Time Patrol

by Bob Mayer

  When it changed, Roland, stone-cold killer, otherwise nice guy, and weapons man for the Nightstalkers, had the stock of a sniper rifle tucked tight in to his shoulder with a righteous target approaching, and that made him happy. Neeley, a usually stone-cold killer from the Cellar, was in overwatch, with her own sniper rifle, and she was acting wonky. That made Roland unhappy since he liked her, and like for Roland was the equivalent of rabid devotion in a well-trained attack dog. However, it all balanced out and mattered little since he was in combat mode, and feelings were of no consequence to him in that mode. There was only the mission.

  Roland was a man who could live and flourish in the here and now.

  That’s a rare, and valuable, trait.

  It was going to get a lot more valuable.

  The problem with hiding off the grid was that sometimes you went off the grid.

  Jane Eyre led to Wuthering Heights. The names of the trails comforted Teri Stevens, not her real name, as she settled into her nine-minute-per-mile pace as verified by the GPS program on her iPhone. She wondered who had come up with the names, while noting that she had no cell phone signal in this old-growth forest of the Pacific Northwest. She was very conscious of the pace, a means to use time to push herself. People approach time differently, as if it were something they could control or use.

  Teri was running in Putney Woods on the south end of Whidbey Island, Washington, which was in the middle of Puget Sound not far from Seattle. She was dressed for the weather, with long black Gore-Tex pants and a yellow rain jacket. She skirted the puddles as best she could, but mud seemed to be an integral part of negotiating these trails, and after her first week running in the woods, she’d surrendered to that fact.

  She was a striking young woman, just past thirty, who cursed those genetic gifts every time she looked in the mirror because she was aware on a fundamental level those had been the first thing that had attracted him.

  It was something she ruminated on often, going back in her memory, looking at all those choices and non-choices as paths, much like Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights, with many branches spinning off. She wished she could go back in time and make a decision at times when she’d simply let fate push her down a path, and perhaps change a decision or two or three.

  One for certain. And that was the decision to marry him.

  But things were as they were, and there was no changing it.

  Such is the way most people view time. She had little idea that there were some who viewed it quite differently.

  Towering pines and moss-covered trunks lined the trail and her eyes darted into the dark green shadows, on the nervous edge between believing the trees were an enveloping protection or a dark hole for her fear to lurk.

  Sixty-two meters down Wuthering Heights from the intersection, Roland wouldn’t have liked the word “lurked.” He was in what was technically called a hide site and had been in the same position for twenty-eight hours, plus fourteen minutes, give or take some seconds. He’d cut back eating a week ago, so the only calls of nature were a slight roll to the left to urinate. The rain cleansed the mud he lay in, if one could be considered clean in four inches of mud, but Roland had been in worse spots, which tells most of what one needs to know about Roland’s past. He was hungry, but that wasn’t important. He was covered by a ghillie suit he’d spent three days preparing for just this forest, for just this weather. The outfit made him indistinguishable from the rotting log four feet to his right. Roland, in the flesh, was an imposing figure—six and one-third feet tall, solidly muscled, and sporting a scar along the right side of his head—a scar that was now poorly masked with a barbed wire tattoo.

  Neeley hadn’t commented on the tattoo when she saw it for a first time and, although Roland would never admit it, that omission hurt his feelings. It also made him wonder if the tattoo had been a mistake. Roland pretended otherwise, but he cared very much what the women around him thought, especially Moms and Neeley.

  He had a CamelBak of water tucked under the suit and the nozzle was an inch from the right side of his mouth. He’d been sipping it on a schedule that allowed a one-quarter reserve past the time he planned on being out of the hide site because plans sometimes went wrong and one always planned on that. Anyway, given the damp weather of the Pacific Northwest, dying of dehydration wasn’t high on Roland’s concerns for this mission. There were so many other likelier possibilities.

  It was Protocol and Roland knew Nada, the team sergeant of the Nightstalkers, would have approved. When he had time, and he’d had time on this op, Roland always ran his actions through the Nada filter. It was useful in little things, and little things added up to big things, like staying alive. Roland had every Nada Yada memorized, the rules by which his team sergeant ruled his life and that of the team.

  Roland wasn’t off the grid from the Nightstalkers on this op working with Neeley, like he’d been on the last one in South America. This was a mutually approved operation, Moms slapping Roland on the shoulder as he headed out for the airstrip at Area 51, wishing him good hunting. Nightstalker and Cellar operative working side by side.

  What was the world coming to? Cats and dogs . . .

  Even though he liked (perhaps not exactly the right word) Neeley, he missed his team. Most of all, he missed Moms, to whom he owed the deep and abiding allegiance of a blood debt since she saved his life in Iraq years ago.

  For a man like Roland, there was no greater bond.

  His left cheek rested lightly on the stock of the sniper rifle, but that eye was closed as he used his open right to scan the trail. He had that sixty-two meters’ line of fire to the intersection, which made the sniper rifle seem like overkill, but Roland never minded stacking the odds in his favor. Better to over-, rather than underkill. Roland never understood those movies where the bad guy walked away from the supposedly mortally wounded good guy only to end up on the wrong end of the good guy’s gun by the end of the movie. Bad guy deserved to die then, not particularly for being bad, but for being stupid.

  Roland’s training had kept him alive this long and he’d learned early in combat that there were no rules, no sporting, gentlemanly code of honor. There was alive or dead. An “honorable” death was still dead and Roland considered any dead a sucky dead.

  The receiver in his right ear crackled, volume set so low not a sound escaped the inner ear.

  “Beta on schedule, on Jane Eyre, heading to Wuthering Heights. On pace. Over.” Neeley’s voice was subdued, matter-of-fact.

  “Roger. Over.” Roland’s whisper was transmitted by the electronics wrapped around his throat.

  Wuthering Heights. It occurred to him that he’d never read the book. Of course, Roland had never read any novel. He’d tried one, a Conan the Barbarian novel someone had passed around on a deployment, but it had hurt his head. He’d read lots of weapons manuals, but those had pictures and, for him, a practical purpose. He only knew Wuthering Heights was a book because Neeley had remarked on it as they studied the map and satellite imagery of the woods.

  “How’s it end? Over.”

  Neeley had been with him long enough that she knew what he was referring to.

  “Badly. Guy doesn’t get girl. Girl doesn’t get guy. No happily ever after. Over.”

  There never was, Roland thought, which was a very profound thought for Roland.

  Teri Stevens wasn’t a big believer in happy endings either. The psychiatrist in Coronado had suggested running as a stress reliever, failing to see the irony, which might have made a less desperate person doubt his perception, but Teri had faithfully taken up the regime, and it did seem to take the edge off a little bit. She’d started on the beach, the same beach where he’d earned his “Budweiser” insignia when he’d graduated from SEAL training.

  He’d made her memorize all the trivia about the insignia, and at first it had been exciting, to be part of this special group. A golden eagle clutching a trident and a flintlock pistol across an anchor. The informal “Budweiser” designation c
ame from the fact current SEAL training had developed out of BUD/S, Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL training. The anchor represented, of course, the Navy, parent service of the SEALs. The trident represented the ancient god of the sea, Neptune, or Poseidon, depending on which mythology flavor whetted the appetite, Roman or Greek. The pistol, if one looked closely, and she’d been forced to, was cocked, representing the SEAL’s ability to always be ready.

  To go off, she remembered ironically. To go off. She should have paid more attention to that bit. And the eagle, lastly, represented the ability to parachute in from the air. The last bit of trivia she also found ironic in that the eagle, usually portrayed on flags looking upward, was looking downward on the insignia, to remind the wearer that humility is the true measure of a warrior.

  That part hadn’t seemed to take hold in her ex.

  Of course, he hadn’t always been that way. The first couple of years he’d been almost normal, as normal as someone who had made Special Operations their occupation of choice. But in 2005, on a deployment to Afghanistan, bad things had happened to a bunch of his SEAL buddies during Operation Red Wings, and he’d come back dark and bitter. He’d never talked about the greatest loss of life on one operation the SEALs had ever experienced. She’d read the books about it and saw the movie from the Lone Survivor, but still didn’t understand her husband’s role in it all.

  They’d divorced a long, hard year later.

  She’d stopped running on that beach when she was warned he was back from wherever it was he’d disappeared to. How “they” knew that, she had no clue, but within five minutes of the call she’d had her stuff in the car and was driving. She went about as north as one can go on the West Coast and still be in the States, then off the coast to an island.

  And started running again.

  After six months she was up to ten miles a day. She was also thirteen hundred miles away from where she had last seen the man who had begun his love with flowers and ended it with his fists and worse.

  She turned from Jane Eyre onto Wuthering Heights. Her right foot slipped on the edge of a puddle and slid out from under her. With a splash she went to her knees in six inches of black water without an expletive or complaint. Years of fear can blunt and silence even the most instinctive reactions.

  Teri got to her feet, stepped out of the puddle, and let water drain out of the pant legs.

  While she was doing that, Roland moved his head two inches to the right, removing his cheek from the rifle stock. He opened both eyes. The fall was the unexpected, which was to be expected. It would shift the timeline. How much? Roland hated when the timeline got shifted on an op. But he was trained to adjust. As he’d learned in his first infantry assignment as a young private: The best plan works up until you make contact with the enemy.

  Neeley chimed in. “Alpha on schedule, on Jane Eyre, heading to Wuthering Heights, moving faster than yesterday. Closing for the kill. Over.”

  “Roger. Over.”

  Teri began walking up the trail, letting each footfall squeeze water out of her socks and through her shoes. There was something to be said for a treadmill. But gyms required membership, and she was no longer a joiner. Even with the fake identification the Navy had given her, she kept her new name as tight to her as her skin.

  She checked her GPS. The fall had thrown her pace off, and she’d become obsessive about keeping time. She stood still and pushed buttons, updating the setting. Still no cell signal.

  It was only because she wasn’t moving that she heard the light patter of feet behind her.

  She turned and saw her ex-husband, Carl Coyne, come around the curve from Jane Eyre, running on the balls of his feet, his stride long and loose. He wore gray sweats, a hood pulled low over his forehead, almost hiding his eyes. The sweats were soaked from the rain, but she knew his answer to that: The human body was waterproof.

  She saw that look on his face, the familiar one, and knew she could never run far enough or fast enough. He was almost floating to her, easily skirting the puddle she’d fallen into. It was all for nothing, all the running, because his promise to destroy her had not been spoken as lightly as he now ran. That threat was a fuel that had kept him searching for the past six months with more ferocious determination than her trembling fear could propel her to hide.

  She was surprisingly calm as he closed in on her. Running would only gain her a few futile seconds. Screaming would just startle the wildlife. She realized she was actually almost relieved to be done with the constant fear, to have it end in the way she’d always known on a very deep level was inevitable. Death and taxes and here came the former.

  The moments were stretching out, the way they did when adrenaline surges and warps time, which should be an indication to all that perhaps time is not absolute, but a variable? Coyne was slowing to a determined walk, a narrow, double-edged knife in his right hand, a cluster of plastic cinches in his left; that last bit caused her to reconsider running.

  Those cinches indicated the inevitable would not happen fast. Her previous almost-relieved feeling floated away with a gasp of terror as the realization of torture before death hit Teri, and what little sense of self she’d held on to died.

  Carl stopped ten feet away and just stared at Teri, relishing the moment, his excitement palpable. It was getting dark even though it was not late, but daylight was different on this island that she had chosen for its remoteness and lack of a bridge. Teri should have known water would be no barrier to an ex-Navy SEAL. They lived and thrived in the water. Instead of protecting herself with a barrier, she’d enclosed herself in a prison.

  The thick trees surrounding them made it even darker. Teri looked up to the sky as if there was an answer, but she saw only leaves and a few specks of cloudy gray. She felt sad, wishing that she could see the sun one more time. The Pacific Northwest was indeed a great place for vampires to make their home, but for a Southern Californian girl, it was oppressively depressing. An eagle flashed by overhead, and she wished fervently she could take wing with that bird, experience that freedom. Be anywhere but here.

  Any time but now.

  Teri looked back at him. As she gazed into those rage-filled eyes, she saw a speck of red in the left eye. Something she’d never seen in it before.

  Carl took a step, closing the distance between them.

  Unfortunately, Roland couldn’t make one hundred percent positive identification because Teri’s head was in the way of most of the target’s face, plus the hood was pulled down low. Roland did have a clear line of sight just past her head on the suspect’s left eye and could put a 7.62x51mm steel-jacketed NATO round straight through the orbital socket, through the skull, and take a nice chunk of brain matter out the rear. And Roland did have Neeley’s positive identification. However, Neeley did not have her finger on the trigger.

  There were rules to a Sanction, and they were rules Roland took seriously, because they were the Cellar’s version of the Nightstalkers’ Protocols. Plus Neeley had insisted he take them seriously.

  One could never be wrong on a Sanction because they were what Neeley had called a “No-Do-Over.”

  Dead was not reversible.

  Of course, it didn’t occur to Roland: Who the hell else would be out here trying to kill this woman?

  Neeley had insisted, and Roland was a team player.

  Roland shifted the rifle ever so slightly and his finger curved over the thin sliver of metal.

  Roland had been following the rhythm of his heart ever since the woman turned the corner. Now he synchronized it with his shallow breathing as Carl stopped once more, five feet short. Blinking, as if the red in his left eye were a bug, distracting him.

  For a moment, Carl seemed to flicker. Most would have attributed the anomaly to an overactive imagination.

  Except Roland didn’t have one.

  He noted it, knew the flicker was real, but kept his eye on the target.

  “What is—” Carl began in a slightly puzzled tone, staring past her, but t
here was a breeze by Teri’s right cheek, as if a very fast hummingbird had flitted by. A crimson streak appeared just above and outside of Carl’s left eye along the skin on the edge of his skull, extending back over his ear. The gray hood was torn back, as if an invisible hand had grabbed it and jerked.

  Roland shed the ghillie suit with one smooth movement as he got to his feet, leaving the rifle lying on the log. Coinciding with his first step onto the trail, he drew his MK23 MOD-O Special Operation pistol, a bulky suppressor on the end of the barrel marring the gun’s smooth lines. He brought it up to the ready as he strode down the trail, in a proper two-handed grip as he’d been taught on the ranges and in the Killing House at Fort Bragg so many years ago.

  “Going in to confirm,” he informed Neeley, still in a whisper. “Over.”

  “Coming in to back up,” Neeley replied. “Over.”

  Carl dropped the cinches, his left hand pressing against the side of his face, blood flowing over the fingers. “What the hell?” he yelled.

  He lurched toward Teri, the point of the commando knife leading.

  Teri heard a soft pop from behind and saw the splash of blood in Carl’s right elbow as a .45 caliber bullet hit the joint. Such were the vagaries of bullet trajectory on impact with the human body that the round hit the base of the humerus, changed course, traveled up the arm parallel to the bone, and then punched out Carl’s right shoulder with a pretty red spurt.

  Pretty to someone like Roland, that is.

  The impact of the heavy bullet spun Carl around and ripped tendons in his arm as they strained to keep it attached to his body. The tendons succeeded, barely. With a splash, Carl dropped to his knees in a puddle from the shock, a few drops of water hitting Teri on the cheek along with some specks of blood from her ex. She numbly reached up and wiped them off.

  She finally looked over her shoulder and saw Roland, a massive figure dressed in black, wearing a black watch cap, his face smeared with camouflage paint, striding down the trail at a fast, but not hurried, walk, a large gun extended in his left hand, right hand cupped under left, weapon held steady and on line with his left eye. He didn’t even seem to register her, his focus was on Carl.