Hunting Season

by P. T. Deutermann

  His immediate objective was a valve pit where a dozen of the big overhead pipes came down into a walled enclosure, which was twenty feet square. There were mounds of rubble from collapsed buildings on three sides, and what looked like a storm drain coming out on the fourth side, pointing down into the swale. The swale, a shallow, grassy ditch, cut across a gentle slope of deep grass. He was able to crawl through it to the storm drainpipe, which was nearly three feet in diameter. He went through the drainpipe for ten feet, sweeping a stick ahead to rustle any lurking snakes out, and emerged out onto the concrete floor of the valve pit. There was a carpet of small rubble on the floor, and he had to sweep some of it out of the way with his forearm as he pulled himself across the floor between the huge steel valve stems. The pipes over his head were large, twelve to twenty inches in diameter. Some were lagged with insulation;

  others were bare metal. The ones that bent down into the floor of the valve pit pointed in the direction of the Ditch.

  He had chosen the pit because it offered concealment, while remaining escapable. Going into one of the ruined buildings would have been risky;

  she could trap him in or on top of a building. The big pipes, being metal, would also offer some infrared masking, at least until the cool night air drained all the heat out of the metal. The valve pit was at the end of one of the shorter side streets. It was less than a city block from the main street, and the concrete buildings from that intersection on up the hill toward the admin building remained pretty much intact. All of the buildings below that intersection had been seriously damaged, having lost at least one wall. The four buildings nearest the power plant had been flattened into mounds of broken concrete, surrounded by tangled ropes of steel pipes. The shattered concrete was visible only as big blobs of gray in the near-total darkness.

  He extracted his sound-cone apparatus and assembled it up on the lip of the concrete wall surrounding the pit. He pointed it between the nearest buildings, in the general direction of where the power plant had been.

  He reminded himself to keep thinking in terms of infrared contrast. He piled some pieces of rubble around the cone to ensure it would blend in with the rest of the structure’s IR signature. Then he pulled out another plastic pouch and extracted two golf ball-sized cubes and a coil of very thin wire. He took one of the cubes and crawled along the pit wall, keeping the top of the wall between him and the power plant. He set the cube on the left corner of the pit, placing it between a pipe fragment and a broken concrete block. He connected some wire to it, then brought the other end of the wire back into the pit, burying the wire as best he could. He repeated this procedure with the second cube, taking it in the opposite direction. Once back down in the pit, he connected the two wire ends to a cigarette package-sized plastic box and set it down. Crouching down behind the pit wall, he extracted a small battery pack and attached it to the plastic box. Then he activated the box, illuminating a small red window.

  In the window was a scrolling menu of sounds stored digitally in the box.

  He could select a different sound for each of the two channels going out to the miniaturized speakers, or a stereo signal through both at once. He set the box down and turned the digital window down to minimum brightness. Then he took out a pair of silver-mirrored sunglasses and put them on. He couldn’t see anything in the darkness anyway, and these would give him some protection in case she got close enough to pop a disrupter in his face. The coating on the glasses was keyed to the color frequency of the disrupter. Then he crawled as

  quietly as he could around the bottom of the pit, patting the floor with his gloved hands until he found a flat piece of metal about a foot square. He slid this into the back of his chest pack. Then he went back to the wall nearest the power plant, slipped the stethoscope on, crouched down behind the wall as comfortably as he could, and settled in to listen.

  He was able to train the cone across an arc of about fifty degrees, which was sufficient if his assumptions were correct. She could, of course, come from any direction at all, but he had watched the industrial area for most of the afternoon and had seen no sign of her. The light ring meant either that she was there or it was a distraction. Since he couldn’t know which, all he could do was make his assumptions. He tried to clear his mind and concentrate on the sounds cape in front of him. The air was not moving, and neither was anything else, if the cone was working correctly. He reached up and trained the cone slowly from side to side, straining to detect any differences in the earphones. Nothing. He touched the butt of the .45 hanging in its shoulder holster. He didn’t have any spare ammunition. He drank some water, closed his eyes, and listened. He wondered if McGarand was still alive. He hoped so.

  He had no illusions that Misty was coming to talk to him or even to take him in. She was coming to kill him. Those had probably been her orders all along, once the Agency headquarters found out that Lynn was missing. They’d have known full well that if Lynn was dead, and that would have been the logical assumption when a kid had been missing for that long, then the lock was open. Kreiss would have had no incentive to keep quiet anymore. Worse, Kreiss might have thought the Agency had taken Lynn, which would have given him every incentive to reveal what he knew. The solution would have been the same either way they looked at it: This wasn’t a retrieval operation. He had become the mother of all loose ends.

  Something clicked in the stethoscope.

  Janet stood looking out the window of their fourth-floor room in the Donaldson-Brown Center. Lynn was on the bed, tally dressed, staring at the muted TV screen. The remains of a room-service meal was sitting on the table. Janet could see the Virginia Tech campus stretching before her, a small city of crenellated academic buildings, barracks like dorms, and streetlights. The sidewalks were surprisingly filled with students moving between the buildings like so many industrious ants. Typical engineering school, she thought. Labs all night. Computer time when you could get it.

  The streetlights were crowned with fuzzy halos as the evening atmosphere thickened.

  Farnsworth had set up a debriefing session with Lynn Kreiss upon return to the federal building and then closeted himself in the secure communications pod, with no operator this time, for an hour and a half.

  When he finally came out, he had ordered them into the hotel as a protective measure. There were supposedly four agents downstairs in a loose perimeter.

  Janet didn’t think they were in any danger, because that woman would be busy. Kreiss was definitely in danger, however, based on the look on his face when he’d left the car. She had argued as vehemently as she could that they ought to go back out there, in force, and retrieve him.

  Farnsworth had given her a strange look when she used that particular word, but he remained adamant: Their mission was complete. AD Greer and a horde of executive assistants from the director’s office were probably combing through the FCI archives as she stood looking out the window.

  Once they found the document, all hell would break loose, especially with a national election looming. Or, more likely, and as Kreiss had predicted, an extremely private deal would be made at the highest levels of the Justice Department, and the Bureau would enjoy a sudden degree of unprecedented operational freedom.

  Lynn hadn’t said three words since they’d left the federal building.

  Janet had explained what Kreiss had told her on the way to the hotel, and the girl had just nodded. She was obviously deeply disturbed that the Bureau had chosen to throw her father to whatever wolf was waiting in the ruins of the arsenal. She’d given Farnsworth a look of such reproach that he had actually blushed. Now they had orders to stay at the hotel and wait to see what, if anything, broke loose in Washington. The aTF was still hunting McGarand, but that particular mad bomber had simply disappeared.

  Janet wondered if he, too, was out there at the demolished arsenal.

  Probably not.

  She had mixed emotions about what they’d done. It was 11:30, and Leno was doing his monologue. Somehow, none o
f it seemed very funny tonight. Yes, Kreiss had made this deal, and gotten his daughter out of that woman’s clutches. Her own bosses were about to peel back a scab they thought would give them nearly unlimited leverage over their tormentors at Justice. That might or might not be true, she thought, given the fact that the current administration was in its final months, with not too much left to lose in terms of its already-odious legacy.

  Farnsworth said he was putting Janet in for an award, and he had told her to think about going back to a headquarters assignment in Washington. Janet wasn’t so sure about that, either.

  “Palace games,” the woman had said.

  Pretty fucking lethal palace games, Janet thought. And what Greer had done to Kreiss was just plain dishonorable. She might have made a mistake coming back to the fold.

  She turned around, to find Lynn watching her. Something in the girl’s expression reminded her of Kreiss. No drama, just a patient consideration of the situation and a hint, just a hint, of unexpected action if an opportunity presented itself. She and Lynn looked at each other. They had done the wrong thing.

  “What would you think about going back out there?” Janet asked.

  “See if we can find your old man?”

  Lynn sat up.

  “About fucking time, Special Agent,” she said.

  “You got another gun?”

  Kreiss carefully put his gloved hand on the cone to see which way it was pointing. To the right of the direct line between the valve pit and the power plant. He removed the stethoscope, closed his eyes behind the mirrored glasses, and listened hard to the bare susurrations of a night breeze filtering through the piles of debris all around him. The breeze was just enough to obscure the sounds of traffic out on Route 11. It had been three hours since he’d heard the last noise. He’d been dozing since then, which actually was part of his craft. Relax the body and concentrate the mind.

  Build energy reserves while that part of his brain that did the sound work listened with all the mysterious precision of the subconscious mind. He looked at his watch: 11:40. He shifted his body behind the wall, easing a cramp out of his knee. He put the stethoscope back to his ears.

  Ten minutes later came another click, followed by what sounded like the rattle of a very small pebble. Something, or someone, moving out there. Misty? He pulled the glasses down again. Black night to the max. Tenebrae factae sunt. Darkness has fallen. Got that right.

  He shifted position again, putting his left shoulder in touch with the cooling surface of the wall, his right hand now holding the .45 automatic.

  The tactical question was, How many people did Misty have with her?

  They’d sent a crew into the mountain after Janet and Lynn, but they hadn’t come back out. Lost them all? That would put Misty in a rare mood, especially being defeated by a redheaded amateur. She wouldn’t agree: The cave had done them in, not Janet Carter. But would she have

  had time to summon more backup? One-on-one against Misty was bad enough, but if she had help, this was probably hopeless.

  Another click, not as loud. He reached up again and swung the cone to the right ten degrees. The faintest movement of air against his cheek told him that the weather might be changing. The night now smelled faintly of moisture against the backdrop of the pine forests surrounding the industrial area. He squeezed the stethoscope earphones harder into his ears. If Misty was moving, she’d be doing so while searching for some visual cue that he was out there. Some small patch of infrared contrast, a blob of green warmth where there shouldn’t be one. He reached up again and moved the cone farther to the right. A minute passed, and then another. Then a new sound, a tiny scraping noise. Fabric over concrete? It had seemed marginally louder. He wondered if she’d done the same thing he had—parked herself in a corner and dozed for a few hours before starting the hunt. One thing about a sleeping human: If properly hidden and wedged the body didn’t move. You took a chance, of course, of being caught sound asleep. It depended on how well your subconscious mind had been trained to listen. He took a deep breath, let it out quietly, and then decided it was time to get things under way.

  He took out the piece of metal he had been warming inside his chest pack and placed it up on the top of the side wall. If what the cone had detected was Misty, she shouldn’t be able to see the warm piece of metal until she had moved another hundred feet or so farther to his right, because of the buildings. Then he reached down for the control box and selected the third program and entered a fifteen-minute delay. He slipped off the stethoscope, brought the cone down off the wall, and buried them in loose gravel. Then he slithered silently into the big drainpipe. A minute later, he crawled out of the valve pit altogether, rounded the first street corner, and began inching toward the nearest concrete building rising above the side street that led back down to the valve pit. He crawled six feet and then stopped to listen. This was the dangerous bit: If she illuminated the area with the IR system, he was dead meat down here on the street. He repeated these movements until he reached the corner of the building. There he got up, flattened himself against the wall of the building, and went hand over hand until he felt the ladder.

  This was the decision: There was only one ladder. If he went up it, he could not get down again if she detected him up there. But if this worked, and she closed in on the valve pit to investigate the infrared target he’d left for her, he’d be in a position to fire down at her.

  Especially if she reacted when the sound program let go. He considered the time: He had only a few more minutes to make his decision.

  Did she have helpers? He decided that she didn’t. Misty was supremely confident in her own abilities. She also knew that Kreiss wouldn’t run very far into the woods to prolong this. He figured she was moving and scanning, crawling a few yards at a time and then sweeping the entire debris field with the IR scanner, looking for a point of contrast. Or she could have an illuminator up on some wreckage, bathing the whole debris field in invisible light. Probably had the scanner mounted on an AK-47, based on the sound of that single shot earlier this afternoon. Misty normally didn’t carry a handgun, but she had always liked the heavy-duty Eastern Bloc weapons.

  The wind blew in his face again, this time carrying the scent of old chemicals, overlaid with a residual whiff of nitric acid. That has to be coming from the main street, he thought. So she should be upwind of him, then, and, therefore, up-sound. He estimated the time remaining.

  He had to move, one way or the other, or she’d get close enough to hear him on the ladder. He started up.

  Janet shut off her headlights as they coasted quietly down the hill on Route 11. The intersection marking the entrance to the arsenal was a quarter of a mile ahead, the dead traffic lights just visible before she shut off her lights. They had gone out a back fire door of the hotel and circled the block around the library to come into the parking lot from the town side, away from the front entrance. She’d called down to the lobby before they left and told one of the agents that they were going lights-out in the room. He told her to sleep tight. They’d waited a half hour before making their move. Then she and Lynn got into her Bureau car and headed for Ramsey.

  Janet pulled the car into the exit lane for the arsenal. The barrels were still there, but they were no longer blocking the ramp. She drove slowly and quietly up the road toward the main gate, stopping just down the hill from the gate itself so as to minimize their engine noise. She parked to the side and shut it down. She rolled down her window and listened. She had been having second thoughts about this little caper ever since leaving downtown Blacksburg, but, given Lynn’s enthusiasm, she couldn’t think of a way to back out. When Farnsworth found out, she’d probably be a civilian again. Lynn had Janet’s .38 in her lap and was rotating the cylinder, click by click.

  “So,” Janet said.

  “This seemed like a good idea at the time. Now I’m not so sure.”

  “I say we drive in there, lights and horn going,” Lynn replied.

  “Go in
there and make a shitload of noise until Dad pops out of the bushes and yells at us. Then grab him.”

  “Might not be that simple,” Janet said.

  “If they were going to go after each other, that will be a free fire zone down there. Open season. We go down there, we might get ourselves killed. You heard that rifle this afternoon.

  Plus, if you show up, you’ll distract your father. Maybe get him killed.”

  “If you’re thinking of leaving me out here,” Lynn said, “you can just forget that shit.”

  “I’m thinking we shouldn’t go in there at all,” Janet said, conscious now of the open window and how their voices might be carrying. She scanned the chain-link fences ahead of them.

  “Hell, it may be all over by now. But either way, we know nothing about the tactical situation. I’m saying we probably can’t help, and we might even screw things up.”

  “Then let’s call the police. The local cops, I mean. Make some hysterical phone call to nine one one; two women in trouble at the Ramsey Arsenal.

  Rape. Murder. Frenzied bikers. Bring a mob of cops out here and they’d have to stop it.”

  Janet was shaking her head. Coming out here had been a dumb idea.

  “They might stop it tonight, but then it would just go on. That woman and your father would melt away into the woods. I think after all that’s happened—in that cave, and with the big explosion we had here—this has become personal now. The matter in Washington is being solved as we speak. I’m just afraid if we go in there now, we might do more harm than good.”

  “I think you’re just plain afraid,” Lynn said, turning away from Janet and staring through the darkened windshield.

  Janet held her tongue. Of course she was afraid. Anyone who wasn’t afraid of both those people down there would be an idiot. But the more she thought about it, the more she knew she was right. Of course Lynn was burning up with worry about her father, but that didn’t solve the practical problem: They couldn’t just drive down there. What would they do once they got inside? Offer mediation services? Counseling? She could just see herself climbing around the wreckage of the industrial area, calling for them to come out and talk things over. And