape velocity of six thousand feet per second. That momentum will take you through a flak vest or a Kevlar helmet. That's a lot of very destructive metal flying around. It will shred people, soft vehicles, light armor and aircraft – and it's very bad news for helicopters."
He turned and faced another target about two hundred meters away. This time, instead of one bunker, a hundred and fifty combat targets showing a menacing crouching infantryman advancing had been set out to simulate an attacking enemy force. They were in three irregular rows and were spread out in a line over two hundred meters wide and fifty meters deep.
Cutler picked up a RAW munition and fitted it, then adjusted the range on a small LED dial. Then he aimed slightly high. "Airburst," he said, and fired.
Every man in the assembled group examined every target after the demonstration. And every single target had been hit.
One single RAW round.
Somewhat subdued by what they had seen, Fitzduane and Kilmara had a quick lunch and headed for Maury's mobile home to meet their Magnavox contact.
Having a serious discussion at a busy exhibition stand was not easy. Also, Maury's vehicle was more working base than home. In it were excellent communication and office facilities.
Maury liked to travel, but he also liked to work. In truth, he never seemed to stop working. Certainly, one element that underpinned his detailed knowledge of the terrorist world was sheer application.
So far he had spent just one hour at the exhibition. He had done a lightning tour and then returned to his mobile burrow. Military gadgetry was all very well and he kept himself informed, but what really turned Maury on was the live game. Thanks to modern satellite communications, he could play that anywhere – and he did.
Fitzduane found Maury watching the fax for incoming nuggets in the utterly focused manner of a cat monitoring a mouse hole and brought him, protesting, into the meeting with Don Shanley.
Shanley impressed Fitzduane, and he wanted to put the Magnavox man under some additional pressure. Maury was rather good at asking awkward questions.
"What do you guys want to achieve?" said Shanley. "The more I know, the better I can help you."
"You just want to sell hardware," said Maury aggressively. "I hate salesmen."
Fitzduane groaned inwardly. This was not the best way to start. He had in mind awkward technical questions. Downright bad behavior would not be helpful. Still, the only thing now was to go with the flow.
Shanley smiled. "We all have some position to advance," he said. "Personally, I like to think of myself as a problem solver."
Maury glared at Shanley. "What do you know about combat?" he said. "Have you ever served?"
Shanley was tired, Fitzduane had observed. At Maury's question he went pale, as if the remark had struck deep. Given Maury's aggressive approach, Fitzduane would not have been surprised by an angry response, but the Magnavox man showed restraint.
"I know more about my field than most," he said quietly. "I hope that will be sufficient for you gentlemen. As I understand it, your application relates to FAVs. Perhaps we can take it from there. It might be helpful if you work from first principles."
Fitzduane caught Kilmara's eye and made an almost imperceptible gesture. Kilmara took the point and cut in.
"Don, my unit came into being as a counterterrorist force," he said. "Subsequently it was expanded to have an offensive capability. That meant we needed to deploy heavier firepower to deal with armor and other special situations, and pretty soon we ran into problems. Quite simply, our Rangers, no matter how physically fit, could not carry the weight of weaponry and equipment which we considered necessary to do the job. I am sure you now the figures."
Shanley nodded. "A fit soldier is supposed to carry only about one-third of his body weight if he is to remain combat capable – say, sixty pounds odd. In practice, by the time you have added spare ammunition and the modern tools of his trade, the guy – or girl these days – is staggering under a hundred pounds or more. That restricts his mobility and he tires faster. Worse again, he still is not carrying what is required in combat today. The days of a rifle and sixty rounds of ammunition are long gone. Now he is laden with four hundred rounds of ammunition, antitank weapons, explosives, claymores, laser range finders, and-" he smiled – "thermal sights. And there is more. Radio batteries are a real curse. And then there is his NBC kit."
"You've got the picture," said Kilmara. "A single special-forces soldier has never been better equipped or more potentially lethal in the history of warfare, but he cannot carry what he needs.
"Well, I tossed the problem out to Colonel Fitzduane. Hugo has a talent for this kind of thing."
Fitzduane could see that Maury was getting hooked.
"Back in World War Two," said Fitzduane, "my father was one of the founding members of the SAS in North Africa. Stirling's idea was to raid behind German lines using heavily armed jeeps."
"Did it work?" said Shanley. "As I understand it, the German Army in North Africa was heavily armored. Jeeps against armor does not seem much of a deal."
"A few dozen SAS destroyed more German aircraft on the ground than the entire Allied Desert Air Force, which contained thousands of men," said Fitzduane. "As to armor, the idea was not to go head to head. In those days, you couldn’t destroy a tank with anything you could carry in a jeep. But jeeps were faster and they could hide. And they were devastating against light armor and trucks. As a tactic it worked brilliantly."
"But surely the casualties were heavy?" said Shanley.
Fitzduane shook his head. "Ironically, you were a lot safer in the SAS than the regular army. It was a case of brute force versus speed, maneuverability, firepower, and brainpower. Anyway, with the SAS experience in the back of my mind, I started exploring the idea of a fast, light unarmored vehicle equipped with light but powerful weapons. And pretty soon I was pointed this way. The U.S. Army might have gone heavy, but some people were pushing at the envelope."
"Chenowth," said Maury. "They made the dune buggies that did so well in the Baja. The U.S. Army formed an experimental division and started playing with converted Chenowths equipped with grenade launchers and TOW missiles and the like. It was political dynamite, because field evaluation showed that a fast attack vehicle, a FAV – which was what they called these things – could, in many cases, outkill not just armored fighting vehicles, but also tanks. I've heard kill rates like nine to one and four to one."
Fitzduane nodded. "It gets complicated when you are talking combined arms, because armor does not operate in a vacuum. Add helicopters into the equation and FAV's might not have done so well. Also, the Abrams tank and the Humvee programs were well advanced and big money was involved, and no one wanted to lose them. So, for all practical purposes, the FAV experiment was killed. I hear the marines bought a few, and the SEALs certainly took them on board with success, but major development, which was what the program needed, never happened. It should have, because FAV funding would have been chicken feed in comparison to most military programs, but it didn't. That's the trouble with inexpensive programs. There is not enough money in them."
Kilmara smiled. "Well, since we don't have any real budget by American standards, we picked up on the U.S. experience and some work in the U.K. and produced our own machine, but decided to try a slightly different direction. Both the Chenowth and the Saker are wheeled vehicles, excellent for some terrains but no good in marshy ground or snow.
"But we don't have the money to have different vehicles for different conditions, so we decided to go for an unarmored high-speed tracked machine that could do most of what the Chenowth and Saker could do but could operate worldwide. Sand, mud, rocky shale, snow, ice, marshy ground – the Guntrack can go just about anywhere. The intention is to equip it with enough firepower to knock out a tank and handle any immediate aerial threat, and it is the weapons aspect that we are still working on. Want to see it, Don?"
Shanley was not used to generals being this informal. He was a courteous man by nature and had found that around the U.S. Army, a crisp "Sir" did not go amiss. "Yes, sir!" he said.
Kilmara looked at him. "We're an informal culture these days in Ireland," he said. "First names are normal. I'm Shane. He's Hugo, and he-" he indicated Maury – "I think he is mellowing."
"Maury," said Maury. He was looking downright agreeable.
Fitzduane slipped in the video.
The group turned toward the screen.
The terrain was rocky undulating ground covered with outcrops of heather and patches of rough grass. In the background there was a line of hills under a lowering sky that was a surreal mix of menacing clouds and shafts of light.
It was a bleak but dramatic landscape that encompassed an extraordinary variation of shape and line and shade and color. It was stunningly beautiful, and Shanley suddenly realized that this was not just some foreign land.
This was where his roots lay. This had once been home.
A dark shape appeared in the distance. It was hard to make out the details. The silhouette was low and indistinct. The vehicle approached following a zigzag course and across land that would have been impassable in a wheeled vehicle. The sound track suggested it made surprisingly little noise.
The vehicle came closer and drove parallel past the camera so it could be seen in profile. As it did so, it could be seen that although the tracks were riding over rocks and a generally uneven surface, the upper portion of the vehicle was virtually stable.
The driver locked one track and the Guntrack did a 360-degree turn on its own axis and then came to a complete halt.
It was like nothing either Don or Maury had ever seen. It was a small, low black box on tracks with a wedge-shaped front and what looked like folded-up forklift prongs on the rear. A driver and a gunner equipped with twin 5.56mm Minimi machine guns sat in the front.
The vehicle was steered by left-hand drive. To the right of the front gunner, a Stinger antiaircraft missile was clipped into position. Behind the two front seats was a gunner with an M19 belt-fed 40mm grenade launcher mounted on buffered soft mount attached to a turret ring. As they watched, the rear gunner's station rose on a hydraulic mount to give him a wider field of fire. The entire station then rotated 360 degrees. It then retracted and a slim mast mounting a miniature FLIR monitor rose up and panned in a circle.
"The Guntrack," said Fitzduane, "is the vehicle that the Irish Rangers are beginning to use for special operations. It is not armored in the traditional sense, but it is made from a special plastic that will withstand small-arms fire, and the tracks are a Kevlar and artificial rubber blend. Hell of a good power-to-weight ratio. Accelerates like a rocket and does up to eighty-five miles an hour with a full payload. The weapons fitted can, of course, be varied, but fully equipped with something like you see, it should cost no more than five percent of a tank. As to maintenance, if I can exaggerate just a little to make a point, it can be maintained by the three-man crew with their Swiss Army knives."
The video continued for another fifteen minutes as the camera focused in close-up on individual aspects. Everything from fuel consumption to changing an engine was covered. In fact, it was the attention to detail that was most impressive and ingenious.
The fuel tank, for instance, was of a honeycomb design that could be penetrated by an incendiary round without igniting. The forks at the back could be lowered to pick up a standard NATO pallet holding up to a ton. Guntracks could be linked so that if the engine on one went, the second could pull the first under power.
Shanley and Maury watched with fascination. The sheer logic of the thinking was impressive. The Guntrack had been designed by people who knew the reality of combat.
Maury could still see a problem. "Artillery will make mincemeat of you," he said. "Potentially, there is a terrifying amount of unfriendly metal on today's battlefield, and much of it will cut right through your plastic box."
"The Guntrack is not the ultimate weapon," said Fitzduane. "It is no more than one more useful tool. It is designed for a shoot-and-scoot approach to survival. It is primarily a better way, we think, to get around when you are on the ground on some special operations missions. The underlying idea is not to be detected at all, but if you are detected, to have enough firepower to make the enemy back off while you hightail it out of the area. It beats the hell out of dying."
Shanley had been thinking it through. "How do you use Guntrack tactically?" he said.
"We've found that the minimum practical deployment is two vehicles," said Fitzduane. "Then fire and movement. One covers the other like a fighter pilot and his wingman."
Kilmara turned to face Shanley and Maury. "Well, gentlemen," he said. "Now you know what we are working on. The next question is what you can suggest. Any ideas?"
"More than a few," said Shanley. His mind was racing. What he had seen, if properly developed, was not just interesting. It was tactically significant.
"This idea of a small, inexpensive fast attack vehicle taking on tanks reminds me of something that happened in Africa. The Libyans tried to grab their neighbor to the south and assembled an invading army of hundreds of tanks. They were beaten by Chadians driving only Toyota pickup trucks equipped with Milan missiles. The pickups maneuvered faster than the Russian tanks could move their turrets. Also, they were so small they were hard to hit."
Kilmara, who had been in Chad advising the Chadians at the time, did not say anything but looked at Shanley with renewed respect. This was a man who did his homework.
"You should look at Dilger's Baby," said Maury cryptically.
Fitzduane and Kilmara looked at each other blankly.
"How does a baby fit into all this, Maury?" said Kilmara carefully. Maybe Maury had finally flipped.
Maury beamed. "You'll see," he said.
When the meeting broke up, Fitzduane checked the switchboard to see if Kathleen had checked in. If she went on an expedition, she normally called during the day to say roughly when she would be back.
There was no message. It was not significant, but Fitzduane could not help feeling vaguely uneasy. He looked at his watch. It was heading toward 5:00 P.M. The exhibition would close at 6:00, and soon after was a barbecue and some entertainment planned by the exhibition organizers for 7:30. The posters announced that there would also be some entertainment and dancing afterward.
Fitzduane had never seen country-and-western line dancers and was mildly curious. Certainly Kathleen, who loved dancing, would like it. As to the parachuting, there was always something morbidly fascinating about watching fellow humans jump out of a perfectly good airplane. Would the parachutes open? Where and how would they land?
It promised to be a pleasant enough evening.
The North Carolina State Police duty officer contemplated the message slip. A citizen had reported seeing a woman being manhandled into a helicopter that had been parked in a remote clearing in the wooded land that bordered the freeway. The woman had been struggling and then she had gone limp, the witness thought. The helicopter had taken off immediately. Direction? Unknown.
Color of hair? Unknown. She had a bag or something over her head, he thought. Color of skin? The citizen did not know.
Descriptions of the assailants? There had been two – or maybe three. They had been casually dressed.
He could not really tell much else. How close had he been? He had been hiking in the woods and had seen all this as he was walking back. He was fifty to seventy-five yards from the clearing. Something like that. He wasn't real good at estimating distances.
The duty officer called in the dispatcher. "This is pretty thin. What did he sound like? Citizen or crank?"
The dispatcher shrugged. "Elderly, a little vague, but he definitely believes he saw something."
"Why was he hiking in the woods?"
"He said he is a birdwatcher. He was looking for the red cockaded woodpecker. He's sure about that."
"So he saw all this through binoculars?" said the duty officer, somewhat encouraged. He had been wondering how much an elderly man could see at fifty yards when peering through the gloom of a forest. Or was it seventy-five yards? It could be a hundred. It could be thirty.
Could you really tell the difference between a woman being helped aboard and pushed aboard? A bag over the head sounded more like a head scarf to retain some semblance of a hairstyle under the assault of a rotor wash. Not a clear picture.
"Apparently not," said the dispatcher. "They were hanging around his neck, but he just forgot. He said he was too surprised, but he insists that he saw what he described. Adamant would convey the degree of emphasis. This guy was all fired up."
The lieutenant smiled and checked the report again. The incident had happened – if anything had happened – forty minutes ago. His nearest patrol car was a good fifteen minutes away. And he was short two men.
"What kind of chopper?"
The dispatcher was getting a little irritated. "I asked him. He's into birds, not aircraft. Single rotor. Civilian paint job, something pale. That's all he knows."
"Did you ask him why he didn't report his earlier?" said the lieutenant. "I don't know what he expects us to do after forty minutes. The helicopter could be sixty miles away by now."
"He had to get to a phone," said the dispatcher. "And then he said he found he hadn't a dime."
The lieutenant shook his head. Where did they find them. He was tempted to log the call as requiring no further action, and then a thought occurred to him. He checked the map again. He knew that clearing. He'd patrolled that area. Hunted around there, too.
"If this is about a kidnapped woman, what would a helicopter be doing in that clearing? It's only about a hundred feet across." He looked at the map again and racked his brains. "There's a shitload of other places in the area you could land in more safely."
"Unless you didn't want to be seen," said the dispatcher. She waited a beat before adding, "sir."
The lieutenant looked at her. He was good at looks. This one connected. Whatever the witness had said, given FortBragg's proximity, it was most likely a military chopper on some damn fool exercise. Still, maybe not. The red cockaded woodpecker was a protected species. The military, much to their chagrin, had been instructed to give the bird a wide berth. The word was they were even printing maps with little woodpeckers printed all over them. Hell of a note.
"Who is the closest?" said the lieutenant. "Richardson?"
The dispatcher nodded. "Sergeant Richardson," she confirmed.
"Tell him to go to the clearing and have a look around. He's got a good eye, and who knows… maybe the Russians are invading."
The dispatcher grinned and shook her head. "North Carolina in all this heat and humidity. No chance."
State trooper Sergeant Andy Richardson had a reputation for thoroughness. He was not academically bright, but he had learned you could go a long way in police work by just being organized, methodical, thorough, and healthy. And common sense did not hurt either.
He was completing his notes on a minor traffic accident when the call came in. It was not urgent, so he finished the cup of herbal tea he had resting in the cup holder and completed his notes.
He then closed his eyes and meditated for several minutes. It was not exactly police procedure, but his wife Susan was a great believer in cultivating inner peace, and it certainly seemed to work. He did not complete his shift stressed out like many of his colleagues. He could take most things in his stride.
Despite taking his time, he reached the turnoff to the clearing only fifteen minutes after the dispatcher's call had come through. The unpaved access track stretched out ahead of him. The clearing, he recalled, was about a quarter mile away. The forest crowded in on either side.
He was tempted to drive on down the track, but he decided to think this one through. If someone had been pushed into a helicopter in the clearing, they had to have been brought there. It could, of course, have been another helicopter, but if so, why make a switch? No, the chances were that a vehicle would have been used.
Richardson got out of the cruiser and examined the track carefully. He could see one recent set of wheel marks in the dust heading toward the clearing but none coming out. The hairs on the back of his neck started to prickle. The supposed incident had happened about an hour earlier. The vehicle that had been reported as being involved in the transfer should have left – or else it was still inside. There was one other possibility.
He picked up his radio and gave his call sign. "Did our birdwatching witness drive to the clearing?"
"Negative," said the dispatcher. "His home is about two miles back, and he walked. He's there if you need him."
"I've got one set of tire tracks going in," said Richardson. "I'm going to block off the road and go in on foot. I'll call you in ten."
"Need backup?" said the dispatcher.
"No," said Richardson. "This probably doesn't amount to anything. But…"
He parked the cruiser across the track. Then he unclipped his shotgun. You never knew, and the mere sight of a shotgun tended to make potential assailants think twice. There was something about the sheer size of the muzzle.
He walked carefully and slowly down the track toward the clearing, examining not only the track itself but the undergrowth and woods on either side. If someone had been struggling in the car, they just might have been able to drop something out of the window. Perhaps some identification or a note. Well, it was unlikely, given the prevalence of air-conditioning combined with fully closed windows, but he had to check and now was the best time.
It was alarming how quickly the integrity of a crime scene could be compromised. Items of value that might also be clues had a tendency to vanish no matter how you tried to secure the scene. Human nature was just that – all too human. Of course, this was not yet a crime scene, but when you had a report you had to act as if the location might be. Certainly this was Richardson's way.
He held his shotgun in his right hand and used a stick to push aside the vegetation. All kinds of things that crawled and slithered and bit flourished in North Carolina – and not all were human. He smiled to himself, and then the joke lost some of its flavor as his stick revealed a rattlesnake curled up next to a rock. The snake seemed to look at him as if debating the odds, then shot into the undergrowth. It did not like shotguns either.
Richardson was used to snakes, but that kind of eyeball-to-eyeball encounter certainly got the adrenaline going. He waited until his heart had stopped pounding and then radioed in.
This time he was transferred to the lieutenant, who was becoming somewhat frustrated at how long checking out one simple call was taking. Particularly when it was almost certainly nothing.
"Hurry it up, Andy, will you?" said the lieutenant.
"Roger that, Lieutenant," said Richardson flatly.
He entered the clearing a few minutes later. If he had read the tracks right, there should have been a car there, but there was nothing. This was all getting ridiculous, he decided. They would be talking flying saucers and little green men soon. In the real world, vehicles did not drive into lonely clearings and just vanish. Life was much more mundane. Solid stayed solid and flesh stayed flesh. And visible stayed visible.
All good sensible thinking, he reflected, but he still could not see that damned automobile and there was no track out of the clearing.
He started a perimeter search. The trees were growing too close together and too irregularly for a vehicle to have been driven between them. Then he saw the break in the tree line where maybe there had been a lightning strike or storm damage. Anyway, a couple of trees were down. The vegetation had been cut away and then replaced in a crude attempt to buy time.
He pulled the cut undergrowth out of the way. It did not take too long, and then there in front of him was the trunk of a Dodge sedan. A rental, by the look of it. The hood pointed into the forest.
The trunk was locked. He tried the doors and they were open. There were no keys in the ignition, but he found the trunk release lever.
He recognized the odor immediately. It was an amalgam of blood and excrement and fear. It was the smell of violent death.
He edged up the lid of the trunk with his stick and looked in.
Staring up at him, wide-eyed mouth open in a rictus grin of fear, was the body of a young woman. Her throat had been cut and it looked as if she had bled to death there. Her clothing and the inside of the trunk itself were saturated in blood.
Richardson could imagine her lying there terrified and helpless in the confines of the trunk as her executioner stood over her, knife in hand. There were severe slashes on her hands. She had tried to defend herself. Closer examination showed blood on and around the front passenger seat. She had been hit there, he surmised, and then dumped as she was dying. The callousness was chilling.
Subdued and depressed, he called in. He could take traffic accidents except where they involved the injury or death of children.
This kind of wanton butchery shook him. He thought of Susan. It could have been she in there.
Procedure dictated that he wait for the scene-of-crime team, but he had to do something and he knew he was professional enough to do it right. He started searching the clearing slowly and thoroughly, working to an imaginary grid.
There were clear signs of the reported helicopter and of activity surrounding it. Leaves and small branches had been dislodged by the downdraft, and some branches in the center of the clearing by landing skid marks suggested that the pilot had maybe clipped the tree tops coming in. Out of practice, inexperienced, or just a hotshot? Hard to know. Richardson favored out of practice. A novice would scarcely try landing in a narrow clearing like this.
After twelve minutes of searching, he saw a glint in the sandy earth fairly near the skid marks. Whatever it was seemed practically covered. Dropped by accident or deliberately.
He bent down and scratched the earth away with his stick. It was an unusual charm bracelet made of two types of gold, by the looks of it. He hunkered down, hooked the bracelet on the stick, and brought it close. The design was abstract, but one of the charms looked like a harp. It was an expensive item and had both a clasp and a safety chain. This had not fallen off by accident.
He read the inscription inside.
Richardson took an evidence bag out of his hip pocket and slipped the bracelet inside. He was thinking. The kind of gutsy person who dropped this will have tried to drop something more than once. But he had found nothing on the track, and the car's windows were, as he had expected, closed. Maybe she had been kept in the trunk with the other woman. Hell, maybe there was only one woman and the witness had been mistaken. She had struggled as she was being put on board and had been killed.
No, that did not feel right. The witness had proved out so far, so why not give him the benefit of the doubt and assume two women? That meant the kidnap victim could have been kept either in the trunk or in the back of the car.
Either way, it meant searching the car, and that was very much against the rules.
On the other hand, in a kidnapping – and now he was fairly certain there had been one – time was crucial.
He found the telephone message slip pushed down behind the upholstery of the backseat. It was the kind of thing you would jot down to remind you what room you were in. There was no date, but the paper looked fresh.
They now had a dead woman, murdered for sure, a probable kidnapping, and some guy named Hugo was involved. The message slip was from Fayetteville.
Richardson called in again. He did not do any more searching. A kidnapping – and a helicopter being used – was going to mean federal involvement for sure.
And the feds could be more than difficult if they felt their scene of crime had been screwed up.
Sergeant Richardson did not think he had screwed up, but as with most things in life it was going to be a matter of perception.
He checked his watch and hoped that the scene-of-crime team would get their ass in gear. It was going to be dark soon.
Shelby Jacklin, sheriff of Fayetteville, put down the phone and thought. When he had been younger he had been a great believer in immediate action. Now he liked to get the flavor of a situation before moving.
It had taken just one phone call to identify this "Hugo." The question now was what to do. Hugo Fitzduane might be the killer or he might be entirely innocent. But the probability was the either the dead woman or the kidnap victim was closely connected to him. And it was a statistical fact that most murders were carried out by someone you knew and most probably were close to. Like married to.
This business was going to get complicated. The body had been discovered by the state police outside his jurisdiction, but this Fitzduane was staying right in the sheriff's patch. And before long the feds would be on the scene.
They could question Fitzduane immediately or go for a search warrant first. Then they could search this Irishman's room with impunity. It was the safer route. A search warrant would not take long. Judge Rikel was a hard-liner with strong views on violent crime.
It would also be a good idea to check Fitzduane with the FBI. Sheriff Jacklin was not overly fond of the feds, but he had learned to sup with the devil if it got the job done.