I shook my head at him violently.
“There’s no time. A phone. Do you have a phone?”
“She has one, but I make her leave it back at the vehicle. Breaks her concentration,” Walke said, smiling.
He had a good and gentle whiskered face.
“Wouldn’t work, anyway. Not out here. No bars,” said Rosalind, a scrawny tomboyish girl with short, sandy hair and freckles.
“I’m a police officer,” I finally managed to get out. “From New York City. I was just attacked by two men up at that shooting range on top of the mountain who I was trying to question. I managed to escape, but they have friends who are right this very second trying to find me. If they do, they will kill me and you. These guys are soldiers, professional killers. We need to leave this place now.”
“Don’t believe him, Grandpa. He’s lying,” Rosalind said, shaking her head. “Leave him. He’s a bad man. Let’s just get out of here and call the cops.”
“At that shooting range, huh?” Walke said, nodding as he looked back up the hill. “I knew those fellas seemed fishy.”
“You don’t believe him, Grandpa, do you?” Rosalind said.
“Yes, I do,” Walke said, helping me up. “Let’s get back to the ATVs.”
I sat in front of Walke on his Honda ATV, cradled in his arms like a baby in a basket, as we skirted the swampland back to the pickup he had parked four miles away.
As the woods flew away behind us, I couldn’t stop thinking about how lucky I was. About God answering my prayers. When we arrived at the blue truck and Mr. Walke cut the chain of the cuffs with a pair of side cutters he took from the toolbox, I was seriously thinking about hugging him.
We’d gotten both ATVs back into the bed of the truck and had just started the engine when we heard it. It was a distant sound, almost pleasant at first like a lawn mower, but then we could hear its trilling. It was a helicopter, flying low and fast over the swamp.
“That them?” Mr. Walke said.
I nodded.
“Let’s get the hell out of here.”
“Grandpa, what have you gotten us into now? Grandma is gonna kill you,” Rosalind said, sitting beside me with Roxie in her lap.
Joe Walke dropped the truck into drive and dropped the hammer.
“What else is new, child?” he said, as we bumped and skidded off down the old dirt logging road.
Chapter 25
The whizzing rotors of the black MH-6 chopper that Haber called the Black Egg of Death slammed at the air above as they followed the slope of the hill down. Like a skier coasting down a ramp, the wasplike aircraft floated down the ridge low enough to put stars on the tops of the hemlocks and white pines it skimmed.
As in Iraq, Paul Haber sat in the skid seat of the helicopter poised like a bronco-busting cowboy in the chute. He had aviator sunglasses perched atop his head and the butt of the M4A1 held jauntily off his hip, right hand in front of the trigger guard, in a textbook field-manual ready position.
Devine knew that the real authority of military men and leaders lies in the half-magical, half-insane ability to lead by example, to dive headlong into combat with calm and confidence. How many times had he seen Haber expose himself to devastating fire without hesitation?
Haber could do anything, Devine thought, his doubts and fears long gone. Haber wasn’t like regular men.
As in Iraq, when Haber was his hero, Devine watched closely what he did, how his hunter’s eyes tracked into the boughs of the endless trees.
“Sir, three o’clock,” said Willard, on the aircraft’s other side.
The bird swung to the right. On Sweetheart Mountain, the opposite hill of the river valley beyond the swamp, there was movement up an old logging road. It was a faded blue pickup. Dirt spat out from the rear tires as it struggled up the steep grade.
“Is it him?” Haber called over the intercom.
“I can’t tell,” Devine said, trying to make out anyone in the cab. It was practically impossible with the vibration of the chopper.
Haber grabbed the glasses and looked himself.
“It has to be. Get after the truck.”
The chopper’s nose tilted downward and they sped forward over the swamp. Reaching the opposite side, they could see the blue pickup make the top of the hill. Instead of continuing on the logging road down the other side, the truck lurched to the left and continued along the top of an exposed rocky ridge, bouncing up and down off the bumpy rock face crazily as it picked up speed.
“What the hell is it doing?” Devine said.
“Who cares? Get up on that damned ridge and give me a clear shot.”
They’d just reached the top of the ridge, coming up behind the truck, when it happened. The driver’s-side door of the speeding truck opened and a man slid out, tumbling, skidding, and kicking up a cloud of rocks and dust. Into the air on the other side of the ridge, like Evel Knievel trying to jump the Grand Canyon, the still-speeding driverless truck sailed straight off the other side of the cliff and disappeared nose-first from view.
“What the—?” Haber said, and laughed. “Get me down there! Get me down there now!” The helicopter touched down in the tight clearing at the top of the ridge, where the truck’s driver had landed and was still sitting. As they jumped out and approached, Devine saw he was an old man, dressed in an orange vest and waders.
“Who the hell are you?” Haber said to him.
“I’m Joe Walke,” he said. He held his glasses in both hands and looked over the cliff, where the truck had shattered against the boulders far down below. “It wasn’t my fault. He wouldn’t jump. I told him.”
“Who wouldn’t jump?”
“That New York cop you’re chasing,” Walke said. “I thought we could bail and shake you, but he didn’t get my gist, I guess.”
“That cop is down there in the truck?”
Walke nodded.
“Poor fella,” he said.
Devine stood over the old coot, while Haber sent Irvine and Leighton down in the chopper to check out the truck.
“There’s nobody in there,” Irvine radioed up after another three minutes. “The old fart’s lying.”
“What?” the old man said, looking down at the truck again. “No? That’s funny. I could have sworn I seen him right there next to me. He must have jumped after all.”
Haber looked out down the ridge, the thin silver filament of the river in the shadowed land in the distance. It was past sunset now, getting dark.
“I wanted to wrap this up before dark, but now that won’t happen, will it?” Haber said, and hit the old man square in his face with the rifle butt.
The old man turned with the blow. Then he turned back and spat out a tooth.
“You think you’re tough, hitting an old man? You ain’t shit.”
“And you’re what?” Haber said as he leaned down over him. “Mr. Shit, I presume?”
The old man rolled up his sleeve and showed him a tattoo on his bicep, green and smeary with age. Devine recognized it. It was the skull and wings of force recon. USMC ’68, it said beneath it.
“That’s who I am. Right there. Semper fi, you asshole.”
Chapter 26
Three hours later, we came upon the sign between two stone posts. It was metal, in the shape of an arrow, lying rusted on the ground beneath a cracked wood beam.
Big Country Secret Cavern, it read, in Jet Age 1950s script.
It was Joe Walke’s idea. If he wasn’t convinced by my story, he knew we were in danger when he spotted the man with the gun riding on the outside of the helicopter.
There was no way to drive out of the area without being spotted from the air, so Joe insisted we bail while he drew Haber and his men off in another direction. A former coal miner and also the son of a coal miner, he’d spent his whole life in the area and could navigate the woods blindfolded. Rosalind, too, knew a special way out on foot.
“This place was big a long time ago, but it’s been closed for years. Even the road is
gone,” Rosalind said as we stepped past the sign, Roxie at our heels.
In the low moonlight, I saw that there was an indentation in the hill we’d been skirting. It was just rock face along this side, ten stories of it going straight up.
Twenty feet later, we saw the cave opening. It was triangular, like a church roof, and it was on the other side of a huge black pond.
“How are we going to get through? Swim? It’s filled with water.”
“No, this way,” Rosalind said, going left around the oblong pond. “They used to send you through in paddle boats, Tunnel of Love–style, Grandpa said, but there’s a walkway. C’mon.”
As we stepped in under the cathedral-like ceiling, Roxie started barking.
“Stop your fidgeting, Roxie. I like it as much as you do.”
I turned on one of the flashlights Joe Walke had given us. We also had some water bottles, and the shotguns—they held about twenty rounds, most of them number 7 birdshot, but there were a few shells of double-ought buck.
What wasn’t in our favor was that the shotguns were over-and-under break-open style, so they could only hold two rounds at a time. If we got into a firefight with these professional military folks, it was going to be over very quickly.
The beam of the flashlight revealed some beer bottles and graffiti on the rough rock wall, but they looked old and faded. I pointed the flashlight down the cement lip of the path beside the canal-like waterway. The path continued for at least a football field and then seemed to disappear to the right.
“You sure the other side isn’t blocked or anything?” I asked.
“No way. The other side is even more open than this one. It would take an earthquake,” Rosalind said.
We walked deeper into the eerie, dead-silent cave. The rough rock walls had a lunar quality, seeming to shift as the light moved over them. Some sections had weird patterns and folds. Embedded minerals in other areas glittered and threw back the light in disco-ball constellations.
Even on a day when I’d had a gun to my head, in this claustrophobic space my nerves ached to turn around. It was like we’d just walked in through the gates of hell.
“Marshall, Will, and Holly, on a routine expedition,” I sang, as I pointed the light up at cone-shaped rock stalagmites—or were they stalactites? It had been a while since I’d been underground, in the middle of nowhere, in the middle of the night.
“What’s that?” Rosalind asked.
“From a show I used to watch when I was your age called Land of the Lost. Ever hear of it?” I asked.
“No,” she said, leading onward into the dark. “We don’t have a TV. Grandpa says TV makes people stupid.”
“He may be onto something there,” I said. What a brave and capable little girl.
We finally reached the opening. When we stepped into the glorious open air from the long and nightmarish tunnel, I saw that the canal led into a huge lake. We were on the other side of the hill now. We’d walked straight through the mountain.
I looked back. The roof of the tunnel was an almost perfectly rectangular slab of rock about ten feet thick. It looked like a knocked-over monolith, like the roof of Stonehenge half-buried in the earth.
“People actually paid to do that?” I said.
“So I’m told,” Rosalind said, shaking her head.
“How long is it to this town? What’s it called?”
“Chapman. About eight miles around the other side of this lake.”
“Wait! Get down!” I said. “I see something.”
About a mile away, along the left shore of the lake, there was a light. A flashlight. Somebody walking, coming toward us. Worse than that, I thought I heard a short bark.
“You gotta be kidding me,” I mumbled. What are we going to do now?
I looked back at the mouth of the cavern, then toward the slope of the hill above it. It was steep, filled with trees, but manageable.
“But that heads right back up the hill to their camp,” Rosalind whispered. “Don’t we want to go away from there?”
“We have no choice. C’mon,” I whispered, and slung the shotgun over my shoulder.
Chapter 27
Dawn was breaking as we topped the crest of the ridge.
The whole top of the mountain was covered in a silver mist that turned to a spectacular rose-gold in the light of the rising sun. If I wasn’t being hunted down like a rabbit by a group of what had to be Special Forces soldiers, I bet I would have appreciated it even more.
Rosalind and I were freezing and exhausted. We’d only slept a little the night before, forty-five-minute catnaps in two different spots up the hill. We’d heard the helicopter twice, but it hadn’t sounded very close, thankfully.
There wasn’t a peep out of Rosalind or Roxie during the climb. I couldn’t believe what a great dog that setter was. She, too, knew we were in very deep trouble.
We had been walking down a small wooded rise for about twenty minutes when the mist started to lift. You could actually see the moisture rising slowly, like a stage curtain showing the feet of the trees.
And then a few seconds later, we stopped when we suddenly saw something.
Ahead of us about a hundred feet away, there was a man sitting on the ground, his back turned, leaning against a blown-over tree.
Chapter 28
Though seated, he appeared tall and lanky, wearing camo, a gun propped on the log next to him.
Gripping our cold shotguns, we knelt on the forest floor and watched him for a very long and silent five minutes.
He didn’t move. Was he sleeping? Dead? Or was it a trap?
Very slowly I began walking down toward him. When I was about ten feet away, the guy sort of stirred and reached for his weapon.
I closed the gap and put both barrels of the shotgun to the back of his head. “Don’t!” I said.
I made him lie on his belly, searched his outer pockets, and found zip ties that I used on his hands. Twenty feet away from where he’d been sleeping, the trees gave way to a clearing I recognized as the firing range I’d seen the day before. Beyond it were the trailers.
We’d done it. We’d made it back to their camp. I told Rosalind to head to the tree line and wait for me there, while I went back to the soldier and lifted his weapon—an actual grenade launcher! Just amazing. These guys had to be CIA or something. You couldn’t get grenade launchers at Walmart. I’d never even seen one.
The man remained silent as I removed his camo balaclava. He looked boyish, in his late thirties, a pleasant enough curly-haired guy with a goofy gap in his teeth. His driver’s license said his name was Justin De Souza, with an address in San Jose, California.
“Long way from San Jose, Justin,” I said. I found a Clif energy bar in his bag, ripped off the wrapper, and started chewing.
“Where are the others?” I said, spitting crumbs.
“Where the hell do you think they are? Out looking for you.”
“You’re the only one here?” I said skeptically.
“Yes. I mean no. Therkelson is in the trailer with a broken back. And the old man is here. They got him locked up.”
“The old guy in the blue truck? He’s here?”
“Yes. He’s okay. A little roughed up, but okay.”
“Get up and show me,” I said, kicking him.
We walked to the clearing and stopped.
“Rosalind, I’m going to take this guy back over to those trailers. If something happens, I want you and Roxie to try to get to Chapman by yourself. But if it’s okay, I’ll whistle and you and Roxie run as fast as you can to the trailers, okay?”
“Okay,” she said. “Where’s my grandpa?”
“In one of the trailers, I think. Just let me go check first.”
I turned back to Justin.
“Okay, buddy. Showtime. If you’re lying and somebody takes a shot at me, I won’t shoot back at him. I will pull this trigger on you, Justin, and we can die together. Now get moving. Fast.”
The twenty seconds
it took to run out in the open toward the trailers were the longest of my life. Any moment, I thought I would know what it felt like to take a high-powered bullet to a vital part of my body. But we made it. There were no shots.
We found Joe Walke in the second trailer, sitting against the wall in his orange vest.
“You got the drop on them!” he said, leaping up with surprising energy. “I knew it! Where’s Rosalind?”
I whistled.
Their hug moments later on the edge of the firing range was epic. Roxie, who couldn’t contain herself any longer, let out a happy bark.
“Okay, Joe. Here’s what I’d like you to do. Find some keys, take one of the vehicles, and head down the hill.”
“What are you going to do?”
“My job,” I said, shoving Justin back into the trailer in front of me, “is to end this thing. Now go.”
Chapter 29
I made Justin sit against the wall.
“You ever want to make it back to San Jose in the vertical position, you better start explaining just what in the hell is going on here, Justin. Because I’ve had a long night, and I’m not in the mood.”
“We’re training at the camp.”
“Training for what? The coming alien invasion? I’m a cop, Justin. NYPD. I know what happened to Eardley. How he didn’t die in the crash back in ’07. How his old buddy Haber is here running a paramilitary operation, and decided Eardley should take a dive off the side of a building. What are you guys? CIA?”
Justin looked at me.
I took a chance. “Look, man. I have no stake in this, except that I tried to solve a murder and now people keep shooting at me. But I was just at the Pentagon, asking how this guy turned up dead again, and the brass are all over this. The secret is out.”
Justin grunted, so I continued. “And this little training camp is gonna look pretty strange when the powers that be start sniffing around. I wouldn’t be surprised if Haber took that chopper and flew away. If not, I’m gonna wait here with your weapon to greet him in style. But if you tell me what’s going on, I can help you.”
Chase Page 6
