Reckoning

by James Byron Huggins

  "But anyone can lose strength, Sarah," Malachi said with a gentle concern. "Even Gage. He has known the kind of pain that men die from, and everyone has a limit to what they can endure. You must remember that he is only a man. A strong man, a hard man, to be sure. But still only a man. He knows fear, like anyone else."

  Sarah held a concentrated gaze on the hills. "He's searching for something."

  "Yes, he is," Malachi said. "He is searching for what he is. He hasn't given up, yet. I know. I am watching him."

  "He's so quiet," she whispered.

  "Yes."

  Sarah's eyes narrowed. "I thought he might just be tired, or exhausted. But it's more. It's a depression." She waited, searching for the proper word, grimaced with compassion when she found it. "It's fear."

  Malachi nodded, silent.

  She shook her head, teeth clenched. "No. I won't let him do this. I've got to try and reach him, somehow. Because I know he won't stop. He's still going to go against these people, after the manuscript. But if he's lost his edge, if he's lost his confidence, he won't stand a chance."

  "Use wisdom, Sarah," Malachi cautioned, gazing down. "True answers to our fears are never simple or clear. Pain and hardship are the rule of life, even for children of faith. A troubled spirit is rarely healed easily. In time, I believe, he will find both himself, and his courage, again. But it will come when it will come. If you choose to help him find his way, be careful that he does not also come to fear that you have lost faith in him."

  Sarah's face was grim. "I understand. I think I know how to deal with him." She paused. "Do you think he may have just been injured too many times?"

  "I know that each man has a limit." Malachi's face reflected an uncertainty. "But we cannot know, for certain. I know that Gage is still fighting, in his silent way, to find what he has lost. That is why he is with Chavez, in the hills. Chavez understands. He understands how wounds can haunt, how fear can follow healing. They speak little, but Chavez knows everything. That is why he is following and Gage is leading. He does not want to push Gage. He wants Gage to set the pace."

  Malachi looked at the sun, only a couple of hours from sunset. "Remember that life is often a dark and wounding journey. We bleed. We suffer. It is the price we pay to remain alive. The more we love and live, the more we will suffer. That is why great love requires great courage." He waited. "But Gage is, perhaps, tired of wounds, and no one can fight for him. It is something he must do within himself. By the strength of his spirit, he must resurrect his will to overcome."

  Sarah shook her head, a lonely silhouette. "But why now? He was hurt a lot worse than this in the desert, and he came back strong."

  A long silence joined them, and Malachi spoke again, a strange air of sudden understanding in his words. "Perhaps ..." the old man began, gazing at her with a gathering certainty, "Gage has never possessed reason to fear. Perhaps Gage has never known fear of death because he has never valued life." He paused, focusing on her. "Or love."

  Sarah closed her eyes.

  "Yes, perhaps it is love that truly wounds us," Malachi intoned, his words deep and purposeful. "And perhaps it is love that heals."

  Frowning, Sarah opened her eyes, staring with a steady concentration into the dusk. She nodded slowly.

  "I hope so," she whispered.

  *

  Methodically chambering the Colt .45 and flicking on the safety for a fast first shot, Kertzman laid the semiautomatic on the hotel room desk in front of him. Then, by reflex, he moodily glanced at the hotel door and window, making sure the lock was secure, the curtain completely closed.

  On the road for five days, he had collected real estate documents from Sullivan, Ulster, and Delaware counties, all centering on a time period six months before and after the founding of Allied Air Transport in Monticello. He had a lot and he was convinced that, somewhere in the records, he would find what he needed.

  Radford had paged him earlier in the day to advise him on what was happening in the NSA computer room. They were still checking and cross-checking identifications and personnel records of Expansion Transport. So far the NSA staff had discovered that almost 50 of the employees were currently wanted on local or federal warrants, had stumbled across evidence that Expansion management was overbilling clients, and had uncovered a host of other minor indiscretions of the law. It had even found ten employees who had used false IDs. But every print search on the suspect employee yielded an eventually positive identification through the Henry Classification system of the FBI computer program.

  No match yet for Gage.

  And nobody, absolutely nobody, as Radford had stressed, in the management or ownership level of Expansion was found, in any way, to have any background indiscretions. During the call Radford had seemed somewhat gloomy and unhappy about the drudgery. But Kertzman was enthusiastic, cheered him on for the good work.

  He laughed out loud as he remembered the phone call.

  Just a few more days, he thought, because I'm closing in on this guy. I'll find out who the bad guys are and who the good guys are. And if you don't cooperate, Gage, I'll fry you, too.

  Before Kertzman, spread across the table, laid a wide mass of records revealing land purchased for 1990, including dates, plots, road numbers, and descriptions as well as the current listing of ownerships.

  Face scowling in concentration, Kertzman leaned forward in the cheap armchair, the image of a gorilla in a blue working shirt and dark brown corduroy pants. He tried to imagine himself in Gage's position; a renegade Delta Force commando bent on protecting himself, needing a safe house, solitude, a place to hide out for the long run.

  Land, he thought, he needed a good-sized chunk of land. At least 50 acres of it. Probably more like 100 or more. And he'd want some distance, no neighbors, no possibilities of cameras in windows. He'd need gullies, ravines, and hills surrounding him so that he could go tactical. But he'd also need a little flatland immediately around the house, a little clear space so he could see them coming.

  Kertzman had already purchased topography maps according to home sites, and he'd planned to check the purchased land against the topography charts to shuffle any unsuitable locations lower on the list.

  With resolute calm and a hot cup of coffee beside him, Kertzman picked up the first batch of records, perused the listing of land purchases for Delaware County. Then, with amazing speed, he began to write them down, rearranging the land purchases with the largest plots first, copying them in descending size for the one-year period. It was a lot; 153. He repeated the procedure with Sullivan and Ulster counties, methodically listing each plot in order of size, from largest to smallest in descending order.

  Four hours and six cups of coffee later, he was finished. He could have accomplished a lot more a lot quicker, if he had used an Agency computer, but that would have violated the rules of his greater plan, exposed his moves. So he did it the old-fashioned way. And in his own, stubborn self-reliance, he enjoyed it.

  "Finished." He leaned back from the desk, rubbing his eyes tiredly. It had been a long time since he had done anything this methodical. It was like the old days, when he was just a grunt highway patrolman in South Dakota, finishing paperwork on top of paperwork with no end in sight.

  He stared wearily at the 45 legal-size pages of listings.

  You're wastin' time with this, boy!

  The thought stung Kertzman.

  "No I'm not," he said aloud so that he'd hear himself say it.

  Maybe in time he'd believe it.

  Frowning, he leaned forward again and began to check the listings of past purchased against current ownerships, discovering who still owned the same plots that were bought in that period of 1990. In the end, he had a list of 25 plots of land that were over 100 acres in size still in the possession of the same owner. There were 40 listings for plots over 50 acres, and the remaining 20 listings were for plots less than 50. Any plots smaller than 20 acres could be ignored.

  "That ain't gonna be you, partner," Kertz
man whispered to himself. "You want some room. You want to be able to use the terrain, to choose a dozen different lines of retreat."

  Kertzman realized that if Gage had arranged another purchase of the land from one identification to another since 1990 it would delay his success at tracking the Delta warrior down. But he was betting Gage hadn't resold the land to another identity. Buying and selling was an activity that violated Procedures to Escape and Evade.

  Kertzman recalled the Special Forces training manuals he had studied on the flight from Washington to New York, copies of the same manuals Gage was issued when he was training in the early eighties.

  Escape and Evade. Never move in a straight line. Never become visible. Never attract attention. Move as far as possible as fast as possible, then find concealment and don't move again. Never do anything you don't have to do.

  There was more in the training manuals. A lot more. With dazed fascination Kertzman learned methods for creating illegal incendiary weapons out of coffee, sugar, soap, potassium, rubbing alcohol, or turpentine; weapons that could be made quickly and with little preparation from standard kitchen products but which would explode like napalm and burn even under water. He learned how to improvise lethal booby traps from locks, telephones, whistles, flashlights, doorknobs and even candy bars. And he learned more about camouflage than he ever believed existed.

  Kertzman was already familiar with the concepts of using terrain, shadows, and foliage to conceal shape and cover sound. But, while studying the manuals, he learned how to use an enemy's visual depth perception to conceal movement, how to use double slopes to throw the sound of a rifle shot, causing the sound to come from an area several hundred yards away from the actual point of fire.

  He learned new methods for locating water in the desert (by studying the birds in the evening), for sewing wounds shut with human hair, and for nocturnal navigation by the stars. And there were techniques teaching how to eat substances that would make a normal person vomit (pinch nose, close eyes, chew with water, and swallow quickly), how to move on dry sticks without making a sound (set the foot down, heel to toe, upon the sticks and in a direction parallel with the sticks), and how to utilize the red-cone, green-cone color receptors of the eyes to detect motion in the dark, instead of simple visual acuity (stare fixedly at the ground parallel with the moving object. Do not look at moving object, but keep object in peripheral vision, allowing cones to monitor movement by distortion of shading).

  Kertzman found every secret of ancient and modern combat that man possessed. It was an encyclopedia of both arcane and high-tech methods of killing, the perfect path through war.

  Finally, when most of what he was reading was only sliding off his back, Kertzman had set the manuals back in his briefcase, amazed at the knowledge provided to these elite fighting units.

  Kertzman shifted, disturbed again by the thought of how dangerous Gage could be. Then he turned his attention once more to the real estate records. Plot by plot, he studied the properties on the topography map, selecting sites which offered good terrain for defense; terrain with hills, gullies, ridges, or sharp inclines. Some of the plots centered around the Ashokan and Roundout Reservoirs, popular tourist attractions busy with people.

  No, thought Kertzman, too many people. You want isolation. No chance of any recognition.

  Fifteen plots of purchased land ranging from 100 to 300 acres stretched from east to west across a section, Highway 206 to Highway 28. Some were located in isolated, backwoods lakes like Alder, Beecher, and Balsam. Terrain elevations became increasingly steeper as land moved east. Some of the steepest elevations were in the area of Doubletop Mountain, which capped at almost 4,000 feet, low for a Western State but a respectable elevation for this high on the East Coast. An hour later Kertzman had a specific list of high probable sites he would begin to explore in the morning.

  Morosely, Kertzman stared at the list. Now for the hard part.

  Checking out ownerships would be difficult without arousing suspicion. He could question a few neighbors, a couple of sheriff's deputies, see if he couldn't pick up a sign, a mark that might give him what he needed. But right now he wasn't even certain about what that might be. Probably something obscure. Maybe a neighbor who had no idea about the mystery man who lived next door. A sheriff's deputy who remembered sporadic complaints of rifle fire at a particular location. But Kertzman doubted it. No, this guy would be careful, real quiet, but not so quiet as to arouse suspicion. Neighbors would know him as just another vaguely friendly but private person, and checking with cops could go either way. They might know something, but cops liked to talk. That meant that word could get around that someone was asking questions. And if Gage got wind of a hunting party, he would be gone in the blink of an eye. A ghost.

  In the morning, as routine, he would check phone records.

  Everybody had a phone, even Gage. It wouldn't take much time, and there might be phone records from this particular company to someone on the property list.

  It was worth a shot.

  Kertzman stared at the papers a moment longer. His eyes burned. It had been a long week, a long day. He had a lot of work to do in the morning. Wearily he rose and walked to the bed, turned off the light.

  Outside, the sounds of traffic, the distant drone of a siren.

  He sniffed. Caught the faint odor of something stale and sickly sweet. It smelled cheap.

  One day he'd leave all this behind, walk away from the lies, the deceptions, the games, and the power. He'd find his home again in the mountains, find what he'd lost in the city walls that had smothered him for too long.

  It was a comforting thought, being alone in the high country, the cold wind at his back, blue sky everywhere. But he wouldn't find it tonight. Tonight he had a job to do, and he was locked in by honor to finish it. If he didn't, there would be nothing for him to find in the desert or the hills or the high country. For in the end he'd only have what he took with him, what he took away from this madness.

  Honor. Duty.

  A man's got to live with himself.

  Slowly Kertzman took off his boots and lay down, not bothering to remove his clothes. He was glad he had called Emma earlier in the night, had comforted her in her loneliness, had told her he would be home in a few days. But she had still sounded somehow sad. She was tired of so many years of traveling, of him living on the road, investigating, away from home. But it would soon be over. After this. Then they would move back home to the country where they belonged.

  Kertzman placed the Colt on the nightstand and removed his hand, waiting a moment. Then he reached out suddenly, groping for a split-second before finding the checkered handle, the safety, flicking it down. He gripped the gun, familiarizing himself with the abrupt action.

  He rested for a moment, imprinting the movement in his mind before initiating the safety and laying the Colt down again, allowing himself to relax.

  As his eyes closed he fell instantly into dreams of the forest, and hunting, seeing himself on a cold white ridge in the close morning dark, watching a trail through a scope, waiting patiently for the beast to come up the path in the first faint light of dawn.

  *

  THIRTY

  Slashing, leaping, and circling in a form of deadly ballet, Gage moved forward and back, twisting, catching, and releasing. Suddenly Chavez's knife was torn from his hand, spinning like a wheel to land in the dirt.

  Chavez nodded, grunted, and picked up the knife, which was still in its sheath. And they began again, sparring, slashing with the sheathed weapons, moving and fighting as if the blades were exposed.

  Sarah watched, sitting on the woodpile beside the house. Almost 24 hours had passed since she had spoken with her father about Gage, and neither of them had mentioned it again. Sandman was preparing to go into the hills, his usual maneuver with dusk, for first-shift guard duty. But for the moment he stood beside Sarah, shouting instructions to Gage and Chavez.

  "Don't try for a trap!" Sandman shouted at Gage. "You're a
lways tryin' for a trap! That's what gets you hurt! Let it happen! Don't try to make it happen!"

  Teeth clenched, Gage slashed upwards from the waist. Chavez grunted explosively, twisting to deflect Gage's forearm with his own, slashing in again as Gage jerked his arm back. The sheathed blade missed by a foot and they were circling again, keeping careful distance.

  "Explain this to me," Sarah said suddenly to Sandman, who immediately seized the opportunity.

  "You see," he began enthusiastically, gesturing to describe his point, "you got seven angles of attack. High, middle, and low from each side. That's three on each side. The seventh angle is straight forward. When Gage moves to Chavez's right, he's cutting off three of Chavez's best angles because Chavez is right-handed. That means Chavez has to bring his arm way out to use those three right-side angles to cut. He won't do that. It'll open up his defense. He needs to keep the blade up close, in front. So he has to turn with Gage, or back up and reposition or something to get his angles back. It's constant movement and distance."

  Chavez slashed. Gage's free hand followed the blade, caught the wrist, and with his forearm and a quick twist, sent Chavez's sheathed blade pin wheeling through the air again. Chavez nodded, as if he approved of the move. Then he picked up the knife and they began again.

  "That's called a trap," Sandman replied without looking at her, keeping his eyes on the sparring. "Gage trapped his hand, disarmed him. Gage is good at it but he looks for it too much. He always did."

  A moment passed.

  "A trap is a lot simpler when you're fighting someone who doesn't know what he's doing," Sandman added, still studying the movements. "But Chavez is good. Just in the last thirty seconds Gage tried for two more, and Chavez cut him both times."

  "Not really cut," Sarah said, knowing it didn't need to be said but not able to help herself.