by Dan Simmons
The special agent seemed to be pulled backward by the tug of an invisible cable. His sunglasses and cap flew off and he landed on his back, legs spraddled, the rifle six feet beyond his head.
The sudden silence was deafening.
Natalie was up on her knees, peeking around the side of the boulder and breathing heavily through her mouth. “Oh, Jesus,” she whispered.
“Are you all right?” asked Saul. “Yeah.”
“Stay here.”
“Forget that,” she said and stood with him as he got up to descend the hillside.
They were forty feet down the slope when Haines rolled over, scrabbled onto his knees, retrieved the rifle, and bolted for the opposite tree line. Saul dropped to one knee, fired, and missed. “Damn! This way.” He pulled Natalie to their left, through thick brush.
“The others will be coming,” panted Natalie. “Yes,” said Saul. “No noise.” They continued moving left, from tree to tree. Across the clearing, the hillside was too bare for Haines to move clockwise ahead of them. He would have had to stay where he was or be moving toward them. Saul wondered whether the pilot was armed.
Saul and Natalie moved as quickly as possible while staying behind trees and keeping back from the edge of the clearing. When they were approaching the point where Haines had entered the trees, Saul waved Natalie to a stop in a thick copse of second growth while he moved forward in a crouch, looking to the left and right after each step. Extra cartridges jingled in the pockets of his sports coat. It was getting dark under the trees. Mosquitoes were coming out, buzzing by Saul’s sweaty face. He felt like hours had elapsed since the helicopter had landed. A glance at his watch told him that it had been six minutes.
A horizontal band of light on the forest floor caught something bright against dark needles. Saul dropped to his stomach and wiggled forward on his elbows. He stopped, gripped the rifle in his left hand, and extended his right hand to touch the blood that had splattered needles and dirt. Other spatters were visible to the left, disappearing where the trees grew thicker.
Saul was edging backward when the roar of automatic fire began to his left and behind him, anything but toylike now, loud and frenzied. He pressed his cheek to the soil and tried to will his body and backbone into the dirt with him as bullets ripped branches, stitched tree trunks, and whined into the clearing. He heard at least two strike metal there, but he did not raise his head to see which vehicle was hit.
There was a terrible scream not forty feet from Saul and then a moan that started low and seemed to ascend into the ultrasonic. He jumped up and ran to his left, catching his glasses as a branch batted them off, almost falling over Natalie where she crouched behind a rotten stump. He threw himself down next to her and whispered, “You all right?”
“Yes.” She gestured with her pistol toward a thick growth of young pines and spruce where the hill bent toward a ravine to their left. “The noise came from over there. He wasn’t firing at us.”
“No.” Saul looked at his glasses. The frames were bent. He tapped at his sports coat pockets. Cartridges clinked. The pistol was still in his left pocket. His elbows were a muddy mess. “Let’s go.”
They crawled forward, Natalie three yards to Saul’s right. As they approached a small stream running out of the ravine the undergrowth grew thicker, sporting tender young spruce and fir, stands of low birch, and clusters of ferns. Natalie found the pilot. She almost set her forearm on his chest as she moved around a thick juniper bush. He had been cut almost in half by rapid fire from the M-16. His abdominal wall hung in loose flaps of red striated muscle, and his fingers were clenched around the white and gray ropes of intestines as if he had tried to tuck himself back in. The small man’s head was thrown far back and his mouth was wide open in an unfinished scream, the clouded eyes fixed on a small patch of blue sky between branches far above.
Natalie turned and vomited silently into ferns. “Come on,” whispered Saul. The noise of the stream was loud enough to cover soft sounds.
There were tiny asterisks of blood on a fallen log behind a wall of spruce saplings. Haines must have crouched there minutes before until he heard the sound of the pilot moving through the bushes seeking his own shelter.
Saul peered through the spruce. Which way had Haines gone? To the left, across twenty-five feet of open space, the mature forest began again, filling the valley and rising over the low saddle to the southeast. To the right, the ravine was filled with young trees, narrowing forty yards above to a narrow gap filled with three-foot-high juniper.
Saul had to decide. A movement either way would expose him to view to someone who had gone the other way. It was the psychological barrier of the clearing to the left that made him decide that Haines had gone to the right. Saul slid backward and handed the rifle to Natalie, putting his mouth almost against her ear as he whispered to her. “Going up there. Tuck in right under the log. Give me exactly four minutes then fire the rifle into the air. Stay low. If you don’t hear anything, wait one more minute and fire another round. If I’m not back in ten minutes, get back into the van and get the hell out of here. He can’t see the road from up here. Do you understand?”
“Yes.”
“You still have the passport,” whispered Saul. “If things go bad, use it to get to Israel.”
Natalie said nothing. She was very tense, but the line of her lips was thin and firm.
Saul nodded at her and crawled through the barrier of soft firs, staying close to the stream as he moved uphill.
He could smell the blood. There was more of it now as he crawled through tunnels of low juniper. He was moving too slowly; three minutes had passed and he was not far enough up the ravine. His right hand was sweaty around the grip of the Colt and his glasses kept slipping down his nose. His elbows and knees were very sore and his breath rattled in his chest. Flies buzzed up from another bright spattering of blood and batted against his face.
Half a minute left. Haines could not have gone much farther unless he had been running. He could have run. Ten yards would make all the difference. The M-16 had twenty times the range of Saul’s pistol, including the extra bullet he had loaded after racking a round into the chamber. Saul had eight shots. His pockets were filled with the heavy cartridges for the deputy’s rifle, but he had left the three extra magazines for the pistol neatly arrayed back where the deputy was handcuffed.
It didn’t matter. Twenty seconds until Natalie fired. Nothing would matter unless he got close enough. Saul lunged forward on his elbows and knees, panting audibly now, knowing he was making too much noise. He fell forward under an overhanging branch of juniper and gasped through his open mouth, trying to regulate his breathing.
Natalie’s shot echoed up the ravine.
Saul rolled onto his back, holding his forearm to his mouth so the sound of his panting would be muffled. Nothing. No answering shots or movement from above.
Saul lay on his back, pistol alongside his face, knowing that he should move forward, get farther uphill. He did not move. The sky was darkening. A ripple of cirrus caught the last pink light of evening and a single star gleamed near the edge of the ravine. Saul raised his left wrist and looked at his watch. Twelve minutes had passed since the helicopter had landed.
Saul breathed in the cooling air. He smelled blood.
Too much time had passed since Natalie’s first shot. Saul had raised his wrist again to check the time when Natalie’s second shot rang out, closer this time, the ricochet tearing at rock thirty feet up the side of the ravine.
Richard Haines rose out of the shrubbery not eight feet from Saul and poured automatic fire down the ravine. Saul could see the muzzle flashes above him and smell the cordite. Bullets ripped apart the shrubbery he had just crawled through. Young trees two inches thick were sliced off as if harvested by an invisible scythe. Bullets struck rock on the east side of the ravine, screamed again on the west side, and kicked up dirt far below on the east wall. The air filled with the scent of sap and cordite. The firing seem
ed to go on and on and on. When it paused Saul was too numbed to move for two or three seconds. He heard the metal click of one clip being ejected from the M-16 and the tap of another one going in. Twigs snapped as Haines rose to his feet again. Then Saul rose, saw Haines standing less than ten feet away, extended his right arm, and fired six times.
The agent dropped the rifle and sat down with a grunt. He stared curiously at Saul as if they had been two children playing a game and Saul had cheated. Haines’s hair was sweaty and disarrayed, the flak vest hung loose at one side, and his face was streaked with dirt. His left pants leg was soaked with blood. Three of Saul’s shots must have struck the vest and driven him backward, but Haines’s left arm was shattered at the shoulder and at least one bullet had gone in where the vest hung loose at the throat. Saul saw white splinters of collarbone protruding from flesh as he stepped forward through the low juniper bush and crouched three feet from Haines. Saul moved the M-16 to one side with his left hand.
Haines sat with his legs out, black shoes pointed skyward. His mangled left arm hung at a sickening angle, but his right hand lay limply on his knee in a relaxed, almost casual manner. The handsome man’s mouth opened and closed several times and Saul saw bright blood on his tongue.
“It hurts,” Richard Haines said in a small voice.
Saul nodded. He squatted and stared at the man, assessing the wounds out of professional instinct and old habit. Haines would almost certainly lose the left arm, but with immediate attention, ample plasma, and an airlift in the next twenty or thirty minutes, his life could be saved. Saul thought of the last time he had seen Aaron, Deborah, and the twins. Yom Kippur. The children had fallen asleep on the couch between them as he and Aaron had talked.
“Help me,” whispered Haines. “Please.”
“No, I think not,” said Saul and shot him twice in the head.
Natalie was working her way uphill with the rifle when Saul descended the ravine. She looked at the M-16 in his hands and the extra clips in his pockets and raised her eyebrows.
“Dead,” said Saul. “We have to hurry.”
Seventeen minutes had elapsed from the time the helicopter landed when Natalie started the van again.
“Wait,” said Saul. “Did you check the deputy after the first shooting?”
“Yes,” said Natalie. “He was asleep but okay.”
“Just a minute,” said Saul. He jumped out of the van with the M-16 and looked at the helicopter forty feet away. Two teardrop gas tanks were visible behind the bubble. Saul set the selector on single shot and fired the rifle. There came a sound like a crowbar striking a boiler, but no explosion. He fired again. The air suddenly filled with the strong reek of aviation fuel. The third shot started a fire that engulfed the engine and bloomed skyward.
“Go,” said Saul as he jumped in the van. They bounced forward past the Bronco. They had just reached the trees on the southeast side of the clearing when the second fuel tank exploded, throwing the bubble cockpit cover into the trees and scorching the left side of the Bronco.
Two dark cars flashed through the open switchback on the hill a quarter of a mile behind them.
“Quickly,” said Saul as they drove into the darkness of the forest. “There’s not much chance for us, is there?” said Natalie. “No,” said Saul. “They’ll have every cop in Orange and Riverside counties after us. They’ll seal off the highway between here and the other side, close all routes to I-fifteen, and send he li cop ters and four-wheel-drive vehicles into the hills even before first light.”
They rocketed across a stream and roared over the saddle at 70 m.p.h. in a shower of gravel. Natalie slid the van around a corner, counter-steered perfectly, and said “Was it worth it, Saul?”
He looked up from trying to adjust his bent glasses. “Yes,” he said. “It was.”
Natalie nodded and drove down a long slope toward an even darker stretch of forest ahead.
FIFTY-ONE
Dothan, Alabama Sunday,
April 26, 1981
On Sunday morning, before a live in-person audience of eight thousand and a live television audience of perhaps two and a half million, the Reverend Jimmy Wayne Sutter preached a fire and brimstone sermon so bone-rattling that members of the audience in the Palace of Worship were on their feet and speaking in tongues while those at home were on their phones and giving their Visa and Master Charge numbers to waiting pledge takers. The televised worship ser vice lasted ninety minutes and seventy-two minutes of it consisted of the Reverend Sutter’s sermon. Jimmy Wayne read excerpts from the Letters to the Corinthians to the faithful, and then followed that with a much longer segment where he imagined Paul writing updated letters to the Corinthians in which he reported on the moral tone and prospects in the United States. To hear the Reverend Jimmy Wayne put words in Paul’s mouth, the current climate in the U.S. was one of prayerlessness, pornography, creeping secular humanism inculcating defenseless youth in the secret rites of sinful socialism, permissiveness, promiscuity, demonic possession advanced by rock videos and by Dungeons and Dragons games, and a general and pervasive rottenness manifested most visibly by the sinfuls’ refusal to accept Christ as their personal Savior while giving generously to such urgent Christian causes as Bible Outreach, 1-800-555-6444.
When the Outreach Gospel Choir had sung their final triumphant chord and the red lights were out on the nine massive cameras, the Reverend Jimmy Wayne swept through the private corridors to his office, accompanied only by his three bodyguards, his accountant, and his media consultant. Sutter left all five in his outer office and shed clothes as he moved across the carpeted expanse of his sanctum sanctorum, leaving a trail of sweat-soaked garments on the floor until he stood naked by the bar. As he poured himself a tall bourbon, the high-backed leather chair behind his desk swiveled around and an old man with a flushed face and pale eyes said, “A very stimulating sermon, James.”
Sutter jumped, spilling bourbon on his wrist and arm. “Goshdarnit, Willi, I thought you were coming this afternoon.”
“Ja, but I decided to arrive early,” said Wilhelm von Borchert. He steepled his fingers and smiled at Sutter’s nakedness.
“You come in the private way?”
“Of course,” said Willi. “Would you prefer that I came in with the tourists and said good morning to Barent’s and Kepler’s men?”
Jimmy Wayne Sutter grunted, finished his drink, and went into his private bathroom to turn on the shower. He called over the running water, “I got a call from Brother Christian about you this morning.”
“Oh, really?” said Willi, still smiling slightly. “What did our old dear friend want?”
“Just letting me know that you’d been busy,” called Sutter. “Ja? How so?”
“Haines,” said Sutter. His voice echoed on the tile walls as he stepped into the shower.
Willi walked to the bathroom door. He was wearing a white linen suit with a lavender shirt, open at the neck. “Haines the FBI person?” he said. “What about him?”
“As if you didn’t know,” said Sutter, scrubbing his broad stomach and soaping his genitals. His body was very pink and devoid of hair, somewhat like a huge, newborn rat.
“Pretend I do not know and tell me,” said Willi. He took his coat off and hung it on a hook.
“Barent’s been following up on the Israeli connection after Trask’s death,” said Sutter, spluttering as he dunked his head under the stream of water. “They found that someone in the Israeli Embassy’s been doing computer searches through limited access files. Searches on Brother C. and the rest of us. But this isn’t news, is it?”
“Go on,” said Willi. He pulled off his shirt and set it on the hook with the sports coat. He slipped off his three-hundred-dollar Italian loafers.
“So Barent eliminates the meddler and Haines traces the connections out to the West Coast where you were playing what ever game you were playing. Last night Haines almost catches your people but has an accident himself. Someone lured him to the forest and
shot him. Who were you Using? Luhar?”
“Did they not catch the perpetrators?” asked Willi. He carefully folded his slacks across the back of the commode. He was wearing pressed, blue boxer shorts.
“Nope,” said the Reverend Jimmy Wayne. “They got about a million police in those woods but haven’t found ’em yet. How’d you get them out?”
“Trade secret,” said Willi. “Tell me, James, would you believe me if I told you I was not involved in this?”
Sutter laughed. “Sure! Just as much as you’d believe me when I tell you that all of our donations go toward buying new Bibles.”
Will took off his gold wristwatch. “Will this have an adverse effect on our timetable or plans, James?”
“I don’t see why it should,” said Sutter, rinsing the shampoo out of his long, silver hair. “Brother Christian’ll be even more eager to get you on the island where he can deal with you.” Sutter opened the sliding door and looked at Willi standing there naked. The German had a massive erection. The head of his glans was almost purple.
“We will not falter, will we, James?” said Willi, stepping into the shower next to the evangelist.
“No,” said Jimmy Wayne Sutter. “How do we know what we must do?” asked Willi, his voice taking on the lilt of litany.
“The Book of Revelation,” said Sutter and groaned as Willi gently cupped his testicles.
“And what is our goal, mein Liebchen?” whispered Willi, stroking the heavier man’s penis.
“The Second Coming,” moaned Sutter, his eyes closed. “And whose Will do we fulfill?” whispered Willi, kissing Sutter’s cheek. “God’s Will,” answered the Reverend Jimmy Wayne, loins moving in response to the rise and fall of Willi’s hand.
“And what is our divine instrument?” Willi whispered into Sutter’s ear. “Armageddon,” Sutter said loudly. “Armageddon!”
