“You’ve shot people before,” he said.
“A couple,” I said. “I didn’t enjoy it, but they were fully prepared to shoot me.”
“You did what you had to do,” he said. “I hope you’re prepared to do it again. The trick is, don’t hesitate. Don’t think about it. Shoot first, think later. Just aim for the middle of him and keep pulling the trigger until you run out of bullets.”
“I can do that,” I said. “How about you?”
“These people intend to assassinate the former president of the United States. What do you think?”
“That,” I said, “answers my question. Can’t you drive a little faster?”
We were on the Edgartown–West Tisbury Road, heading west. As we put a little distance between ourselves and Edgartown, the traffic seemed to thin out, and pretty soon we had an empty road ahead of us. I noticed that J.W. had nosed the needle of his speedometer past sixty. The old Land Cruiser was shimmying with its effort.
“We get stopped by a cop,” I said, “we’ll surely be late.”
“We get stopped by a cop,” he said, “we can tell him what’s going on and get some help.”
“If he believes us.”
“Which he probably wouldn’t,” said J.W. “On the other hand, this is one date we can’t be late for. Too late even by one minute and it’s all over.”
A few minutes later J.W. slowed down, then took a left turn onto a dirt road. It cut through woods and meadows. No houses or other buildings.
I squinted at the map and saw that he was aiming for Scrubby Neck Farm. “You know what you’re doing?” I said.
“I think I’ve got an idea where their launching area is.”
J.W. took a left and then another left, and then we found ourselves at the end of the road.
He stopped and climbed out of the Land Cruiser. “Can you find your way back from here to the road?”
I nodded.
“Okay. Take a left turn on Deep Bottom Road. You should find a trail going off to the left into the woods. Go.” He patted his hip, where he’d tucked his Smith and Wesson .38 into his belt, gave me a thumbs-up, and headed for the woods in back of one of the house lots.
I scrambled over the console into the driver’s seat, and suddenly I was alone in J.W.’s Land Cruiser with a puny handgun in my pocket and the life of a former president of the United States in my hands.
I looked at my watch.
I had about twenty-five minutes. Not enough time to ponder the significance of what I was doing.
I found my way back onto the Edgartown–West Tisbury Road, turned left, and began looking for Deep Bottom Road.
I thought about J.W. By now he was sneaking through the woods toward some general area he’d seen on the big map at Dr. Lundsberg’s house the previous night. If we were right, there would be a man with an FIM-92 missile launcher there.
I blinked away the image of J.W. and his .38 shooting it out against a man with a weapon powerful enough to blow up an airplane. I had to focus on what I was doing.
I found Deep Bottom Road and turned onto it. It was a narrow dirt road that cut through some scrubby woods. I slowed down to a crawl and looked hard. Off to the left, the land rose to a little lumpy hill. A good vantage for shooting down airplanes.
After a few minutes, I spotted some old ruts leading into the woods. This had to be the place.
My first thought, in the interest of time, was to take the Land Cruiser as far over those ruts as its four-wheel drive would allow.
Then I thought about the noisy old Land Cruiser whining along in four-wheel drive with its bad muffler and all its rattles and clanks. I wondered if I could drive it very far without alerting the man I expected would be waiting on top of the hill. I couldn’t take that chance.
So I pulled it over to the side of the road and got out. Now the clouds blanketed the sky and the wind was whipping the tops of the trees. The air was dense with moisture. Soon it would rain.
I began to hurry down the rutted road, and I’d gone about halfway when I heard the murmur of a man’s voice. I stopped in my tracks and listened. I couldn’t make out his words, but his voice was low and conspiratorial.
I slipped off the ruts into the woods and began to ease my way from bush to bush parallel with the rutted roadway until I saw him. He was a young black-haired man wearing work boots and camouflage pants and a black T-shirt. His back was to me so I couldn’t see his face. He was sitting on a big boulder with a cell phone pressed against his ear and a cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth.
An Uzi leaned against the boulder he was sitting on. It was an ugly thing, all function, no form, just a mechanism of black metal that could spit out bullets so fast they made one continual blasting noise. It didn’t have a stock. You didn’t bother holding it to your shoulder and aiming. You just held on with both hands, kept your finger on the trigger, and let the bullets spray, the way I had done the previous night when J.W. and I were fleeing from Dr. Lundsberg’s place. I remembered the feeling of lethal power in my hands when I held that Uzi that was spitting bullets at the speed of sound. I didn’t want those bullets spitting at me.
I was about thirty yards from the guy. If he didn’t turn around, and if I could avoid stepping on a twig or flushing a partridge, maybe I could sneak up behind him.
No other plan occurred to me, so that’s what I decided to do.
I kept one eye on the man and one eye on each place I set down my foot. The freshening wind and the damp air helped muffle the sound of my movements.
I found myself drenched with sweat, even though the air was cool. My middle-aged heart was hammering in my chest, and I had the random, panicky thought that if a stroke or a heart attack killed me, ex-President Callahan would also be a dead man.
Luckily, the area around the boulder where the guy with the Uzi sat featured tall pine trees, and the soft ground was cushioned with years of fallen brown needles.
I was no more than ten feet from his back when he snapped his cell phone shut, stood up, and stuffed it into his pants pocket. He took a final drag off his cigarette, dropped it onto the ground, and half turned toward me as he stamped it out under his foot.
I crouched behind a tree trunk and held my breath as he yawned and stretched. Then he turned away from me, tilted back his head, and gazed up at the dark sky.
I slipped Zee’s Beretta out of my pocket, flicked off the safety, got my feet under me, took three quick steps, and levered my left forearm around the man’s throat before he knew I was there.
I yanked back as hard as I could. I held nothing back. I wanted to crush him.
He gurgled in his throat and grabbed and scratched at my arm with both of his hands.
I jammed the muzzle of the Beretta into the soft place under his right armpit. My finger tightened on the trigger.
“Do it,” I told myself.
But I couldn’t.
He was clawing at my arm where it was levered around his throat. I felt him growing weaker.
I lifted the Beretta and smashed the butt down on top of his head.
A moan started in his chest and rose up into his constricted throat. It stopped there, and the man’s entire body shuddered and twitched.
Then he went limp in my arms.
I eased him to the ground. He lay on his left side, motionless. I looked at his face. I thought I might have seen him in Father Zapata’s church, but maybe not. He was a stranger to me.
I wondered if I’d killed him after all.
I bent down and pressed my fingers against the side of the man’s throat. I found a fluttering pulse. I kept my fingers there, and after a minute his pulse seemed to strengthen.
He’d wake up with one helluva headache.
I hoped he wouldn’t wake up for a while, because I wasn’t done. I still had a job to do, and I couldn’t afford to take the time to tie him up.
I stuffed the Beretta into my pocket. At that moment, the unconscious man’s phone rang.
I fi
shed in his pocket, where I’d seen him put it, pulled it out, opened it, and grumbled, “Yeah?”
“Everything all right?” said a deep voice. He spoke with no accent.
“Uh-huh,” I grunted.
“Fredo?” he said. “That you?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, okay,” said the voice. “I thought I heard something.”
I mumbled, “Umm,” and shut the phone, figuring if I tried to say more I’d be pressing my luck.
I knelt down and stuffed the phone into the pine needles under the boulder. Maybe it would provide some kind of evidence later.
When I stood up and looked at my watch, a raindrop hit the back of my hand.
Callahan’s plane was due in about five minutes.
I picked up the man’s Uzi. A path wound up the slope. I started to follow it. I expected to find a man with an FIM-92 missile launcher on the hilltop.
The rain moved in quickly. It came aslant on a sharp northeasterly wind. The trees swayed and creaked, and almost instantly the ground under my feet was soft and moist.
I made no effort to move silently. I held the Uzi in both hands with my finger on the trigger and followed the path quickly up the hill.
The man was standing on the far side of a clearing. He was looking intently through an opening in the foliage toward the airport. The Stinger was mounted on his right shoulder. It was a simple-looking device—a tube about four feet long extending back over his shoulder, a square piece braced against the front of his shoulder with a handle and a battery pack and what I assumed was a trigger mechanism. He had it aimed upward at about a forty-five-degree angle, and he was squinting through a sight of some kind. He held the handle in his left hand. His right hand fingered the trigger.
I stood in the path, partially hidden by the close-growing bushes. He stood on the other side of the clearing about twenty feet away. His back was to me, and he seemed to be concentrating on what he was seeing through the sights of his terrible weapon, but even under the cover of the wind and rain, there was no way I could get close enough behind him to grab him by the throat and whack him on the head before he saw me.
Then I heard the drone of a jet engine. It seemed as if it was directly overhead. I looked up, but the plane was higher than the low-hanging storm clouds.
I wondered if Callahan’s plane would decide not to try landing in this weather. But I doubted it. Instrument landings were routine.
The sound of the plane’s engine faded into the clouds. I guessed it was circling, preparing to make its final approach.
The man with the Stinger was pointing his weapon up at the sky, and I remembered that he didn’t need to aim it, that its infrared homing mechanism would take care of that. As I understood it, all he had to do was launch the missile in the general direction of the plane. Its high-tech capabilities would do all the fine-tuning.
It looked to me as if the man was about to shoot.
“Hey!” I yelled.
He whirled around to face me, and in that moment I saw that it was Harry Doyle.
Chapter Fifteen
J.W.
When you live on an island you’re always conscious of the weather, especially of the wind and of tropical storms moving up the coast or brewing between Africa and the Caribbean. Although we all keep track of the latest forecasts, they are rarely of much help to us residents of Martha’s Vineyard, because island weather often is quite different from mainland conditions. Also, in spite of the fact that the island’s land mass is only around 120 or so square miles, it’s not uncommon for it to have completely different kinds of weather only a few miles apart. My house in Edgartown can be in a blazing hot summer sun, but if I drive to South Beach to cool myself in the surf I can find a thick fog with a chilly wind blowing. Or I can leave home in a steady rain and find dry roads in Vineyard Haven or bright sun in Chilmark.
And, as in all of New England, there is truth in the old saying, “If you don’t like the weather, wait a minute.” So when the wind veered and the storm clouds came roiling in from the east, I was not surprised, but I wished Thor had kept his hammer quiet for a bit longer.
As Brady drove away, I was filled with a desire to be many places at once, to be invincible and invisible. But I was here and very mortal and touched by an urgent fear. I knew I had no time to waste if I was to find the missile site I knew was near.
But where was it? I was within the circle I’d drawn on our map, but the landscape was new to me. Oh, to be Sherlock Holmes, capable of deducing truth from the scantiest clue, or Lew Wetzel, unerring in his tracking skills.
But I was neither, and my time was running out. The high branches of the trees were beginning to sway, and the temperatures began to drop as the gray clouds passed under the sun.
I was on a sandy road leading toward South Beach. I started trotting down the road, looking for fresh tire tracks. Somewhere off to my right, not too far from the road, was the site I sought. I’d seen the size of the crates holding the missiles, so I was sure that they and their operators had been brought in by car and that the car would still be in the area to provide them with a swift escape from the search that would certainly follow the crash of the plane.
Other people used this road to get to their houses, so the car must be parked out of their sight. Maybe behind an abandoned building or in a grove of trees.
I watched for any sign of tire tracks leading off the road but saw none. I trotted on, because I could think of nothing else to do. I had odd imaginings. One of them was a genuine wish for a helicopter. If I had a helicopter I could find those guys in two minutes. Another was a vision of a plane exploding in the air and sending fiery pieces of metal spinning to the ground. A third was of me running headlong into a man with an Uzi, who immediately turned it toward me. I felt an additional rush of fear and stumbled when I thought of that, but I kept going.
It seemed that I’d been trotting forever when I finally saw where some tire tracks had turned off the road to the right. I glanced that way and saw no sign of the car, but the soft sand and the bent grass led my eyes toward a thick cluster of tall oak brush. I imagined eyes looking at me from the oaks, like those of lions lying in the tall grass of the veldt, invisible to their prey, so I trotted on down the road as though I was out for an afternoon jog. When the road bent out of sight, I left it and cut to the right, running, bent over, eyes sweeping the trees ahead of me.
Then, believing that a guard must certainly be somewhere near the car, I slowed and moved ahead more carefully. My advantage was that I knew he was there but he didn’t know I was there. I made a wide circle out around the cluster of oak brush, glad that the wind was rising and filling the forest with sounds to cover those I was making.
Suddenly I saw a van with the Zapata Landscaping logo. It was hidden from the road by the oak brush and had been turned and was parked facing back toward the road. I froze and let only my eyes move. I saw nothing more at first, but then I saw movement. A man was coming toward the car from some site farther into the woods. The sureness of his stride suggested that he was walking on a trail. Or maybe his confidence was based on the Uzi slung on his shoulder. I instantly recognized him as the man I’d seen at the meetinghouse when I’d slipped away into the cover of trees after Brady’s warning phone call.
In the movies, machine-gun-toting villains are always blazing away at pistol-packing heroes and missing them a thousand times before getting popped off themselves by a single round from the hero’s trusty handgun. But I didn’t think that was a likely scenario if I challenged the guard’s Uzi with my old .38, and for a moment I was in a whirlpool of thought, desperately wondering what to do.
Then I heard, or imagined I heard, the distant sound of a plane somewhere off to the southwest, and knew I had no time to waste. Turning, I scurried back to the road, then ran from there toward the cluster of oak brush shouting, “Zapata! Zapata! Abort! Abort!” The sound of the plane grew louder, and I heard, too, the faint sound of what could have been firecrackers,
but I believed was gunfire coming from the direction Brady had headed.
Rounding the brush, I came face to face with the guard. The muzzle of his Uzi looked like the entrance to the Holland Tunnel, but I ignored it and shouted, “It’s been called off! I just heard from Lundsberg! Callahan’s not on this plane! Use your phone! Stop Zapata before it’s too late! If he shoots down this plane, the cops will get us before we have another chance! Hurry!”
The big man stared, not knowing what to believe.
“Call him! Quick! If he shoots that missile, we’ll never get another chance at Callahan!” He still hesitated, and I screamed, “Jesus Christ, man! Do you want us all shot or in jail for nothing? Here, gimme that phone!” I reached for it.
But he suddenly believed and brushed my hand away. He tipped the Uzi up, dragged out his phone, and shouted into it. “Zapata! Don’t fire! Repeat, don’t fire! Callahan is not, repeat not, on this plane! Lundsberg says to abort! Do you hear me? I said abort! Do not fire. Callahan is not on this plane! Abort! Abort!”
He turned and stared up the path as if to will his voice to reach Zapata even faster, and when he did I snaked out the .38 and laid it as hard as I could on the side of his head. He went down like a felled ox. I found a pistol in his pocket and put it in mine, and then I grabbed the Uzi and ran up the path.
At its end, in a small clearing on the far side of which branches had been cut away to more clearly reveal the airport runway, stood Zapata, holding a weapon that I took to be the missile launcher. It was pointed toward the ground. The air was full of sound as a jet plane roared over our heads, descended, and touched down. Zapata was watching it, half turned away from me. It had begun to rain, and the noise of the plane and the rain and the rising wind hid the sound of my footsteps as I approached him. Or perhaps he presumed that I was the guard. In any case, he didn’t turn until I was close to him. When he did, I leveled the Uzi at him and said, “Put down that launcher. Don’t make me kill you.”
His face went pale. He hesitated so long that I almost fired. Then a bitter smile appeared on his face. “If I squeeze this trigger, I imagine both of us will be blown to bits,” he said. “What do you think?”
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