Hunting Season

by P. T. Deutermann

  “What?” Despite the pain medication, her side was beginning to really hurt, and it was getting harder to breathe. She tried not to panic. Development?

  “The state police pulled Lynn Kreiss out of that last building down there. She’s injured but alive, Janet. She was able to tell us that two guys have been holding her here since those kids disappeared, but then she became incoherent. Started babbling about Washington and a hydrogen bomb. Then she passed out. This is all secondhand—I wasn’t here yet.

  But now we have to find out what the hell happened here.”

  “Is aTF taking over?”

  “Oh, hell yes, they’ve taken over. In force. They’re de laminating about Whittaker. Their lead guy is foaming at the mouth about why Washington never told them they suspected this place of being a bomb factory.”

  “Brilliant,” Janet muttered.

  “This whole place was a bomb factory.”

  “Sir?” the medic said, looking at his monitors.

  “I think you’re all done here, okay? We gotta transport now.”

  Farnsworth nodded and withdrew.

  “Get well quick, Janet,” he called as the attendant began shutting the doors.

  “Fucking Kreiss—he was right!”

  he added.

  And Kreiss had known a lot more than he had been letting on, she thought as the attendant slid forward and rapped on the window to the driver. She wondered if Kreiss was out there among all the rubble, or still in pursuit of these people who had been building—what out here, a hydrogen bomb She was no explosives expert, but she knew that wasn’t possible.

  No way. But assuming Kreiss was alive, somebody did need to tell him that they’d found his daughter. That he could stop chasing the phantoms of the arsenal and come in and talk to them. The ambulance was rolling and the attendant was doing something with one of her IVs. She suddenly felt very sleepy. Have to remember that, she thought as she slipped off again.

  Browne waited until dark to go back to the Waffle House on Route 11 to retrieve his pickup truck. Earlier, he’d driven the propane truck out

  to the interstate and five miles north to the big TA truck stop, where he’d parked it among a hundred other big trucks that were idling out at the back of the cinder lot. He’d cooled his heels for an hour at the truck stop before hitching a ride back down 1-81 into Dublin, south of Ramsey. From Dublin to the Waffle House on Route 11 had been a four mile walk. He’d seen all the emergency vehicles running up and down Route 11, so somebody must have finally opened the door to the power plant. His suspicions were confirmed when he went into the Waffle House for a cold drink and everyone was talking about the big bang out at the arsenal.

  As he drove his pickup back to Blacksburg, he was satisfied that any evidence of what they had been doing out there for all those months, including the retort, the pumps, the generator, and even the acid tank were now somewhere in low earth orbit. He’d also put enough acid down that tunnel to obliterate any trace of the security truck and any number of intruders.

  Leaving the girl… well, he’d done what he had to do. Regrettable, but necessary. That nitro building’s big vertical expanse of concrete wall facing the power plant should have taken care of the girl once the explosion occurred. Keeping her had been a dumb idea all along, he thought now. It was just that he had never been quite able just to shoot her. He was ashamed about Jared fooling around in there. He should have known that would happen. He would go out to Jared’s this afternoon, find out why that oversexed young pup hadn’t shown up. William had been headstrong, but he would never have taken advantage of the girl that way.

  The thought of his dead son stole some of the satisfaction out of what had happened out at the arsenal. The radio was talking about aTF agents.

  These were the same federal cops who’d killed William. But two weren’t enough. The goddamned government, with all its alphabet soup of cops, was out of hand. Killing women and children in the name of the law, sending snipers to gun down women with babies in their arms, then lying through their collective teeth about it, then being exonerated in court.

  He’d followed the Waco standoff on the television, but had missed the exact moment when they drove their tanks into the building and burned those deluded bastards out. He was convinced that there was the mother of all coverups in place over Waco. William, William, William, he thought sadly. Why did you have to go down there? Why did you join up with such a bunch of misguided fools? I lived for the day I could get you back. And now you’re nothing but a pile of greasy ashes out in some dusty field near Waco.

  He took a deep breath to calm himself. Remember what you’re going to do, he told himself. You’re going to show those bastards that they’d killed the wrong man’s son. The arsenal was just the beginning.

  His plan now was to wait twenty-four hours to let the hubbub surrounding the arsenal explosion subside, and then he’d head north with the propane truck for the final stage. There was only one thing that could link him to what happened out there, and for that, they’d have to go through every one of the nine hundred ammo bunkers out on the back reservation.

  Bunker number 887 looked like every other bunker—partially buried, 150 feet long, 40 feet wide, and 20 feet from floor to the top of its curved ceiling.

  It contained his post-attack getaway stash: cash, clothes, passport, food and water for two weeks, and even a car. Assuming he got clear of what he was going to do in Washington, he would come back here, hide out in the bunker for a while, and then disappear. There were people in splinter groups of the Christian Identity network who would help him hide.

  What he had to do right now was to make jared understand he needed to keep his head down and his mouth shut from here on out, no matter what happened up in Washington. He’d deliberately not told jared specifically what he was going to do with the hydrogen. What the boy didn’t know, he couldn’t tell. The propane truck was safe for the moment—just one more truck parked at a truck stop, right out in plain sight, which effectively made it invisible. The only other person who knew anything was dead. Just like his William. Fair was fair.

  He crossed the New River bridge and headed north toward Blacksburg.

  He decided he would go directly to Jared’s trailer before going home. See if the dummy had disentangled himself from his current whore long enough even to know about what had happened out at the arsenal.

  Kreiss ended up going back to his cabin. He had driven down Canton Street where Browne McGarand lived and had seen the house. It was a medium-sized two-story brick house on a half-acre lot in a well-kept, heavily treed neighborhood. He had spotted a detached garage at the back of the house, and the yard looked well attended and free of trash. An elderly man had been raking his lawn next door when Kreiss drove by. He had glanced at Kreiss’s truck, but he had not really looked up. One more pickup truck going down the street was apparently not remarkable. There were other people about, and he heard some dogs barking when he stopped at the corner, as if checking a set of directions. There had been

  no sign of the tanker truck. He turned at the next corner and discovered an alley that ran behind the houses on Canton Street and the houses on the next street over. The property lines were marked by clusters of metal trash cans standing guard along the alley.

  He had decided not to go past twice, not with that geezer out there.

  Old people noticed things, and, unless Kreiss was willing to stop and go knock on the door, he didn’t want to be remembered. It looked like a quiet middle-class neighborhood, which told him absolutely nothing about the occupant of number 242 Canton Street. He would come back tonight and try for that alley. He might need to create a diversion of some kind. If the neighbors were mostly elderly, there would be people about, not to mention dogs. A NEIGHBORHOOD WATCH sign emphasized the point. He saw what looked like a mom-and-pop corner gas station one block down from Canton Street where he might be able to park when he came back at night.

  After cruising Browne McGarand’s house and n
eighborhood, he decided to drive out to the area of jared McGarand’s trailer. On the way out there, he thought he heard thunder, but the sky seemed to be clear.

  When he approached the intersection of jared’s road with the state road, a Highway Patrol car was blocking the entrance. He kept right on going, catching a quick glimpse of more flashing blue lights back in the trees.

  Okay, he thought, Jared’s demise is no longer a secret. He drove on down the state road and turned onto Highway 460, which would take him back toward his own cabin. He decided to go home, catch a quick nap, and then he had some preparations to make for his call on the other McGarand. Maybe this guy would be more forthcoming, and would live long enough to give him what he needed to know. Given the man’s cold, quick decision to begin shooting out there at the arsenal, he might be a tougher nut to crack than the beer-guzzling Jared.

  Focus, he reminded himself. The objective is not revenge, the objective is to find Lynn, and this bastard probably knows where she is. As he drove home, he turned on the truck’s radio to get a weather report, and he found out that it had not been thunder he’d heard earlier.

  Janet was fully awake in a semiprivate room at the Montgomery County Hospital when Farnsworth showed up with a small crowd that included the red-faced Mr. Foster. Her ribs had been taped, and there were bandages on some of her bandages. The most painful points on her body were actually where the IVs had been. Sounds still echoed in her ears, and she felt as if she had been pummeled all over. The other bed was empty,

  and the RA sat down on the edge of it. His expression was somber, and then she remembered that Ken Whittaker had been killed, along with those two kids, the rent-a-cops. Farnsworth was accompanied by Ben Keenan, who was his number two in the Roanoke FBI office. Keenan, who had been away on annual vacation, had come back in after the explosion.

  There were three other men, whom she did not recognize, but they looked like feds. They filed in behind the RA and gathered around the end of the bed. She saw a state trooper standing on guard outside her door before Farnsworth shut it. She was almost glad to see them, until Farnsworth introduced the three other men as being from the ATE Two of them appeared to be in their early thirties, and the third was much older. She nodded carefully as each was introduced, then promptly forgot their names.

  “How’s Ransom?” she asked, remembering his crumpled form.

  “Not terrific,” Keenan said.

  “Took a piece of re bar through the head.

  He’s in a coma. We’re all praying that he’ll come out of it. But actually…”

  He shrugged.

  “Janet, can you go through it again?” Farnsworth said.

  “What happened out there at the arsenal?”

  Janet described their tour of the bunker fields—nothing out there but empty concrete mounds surrounded by tall weeds. Then she described their search in the industrial area, and where she had been standing when the world ended.

  “I remember that one of those kids—one of the rent-acops—had gone down to unlock the power plant, but I wasn’t paying a whole lot of attention.”

  One of the younger aTF agents leaned forward.

  “We’re trying to figure out what kind of a bomb it was,” he said.

  “The girl they recovered?

  She made a fragmentary statement at the scene, said something about a hydrogen bomb and Washington? You have any take on that?”

  She shook her head again, carefully. There was a monster headache lurking back in there. The aTF guy must be talking about Lynn Kreiss, she thought. The second aTF agent, the other young one, asked her if she could describe the explosion.

  “Felt it, never saw it,” she said.

  “Pressure, heat, no noise—I think the sound was there, of course, but it was overwhelming. You all are echoing when you talk.”

  “We have a tech team from the Washington NEST at the site right now,” the aTF agent said.

  “You know, that nuclear emergency response team? They’re making a

  radiation survey, just in case, although we think the nuke angle is unlikely. We’ve backed all the local response people out until we know something, one way or the other.”

  Janet didn’t know what to make of all that. She’d caught only a glimpse of the area through the doors of the ambulance. She supposed it could have been a nuclear bomb, given the extent of the destruction, but shouldn’t she have been flash burned On the other hand, that power plant had been absolutely flattened. She could still visualize the molten and smashed boilers where the building had been, and the crumpled tank farm behind it.

  “Janet,” Farnsworth said.

  “Did you personally see any signs of human activity within the arsenal? Anything in any of the buildings that looked recent? Trash in the street? Shiny metal surfaces?”

  “No, sir,” she said.

  “I’d been there earlier, of course, and the hole was still in the street where my car went through that plate.” She paused for a moment. Something about pipes. Then she remembered.

  “There were some pipes piled next to the hole in the street that I don’t remember being there when Kreiss got me out. But I may not have seen them—I was pretty exhausted by then.”

  “Who is this “Kreiss’?” one of the aTF agents asked.

  Foster and Farnsworth exchanged a quick guarded look that the aTF agents could not see.

  “A security guard at the arsenal,” Farnsworth said.

  “They were making a patrol and found the plate gone. Back to these pipes—you’re saying they could have been put there after you got out of the tunnel?”

  “Sir, I don’t know. I just remember seeing them and not remembering their being there the last time.”

  Farnsworth nodded.

  “Okay,” he said.

  “Once the NEST people are backed out and the place is verified radiation free, we’re going to do a really comprehensive search of the wreckage area and the rest of the installation. If people have been using this installation, especially if it’s been going on for a while, we should find evidence of it: intrusion routes, trash, chemicals, bomb-making equipment, residues, stuff like that.”

  “aTF will be honchoing that effort,” the older agent said, as if to remind Farnsworth whose jurisdiction bomb makers came under.

  “Absolutely,” Farnsworth said, looking at Janet with a slightly annoyed expression.

  “But we can’t go forward until the nuke people say the place isn’t a hot zone.”

  Janet tried to think of something else to tell them, but she couldn’t.

  Her body hurt enough to distract her. Farnsworth got up.

  “Well, okay, folks,” he said.

  “Let’s leave Agent Carter here some room to recuperate. Of course she’ll be available for further questions in due course. I’ll have an interviewer come up and take a dictation for the record tomorrow morning, and we’ll make that available for all concerned.”

  The men made sympathetic noises and backed out of the room, leaving only Farnsworth behind. He again nudged the door closed behind them.

  “What’s the deal with Kreiss?” she asked softly He shook his head.

  “Beats the shit out of me. Foster came down here with his hair on fire when word of the explosion got back to D.C. But now aTF has everyone spun up with what the girl said about a hydrogen bomb. Washington thinks she’s hallucinating, but she’s still out cold, so no one wants to take any chances.”

  “Foster want to pin this one on Kreiss, too?”

  “I’m no longer in that loop. But there’s something going on, and it involves the damned Agency.”

  “I’d like to tell Kreiss we’ve rescued his daughter,” she said.

  “Well,” Farnsworth said, glancing over at the closed door, “that guy Foster has a slightly different slant on that proposition. But the focus right now is on the Kreiss girl talking about a hydrogen bomb and the capital. People in D.C. are seriously spun up.”

  “An H-bomb? That’s kind of ri
diculous, isn’t it? I mean, don’t you have to have an A-bomb even to initiate an H-bomb?”

  “I’m no physicist, Janet. All I know is that when the girl said that, the BATF people did not laugh. In fact, they went semi-ape shit got that nuclear response team heloed down here on an hour’s notice. They were scaring the locals with all those Geiger counters and guys in moon suits until we cleared everybody out of there. Thank God the press didn’t get onto that.”

  “But, boss—an H-bomb? C’mon.”

  “Did you see that building, Janet? The Army people had some pretty good pictures of the industrial area before the explosion, and that power plant was a big fucking building. It’s now a concrete deck. The debris field is a half mile in every direction, and every vertical wall facing the plant has been damaged or knocked down. They found some pieces of the boiler tubing out on Route Eleven, for Chrissakes. You tell me what kind of bomb that was.”

  Her head was hurting and it was hard to concentrate.

  “But what has this to do with Kreiss? He was just looking for his daughter.”

  “The homicide of jared McGarand is the key to that, we think. Look,

  we’re keeping aTF in the dark about Kreiss and the rest of it, because you know that crowd: They’ll go off half-cocked. That’s doubly true if they think there’s Agency shit involved here. They do bombs, and we have the mother of all bombs for them to focus on right now.”

  “What’s their theory, if not a nuclear device?”

  “The older guy, the one who didn’t talk much? While everybody else was running around yapping on their radios and pretending they hadn’t pissed their pants, he was making a drawing of the bomb site. When I asked him what kind of bomb was in that building, he said something interesting. He said it looked to him like the building was the bomb.”

  “And what the hell does that mean?” she asked. She was having trouble keeping her eyes open. She hated being in the hospital, but right now, there was a sleep monster in this bed and it was whispering her name.