by A P Bateman
Stone thought of the breakwater in the Chesapeake. It couldn’t be any more hazardous than getting over that. The man drove off the road for a short way and joined some tyre tracks that led up a hill. Stone realised that the hill he had first seen from the point was in fact a clump of five or six hills with trees in the valleys and savannah style grass on the top. He could see a large satellite dish and a cluster of smaller dishes in the distance.
“They’ll know you’re heading there by now,” the man said.
“So what am I up against?”
“You’ll finish this and get me off the island?”
“I’ll finish this,” Stone said. “You can make your own way off.”
They neared the satellite dish and the man bounced over some rough ground and winced. He had a piece of material from one of his colleagues’ sleeves wrapped around his thigh, but it was soaked through. Stone looked at the set up and went through his options. He had limited ammunition and wanted to conserve it. Ramming the dishes with the truck would seem the best option. He would take the wheel and simply ram and reverse the vehicle until everything that looked like a satellite dish, generator or receiver was smashed. He could then fire precision rounds through the generators and receivers. They may well be able to repair the damage, but it would take them weeks.
The man seemed to consider Stone’s comment for a moment. “Ok,” he said. “I’ll help, but I want you to remember what I did.”
“Oh, I’ll remember everything you did, all right.” Stone thought of the banker pegged out, watching his family torn up in front of him. A feeding frenzy of black beasts thrashing the water red. The screams of his wife and children… He had already decided this guy would never leave here. He wouldn’t live past his usefulness. “So tell me.”
“You’ve got Rodriquez. He’s a Puerto Rican. Small guy but he’s got like an iron core. He can hold onto a pole and push himself out like a flag.”
“I know a bar where the girls do that for five-dollar tips.”
“No, seriously. You won’t hurt this guy in the stomach. I reckon he’d stop a nine-millimetre in his six-pack. He’s an ex-recon marine. So you won’t see him coming either. Then there’s The Bull. Black guy, six-four, two-hundred-and-eighty pounds of muscle. Well, you know him.”
“What?”
“Well, he brought you here, dumped you on the beach. Anyway, he played big-time college football. He was set for a great career in football but nine-eleven changed all that. He had two firefighter brothers die in the Twin Towers. He joined the marines and did as many tours as he could. He’s a handy soldier in every way, but he’s a slow mover and relies on his strength. He’s not too smart either.”
Stone said nothing. This man could have been, would have been, a brother in arms. His joining the marines because of the atrocity of 9/11 mirrored his own in joining the army. “How many are there?” he asked.
“There’s four assets left altogether. That’s the name they use for the killers.”
“Who are the others?”
The man hesitated. He seemed to be struggling to answer. He looked at Stone, opened his mouth, but said nothing. He looked back at the satellite ahead and shrugged. Stone recognised the man had a change of heart, but not in time. “Why don’t you ask them yourself?” The man pulled the key out of the ignition dived out of the Jeep, landing heavily in a pile of splayed limbs. He clearly hadn’t expected to fall so heavily, or had expected to travel further, and was struggling to get up and away from Stone at a laughably slow pace.
Stone saw a movement behind the large satellite dish. He ducked down as bullets struck the front of the Jeep. The vehicle was stationary and without the keys, and wouldn’t be starting anytime soon. Stone slid out, the shotgun in his hand. He needed to do some damage limitation. He needed the keys to the Jeep, so needed the man to stop crawling for cover. He aimed at the man from under the truck. He was up on his feet now, half hopping and half running away with the inert shotgun as a crutch. He was making a better pace now. Stone fired and the man sprawled onto the ground screaming, at least a few of the 00 buckshot smashing the shin bone in his good leg. Stone wouldn’t lose sleep over the man, too many bodies had been disappeared by his actions and he detested people who simply did evil and justified that they were only a small cog in a big machine.
He turned his aim back to the satellite dish. He couldn’t see the person who had shot at him, but he decided a few volleys at the dish wouldn’t hurt and would disable their operation, if only in the short term. He fired and pumped several times, aiming at the receiver which was located on top of the arm in the middle of the dish. He then reloaded the weapon with shells from his pocket. He glanced around, but the absence of attackers was somehow worse than seeing them. He knew someone was there, he just needed to locate them. He had felt the same way before in Afghanistan. In the mountains, the culverts and fields of maize. Being in a firefight and not being able to locate your enemy was a truly terrifying experience.
He backed up along the side of the Jeep and crouched down at the rear. The man with the ruined legs was thrashing about in the long grass. He was unarmed and of no further threat. He wasn’t going anywhere anytime soon. Stone left him and shuffled down the driver’s side of the tiny vehicle. He felt the hit of the bullet in the centre of his back. He dropped the shotgun and fell forwards, unable to break his fall. His face was turned to the right, his cheek in the dirt and his hands by his sides. He couldn’t move, the pain in his back was crippling and had spread across his body into his limbs. The pain was constant. He had felt it before, though not for so long a period. It was as if he had been Tasered, but the operator wouldn’t stop the shock… And then he realised it was a drug affecting him, like a tranquiliser dart.
Stone was paralysed. He could not move his head, but he could see a pair of black military boots on the other side of the Jeep. They made their way over to the man in the grass. Stone could see a thick pair of legs clad in camouflaged trousers as the otherwise unseen man moved further away from the Jeep. The boots roughly turned the injured man over. He looked upwards, held his arms outwards, his hands spread protectively in front of his face. Stone could not hear, but from the man’s actions, he knew he was pleading for his life. There was a loud gunshot and the man’s body jerked, as his head turned to mist and disappeared. His hands dropped by his sides. Lifeless, still.
The boots and legs made their way unhurriedly back to the Jeep, then all Stone could see was the boots as they drew near. And then they went out of view entirely and he heard them behind him on the ground. He knew what was coming. He’d had a good run. He’d danced with death many times and won. Now it was time to pay the band. Hopefully it would be quick. Strangely, he wasn’t scared.
The feeling of paralysis started to fade and he felt the boot on his side, saw the blue of the sky come into view as he was rolled over. He looked up into the man’s face. As black as coal, towering above him. This man could only be The Bull. He had the most curious features, aesthetically all wrong. It was a moment before Stone realised what it was. The man had no nose. Just two raw-looking holes and some fleshy skin that looked like an upturned limpet. The man was breathing hard through his mouth, exposing a set of brilliant white, but shattered teeth. Whatever had happened, it had been recent. He certainly hadn’t been born that way, nor lived like it for years. Stone guessed it was merely a matter of days. Part of the featureless nostrils had started to scab over. He looked past the man’s extraordinarily unpleasant face. Took in the white clouds scudding across the beautiful blue sky behind him. There was no fight left in him, because as hard as he tried, he could not make his arms and legs move. They were stiff and numb, atrophic. And then the man took out a strange-looking pistol with a cavernous diameter muzzle. He was smiling and Stone suddenly realised, like déjà vu, that he had seen both the man and the weapon before. Another time, another place. He saw the weapon point downwards, felt the impact of the dart, but only a whisper of sound, like a rush of air. He lurc
hed on the ground, then, much like the pain in his back, he filled with heat and numbness and what he would have described as being drunk and sick and dizzy and hungover all at once. And tired. As tired as it was possible to be. And then his eyes closed and for the briefest of moments he remembered how he got here, the gaps filled in the chasm of uncertainty, and he took comfort in the fact that nothing else seemed a blur.
33
Getting the tiny dory to shore had been more difficult than Stone had imagined. He had judged the swells as best he could, but a large wave had broken over the stern and not only drenched them, but sent the vessel side-on to the subsequent wave. The engine had died and with no power to manoeuvre them into a better position, the boat had been swamped and overturned. They were only waist deep when they both resurfaced, but they had little choice but to abandon the boat and wade to shore. The water was cold and the air temperature was dropping fast. The boat had been left abandoned, bobbing with the swell, half submerged with the rudder scraping the sand. The next wave broke onto its prow and it disappeared entirely.
When they waded clear of the water, they stopped at the shoreline and looked at each other. Kathy’s hair was stuck to her face and she was slicking it back. “Nice work,” she said. “Remind me never to get into a boat with you again.”
“The chances will be slim.”
“Non-existent,” she chided. “It wasn’t insured either.”
“The Secret Service will reimburse you,” he lied. He had no idea how he stood with the agency, but he knew it wasn’t good. If he got out of this and managed to keep his freedom, he’d buy Kathy a new boat with his own money.
“So what now?”
“Into the dunes,” Stone said decisively. “We get out of sight, get dried off and get back to your house. If they’re still there, we’ll have the element of surprise.” Stone took the pistol out of his holster and ejected the magazine as he walked up the beach. He upturned it and water ran out. He handed it to Kathy while he pulled back the weapon’s slide and gave it a shake. It dripped with water and Stone blew harshly down the barrel and into the breach to remove any droplets. He took the magazine off of her and made the weapon ready again. Holstering it, he stopped and took out his cell phone. “Damn thing,” he said. “This is how they got to me. This is how they found Edwards and how they followed me to you.” He turned and threw it into the ocean. “I’m sorry. They corrupted my voicemail, intercepted my calls, I should have thought they would be able to follow my signal GPS as well.”
Kathy didn’t say anything. She touched his arm, then turned and carried on walking towards the sizable dune. It was steep and the sand was loose which made climbing it difficult and the exertion burned the muscles in their thighs and calves. At the peak, the dune dropped down ten-feet or so on the other side and the sand became firm underfoot. Sea grass sprouted and grew in large clumps and after fifty paces or so, small, gnarly trees formed the fringe of a wood made up from mainly large pines. The woods were not dense and had been well-managed. The visibility through the trees was considerable. There were stacks of logs in places and at first Stone thought they were the property of a logging concern, but as he studied them, rotting to the elements, Kathy had told him they were stacked in such a way as to attract insects and worms – a kind of feeding station for rodents and birds, which in turn attracted snakes and bigger birds such as eagles, owls and hawks.
The walk had dried them quickly. They had taken off their clothes and wrung them out, then redressed and kept moving. After almost a mile Kathy stopped. She had been limping for most of the walk.
“I need a rest,” she said. “I’ve got blisters from my wet shoes.” She pointed to her wedges. “These aren’t exactly meant for cross-country.”
Stone looked at her toes, noticing they were bloody. He motioned her towards a fallen tree. It had upended and the majority of the roots were clear of the earth, but a few had hung on and the tree was still alive, it’s branches reaching upwards like individual trees. “Let me take a look,” he said.
“It’s ok, I just need to rest them.”
Stone took out his Spyderco knife and whipped open the blade. He cut the lining from his jacket and folded it. “Here,” he said. “Take off your shoe and wrap your foot in this. It’s silk. It should soothe and cushion any cuts or blisters.”
“You need a new jacket now,” she teased, easing a shoe off and reaching for the material.
Stone gently brushed her hand aside and held her foot, wrapping it for her. He helped her on with the shoe, then sliced off another piece of the silk. “Give me your other foot,” he said. She did so and he repeated the process. She had tiny feet, but then most of her was. She seemed childlike and vulnerable, her hair wet stuck to her scalp, her clothes damp and clinging to her body. When she put her foot back down, she smiled. Her smile was childlike too, almost innocent. It made him feel even more guilty that he had inadvertently led them to her. He had to remind himself that she was a grown woman in her thirties and not a teenager. She was vulnerable, yes, but not completely innocent. She had gone looking for a story, one with enough meat on the bone to feed the media and the public’s appetite for a shocking story for a long time to come. A story that would potentially secure a book deal, maybe even television rights. She had trawled the worst of mankind to find what she wanted, and now she was running from it. She had brought much of this on herself. Even so, by his mistake, he still felt responsible.
“What’s the plan?” she asked. “I mean, there could be police and a TV news circus there, for all we know.”
Stone shook his head. “These people are well organised. They tapped your phone to establish your connection with Isobel, and in turn, her connection with me. Then they had the time and resources to put an asset into play and convince me she was you. They must be well connected. You don’t learn this stuff in the private sector. They have government history for sure. They manipulated the law in Washington, tapped the lines, fooled me into thinking I was talking to a dispatch operator. Then they sent a fake cop to kill me…” he frowned, trailing off mid-sentence. It didn’t make sense. The man impersonating the detective had drawn his weapon and fought with Stone, but Kathy – or the woman pretending to be Kathy – had tried to help. She had got herself punched in her face for her trouble, and that’s when the two dogs had gone crazy. The man had been killed within seconds. But why would the woman try to help Stone, if another was trying to kill him? The man calling himself Detective Rawlins had to be another party. A competing organisation.
“Sorry, you were saying?” Kathy asked, uncomfortable be Stone’s long silence.
“I don’t…” he paused. “I think I’ve been played all along,” he said. “Yes, this woman who impersonated you wanted to find both yourself and Edwards through me, but someone else has wanted me dead all the time. Kathy didn’t want me dead. She used me as a stalking horse.”
“A what?” she frowned.
“Hunters used to, maybe they still do, make a wooden cut-out of a horse and hide behind it moving it ever closer to their prey. When the time was right, they’d shoot. She used me to get to Edwards. The man, Rawlins, was another contingent. Most probably after the same thing.”
“Two people hunting you?”
“Two different organisations, yes. One hunting, one using me to get to another target.”
“Who else?”
“I have no idea. I don’t know who Kathy is representing, let alone the other guys.” Stone shook his head. “But how else would they really have got my phone details to start with? And the two gunmen, they tried to kill me as I left her place.”
“Wait, what?” she frowned. “So how many people have tried to kill you?”
“Two men, after I met her for the first time. Then the cop who came to investigate. Then my computer tech guy was killed on his way in to help me with the information Kathy, or this woman, gave me. A car-jacking gone wrong is what the Washington DC police are calling it. Although I don’t think it was a car
-jacking, but a professional hit and it went very much as intended.” Stone shook his head. “And Edwards was killed by Kathy, or the woman pretending to be you. I’m absolutely sure of it.”
“How sure?”
“Positive,” Stone said emphatically. “He had like a cherry or berry lipstick or lip gloss smeared on his lips. He’d kissed her for sure. I’ve no doubt he was under the illusion he was heading into the bedroom for sex.”
“Well, how would you know it was her type of lip gloss?”
Stone hesitated. “I just do,” he replied. “It was the same as she wore when I met with her.”
“Oh,” she said, sensing there was more to Stone’s comment. She didn’t push. “But Edwards knew me,” she insisted. “He wouldn’t have been fooled by her Kathy act.”
“Well, maybe she had another angle. Either way, he had kissed her, and she got the drop on him. I’m sure of it.”
“Ok. So who were these guys out here?”
“It could be either outfit. They looked professional. Were professional. They looked in-keeping with the two guys who attacked me on the road.”
Kathy stood up. “Well, we better get going and see what we can find out.”
They walked on, led by Kathy through the myriad of paths. Some were well-worn, most likely trails to the beach made by nearby residents or visitors. Others were smaller, most probably fox or rabbit trails. Thistles ran along the edges of the paths and they occasionally brushed the thorns with their ankles or shins. After several hundred metres Kathy stopped walking and turned to Stone. There’s a property coming up here, then my father’s house is about a hundred yards further on.
“Ok,” Stone said. “Do you know your neighbours?”
She shrugged. “Not that well. It’s a holiday home. There won’t be anybody here now until Christmas, maybe Thanksgiving, then after that they open it up from June to September. Weekends mostly.”
