The box he’d referenced was a curved metal pole with a keypad. High-tech for an isolated barn. A deep ditch ran between the road and the fence, ready to drain runoff and snowmelt out of the mountains, and you had to cross a massive cattle-guard grate to get across that and onto the last thirty feet of dusty drive. Larry was scanning the property, searching for watchers, and Mark knew he should be doing the same, but for some reason he was fixated on that cattle guard. It looked new, the stainless-steel gleaming in the sun, high angled pieces that rose on each side, allowing for heavy equipment to lower the grating into place easily. Cattle guards were common in this part of the world, so why this one held Mark’s eye made no sense, and yet he couldn’t look away from it, and the echoing, popping noise in his head was back and louder, closer to the surface.
You’ve seen it before.
Of course he had. He’d seen a million of them, old and rusted and dusty, while this one was new.
It shouldn’t be new, nothing else here is new—
There was nothing strange about it, nothing threatening; it was a straightforward device for livestock and drainage and—
You’ve seen it before!
The voice in Mark’s head didn’t seem to be his own, and the light reflecting off that polished, clean steel pierced his brain like an ice pick through the eye and he was just about to look away when a memory finally broke the surface like a drowning man fighting a riptide.
The basement in Cassadaga. The trap on the table. It was a model. It was a scale model and that means this one, at full size, is—
“Uncle, hang on,” Mark said, and Larry glanced at him but kept driving. As the front wheels bounced off the gravel road and onto the cattle guard, Mark grabbed his uncle by the back of his neck and jerked him down, away from the windshield and the window, pressing their faces together and slamming their heads against the gearshift. For one blissful instant, a tenth of a second, he thought, I was wrong, and I am going to look like a fool.
Then the truck rocked like it had taken a direct hit from a howitzer, and glass exploded all around them.
Just like the tiny one. That was a model for this. Turning a standard bit of equipment into a bear trap. That is what they were working on.
Larry was struggling against him, swearing and fumbling for his gun. Mark held him down for a few seconds, but there were no more impacts, so he released him and they both rose shakily to look at the damage.
The windshield was spiderwebbed with fractures, and all of the windows had blown out. Larry’s cheeks and arms were laced with small cuts, and Mark’s showed the same damage. As they looked at each other and then the truck, Larry whispered, “Mother of God, what is that?”
He was looking at the doors. Pieces of metal each as big as a man’s fist but filed down into shark’s teeth had punctured the doors, slamming shut on the truck with such incredible force that they’d bitten clean through. The doors themselves had buckled inward, and on a newer vehicle, a smaller one with less solid metal in the frame, the damage would have been even worse. A compact car would have been crushed. In another car, the airbags would have deployed, but Blue had come off the line long before airbags. Mark twisted in his seat and opened the latch on the bedcover window.
“We gotta get out.”
He wormed through the narrow opening and fell into the corrugated bed, landing hard, bits of glass biting into his hands, and again he thought of Cassadaga, of his crawl out of the basement while the house had burned around him.
He climbed across the truck bed, noticing for the first time that Larry had a trio of long guns—two rifles and a shotgun—hidden under a roll of old carpet, and he found the latch to the tailgate and opened that and pushed out, stumbling into the dusty road, shedding pebbled glass and drops of blood. He turned back and saw Larry following suit, swinging down to the road.
“You okay?” Mark asked.
“Fine. Thanks to you, that is. If you hadn’t pulled me in like that, that fucking thing would have taken my head off. Damn sure it would have broken my arms and ribs, probably my leg. How in the hell did you see that coming?”
“Walter,” Mark murmured.
“Who?”
“Nothing. I saw a version of it in Florida, and I nearly lost my hand to that one. It was so small I didn’t understand what it was a model of. I finally recognized the shape. Almost too late.”
“Just in time, that’s for sure.” Larry stepped away, looking at his beloved truck from the side. The hood and the cab were demolished, smashed and ravaged by those massive steel teeth that had been welded onto the angled side of the cattle guard. The design could not have been simpler—it was an old-school trap, springs responding to pressure, but Lord, they were powerful springs.
Why use springs, though? Mark wondered. An explosive and a pressure sensor could have incinerated the truck and killed them both in the time it took to blink. The technique employed here was far more labor-intensive, resulting in far less damage. It was a step backward in the art of war.
It fits Pate’s preaching, Mark realized. Pate needed to sell the idea of the dangerous world of modern technology. He would, therefore, go to war with old weapons, or at least old theories.
“Look what they did to Blue,” Larry said. The look on his face made any expression he had shown at Sal Cantu’s seem positively kind. “Do you have any idea how many miles I’ve covered behind the wheel of that—”
The gunfire that interrupted him was a sustained burst of shots, rapid and fired from a semiautomatic. The bullets lit up the truck, taking out what was left of the windshield and pocking the hood like hail. The shooter wasn’t armed with a large magazine, apparently, because he ran out of ammo almost as soon as Mark and Larry managed to react, and they were pressed against the back bumper, guns drawn, during the brief respite where one magazine was dropped and another inserted. Then a second burst fired. More glass and metal flew, but the bullets weren’t penetrating, and many of them were sparking off the steel cattle guard.
Mark dropped to the gravel and rolled sideways as Larry hissed, “Markus, don’t go out there!”
Mark had his gun raised but wasn’t about to return fire with the .38. That was like bringing sparklers to a fireworks show. He just wanted to see where the shooter was.
He wasn’t hard to locate—there was a pedestrian door on the east-facing side of the building, toward the front gate, and a man stood in front of it with a rifle, probably an AR-15, at his shoulder, spraying bullets at the truck.
Mark ducked down and said, “What kind of rifle do you have back there?”
“A thirty-aught-six and a three-hundred Win Mag.”
“Give me the three-hundred and I’ll own this guy.”
“I’ll do the shooting.” Larry rose high enough to fumble the folded carpet out, then dropped with a shout when another burst of gunfire rattled the truck.
“You hit?”
“No, but it was closer than I’d like.”
Mark pressed up against the rear passenger-side tire, holding the .38 and feeling impotent. He was a fine pistol shot, but the distance rendered that meaningless.
“I think he’s shot himself out of bullets,” Mark said. “Hurry!”
Larry grabbed for the rifle and instead caught the roll of carpet and dragged the whole mess out, flopping it into the gravel. The shooter took a few steps farther from the building, as if considering coming all the way out, then stopped, and Mark caught his breath.
Garland Webb.
“It’s him,” Mark said, though his uncle had no idea who he was talking about. “He’s here.” He swung around the truck, rose to his knees, and shot the cylinder on the .38 empty. None of the bullets came close, and Garland Webb turned and fled into the shadows of the building.
“Shit!” Mark looked at Larry, still fumbling through the rolled-up carpet for the right rifle case, and shouted, “Give me your pistol!”
“Pistol, hell! We’ve got to make up the distance!”
“Give
me the pistol!”
Larry looked up at him in shock, saw Mark’s face, and handed over the gun. It was a Colt .45. Mark checked the load and took off at a sprint while his uncle screamed at him to stop. If Webb had more ammunition or another weapon, it was a suicide run, but Mark couldn’t think clearly enough to care. Webb was there, and Mark had a gun in hand.
He’d waited two agonizing years for this moment.
He ran down the ditch and scrambled up the other side and then hit the fence and climbed. There was barbed wire along the top, and he felt it shred his stomach as he flipped over and then landed in the gravel on the other side, but he didn’t pause, just stumbled forward and then ran hard once he had his balance, praying that Webb would show himself again, step out of the darkness and into the daylight. Into shooting range. For too long, he’d been hidden just like this—behind high fences and thick walls, locked inside dark, inaccessible rooms.
Now, though, he was right there.
Mark was halfway to the building when he heard an engine start. He pulled up short. Then he realized that the engine was coming from behind the building, and he began to run for the closest corner of the barn. He was halfway there when a truck came into view from the opposite side, a white Silverado with mud spattered along the side. Instead of driving toward the gate, it angled across the empty parking lot and toward the fence, gathering speed. Mark took two shots at a run—foolish, wasting bullets—and then forced himself to stop and take careful aim, going for the tires. He squeezed off the rest of the rounds in the gun, hitting the tailgate but never the tires. Meanwhile the truck was still accelerating, heading right for the fence. On the other side of the chain link, the land was rough but flat enough for driving, and the road was only a hundred yards away.
“Damn it, Larry, shoot! Shoot him!”
But no gunfire came from his uncle, and the Silverado hit the fence at fifty miles per hour at least. It tore through the chain link as if it were so much twine; the engine howled and the truck fishtailed and bounced over a short clump of brush, down into the ditch, and then up onto the road. The tires burned rubber, smoke rose from the pavement, and the truck was gone.
Mark dropped to his knees in the parking lot. His chest was heaving, and he could not take his eyes off the spot where the truck had just been.
Where Garland Webb had just been.
Had him. He was here, and so was I, with a gun in my hand. Finally.
He felt so tired, so beaten, that it took two tries for him to rise to his feet. By then, Larry had reached him and was in midsentence as well as midstride.
“…stupidest stunt I’ve ever seen! If he’d had another clip you’d be splattered over this parking lot like roadkill! Running into the wide-damn-open with nothing but a pistol, and you—”
“Why didn’t you shoot?” Mark screamed. “You had a three-hundred Mag and you couldn’t get off a single shot!”
“I don’t drive around with that thing loaded up and ready to fire from the hip, Markus! If you hadn’t run up there like a damned kamikaze pilot, I’d have been ready to pick him off no matter how he came out.”
They stood there and stared at each other, both of them glaring and breathing hard, and then Mark turned away and said, “Stupid son of a bitch!” He was talking to himself, not his uncle. Larry was right; if Mark hadn’t forced the issue, there would have been enough time to load and scope in, and then no matter how Webb chose to leave, it would have ended with a squeeze of the trigger.
It would have ended.
Mark reached into his pocket and closed his hand over Lauren’s old dive permit. There was blood on his hand from either the glass or the fence, and he could feel it oozing between his fingers.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“You should be, acting that damn foolish,” Larry said, unaware that Mark hadn’t been apologizing to him.
“That was him,” he said. “Uncle, that was the man.”
“I got that impression, son. Tell you something else—I know whose truck he was driving.”
Mark turned to him. “What?”
Larry’s face, speckled with fresh cuts leaking blood, was taut with anger. This time, though, it didn’t seem to be directed at Mark.
“That Silverado belongs to Scotty Shields.”
“The hunting guide? I thought you said he was in Alaska?”
“He did say it. But he wouldn’t leave that truck behind. Not by choice.”
For a moment Mark was silent. Then he said, “Let’s see what he left in there.”
They crossed the parking lot and approached the open side door from which Webb had emerged. Even though it seemed unlikely there was anyone still inside, Mark lifted a finger, asking Larry to wait. Mark had made enough foolish mistakes in this place. He motioned to the doorway and then back to himself, indicating that he was going through first, and Larry nodded and stepped to the side, ready to provide covering fire. Mark went in low so Larry could shoot over him if needed.
Nothing but silence and darkness greeted him. The inside of the barn smelled of rust and something with an acidic tang that Mark couldn’t place. He turned sideways and checked both sides of the door and found the light switches.
“I don’t want to turn these on,” he whispered.
“Hell, son, ain’t nobody here but us and the rats. Light the place up.”
Mark glanced into the expansive dark, clenched his teeth, and hit the lights.
The fluorescents had that little hitch, the half-second pause before full glow, and by the time the barn was illuminated Mark had placed the smell—there were pallets of fertilizer stacked around the room. A fine explosive material. Along the far wall were more grates for the cattle guards, loose pieces of steel, and a pair of commercial-grade welders. Quite the workshop.
What was most troubling about the place, though, was how empty it was. Mark didn’t think it was a case of slow stockpiling. It looked more like they’d been taking supplies out. Fresh tire tracks lined the floor, and a Bobcat with a front loader was parked near the huge barn doors on the opposite side, where the Silverado had evidently been. It looked like they’d been loading.
“They’re getting ready,” he said softly.
He walked to the big double doors and pushed them open in a shriek of rusted metal. More tire tracks here, and they were wider than the pickup Garland Webb had been driving. A flatbed, probably.
Larry followed him outside. Neither of them spoke for a moment. The wind blew gravel dust into the air, and it stuck to the blood on Mark’s face.
“You know where to find Scott Shields if he really is still around here?”
“Yes.”
Mark looked up the road where Garland Webb had vanished. Everything was completely silent again, as if the crush of steel and exchange of gunfire had never happened at all. No car had passed. The countryside spread out vast and empty, the sun high.
“How far is Shields’s place from here?” Mark asked.
“Not very, but it’ll take a long time walking.”
“I guess we’ll need a car, then.”
“I haven’t forgotten how to acquire one when necessary.”
They walked back to the truck. Larry handed Mark the two rifles without comment, and then he took the shotgun and his duffel bag. He gave his truck one last sorrowful look but didn’t say a word.
They set off together down the dusty road.
49
Eli drove to Red Lodge after the morning council. The tribes were in motion, Jay Baldwin was behaving, and Garland Webb was in position to deal with Markus Novak if he actually appeared on the trail. Eli thought that unlikely, but it was good to have safeguards. For Garland’s sake, he hoped Novak actually made it through.
His only concern—that news of her son’s arrival might unsettle Violet and throw off the morning’s rituals—had not developed. Overall, there was nothing in the warm, sun-splashed morning that suggested harm, and there were only a few remaining tasks. He wished that Janell had arrived,
but he was not worried by her absence. If there was anyone among them who could be trusted to handle a crisis, it was Janell.
He stopped at a café in Red Lodge that offered Wi-Fi, ordered a coffee, and set up in a back booth where prying eyes didn’t reach. He had a backpack with four tablets and five smartphones, and he had nine messages to send. The first, a text message to Jay Baldwin:
You are sick today. Call in early, Jay—it’s the courteous thing to do. And prepare your barehanding gear. Don’t forget the hot stick! Talk soon.
That done, he turned off the phone that had sent the message, withdrew a tablet, and set to work composing a longer, more emotional note. This one was his pet project, the most difficult of all the recruitment efforts, because he’d had to pose as the neophyte in need of convincing rather than the messenger. If the plan was effective, though, the rewards would be enormous.
Using an application called an Android emulator to mask his location and make it look as if he were posting from Seattle, he logged on to a locked social network. There his name was Fasiel, and he was a twenty-seven-year-old Web developer who had converted to Islam twenty months earlier. He had posted references to the vulnerability of Seattle’s electrical grid time and again, urging his brothers to take action. The level of trust in Fasiel seemed minimal, although he was subject to recruiting efforts—Eli’s post office box in Seattle, which was checked by one of the heavily armed men who had arrived this morning to provide security support at Wardenclyffe, had received everything from gift certificates to Islamic bookstores to a box of chocolates.
Now on to the most important messages, which Eli would write essentially in nine different languages. Each extremist group had a unique jargon with a shared constant—they all appropriated certain words, terms, or ideas that made them feel authentic. In the echo chambers of this online world, where people parroted one another and an original idea was not only discouraged but feared, it did not take long to learn how to join in the chorus.
My brothers, Fasiel wrote,
By dawn tomorrow you will be aware of a great action, praise be to Allah, the most merciful and most beneficent. The American crusaders will be struck by the Sword of Allah deep in their hearts, and it will cast terror across the Western lands, and from nation to nation his power will be known. I caution you that the truth will not be told, and I suspect you will hear nothing but lies from the infidels, who will not wish to admit they could be so humbled by soldiers of the Caliphate. The crusaders will deny that they have been struck within their own fortresses and across the oceans, struck deep within their own homeland. When the news reaches you, the Americans will surely say that this strike at their hearts was made by a group of their own kuffar, their own clueless kind, and not by those who, Allah willing, will soon join you in Dabiq. Do not let the lies hide the truth, brothers. You will know of what I speak when you see the news, you will know immediately, and you must claim the work as that of the Caliphate, for I may perish in the fight and for the cause, dying without fear, dying with the promise of the Prophet, blessings and peace be upon him. Please do not delay in this: let the infidels know that it was the Caliphate’s sword that found their heart. This is just the beginning, as we know, and a warning for those who wish to take heed.
Rise the Dark Page 24
