Hunting Season

by P. T. Deutermann

“Take me where?” she asked.

  It was the first time she’d spoken to him, and it surprised him. Her

  tone of voice was not what he had expected. There was a matter-of factness about it, almost a tone of defiance. His first reaction was not to tell her anything, but then, why not? She would either be with him in the truck, suitably subdued, or she’d be mewed up here in this concrete building.

  No, wait: He couldn’t leave her alive—if they searched the whole facility for the missing security people, they’d search all the buildings. So he either had to kill her outright or take her with him. He considered the prospect of simply pulling his gun and killing her right now. He shook his head. No, he’d kept her as a bargaining chip, and that’s what he would use her for. He rehearsed his mantra: The two boys killed themselves when they stumbled into Jared’s traps. They should not have been here. The flash flood had killed them.

  “To Washington,” he said.

  She didn’t answer at first, then coughed and asked him why.

  “With a hydrogen bomb.”

  “Bullshit,” she said immediately.

  “No individual can make a hydrogen bomb.”

  “Oh yes I can. In fact, I have.”

  “It takes a fission device to trigger a hydrogen bomb,” she said.

  “You’re going to tell me you made one of those, too?”

  “I have made a hydrogen bomb,” he said.

  “But it’s not what you think.”

  “I’ll bet,” she said.

  “What do you want with me?”

  “You are insurance. A hostage, in case things go wrong. I don’t want to have to kill you.”

  “If you’re taking a hydrogen bomb to Washington, you’re going to kill lots of people; I’m supposed to believe you’ll spare me?”

  “That’s different,” he said, shining the light around the interior of the building, making sure she wasn’t trying to distract him from something she’d set up.

  “This is personal, and as far as I’m concerned, this is an entirely legitimate target. You blundered into this by accident, which is the only reason you’re still alive.”

  “Where’s the other one?” she asked.

  “The one who likes to see me naked.”

  Browne felt a surge of anger. Goddamn Jared.

  “Don’t worry about him anymore. His part in this is over, and he won’t be going along. Pm taking the bomb to Washington.”

  “I’m hungry,” she said.

  “Why don’t you go away, so I can eat.”

  “I will. But we may be leaving soon. If you cooperate—no, if you simply go quietly—I’ll let you live. If I get cornered, I’m going to

  trade them you for me. If you won’t go along, I’ll put you out in one of the underground field magazines to starve. If you tell me one thing and then do another, I’ll be forced to cut your throat and pitch you out onto the highway.

  Think about it.”

  He switched off the flashlight and closed the steel door. Outside, the night was still, only the faint buzz of insects from the nearby woods breaking the silence. He looked at his watch; he had a few minutes before the retort needed changing. He turned away from the power plant and walked up the main street for three blocks, turned right, and then walked down a side street and across an open area of hard-packed dirt to a low lying concrete bunker that was fenced off from the rest of the industrial area. A dusty sign on the bunker read mercury-contaminated

  SOIL;

  keep out. He looked around and then opened a walk-through gate in the chain-link fence and went through. There were two doors to the bunker:

  one big enough to admit a front-loader tractor, and the man-sized door on the other end. He unlocked and stepped through the man-sized door, closing it behind him. He switched on his flashlight and checked through his getaway stash. Not even Jared knew about this. This was one of two supply caches he had prepositioned in the arsenal. This one was for his run to Washington. There was some cash, a gun, a fuel-delivery manifest from the company whose name was on the truck, and some spare clothes in a duffel bag. He gathered up what he needed and closed the bunker up again. Then he walked back down the dark side street to the power plant and went inside. He wished Jared was here to patrol against intruders, although there was no sign that anyone was out there.

  Janet felt the rope slipping back and tried to do something, anything, but her muscles were turning to jelly and she couldn’t force another ounce of strength into her hands. Her hips and bare legs were dangling out over the ledge and the lip of the tunnel was cutting into her middle. Her attempt to hoist herself on the end of the pipe had been a total failure.

  Despite the cold air in the tunnel complex, her eyes were stinging with sweat and she was having trouble breathing. The rope slipped back another quarter of an inch. He was losing it. She was going to fall, all the way back down into the black waters of the siphon chamber.

  “Can you lift your legs?” Kreiss called through clenched teeth. His voice was filled with strain.

  “W-what?” she asked stupidly. She’d heard him just fine, but she didn’t understand.

  “Your legs—can you lift a leg, get a knee over the edge?”

  She tried, but the angle was wrong. Her knee just bumped into the hard concrete, and she crumpled back against the unforgiving wall. Her center of gravity was still below the lip. She knew she did not have the upper-body strength simply to pull herself over. But the effort gave her an idea, a last, desperate idea.

  “Wait,” she said, bending in the middle so as to get her feet flat against the wall.

  “I can’t wait. I can’t hold you much longer.”

  “I’m going to straighten out my legs and then lock them,” she said, hoping Kreiss would understand. She didn’t have energy to waste talking.

  “As the rope comes back. Then I’ll walk up the wall as far as I can. I think I can do it.”

  “Go ahead. Tell me when you’re ready and I’ll give you some slack.”

  “Just hold what you’ve got,” she said. She didn’t want him to let go, he was losing ground as it was. As the rope jerked back toward her in quarter-inch increments, she planted her feet firmly against the concrete and willed her legs to straighten. She would have a very brief window of opportunity to fly-walk up the wall, after which, she’d just have to let go and drop. She wondered how deep the water was down in the big chamber.

  She forced her eyes open but could not turn her head. Her left leg straightened out first, then her right. She locked her knees, but she was still bent like a hairpin. She would have to let him lose more ground.

  She gripped the rope as hard as she could with her left hand and then quickly wrapped the loose end around her right wrist three times. She took up the strain on her right wrist and hand and did the same thing with her left, then equalized it. It gave her a much more solid grip, but then she realized she was losing circulation in both hands. Mistake. Big mistake, but there was nothing to be done. She had to go for it, and do it now, angle or no angle. She slid her right foot up two inches, and then her left foot. It was hard, very hard, and her arms felt like they were coming out of their sockets. She did it again.

  “Hold it if you can,” she grunted.

  Kreiss didn’t answer from up above, but the rope seemed to steady. She moved her feet again, getting the hang of it now, slide up, hold, slide the other one, hold. Breathe, she told herself; don’t forget to breathe. She was hanging out like a wind surfer now, forcing herself to ignore the void below her and concentrating on the green swatch of concrete right in front of her. Her wrists were burning, but her hands

  were beyond sensation. She slid her feet again and realized she was close, only about two feet to go before they would reach the edge. Slide, plant it, bend the knee a little bit as her back flattened some more, slide the other one, plant it. Hold the fucking rope, Kreiss. Don’t let go; don’t let go. Thank God I’m barefoot….

  And then she felt the toes of her right foot
engage the smooth steel edge of the lip. She twisted slightly on the rope, trying to get a foot over. Wrong move. She had to get the other foot up to the edge first, then simply pull herself vertical hand over hand.

  But she couldn’t go hand over hand because her hands were completely wrapped in the coils of the rope, and paralyzed besides. She gave a small cry of total frustration and looked up the slope at Kreiss, who was barely visible except for the oval patch of white that was his face. She tried to speak, but her lungs were bursting with the effort of holding herself at the edge, her feet pinned against the cold steel, while the rest of her body hung out like some mountain climber enjoying the view. She was trapped, unable to go either up or back without falling. One of them had to do something, but she didn’t know what.

  Then Kreiss moved. He must have seen her predicament, because he locked his feet and leaned back hard, up the slope of the tunnel, so that the angle of the rope straightened. It produced a small tug, but it was enough to bring her body more vertical. He leaned some more, until his back was at nearly the same angle as hers, and suddenly she was able to simply step up into the tunnel. Kreiss sat down hard with a grunt as Janet sunk first to her knees and then down onto her shins and forearms. She resisted a temptation to kiss the concrete. Then Kreiss was there, unwrapping her hands and wrists.

  “Nice outfit,” he said softly.

  “Especially the Sig.”

  “They told us never to lose our weapon,” she replied, unable to straighten up. Every muscle in her abdomen was cramping and her ribs hurt where the harness had cut into her. Then she began to shake as the adrenaline crashed. He turned her around gently so that she was sitting and wrapped his arms around her chest, below her breasts. She shook like a leaf, uncontrollably, and then realized she had urinated.

  “It’s okay,” he whispered.

  “It’s okay. Perfectly natural. Doesn’t mean a thing. You’re safe. Say it for me. I’m safe. Say it.”

  Her teeth were chattering and she was absolutely mortified, but he kept saying it until finally she got the words out.

  “Now, deep breathing,” he ordered, still holding her from behind, his legs alongside hers, both of them sitting on the cold concrete as if in

  a luge. He was warm and she was very cold, but there was nothing erotic or sexy about it. The hard ridges and buckles on his crawl suit felt odd, and she was keenly aware of her wet underpants. She suddenly just wanted to go to sleep until it all went away. Then he was lifting her up, strong, large hands under her armpits, dragging her gently to her feet.

  “Come on,” he said.

  “One more climb.”

  An hour and a half later, he pulled his truck alongside the curb in front of her town house. She had slept in the passenger seat of his truck the whole way into Roanoke, waking only when he asked her for directions. He had covered her up with one of his coats as soon as she got into the truck, and she’d gone down like a stone. Now she appeared to be disoriented, rubbing her eyes and looking out the windows.

  “This it?” he asked.

  “Yes,” she replied, stifling a yawn. He had taken off his hood and gloves so as not to attract attention on the road. Her eyes were hollow with fatigue.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  “For everything.”

  “I’ll get the coat back later,” he said.

  “That was a Bureau car that went down the hole, right? You’ve still got your own wheels?”

  “Yes. My car’s at the office. I suppose I have a significant paperwork exercise ahead of me.”

  He didn’t reply. He was ready for her to get out of the car, but she wasn’t moving. He was about to get out and go open her door, when she asked him why he had been crawling around the arsenal.

  He’d been anticipating that question.

  “Because of what that kid said, that my daughter and her friends had gone to explore that place.”

  “But at night?”

  “During the day, as much as half of a search area is in shadow. It’s easy to miss something. I have a night-vision pack built into this crawl suit. At night, especially when there’s ambient starlight or moonlight, almost everything’s visible.”

  She hesitated, then asked, “You think she’s there?”

  He took a deep breath. He was not going to tell them anything, not until he’d had a chance to hunt down the second man and find out what he needed to know. Plus, now there was the little matter of the jared pancake flattened under his trailer.

  “It’s the best lead I’ve got,” he said.

  “I’ve been there twice before. I’m going to look until I find something or satisfy myself that there’s no trace of them.”

  “We could help with that, especially after—”

  “No. I mean, I know I can’t stop you, but you can’t help without alerting those Washington people. Their focus is on me. That story about a bomb cell is probably bullshit. Besides, I can do this better alone. And it’s not like I’m hunting someone you’re hunting.”

  She missed the gibe.

  “My boss is suspicious about those people, too,” she said.

  “But it’s the weekend. He can’t raise anybody in Washington in his chain of command to check them out.”

  He just looked at her, sitting bare-assed, exhausted, and bedraggled in the front seat of his pickup truck. She had the grace to be embarrassed. If it hadn’t been semidark, he would have sworn she was blushing.

  “I can still do it better than anyone you’d send.” And, he thought, you’d bring a crowd, and then my one lead to Lynn might vanish.

  “Okay, okay, so I’m not in your league,” she said.

  “But surely we have people who are.”

  “I doubt that, Special Agent Carter,” he said softly.

  “With the Bureau these days, it seems to be a question of quantity over quality. But in any event, I’m going back there tonight. I have nothing else to do. If I do find something concrete, I’ll tell you. Would you like an escort to your door?”

  “I can manage, I think.” She glanced down at her bare legs.

  “Hopefully, my neighbors won’t see me in this … outfit.”

  “They’d probably find mine even more interesting. I’d appreciate it if you’d find a way to leave me out of your report on how you got out of the tunnel. Maybe just say you climbed out.”

  She thought about that for a moment.

  “If you wish, yes, I can do that,” she said finally.

  “But you did save my life. That should go into the record.”

  “Not my record, Carter. My record is closed. I’m just a father searching for his missing daughter now. Nothing more.”

  She kept looking at him in the dark.

  “What was the message that Ransom failed to deliver?” she asked.

  He looked down at the white oval other face. Even in the truck, he was taller than she was. He couldn’t tell her, not without explaining the whole story. And if he was right about the message, he had little time to lose. He had to find Lynn before they decided to send someone.

  “I can’t tell you that,” he said finally.

  “Funny, that’s what Ransom said when I asked him.”

  “Well, there you go,” he said.

  She hesitated, as if to see whether or not he would say anything else, but then she got out.

  11

  Janet was sitting in her kitchen, having a badly needed cup of strong coffee, when the phone rang. It was 7:30 on Sunday morning. To her surprise, it was Ransom on the line.

  “So, Special Agent, where you been?”

  “You miss me, Ransom?”

  “Yeah, well, after a fashion, yes. Your surveillance folks found our little device on Mr. Farnsworth’s car. Very funny, Special Agent. Not too bright, maybe, but very funny.”

  “I thought that was one of our bugs?”

  “Let’s just say that your boss was, um, agreeable to the notion of tracking your Bu car. Which is why I’m calling, actually: Where is said
Bu car?”

  “In China, somewhere, probably,” she said.

  “Look, I’m just getting my first caffeine of the day. Can this discussion possibly wait?”

  “You got more of that coffee around? Because I’m sittin’ outside your town house right now, as a matter of fact, and we do need to talk. Sooner rather than later, as they say in the coolest circles of government.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake, yeah, sure, all right.”

  She got another mug down from the cabinet and then went to let him in. He was wearing a short-sleeved black shirt, khaki trousers, wraparound black sunglasses, some expensive-looking boots, and a green windbreaker with a Boy Scouts of America logo. She realized she was naked under her bathrobe, so she tugged the strings around her waist.

  He sat down in the kitchen, took off his sunglasses, and waited while she fixed him a cup of coffee, “Nice touch,” she said, pointing to the Boy Scout logo.

  “Well, you know,” he said.

  “We brave, loyal, thrifty, all that good shit.”

  “Right. So, what’s the big deal about my Bu car on a Sunday morning?”

  she said.

  “Where is said Bu car, again?” he asked, raising his eyebrows.

  “You say something about China?” She hesitated for a moment, then told him what had happened, including the fact that she had been rescued by Edwin Kreiss.

  He whistled softly when he heard about Kreiss.

  “And this was basically at night? You sayin’ Kreiss was creepin’ the arsenal at night? Last night?”

  She explained what Kreiss had said about night-vision equipment. He nodded, then asked her precisely when Kreiss had pulled her out of the tunnel.

  “It was night. I guess I don’t remember,” she said.

  “Elevenish, I’d guess.”

  He said, “Uh-huh,” and then looked around the kitchen as if seeing it for the first time.

  “You got plans for your Sunday, Special Agent?” he asked.

  “Uh—” “Now you do. Let me suggest you take that coffee upstairs, make yourself functional, if not too beautiful, and then I need to take you somewhere to show you something’.”