Two Songs This Archangel Sings m-5

by George C. Chesbro

  Soon the first commando had company. As the plane continued to describe a large, high-altitude circle around our position, five more lumpy figures leaped out into the night, opened their chutes, and began to float to the earth. We were caught in a deadly circle perhaps two or three miles in diameter, and the circle would begin to close on us as soon as the men landed.

  "Brother," I said, "I do believe it's time we split."

  "Outstanding idea, Mongo. Gary-?"

  We both turned around to find that Gary Worde had disappeared. Garth and I were alone.

  17

  Our first thought was that Gary Worde had panicked at the sight of the commandos and abandoned us-but he was gone only long enough for Garth and me to work up a little panic of our own. When he reappeared, he had a huge bowie knife in a metal scabbard strapped around his waist. Nunchaku sticks, their polished mahogany gleaming in the bright moonlight, hung around his neck by their connecting chain. In his right hand he carried a packet about the size of a paperback book wrapped in dirt-encrusted, heavy-duty yellow oilskin. He squatted down, set the oilskin packet to one side, and started to rub dirt over his hands and face, indicating that we should do the same.

  "Gary, I can't tell you how sorry I am that we drew these people here," I said as Garth and I quickly smeared dirt over our exposed flesh. "We thought we'd been careful to make certain no one was following us, and we wouldn't have come here otherwise."

  "Don't worry about it, Mongo," Worde replied in a low, breathless voice. I could only guess at the nightmares that were going through his head at the moment; he was clearly frightened, but controlling it. His reaction was called courage. "Veil made clear to me from the very first time he came up here that any kind of association with him was extremely dangerous and that something like this could happen. It was one reason he told me the whole story of what had happened to him. I accepted the risk because Veil was the one person whose company I enjoyed-and needed." He straightened up, hefted the packet. "I also accepted this."

  "What's in it?" Garth asked.

  "I don't know," the bearded veteran replied as he slipped the packet inside his coat.

  "When did he give it to you?"

  Worde thought about it. "It's hard for me to say. It was quite a few years ago; I don't know how many. I remember that it was in the fall. He brought it to me on one of his visits. He asked me just to bury it someplace and keep it for him; he said he might need it someday. I'm thinking now may be that time."

  I glanced at the luminous dial on my wristwatch, saw that four minutes had passed since the figures had begun to drop from the sky. "Gary, do you think you can get us out of here through that ring of commandos?"

  "You just follow me," Worde replied in a low voice that trembled with both fear and anger. "I don't care how well trained or equipped those jokers are; they don't know these mountains, and I do. They don't know we're on the move, so don't do any shooting except as an absolute last resort. If we can break through the circle without being detected, I think we'll be home free. We'll walk in single file, and you should try to step exactly where I step. Okay?"

  Garth and I nodded.

  "Then let's do it."

  Garth and I followed Gary Worde as he walked down to the stream. He picked up his rifle from the chopping block, then started back the way we had come. After a hundred yards or so he cut to his right and headed up a fairly steep embankment. As we had been instructed, Garth and I tried to step exactly where he stepped, and as a result found ourselves avoiding dead sticks and loose stones. Worde obviously had excellent night vision, for we were moving at a fairly brisk pace through a densely wooded patch of hillside where little moonlight filtered through the trees. We tried as best we could to imitate his silent walking-a curious, rolling gait that Veil had showed me and which enabled Worde to move silent as a ghost through the night forest.

  Suddenly Worde stopped, and I almost bumped into him. He motioned for us to be silent, then cupped both hands to his ears. I listened, but could hear nothing but the sound of our own raspy breathing. After a few moments we moved off again, but we had gone less than a hundred feet when Worde stopped again and listened. After watching him pluck from silence the sound of the approaching plane, I had a great deal of respect for Worde's hearing; still, judging from the positions of the commandos when they had dropped from the sky, I didn't think any one of them would yet be close enough for us to hear his passing.

  "Veil?" Gary Worde called in a low voice that was just above a whisper, and which sounded curiously like the soughing of the wind.

  Veil?!

  Suddenly, behind us, there was an explosion that shook the ground. We spun around in time to see a column of white and orange flame shoot up into the sky from the site where Gary Worde's cabin had been.

  "Shit," Garth said. "One of those sons-of-bitches moves fast."

  "Satchel charge," Worde murmured. "Whoever made it to the cabin knows we're not there. Now we'll see what kind of communications they have."

  As if in response to Worde's thought, the cargo plane came flying in low from the south, gained altitude, and then banked into a tight circling pattern with the flaming cabin as its epicenter. Then flares began to fall, incandescent balls of fire that stripped the cloak of night from us.

  We were in trouble; although the hillside was covered with trees, there was no foliage. There would be a spotter up in the plane equipped with high-powered binoculars to search for us, or signs of our passing. We threw ourselves to the ground next to the trunks of trees and froze as the plane flew off into the distance. Finally the flares winked out, and night rushed back in over the mountain. We waited, listening, but could hear nothing but the drone of the airplane circling somewhere out of our line of sight. After more than two minutes passed, I began to dare hope that we hadn't been spotted.

  Then the plane came into view; it banked against the moon, then began to descend rapidly, coming directly at us.

  "Oh, no," Worde moaned in a barely recognizable voice as the first black canister dropped from the belly of the plane and began to tum lazily end over end as it angled down toward us. "Oh God, no."

  We sprang to our feet. Worde threw his nunchaku away and we half-ran, half-fell down the hillside as fast as we could. There was an explosion, and I didn't have to look back to know that the spot where we had been was erupting with napalm flame. We were flushed, and there was nothing left to do but run.

  We'd become separated in the scramble down the hillside, but Garth and I found each other just inside the tree line by a small, open glen. Ten yards to our left, just beyond the tree line and bathed in moonlight, a trembling Gary Worde was kneeling on the ground with his hands crossed over his head.

  "Gary!" I shouted as Garth and I ran to him and grabbed his arms. "Gary, get up!"

  We managed to pull Worde to his feet and drag him back into the minimal shelter of the trees as another canister dropped from the sky and splashed a river of flame through the forest on the opposite side of the glen. Still holding Worde, Garth and I started to run back through the trees. We had gone perhaps fifty yards when Worde suddenly broke free from our grasp, spun around, and screaming, ran back through the trees. Garth and I sprinted after him, but stopped at the edge of the tree line and stared in horror at the figure kneeling in the very center of the clearing. This time his head was neither bowed nor covered, but back; his rifle was in his hands, and he was pumping bullets at the fast-approaching plane.

  "Gary!" I screamed. "Get up! Get the hell back here!"

  But the hidden veteran was beyond the sound of any human voice; the spiritual barbed wire that had been holding him together for so many years had finally snapped and was flailing at him. He was back in Viet Nam, and this time he didn't intend to come back.

  I started to run toward the hopeless rifleman in the clearing, then felt my feet fly out from under me as Garth grabbed the hood of my parka and yanked me backward. It was Garth who darted forward as I scrambled to my feet-and then we both d
ropped to our bellies as automatic weapons fire suddenly erupted from the top of a rise a hundred and fifty yards to our left. Bullets raked through the bare, skeletal trees, snapping off branches which rained down all around and over us. When I turned my head, I could see the figure of the commando standing straight and with his legs braced to either side of him as the submachine gun he held against his hip bucked and chattered. Gary Worde's lifeless body jerked spasmodically under the impact of the bullets, while above us the plane banked and reversed course for another napalm run.

  If Gary Worde's corpse went up in flame, so would the oilskin packet he carried. The only piece of evidence-if it was evidence-against Orville Madison would be destroyed.

  "Cover me, Garth; throw some fire in that prick's direction. We need that packet."

  "What-?!"

  Garth lunged and grabbed for me, but I was already on my feet and scrambling through the snow in the clearing. Bullets kicked up little white fountains around me as I ran, rolled, and crawled toward Gary Worde's bloody corpse. I heard Garth's rifle shots-three, four, five. But a rifle in the darkness against a man equipped with a submachine gun wasn't much of a match.

  Out of the corner of my eye I saw the cargo plane coming in low over the treetops, on a direct line with me. Another black canister dropped from its belly; if I wasn't ventilated by bullets, I was soon likely to get roasted.

  "Mongo!"

  "I see it!"

  Worde's corpse was on its belly. I rolled it over, then put my hand inside his coat and groped through the gore I found there. My fingers closed around the packet. I pulled it out, jumped to my feet, and started back toward the trees just as the canister landed behind me. I leaped and rolled, clawing my way through the ice and snow as a great whoosh rolled over me in a tidal wave of sound. The odor of gasoline stung my nostrils as thick, billowing clouds of suffocating black smoke swirled over and around me. Flames slapped at my face-and then I was out of it, and into Garth's grasp.

  "Jesus!" Garth shouted as he lifted me up, then slammed me back down into the snow. He rolled me back and forth a few times to smother my burning clothing, rubbed snow through my hair, over my face and neck. Finally, apparently satisfied with the fruits of his labors, he sighed and sat down hard in the snow.

  "How am I?" I asked loudly in order to be heard over the roar of the fire in the meadow and the forest beyond.

  Garth frowned and shook his head in disgust, even as tears welled in his eyes. "Only slightly singed."

  "I'm glad to hear it." I held up the packet. "Look what I've got."

  Garth, a strange expression on his face, didn't even glance at the packet. "Why did you do a dumb-ass thing like that?"

  "Huh?"

  "Why did you run out and risk your life like that? Trying to save somebody's life is one thing, but Worde was already dead. That package wasn't that important, Mongo. None of this shit is."

  "I don't understand what you're saying."

  "Who gives a shit if Orville Madison becomes secretary of state or not?"

  "I thought you were beginning to."

  "Wrong. I'd break the man's spine if I could get my hands on him, but I don't give a shit if he becomes secretary of state. I give a shit about trying to keep you in one piece. Then you go and do a damn fool thing like that and almost get yourself killed for a lousy package which could contain dirty laundry, for all you know. What do you think would happen to me, Mongo, if you died?"

  I had no answer for a question I'd never expected to hear. I was trying to think of something to say when I suddenly realized that the shooting from the ridge had stopped. Startled, I glanced toward the ridge; the silhouette of the commando was gone.

  "I think I got the son-of-a-bitch," Garth continued quietly.

  "Then what the hell are we doing sitting here?!" I shouted, jumping to my feet. "Let's go!"

  A dead commando meant a hole in the ever-tightening cordon, and so we began climbing the ridge directly toward the spot where the gunman had been standing. However, we had to take into account the possibility that the man was just playing possum and hoping we would do exactly what we were doing, and so we proceeded with a good deal of caution. Halfway up the ridge we split up, with Garth going to the left and me to the right. With my Beretta out, I darted from tree to tree, listening for any sound from the top of the ridge, looking for any movement. I'd made it all the way to the crest of the ridge when I heard Garth's voice.

  "Here, Mongo," my brother called softly. "I've got him."

  Moving in the direction of Garth's voice, I found him standing over a large man dressed in a camouflage uniform of brown and white. The man had night-vision goggles draped around his neck, a large pack strapped to his back, and his lifeless hands held an Uzi submachine gun. He made a formidable-looking corpse, but it hadn't been Garth who'd killed him; the commando's throat had been deeply slashed from ear to ear, and the thumb on his right hand had been amputated.

  "Goddamn," I said when I'd recovered from my initial shock. Gary Worde had been right on target when he'd called out Veil's name.

  "Yeah," Garth murmured as he reached down and picked up the Uzi. He took two ammunition clips from the man's belt, dropped them into his pocket. "If Kendry had really wanted to make me feel good, he'd have hung around just a few minutes longer. Which way is the truck?"

  Taking out my compass, I held it in the palm of my hand and squinted at the needle in the moonlight. "That way," I said, pointing to my left. "But we can't cut over that way until we're sure we're outside the ring. For now, I think we should keep on going straight."

  "Right," Garth said curtly, and we started down the opposite side of the rise at a trot.

  Our thoughts with the man who had died of the disease called Orville Madison which we'd brought with us into his place of solitude, we walked due north in silence for better than three hours, until the sun began to rise over the horizon to signal a cold, white dawn. We'd paused often to listen and watch, but we had detected no sounds of pursuit. Now we stopped at the top of a mountain and scanned the surrounding landscape through our binoculars, saw absolutely nothing except distant plumes of smoke rising from the forest fires started by the canisters of napalm.

  There was no cargo plane, no sign of the five surviving commandos. There was also no sign of Veil, although we knew he had to be out there someplace.

  Puzzled but relieved at the absence of any kind of pursuit, we checked our compasses, then started off to the east. With a little luck, I thought, the Jeep would be where we'd left it, and it would start.

  A half hour later two New York State Police helicopters appeared in the distance, heading toward the fires.

  "Do we want to be rescued?" Garth asked as we stood inside a shadowy copse of fir trees and watched as a third helicopter passed almost directly overhead.

  After some consideration, I shook my head. "I don't think so."

  "It could save us a long hike, and a very cold night in the mountains; we can't risk a fire."

  "We need time to think about what we're going to do next and who we're going to see. I think we're better off if we keep our options open. If the State Police get hold of us, they'll have an awful lot of questions I'm not sure we want to answer yet-at least not to them."

  "You're right. Why don't you open the packet and see what the hell's in there?"

  "I was thinking it might be better to open it in the presence of at least one official witness. It's sealed pretty good, and as long as we leave it that way there are tests that can establish the fact that it's been sealed and underground for a few years. That could be important."

  Garth nodded his agreement. "You sure the Jeep is in this direction?"

  "Ask me in a day or two," I said, and started down the side of the mountain.

  We'd headed in the right direction, and the Jeep was where we'd left it; unfortunately, we never got a chance to see if it would start. New York State troopers were waiting for us-in force-when we emerged from the forest on a ridge just above the pla
ce on the highway where we had parked the Jeep almost a week before. Suddenly, grim-faced men in blue and gray uniforms seemed to be popping up or out all over the place, surrounding us with their guns drawn.

  "Freeze!" a tall, burly state trooper standing fifteen yards ahead of us shouted as he leveled a shotgun between Garth and me.

  We froze, slowly raised our arms in the air.

  "Where's the other one?!"

  "What other one?" I asked. "Look, Officer, we were just out for a little hiking."

  "With a submachine gun?"

  He had a point. Almost as an afterthought, Garth relaxed his fingers and the Uzi clattered to the frozen ground. One of the troopers quickly stepped forward and snatched it up. Then we were grabbed, hustled down to the road, slammed up against a car, and roughly frisked.

  "You're making a mistake, Trooper," Garth said in his most reasonable tone of voice. "Look in my wallet; you'll find a detective's gold shield. My name's Lieutenant Garth Frederickson, and I'm on special assignment for the NYPD. This is my brother, the criminologist Dr. Robert Frederickson."

  "We know who you are, Frederickson," a big, black trooper growled from somewhere behind and above my right ear. The man found my Beretta and Seecamp, relieved me of both. "But you're no longer on assignment for anyone, and it's likely that both you and your brother are going to be learning a lot more about criminology from the inside of a prison. Both of you are under arrest for violation of the Federal Espionage Act. Now, where's your buddy?"

  "We don't know who you're talking about," Garth replied in a low, rasping snarl that no longer sounded quite so reasonable.

  "Veil Kendry. When and where did you split up?"

  Garth and I both started to turn around, stopped when a rifle barrel knifed down between us and smashed against the hood of the car.