“You brought the new ID cards to him, in quarantine at Camp Shelton. Colonel Foley gave you money for black-market gasoline and camping gear. And most of the gear was Army issue, including a current-issue uniform?”
“Yes…” Amory replied, his voice hushed. Under emergency rule, these could be hanging crimes.
General Mirabeau said, “And then it all went wrong.”
Amory was still looking at his boots, shaking his head, quivering. “Yes, all wrong, sir, all wrong. He had a pistol—”
“John Doe had a pistol?”
“Yessir! Colonel Foley and the others, at the trailer, they pulled guns on him, they said he wasn’t going anywhere, that they were going to find out where his coffee was hidden, right then and there, that night.” Amory looked up, wild-eyed. “And he shot them, all three of them!”
The general paused, studying the sergeant’s face. “How old would you say he was?”
“John Doe? Colonel Brice?”
“Stick with John Doe, Sergeant. There’s no Colonel Brice. He does not exist.”
“I’d say he was about sixty, or maybe a little older. But very, very fit.”
“He must be pretty quick for a man his age, wouldn’t you say? Pretty quick, to shoot three Army officers like that? Three officers with drawn pistols.”
“Very quick. I think he was just so pissed off at being double-crossed, I mean he was angry, raging angry! I thought he was going to kill me too, and then he made me drive him north.”
“I understand, Sergeant. He had a pistol aimed at your back, and you had every reason to believe that he would kill you if you didn’t obey his orders. Now, describe his tattoo.”
“Sir?”
“You saw John Doe’s tattoo during his quarantine washdown, didn’t you? It’s in your report.” General Mirabeau tapped the file on his desk.
“Yessir. Army jump wings. Airborne wings.” Amory pointed to his left upper arm. Right here, about an inch wide.”
“Can you estimate how old it was? The Airborne tattoo.”
“Very old, sir. Decades old at least. They get that look, faded and blurry.”
General Mirabeau paused, staring beyond Amory at one plaque among the many on the opposite wall, a plaque that incorporated an outsized replica of silver Army jump wings on mahogany. After almost a minute of reflection, during which Amory remained frozen in his chair, the general asked, “And when you left him at the buffer zone, he was walking north, toward Tennessee, correct?”
“Yes sir.”
“And you marked the drop-off location on the map in this report correctly?”
“Yes, exactly correct.”
“So where do you think he is now, Sergeant?”
“Really, I wouldn’t know. I suppose he’s in Tennessee.”
“Thank you, Sergeant Amory. That’s all. You’re dismissed.”
Amory stood at attention, about-faced smartly, and marched out of the room.
General Mirabeau leaned back in his chair and slumped down, thinking. Sergeant Quinton Amory would present no problem. The medic could be transferred to some distant post, kept in quarantine work and effectively isolated. Fortunately, the media were no longer a consideration, not under the emergency laws. The doctor, the colonel and the major were already dead. The entire case could be slammed shut on his word alone. A plausible explanation was readily available: the three officers had been killed in a falling-out among thieves, a crossfire over some black-market double-cross.
The next question was: should he notify his counterparts in Tennessee that an unknown subject, a dangerous killer, was probably loose in their territory? It wasn’t only a question of justice. From what he had gleaned, John Doe had killed the three officers in self-defense, after being betrayed. The three dead officers were dirty, involved in some black-market dealings. If he had caught them at it, they might have been hanged. At this stage in the economic and political recovery of the emergency zone, it wouldn’t be good for public or military morale to publicize this bizarre case of senior officers involved in black-market deals and shootouts. They were already dead.
General Mirabeau examined the duplicate ID card on his desk, made from the backup file on the computer that had made the original. The conspirators hadn’t managed to erase every trace of the creation of their fake ID card. “Colonel Brice” looked like a very serious man, with pale blue eyes and a scar across the top of his forehead. It would be simple to have the entire file sent to his civilian counterparts at Fort Campbell, along with a summary of the case.
But why should he? He despised the new rulers to the north, especially what they were doing in Tennessee and Kentucky. Using foreign soldiers on American soil to round up and relocate Americans…that was something he could not understand and would never consider. The Deep South emergency zone had its problems, to be sure, but Americans were solving those problems. In a year, two at most, they would hold new elections and he would step down. Possibly even run for governor of Georgia, his home state. In time, that could even lead him to the White House, as a candidate with a proven record in crisis management and disaster recovery.
In any event, life would eventually pick up and then go on in the Deep South, with or without him. But what the civilian leadership was doing in Tennessee and Kentucky was beyond the pale. Using the Mexican troops of the so-called North American Legion and, even worse, the foreign contract soldiers of the mercenary battalions, that was simply unimaginable. Why should he help them find an old American soldier on the run, even if he had killed three of his officers? Three corrupt officers. Well, he wouldn’t do it, he finally decided. To hell with the traitors up north. Let them find the old soldier on their own—if they can.
The fingertips of the general’s right hand went to his left side and gently touched the wings that he had worn since graduating from the Fort Benning jump school thirty years before. He spun around in his executive chair and stared out his window at the massive jump tower across the green fields, where even during the long emergency trainees still made their first controlled descents under canopy. Airborne, all the way, he mouthed silently.
****
Carson was dragged, bumping and scraping along a path, sunlight flickering between trees. He was pushed and rolled and jabbed, and with every movement came stabbing pain he could neither grasp nor evade. His world was a swirling cavalcade of faces and places, remembered or imagined. Jet and prop fighter airplanes flew above him as he heard desperate radio calls for air support, screams and explosions.
Eventually there was stillness, and when he awoke he was in a small, dimly lit room. He was lying on his side on a narrow bed, covered by a quilt, wedged into position with cushions and rolled-up blankets. Besides the pain, he was possessed of a great thirst. Above him, model airplanes locked in frozen dogfights hung by threads, suspended from the ceiling. Posters of rock groups and professional athletes covered the walls.
The young hunter entered the room and sat on a wooden chair near the bed. He was wearing jeans and a gray sweatshirt. Thick brown hair nearly covered his brown eyes. The boy said, “Welcome back to the world of the living.”
“Who are you?” Carson had to work his lips and tongue to speak, seeking saliva and finding none.
“I’m Zack Tutweiler.”
“The kid who shot me. Zachary? Okay, Zack. When…how long?”
“That was Christmas morning—Tuesday. It’s Friday now. You’ve been in and out, but this is the first time you made sense. You talked a lot, but it was mostly crazy talk.”
Phil Carson stared at the boy, blinking, working his jaw, licking his lips with a dry tongue. “Well, Zack, thanks for not putting another arrow through me.”
“Yeah. And thanks for not shooting me.”
They stared at each other.
Carson broke the silence. “Zack, where are your parents?”
“Parents? My parents… They’re dead. Both dead. I’m the only one left.”
Carson continued to stare. “I’m sorry.�
��
“Yeah. Me too.”
“Is this your house?”
“My father—I mean—yes. It’s mine now, I guess.”
“Are we far from the place…I mean…how did I get here? Did I walk?”
“No, you lost too much blood. You were out of it. I wasn’t even sure you’d live. I dragged you here in a travois.”
“A what?” The word, which rhymed with “boy,” was unfamiliar to Carson.
“You know, two poles, with a blanket tied between. Like the Indians used. Only I used your poncho instead of a blanket, and two saplings.”
“Where did you learn that trick?”
“The Boy Scouts. And from my father. And from reading a lot.”
Carson pondered this, his mind still swirling with dreams, fragments of nightmares, and half-remembered images of trees and sky, of being pulled through the woods. “Zack, have you got some water?”
“Right there in the cup. You’ve been drinking plenty already. It’s juice, made from powder. You don’t remember?” He pointed to the small table set up near the head of the bed. There was a purple sports bottle with a long flexible straw protruding from its cap, and he handed it to Carson.
“I’m not sure what I remember. I’m not sure of anything.” He took the cup and drank from the plastic straw. The room-temperature grape-flavored drink was delicious.
The boy asked, “So, what’s your name? I think we can rule out what’s on these ID cards, Colonel Brice.” Zack Tutweiler held up Carson’s stack of identity cards, fanning them out like a hand of cards. “These are brand new—they never spent a day in a wallet. So, where did you get them? Your uniform is brand new too, and so is your nametag and rank. And why were you running north? Most folks are trying to get out of Tennessee. You’re the first one I’ve met going the other way.”
“It’s pretty…complicated.” Carson set the water bottle back on the table.
“Well, go ahead anyway. I’ve got time. Why don’t you start with your name? Your real name.”
Carson stared at the blue Spitfire prop fighter hanging above him. Red and white shark’s teeth decals had been carefully applied to the plastic model’s nose. He dropped his eyes back to the young man who had shot him with an arrow and then brought him home and nursed him. The kid could still finish him off or turn him in if he so desired, that was a given. He was lying on his side in a strange bed, in an unknown house, completely at the boy’s mercy.
He had nearly been killed when he’d shot the three Army officers back near Camp Shelton on Christmas Eve. Then he’d been shot with an arrow on Christmas morning. If he were arrested now, they’d hang him for sure. He wasn’t just living on borrowed time; he was far beyond that stage. There wasn’t even a term for his current precarious state of existence. Playing charades with this boy seemed pointless. “My name is Phil Carson. I’ll tell you the rest, anything you want to know, but tell me about my wound first. How bad is it?”
“The arrow went through your left butt cheek at an angle and out your left thigh, on the outside. Split your butt open pretty good. So I put on the coagulating powder—lucky for you I had a pack of it. I always carry Quik Clot when I’m hunting, in case of an accident. That stopped the bleeding, but you’d already lost a lot of blood. You must be pretty tough: I think most people die when they get a wound like that. Maybe it’s because you’re old, or maybe you’re just lucky…I don’t know.”
“Lucky? If I was lucky, I wouldn’t be here at all.”
“Maybe. So, who’s Paulo? And who’s Ranya?”
“Long story…”
“Do you really have a treasure boat worth a million dollars? You were trying to sell it to me, but I needed a helicopter to get it.” Then Zack laughed, showing his crooked front teeth. The teenager needed braces, which seemed as unlikely under the present circumstances as his sprouting wings, or owning a helicopter. “Was that all crazy talk, like all that jungle fighting stuff? I mean, a treasure boat—what’s up with that?”
Carson exhaled and stared at the Spitfire model above him. “Well, Zack, let me tell you what happened. I was bringing a sailboat, a catamaran, up from Brazil. I was aiming for Texas. It was loaded with Japanese solar panels and Brazilian coffee. I put everything I had into that cargo after I got chased out of Panama.”
“You’re making this up, right?”
“Nope, it’s all true. A bad storm caught us rounding Cuba, and the boat went ashore just over the line in Alabama, down from Mobile. The boat was wrecked, driven way up into a marsh. There was nothing I could do but walk away from it. The Mississippi Guard picked me up and put me in a quarantine camp. While I was there, I made a deal with an officer—a military doctor. He was going to help me get out of Mississippi, and I was going to tell him where my boat was. That was the deal we made, but I was double-crossed. That was on Christmas Eve. There was some shooting…they didn’t know I had a pistol. I didn’t start it—well, maybe I did. But they pulled guns on me first, and then a couple of them wound up dead.”
“That’s why you have an empty .380, and an Army nine millimeter Beretta.”
“That’s right. I didn’t figure it’d help to stick around and try to explain how it was self-defense, so I took off in an Army pickup truck. I was trying to get out of Mississippi as fast as I could. The last part of it I was on foot—and that’s where we, ah, met. So, how close was I to Tennessee?”
“About a quarter mile from the border.”
“Shit. I almost made it.”
“Yeah. Almost.”
“And now what? What’s next? Are you going to turn me in, Zack?”
The boy paused and then replied, “Naw, I don’t reckon so.”
“Why not? You could get in a lot of trouble for harboring a fugitive.”
Zack snorted, almost a laugh. “Like things are so great around here already? You know what I was really doing up in that deer stand? I was wondering if I ought to do what my mother did and jump off a bridge. Or maybe just walk into Tennessee and try to kill the first foreign S.O.B. that I saw. Things haven’t exactly been going so well for my family—they’re all dead. If I told you about it, you’d understand what I was thinking about up in that tree stand. Nothing good, let me tell you. Then you came along and, well, after you didn’t shoot me when you could have, I figured that was some kind of a sign. Christmas morning, and everything. So, no. I won’t turn you in.”
“Well, I appreciate that.”
“Hard to figure why you’d want to walk into Tennessee, though. When I was thinking about doing it, I figured it for a one-way trip.”
“Can’t be much worse than getting hanged for murder, here in Mississippi.”
“You’ve got a point there. But you ain’t going to Tennessee or anywhere else real quick, not till your hindquarters heal up. You try and walk too soon and it’s going to bust wide open.”
“Thanks for taking care of me, Zack. You’re a pretty good medic.”
“Thank my father, he taught me. But there’s some other reasons I figure to keep you around a while, besides pure Christian charity. I found some interesting things on you when I was playing nursemaid.”
“Such as?”
“Well, your belt seemed sort of heavy, and it’s not the kind of a nice leather belt you often find on a soldier. Not even on a fake colonel, I’d reckon. That was another giveaway—no real colonel would wear a non-regulation belt. I split it open with a razor and I found your gold. Then I checked the sneakers in your pack, and I found some more.”
Carson stared at him. “I see.” The boy was formidable.
“And I found a little bitty list of names and addresses, written real tiny with a sharp pencil.”
“You found that too, did you?”
“I did. Piss-poor security, Phil Carson, carrying around a list like that. You know, if the wrong people found that list, everybody on it could wind up skinned alive. Or sent to a relocation camp, which probably ain’t much better.”
“Where’d you get ideas
like that, Zack Tutweiler? Your father?”
“That’s right. Plus I read a lot—there’s not much else to do out here.”
Carson smiled. “Except to go out bow hunting, right?”
“Well, there sure ain’t no TV or video games, not when there’s no electricity.” Zack smiled back, revealing his twisted front tooth.
“You’re right about it being bad security, my having that list. I know it’s a poor excuse, but when you get to my age, you have to write things down. My memory isn’t what it was.”
“I see. So, were you really a soldier in Vietnam? Or was that just more crazy-man dream talk? You know, all that ‘Sneaky Pete, Roger Dodger, over and out’ stuff?”
“What do you think, Zack?”
“I think it matches up with that old parachute tattoo on your arm. The Army jump wings. And all them old scars you’ve got—and some not so old. Like that beauty on your noggin.”
“Yeah. And don’t forget the one you gave me.”
“Don’t mention it.”
Neither said anything for a long minute.
“So, what’s next, Zack Tutweiler?”
“I don’t know. It’s going to be a while before you’re up walking. Your butt cheek is all torn up, and I’m not much of a surgeon. I hope that broadhead didn’t clip anything important, like nerves or something. Can you lift your leg? Wiggle your toes?”
“Let’s see…damn, that hurts! Maybe I’ll wait a while on that.” Carson went slack, breathing heavily while fixing his eyes on the diving Spitfire above him.
“Suit yourself.” Zack stood and idly rearranged small knickknacks on top of his dead brother’s bureau.
“Zack, how safe is it here?”
“Safe? Are you kidding? It ain’t safe at all. Everybody in my family died here.”
“I mean, do they ever come to check this place out?”
“ ‘They’ who?”
“The Mississippi Guard, the police, the sheriffs…any of them.”
“No. We’re at the end of a dead-end dirt road, and it’s made to look like nothing’s back here. I hardly ever run the generator, and I never show lights at night.”
Foreign Enemies and Traitors Page 17
