White Star

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Few entered Idaho's Big Wood River Valley unnoticed and unremarked.

Big Ed Gatwick cruised in from Lewiston on his 1950 Harley Panhead. The motorcycle's frame-off restoration had taken him two years, and he had installed the best: S&S rods and pistons, Sifton lifters and cam, and a Screaming Eagle carb. The fenders and frame were painted black-cherry pearl, and everything else was either black leather or gleaming chrome. Big Ed blew through Hailey and headed north toward Ketchum and Hobart in a reclining position, his gloved hands on the handlebars above the Springer fork, his black boots high on rests, and his bulk low in the curved seat. Seventy-four cubic inches filled the valley with an echoing rumble, a throbbing balls-grabbing pulse that for Big Ed Gatwick was proof God existed, for only He could have created such a sound, with apologies to the Harley Davidson Company.

Gatwick's club was the Lewiston Death Deacons, and he was leading six Deacons to the Galena Lodge near Galena Summit, north of Hobart. Going to do some drinking, toking, joking, bust a head or two, it was all on the agenda. Once in a while he and the others would push around an overwhelmed small-town sheriff, and you couldn't have more fun than that. The club liked to show up in some jerkwater town unannounced and uninvited, party hard, then clear out before the law could rally its forces. The biker wore a black leather jacket with the Deacons' colors, a hooded grim reaper carrying a scythe. Gatwick's gray beard was blown over his shoulder by the rush of wind. He wore a pill helmet, and on his nose were green-tinted granny glasses.

In Gatwick's rearview mirror — a glass sliver put there only to appease hard-ass state patrolmen — Jig Lawrence piloted his Harley. The others trailed behind, weaving side to side, filling the highway and turning some heads, and that's what it was all about.

Gatwick rounded a corner and squinted through the sunglasses. A cop car was ahead on the side of the road, and some orange barricades. Gatwick slowed the Harley, drawing near to the roadblock. A copse of pine trees bordered the highway, where a dirt road trailed away into the hills. The cop was an old gummer, his belly over his ammo belt and jowls over his shirt collar. A soft touch, looked like. The biker squeezed the brake. A lone old man wearing a gun, and all the hicks in this valley depending on him for law and order. Gatwick laughed as he brought the Harley to a stop in front of the cop.

"Everything's legal, Officer." The biker called, grinning contemptuously. He revved the engine once for punctuation.

Roy Durant could move faster than he looked. He took three steps and pressed the kill button on the Harley's handlebar. The motorcycle sputtered and died.

Big Ed rose over his seat. "Hey, you got no right—"

Jig Lawrence pulled up next to Gatwick. Then the others came, roaring their engines, a threatening, demanding sound, and they circled the police chief.

Durant held out his hand to Gatwick. "Your license, quick."

Big Ed insolently leaned back on his seat and was about to say something when the air was split with a hammering bellow that drowned out the motorcycles, a gut-thumping percussion that made the bikes and their riders seem puny and irrelevant, drowned in the blare.

Gatwick's head jerked to the sound.

"Sorry," Idaho National Guard Sergeant Ralph Neal yelled, smiling. "Just clearing my barrel."

The sergeant's fists were gripping the handles of an M2 heavy machine gun pintle-mounted on the back of a hummer. His thumb was on the butterfly trigger. The 100-round disintegrating-link shell belt rose from the sergeant's feet to enter the breech, and was still swaying. Slight wisps of gray smoke rose from the barrel as bits and pieces of a pine tree drifted to the ground. The sergeant's driver, Private John Goode, also grinned malevolently, the stock of an M16 resting against his thigh, the barrel poking above the windshield. Arrayed in the trees behind the jeep were a dozen other members of the Guard, all dressed in desert camouflage, all on loan to Pete Coates. They had been assigned to help man the checkpoint. A troop truck was parked farther into the trees.

Big Ed swallowed so hard his Adam's apple bounced against his leather jacket's lapel. He said nothing. It took only a moment for Chief Durant to look at each Deacon's license and stare into each face, matching it with the features of the Russian he had memorized. The Deacons were silent and docile, refusing to meet Durant's gaze.

Then Big Ed Gatwick kicked his Harley into life, leaned it over to turn south, and sped away, back down the road he had just come up. Jig Lawrence and the rest of the Deacons followed, a swift and ignoble retreat.

Chief Durant gave the sergeant a thumbs-up and hollered gleefully, "That's about as much fun as this old man is ever going to have."

This was Elsa MacIntire's fifteenth round-trip from Missoula to Jackpot, and her right arm ached as it always did. In fact, everything ached on her right side: knuckles, wrist, elbow, shoulder, even her hip. She once figured that between the time the bus dropped her group off in Jackpot at five in the afternoon until she reboarded the vehicle at nine the next morning, she pulled a slot machine handle over five thousand times, and that included a slight pause every ten minutes to light a new cigarette. She stood at the machine like a sentry at her post, steady and resolute, unfailing in her duty to drop another quarter into the slot the instant the wheels stopped. Her gaze was usually on the middle distance, the cigarette smoke a veil in front of her face. She rarely bothered to look at the bars, bells, and fruit on the wheels, because the spinning red light on top of the machine would announce a win, and she would be rewarded with the nurturing sound of quarters dumping into the payout cup.

Slumped in her bus seat, Elsa MacIntire was exhausted. She came once every other month to the tiny gambling town on the Idaho — Nevada border. On the run home she was always five hundred dollars poorer, she always smelled like an old ashtray, and her right arm always pumped pain into the rest of her. She loved it. At seventy-three years of age, Elsa figured she had done everything worth doing, had had all the fun allowed a person in one life, and these coach trips to Jackpot were an extra she allowed herself, and she would continue to make them as long as her right arm could yank the handle. She didn't mind the money she lost each trip, because the smidgen of character her trollop of a daughter possessed would not be improved in any way by inheriting her money.

The bus was filled with elderly Missoula women. They had an informal club, with its nexus the bus trip to and from their Montana homes. On the way to Jackpot they laughed and told stories and gossiped. On the way back they were quiet, utterly worn out, having stayed awake the entire night to pull the arms. Elsa napped on and off, but she tried to remain awake as the bus passed through the lovely Big Wood River Valley, from Ketchum on north over the Galena Pass. The views of mountains and the river refreshed her, made her feel as if she had taken a bath.

She was hungry, having had no time to eat while playing the slots. She always packed four sandwiches, saving two for the road home. She pulled a roast beef sandwich from her large handbag and unwrapped it. The bus unexpectedly began to slow. She raised herself to her full height in the seat to peer forward over the horizon of blue-gray hair. There was nothing to be seen, so Elsa bit into her sandwich.

The door hissed and a German shepherd climbed into the bus. Behind the dog was a large man wearing a black windbreaker with "FBI" imprinted on its front. A second FBI agent, this one carrying a rifle, followed them up the stairs into the bus. Elsa MacIntire didn't know a rifle from a shotgun, and certainly didn't know that the FBI agent's weapon was a Valmet assault rifle.

The agent spoke for a few seconds with the driver, then announced to the passengers, "The FBI will be conducting a search of this vehicle, looking for a fugitive. The dog will be searching by scent."

One of Elsa's friends shouted, "How's the dog know what the fugitive smells like?"

The handler replied, "We've got a few of his shirts. Found them in his hotel room. It's faster for the dog to vet all of you than for us looking at each ID and face."

"Especially our old wrinkled faces," a passenger cracked.

The agent smiled at the joke. The German shepherd slowly led him down the narrow aisle. The dog's head methodically turned left and right, sniffing at sleeves and dresses and purses. A few of the ladies petted its tan and black flanks as it passed. The German shepherd seemed happy in its work.

When the dog reached Elsa MacIntire, she asked, "Does he like roast beef?"

The FBI agent grinned again. "He's been trained not to eat while he's on duty. And he won't take food from strangers."

Elsa replied, "There's not a dog alive who'll turn down roast beef."

The agent's voice was condescendingly polite. "Go ahead and try. His name is Dooley. He won't even sniff at it."

She opened her sandwich and pulled out the roast beef, three palm-sized slices of Grade A with no fat at the edges. Dooley's ears lifted, and he squared his grand head fully to the old lady. The agent laughed confidently.

"Here you go, poochie." Elsa held out the meat.

The dog instantly grabbed the meat with its teeth, but carefully so as not to catch Elsa's fingers in its gleaming white fangs. Dooley ecstatically gulped the beef down and leaned forward on the leash for more.

Elsa asked sweetly, "Might he like my other sandwich, too?"

The agent growled, "Goddamn worthless cur." He yanked on the leash. "Get back to work, Dooley."

The dog began his sniffing again, looking back over its shoulder several times at Elsa. The girls laughed and laughed. When the search was done, the dog handler exited the bus, the back of his neck still red as paint.

Six miles northwest of the bus, high in the Sawtooths, Glen Reeves and Bob Valiquette hiked along a trail toward the base of Mount Ash where they were going to climb a crag known as Ben's Throne, a 5.11 bolted, four-pitch climb that would take them all day and would leave them twitching and stumbling and delighted as they returned at sunset to their car parked on a logging road below.

Reeves and Valiquette were laden with ropes, harnesses, cams, holds, chalk bags, and lunch. They were bringing many runners rather than quickdraws for the crux pitch. A tough semi-hanging belay was near the Throne's roof. Stunning views awaited them on top.

They climbed the steep hill of loose stones at the base of the crag, then slipped off their packs to ready themselves for the assault. They donned their climbing slippers and harnesses, then hung their gear on the belts' fixed racking loops. Their climb — the vertical pocked and cracked five-hundred-foot-high face — was two-thirds up Ash Mountain. Below them was a deep valley falling away to a narrow line of aspen at the valley's seam. Then the terrain rose again to ragged granite ridges two miles across from them.

Valiquette dusted his hands with chalk. "Know how I know I'm getting old, Glen?"

"New wrinkles around your eyes?"

"That, too. But mostly it's that I increasingly prefer the safety of a bolt at my feet."

Reeves rechecked his harness buckles. "What's the farthest you've ever fallen?"

"You were there. Seventy feet."

"That's right, on Mount Borah. You fell so far I couldn't see you." Reeves laughed. "I couldn't tell if you'd tumbled into the dihedral to our right or had simply fallen free."

Valiquette was going to take the lead, and Reeves would be second. Just as Valiquette reached for his first hold and slipped his rubber-covered foot into a crack, a deep fluttering sound poured into the valley, an extraordinarily foreign noise.

Both climbers instinctively ducked. Any strange noise was at first thought to be something falling toward them. A fist-sized rock would sound like a man screaming as it rocketed past them to the floor. But nothing fell.

An ugly metallic nose edged around the face's vertical horizon, a frightening piece of brown machinery suspended in the fine air.

"A helicopter!" Valiquette exclaimed. "What the hell is it doing so close?"

"Bastard," Reeves said, prepared to ignore it. "Some rich Californians looking for vacation property. A Ketchum realtor probably hired the helicopter to impress them. They do it all the time. Let's go."

Valiquette turned to face the copter. "That's no charter helicopter. Take a look."

The machine closed on the climbers, nearer and nearer, blowing up dust from the scree.

"You were in the army," Valiquette said nervously. "What is that?"

Reeves licked his lips. "It's a Huey Cobra."

"Jesus, what're those tubes with the openings?"

"It's a 40-millimeter grenade launcher with 300 bombs."

"And the thing under its snout?"

"A 30-millimeter chain gun that fires something like a million rounds a minute."

"All for us?" Valiquette asked.

The helicopter drifted closer, its blades beating the air and the turbine engines howling. Sun reflected off the windshield, hiding the pilot. A loudspeaker attached to its nose crackled out with "Please turn fully to the helicopter and present your driver's licenses or other identification."

Reeves quickly pulled his cloth wallet from his pack. His finger trembling, he opened it to find his Idaho driver's license. He held it up to the copter. "Do you think this is the Forest Service, and they're checking permits?"

"The Forest Service using Huey Cobras?"

"I wouldn't put it past them."

Both climbers stood motionless, their licenses in front of them. They did not know that a Nikon TRL camera attached to the fuselage next to the loudspeaker was taking a photograph of them and the licenses.

The loudspeaker squawked again, "Thank you."

The turbines wound up. The Huey lifted away from the mountainside, bringing its tail rotor around and yawing downhill. The helicopter raced to the valley floor, low enough to blow up a trailing cloud of dirt all the way, then disappeared downstream just above the treetops.

The climbers turned back to the granite and lichen face, and for much of the ascent they cursed the newly officious and newly high-tech United States Forest Service.

Down in Hobart, Ray Miller sadly shook his head. "I'm sorry, miss. I don't have the work."

"I've been a short order cook on and off for ten years," the woman argued. "All I need is a week's employment. I work hard and I don't steal."

"I don't doubt anything you say," the Right to Keep and Bear Arms Saloon owner said. "But take a look around. It's lunchtime, but you and I are the only people in the place. I can hear my echo in here."

The woman had walked into the saloon a few minutes before. She was in her late thirties. Her brown hair had a badger's streak of gray and was loose down her back, and a length of rawhide and ribbon was tied into it. She wore no eye shadow or lipstick. The bridge of her granny glasses had been mended with a small piece of duct tape. Her yellow and white print blouse was tucked in at her waist. A belt of braided cloth held up her jeans. Her old back-pack had a grease stain along a side. Miller guessed she dressed like a hippie to hide her poverty.

"What's your name, young lady?" he asked. He had been standing behind the bar doing his paperwork. A hand-held calculator, a corporate checkbook, and a sheaf of bills were in front of him.

"Susan."

"Where you coming from, Susan?"

"Calgary. My husband left there three months ago, gone to Texas to look for work in the oil fields. I'm on my way to join him. But he couldn't send me any money."

"You hitchhiking?"

"Yeah." She brushed her hair back with a hand. "You wouldn't believe the crap I have to put up with, guys picking me up in their pickups and semis."

"How about a chili potato on the house? I make the chili from scratch, and I dump it into a baked potato and grate cheese over it."

She grinned gratefully, then slipped off her backpack and put it at her feet. She slid onto a stool.

Miller wrapped an apron around his waist. "I like to think my potatoes are famous, but I serve less than thirty meals a week. I cook and wait tables, and then I bus and clean the plates. I wish I could offer you a job."

"I understand."

"I used to make a pretty good living," Miller added. "But the town has dried up and is on the verge of blowing away."

"Don't apologize." She smiled warmly. "I understand."

The Right's door swung in and four men entered single file. They had the look of tough accountants, which meant they were FBI agents. They were all in slacks and windbreakers. They took chairs together at a round table under an elk head. The first to take his seat lifted the menu which was encased in an upright plastic stand.

Ray Miller said to the hitchhiker, "I'll get these guys' order and be right back to start on your potato, Susan."

As Miller rounded the bar to wait on the table, five more men and two women entered the saloon. All wore Idaho State Patrol uniforms. They took the table near the stuffed Chinese pheasant.

Miller nodded at the State Patrol officers as he walked to the table of FBI agents. "May I help you? I recommend the potatoes."

Before any of the agents could answer, the door opened again. This time two men in sports coats entered. Miller did not know it, but they were Boise plainclothes policemen. Before the door pulled itself closed, in came five more state patrolmen, then three Idaho National Guardsmen in summer field uniforms.

His pen poised over the pad, Miller asked the FBI agents, "You fellows looking for that Russian that Chief Durant told me about?"

"That's right." The agent had a preacher's quick, confiding smile.

"Lots of you folks coming to Hobart?"

"Lots."

"How many?"

The agent asked, "What's an Oinker Potato?"

"Strips of crisp bacon and chunks of tomato over melted cheddar cheese."

"I'll have one of them."

The door swung open again. A man and a woman entered wearing uniforms Miller did not recognize. He squinted at their arm insignia. Coeur d'Alene police.

Miller tried again. "You could do me a big favor helping me plan my kitchen by letting me know how many of you are in town."

"Couple hundred."

"Going to be here for long?"

"Four, five days, a week. Who knows? And a Diet Pepsi."

"I'll be right back," the saloon owner blurted. He hurried to the bar, weaving between the full tables. He rushed to the stool where the hitchhiker Susan had been sitting. It was empty.

"Gone," Miller breathed miserably. "Goddamnit."

But she was still in the saloon. Wearing an apron she had found on a hook on the cooler door, she was behind the bar, bent over the ice machine, ladling ice into glasses. She put one under the Diet Pepsi spigot.

She smiled again at Miller. "I take it I have a week's work."

"Looks like it'll be a long, long week. Make both of us some money."

He scurried back to the FBI agents, still smiling.

So it was that Hobart and environs came to groan under the weight of law personnel. They emptied the Big Wood Grocery Store, bought all the gas at the Sinclair station, filled the Hobart Motel, and cleaned out Bud's Drug of candy bars and newspapers. But Ray Miller never ran out of potatoes, because if there is one thing Idaho has, it's potatoes, and as the state's license plate will testify, they are famous. The law officers and soldiers filled the streets with their vehicles, jammed the telephone lines, stood on the corners, swaggered and smiled, and added a sense of wonder and purpose to the lives of Hobart citizens.

Owen Gray lay on his belly, the M-40A1 Marine Corps sniper rifle in front of him. His left hand was forward, with the palm against the stock ferrule swivel and the sling high on his arm. His wrist was straight and gently locked so the rifle rested on the heel of the hand. The fingers cupped the stock but did not grip it. His left elbow was under the rifle's receiver. The bones, not his muscles, supported the rifle. The wood butt was firmly in the pocket of his right shoulder. His right hand was wrapped around the checkered stock with the thumb extended over the narrow portion of the stock. Gray's left elbow was the pivot to move the barrel. His shoulders were level. His trigger finger lay alongside the guard.

The barrel was free-floated, meaning that it was secured to the chamber but did not touch the stock. The gap between the stock and barrel was the thickness of a dollar bill, and this clearance prevented the stock from distorting the barrel from one shot to the next. The barrel was heavier than on most other rifles, and this distributed heat from the powder discharge more evenly, reducing warpage. Near his elbow was a box of match ammunition, so called because each bullet in the same box and each box in the same case had the identical serial number, indicating the bullets had been manufactured with the same batch of gunpowder on the same day, thereby eliminating the vagaries in powder that might randomly change muzzle velocity.

He peered over the scope. Shepherd's Bowl was spread out before him. The bowl was misnamed, and was in fact a U-shaped valley. Fed by a small spring, Black Bear Creek originated in the valley and exited at the eastern end to wander two miles to the Gray ranch and then on to join the Big Wood River. Shepherd's Bowl was so named because a Basque shepherd— one of many who had come to Idaho in the early years — tried to raise sheep in the valley, had lasted one bitter winter, and had retreated with far fewer sheep than he had arrived with.

Gray was three-quarters up the north side of the bowl. The area was two miles long, running west — east, and a mile and a half across. The valley's center was thick with trees and undergrowth, particularly dense where Black Bear Creek formed itself and dribbled out of the valley. The creek was only a foot across at the mouth of the valley, but it provided water for hundreds of mature trees that trailed like a snake along the bottom of the valley. Also along the valley floor were a dozen patches of wild grass, each a half acre to an acre. These swaths of grass had convinced the poor shepherd he might be able to graze his flock in Shepherd's Bowl. The small meadows were covered with red-top grass, wild oats, rattlesnake grass, fireweed, and cheat grass, most growing to the height of a man's waist, with the fireweed protruding a foot or two from the soft blanket of weeds. The slightest wind pushed waves into the grasses. At this time of year the grass was yellow and dry.

Gray's hide was a small protrusion on the north slope, a cleft in the incline formed by stones and dirt sliding down the grade and building up behind a boulder over the centuries. The ledge was just large enough to lie on. By taking an indirect route, ducking through bushes and taking advantage of a few sparse trees on the north slope, it was possible to climb to the ledge without being seen from anywhere else in the bowl, but it took care and skill. Other distortions in the half-cone of the bowl's north side included more boulders, some with dogbane growing around them, banks of yellow-blooming Scotch broom, a few stunted lodgepole pines, and clusters of rolling brittle tumbleweed blown against outcroppings, but most of the north slope was open and clear. It curved around like the stands of a football stadium.

High on the bowl's north side at about Owen Gray's ledge the grade increased. He glanced over his shoulder at the surface that rose like a wave behind him. Here stones lay on each other, not cemented by soil but loose enough to sink or roll away under a footstep. Reflected sunlight flickered from quartz flakes in the granite stones. Occasional blades of cheat grass grew in the rubble. Papery yellow and red lichen topped many of the rocks. A few sego lilies dotted the scree, their blossoms resembling white butterflies. But these few living things did little to change the arid, tumbly, sun-baked nature of the north slope.

Gray looked back over the rifle to the other side of the bowl. The south side was hidden in shadows much of a summer day and all of winter, and was forested with pine and aspen and other trees. Gaps in the tree cover revealed green and flowering underbrush. So different were they that the north and south sides of Shepherd's Bowl could have been on different continents. Behind the bowl, jagged peaks were limned against the diamond-blue sky.

He lowered himself over the rifle's butt, stock, and grip, which snipers call the furniture. Gray checked himself again. His right cheek and right thumb — curled over the small of the stock — formed a spot weld. He could not feel where his body ended and the rifle began. This firm weld would allow Gray's head, hand, and rifle to absorb recoil as one unit. He brought his eye to a position behind the lens's eyepiece, sighting on a low knot in a pine near the valley's mouth. He kept his eye back from the lens to protect it from recoil. Too close, and the scope would cut a bloody circle to the bone around the eye. When he took a deep breath, the crosshairs moved down straight through the center of the target, indicating he was well balanced over the rifle.

Gray had always credited a rifle scope with magical qualities. He well understood the optics. He knew the objective lens at the front of the scope produced an upside-down and backward image of the target. In the middle of the scope, the erector lens magnified the image and returned it to its correct position. The eyepiece lens then magnified the image further. He knew that while the average eye can distinguish a one-inch detail at a hundred yards, a one-sixth-inch detail could be seen with a 6X scope. An object viewed from six hundred yards through a 6X telescope will have the same clarity as if viewed by the unaided eye from a hundred yards. He knew that the magnesium fluoride coating on his lens increased transmission of light from about 45 percent to 86 percent. No sorcery in any of this.

But those same optics that magnified the view and flattened the perspective also flensed away humanity. In Vietnam when Gray peered through a scope, the image quartered by the cross-hairs was not a human but a target, nothing but a mathematical problem of windage and velocity and direction. The scope had a marvelous ability to eliminate sloppy moral issues and extraneous questions of commitment to the cause. If it appeared through the scope, Gray could kill it.

The scope's magic survived time and tragedies, it seemed. He had accepted the rifle with stomach-churning trepidation, but even after the decades he had felt its supernatural power of simplification on the Brooklyn roof as he found the target. Once his eye was on the crosshairs he was ready in all respects to pull the trigger. The ghastly outcome — the death of Mrs. Orlando — had sickened him, had left him exhausted with grief. Yet here he was on a perch high in a mountain bowl ready again to pull the trigger, as long as all the world's complexities were filtered out by the rifle scope.

He lifted his head to avoid eyestrain. At the mouth of the valley, several low branches of a dogwood were rattling, whipping left and right. The only animals that would make such a commotion were a bear using the tree to scratch its back or an elk or moose trying to rid its horn of felt. Gray sighted in on the dogwood, not intending to pull the trigger, but saving himself from reaching for his binoculars. He narrowed his eye slightly. The rifle was dead calm in his hands, so still that a bead of mercury placed precisely on top of the barrel would have remained there.

Adrian Wade's face popped into the crosshairs, her eyes like flares in the scope. She had emerged suddenly from under the tree, but now caught her jacket on a branch. She yanked on it and finally freed herself.

Gray jerked his eye up from the scope.

He pivoted the weapon aside. He found her with his unaided eye. Her red coat and black hair stood out like a sailor's emergency dye on a calm sea. He brought up the binoculars. She was scanning the bowl, moving her head randomly, an amateur's visual search that would miss him entirely. He stood, removed his coat, and waved it back and forth until she started in his direction. She crossed a wide clump of purple heather and ducked through a barricade of Scotch broom. She climbed the slope, coming at him from the southeast, gaining elevation as she hiked deeper into the valley.

She was hurrying. More than hurrying, she was frantically pedaling her legs. Again Gray brought up the binoculars. Sweat flowed freely down her face, and her mouth was open and panting. He used the field glasses to search the trees behind her, but she was not being chased. As he watched her ascend the bowl, he pulled an apple from his pack and ate it from the bottom up, and consumed every part of it except the stem, which the twins had told him was the weirdest thing in existence. He had learned to eat an apple that way in Vietnam because an apple core might be found by an enemy trying to follow him.

He liked watching Adrian Wade, Gray admitted to himself. She moved with the grace of an athlete, even on the unstable slope and even though she was breathing heavily in this oxygen-weak altitude. She reached the loose scree just below his hide and used her hands to climb the last yards up to him, pumping her legs as the rocks gave way.

She gasped. "I don't suppose you could have met me halfway."

"I was eating my lunch." He flicked away the apple stem.

She climbed onto the ridge and collapsed on the soft soil and gravel. Her chest heaved as she worked the thin air. She leaned back on her elbows. Her face glimmered with sweat. She dragged a sleeve across her forehead. Gray lifted a canteen from his pack and handed it to her. Her pistol was a bulge under her coat.

She drank greedily, then said, "I thought I was in good shape."

"You were running like you had turpentine on your butt. What's going on?"

After a moment her breathing eased. She smiled and said majestically, "I have your answer."

Gray scratched his neck where a deerfly had bitten him. "I have more questions than you have answers, I'll bet."

She laughed gaily and shook her head. "I'm good, you know that? Man, I'm good."

Gray couldn't help but smile along with her. "You are busting your buttons."

"Owen, you are going to grovel with thanks before me. You've spent years and years wandering around in the dark, your hand out in front of you to ward off unseen dangers, and now I'm going to lead you to the light." She tilted her head back and laughed again, a victorious chortle.

The sun played with her hair. He had not seen the flecks of red and gold in it before, but the harsh high-altitude light found tiny glints of color among the ebony. And the light made the shock-white skin of her face translucent, revealing delicate blue lines beneath. Her mouth was curved and lush and red. Perspiration made her face shine as if in the afterglow of passion.

Her mouth came together to say something but Gray beat her to it. "I know. I'm staring. I'll stop."

Her eyes were amused. "Go ahead and stare." Then another laugh. "I'm going to blow you off this ledge with my news."

"Stop crowing and tell me."

"I don't want you to think it came easily."

"You're still crowing."

Surrounded by computer and communication equipment, Adrian Wade had spent hour after hour in her corner of the cabin's living room. Last night Pete Coates and Gray sat at the table under the antler chandelier sipping coffee and watching her. She seldom rose from her seat in front of the monitor, and when she did it was to insert or retrieve a document from a fax machine. She would stare, then pound the keyboard, then stare again, gritting her teeth, drumming the table, occasionally leafing through the pages of several three-ring binders. Or she would speak into the telephone, sometimes in English but usually in Russian. Gray once delivered coffee to her, but it remained untouched on the desk until it was cold. Once in a while she would say something aloud but only to herself, and Gray doubted she was aware she was speaking. Things like "Good for Captain Mason. I've got the patch through." And, "I didn't even think Donetsk had telephones." And, "His assistant owes me one, so I'll try him." Coates and Gray would look at each other and shrug, not having the slightest idea what she was talking about. Her voice and manner changed from one phone call to the next. At times she was as hard as a labor negotiator. On other calls her voice had the dulcet tones of a diplomat. Sometimes she wheedled and entreated and cajoled, then abruptly became angry, then smoothly placating. It was an entertaining performance, even though Gray and Coates could not understand most of what she said. Last night she had been at her station when Coates and Gray had turned in, and she was there when they got up in the morning. Gray did not know if she had slept.

She demanded, "Give me a date between 1947 and half a year ago."

"A game? I don't feel like playing games."

"Any date."

Gray pinched the bridge of his nose. "April 5, 1956."

"Nikolai Trusov has six weeks remaining in the third form at the Korsko Preliminary School in the village of Valosk, south of Moscow. He is wearing a cast on his forearm because of a fall from a tree."

"December 6, 1975."

"Trusov is in Olympic training at the Central Army Sports Club facility near Pervouralsk in the Ural Mountains. He is skiing forty miles a day, is on a rifle range two hours a day, and is undergoing an hour of weight training each day."

"August 12, 1987."

"Trusov is operating near Safir Chir, a town in the Panjshir Valley about seventy-five miles north by northwest of Kabul. He is attached to the 1st Recon Company, 2nd Motor-Rifle Regiment, 15th Motor-Rifle Division."

"I'm impressed," Gray admitted.

"I've known all this for two or three days. But there was a hole in my Nikolai Trusov calendar, and try as I might, I couldn't fill it in."

"What dates?"

"July through November 1970. General Kulikov and his staff in Moscow appeared to be working hard, but they couldn't find anything. I began to wonder about the dedication Kulikov was bringing to his investigation. Armies around the world produce mountains of records, and half of any army is employed generating documents about the other half. A chronicle of those five months of Nikolai Trusov's military career had to exist somewhere."

"So what did you do?"

"I goosed Kulikov." She leaned back further on her elbows, and her back touched the scree. It rattled and shifted, and a small stone slipped onto her shoulder. She flicked it aside. "At my request, FBI Assistant Director Robert Olin spoke with the Russian Republic's Vice President Felix Ogarkov, whose main job is lobbying western governments for aid for Russia. Olin spoke of how our government would view favorably in its foreign aid considerations any further and diligent assistance General Kulikov might give to the investigation of Trusov. This was yesterday morning. As I understand it, Ogarkov immediately alerted General Kulikov that should Kulikov help in procuring American aid, a diplomatic position might open up somewhere for him, maybe a consulship in the U. S. or Europe."

"It worked?"

"Kulikov dug his heels into his horse, I think. He found what I was looking for. In the late 1960s a training brigade was formed from troops in the Moscow Military District. So secret was the new brigade that rather than being somewhere in the chain of command under General Polynin, who was head of all ground forces, the brigade was under General Bukharin, chief of the Main Political Directorate."

"A training brigade that was secret? That's unusual, isn't it?"

She let the question hang for a few seconds before delivering the hook. "The 1st Special Training Brigade was sent to Vietnam. The Pentagon has long known that Soviet pilots trained North Vietnamese pilots. And now it seems that the Soviets were training soldiers, also. Nikolai Trusov taught marksmanship and fieldcraft. And he did some shooting, maybe in Vietnam. The general found out that Trusov already had eleven kills before he went to Afghanistan. Polynin said the files weren't complete, and he doesn't know the nature of the kills, but they are recorded. So with Trusov's seventy-eight kills in Afghanistan, he's up to eighty-nine."

A cable seemed to tighten around Gray's chest. "He was in Vietnam?"

Another smile. "He trained NVA and Viet Cong snipers. General Kulikov has now spoken to three other sniper instructors in the 1st Brigade. They all have clear memories of Nikolai Trusov, and they all remember his last day of active service in Vietnam."

Owen Gray stopped breathing.

She said, "The 1st Brigade instructors all knew of you, Owen. White Star was famous and feared. You and the other American snipers were the reason the 1st Brigade went to Vietnam. You had shown the devastating effect of a lone man and a high-powered rifle, and the Vietnamese were determined to counter you with their own snipers. So in came the Russian instructors."

Gray willed his lungs to work, and he asked, "Where was Trusov in Vietnam?"

"He spent most of his five months in Vietnam at an NVA camp near Chu Lai until he left the camp to travel south."

Gray closed his eyes.

"He bragged to his 1st Brigade friends that he was the finest marksman in the world, and there was only one way to prove it. He told them he was going to hunt you down. And so one day in November 1970 he took off, knowing you were operating somewhere in Elephant Valley."

"The man I killed was an American."

She shook her head. "Nikolai Trusov was wearing a U.S. Marine Corps field uniform and backpack. He had gotten it from the NVA, who must've taken it off a dead American. He wore it to confuse you, knowing that at the very least you would hesitate a moment. That's all Trusov thought he needed to defeat you, a moment of indecision on your part."

Gray opened his eyes. Adrian was no longer smiling. He said, "Even if what you say is all true, I killed the man in Elephant Valley."

"As hard as it is to admit for a sharpshooter like you, your bullet was high and wide."

"He was dead. I saw him."

"You put a trench in his head. It knocked him senseless and he bled profusely. You saw a mask of blood over his face, but you weren't looking at a fatal injury. And you've said yourself you only saw the downed target through your binoculars. You never walked to the enemy soldier to check him out."

Gray was staring at the scree behind Adrian, seeing nothing. He stammered, "You.. you have no idea… "

A small wind brushed her damp hair. "I've been unable to discover who found the wounded Trusov in the valley, or when, but we can presume it was an NVA or Viet Cong patrol. But General Kulikov, rushing after a diplomatic post, connected me with the 1st Brigade medical officer who first treated Trusov after he was carried back into the Chu Lai camp. The medical officer is now a professor of medicine at Moscow University. He told me that the bullet had exposed Trusov's brain, left it open to the air. He put a dressing on it, and Trusov was returned to the Soviet Union several days later, still out cold. At some later date he regained consciousness, and later still a metal plate was put in his head."

The revelations seemed to have deboned Gray. He was limp and sagging. He whispered, "For all this time… "

"Your ninety-seventh kill wasn't a kill, and he wasn't an American."

Gray was still staring over her shoulder. Her news was seeping into him, impossible to absorb all at once. The central fact of his existence for most of his adult life — the anchor secured to his mind and heart and soul — had just vanished. It left a vacuum, and for the moment he was incapable of filling it with amazement or elation or gratitude.

"So you are back down to ninety-six." Her grin was back in place.

He shook his head. "Ninety-seven. Mrs. Orlando."

"I'm sorry," she said in a diminished tone. "But poor Mrs. Orlando's death was different. You were tricked by an expert. You didn't kill Mrs. Orlando. Nikolai Trusov murdered her. You only pulled the trigger. You might as well blame the rifle's manufacturer as yourself."

"I know all the rationalizations already," Gray said.

"Much of your burden has been that you ran away in Elephant Valley."

"That's so nicely put."

"But it's true," she persisted. "You've railed against yourself all these years not so much because you fired quickly and you thought an American soldier died by your hand but because you ran and never reported it to anybody and left a family wondering. It was a bit of cowardice, and it has worked inside you like a worm ever since."

Gray rubbed his temple.

"Nobody goes through life without an unflattering glimpse of himself or herself. You've had yours. You can fairly ascribe it to pressure of the field or youthful inexperience. But at the very least, the hard fact of killing the American is gone, just disappeared."

He abruptly grinned. "It has, hasn't it?"

Her news was sinking in. He felt lighter, as if gravity were exempting him. And giddy.

She smiled in recognition of her effect. "Am I good or what?"

"I never doubted it." He breathed the sweet air. "God, you have no idea…"

"So now all you have to worry about is Trusov."

"Why has he waited all this time to come after me, do you think?" Gray asked.

She shrugged. "Most of the time he was in the army or in a prison and couldn't come. Before that, who knows? Maybe the desire for revenge and to prove himself against you took a long time to eat away at him. Or maybe he wasn't crazy enough yet."

Gray nodded, lost in thought, his eyes on the distant rim of the bowl.

She waved at the valley below them. "What are you doing way up here?"

"I'm learning the terrain. Or relearning it, as I played a lot here as a kid."

She stood up, stepping over his legs, staying well away from the rifle. "I'm going back to the cabin." She turned for her descent. Stones skidded down the steep hill in front of her. She sidestepped down. A redtail hawk drifted over the bowl's ridge, black against the sky.

After several moments Gray put the binoculars to his eyes to watch her. Watch her move. Watch her black hair and her hips and shoulders.

She must have known he was watching her, because she suddenly turned to look back at him and smile and wave. Gray flushed. She knew him better than he had supposed. She disappeared in the grove of trees at the mouth of the valley.

He tapped the sniper rifle's stock and said, "I'm more comfortable with you than with her."

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

"What are you making?" Andy Ellison asked.

"A surprise."

"For whom?"

"For the people chasing us." Trusov poured nails onto a plate in front of him.

"Are you making a bomb?" Ellison nervously chewed on a lip. He was wearing a Janis Joplin T-shirt and denim cutoffs. A string with one ceramic bead was around his neck.

"Something like that."

"Don't you think that's a little… a little violent?"

Trusov shrugged. He used a knife to cut a stick of dynamite in half, then snipped off a length of duct tape to close off the dynamite's open ends.

"Where'd you get all this stuff?" the hippie asked, pointing to the table and then to the green duffel bag on the floor next to Trusov's left leg.

"I find things. I'm good at finding things."

"I mean, a person just doesn't find dynamite."

"He does if he looks in a build house." Trusov inserted a Madoz detonator into the half-stick.

"Build house?" Ellison hesitated, then understood. "The phrase is 'construction shack.' "

Trusov nodded. "I have always been a good traveler. I change my clothes, I change my routes, I change my carrying bag. I pick things up as I go. I watch the ground in front of me, and every fifty paces I check over my shoulder." He placed the dynamite and detonator onto the plate, then placed several more handfuls of nails on top of them. "I'm never caught, not while I'm still moving."

They were sitting in the kitchen of a two-story house on the outskirts of Butte. The vacationing owners — the tiny placard under the doorbell identified them as the Robinsons — had stopped their newspapers, but it had taken the paperboy two days to figure it out. Trusov had found two old newspapers on the front step. He had broken in by a side window. The kitchen floor was of black-and-white tile. Pots and strings of garlic and dried red peppers hung from a frame above the stove. Trusov had spread a newspaper below his work on the table. Near the duffel bag on the floor were several five-gallon cans of gasoline and a box of plastic garbage bags. Ellison hadn't asked him about the gasoline. The rifle leaned against the wall behind Trusov. Ellison had glimpsed several other rifles in the duffel bag. The blinds were drawn throughout the house.

Trusov explained. "In Afghanistan our airplane was hit by anti-aircraft. The pilot landed the plane in a field. I walked three hundred kilometers across that country to safety. Nobody caught me. Nobody even saw me."

"What happened to the pilot?"

"I left him at the plane."

"What happened to him?" Ellison asked.

"Sometimes it is better to travel alone. Sometimes it is not." The Russian put a second plate on top of the first and bound the two plates together with duct tape. Inside the plates were the explosive, detonator, and nails. He held the thing up to show Ellison, turning it slowly. "A mine." He picked up yet another plate and ladled handfuls of nails onto it, beginning the second mine.

"Where did you learn English?"

"In prison. From a book." Trusov's smile was turned down at the corners. His grin never touched his eyes. "Now I ask you a question."

"Shoot." Ellison peeled back the wrapper on a granola bar, feeling safer now that the stranger was taking an interest.

"Why do you grow marijuana? Why not get a work?"

Ellison was offended. "The word is 'job,' and that is my job."

"Why not get a job where you don't go to prison?"

"Growing weed is all I know how to do. And it's a matter of principle."

Trusov fiddled with the detonator.

Ellison went on: "I'm holding on to my past as a matter of principle. My girlfriend of fifteen years left me and got a license to sell real estate. My dog wandered off because I wouldn't feed him meat or meat by-products. But I'm sticking with it. Rubbertire sandals, peace medallions, the works."

"You might not be as smart as I first thought," Trusov said, still working on the detonator.

Ellison hoped the big maul-faced man was joking. He ventured, "I've tried to stop time, stop the clock, just like the Amish in Pennsylvania and Ohio have. They stopped the clock in the last century, and I stopped it in 1968."

Trusov appeared uninterested, working on his second mine.

Ellison forged ahead. "Do you ever wish you could stop time?"

The Russian slowly lowered the plate. "I'm happy where I am. And with what I'm doing."

"Isn't there a time you wish you could return to?"

Trusov's eyes were blank. "There is one day I would want to have back, yes." Then he was silent and unblinking.

A full minute passed.

Andy Ellison generated cheer in his voice. "But this'll soon be over. We'll shake them. They'll never find us."

"Yes, we will soon be released."

"The word is 'free.'"

The Russian looked at him. "Yes. Free."

The monitor glowed with vibrant colors, blue and green and red and orange and yellow, all in wavy lines unreadable to Owen Gray.

Coates pointed at the blue. "That's him. Heat shows as blue. He's in an upstairs bedroom."

"What's this?" Gray raised a finger at a dot of blue on the first floor.

An FBI technician answered, "He left a light on in the kitchen, probably the same light the Robinsons left on when they went on vacation."

The three men were in a delivery truck that read "Big Sky Plumbing" on the side. They were parked fifty yards from the Robinson house. The infrared's sensor was located in the passenger-side rearview mirror, and the apparatus was pointed at the Robinsons' house. The technician played with a dial. A row of blue shades appeared at the bottom of the screen, from ice-blue to dark purple, each in a small box.

The technician instructed, "A person asleep has a different blue signature than one awake." He pressed a finger onto the screen below a light blue, then pointed at the wavy blue figure in the middle of the monitor. "See? Same color. So he's asleep."

"You sure it's Trusov?" Gray asked. He was squatting on one side of the technician, Coates on the other. He held his rifle by the stock, butt plate on the floor. Gray's leg ached where the axe had sliced into it. The tech sat on a low milking stool, facing the monitor and keyboard.

"A mailman on his way home from a softball game spotted Trusov entering the house about nine tonight."

Every post office in the western U.S. had a photograph of Trusov. Same with every Federal Express and UPS office and 7-Eleven and gas station. Every newspaper had run photographs of the Russian. In Montana alone three quarters of a million people knew his face.

Coates carried a flashlight in his hand. "And the Silver Bow County sheriff's department has been watching the house since about ten. No one has come or gone since then. It's the Russian, we're pretty certain."

"What about that dope grower Trusov forced the Black Hawk pilot to pick up?" Gray asked. "That could be him asleep in there."

"We don't know where he is. He's not in the house, because the heat detector sees only this one body, and Trusov was seen going into the house."

An hour ago Gray arrived in Butte, flown from Hobart by Bruce Taylor in the Black Hawk. After the disaster in Jefferson County, Coates had realized he was in over his head. Coates had said that had Gray been there, Gray might have sniffed out Trusov's presence in the field behind the helicopter. Gray had doubted it, but Coates had insisted Gray be present when next they cornered the Russian. Gray had the best chance of detecting a trap.

The technician asked, "Why don't you just plug the Russian right now from here. Hell, we've got rifles powerful enough that they'll send a bullet through that house's wall, through Trusov, out the far wall, and into the Pacific time zone."

Coates rubbed his chin. "There's a chance it's that hippie lying sleeping in there, not Trusov. There was an hour gap between when Trusov was seen entering the house and when the sheriff's department started the surveillance."

The tech was wearing a Pendleton shirt and climbing boots. He had a porky face, and it creased into a grin. He reached for a manila envelope. "But look at this." He pulled out an X-ray radiograph, switched on the cab's overhead light, and held the sheet up.

"You X-rayed the house?" Coates asked. "X rays will go through wood?"

"You bet, if you crank them up. They're called hard X rays. But it won't go through metal. And that person on the bed is never going to have children, but we don't care about that, do we?" He started a laugh but swallowed it when Coates and Gray would not join in. The technician pointed at the plate. "This dark figure on the X ray is the barrel, bolt, and scope of a rifle."

Coates stared at it for a moment. "No hippie carries a rifle around. That's Trusov all right."

The tech suggested again, "Let's plug him from here. Save the taxpayers some money."

Coates ordered, "You tell me over the radio if Trusov gets up from that bed. You got that?"

The tech dipped his chin, returning the X-ray photo to its envelope. Coates pulled an earplug from his shirt pocket and pushed it into his ear. The plug was in fact the entire radio, manufactured by Motorola, with receiver, antenna, battery, and speaker all in a package no larger than the tip of a finger. Coates led Gray out the van door. The night was still, the Montana night sky vast and painted. The Robinson house was a smudge in the distance, black on black. Six other law enforcement personnel waited at the back of the vehicle. The detective pulled his revolver from under his coat. "We're going in."

"Terrific." Gray's voice was flat.

Gray flipped the M-40 A1's safety off. He followed the detective along the road toward the house. An FBI agent followed, carrying a set of picks on a steel ring. He clasped the picks together so they would not jingle. A quarter mile down the road was a sedan with three FBI agents standing near it, barely visible in the starlight. Other agents and sheriff's deputies were a hundred yards behind the house.

The three men neared the house. A slash of light was visible under venetian blinds at the kitchen window, the same light seen as a heat source on the monitor. At the picket fence Gray ran his free hand up and down the gate pickets and over the latch. He nodded at Coates. There were no booby traps attached to the gate. They pushed it open slowly. The gate did not squeak. They moved along a concrete walkway between planter beds of orange and red marigolds that stunk even at night.

The FBI agent took the lead and stepped onto the porch. He knelt at the door and worked his picks. Ten seconds later he nodded. Gray and Coates removed their shoes. Gray slowly twisted the knob. He nudged the door open three inches, then reached behind it to check the inside knob. He pushed the door open a fraction further, and reached inside further, checking for string triggers.

When the door was open fully, Gray led Coates inside. He moved slowly to avoid sound and to carefully survey the house. Each step was deliberated before taken. Gray's eyes searched the walls and the rugs and the furniture. The living room was dark except for light coming from the kitchen. Mrs. Robinson's collection of porcelain dolls — dozens of them — stared from a display case. A Wurlitzer organ was in one corner, with open sheet music on its stand. The room smelled of a dog, probably on vacation with the Robinsons.

Coates tapped Gray on the shoulder to stop him, then put his lips at Gray's ear. The detective whispered, "The earplug just said he's still lying on the bed. Hasn't moved."

Gray's hand ran over the riser and the first step to the second floor. He began up, checking the banister rail and pickets and the steps as he climbed. He paused on each step, listening and feeling. Gray led Coates into the second-story hallway. Gray slid his stockinged feet along soundlessly.

When they reached the closed bedroom door, the detective tapped his earplug and gave the thumbs-up. The tech had just reported Trusov was still asleep.

Gray put his hand around the knob. As slowly as he could and still be moving, he turned the knob.

Coates lifted his thumb again, keeping his fingers around the flashlight handle. Still asleep. His pistol was at his ear. His teeth were bared.

Gray turned the knob. The bolt freed itself from the door frame. He inched the door open and slipped his hand inside to feel the interior knob. He slid his hand up and down the inside of the door as far as he could reach in up to his elbow. Nothing. No traps. He nodded at the detective.

Coates clicked on the flashlight and rushed the door. He swept into the room yelling, "Hands up, asshole. You're under arrest."

Gray followed, the bore of his rifle instantly pointing at the bed. He almost slipped on the damp floor.

The detective aimed the flashlight. "Goddamnit." He pointed the beam up and down the body. "Goddamnit to hell." The beam found the face on the pillow. "It's that hippie."

Andy Ellison lay on the bed, fully clothed, his throat laid open ear to ear. Blood was pooled on the floor in several places. Trusov had slit his throat, then dragged him to the bed.

Coates stepped to the wall to throw the light switch. Nothing happened. He pointed the flashlight at the overhead socket. The bulb was missing. He returned his flashlight's beam to the body on the bed. Blood had further dyed Ellison's tie-dyed shirt. A deer rifle leaned against the wall near the bed. A framed charcoal drawing of a bearded, severe family patriarch from the nineteenth century hung on one wall.

Gray put his hand across Ellison's forehead. It was still warm. "He's only been dead fifteen or twenty minutes."

Coates brought his gun hand to his forehead, pressing the back of his hand against his head. "That sensor didn't detect the heat of a man sleeping but of a man permanently cooling." He added sourly, "He might've been a puke dope grower, but he didn't deserve this."

Gray's nose came up. He sniffed, then suddenly pushed Coates toward the door. Too late.

Fire spilled from above the doorway to the wood floor, where it splashed into the room. The wall where the charcoal portrait hung shimmered as if liquid, then licks of fire curled through the wallpaper. An instant later the wall was a sheet of fire.

Gray pushed Coates's shoulders as they fled the bedroom. In the hallway fire gushed from a heating vent like a blowtorch, spreading quickly along the hall and slopping down the stairs, black smoke twisting away and ebbing against the ceiling. Lace curtains disappeared in a flash of fire. Above the second bedroom door the hatch to the attic had been left partly open. The sound of a dull burst came from the attic, then flames spewed down through the hatch, a red and yellow torrent of fire. The two men splashed through puddles of flame. Gray's pants legs caught, and he swatted them. When another muffled rupture sounded, the bathroom instantly filled with flames, billowing and surging, then rushing out into the hall.

Wallpaper peeled and curled, then caught on fire. The ceiling was abruptly made of flame rather than wood, a dome of fire above them. The old house popped and hissed and groaned. The fire sounded like a locomotive.

They reached the stairs. The steps crawled with flames. Gray fought for breath, and his throat and lungs seemed parboiling. The air was black with acrid smoke. Gray blindly led Coates down the stairs, feeling the fire work on his pants legs. Flames swirled and coiled, reaching for them. They tumbled down the stairs, a huge hand of fire reaching down after them.

Gray and Coates sprinted through the main room and out the door, leaving the blaze behind. Gray sucked the cool air into his lungs and swatted at his pants legs.

Coates bent over, hands on his knees, gulping air. He wiped his face with his sleeve. He formed the words slowly. "Christ, that was nasty."

Gray squeezed his eyes closed. His pants and shirt radiated heat as if just taken from a clothes dryer. Behind him the second story of the Robinson house was fully on fire with flames pouring out of windows that had been shattered by heat. The FBI locksmith was running toward them, and several law-enforcement cars were speeding along the road toward the house.

"We could've been killed," Coates said. He swatted embers from his jacket sleeve.

Gray shook his head. "Trusov was toying with us."

"He was playing a game? Why?"

"Trusov is a predator. A cat. And a cat plays with its mouse before it kills it."

Owen Gray sat under the antlers in the dining room. The Marine Corps sniper rifle was on the table. He was installing an Army-issue MILE — a multiple integrated laser engagement system — on the barrel. The MILE was slightly larger than a cigarette pack, and it fit on the front of the barrel just behind the sight. Also on the table was a scope mount extension that would raise the scope an inch to allow the shooter to peer over the MILE. The installation and instruction booklet was held open by a Crescent wrench placed across its pages. Gray worked slowly, occasionally turning pages in the booklet. He was unfamiliar with the laser system designed to put a dime-size red dot on the target's forehead.

Coates returned from the telephone. "The FBI has determined how Trusov booby-trapped the house in Butte."

Gray looked up from the weapon.

"He removed light bulbs from their sockets, then connected the electrical wires above the bulbs. He did so for all the lights on that fuse, essentially making one long filament from the fuse box. When I threw the light switch on in the bedroom the fuse should have blown."

"So why didn't it?"

"Because Trusov had removed the fuse and stuck a penny in the fuse box. With no fuse to blow, the electrical wires overheated in just a few seconds. Trusov had also been in the attic, where he placed eight or nine plastic containers of gasoline right on the exposed wires. When the wires caught fire so did the gasoline. Our Russian is a smart boy."

Coates sat across from Gray and lifted the bottle of beer he had been nursing. He resumed peeling the label off with his thumbnail. His half-filled glass was near his elbow. A tray of cold cuts and a dish of apples were also on the table. He sipped the beer.

"The FBI has learned that his name was Andy Ellison, the one Trusov killed in the booby-trapped house," the detective said. "Why do you suppose the Russian went to all the trouble to pick him up in the helicopter and take him along for the ride, when all Trusov was going to do was slit his throat? Any warm body would've worked to draw us into that house."

Gray replied, "A sniper works anonymously, seldom with an audience, except his spotter. Maybe Trusov needed an audience for his cleverness, even some poor fellow he was going to murder."

Coates nodded. "Yeah, maybe."

"Or perhaps the Russian just wanted to talk, to unburden himself a little."

"He doesn't strike me as the talky type."

Gray said quietly, "We all need someone we can let go a little with, even snipers."

Behind Coates, Adrian Wade tapped at her computer keyboard. Lights in the room were low, but her hands and documents and notes were under an orb of illumination from a nightstand light. The fire on the grate was crackling.

Coates looked across the table at his friend. "You can let go with me, Owen. Are you holding up all right?"

Gray lowered the rifle to the table near several tubes of camouflage grease paint. He glanced over at Adrian, then back to the detective. "No, I'm not."

"You getting any sleep?"

"Not much." Gray's voice was the ghost of a whisper. "And I'm not keeping my food down." He wiped his upper lip with a finger. "A couple of times out in the woods I've found myself bent over, heaving away. My stomach feels like some farmer is turning it over with a mule and plow. I look back now, Pete, and I don't know how I did two tours in Vietnam."

"We older guys can't take it."

"I'm terrified." Gray let out a long breath. "My children have been orphans once and I'm afraid of leaving them orphans again. And I'm afraid for myself. I don't want a bullet to find me. I'm so frightened I'm having trouble swallowing."

Adrian Wade flicked off her light and rose from her desk. She walked over, her hands at the small of her back as she twisted out a kink in her muscles. She sat next to Coates, then lifted an apple from the basket.

She must have been listening, because she said, "You don't need to be afraid yet, Owen."

"The mad Russian isn't after you, so perhaps you aren't the best judge of whether I should be afraid." He smiled quickly to take offense from his words.

She brought the apple to her mouth, but instead of biting into it, she said, "Nikolai Trusov wants one thing in this life, and that is to re-create the day you shot him. Brick by brick, board by board, he is reconstructing that day."

"Do you think he wanted Owen to return to Idaho?" Coates asked. "Was that part of his plan?"

"He had Owen's high school yearbook, and so he knew Owen came from Hobart. So Trusov might have guessed Owen would return to Idaho. But I suspect that the precise location where Owen went after Trusov chased him from Manhattan didn't matter to the Russian as long as it was wilderness. Trusov needs wilderness as part of his plan."

She took a tiny bite of the apple, more a gesture, and went on. "Look at what he has done so far." She brought up her other hand to count off with her fingers. "First, he has chased you from the city into the wilderness. Idaho isn't Elephant Valley but it's still bush and forest. Second, he has forced you to return to your old profession of sniping. Third, he has stolen your Vietnam weapon, and he is going to insist you use it, not some other rifle."

"What's he going to do with my old Winchester?" Gray asked.

"He is going to somehow present it to you. And that's what I mean when I say you don't need to be afraid yet. That day in November 1970 won't be fully re-created and he won't begin the duel until you are using your Marine Corps sniper rifle. That's why he stole it from the museum. And fifth, we know that he is carrying with him a Mosin-Nagant sniper rifle, the one he used in Vietnam, or one identical to it."

Gray stared at the sniper rifle.

"Trusov would import tropical birds and bamboo and potted palms if he could. But he is going to settle for what he can get."

"Does Trusov have any more rules I ought to know about?" Gray asked.

Adrian pointed at the MILE. "He isn't going to allow you to use technology you didn't use in Elephant Valley. No lasers, no parabolic listening devices, no night vision goggles."

"What if we don't follow his rules?" Coates asked.

"He'll continue to kill anybody standing next to Owen until Owen understands his message and agrees to his rules."

Coates stepped to the couch in front of the fire and sank into one end of it. Adrian followed him, tucking herself into the other corner of the couch, leaning against the armrest. She kicked off her shoes and tucked her legs under her. Her blue-striped shirt was open to the second button. Her light-blue jeans were tight at her ankles. After a moment, Gray followed. He lifted a log from the box and threw it onto the fire before sitting between Adrian and the detective. Gray spread his legs, hooking a foot under the coffee table leg. Adrian was watching Gray.

"I think Nikolai Trusov has been telegraphing his movements." She spoke between bites of the apple.

"Wanting us to know his progress toward Idaho?" Coates asked.

"Sure. He is keeping ahead of the law but not particularly hiding his progress. He has left fingerprints everywhere. He has let himself be spotted a couple of times. For example, he didn't have to eat in that cafe in Mentor. His picture had been in the papers throughout Minnesota. He must've known he'd be spotted."

Coates agreed by nodding.

"And more than that," she continued. "The violence he inflicted on that gas station attendant in Cleveland was a message to us. He didn't need to do that. He could have flicked that fellow aside with the back of his hand. Trusov is too steady and professional to get carried away in trying to fend off some kid. He was telling us what we can expect if we don't go along with him."

"A long-distance message," Coates agreed.

The flames worked noisily at the wood. A charred log fell onto the embers, sending sparks up the chimney. The air was crowded with scents — fire smoke, old cedar, garlic from their pasta dinner, and Adrian's distinctive aroma, an eerily arresting and confounding fragrance.

When the telephone rang, the detective rose to cross the room to Adrian's desk. He carried his beer glass with him. After a moment he dropped the handset onto the receiver and walked back to the couch. "A sporting goods store near Butte has been broken into. A smash-and-grab. Trusov left his prints again."

"What'd he get?" Adrian asked.

"A .30–30 deer rifle and a .22, two shotguns, ammunition, three dozen hunting and fish-cleaning knives, some climbing rope, baling wire, and some cold-weather clothing. A cap, a pair of boots, that sort of thing. What's he want with the knives and rope and wire? And so many weapons?"

"Traps," Gray answered. "Protecting his hide and his routes with nasty surprises. Same thing I've done around here."

The detective rubbed the back of his neck. "Owen, I had hoped we wouldn't have to get to this because I thought we'd catch Trusov before he got here, but tomorrow you'd better start teaching me the lay of the land so I can help you when the time comes." He headed toward Gray's childhood bedroom. "I've got the bottom bunk. I'll be asleep in ten seconds." He disappeared through the door.

When Gray started to rise from his chair, Adrian's hand on his shoulder stopped him.

She asked, "Do you want to talk?"

"I'm out of talk." Gray's voice was so soft it mixed with the sounds of the fire. "Nikolai Trusov is reducing me to a rifle. Rifles don't have much to say."

Her hand was still on his shoulder. "We could talk about your plans after this is all over."

He looked at her a long moment. Then he gently shook his head. "For a number of days I haven't been able to think of any future beyond Trusov."

"You have a future, Owen. I'm interested in it."

He lifted himself from the couch. He stepped to the bedroom door, then glanced back at her. Searching for something to say, he found only "I'm interested in your future, too." He looked at her another moment, then continued into the bedroom.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

The Civilian Conservation Corps built the fire tower in the late 1930s, and it had been repaired and upgraded over the years, until the mid-1980s, when it was abandoned, a victim of Forest Service cutbacks and satellite technology. The tower was on Fellows Mountain, a granite peak that offered a thirty-mile view yet was accessible almost to its peak in a four-wheel-drive vehicle. So many mountains formed this long spine of central Idaho that many of them, even those over nine thousand feet, were unnamed. Fellows Mountain owed the distinction of a name because the Forest Service spotter who had worked there for twenty-two summers carried the name.

The tower offered a 360-degree view of the crests and cliffs and ridges and chimneys of the surrounding mountains. The distance in all directions was filled with powerful cut-tooth shapes. Below the jagged granite formations were the forested foothills and alpine cirque lakes. From the tower's height, man's feeble inroads into the wilderness — a few ranches, the stunted town of Hobart, the occasional hunter's shack, the winding roads — were entirely hidden.

The tower was five miles east of Owen Gray's cabin. It straddled a sharp ridge, two of its four support posts on the south slope and two on the north. Valleys fell away in both directions, steep walls of fractured granite that plunged with dizzying abruptness to avalanche gullies below. Beyond the valleys were more ridges and peaks, some with sparse coverings of pine trees. The rim of Shepherd's Bowl was visible, the basin out of sight. Daisies and thistles and tarweeds tried their best but made little headway on gray stone.

Gray and Coates parked the Jeep fifty yards from the tower, where the Forest Service road ended. They traveled over the broken ground, following a trail that wound to the south side of the ridge. Even after years of footsteps from rangers and hunters the path was hardly a path, noticeable only because some of the sharper stones had been turned aside by boots over the years. The sun was a flat plate high overhead. The rocks radiated heat. The air was light and scentless.

"So you know where Trusov is?" Gray asked between deep breaths.

"You think I've been picking my nose all this time?"

"It means he crossed some hard country on foot."

The detective said, "The man is a machine. We learned a long time ago he could jog forty miles with a full pack over rough country. And he's done just that." Coates turned his head halfway to Gray. "But he's still twenty miles away. He hasn't made it over the Galena Pass yet. We're sure of that."

The trail narrowed and curved around a boulder formation that brought Gray and Coates near the precipice. They carefully stepped around stones and continued up the ridge. Gray was carrying the Marine Corps sniper rifle on a sling and the backpack. In his hand was a rolled-up map.

They drew near to the tower, which loomed above them on the ridge. A shaky ladder was attached to one post and was connected to a closed trapdoor. Wood planks framed all four sides, above which were picture windows on all sides. The roof was pitched sharply to allow snow to slide off. A stovepipe breached the roof, its conical metal cap tilted.

Coates bent over, his hands helping him scramble up the incline. They reached the cool shadow under the tower. A few milkweed plants grew at the base of the poles. Gray tested a rung with his weight. Then he began to climb. He pushed open the trapdoor with the palm of his hand. Its hinge was made of leather. The door fell back onto the floor with a loud slap. He pulled himself up and through the hole. Coates climbed after him, his feet disappearing through the hatch.

The tower contained one room. The furniture and equipment had been removed long ago. The roof leaked when it rained, and spots on the wood floor were brown from dry rot. Several nails were on a corner post where the rangers had hung their coats. Two-by-tens laid over sawhorses had served as a table and were still in the tower.

Gray spread out the map on planks near a window. "We are here." He drew a finger across the map. "My house is here. This is north."

"I know north," Coates said testily.

"Your people shouldn't come anywhere inside this area." Gray's finger traced a large circle around his house.

"I'm going to catch that bastard before he gets anywhere near your place." Coates stabbed the map. "Owen, I've now got three hundred law-enforcement personnel in the field, a wall of people. Trusov isn't going to get near your place."

Gray might not have heard him. "Once Trusov is loose inside this area, keep your people away."

"So you can duel with him? That's not what I'm here for."

"It'll be too dangerous for your people to follow the Russian into the forest."

"Three hundred people—"

"They'll be ducks in a shooting gallery, Pete. Entirely out-gunned and outwitted."

"These are skilled people."

"Trusov will kill as many of them as he wants to. A dozen, two dozen." Gray's voice rose a fraction. "I'm telling you, it'll be a slaughter. Keep your people away from him and me once this has begun."

Coates stared at him.

"I'll have too much else to think about. I won't be able to keep them alive." Gray pointed out the window. "That's Bighorn Ridge." He located it on the map. "Over there is Sallick Mountain." Again back to the map to draw a circle. "I want you to promise me your folks won't get inside this circle."

"Well…"

Gray spit out, "Anybody in this circle is going to be a target. For Trusov and for me. I won't have the luxury of analyzing targets. I'm going to fire at any human I see."

Coates finally nodded. "Okay, nobody inside the circle."

Fine optics can make even clear air have a grain. The blue of the sky seems to ripple and bubble, giving substance to nothing. Those optics seem to enhance color, and the small circle of pallid blue sky inside the metal band was sparkling blue. Inside the little disc of sky was a pointed post, a needle-sized metal twig sharpened at the top. The sky, made viscous like a stream by the lenses, floated toward the top of the circle as the scope slowly lowered.

Rising from the bottom of the blue ring of sky was the stovepipe lid, then the pipe, then the tower roof's shingles. Then came the window, the sun's reflection harshly magnified by the scope's lenses.

Nikolai Trusov smoothly moved his finger from the trigger to the eyepiece lens to turn it two degrees. The window frame sharpened. He lowered the rifle, and rising in the scope was more of the tower window. The Russian could make out slight warps in the glass as wind brushed the tower. With steady motion, as if the weapon were on rails, the barrel and scope glided lower. Owen Gray's head rose in the circle. Black hair, pale skin, a tall man. Gray's nose came to rest just above the point of the scope's aiming post. The American's image was shivered by heat currents. Owen Gray. White Star.

Then the scene in the eyepiece lens drifted smoothly to the left. The shorter form slid into view. Barrel-chested, sandy hair, small features in a melon head. The aiming post came to rest on his nose, just below a pair of spectacles. Then it sidled down his neck to the man's right arm. Eight hundred yards south and a hundred yards below the tower, Trusov brought his trigger finger back. Slowly and slowly and slowly.

The Mosin-Nagant bucked back against his shoulder. Most snipers will remain in position after a shot, letting their barrel return to the firing plane. Thinking about another task to be accomplished immediately after the shot makes the attention wander. Trusov had more skill than most and more concentration than most. He instantly lowered the rifle to the boulder he hid behind and brought up his binoculars. He had practiced the maneuver, and the binoculars immediately found the tower glass.

A black slash in the flat scene visible in the binocular lenses was Trusov's bullet, flickering through the air, then disappearing with distance. The tower window shimmered as a hole was punched into it.

Blood and bone and shards of glass filled the air and lashed against the tower's far window like windblown rain. Pete Coates spun and then collapsed. Blood and bits of flesh slid down the far window. Trusov lowered the binoculars.

Snipers are taught that if they are captured or if they are surrounded, the time to break out is now, not later when the enemy has had time to regroup. All glass and plywood, the fire tower offered no protection from bullets. Coates groaned, blood spreading on the floor under his shattered elbow. Gray pushed him toward the hatch and without a word shoved him through. Coates landed heavily on the ground. The rifle in one hand, Owen Gray followed the detective through the hatch to the rocks below.

He landed hard on the incline and rolled involuntarily downhill, almost to the support post. Behind him, blood dripped from the hatch to splatter the stones. His shoes pushing against the loose rocks, Gray scrambled up the incline to push Coates behind a boulder. The detective moaned and his eyes opened. His elbow was frayed and bleeding, his jacket wicking away blood.

"Stay down," Gray ordered.

A bullet slammed into the rock supporting Gray's right foot. His leg collapsed, and he slid further down the incline. He tried to reach for the eight-by-eight, but he slid past, out into the blinding sun. He tightly gripped the rifle.

Hoping to find a foothold, he jammed a leg against the mountain-side, but the loose stones slid away beneath him, rolling and bouncing down the slope. He clawed at the rocks and managed to slow himself. His slide stopped when his foot found a brace against a stone.

Blasting up a cloud of granite grit, another bullet kicked away that stone. Gray fell again. The side of the mountain gained in pitch, and he slipped more quickly, his body bouncing painfully as he skidded over the rocks. He tried to jam the stock of his gun against a boulder to stop himself, but he was sliding too quickly and the boulder ripped the weapon out of his hand.

Feet downward he slid, crashing down the incline. With his left hand he frantically grabbed at a Scotch broom, a tawny, strong plant that would hold him. His fingers caught a branch. He stopped, perched precariously against the side of the mountain. Blood flowed from his legs where pants and skin had been abraded.

A bullet coursed into his left arm, digging a half-inch trench in his triceps. His arm jerked spastically and he lost his grip. Yet another bullet struck the heel of his boot, tearing off the leather and burning the bottom of his foot. His leg collapsed, again sending him helplessly down the steep hill. When his leg caught on a rock, his momentum flipped him to one side and he began to roll length-wise down the gully side, stones smashing into him as he tumbled. The world whirled madly around him. Blue sky and gray stone spun over and over. His head banged into a rock, then another.

He came to rest at the bottom of the gully. Scraped and shot and bleeding, he crawled behind a boulder that hid him from the south slope. His rifle was somewhere up the slope.

Gray heard several more shots and the shattering of glass. Trusov was disabling the Jeep.

Five minutes passed before his vision lost the fuzziness at the edges and Gray admitted to himself that he could think clearly again. The Russian hadn't been out to kill him or he would have. All the pieces of that day in Vietnam weren't yet in place. Gray was safe, the Russian probably gone.

Gray rose from behind the boulder. Limping and bleeding and aching, he crawled back up the slope.

The computer monitor displayed the photographs one after another, all with the clarity of 35-millimeter slides. Owen Gray at twelve months, a scant halo of dark hair, pudgy cheeks, an open smile revealing four baby teeth. Owen Gray, eighth grade, shy grin, eyes a little to the left as if a friend off-camera is razzing him. Owen Gray wearing a narrow black tie and a full grin, his hair over his forehead in the new fashion imported from Liverpool, his high school yearbook photo. Owen Gray's Marine Corps boot camp ID photo, shaved head, stunned look. Another Marine photo of Gray, this time receiving the Honor Man citation from a colonel, Gray wearing a white dress cap and a single chevron.

Next was a snapshot of Gray sitting in front of sandbags wearing a small mustache, a rifle with a starlight scope just visible at the edge of the frame. Next was a college yearbook photo, then one from law school, then a photo from his first year as a prosecutor. Gray was aging as the photos rolled by, a few wrinkles at the corner of his eyes, a slight rise in his hairline above the temples. The last, from six months ago, was taken at a federal prosecutors' dinner, showing Gray in black suit and a floral tie, wearing a confident but tired grin.

For a moment, Adrian stared at the screen, at the most recent photo, then she stroked the keyboard several times and Gray's baby photo appeared again on the monitor. Distant laughter from the troopers at their car on the other side of the big larch tree did not distract her. She went through the photos of Gray, this time more rapidly, watching him grow and stabilize and age. The photos revealed little, only what Gray was prepared to show the camera, but still, for a student of human nature as Adrian Wade was, there was much to be seen. Some scoffed at the notion of intuiting personality traits from photographs of a face. It smacked of the fakery of phrenology. But a camera could peek behind the surface of the skin, could betray confidences and convictions to the careful viewer.

She leaned back in her chair studying Owen Gray's face. Her work in the mountains was finished, her investigating and computer skills no longer needed. She should have been packing her few things, readying for the journey east, but her clothes remained on pegs in the bedroom. She idly tapped her fingers on the base of the keyboard. She wore her Goretex jacket, only slightly askew on her shoulders because of the handgun under the fabric. To her left, the antler chandelier swung slowly in a draft. Sunlight streamed through the windows, making the room dark by contrast. Outside, a song sparrow let loose with its three piping cheerful notes, followed by a rapid slur of a smaller trill. Adrian lifted her wallet from the desk and pulled out her driver's license. She held it up alongside the monitor. She stared at the small colored photograph of herself, then her eyes shifted to the image of Owen Gray on the screen.

She smiled knowingly and said to the screen, "I know your future better than you do."

The cabin's front door burst inward, the sound of the blow and the splintering of wood seeming to have a physical impact on Adrian. She flinched, then spun out of her chair. The door wagged left and right, its top hinge dangling loose and the knob hanging by a few wood shreds. Sunlight poured through the door. The room was alive with new light. Her hand went inside her jacket.

Holding a deer rifle, Nikolai Trusov stepped to the door. He filled the frame and was backlit with rays of sun streaming off the black silhouette of his body like tiny searchlights. He was magnified by the harsh light, but his stony features were made murky by the shadows. Adrian hissed through her teeth at the sight of him.

He held out the rifle. His voice was guttural and entirely foreign. "Give Gray his rifle. And give him this message—"

"Not likely," she cut in.

The Russian must have been astonished at her speed. She had told Gray she was qualified with a pistol. More than that, she was good with one. Her Smith and Wesson Model 459 weighed only twenty-eight ounces and had a four-inch barrel. It was small, yet it was a semi-automatic 9-mm Parabellum with a fourteen-shot staggered clip. So it was also fast. It whipped out from under her jacket, its nickel finish gleaming like evil. She was pulling the trigger before the Russian was in the sights. Thoughtful aiming was not this weapon's purpose, but rather it was designed to fill the air with projectiles. She fired six times, as rapidly as she could pull the trigger. The gun climbed a ladder rung with each shot. The flat crack of the shots rattled the cabin's walls. Dust drifted down from the chandelier.

She lifted her finger from the trigger, the pistol still up and ready. Where she had expected to see a body there was nothing, just sunlight filling the doorway. The room screamed with the absence of the body that should have been there. The air smelled of burnt powder. She glanced through the door. One state patrolman was lying on the ground in front of the car, a slash of blood under an ear. The other officer was in the front seat slumped forward, his jaw open in mortal surprise. Trusov had killed them both a moment ago.

Adrian kicked the door shut and stepped quickly to the wall near her desk. She held the gun up with both hands, her back against the log wall. The room had too many windows, too many places where the Russian could peer inside. She would be safer in the back bedroom. She bent low to pass under the window that looked out onto the destroyed woodshed.

Trusov's arm lashed through the window, through windowpanes and sash bars. Glass chips and shards followed the swinging arm into the cabin. The arm seemed covered with sparkling scales that blinked and glimmered. The fracturing glass sounded like a harsh laugh. The hand seized Adrian around the neck, yanked her upright, then backwards through the shattered window, dragging her over slivers of glass. Glass fragments resembled teeth, and she seemed to be sucked back into the jaws of a dragon. A shard bit into her hand and she dropped her pistol.

Glass hung from her jacket and hair. A necklace of blood appeared on her neck. Nikolai Trusov held her upright from behind, one hand on her neck, the other clutching her upper arm. His hands secured her like steel bands. His breath was on her neck.

The Russian growled, "Give him the rifle and this message—"

Adrian Wade had trained for years for this moment. All the falls on the mat at the dojo, all the tournament rounds. She fiercely jerked her head back, cracking her skull into his nose. He grunted with pain. His grip lessened.

She abruptly shifted her weight to one side and launched her elbow back at his groin. She caught his genitals with full force, the point of her elbow sinking inches into his pants.

He should have buckled over. He should have collapsed to the ground and lain there vomiting and gasping. Instead he lifted her fully off the ground and marched her to the next window. He caught a fistful of her black hair, then rammed her face through a windowpane. Glass shattered and shimmered. A cascade of flashing prisms surrounded her, a sea of glittering refractions. Cuts opened on her forehead, sending a wash of blood over her eyes. When he brought her head back out, glass splinters dug into her skin behind her ears, spilling more blood.

"Why do you Americans never listen to anything?" he asked levelly, his voice a study in reason and courtesy. Again he had her by the neck and arm. "Will you listen this time?" He moved her head back and forth, as if she were nodding. "Good. I'm going to let you live because you are to give Gray the rifle and give him this message. I will be within eight kilometers of this house. He is to come into the field alone and with his rifle. Do you understand?"

Again he tugged her head back and forth, forcing her to nod. He tossed her against the logs of the cabin wall, a casual offhand motion, but her head hit the wall. She fell onto glass pieces and lay motionless, her face a bloody mask. He retrieved the rifle from the porch. It was Owen Gray's Winchester 70 with the mounted Unertl scope. He treated it more gently than he had Adrian, propping it up next to her, carefully so as to maintain the scope's alignment, the butt on the ground.

"I will be waiting for him." The Russian disappeared around a corner of the cabin.

Only after several moments could Adrian push herself to a sitting position and dab at the blood on her eyes. She winced as her fingers pushed needles of glass further into her forehead. She tried to rise but could not. She blinked, and her eyelashes flicked away droplets of blood. She was too dizzy to move, so there she waited for Owen Gray.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Stealth or speed. The dilemma had been an endless source of debate among Gray and his sniper friends in Vietnam. Hurry but risk detection? Or proceed carefully and risk losing the target? No satisfactory answer was ever produced, but now Gray settled on speed. He moved up Black Bear Creek Valley at a brisk walk, the rifle in both hands.

He was dead tracking, moving faster than the man who had left the sign. Gray glanced at several fresh footprints near the stream. Then came a rough patch of boulders, then bent stems of marsh cudweeds, then the prints again. Trusov's register indicated he had walked rather than trotted up the valley. Trusov was doing nothing to hide his direction or speed. Gray knew that at some point ahead, when Trusov decided it was time, the footprints would simply vanish.

Noise is the exception in the wilderness. Silence is standard. Gray moved along the creek with unearthly quiet. A watcher might have concluded Gray was floating along the path. He was imitating a fox's walk, moving his feet in line, one directly in front of the other with each step coming down on the outside of the foot before rolling to the inside. The gait reduced the number of branches the legs might rasp loudly against, and the rolling footfall crushed fewer twigs and leaves.

As Gray walked up the valley he also traveled into a new state of consciousness. His old skills had been slowly coming back to him since that day on the federal courthouse steps, but now he was enveloped in the armor of his Vietnam mind. The wound in his arm from Trusov's bullet should have been flooding him with pain, but Gray felt nothing. The scrapes and bruises — and he was nothing but grainy red scrapes and purple bruises from his mad slide — should have frozen him with pain, but he hardly felt them. He had the right to be propelled by revenge, but he knew that in the field hate kills the wrong person. Here, too, he felt nothing. And he should have been frightened, but he was dead to fear. He was a coyote, with no ability to ruminate, with no thoughts of the future or past, considering nothing but the ground that carried him and the flora that hid him. He had entered a fog of indifference where he would be distracted by nothing and would address only the puzzle in front of him.

And that was all it was, a puzzle, no more complicated or monumental than a dime-store toy. Gray had to center a man in his crosshairs and pull the trigger, the irreducible act. He simply had to find those clues in the field that would allow him to move his finger back a half an inch before Trusov moved his own finger. Then the puzzle would be solved.

Gray moved up the valley, passing aspen and cottonwood and pines. Black Bear Creek was a carillon to his right. He looked at nothing and at everything, using a technique known as splatter vision, where he let his vision spread out. Rather than focus on any one object, he softened his eyes to gather in all in front of him. His field of vision was of half the compass points ahead.

His face and hands were covered with brown and olive and green greasepaint. Some of his cohorts in Vietnam had worn loose clothing like the duelists of the last century, thinking an opponent would be deceived as to the location of the heart. But with bullets fired from a modern sniper rifle the precise spot the bullet entered the trunk was usually irrelevant. Gray wore a field uniform provided by Arlen Able that Gray had brought with him to the Sawtooths. Rawhide was tied around his pants legs at the ankles to keep the trousers from flapping. Several leafy twigs were stuck into buttonholes. On his feet were a pair of his father's buckskin moccasins that were almost as quiet as bare feet. He wore a regulation-issue Marine Corps utility cap. Gray had put several short syringa branches into the webbing, and the leaves bobbed against his head as he walked. He had cut flaps from the cap's sides, so pieces of cloth hung down on his ears and hair, breaking up the cap's lines along his temples. He had left his belt and wristwatch behind because of the danger of reflection. A length of rope secured his trousers. He wouldn't need to know the time.

A Marine sniper in Vietnam entered the field traveling light, but even so his pack outfitted for a three-day mission contained over forty items, including tactical maps, washcloths, C-4 plastic explosives, wire cutters, extra boot laces, water-purification tablets, BFI blood coagulant, toilet paper, a strobe light, foot powder, a transistor radio, Kool-Aid, a Turkish battle-axe, and more. Gray carried far less. In addition to the rifle and what snipers called the basic load — eighty-four rounds in a pouch — Gray had with him only a pair of binoculars, a Swiss Army knife with screwdrivers for adjustments to the scope, a canteen, a pen, and matchbooks. In his pocket was a small spiral notebook in which he hoped to record his kill. Gray would sanctify the Russian's death by entering it in his notebook just as he had done for ninety-six other kills. Gray had no doubt Trusov also carried pen and paper. And a red shell.

Gray suspected Nikolai Trusov had outfitted himself with almost the same load. The two men were now distillations of all that was known about the craft of the sniper, and this reduction made them identical. Everything Gray knew — every small stratagem, every trace of wisdom about fieldcraft — Trusov also knew. Their destinies had been intertwined since the day Gray fired at Trusov in Elephant Valley. Gray had been fated for this march along Black Bear Creek toward Shepherd's Bowl since then.

Gray pushed through spikes of elephant grass, the Russian's tracks still plain. He ducked under pine boughs. The stream narrowed as it neared its source, and to avoid impenetrable brush thickets Gray jumped across the creek and back several times. As he neared the bowl, he began using a technique his sniper school instructors had called scanning, moving the eyes in abrupt and irregular movements, stopping the eye for only an instant on any one thing. Scanning is unnatural. The eyes demand a rest. But the technique allows the viewer to review and catalogue the immense amount of information the wilderness offered. Scanning seeks not animals or men but disturbances.

He had suspected Trusov would head to Shepherd's Bowl. It was four o'clock in the afternoon. A sniper's instinct is to get the sun behind him, and the bowl was west of the cabin. Trusov would want Gray staring into the setting sun not just because it would impair Gray at the instant of the shot but also because gazing toward the sun is highly fatiguing, and with weariness come mistakes.

Shepherd's Bowl offered something else to the Russian — a closed horizon, a self-contained dueling field. The bowl would fit Trusov's sense of order and his fervent desire to play the game. The bowl would also limit the area Trusov had to scout.

Because Trusov had sent several shots into the Jeep, putting it out of action, Gray had used his belt as a tourniquet around Coates's shattered arm, and had left him at the fire tower. Gray had then taken two hours to hobble back to the cabin to find Adrian, and another hour had passed before an ambulance arrived for her, before he could leave her. A helicopter was on its way to the tower for Coates. So the Russian had been in the bowl several hours before Gray could get there, and in that time Trusov would have learned all there was to know about the area. Trusov might also have had maps of the area.

Gray jumped the creek again. The sky was narrowed by the valley walls and darkened by tall trees, but it was opening up ahead. Another five hundred yards would put Gray at the mouth of Shepherd's Bowl. His options now were to travel faster or slower, but not at a walking pace. Nothing in the wilderness — not a deer or a wolf or a snake or a bear — moves at a human's pace, and anything traveling four miles an hour is always a target. He slowed, coasting over the ground. His feet melted to the earth's contours. Gray let the wilderness soak him up. He might have been invisible.

The memory of Adrian tried to push itself into his mind, and only with effort could he dismiss it, his eyes scanning and scanning. He had left her in the care of a physician and ambulance attendants. She had worn on her face most of the blood she had spilled, and so looked worse than she was. She wouldn't need to stay overnight at the clinic in Ketchum. Still, she would require stitches near her shoulders and behind her ears. Butterfly bandages would be sufficient for her forehead. The doctor said she might have a slight concussion, but she had been asking Gray questions, as always. Gray had gently chided her. He was relieved when she laughed. Gray had peeled her hand from his, then taken up the rifle to begin his journey to Shepherd's Bowl.

Gray rushed up in shadows cast by the trees in front of him. He ducked left and right, left and right, to new shadows, always nearer to the bowl's mouth. Nikolai Trusov was within two miles of him, of that Gray was certain. The most dangerous thing in the field for a sniper is another sniper, because he knows what to look for. Those tactics of travel and camouflage that made Gray blend with the wilderness worked only up to a point with another sniper, who would see what others could not and expect what others would not. Gray stepped around a chokecherry. Through the trees he could see the bowl's west wall. The sun was lowering in the afternoon sky, sending out spokes of gold light that turned like a wagon wheel.

Black Bear Creek dwindled to rivulets winding between stones. Not far into the bowl was the small pool where the stream originated. As Gray moved forward, the valley grew in front of him until it filled his vision. He stood behind a lodgepole pine and pulled his binoculars from the pack. He held his hand above the objective lenses to guard against reflection.

Shepherd's Bowl was a study in shifting greens and browns. On Gray's right the north slope resembled a desert. Lower on the north slope were the muted dusty greens of sagebrush and bitterbrush and mountain heath and Scotch broom, with green leaves shading to yellow. Higher on the slope, brown and gray boulders were spotted by stonecrop with its tiny, waxy green pods.

Gray shifted the binoculars. The bowl's center was a mix of grasses that had dried to yellow. Lodgepole and yellow pine, mountain hemlock and mountain laurel, dotted the patches of grass. The trees were dense along the bowl's east — west crease.

On Gray's left was the south slope, the darker wall where the green of lodgepole pine was touched with the blue and black of shadows.

Gray moved the binoculars right to left again, looking for agitation in the underbrush, looking for a too-straight line, looking for the slightest of reflections, looking for color that was too lively, looking for anything white or black, looking for perturbed crows or jays, never focusing on one thing for too long. All he found was more green and brown.

Trusov's footprints went due west, entering the long swath of trees on the seam of the bowl along the creek. Following this long dell was the only way to enter the bowl unseen by anyone on the bowl's slopes, and this was the route of Trusov's prints. To follow the Russian's path would most likely mean walking into a trap.

Gray moved west through the trees into the bowl, then took a dogleg route, south a few paces, then west again. He walked with exceeding care, slowly and with patience, following Trusov's westerly route but by a parallel course a hundred feet from Trusov's trail. He watched the ground, avoiding dried foliage that might crackle underfoot. He moved so silently he could not hear his own footfalls. The Winchester was across his chest.

He approached a dell, a hundred-yard expanse spotted by only a few trees. The spring and pool were to Gray's left. The odor of tarweed carried to Gray. The dell was also filled with sow thistle and yarrow and knapweed. Gray lowered himself to his knees and elbows and crawled forward to survey the dell. He shimmied along the ground around a pine tree to two rotted logs. One tree had fallen over the other several years after the first came down. Gray crawled into the vee formed by the logs. The fallen trees were so old that dandelions were growing from their decomposed bark. Gray flinched when a goldfinch flashed by. The bird trilled as it flew, the notes sounding like "potato chips, potato chips."

Gray checked over his shoulder. From behind he was protected by an upright pine. His hide was almost fully enclosed. He was satisfied he was in a position a bullet could not reach. Gray rose to kneeling, brought his backpack around, and reached for his binoculars. Moving half an inch at a time, he rose to peer over the log.

Sound and the pain rushed over him at the same instant. An explosion from above lanced his back from shoulder to the base of his spine. Ferocious jets of pain. Gray toppled sideways onto dry cheat grass. His back felt as if a surgeon had opened it with a scalpel. He gasped with pain, then scrambled closer to a log, trying to tuck himself under it. He didn't know where the danger lay. Blood was left on the ground. He squeezed his eyes against the racking pain, then opened them to stare skyward.

Around the tree above him, about fifteen feet off the ground, was a circle of baling wire. Something had been attached to the tree. Gray's hand found several fragments of pottery, portions of a plate. Then he saw a littering of nails.

Gray knew then the trap he had fallen for. The Russian had placed an impact mine above a likely hide. Trusov had somehow glimpsed Gray but had been unable to get Gray in his scope. Trusov had set off the explosive with a bullet fired from a long distance, causing the nails to blast down at Gray. In effect the mine allowed Trusov to reach around corners. The Russian would have more mines in the bowl. The mine had not been meant to kill him. Trusov would want the purity of a bullet for that task.

Gray slowly brought a hand around to his buttocks. Teeth clamped together, he pulled out a protruding nail, then another. He ran his hand along his shirt and found several more nails in his back, gingerly pulling them out. His back was damp but there was less blood on the ground than he had feared. Gray decided he wasn't badly hurt. Nothing vital had been cut. Several nails were still embedded in his flesh where he couldn't reach, and when he crawled away from the logs the skin and muscles of his back shrieked. But this wasn't going to kill him. Trusov had failed with his first attempt. Gray was almost cheered by the thought.

Then he realized he had been entirely surprised. Not once, not in months and months in the Vietnam bush, had Gray been caught utterly unaware. Now it had happened.

He stilled those thoughts. He checked his canteen. No leaks. His binoculars were scratched, but the lenses were intact. His pack had holes in it but would carry his equipment. The Russian's mine had failed.

Gray concentrated on the best way to make it back to the thicket of trees near the bowl's mouth. He could not cross the glade, not with Trusov out in front of him — at least, that's where Gray thought the bullet had come from, although the blast from the plate mine had masked the sound of Trusov's rifle.

Trusov had been in the bowl at least three hours. Time to prepare many other surprises.

Gray returned east the way he had come, this time even more slowly, his head moving left and right. Moments later he had returned to the mouth of the bowl.

He wanted to circle around Trusov, who Gray presumed was somewhere in the middle of the bowl in the dense trees. Because the north slope was mostly barren, Gray would have to do his circling on the south slope. But between him and that incline were tracts of grass, open killing ground, an artilleryman's dream and an infantryman's nightmare, almost impossible to cross without being observed. The grass began under the trees where Gray stood, and ran toward the south slope.

Gray slid his backpack around so that it hung on his left side, hugged the rifle to his stomach with his left hand, then lowered himself to the ground. His back and buttocks yelped with pain.

Because lying on his belly would flatten more grass Gray stretched out on his right side. A nail in his back ripped his flesh as he stretched out. Leaving the cover of the trees, he began a side crawl into the thick grass. He used his right hand to part the grass in front of him, pushing the grass stems to either side, careful not to snap the stalks. He moved slowly, nothing like the pace of an infantryman crawling under barbed wire but more like a worm where every part of his body was in contact with the earth and was used to push himself along. His motion resembled a swimmer's sidestroke but more constricted and much slower. He traveled only a few inches a minute through the grass and by the occasional blue-blooming larkspur and yellow paintbrush. With his toes he righted stems that did not spring back on their own. This would prevent shining, which occurs when the sun bounces off vegetation that has been pushed down, leaving a bright trail. And the grass was dry from the day's heat, so Gray knew he was not leaving a trail of dulling, a highly visible path where rain or dew has been knocked away.

His passage through the field of grass would have been invisible to anyone standing ten feet away. In Vietnam, Gray had used grass fields many times, not only to move unseen but also as a hide. Grass is a sniper's safest shooting position because there is nothing — no rocks or trees — that an enemy can use to sight or range his gun.

The crest of the grass was a foot above Gray's head. His nose was in the dirt. Had he allowed himself the luxury, he would have reeled from the sensations. The raw scent of the earth, the hot puffs of an idle wind that pushed through the grass, the insistent drone of yellow jackets and bees, and the taste of his own sweat as it slid from his cheek into his mouth were all magnified by his tiny horizon. Twenty feet away, also hidden in the grass, several chukars let loose with their strident chuk-karr, chuk-karr, unaware of Gray's presence. But he had not gone entirely unnoticed. The sunlight flickered, and Gray moved his eyes skyward to see a vulture passing between him and the sun. The bird wheeled over Gray, its oddly tipsy flight distinguishing it from its raptor cousins, then it soared away, apparently deciding Gray was too far from death to be of interest. A tick hopped onto Gray's leading wrist. Gray could not risk the extra motion of swatting it away. The insect burrowed into the skin and its spotted body swelled with Gray's blood. Gray inched along.

There had been no choice between the M-40A1 sniper rifle and his old Winchester 70 that had been delivered by Nikolai Trusov. After he had tended to Adrian and the ambulance had carried her away, Gray approached both weapons, both on the porch leaning upright against the log wall. The Winchester had seemed to leap into Gray's hands like a lost dog. And the instant the Winchester found Gray's hands it seemed to vanish. Over the past several days he had become accustomed to the M-40A1 and was confident with it. But that rifle was still a stranger. Even after all these years the Winchester felt like an extension of Gray's body. His arteries and nerves and sinews continued into the wood and all the way up to the bore. And now, rather than being inert wood and metal, the rifle helped Gray worm his way through the grass, bending and pushing. Gray had not had the chance to zero the weapon, but he trusted it to be accurate. His old friend the Winchester would not allow itself to fall out of zero. And Trusov would want Gray's old rifle to be accurate. It would fit the Russian's notion of fairness.

Gray and his rifle pushed through several tufts of fleabane, and then rather than change direction he let a bull thistle scratch his face as he passed. He pressed himself against the ground as he moved. Dirt and twigs kept finding their way into his mouth, and he quietly spit the bits out as if he were a Pall Mall smoker.

Gray could do nothing better in this world than to move invisibly across terrain. Each small and silent motion was an art, his art. When the rhythm of the crawl came back to him after a while, he found he could pick up his pace a few more feet an hour. The slightest mischance with an errant stalk of grass might send a bullet his way, so Gray constantly reined himself in. He desperately wanted the shelter of the trees. His clothes were sodden with perspiration. He was still leaking blood. Stray pieces of dried grass clung to him, and he began to resemble a scarecrow.

Two hours passed, all the while Gray knowing Trusov was in a hide somewhere in the bowl, searching with his binoculars, occasionally raising his rifle to use the more powerful mounted scope.

Then the sound of a shot rushed over the grass. Gray bit into the ground, flattening himself. The noise echoed around the bowl, washing over Gray several more times. Gray did not hear the bullet passing overhead or through the grass. He allowed himself the slightest smile of satisfaction. Trusov must be nervous. He had fired at a shadow or a bird or a wind-blown branch. When a nail in his back brushed a nerve the smile vanished.

Gray dug his leading hand into the ground and pulled forward, parting the grass, sliding over the ground, rearranging the grass behind him, a smooth mechanical motion impeded only slightly by the spikes of pain in his back. He could smell pine sap and knew he was drawing close to the trees. Maybe another sixty or seventy yards.

Then he smelled something else, a scent entirely foreign in the bowl. For an instant all his nose could detect was some sort of chemical. And then he knew it was gasoline. Next he smelled fire.

Gray could not risk raising his head above the grass, but he could hear the fire ahead of him, spreading rapidly left and right, probably along a line of gasoline Trusov had poured. The Russian had probably left behind a partly filled can of gas, and had ignited the gas by firing into the can. Trusov must have suspected Gray was in the grass but could not know precisely where.

The fire quickly consumed the dry grass. The wind was easterly but indifferent, only haphazardly pushing the flames, but the cheat grass and bunch grass and nipplewort were hay-dry, and the fire briskly ate into the field, quickly working east toward Gray. Smoke reached him, then tossing embers. Grasshoppers flicked by, fleeing the flames, then mice, one after another, a few crawling along Gray's arm, too frightened to care about the human.

A wind-tossed bit of burning grass landed on Gray's back, but to swat at it would ruffle the grass that hid him. Trusov was surely scanning the field, hoping to flush Gray and put a bullet into him as he tried to escape the fire. The fire was meant not to kill Gray but to flush him. Only a bullet would do for the killing.

The heat reached for Gray, the first blushes of it rolling over him, then subsiding with a quirk of the wind. Then more insistently, a pulse of heat that made him suck air. He looked forward through the grass. Orange licks were blackening and twisting the grass and sending waves of black smoke skyward. Not enough smoke was over him to cover him for a sprint. Gray had no choice but to lie there. From Gray's point of view — his eyes two inches above the dirt — the fire seemed to be sprinting toward him. Bits of flaming grass rose and swirled as smoke billowed. Grass snapped and hissed. A new gust of wind sped the flames. The fire roared as it closed in on Gray.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Bite down. No trembling, no thinking, no equivocating. If he rose to flee he would die. If he made a sound or if he made any quick move he would die. He could feel the sweep of Trusov's binoculars, feel the Russian's eyes searching and searching.

To protect his weapon and prevent ammunition in the pack from detonating in the heat, he slowly brought his backpack and rifle to his stomach. He tucked the pack and Winchester under his belly. Walls of heat rushed at him. He crammed his hands under him, squeezing the Winchester's stock, knowing he would need a grip on something.

Embers landed on Gray's shirt and pants, burning through the cloth and into his skin. The fire sounded like an animal tramping through the brush, closer and closer, cracking and bursting, homing in on Gray. Curls of flame came for his cap. The odor of burning fabric filled him. The blaze came on louder, now the sound of an engine.

He clamped his eyes shut and ground his mouth into the soil, filling it with dirt to dampen any scream. The first licks of fire found his face, caressing him then eating into his skin. The cap was on fire and his hair with it. Gray tried to dig his face deeper, deeper into the cool soil. His head felt as if razors were being dragged across it, temple to temple.

An ear caught fire. The fire stitched its way down his neck to his shoulders. It felt as if he were being flayed, as if his skin was being peeled back to reveal his skull and bones. His shirt caught with hissing flame, and the sensation of flaying continued down his back. The fire line advanced past his shoulders and to his back, then along his back, baking his skin, bubbling it with heat. But the quickened wind pushed the flames. The fire ate but did not tarry. A cloud of smoke covered him and he gasped for breath, and in the smoke was his salvation. The smoke was above him now. He had cover.

Marine snipers know that the fastest way to travel from one position to another is the rush. Gray slowly drew his arms to his body with his elbows on the ground, and pulled his right leg forward. He rose by straightening his arms as if doing a push-up. Keeping his grip on the rifle, he dug his left foot into the soil and leaped up, rising in the flame. Gray willed his knees to work. He ran low to the ground.

The blaze leapt and twisted around him. Fire stuck to him, consuming more of his skin. He bolted along the fire line, the only place the smoke was thick enough to hide him, keeping a shroud of black around him. His burns were a straitjacket of pain, and every step squeezed him with agony. He ran along the fire, right along the fire line, running for his life. He could see nothing but roiling smoke.

Then the south slope and its trees appeared before him, blurred by the smoke. His burned skin wrapped him in an agony he could not outrun. A pant leg trailed fire, and Gray could feel the flames chewing into his thigh and knee. He sprinted out of the fire, and carried smoke along with him as he ran uphill, then finally out of the smoke and into the woods. He passed several trees deeper into cover before he dropped the pack and rifle and collapsed at the base of a pine tree. He rolled on the ground, trying to extinguish the flames. He scooped pine needles onto his head, dampening whatever fire remained.

His cap was gone, and so was most of his hair. His mouth gaped open with the pain. When he sagged back against the tree trunk, a thousand needles of pain sank into his skin. He lurched away from the tree, and fell slowly to one side. Behind him, the fire continued across the field. Smoke churned up, then collected in a mushroom before drifting slowly east toward the bowl's mouth. The back of his shirt had burned away, but the sleeves and front were held on by a stretch of fabric at his collar. One leg of his pants was gone.

Gray breathed deeply against the pain. He brought his feet up and bent over into a fetal curl. He shook uncontrollably. His skull was a universe of suffering, the pain blocking other senses, blinding him and deafening him, making him useless in the field. His thoughts were dim pulses. He was safe in the trees, he knew, but he would have to move out, and he had to gather himself. He had to push aside the agony from his back and head and shoulders and leg.

He closed his eyes. Isolate the pain. Move into myself. Cut out every sensation that would not work to defeat the Russian. Concentrate. Push it away. Survive this day.

He opened his eyes. He drew himself upright. He surveyed himself. His left arm was burned from the shoulder to the elbow, resembling bacon. His belly had protected the skin below the elbow. The back of his shirt was gone, burned away, and Gray knew the skin there was scorched, leaving pink and red blotches. Same with his shoulders. His left pant leg had burned away, and the skin below was blistered and red and pink and already leaking. When he gently touched his scalp his head was jolted with pain. A little hair remained in clumps, but most of his scalp was exposed and raw with burns. His left ear was curled by a burn.

He brought his hands up to his face. He curled his trigger finger. Gray's hands were fine, and he now found he could focus his eyes. And he could run. He was still alive and could still work his rifle.

He whispered, "I'm not done yet, you son of a bitch."

But his camouflage had gone up in smoke. He was as pink as a pig. His back and leg and arm and shoulders were a vibrantly colorful target. In the green and brown and gray bowl Gray's raw skin would stand out like a flare.

He had to camouflage himself, and he knew he would have to improvise and he knew it would test him to his limit. Gray opened his pack to retrieve his canteen. He twisted off the cap and allowed himself two swallows. Then he crawled several feet from the tree to a flat patch of ground. The soil had a thin mat of needles and dried leaves and wild straw. Gray poured the water from his canteen onto the ground, shaking the last drops from it. Then with his hands he worked the ground, kneading it like a child making mud cakes. He spread the mud out, making a bed of it.

Gray sat down at the edge of his mud bed, locked air in his lungs, and leaned back onto the mud. The pain was as if a knife was sinking into his back again and again, a red wash of agony. But Gray squirmed on the ground, rubbing his back into the mud and leaves and sticks and straw. And when he thought he might pass out from pain, he forced himself to go on, to continue to writhe until the mud had caked his back.

He sat up shivering with agony, but before his resolve melted with pain, he scooped up handfuls of the remaining mud and dabbed it onto his leg, pressing it onto the oozing red burns up and down his leg. His hand shook with suffering. He pressed more mud onto his shoulders, then onto his face. His teeth were clamped so tightly together his jaw ached. And finally he lifted the last of the leaf and straw and mud mix and crushed it onto his skull. He bucked with agony and his hands faltered. But he pressed scoop after scoop of it on, caking his head with the mud mix.

He gasped with the pain, and he had to will himself upright. He breathed against the suffering, and again focused. He looked at his leg and hands and shoulders. He resembled a bog monster. After a moment he could bend down for his rifle and pack. He put the empty canteen back into the backpack. With the Winchester in one hand and the pack in the other, Gray slowly surveyed his position. The trees offered cover in all directions. He walked unsteadily up the gradual hill into the deeper cover of the forested south slope.

Nikolai Trusov lowered his binoculars and rubbed his eyes. From his hide he had been scanning the grass. He crossed his brow with a hand, bringing away dampness. He had patted mud onto his face and hands, and had stuck small branches into his clothing. His hide was behind a fallen and decayed pine trunk. His arms rested on a sunken portion of the trunk where hooves had chipped away at it over the years, as the tree had fallen across a deer path. His Mosin-Nagant rifle was at an elbow and his pack was near his feet. On his head was a brown wool watch cap. He had camouflaged the cap by pressing fistfuls of pine needles onto the fabric. He wore the cap high, above the caked mud on his forehead. His scar resembled the flat plates on a lizard's back. Only four inches of Trusov's head showed above the log.

He brought up the binoculars again, pressing them against his eyes. Again he stared at the wild grass near the mouth of the bowl, the same carpets of grass he had been looking at for hours. He knew his mine had forced Gray to enter the bowl in the grass. But the grass field was broad, and he had not seen any movement in the field, no twitching grass. Trusov nodded, an acknowledgment of the skill required to move unnoticed through grass. But Trusov had known of Owen Gray's skills for decades.

The blaze was reaching the east end of the field. Fire was almost done with the grass. Yet he hadn't flushed Gray. Gray hadn't bolted. Where was he? Trusov lifted the rifle to use the scope for a closer view of the charred field. Burned clumps of grass, not much else. Impossible to hide in the field because the fire had burned away the grass cover. Where was Gray?

Trusov needed a closer look. He crawled away from the hide, rose to a crouch, and sped fifty yards east down the gradual incline toward the blackened field. He dropped to a crawl, his rifle in his right hand. A perfect hide was ahead, a log topped with brush. He moved toward it, then along the log, secure behind it.

Then he stalled. An animal was ahead of him, digging with a paw at the fallen tree, then moving several steps toward Trusov. The creature walked with a rolling sailor's gait, its toes in and its heavy tail brushing the ground behind it, obscuring its trail. Its blunt nose and button eyes were followed by a mass of tan and black quills that shifted left and right as it walked. The porcupine waddled toward him, unhurried and unconcerned, safe beneath its mantle of needle-sharp barbs. Its snout was to the ground, its thirty thousand quills quivering and shifting. It did not see or did not care about the Russian. The animal stopped below the brush growing on top of the log.

Trusov may never have seen anything like it. But the Russian was in a hurry and had no time to wonder about the strange animal. The creature was in his way, occupying Trusov's perfect hide. He brought out the knife from his belt and moved toward the animal. When he reached the porcupine he slashed down once, then again, the knife cutting into the animal, blood pouring instantly. The porcupine shivered its quills and caterwauled, then trotted away, leaving a trail of blood. Trusov wiped the blade on his pant leg and returned it to his belt. He crawled into the cover of a thimbleberry bush.

He brought up his binoculars, but before he could place them against his eyes his nose came up. He had a scent. It was faint, there and gone. He sniffed the air hungrily. And the scent was there again.

He allowed himself a small smile, a terrible grin where the corners of his mouth were turned down. He had, after all, caught Gray in the grass. He smelled burned meat. Gray's burned flesh. Gray was either dead or injured. The Russian's victory was closer. Still wearing the rictus smile of a cadaver, Trusov peered through the binoculars and began scanning the blackened grass field.

Gray had to keep moving. He began a low crawl, keeping his body flat against the ground. He gripped the sling at the upper swivel with the rifle resting on his forearm and the butt dragging on the ground. He moved his arms forward and brought up his right leg, then pulled with his arms and pushed with the right leg. It was slow, but nothing of Gray or his weapon rose more than fourteen inches above the ground. His burns made it feel as if the ground was clawing at him with sharp talons. He crawled through mountain heath, its pointed leaves raking his face.

Gray flinched and dug his head into the ground at the sound of a projectile soaring in at him and passing a few inches from his ear. He cursed himself. It was a hummingbird, curious and fearless, then bored and gone as quickly as it came.

He rose behind a pine, his back to the tree. He swung his gaze along the protective trees uphill from him on the south slope. Nothing visible amid all the trees and brush. Because he never looked around a tree unless his head was close to the ground, he lowered himself again. He turned toward the tree, pressing his cheek and temple against the coarse bark, then brought an eye around.

His view was of much of the bowl, from the mouth off to his right to the high banks of the north wall. He again brought out the binoculars. Nothing. Gray's mouth pulled down. The sound of a woodpecker's rapping came from the thick wedge of trees downhill at the bowl's center. The fire was burning itself out near the mouth of the bowl. The wind was slowly clearing the bowl of smoke.

Huckleberry and heath and sorrel offered low cover. Gray crawled from tree to tree, traveling a hundred yards, then another hundred, moving west farther into the bowl. Its snout forward, the Winchester urged him on.

Early in his sniper career Gray would stay up most of the night before a mission because it was thought that being tired reduced pressure. But on the mission Gray had found his concentration wandering, perhaps in search of sleep. Instead, as he learned more and more about his craft and recognized the nuances of the wilderness, he discovered that the sheer volume of information pushed aside the pressure and fear. Now it was the same. Leaning into the tree trunk, critical intelligence poured into Gray. The sun's position, humidity, wind, temperature, ground cover, sights and sounds, all were ever changing. Every few feet he journeyed he had to assess entirely new conditions. He looked for unusual movement, he searched for possible hides, he searched for untoward reflections, he listened for peculiar sounds. Gray knew that whoever could best marshal his mental resources and keep them honed the longest would leave Shepherd's Bowl that day. All Gray needed to do was concentrate.

He crawled over a mat of moss campion then through a spread of wheatgrass. Lodgepole pines marked his way on both sides. The tick was along for the ride. Gray could not pinch off its swollen body because its head would remain below the skin and might become infected. Later he would put a lighted match close to the tick's behind, and the insect would back out of Gray's skin on its own volition. This presumed there was a later for Gray.

He moved over the ground quickly and quietly. He should have been as comfortable crawling on all fours as a weasel, but his skin howled with every motion. He was thirsty and had no water, and he knew that thirst, magnified by pain, would alter his judgment. He would need water soon.

He brushed by gumweed that left a sticky resin on his arms and cocklebur that deposited green burrs on his pants. He crawled forward between a pine and a tree stump that was bracketed by gorse, a thick bush with vicious spikes on its stems. He could see through trees to the bowl's center. When he reached into his pack for the binoculars, his back and shoulders sent electric jolts of pain deeply into Gray. His hand trembled when he brought out the field glasses.

When he pressed the binoculars against his face, his hand jumped. He swatted at his face, knocking a paper wasp away from the corner of his eye. He had been stung at the lines near the corner of his left eye. Had his back and shoulders and leg not been in agony, Gray would have laughed. Fate had decided Gray just wasn't suffering enough yet, so it added a wasp sting and a tick bite to the mix. Gray touched the corner of his eye. The skin was already swelling. It should have smarted, but the pain was lost in the suffering of the burns. He looked skyward to find a nest the size of a basketball in the tree eight feet above the ground. A dozen wasps angrily patrolled near the nest's mouth. A wasp flitted down toward him. Gray resisted the instinct to swat at it because a sudden movement would alert Trusov if the Russian were surveying the area with field glasses. The wasp moved away. Gray returned the binoculars to his eyes.

Not for long. Pain altered perception, but Gray still trusted his ears, and they picked up a delicate sound, a wispy press of a leaf against another leaf. Other sounds reached Gray — the last crackling of the fire at the base of the bowl behind and below Gray, the brush of wind-tossed needles in the trees, the drone of the wasps overhead. But this slight crackle from the other side of Gray's pine tree was against the grain of the bowl's sounds. It stood out, however trifling. And Gray knew that whoever had made the little sound had not intended it to escape.

It came again, just barely penetrating the threshold of Gray's perception. A tiny crackle, there and gone, but closer, coming from the other side of the pine and gorse. A stalker, someone good at it, someone intent on Gray, coming to kill him, believing Gray was living his last seconds on this earth.

With a calm and slow and utterly quiet motion, Gray brought the rifle up so that its bore was above his head, aimed at the gorse to the left of the tree. He flicked off the safety and put his finger on the trigger.

This time the sound was so quiet, so professional, that Gray could only suspect he heard it. Coming from behind the tree, a little to its left. The nudging of a pine needle.

Gray shut down his systems. No breathing or blinking. He willed his heart to slow. So intent was he on the predator coming toward him that the pain from his burns subsided. The world and all that was in it was on the other side of the brush, coming for him.

Gray felt himself switch onto automatic. All discretion was gone. Gray's instincts and training would tell him when to move without Gray consciously making the decision.

A branch of the gorse wiggled unnaturally, a small flicker. The predator was four feet away with only a tree trunk intervening.

Gray waited three beats, then another and another.

He suddenly pushed himself left with his knees, a leap from behind the tree that took him left to the edge of the gorse for a view of the stalker, Gray's rifle ahead of him, the trigger beginning its short and lethal motion.

Gray was as startled as the bobcat.

The animal's stubby black-barred tail shot up. The bobcat seemed to inflate as the fur on its back and chest rose. It showed its fangs and hissed, a searing noise like steam escaping a locomotive. The bobcat's legs were striped, and its face was decorated with black lines that fanned out to its wide cheek ruff. The cat leaped straight up in fright, and landed in a dead run, back the way it had come, leaving Gray's breath in his throat.

"Goddamnit," he mouthed after a moment. "When this is done I'm coming back here and making mittens out of you."

Gray slowly rose to his feet and started west through the trees. So fearsome was the pain from his back and shoulders that they felt they were still on fire. With each step his skin pulled at itself, washing him with agony. His left leg from thigh to moccasin was burned down to the muscle, and was raw and seeping, and caked in mud and leaves. It rocked Gray with pain with each step.

He slowed, then slowed again. He was not gathering information like he should. The pain was diverting his attention, not letting him gather and filter all the bowl was offering. The pain was numbing his senses. In this arena the slightest disadvantage might be lethal.

An ancient tree stump — so old it was losing its shape as the wood rotted away — offered a spot where Gray could try to recoup. His life depended on pushing the pain away. When he neared the stump he saw a porcupine to one side, rocking back and forth. The animal was gurgling pitiably, and not until Gray reached the stump did he notice the trail of blood the porcupine had been leaving. The animal seemed indifferent to Gray, not moving away, only mewling terribly. Gray quickly surveyed the view of the north slope from the stump, saw nothing, then looked more closely at the porcupine.

Blood was bubbling up from the creature's shoulder and back. Nothing in the wilderness made those wounds. To Gray's knowledge, the only way a wilderness carnivore — usually the fisher, a large and rare and ferocious marten — attacks a porcupine is to flip it to get to the unprotected wiry hairs on the porcupine's belly. These wounds were made by a man with a knife. Trusov.

The porcupine's blood trail showed the animal had come from the west. Trusov was to the west.

The animal was suffering, grunting and panting and swaying, and was clearly going to die, but perhaps not for an hour or two. The porcupine has an Achilles' heel, a lethally vulnerable spot — its snout. Gray whispered, "Sorry, friend," then brought his rifle barrel down sharply across the animal's nose. It collapsed instantly, dead, a pile of sharp points.

Gray pushed himself up the rotting tree trunk. He was facing north, with the mouth of the bowl to his right and the high ridges all around. The view was only partial, with much of the bowl obscured by trees on the lower south slope. Some of the charred field was visible, and across was the parched north slope. Hundreds of trees interrupted Gray's view, and the Russian might be behind any one of them. Or behind fallen logs or thick brush or boulders or clumps of grass.

Just as he was about to crawl on, a glint of light held him to the stump. The metallic shimmer had been distant and faint; and just as he had felt with the bobcat's footfalls, Gray knew the fleeting light had been a mistake. Something was below him, fifteen compass clicks west, a quarter mile away. The view was through a veil of vegetation, and Gray could make out no forms other than trees and undergrowth. Yet there was the tiny flash again. He moved his head slowly a foot left, then back. The speck of light returned at the center of this motion, and when Gray held himself still, the silver pink light remained. It had been his motion that had made it flicker, and when Gray was still it was constant, but only an infinitesimal leak of light, a thin beam, the smallest of offerings. Gray lifted his binoculars.

Two hours later, in the failing light of evening, Gray's binoculars were still at his eyes. He had lowered them and brought them up again and again to avoid eyestrain as he stared at the dot of light. All he knew was that the source of the light was out of place in the wilderness. It was man-made, and it came from a backpack buckle tongue, a boot's metal eyelet ring, a jacket button, a telescope lens, or a piece of litter.

Two hours studying, all the while growing weaker and more thirsty. Although his stomach and chest and right leg and face had been spared by the fire, every square inch of his skin seemed to emit pulses of pain. The burns frequently pried Gray's mind from the task at hand and allowed it to wander dangerously. Toward the end of those hours, the binoculars were almost too heavy to lift, and Gray slipped lower and lower against the stump. His tongue felt as if it had swollen and he could no longer swallow. He was so thirsty he caught himself daydreaming about a water fountain.

And as he stared at the glint and tried to imagine something recognizable from the surrounding brush, his mind started to play, throwing shadows across the bowl's floor, creating phantoms around the puny light. Ruses of the mind, Gray knew, but the pain carried along his thoughts. If only he could send a bullet at the light and end the waiting, but he could not. A wasted shot would alert the Russian to Gray's location.

The sinking sun was turning the little flash purple. The base of the bowl was in deep shadow and was losing its features. The south wall was a deepening smudge of rock against the dark blue sky.

The pinpoint of light had remained as motionless as a stone for two hours. No human could do that. He needed to decide, and so he decided the light was the reflection off a piece of litter, probably a chewing gum wrapper. It was a fuzzy decision, and a terrible disappointment. He had tapped deeply into his mental and physical reserves to study the tiny light, and it had come to nothing. He was now desperately thirsty and exhausted beyond his ability to make clear judgments. His binoculars came down despite his best effort to hold them in place.

He had to find the strength to move. The sky was as red as blood. Soon darkness would cloak him. But that maddening glimmer was worth one more look. With an effort that fogged his vision from exhaustion, he brought up the binoculars again.

At that moment Trusov caught Gray's scent again, the gratifying odor of badly burned flesh. The wind had been shifting and irresolute for much of the afternoon, but for several hours it had been steady from the south, bringing Trusov reliable information about his enemy. Earlier in the afternoon the Russian had moved out of the scent, but the smell had found Trusov again. Gray was alive, was south of the Russian in the trees somewhere, and had slowly moved west. The odor of cooked skin had traveled.

Trusov would move toward the still-pink sky in the west. His and the American's paths would converge at the western end of the bowl. Because daylight was fading quickly, he would not be able to watch his feet and would have to walk more slowly and softly.

When Trusov lifted his rifle the jaws of the earth seemed to open up, seize him, and take him down its black throat. Trusov fell into the void, vaulting down into the wicked murk. He spent an age falling into the black pool, and then he slammed against the bottom of the pit.

He found himself on his knees on the ground. He had only fallen a few feet, but had been blacked out for the two seconds of the fall.

Then a red sheet fell across his eyes, a veil of blood that blocked his view of the ground. He grabbed at himself until he found the wound, a crease across his forehead a quarter inch deep and pouring blood.

Gray had shot him.

Blood spilled through his fingers onto the ground, a torrent of it that filled his vision with cascading red. On his hands and knees he scrambled blindly, dragging his rifle, downhill until he felt the resistance of a bush of some sort. He let himself fall to the ground and burrowed under the bush.

Again he felt his head. The slash was to the bone, into the bone. He could feel his skull, not for the first time.

Trusov's mouth contorted in rage and pain. Owen Gray's Vietnam shot had marred Trusov, and now the second had crossed the scar of the first. The Russian's head was marked by an X.

Blood splashed to the ground. He pulled off his pack and pressed it against his forehead, trying to stem the river of blood, all the while his face screwed up in rage. Moments passed. The blood ebbed. He returned the sopping pack to his back. Night had come. He could see little in the black basin. Shaking with rage and revelation, he lifted his rifle and moved west, slowly and silently and skillfully.

The bowl was lost in darkness. Owen Gray had tried to find his target again, but Trusov had moved quickly, and the gathering darkness prevented Gray from spotting him. Gray had missed. Sheer luck had given Gray a shot, and he had missed. The shard of light he had stared at had indeed been a piece of litter, probably a gum wrapper. Just as Gray had given up on that target, the Russian had walked into Gray's field of vision. None of Gray's tracking skills had been involved. Happenstance had offered him the target. The Russian just happened to travel over the glint of light, and it had blinked out. Gray had lifted his rifle and fired, quickly, before Trusov was lost in the surrounding vegetation. Too quickly. Gray's rifle had bucked up, and by the time he found the spot again in the scope, Trusov was gone. A miss.

Darkness providing cover, Gray walked downhill. Every yard of ground was an effort. The burns were rapidly sapping his strength. His thirst was an all-consuming craving. His mouth and throat were sawdust. He could not generate saliva and could not swallow. Thirst was deadening him to all else in the bowl. If he could not quench his thirst, Gray's judgment — the only thing keeping him alive — would be impaired, and he would soon begin acting irrationally and dangerously.

He moved around boulders and trees, the rifle now a burden. No longer did it lead him and encourage him. He staggered but caught himself against a lodgepole pine. When his moccasin kicked a rock downhill he paused, listening, but could hear only the scrape of his throat as it tried to swallow. He knew he might be making many sounds that would signal the Russian, but the pain and thirst were dampening his hearing. He stumbled on, turning more east toward the mouth of the bowl.

The shallow pool was there, the small spring that was Black Bear Creek's headwater. Gray made his way toward it, brushing the undergrowth too loudly, walking in too straight a line, letting his footfalls sound, all careless. Gray felt in himself the beginning of apathy, an indifference and impassivity brought about by his burns and thirst. If he let this new and unbidden pulse from his brain go unchecked, he would die in the bowl. But these were all weak thoughts. He needed water.

He moved toward the pool, through a patch of field mustard and balsam root, and then in a giddy rush of sensation he could smell the water, almost feel the cool liquid on his lips and tongue. He heard the ripple of a thin stream of water rolling over rocks. Predators from frogs to cougars know to lie in wait at a pool of water, and Trusov was nothing if not a predator. Forty yards from the pool, Gray lowered himself to the ground and once again tried to push aside the pain and thirst to focus on the pool and the surrounding brush and grass.

He waited, searching and listening, the pool all the while enticing him with the scent and sound of water to come forward. He waited, smothered by pain, fighting to fasten his attention on the pool.

He whispered, "It's okay, Dad."

He clamped his jaw. His father's voice had just asked about the south fence. Was it in good repair after the storm? A voice Gray had not heard in years had spoken to him, as clearly as if his father had been sitting beside him. Gray clamped his eyes shut for a moment. He had begun hallucinating. He was now fighting the Russian and his own mind.

He waited thirty minutes. He could no longer be certain of his own conclusions, but he did not think anyone was near the pool. He gripped his rifle and crawled forward, across the pine needles, then onto moss at the pool's edge. He could see only vague black outlines of a tree or two, and the inky black water.

He planted his hands on the edge of the pool, and one hand pressed onto a small, soft form. He jerked his hand away, then felt for it again. He brought up a dead salamander. Gray held it close to his eyes to try to determine what had killed it, but then tossed it aside.

He lowered his head to the water, about to drink when he saw another dead salamander, this one floating on the surface of the pool.

Gray carefully touched the water, and it was cool and promising. But when he rubbed his finger and thumb together, his skin felt soapy. His jaw opened involuntarily. Despair made him sag, and his head almost went into the water before he could fight it back. To be sure, he dipped a finger into the water and brought several drops to his mouth. The water stung his tongue, and he spit it out.

He knew what Trusov had done. Lye and fat are combined to make soap. Trusov had dumped lye into the pool, and the slick, soapy feeling on Gray's fingers had resulted from the lye quickly working on the skin there. The water was poison, not meant to kill Gray but to deprive him of water, to weaken him.

Gray gripped his rifle and backed away from the pool. Dampness clouded his vision, and he paused to wipe at his eye. He was losing. His father spoke again. Owen Gray ignored him this time. He did not need his father to tell him he was not going to make it out alive.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Nikolai Trusov stalked all night, traveling counterclockwise in the bowl, making no more than fifty yards an hour, trying again to find Gray's scent. But he did not. Several times he had to blot away blood from his forehead with a sleeve. The shock of the wound was gone. His strength had returned. He used the night to try to cross Gray's trail.

He succeeded. He came to a stump that had dense spiked bushes on both sides and was protected uphill by a tree. The Russian knelt to peer at the ground. Even in the black of night he could see that the needles and leaves and grass had recently been ruffled. Trusov felt the ground and brought up a leaf stained with dried blood. Gray's blood. The American had been here, had used this tree and these bushes as a hide. A good place to begin the stalk again at first light. He leaned against the stump to wait. A bat flitted by.

During those same hours Gray was lying on his belly near the pool. He had gathered handfuls of the damp moss and had held it above his mouth and had squeezed out drops of water. He had spent two hours extracting precious water, in all not more than half a cup, and if it had restored him to any degree he could not feel it. Then he lay on the stream bank and waited for the night to pass. Nights in the Sawtooths are cold, even in summer. Gray spent the dark hours shuddering with cold and pain, his thoughts meandering. He gripped his rifle fiercely as if that might compensate for his slipping mind.

He might have slept. He could not be sure. The first purple light of false dawn found Gray on the moss and dirt, his eyes and his mouth open. He tried to rise, but his body refused. He argued with his body, demanding it rise, and at the first motion the pain from his shoulders and leg and back erupted anew. He gripped his gun. He was so weak he felt nailed to the ground. He crawled forward, away from the dead pool.

He heard a rough scrape. At first he thought it was his father again, clearing his throat for some new pronouncement. He heard it again, carried in the soft wind. He thought it was real, not a trick of his mind, but he could not be sure.

Dawn had begun, streaking the high rim of the bowl in faint purple but leaving the basin in blacks and grays. Gray turned to the south slope to face the sound. He could see nothing. He wrestled his gun to his shoulder anyway and put his eye to the scope.

Trusov had coughed in his sleep, and the ragged sound had brought him out of it. He hugged the ground. In the still bowl, a cough was the equivalent of a foghorn blast. He lay utterly still. His position between the uphill tree and the stump he was leaning against was well protected. Any shot fired his way from the center or the opposite side of the bowl would sail over the stump, and he was below the stump.

Trusov recoiled when the sound of a shot reached him. Gray had fired. At what? Trusov looked left and right. The Russian was well hidden. What had the American fired at?

A full-throated roar suddenly came from above Trusov. He looked skyward, to the uphill pine tree. A wasp nest had a ragged hole through it, and bits of the nest were floating to the ground. And a black ball of wasps was growing in the air next to the nest.

The nest blew apart as the second bullet sailed through it. The sound of the shot followed. Patches of brown paper fluttered to the ground. As wasps streamed out of their fractured nest the black ball of insects floating in the air grew and grew. Then the wasps found their enemy, the alien on the ground below their ruined home.

Within five seconds of the second shot, fifty wasps were on Trusov, and within fifteen seconds three hundred more. Then five hundred and more.

Gray knew where he was. The Russian dared not move from that spot. The wasps covered Trusov's face in a wriggling black and brown mask, working their stingers repeatedly. His shirt and hands were also soon covered with the insects. So many wasps crawled angrily over Trusov that his form seemed molten.

His face was bunched against the pain, but he could do nothing against the wasps lest Gray's third bullet find him. So he lay there, and he lay there. His eyelids were stung, and his lips and ears, every square millimeter of his forehead, stung and stung again. Wasps crawled partway into his nostrils to sting him there. All along his neck, all over his face. After several moments the wasps began to calm and to lift away from him. The mask dissolved and the squirming shirt dissipated. Trusov had been stung hundreds of times. The inhuman effort not to move or to scream seemed to have stilled Trusov, because when it was time to search for a safe way out from under Gray's rifle, the Russian did not move. A moment passed before he opened his eyes.

Or he tried to. His face had begun to swell. His eyelids and nose puffed up. His bony face began to lose its contours and the skin bloated with the wasps' poison. His hands inflated to resemble mittens.

Four hundred yards down the slope and east, Owen Gray was exhausted, desperate, and pain-racked. But he grinned.

Then he moved out, this little encouragement helping him walk in the direction of the wasps' nest, under brush and alongside pine, carrying his rifle, trying not to let it drag on the ground. Progress was slow. Each yard was marked by pain, but he traveled toward Trusov, one tree at a time, keeping himself covered. He came to the shattered wasps' nest. The insects still patrolled, but they paid no attention to Gray.

He lowered himself to his knees and began following Trusov's trail. Perhaps the Russian had been in too much pain to disguise his obvious trail. But after fifty yards it became less so, as if Trusov was slowly gaining control of himself. Then even less so.

Gray had noticed in Vietnam that when he was on a mission — stalking, low to the earth, rapt with the danger — he was incapable of contemplation that took him more than eight inches above the ground. He might lie on his belly for two days waiting for the mark, and in all that time he would be unable to think of his parents or the Sawtooths or the nurse he had met at the division hospital. No daydreaming, no escape. His mental horizon was the dirt two inches in front of his nose, but it was a focused horizon. He missed nothing, absorbing every tiny crease in the land and every minuscule facet of the flora. The smallest irregularity — a drop of blood, a shallow footprint, a shell casing, a few grains of spilled rice, the scent of human urine — was made plain and portentous by his closeness to the ground. Now, despite his wounds, and revived by his small success with the wasps, he believed he was missing nothing.

So it was that when Gray had gone a hundred yards from the wasps' nest he was brought up by a slight resistance, a negligible increase in friction of the ground. He froze, at first unaware where the irregularity was, then determined it was from his left arm, his wrist, maybe a finger. He did not breathe, he did not swallow, he did not incline his head even a fraction of an inch. He moved only his eyeballs, and even them slowly. His gaze coursed along his arm to his left wrist, which was ahead of him on the ground, partly hidden by grass. He could see nothing wrong. Sweat trickled into his eyes. He was utterly motionless, and he could hear and see and feel nothing irregular, yet he was certain that at the end of his left arm was a vast peril.

The rifle was in his right hand. He let it slip slowly from his grip, its stock and trigger guard and swivel pin settling on the ground with no more force than a tuft of airborne thistledown. He moved his right hand slowly forward, sliding up the rifle barrel so he could see his right hand in front of him. With the tip of one finger of his right hand he parted grass stalks. The finger worked its way into the grass, nudging aside the brittle stems until he saw a glint of reflected green light, a slight foreign spark three inches above the ground.

A length of fishing line. The little finger of Gray's left hand had caught it and pulled it an inch out of its taut north — south line. It was the trip wire of a spring gun hidden to Gray's left or right. Set by Trusov. Gray willed his mind to work. Some lethal devices, such as the Claymore mine, relied not on pressure but on the release of that pressure. As long as the infantryman stood on the mine he was safe. Gray tried to recall snare techniques that used back pressure. He knew of none. He pressed his cheek against the ground and slowly pulled back his left hand from the fishing line. The spring gun was silent.

When his hand was under his chin, he brought his head up. He looked left up the slope. At first he saw only horseweed and cheat grass among the pine trees. Then he detected the two menacing black holes eight feet to his left, the dark eyes of a double-barrel shotgun. To his right the line was tied to the branch of a Scotch broom. The weapon had been placed here to cut down anyone on Gray's route. Which meant that Nikolai Trusov felt he could not cover this approach.

Gray quelled a rising sense of triumph, fought it back as useless and premature. This trap was not a warning or a feint. The shotgun was well hidden and the trip wire detectable virtually only by intuition. His right hand found his Winchester. He rose to his knees and crossed over the trip wire one limb at a time, moving like a cloud on a calm day, soundless, his eyes ever on the fishing line. When his trailing foot slipped over the line, Gray again lowered himself to his stomach. He slithered forward again.

He came to a short whitebark pine, more a shrub than a tree, with a twisted and irregular trunk. On the ground beneath it was a blanket of thick scales from the tree's cones that had been torn apart by chipmunks and nutcrackers for the seeds. The whitebark offered a rising cover. Gray lifted his head, ducking branches, twisting his body to insert it up between the boughs without jiggling them. He brought up the binoculars. Nothing ahead. Yet Trusov had to be there. The spring gun meant Trusov was protecting this passage to his hide.

Just as he was about to return to the ground, the slightest of motions, as insignificant as it was out of place in the high country, caught the corner of his eye. Gray trusted his peripheral vision. Its best use was at dusk when objects that couldn't be seen directly might be observed at the edge of the eye. In daylight, side vision would pick up an oddity, some angle or motion that did not fit into the wilderness pattern that might be missed if viewed straight on. Gray slowly brought his head around to face the irregularity.

A moment passed before he located it. A rifle barrel. Even at a hundred and fifty yards, the barrel, so true and purposeful, seemed a violation of the mountains. Only eighteen inches of the barrel appeared above a fallen log, but when the bush behind it, perhaps a grouseberry, wafted gently in the slight breeze, the barrel stayed fixed in position. Then the barrel moved on its own, stark against the soft grouseberry background. He could not tell if Trusov was facing him or another direction. He could not see the Russian's head. Moving as slowly as if in a barrel of molasses, Gray lifted the Winchester.

He found the Russian's rifle barrel through the Unertl scope. He could see its blued front sight and bore. Gray lowered his rifle a hair. In the scope now was a brown wool cap. Only the top few inches of the cap, but enough.

Gray was acutely aware he might be pulling down on a dummy position, an artful trap left by the enemy that would cause the shooter to reveal his position. Nikolai Trusov's father had used this ruse at Stalingrad. But Gray could not wait. He was at the end of his resources.

Deep breath. Let half out. Hold. Crosshair once. Crosshair twice, softly, ever so softly, squeeze.

The Winchester bellowed and leaped back into Gray's shoulder. He lost the target in his sights but he quickly brought the rifle back down, searching through the scope for the target.

Gray's left hand vanished in a spray of blood and gristle that filled the air in front of him. He cried out and yanked himself down to the ground, his head bouncing against two whitebark limbs. His face plowed into the ground and he rolled onto his belly to flatten himself. Only then did he hear the distant roar of a rifle shot as it chased the bullet. The echo raced around the bowl's walls, washing over Gray again and again.

Gray frantically grabbed the Winchester and rolled to his right, out from under the pine and across a bed of needles and through bunches of cheat grass, turning over and over like a child down a hill. He left a trail of blood. But a second shot did not come. Gray bumped into a tree. Only then did he look at his arm.

Trusov's bullet had blown out a third of Gray's left palm. Several bones lay bare and others might have been missing. Much of the carpus was gone. Flaps of skin and shattered tendons dangled in the breeze. The little finger and ring finger seemed only nominally attached to his hand. Blood spurted from the wound with each of Gray's heartbeats, shooting out three feet as if from a squirt gun. Gray had brought no twine or a thong to use as a tourniquet.

He fought the churning white clouds of shock that dipped down at him from above. He had felt no pain, just a dead tingling somewhere near his left elbow. But then his mouth was pried open by a spear of agony that flew up his arm and neck and landed behind his eyes. Gray's head snapped into the ground, jolted by the pain. The entire left side of his body was spiked by it. He desperately wanted to run away, to leave behind the maimed part of himself and all the suffering it was dispensing.

The day seemed to fade. Tiny dots of neon colors blinked on and off in front of Gray's eyes. He was growing faint with the loss of blood. Holding his breath, Gray reached into his pack. Even this small motion amplified the pain. He breathed deeply, but this acted like a bellows on the pain. His body shook. Blood splattered the tree trunk and rifle. He guessed he had only a minute or two before the heart would have no more blood to pump.

With his right hand he brought out one of the matchbooks. He bit off a match, then dropped the matchbook to the ground. He scraped the match against the score several times before his trembling hand could press down hard enough. When the match head sputtered to life he held the flame to the matchbook. It flared. Gray pinched the matchbook at the staple and held the flame under his wounded left hand.

The fire cooked his hand, turning the ragged gash brown, then black. Flesh crackled and hissed. The air was filled with a nauseating scent. Pain was an acid coursing back and forth in his body. Gray's teeth sank deeply into his tongue, and blood squirted from between his teeth and down his chin.

The hanging flaps of skin curled and shrank. Grease dripped from the cooking flesh. And still Gray held the matchbook in place. His trigger finger and thumb burned as flames consumed the matchbook down to the staple and score. Finally blood from the exposed radial artery stopped spurting. Gray dropped the matchbook and lowered a knee over it to extinguish it before pine needles and dry grass caught fire. He did not have the mental capacity to pray that Trusov had not seen the smoke from the matches. Gray coughed with agony. Every limb shook with suffering.

His thoughts careened to Pete Coates. Then to Mrs. Orlando. He owed them.

He reached for his rifle and began crawling again. His mind was gone. He did not have the capacity to order his body to continue. It acted on its own. He came to the cap and rifle that had fooled him. The hat was on a stick, and the weapon was balanced on a log with a length of twine between the stock and a nearby maple trunk. When the wind moved the maple, the trunk swayed and so did the rifle, just a little, not as much as the background foliage, making the rifle appear to move independently of the foliage. A good ruse, he decided dimly.

When hunting for animals it is always assumed the target has been hit, but when hunting for men that assumption is never made. Trusov grimaced as he ejected the smoking brass casing. The distance had been only four hundred yards, but Trusov had seen human movement, so he had snap fired. He had fired too quickly. After the shot he had seen a fine mist of blood in the air, so he had hit something. But he dared not waltz over to find out. Now he could see nothing but underbrush through his telescope. He brought out binoculars for a wider view. Nothing. But then he detected again the smell of burned flesh.

There was a chance Owen Gray still lived, but it would be foolish for the Russian to remain in one place to speculate on it further. Tree to tree, Trusov moved downhill toward the bowl's center. Either Gray was dead, in which case the vultures and ravens would soon alert Trusov, or Gray was alive but soon dead, and the birds would have to wait awhile. The Russian moved softly across the ground, a specter flowing along silently and smoothly, closing in on the American.

The Winchester pulled Gray along. Down the slope, toward the seam of the bowl, crawling, one hand on the wood stock, the other uselessly waving in the air. His head was downhill, and gravity seemed to pull the pain into Gray's head. Even blinking hurt. His arm and ruined hand were lost in agony somewhere beyond his left shoulder. He scrabbled over stones and through barricades of thistle and wild raspberry. Because his ears rang with pain to the exclusion of all other sounds, Gray could not judge his own sound. He guessed he was making as much noise as a belled cow. But his thoughts were few and growing fewer. He did not have long. His body and mind were moments from surrendering.

Gray glimpsed a patch of skin — maybe a cheek, maybe a wrist or forearm — off to his left four hundred yards. Too little and too fast to dope it in before it disappeared in the kaleidoscope of leaves and boughs. That fleeting patch was moving closer, yet in a roundabout way. Trusov was following his nose, Gray vaguely suspected. Gray could no longer care.

Gray came to the porcupine he had killed. A bird or rat had eaten out its eyes, but otherwise it was intact, its quills dully reflecting the morning sun. Each time Gray exhaled, his lungs paused, as if wanting to be stilled forever. He tried to rise to his feet, but his legs gave out and he toppled sideways into the dry cheat grass, his hand brushing the porcupine's quills. Gray's vision misted, then began to go dark. A quill stabbed at him insistently.

The tantalizing scent of cooked flesh had lingered in the bowl all night and now again in the new morning. Gray was shackled to the odor like a ball and chain. The smell was an inescapable telltale.

Trusov moved south and then back north until he had centered the odor. He moved toward it, through a thick stand of pine, the smell growing stronger. Owen Gray, Trusov's great tormentor, had to be within four hundred meters, dead ahead.

The Russian dropped to his knees. The trees offered thick cover. Because he was low, he could see only thirty or forty meters in any direction, and that also meant that he was not presenting a target for a distant shot. The scent was like a homing beacon. Owen Gray was ahead, now perhaps only three hundred meters. Trusov pushed himself through the underbrush as silently as a shrew.

Then at two hundred fifty meters the woods opened slightly, and there on the ground was a body, partially obscured by trees and brush and just visible above bunches of wild grass. Gray's olive pant leg and his khaki shirt, dappled by intervening syringa leaves. The clothes were charred. Here was the source of the odor that had been beckoning Trusov.

His moment of victory was upon him, but Trusov frowned bitterly. Gray might already be dead. The body lay still. Then it appeared to move. Trusov squinted. The movement might have been an illusion, caused by the sway of leaves. The body moved again.

Prone on the ground, Trusov positioned his Mosin-Nagant in front of him. His fingers were swollen from the wasp stings, and his trigger finger barely fit into the guard. He found the khaki shirt in his scope, then it was hidden by waving leaves, then visible again. A sure shot even through the brush.

Trusov's exquisite moment was at hand. Decades in the making. He nudged the rifle down the shirt for the pant leg.

His finger smoothly came back. A hair's width at a time, the trigger giving lovely resistance. The trigger came back and back.

The rifle fired and snapped back into Trusov's shoulder. The sound of the shot burst away and then echoed in the bowl. He worked the bolt, sighted in, and squeezed again, this time sending the projectile into the thigh. The body bounced as the bullet ripped into it.

The third shot was aimed at Gray's chest, but the target was mostly obscured by underbrush. The bullet flew true and the body jumped. Gray's head was not visible through the scope, hidden behind brush, but Trusov sent two more bullets where he estimated Gray's head to be.

Nikolai Trusov rose to his feet. He touched the fresh wound on his forehead, then the older wound, the deep gouge that had been with him since his first encounter with White Star. Now it was over. He walked toward the corpse of his enemy. Trusov had always been the careful soldier, so he moved slowly, a fresh shell in the breech. He pushed aside thimbleberry and syringa as he approached. Fifty meters to Gray's body, to his vindication, to his rapture.

The body lay still. As he drew near, Trusov could see two of his bullet holes, torn red gaps in the cloth. He could see burns on the cloth. Not much blood, though, so perhaps the burns and Trusov's earlier hit had killed Gray a while ago after all. The smell of seared flesh was now strong. He walked with more confidence, pushing aside syringa branches and stepping over bunches of cheat grass. Closer to the body, to the ineffable pleasure, to the capstone of his years of dreaming.

Five meters from the body, Trusov's mouth twisted with anticipation. And then he saw it was wrong. Everything was wrong. The Russian was allowed three seconds of astonishment. The pant leg was filled with grass. The burned shirt covered not a human body but the body of that quilled animal Trusov had hacked at with his knife the day before. Just behind the porcupine, a small fire had been ignited, using the dry grass, and the fire had scorched the porcupine's body, providing the fresh scent of burned flesh, Trusov's homing beacon. It was all wrong, shockingly wrong.

Trusov only had time to bring up his rifle a few inches.

His left foot danced when a bullet tore through his ankle. The Russian instinctively shifted his weight to save himself from falling. He desperately looked around for the source of his torment and tried again to bring up his rifle.

Then his leg buckled, shot through at the knee. A rifle's bellow came from uphill, from somewhere in the pines. Trusov kept himself upright with his good leg, and twisted around looking for a target but found only pieces of his shattered knee and splashes of blood on the ground behind him.

Trusov stabbed the ground with his rifle trying to catch himself, but a second bullet streaked through his left elbow, almost severing his forearm from his body. Trusov screamed and began sliding to the ground, losing his grip on his rifle.

Another shot, this one tearing apart his right arm. Trusov's arms were nothing but useless flails, hanging by strips of flesh from smashed elbows.

Toppling and twisting, Trusov cried out, a shriek of rage and perhaps of sorrow. But the sound was lost in yet another shot. A bullet flew through the meat of both thighs, spraying a nearby tree with fragments of the Russian.

Trusov landed on the ground near the porcupine. He tried to squirm toward his rifle, but neither his legs nor arms worked, and he lay still, his eyes open. Waiting.

Not for long. Owen Gray emerged from the trees, his reloaded Winchester on Trusov. Gray was almost naked, with mud and pine needles and seeping burns covering his body. His mouth was open and his breath was a rasp. He weaved as he came for the Russian, and fifteen feet away Gray had to stop. He tottered, then found his footing again and stepped ahead. Even Gray's rifle waggled unprofessionally, as if a bough in the wind. He held the weapon in his good hand.

Gray had only a meager recollection of having surfaced from the blackout a few moments ago, prompted by the porcupine's quills stabbing his hand. From somewhere — from the depth of his training or from the desperate need to beat the Russian — he had found the strength to take off his pants and stuff a few handfuls of grass into the remaining pant leg. Then with a match he had ignited a handful of dry cheat grass and had burned some of the porcupine's belly flesh, leaving a trail of scent for the Russian. Then he had draped his shirt over the animal and had crawled away to wait.

Now Gray stepped across pine needles and loose pebbles to the Russian. Gray's steps were small and uncertain, and he had to balance himself after each new step. He fought the blackness that wanted to take him.

The Russian stared back at him. He coughed, inhaled raggedly, and whispered, "That was good. Burning that animal's body, letting me think the smell was from you, drawing me to your trap."

"I don't feel like chatting." With difficulty Gray bent to the porcupine, to his pants. He pulled the spiral notebook from the pocket and ripped out a sheet. He fumbled with the paper but after a few seconds the fabled white star emerged.

Breathing shallowly and gurgling, the Russian stared at him. The red shell he had hoped to leave at Gray's body had fallen from his shirt pocket and lay beside him, insignificant in the grass.

"This is from me." Gray let the white star float down to the Russian's chest. Trusov followed it with his eyes. It landed on his bloodstained shirt.

"You and I are even now." Gray's voice was crabbed with pain. "Our accounts are balanced. I'm done with you." He took a few steps away from Trusov.

Trusov might have sensed a reprieve. He asked weakly, "You are done with me?"

A long moment passed, Gray weaving as if from a strong wind.

Gray turned back, as if with an afterthought. "But then there's Mrs. Orlando. Her account is still owing."

Gray lowered the rifle, put its snout against Trusov's forehead, and pulled the trigger. The Russian's head came apart.

"That was from her."

Gray managed only two steps away from Trusov's body until he sagged to the ground. There he lay, wondering for a few seconds if he would be found, then able to wonder no more.

CHAPTER TWENTY

The two-man crosscut saw creased the log, gliding across the pine, but it was a feeble effort, and the saw did more sliding than biting. A twin was on each end of the tool. Their usual smooth teamwork had abandoned them. They pulled and pushed against each other, the saw teetered and wobbled, and the log remained largely unscathed.

"Can we quit now?" Julie asked.

"You didn't give it much of a try," Gray replied.

"Maybe you could spell us." Carolyn wiped her brow with histrionic embellishment.

"Can't. Doctor's orders. The surgeon said specifically, 'No two-man crosscut sawing.' "

Julie pulled again on the saw, to no effect, as her sister also pulled at the same time.

The woodshed's four new corner posts were now set in concrete. Adrian had leveled the concrete with a trowel. Tools from the closet were spread around the construction site.

The girls tried to balance the crosscut saw in the groove, but they hadn't cut far enough into the log, so they laid the saw on the ground.

Gray was sitting on a stump. He lifted a canteen from his lap and took a long drink.

"The girls and I have a pretty good start on your woodshed," Adrian said. "Are you going to be able to finish it after I'm gone?"

"One way or another."

"Will you have enough return in your hand?" She sat next to Gray, taking the proffered canteen.

"Viable but flail. That's the surgeon's term."

"What's that mean?"

"I'll keep all my fingers, but the smallest two — the little finger and ring finger — aren't going to be of much use. I won't be able to flex or open them. In their charming terminology, the surgeons call such useless fingers flails."

Gray's hand was wrapped in gauze over which was an ulnar gutter splint held in place by an Ace wrap. The two fingers were covered, but three showed. The gutter splint reached a point four inches above his wrist.

Two weeks had passed since the showdown with Trusov. Gray had been in a Boise hospital all that time, and had just returned to the Sawtooths. Under his loose shirt, his back and shoulders were dressed with gauze. Same with his leg under his pants. The hair on his head was starting to grow back, but still looked ragged. The healing burns on his scalp were scabbed and pink. His ear was also healing. Stitches had closed the first wound Trusov had inflicted, on Gray's arm. He would be returning to the hospital for skin grafts. Gray's old tracheotomy scar was the only part of him that didn't hurt.

Adrian had taken care of the children at the cabin for those days. But now Gray was back. Her bag was packed and on the porch.

"They took bone from my hip, a spare tendon called a palmaris from my right wrist, and a sural nerve from my leg, then put all of those assorted parts into my hand. I'll also need skin grafts, and that's the part that bugs me."

The girls had heard it before but they listened intently, adoration and worry written large on their faces.

"How so?" Adrian drank from the canteen.

"Trusov's bullet took out my ulnar artery. I was spraying blood all over like the stuff was free, so I cauterized the wound with a matchbook, as you know. But the surgeons tell me there was no need to do that. That artery would have closed itself off in what they call a vasospasm. I just added to the injury by burning the hell out of myself."

"But you thought you were bleeding to death. It was a good choice under the circumstances."

Gray shrugged.

The twins stepped up to the porch. Shards from the shattered window lay on the ground. A glass repairman from Ketchum had already visited. Adrian had set the door back on its hinges. It would work until a more permanent repair could be made.

Hobart's only police car pulled into the yard, stopping next to the larch tree. Chief Durant was behind the wheel and Pete Coates was in the passenger seat. Durant had found Gray unconscious in Shepherd's Bowl that day, had brought him out, and had spent days at the Boise hospital looking after him. He waved at them, then looked at his watch. Time to get Adrian and Pete to the airport was growing short. She was scheduled to be back in Moscow in two days.

Adrian's forehead and neck were patched with small bandages. Her skin was so white the bandages seemed to blend in. She was wearing washed-out jeans and a denim shirt. She and Gray were silent a moment, watching the twins furtively observe them and speculate about them.

"Got it," John yelled, pumping his arm. He was sitting on a patch of grass near his father. "New record." He beamed with Game Boy success. Gray gave him a thumbs-up and the boy immediately returned to the game.

Pete climbed out of the car and walked toward them. His right arm was in a sling. He had been in the hospital bed next to Gray's for most of a week.

Adrian watched him approach. His face was gray, and he had not figured out how to shave with his left hand, so his chin and a cheek were nicked.

She asked, "Why did Trusov have to shoot at Pete?"

"He knew we were partners. Maybe Trusov wanted to make sure Pete wouldn't help me in the field. Or maybe the Russian just couldn't help firing at him. He was like a crow that eats robin chicks. It was his nature, no more to be denied than a crow's nature."

"How did Trusov know you and Pete would be at the fire tower?"

"He couldn't have. Trusov was traveling to the fire tower for the same reason we were, for a look at the land from a high point. We just happened onto him."

"But I thought you and Pete knew Trusov to still be twenty miles away at the time."

Gray closed his eyes a moment. "He fooled us, didn't he? Not for the first time."

On the porch the twins watched them, speculating.

Coates stopped in front of Gray. "Owen, when are you coming back to Manhattan?"

"I don't know."

Coates glanced at Adrian, then back to Gray. "Are you coming back, Owen?"

"Most likely."

"I mean, we're a good team — me arresting the pukes and you blowing the prosecution. At least they spend some time in jail between arrest and acquittal."

"I'll be back most likely, Pete."

"You proved to me you know sniping, but it's clear there's lots you don't know, I'll guarantee you that." Coates smiled. "Come back to Manhattan and I'll teach you the rest."

He threw a kiss to the twins and patted John on the shoulder as he walked back to the police car.

Adrian dabbed at a bandage on her neck. "Let me ask you something, Owen. Give me a straight answer."

"I always do."

"You always do eventually, after I've spent a good deal of time prying it from you. Why didn't you just call in a squadron of those Air National Guard helicopter gunships and have them spray all of Shepherd's Bowl. There was an easier way to rid the world of Nikolai Trusov, but you chose not to do it the easy way."

After a moment Gray brought his eyes around to hers. "I wanted him." His voice was compelling. "Me, not some helicopter."

Chief Durant tapped his horn, and held up his wristwatch, pointing to it with a finger.

Julie and Carolyn walked quickly toward them, looking at each other as they always did, silently scheming, communicating with each other with the slightest of expressions.

The girls stood in front of Gray a moment without saying anything. Adrian smiled at them. They appeared to be working up their courage.

Carolyn licked her lips and finally said, "Have you asked Adrian, Dad?"

"Pardon? Asked her what?"

"You were going to ask her not to go back to Moscow, but to stay with us here in the Sawtooths. At least for a while."

Julie was never one to let her sister carry all the load. "At least to see if things worked out between you two."

Gray protested, "I never told you anything like that."

"But we could tell you were going to," Carolyn said.

"We could tell by the way you always look at her," Julie added.

Gray glanced at Adrian. She grinned at him and raised her eyebrows.

"I'm not that obvious," he said.

Both girls said at once, "Yes, you are."

Carolyn raced on, "And now Chief Durant is waiting to take Detective Coates and Adrian to the airport. You've got to ask her now."

Gray spread his hands in a gesture of reasonableness. "Girls, Adrian and I haven't talked about anything like that. You're making presumptions, and it's sweet of you but—"

"Ask her, Dad," Carolyn demanded.

"Adrian will say yes if you ask her to stay," Julie insisted. "She told us she's got three weeks of vacation coming, and after that, who knows what might happen?"

"You're already hurt enough," Carolyn added with an impish grin. "If Adrian walks away, you'll have a broken heart, too."

Gray's face warmed. He looked out of the corner of his eye at Adrian. She was still smiling, but there was a touch of color to her cheeks.

He drew a hand along his mouth. He turned fully to Adrian. "We haven't talked about these things."

"Looks like we are now," she said.

He cleared his throat. "I don't like being brazen and forward, and I know—"

"Be brave, Owen," she said, widening her grin. "Show me some of the stuff you showed the Russian."

He asked quickly, "Will you stay, Adrian? For a while."

"Yes. For a while." Then she added, "At least."

The girls whooped and leaped and ran toward Chief Durant and Detective Coates to tell them Adrian wouldn't be going with them to the airport.

As the twins ran past their brother, Carolyn yelled at him, "Adrian is staying. She and Dad are together now."

John didn't look up from his Game Boy. "Cool."

Adrian reached for Gray. They sat there holding hands and leaning toward each other while the twins danced and pointed back at them and happily speculated with the police chief and Pete Coates about the Gray family's future.