by Joe Gores
‘Yes, dear,’ she said gaily. ‘Turn around.’
The anteroom door banged open and Kurt Jaeger surged in like a charging bear, bigger than life. He had an unlit cigar in one hand, a flat blue and white Post Office EXPRESS MAIL envelope in the other. Seeing Emily, he slowed, found a grin.
‘So, Emily. Ready for the big moment?’
‘Yes, if this man would only stand still long enough for me to’ – she gave her husband’s tie a final jerk – ‘get this right…’
Wallberg was slanting a look at the envelope. ‘Something?’
‘The usual suspects – their undying love and devotion so they can be riding the gravy train as it leaves the station.’
Wallberg knew his man too well to believe this. It was in Jaeger’s heavy voice, in the small, hard eyes that dominated the meaty face. He waited patiently until the door to the suite’s bedroom closed behind his wife, then snatched the envelope from the hand of his Chief of Staff.
‘Now let’s see what’s so damned important you had to…’
He ran down. One line, laser-printed on standard letter-size paper so it had no identifying characteristics the FBI lab could analyze. Mailed yesterday from Truckee, California.
‘Who has seen this?’
‘Me. As one of the new boys in town, I was being shown how the White House mailroom guys X-ray all incoming for poisons and explosives and biohazards and all that crap. I saw his name on it and snagged it unopened after they ran it through.’
‘What’s the temperature going to be for the ceremony?’
‘Twenty above. With wind-chill, five above.’
‘Tell Shayne O’Hara I agree with his Secret Service lads. At five above, it is more prudent to go with the closed limo.’
An hour later, Wallberg was standing before Chief Justice Alvin Carruthers, his right hand raised, his left hand flat on an open Bible. He was hatless, the icy wind ruffled his hair as he recited the oath of office after the aged jurist.
‘I, Gustave Wallberg… Do solemnly swear… That I will faithfully execute… The Office of President of the United States… And will to the best of my ability… Preserve, protect and defend… The Constitution of the United States…’
As he repeated the sacred words, that mad message burned in his brain: CONGRATULATIONS TO A DEAD PRESIDENT. CORWIN. Dear God. Would he have to shift priorities for his first weeks – months? – in office to accomodate the nearly unthinkable fact that Hal Corwin might still be alive?
The late March air was icy. Hal Corwin shivered as he crawled out of his sleeping bag to restart his fire. His campsite was a calculated quarter-mile off the ridge trail above California’s King’s Canyon National Park, at the edge of the sub-alpine zone where ponderosa pines crept up to mingle with old-growth Douglas firs and Engelmann spruce.
He sat on the hollow fir log that dominated the clearing as he waited for snow-melt to heat for instant coffee. The log was six feet in circumference and twenty-five feet long. It had been rotting there for four hundred years. The scattered droppings of countless generations of tiny deer mice, shrews and voles living in its depths had nourished the root fungi that laced its open end.
As he breathed the icy air as deep as his damaged lung would allow, he massaged his bad leg.
He stepped away from the tree and was struck a terrific blow below the left knee…
The stalking beast of his dreams didn’t exist, but he knew in his gut that tomorrow the searchers, lesser men, would come.
At two minutes after midnight, a red Chevy Tracker turned off California 180 to stop in the puddle of pale light by the antique gas pumps fronting Parker’s Resort. Two men got out to walk toward the rustic bar-cafe. One was six feet and hard-bitten, the other short, round, red of face. Both wore insulated coats and hunting caps with the earflaps down.
Seth Parker had just finished scraping the grease into the trap underneath the grill. He was a tall, stooped, skinny man, with wary brown eyes and a drooping ginger mustache. The rolled-up sleeves of his long-johns showed tattooed forearms. He stepped into the open doorway, his shadow cast long before him. His 12-gauge leaned against the wall two feet away.
‘No gas tonight, guys,’ he called. ‘Sorry.’
Except for the cafe, he and Mae weren’t really open for the season until the weekend, yet here were these two showing up at midnight on this lonely stretch of highway.
Big Guy stopped, said disarmingly, ‘How about a cabin?’
‘That we might be able to do. Depends on—’
‘How about something to eat?’ said Short and Round.
‘Just closed down the grill.’ But Seth’s wariness was gone. Obviously, for Short and Round, munchies were more important than mayhem. ‘Toasted cheese sandwiches?’
‘With bacon in ’em? And fries?’
‘Bacon we got. No fries tonight. Potato chips, pickles.’
While Seth grilled the sandwiches, they wandered around the old chinked-log building, drinking Miller Lite and looking at the deer and elk heads over the bar, the Chinook salmon mounted above the wide stone fireplace with its still-glowing hardwood embers.
Seth joined them at the table to have a beer himself. He never could get to sleep much before two a.m. anyway.
Short and Round, washing down his sandwich with his beer, said primly, ‘No private facilities are allowed in national parks, but this place sure as hell looks private to me.’
‘Run down, you mean?’ Seth chuckled. ‘My grand-daddy built it before the park went in. Sure you guys wouldn’t be happier at Grant Grove Center? It’s official, open all year. New cabins, a lodge, gift shop, grocery store – and you can get gas there.’
Big Guy shoved his plate aside, shook out a Marlboro, slightly raised it and his eyebrows. Seth nodded. He lit up.
‘Walter and I were trying to hook up with an old friend back at Cedarbrook, somehow we missed connections.’ He took a photo out of his shirt pocket. ‘Maybe he stopped by here?’
Seth studied the proffered picture, said reluctantly, ‘Feller come by ten, twelve days ago. I ain’t sure, but it could be him.’ He felt them tense up while trying to hide it. He returned the photo. ‘He come back three days ago.’
‘What for?’
‘Stock up. Instant coffee, Granola bars, Cup of Noodles, like that. And beef jerky. Lots of beef jerky.’
Big Guy asked, ‘Where’s he camped?’
‘Said he’s been bivouacked up off the ridge trail.’
‘Sounds like we’d better get an early start to catch him in case he’s thinking of moving on.’
Seth stood up to pull on his wool shirt and anorak. In the mountains in late March, the outside nighttime temperature was still in the ’teens, with snow still deep under the ponderosas.
‘Breakfast’s seven to nine, but Mae’ll open up at six.’
As he crossed the dimly-lit gravel drive to fire up the propane heater in cabin six, he thought, Friend my ass. Heat, most likely Feds. He could smell a cop like a bean fart at a girls’-school social.
—
Another dawn. Corwin sat beside his final fragrant spruce fire, drinking coffee. The searchers would be coming up the ridge trail from Parker’s place, moving slowly, silently. They’d be good. He knew that he was better.
A winter wren gave a sleepy cheep in the juniper thicket at one edge of the clearing. A pygmy nuthatch made tiny scraping sounds on its first upside-down journey of the day down one of the ponderosas. High above, in the tree’s crown, the band of resident crows was waking up with muted, grumpy squawks.
Soon they would head out to the lower-elevation meadows to forage, drift back up here to their roost at dusk. He would miss them. His name, Corwin, meant ‘friend of crows’ in Old English.
He kicked the fire to embers, got out the last of the beef jerky. As he had done every morning since coming here, he scattered pieces of it over the log. Several choice morsels he squashed with a thumb down into the deepest furrows of the bark.
When three quick, light caws
identified him as Crow Three, eight sooty birds floated silently down through the branches. The breeding male, big as Poe’s raven and shiny as a stovepipe, landed on the log itself. In high school, Corwin had ended up as Bird Crow, and had passed the name on to the breeding male.
He had begun by scattering the jerky on the log. Had worked his way closer until he could sit on the end of the log while they ate. He knew he didn’t look like another crow to them, but he always furnished them with beef jerky. Crow Three.
Bird Crow began digging at the choice bits of jerky buried deep in the bark. His cohort hopped up to gobble the easy ones. No jostling, no shoving. A clan. A family.
Seven minutes later, the sentinel left in the top of the ponderosa sounded the alarm. The searchers had arrived.
‘Shit,’ said Ray in a low voice. His FBI i.d. was strung on a lanyard around his neck and his Sig Sauer was in his right hand, held low at his side. ‘Crows. They’ll alert him. C’mon!’
The crows barely had time to flap up from the log. One, huge and shiny as a raven, stayed to rip out bits of bark and throw them in all directions with savage sideways flings of its head, somehow always keeping one beady eye on the intruders. Then it was gone with a final fat morsel in its beak.
Walt sat down on the log, winded by his sprint to the clearing. His feet didn’t quite reach the ground.
‘I get it, Ray. Since the crows are here, he can’t be.’
‘Smart fella, Walt.’
Ray held an ungloved hand above the embers of the fire before letting himself sit down and light up. The harsh smell of burning tobacco drifted through the clearing.
‘Twenty minutes,’ he said. ‘Maybe thirty. That close. That’s the bad news.’ He feathered out smoke. ‘The good news is that he can’t be more than forty minutes ahead of us.’ He smeared out his just-lit Marlboro against the log. ‘Let’s move. Let’s show those Secret Service fucks how to take down a suspect – we’ll have this guy’s ass in custody before noon.’
‘Unless he resists,’ said Walter piously. He was an asshole, but he loved mortal shooting and was good at it.
‘Unless he resists,’ Ray agreed.
The crows were back at the beef jerky when Corwin crawled out of the log dragging his pack and sleeping bag behind him.
FBI. He even recognized their voices: they had smoked a cigarette above his hiding place back in the Delta in November. As expected, they had been told that he was armed and dangerous. Well, he once had been. He’d lost track of the men he’d killed over the years. These two were no threat.
He trotted unevenly away down his backtrail, leaving Bird Crow’s gang of ruffians to savage the last of the jerky. He’d call Janet from Cedarbrook, she’d leave the 4-Runner for him at Truckee as planned, he’d pick it up with no contact between them. She would be safe, he would have a clean vehicle to drive now that he was clear of the searchers. In two or three weeks their masters would surely find someone better to send after him – the shadowy tireless tracker of his nightmares?
By then he would be hidden away. In plain sight.
2
On an early April dawn two weeks later, an unmarked G400 Gulfstream jet circled Nairobi International Airport preparatory to landing. Terrill Hatfield stared almost gloomily down at the flat brown earth rushing up to meet them. He had his New Year’s Eve wish: he and his FBI Hostage/Rescue Team were on detached duty to the President’s Chief of Staff for the foreseeable future. But they had failed to catch Corwin at King’s Canyon, as they had failed to catch him in the Delta in November. And now this.
After he deplaned, a government car took Hatfield from a far corner of the field to the far side of Kenya passport control and customs check. He had read the file of the man he had been sent here to bring back. Impressive. Too impressive. He and his men could get the job done without the help of this outsider. But Hatfield had been told to bring him: bring him he would. He would wait for an enabling incident, grab his man, and fly him back to D.C. In custody. It would exceed his authority, yes, but the stakes were high and he had Kurt Jaeger behind him.
What if the man succeeded where Hatfield had failed? There was a way around that. Use him, then step in to seize the power and glory of success for himself alone. Step on the son of a bitch hard, right away. Keep stepping on him. Control him, use him, obstruct him if necessary, then find a way to discard him.
—
Brendan Thorne began bucking hard under Ellie, the 23-year-old blonde straddling him at Sikuzuri Safari Camp in Tsavo East. Eleanor’s groom, 59-year-old Squire Pierpont III, was paying eight hundred bucks a night, not the usual $600, because his new trophy wife, after glimpsing Thorne on their arrival, had insisted on an extra-spacious banda with two private bedrooms.
Hemingway’s randy white hunters with their double-wide sleeping bags were no more, so two or three times a year Thorne, lowly camp guard, got seduced by women like Ellie: bored wives dragged to darkest Africa by wealthy husbands. It was the only social life he got, and as much as he could handle.
Ellie started panting, open-mouthed. Her eyes rolled up. Thorne flipped her onto her back and pumped hard. She came again in synch with him. Vocally. He was glad she had put all that Halcyon in her husband’s final whiskey-soda last night; his job was the only thing that held Thorne together. Since New Year’s Eve, no worthy stalk had yet appeared to rouse him from the somnolence of his narrow days. But he kept hoping.
Thorne emerged into cool pre-dawn darkness to find the other camp guard, a Wanderobo-Masai named Morengaru, squatting beneath an African toothbrush tree. The shotgun that he used for everything from buck to buff rested buttdown on the ground between his knees, the muzzle pointing up past his left ear.
‘Na kwenda wapi?’ Thorne asked. Morengaru stood, swung an arm to the east. Down river. ‘Kwa nini?’ Why?
Gathering dawnlight picked out the high cheekbones on the African’s deadpan ebony face. ‘Lori,’ he said.
Morengaru was going downriver because he had heard a lorry. It must have come from Somalia, three hundred miles to the north. In the 1970s and ’80s, Somali ivory and horn poachers had been the reason Sikuzuri Camp needed armed guards. They had wiped out Tsavo’s rhinos and had reduced its six thousand elephants to a few hundred, then had started killing tourists until Richard Leakey’s Kenyan Wildlife Service rangers started shooting them on sight.
Now Thorne and Morengaru mostly protected the resort’s guests against Tsavo’s notoriously uncivil lions. Tsavo’s males were sparsely maned and much bigger than Africa’s other lions – four feet at the shoulder, five hundred pounds in weight, a feline ‘missing link’ between Africa’s modern lions and the hulking extinct unmaned cave lions of the Pleistocene. Occasionally they ate careless people, even well-heeled wazungu on photo safari.
‘Na piga minge sana,’ said Morengaru.
He had heard the sound of many ‘blows’ – which Thorne knew meant in context the pounding of automatic rifles.
‘Namna mbali?’ How far away?
Morengaru held up five fingers: five kilometers. Since he could hear a car engine starting up twenty kilometers off, on a moonless night could see the moons of Jupiter with his naked eyes, Morengaru’s five clicks absolutely meant five clicks.
A superb starling with a metallic-blue back and chestnut belly swooped down on green-tinged blue wings to the rim of the water pan left out for Yankee, the camp watchdog. He checked right, then left, then plunged his whole jet-crowned head underwater and shook it violently. Came up, sent spray in every direction, repeated, again, yet again, then flew off. As always, the two men watched this morning ritual with great respect.
A kilometer downriver a leopard bitched about his empty gut with a frustrated, rasping, two-note cry. Morengaru said with a sly look and in passable English, ‘Since we two landless rogues, maybe we go hunting now.’
‘You cheeky bastard,’ said Thorne. They both laughed.
Could the leopard kill himself a shifta? A gratifying thought, but unlikely. T
he shifta’s specialty was spraying their prey with AK47 assault rifles from a safe distance away.
So why was Thorne leaving the camp Uzi at home, starting on his first manhunt in seven years with only his Randall Survivor and his 9mm Beretta? Was it his pathetic bow to a time when he had been a fighting man instead of a glorified babysitter? Or because his killing days were gone forever?
Sikuzuri Safari Camp was strung out along a quarter-mile of the Galana River’s south bank. Bar and lounge, dining hall as big as a posh restaurant, good china, chairs and tables of native hardwoods, buffalo horns and animal skulls on the walls.
The two men trotted down one of the resort’s well-marked paths. Golden pipits hurled themselves from bush to bush like tiny gold coins. The watumishi boys were stirring: strong coffee wooed their nostrils, but they had no time for a mug of it. An agama lizard popped up from behind an exposed acacia root to eye them icily, then ducked down again, like an infantryman checking out enemy troops from his foxhole.
They went silently down river on game paths twisting through saltbrush and doum palm, wary of ambush. Saltbrush, thick and bushy like dense groves of cedar, could conceal the leopard they had heard, a pride of lions, even a herd of elephant. All could kill the unwary, and often did.
The long rains were gone. Northeast across the Galana, thickets of spiked wait-a-bit comiphora shrubs – ngoja kidoga locally – blanketed the plains with nasty curved thorns that could claw the skin off a man’s back as neatly as an attacking leopard. Seven Grant’s zebras foraging the dried grasses looked car-wash fresh. Their kick could break a lion’s jaw.
Beyond was the flat-topped Yatta Escarpment, the longest lava ridge in the world, black and forbidding in the early morning light. Tsavo was the size of Massachusetts, still untamed and essentially untouristed.
A six-foot russet-necked Goliath heron, Africa’s largest bird, fished the sedges along the shore beside a shady grove of tamarind trees loaded with rattly brown seedpods. The tree trunks were polished red by mud-covered elephants rubbing against them. Morengaru stopped abruptly.
