Hunting Season

by P. T. Deutermann

  retarded. Not quite three years later, William pulled the plug as well, running off to California initially, and then eventually to beautiful downtown Waco, Texas, where he got himself mixed up with all those nutcases at Mount Carmel.

  He slowed to make the turn into his trailer lot. If only William had just stayed home and done the right thing, none of this shit would be happening.

  But old Grandpaw Browne, he was a scorekeeper. He had raised both kids with a firm, often biblical hand, and to this day, Jared was still a little afraid of his grandfather, especially when he got some of that Methodist fire up his ass. His grandfather’s eyes reminded him of pictures he had seen in history books of Stonewall Jackson or that abolitionist, John Brown. That old man, he wanted to make him a bomb, Brother Jared was not even going to get in the way. Even if it was about Saint William.

  He sniffed as he turned down his own road. He thought he deserved at least some appreciation for helping the old man. He wasn’t sure what old Browne would have done to those kids in the traps if that flash flood hadn’t come along, but Jared knew he owned at least a piece of their deaths. Not that he cared too much—like the old man said, they shouldn’t have come sneaking around like that. But he was now on the hook as at least an accessory, and had the old man even thanked him? He had not.

  He pulled his truck into the yard and shut it down. There was other shit, too. He had stolen that propane truck for him. And hadn’t he paid at least lip service to all that Christian Identity bullshit? Now there was another bunch of nut brains, always praying that the world would end when the year 2001 rolled around. Armageddon on demand, yahoo. He and the boys up in the Black Hats always had a great laugh when all those Doomsday Christians and their woolly-headed blood-and-fire predictions came up. Hell, he knew this wasn’t about Armageddon or the second coming, or the so-called saints versus the sinners. What Browne was fixing up was pure mountain-style revenge, aggravated by his feelings about an oppressive government, out-of-control taxes, even more out-of-control federal lawmen, and the UN with its secret new world order. He’d told the boys his grand paw was making a hydrogen bomb, and they’d laughed at that, too. Well, they’d see. The federal government had snuffed Saint William, and now Browne McGarand had gone and set his face against the whole damned government. The government was dead meat walking.

  He got out and locked the truck. What he had to figure out was how to get back in there and get a piece of that pretty naked thing in the nitro building. He knew how to make her behave now, so maybe he’d

  sweet talk her this time, talk some sense into her, then give her the ride to glory.

  He adjusted his considerable sexual equipment, smiled, and then went to check on the dogs. He refilled their water. They were lethargic, but there was no more kennel mess. He had a beer while he checked through the day’s mail, and then he went to bed.

  At just after 2:00 A.M.” Jared snapped awake and sat up in bed. He tried —to figure out what sound had awakened him. The windows were open, and the night was filled with the normal woods noise of insects and a chirping chorus of tree frogs. He rubbed his face and listened carefully.

  Maybe he’d been dreaming. Then it came again: the distinct sound of a dry branch breaking, and not far away, either. One of the dogs woofed softly, but they raised no general alarm. Was someone out there in the trees back of the trailer? He swung his feet over the edge of the bed and listened again. A few minutes later, it came again, the distinct crunching sound of someone stepping through the forest undergrowth, then the snap of another dry branch. He got up and went to the edge of the back window. His backyard was bathed in the orange glow from a security light mounted on his power pole. The light illuminated the yard, but it had the perverse effect of making the woods even darker. Keeping an eye out the window, he reached into the drawer of the night table and pulled out his government-model .45 auto. He stepped back from the window, racked in a round, and then crossed to its other side. He could see almost nothing out in the darkness.

  He depended on the dogs to alert him to intruders, and they normally did a noisy job of it. But now there was silence in the woods. He went through the trailer, checking the other rooms and the locks and all the windows. There were no signs of intrusion. Then he went back to bed, leaving the .45 out on the bedside table. He was just about asleep, when he distinctly heard the muffled sound of a portable-radio transmission outside, followed by a distinct squelch of static. He sat back up and listened, wondering again if he had been dreaming. Then he got up and went through the whole trailer again, gun in hand, checking to see if he’d left the television or the radio on this time. It was

  just past 3:00 A.M.” and this was pissing him off. Then he had a cold thought: A radio—were there cops creeping around out there?

  He spent the next half hour going from window to window, looking for any signs of movement in the woods. He could not figure out why the dogs weren’t raising hell. There was no wind, so maybe they heard the noises but caught no scent? Then he wondered if there was any connection between their being sick earlier and the possible intruders outside.

  He kept watch for another half hour, and finally went back to bed, this time falling heavily asleep. He would have to tell the old man about this shit in the morning. Except there was always the chance he’d dreamed the whole thing.

  Kreiss came to and tried to lift his head but could not. He was pinned facedown to the cold concrete, lying now beneath several objects. The moon was down and he couldn’t see what had him. His right arm was caught, but his left could move. The back of his head hurt like hell, and there was a wet sensation on the back of his neck. He felt around and closed his fingers over a cold steel pipe, about an inch and a half in diameter.

  He felt around some more and realized he was under a pile of pipes.

  He tried to move his legs and found they were both free. After a minute or so of struggling, he was out from under the pile.

  He rolled over on his back, fingered the trip wire at his feet, and looked up at the nest of steam lines looping over the main street between the buildings. Someone had gone to a lot of trouble, climbing up the steel rungs on the pipe crossover structure and piling a couple dozen lengths of steel pipe up there, rigged to the trip wire. The top padding in his head hood and the Kevlar shoulder pads along the top of the jumpsuit had saved him from serious injury. The Kevlar ribs that ran down the jumpsuit on his chest and back had also taken some of the shock, aided by the soft bulk of the chest pack and backpack. Otherwise, a couple of hundred pounds of steel pipe falling from twenty feet might have killed him. He stretched out on the concrete, took some deep breaths, and felt for bruises.

  So they’d known he was in there. He’d walked down that street coming in and had not hit any wire. Plus, they’d gone to some trouble to rig that deadfall, which meant they’d expected him to come back. Not good. He looked at his watch; it was 3:30, Friday morning. The night was perfectly still, with not even the slightest breeze. He had some satisfaction in knowing that the little black box on top of brother

  Jared’s trailer was going to make him lose some sleep tonight, too, unless he was dead drunk in that trailer.

  So, how had they known? He had used the same ingress point twice, the answer must be there. He got up gingerly, brushed himself off, and explored the swelling cut on the back of his head. He got out a military battle dressing and taped it over the cut. Then he walked painfully down to the rail gates, where he quickly found the electric-eye counter. The counter went to 001 when he passed his hand through the beam. He hit the reset button to zero it, then recorded twenty-six hits. Let them think about that. He went over the gates, walked the three miles down the rail line to his truck, got in, and sat there for a minute in the pitch-black. He was no closer to finding Lynn, and he was still in the dark as to what these people were doing in the arsenal. If he went to the Roanoke feds, he would confirm the sharks from Washington’s worst suspicions.

  McGarand and his helper had been sure
enough about an intruder to set up a deadfall. Hell with it, he thought, as he started up the truck. My objective is to find out what happened to Lynn. I can deal with the likes of Bellhouser and Foster if I have to. They’re just admin pukes with fancy titles and privileged access. There was no more point to creeping the arsenal, where those two guys would always have the home-ground advantage. He decided to just go have a little talk with Mr. Jared McGarand. With a little luck, Jared would maybe give him the other one.

  Hell, Jared will absolutely give me the other one, he thought. And between the two of them, I’ll get a line on Lynn. After that, well, with all the unknowns in the equation right now, there was no sense in making long-range plans.

  He drove back toward his cabin west of Blacksburg, which would take almost forty-five minutes. He stopped in an all-night gas and convenience store out on Highway 460 to get some coffee. The clerk gave him a sideways look, and he realized he must look more battered than he knew.

  While he was refueling the truck, it occurred to him that perhaps the two Washington people had brought along some operational help. Who might be waiting at the cabin for him to return. He finished fueling, paid for his gas and coffee, and then pulled over to one side of the parking lot.

  He extracted a local county map from the glove compartment and examined the roads surrounding Pearl’s Mountain. He knew that there was one paved county road that ran along the stream at the bottom front of his property, and another one that ran along the back slope of Pearl’s Mountain.

  As he remembered, the two firebreaks that bracketed the big hill on

  either side ran all the way to that back paved road. The map confirmed this. If he could get his truck onto one of the firebreaks, and it wasn’t too rough, he could drive partway up the slope and then hike up and over, ending up in a position above his cabin, where he had some toys stashed.

  He checked his watch. It was 5:15. It would take another half hour to get to the back of the mountain, and then at least forty five minutes to hike up and over. Sunrise was around 7:00 A.M. With luck, he could be in position just before dawn. If they had been waiting for him all night, they’d come out at daylight to Kreiss’s version of the welcome wagon.

  Jared called Browne at just after seven o’clock Friday morning. He told his grandfather what had happened the night before.

  “And you hadn’t been drinking? This wasn’t some dream?”

  “No, sir, I came home, had me one beer, checked on the dogs, and hit the sack. This shit started sometime around two this morning, a little after.”

  “And the dogs didn’t alert on it?”

  “No, sir. That’s the weird part. You know them dogs—someone comes around here, they make like it’s dinnertime.”

  Browne was silent for a moment.

  “I don’t like the sound of this,” he said finally.

  “We’ve got someone poking around the arsenal, and now this crap. Tell you what. Go outside when it gets full light and check for sign.

  Take a dog with you. See if he picks up on anything. Then I think we have to go back out to the site, see if your trap did any good.”

  “He hit that trap, his ass’ll still be there,” Jared declared.

  “That was a heap of pipe.”

  “We’ll see. Maybe some bastard’s just playing games. Call me back before you go to work.”

  Kreiss made it up to the south ridge of Pearl’s Mountain just before sunrise.

  He had bought his front slope acreage from the old man who owned the entire mountain. He had permission to hunt all the slopes of the big hill, and he had gone out several times, often with Micah, to hunt deer, grouse, and turkey over its thousand-plus wooded acres. Given his previous career, he had also taken into consideration some defensive measures when siting his prefab cabin, which included arrangements for dealing with the problem of someone getting into the cabin to ambush him. But first, he had to determine if someone was there.

  He crept along the south ridge until he reached the top edge of the

  tree line on the eastern slope. Below was an open meadow littered with big boulders; it swept all the way down from the tree line to the back of the cabin. He was just able to see the cabin in the morning mist, some two hundred feet in elevation below his position and about three hundred yards distant. There were still large patches of shadow in the dawn light.

  A pair of early-morning bobwhites were calling across the grass in the meadow. Above them, a solitary hawk was testing for the first updrafts of the morning, but it was too early. It screeched once in frustration, dropped a wing, and slanted out of sight across the rock face of the upper mountain. There were no lights or other signs of life at the cabin, and he didn’t see any vehicles. He checked again with his binoculars, and then he did see something: There was a Ford Bronco pulled behind some trees to the right of the cabin, well out of sight of the lower driveway.

  Well, all right, he thought. So let’s hold a little reveille. He moved along the tree line until the biggest boulder in the meadow shadowed him from view of the cabin, and then he trotted directly down the open meadow, remaining in the sight-line shadow of the boulder until he reached it. He got down on all fours and probed the base of the massive rock until he found the edge of a camouflaged tarp, which he lifted carefully, checking for snakes. Under the tarp was a well-greased five-footlong steel box. He opened it and extracted a Barrett M82A1 .50-caliber rifle, complete with a Swarovsky ten-by-forty-two scope. The twenty eight-pound rifle had a ten-round magazine loaded with RauFoss explosive, armor-piercing rounds. It also had a muzzle brake and a bipod.

  Beneath the rifle box was another, smaller box. From this, he extracted a black plastic device that looked like a television remote, and a battery pack, which he plugged into the device. He closed the boxes but left the tarp to one side. Then he lugged the huge rifle and the remote transmitter back up the slope to the trees, and once again he traversed the slope until he had a clear field of view of the back of the cabin and the clump of trees hiding the Bronco.

  He checked the controller for electrical continuity with the battery pack, then put it down. He moved backward a few feet until he found level ground on which to set up the Barrett. He lay down beside the weapon, nestled the butt into his shoulder, and sighted down to the Bronco, aligning the crosshairs on the right side of the vehicle’s engine compartment. Even though it was a .50-caliber rifle, the recoil wasn’t too much more than that of a heavy shotgun, because the action was gas operated and the weapon itself weighed so much. The heavy

  round would drop substantially at three hundred yards, so he adjusted the scope accordingly and re sighted He fitted the magazine and then racked one round into the chamber. He didn’t plan to use more than a few rounds.

  He checked his sight line again. Then he got the remote controller, pulled out a tiny whip antenna, and aimed it at the house. He selected amplifier, power on, volume 9, and hit the red button at the top of the controller. Then he selected program 1, and again hit the red button.

  There were twelve Bose speakers placed strategically down in the cabin, all connected to an antique Fisher vacuum tube-driven 2,000-watt audio-amplifier, which was set up in the attic of the cabin. Connected to the amplifier was a CD player with a single compact disc and the radio transceiver, which accepted commands from the remote. The program he had selected was the recorded sound of roaring lions, which let go at close to 150 decibels. The noise was huge, even at Kreiss’s position nearly one thousand feet away. Inside the cabin, it would be earsplitting. He could hear a chorus of dog howling start up from a mile down the country road, where Micah Wall kept a pen of coon hounds. The lion program ran for twenty seconds, and then it switched over to the second program, which erupted with the sound of a machine gun shooting out all the windows in a building. He shut it all down after another fifteen seconds and then sighted back through the scope on the Barrett as he settled himself into firing position.

  Just before the machine-gun sounds ended, two men ca
me tumbling out of the cabin’s front door, holding their ears and running for the Bronco. He let them get within twenty feet of the vehicle before squeezing off the first round, which went through the right-front fender, the engine block, the left side, and then tore off a tree limb fifty feet downslope from the vehicle. Well, maybe just a tiny bit more recoil than a shotgun, he thought as he fired again, this time moving the aiming point slightly to the left to hit the body, knocking a dent the size of a trash can’s lid into the right-front door as the bullet went through the Bronco like butter and spanged off a rock down by the creek before decapitating a pine tree on the other side of the road. The third round he put through the rear axle, blasting both tires down and exploding the differential housing out the back of the vehicle. By then, the two men were flat on the ground, trying to reach China. He stopped firing and rubbed his sore shoulder. He checked the sight line again, but the heavy barrel hadn’t moved.

  He traversed the sight to where the men were. One of them sat up,

  then got up and began brushing off his clothes. He then walked calmly out of the trees and up the hill toward Kreiss’s firing position, acting as if nothing had happened. As Kreiss watched through the scope, the other man stayed down on the ground, his hands over his head, one eye visible as he watched the other man go up the hill. Kreiss sat up and took his finger off the trigger. Coming up the hill was a large black man, who grinned when he saw Kreiss.

  “Fuck a duck, Ed, lions? And where the hell did you get a Barrett?”

  “Hello, Charlie,” Kreiss said.

  “Just something I picked up along the way. And kept. How you doing?”

  Charlie Ransom had been in the Agency’s retrieval Field Support Division for almost eight years and had worked for Kreiss from time to time.

  He was a deceptively agreeable-looking man who was lethally effective in bringing subjects back from urban environments. He stopped when he got ten feet from Kreiss, showed his hands, and then carefully extracted a cigarette out of his shirt pocket. Kreiss watched him light up.