Whorl

by James Tarr

  “Yeah,” the former Army Ranger said brightly. He smiled. “I was thinking I could walk up and knock on his front door.”

  The G4 landed two minutes ahead of schedule and taxied to a small hangar at one end of the airport. They were met by a sleepy-looking guy in a polo shirt and khakis.

  “Who gets the keys?” he asked, holding them up. Smith took them, and the man pointed, then headed off in the opposite direction.

  “Seriously? Well, I guess we won’t be doing any offroading,” Marcus said, eyeballing their transport.

  The team walked over to the Chrysler mini-van and Smith opened the rear hatch. There were several gear bags inside. “All right, gloves? Everybody got their gloves? I’d prefer not to leave a print on anything, in case we have to ditch it.” Everyone on the team pulled out well-worn tactical gloves in varying colors from their bags and put them on. There was no one else around, but still they were careful as they looked through the provided equipment.

  “M4s with Aimpoints, short-range headset radio mikes, looks like some handguns as well. Glocks.”

  “Armor?” Bailey asked.

  Smith said, “I see plate carriers with mag pouches mounted on them. Looks like we’ve got at least a couple loaded mags for each rifle, ball ammo. All right, everybody pile in. Bailey, you finish inventorying what we have, we need to get on the road. Check to see if all the Aimpoints work, count the mags and make sure they’re loaded all the way, you know the drill.”

  As Smith closed the rear door of the van, Haney asked him, “We got cans on anything?” He was hoping at least some of the weapons had sound suppressors, so when the shooting started the target’s neighbors didn’t call the local authorities.

  “Nope. We’re going loud on this one. So hopefully we’ll only need one shot.”

  Kyle shook his head. “It’s Arizona. Unless it sounds like a war, nobody is going to call anybody. They’ll just figure it’s someone out plinking.”

  Dave opened his eyes, completely alert. Nothing like nightmares to clear the cobwebs from your head. He checked his watch in the darkness, and the glowing hands told him it was just after one-thirty in the morning. Damn, that was early. His body still hadn’t adjusted to Arizona time, three hours difference, and he’d been getting up early for so long for surveillance that he’d yet to sleep past 3 a.m. local. No chance of his going back to sleep tonight; he was a little sweaty from the nightmare, yet another version of the gunfight with the dirty Detroit cops where things turned out worse for him than they had in real life.

  He sat up on the couch with a grunt and looked toward the bedroom, which was a narrow space set behind the house’s small kitchen. The door was closed, and he assumed Mickey was still asleep. There was no light on under the door. For being just as much of a target as Dave, the young FBI agent didn’t seem to be having the same nightmares. Then again, he still thought there was a way they could get out of all this alive. Press conference; yeah, right.

  Dave lifted his pants off the floor, stood up, and pulled them on. He’d left his belt threaded through his belt loops, his holster and double mag pouch still on the belt. After securing his belt he grabbed his Glock off the coffee table and slid it into the holster, then pulled his shoes on and laced them up. Walking gently across the length of the house—the wood floor creaked something awful—he grabbed a windbreaker.

  The air outside was crisp and cool in a way that seemed unique to the desert. Maybe it was the dry air, he didn’t know. He could smell a few things….definitely a hint of sage, and maybe mesquite. Sure didn’t smell like southeastern Michigan. The Cherokee was bright in the light of the nearly full moon, and he looked into the night sky.

  “Wow,” he breathed. There really was no comparison between the Detroit sky and what he was seeing above his head in the middle of the Arizona high desert. He might have been on another planet, there were just so many more stars visible. The Milky Way was there in all its fuzzy mysteriousness. One thing he never understood, if the Earth was in the Milky Way, why did it look like it was over there? There was Orion’s belt, and the Big Dipper, follow that to the North Star….he turned around, searching for and finding most of the constellations that his father had taught him all those years ago. The moon was so sharp-edged it looked cut out and pasted above his head. Like he could reach out and touch it.

  As crisp as the air was, it really wasn’t that cold. He walked across the dry crunching earth toward the east side of the valley, as he’d always thought of it since he was a kid. It had seemed a lot larger when he was younger, now it was just a little bowl in the middle of rolling dry hills. He was looking for something…..would it still be there? No reason why it wouldn’t. Reaching the far incline, he searched around for a bit, finally finding what he was looking for. He hadn’t seen it at first, because a few desert weeds had grown up around it, and in part because the ground looked different in moonlight.

  Not sure whether it was the start of an abandoned project of his father’s, maybe the floor of a never-realized tool shed, or the final resting place of an unneeded bit of road construction, the ragged slice of concrete jutted out from the inside of the ridge. He wasn’t sure how far into the ground the concrete went, but a good four feet of it stuck out from the ridge, sloping down and in, with a slight overhang at the bottom. It was at least six, probably more like eight inches thick. A serious slab. He’d have to break it up if he ever wanted to move it. Not much use thinking about that now.

  Dave picked up a few rocks and threw them at the overhang, and stamped his feet, but no snakes or other creatures announced their annoyance with him. Satisfied, he climbed up and sat down on the slab. The afternoon and evening sun baked the concrete for hours, and even this deep into the night he could still feel the residual heat under him as he leaned back.

  Staring up at the infinite universe couldn’t make him forget his troubles, but they slid further back in his mind as he gazed up at the tiny winking pinpoints of light. Checking once again for any bugs or creatures, Dave lay back on the slab, his head on the dirt slope above the piece of concrete. He crossed his arms over his chest and marveled at all there was to see, and tried not to think of anything else.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  “Okay,” Bailey called from the rear of the van. “I’ve got an inventory.”

  “What do we have?” Smith said from the passenger seat. Marcus was driving. The van came with turn-by-turn directional GPS, which was very helpful at night, in unfamiliar territory.

  “Six semi-auto ARs with sixteen-inch barrels. Various makes and models, all topped with Aimpoint M2 red dot scopes, and with single point slings.”

  “Are they new?”

  “The rifles? I think they’ve been test fired, maybe—hopefully zeroed in—but yeah, I think they’re new. It’s sort of hard to tell back here, I’m working off a flashlight. I’ve got fifteen fully-loaded 30-round magazines for the rifles, which doesn’t split equally.”

  “Two mags for some, three for others,” Smith said.

  “Two magazines?” Marcus complained.

  “Between all of us that’s almost five hundred rounds, for one civilian target,” Haney said. “I think we’ll be fine.”

  “Ball ammo, federal headstamp,” Bailey announced. “Probably military contract. We also have two Glock 19s, loaded with ball ammo as well, two fully-loaded magazines per pistol.”

  “Sure there’s only two Glocks?” Kyle asked.

  “Positive. So that’s sixty rounds of nine-millimeter. We’ve got six commercial Motorola walkie-talkies with plug-in push-to-talk headsets. They advertise them as having the range of a mile, but I’ve used them before, that’s pushing it. In the open, they’ll reach half a mile for sure, and in a downtown they’ll reach a quarter mile no problem. Shouldn’t be an issue for us. All the batteries are fully charged. Oh, and I checked the Aimpoints as well, all the dots turn on.” He moved his flashlight around. “Six plate carriers with rifle magazine pouches. Look brand new, never been worn.”r />
  “They have plates?” Randy asked him.

  Bailey nodded, unseen in the dark of the van. “Front and back. Feels like steel.”

  “What about body armor?”

  “No, just the plates. Ummm, I’ve got a bunch of zip-cuffs here, if we’ll need those…”

  “NODs? Please tell me you have NODs in there somewhere.”

  “Nope,” Bailey told them. “No night vision, no suppressors. I do have a smaller bag filled with bottles of Gatorade and Power Bars. Oh, and there’s a first aid kit with a pressure dressing and a tourniquet. And that’s it,” he finished.

  “All right. That’s not bad,” Smith observed. “Geared up nice. Anybody bring anything else that might be of help?”

  “I’ve got a handheld GPS,” Haney announced.

  “I’ve got a compass as well,” Kyle told the group. “Shouldn’t have any problems walking a mile in a straight line, not with this moon.” He looked out the window.

  “Now we’ve just got to get there. How long?”

  Marcus glanced back at the van. “GPS is saying it’s another three hours to the drop-off point.”

  Smith nodded. “Say a slow, careful walk the mile to the house, add another thirty minutes…..we should have eyes on by oh-three-hundred. Perfect.”

  Until Dave opened his eyes, he hadn’t realized he’d fallen asleep. He was surprised, actually, that he’d dropped off, laying there. He supposed he hadn’t been getting enough sleep since driving to Arizona, what with the time change and the nightmares. Still on his back, arms crossed, he hadn’t moved at all in his sleep.

  The night sky was a black velvet blanket above him, a thousand pinpricks of light showing through it. Still dark, no hint of dawn. It didn’t feel like he’d been asleep for more than half an hour, he wasn’t stiff from lying on the ground, and the concrete was still emitting faint warmth. He wondered what had caused him to wake up, maybe an animal nearby had made a sound. No nightmares, for once, for which he was grateful.

  There was a faint crunching above him, and the nearly silent hiss of sand running down the slope. He turned his head to see if there was an animal moving down the slope toward him—didn’t want to surprise a snake, especially if it was a rattler—but couldn’t see anything. The slope reached maybe four feet above his head, and glowed nearly white in the moonlight. Dave was just about to get up and investigate when he heard, seemingly right over his head, a man quietly say, “Alpha’s in position, eyes on. No movement, no lights, vehicle is present.” Dave froze, his heart suddenly racing.

  Aaron couldn’t sleep sitting up for shit, so he was dragging when the flight landed at Phoenix Sky Harbor airport. The detective had arranged to rent a car before they’d left Aaron’s trailer, which was a good thing seeing as their flight landed at 4:22 a.m, but they still wouldn’t be able to pick it up until the counter opened at 7 a.m.

  “My ass is kicked,” he told Ringo as they walked up the jetbridge to the concourse. “You get any sleep on the flight?” They hadn’t been able to get seats together, for which Ringo had been very thankful.

  “About an hour.” Ringo actually felt pretty good. Maybe it was the thrill of the hunt, of putting his nose to the ground, but he always felt like a younger man when he was out and doing something case-related. He reflexively checked his pocket—the recorder was still there.

  He hadn’t made a copy of the digital recording of Hartman, and he wasn’t quite sure why. He told himself that it was because he wasn’t sure how to do it without leaving traces on whatever computer he used, but the fact of the matter was….the recording scared the shit out of him. If there was only one copy, and something happened to it……not that he would willingly destroy it or let it be destroyed, but accidents happened. He shook his head, and pushed that ugly thought away. “I’ll drive,” he told Aaron as they walked. “Get some time under the wheels, then maybe we can get some breakfast. You can nap.” Please God, he thought.

  “We didn’t sit together on the plane, you still have to tell me what the fucking hurry is about all this. How you know that more people are gunning for Dave.” Aaron pointed at the baggage carousel. His locked case full of guns and ammo was already sitting there. “I can load and strap on my shit while you drive and talk.”

  “Don’t get in a hurry, we’ve still got a couple hours, right?” And Ringo wasn’t looking forward to it, either, or the two hour drive to Anderson’s place. He was getting to the age where extended sitting hurt both his ass and his back. “Can you give me the address now?” He gestured at the closed rental car desk. “I’m not going to leave without you.”

  Aaron hoisted his hard-sided padlocked Pelican case off the baggage carousel and looked at the detective. “Sure, as soon as you tell me why we’re out here. What has you so worried?”

  Ringo huffed. “Shit.” He looked around the deserted terminal, and pointed to some out-of-the-way chairs against the far wall. “Let’s go sit over there. You’re going to want to be able to hear this.”

  For what he estimated was an hour, Dave hadn’t twitched, hadn’t scratched, hadn’t dared to do anything other than breathe as quietly as possible through his open mouth. He’d never sweated so much doing so little.

  Whoever it was above him, they were still there. Every five or ten minutes Dave would hear the man shift his weight, or breathe heavily. It sounded like the man was only a foot above his head, but Dave knew with the thin desert air the man could be much further away than that—however, if he had “eyes on” the house and vehicle, he had to be just over the top of the ridge.

  Twice Dave had lifted his head slowly and looked around the valley in front of him, moving only his eyes, but he hadn’t seen anything or anyone. If whoever above him was “Alpha”, calling into someone on the radio, it stood to reason there was somebody else out there, somewhere.

  Dave didn’t know who, how many, or where, but he assumed they were close. Actually, the “who” of it didn’t matter so much. He knew somebody would be coming for him, eventually. FBI, or whoever the FBI would hire to do the job. The only surprise was in how quickly they’d arrived. Well, he had to be honest with himself, there was a small part of his brain that kept hoping Mickey had been lying to him, or delusional, that there really wasn’t a conspiracy to remove him from the gene pool because of his matching fingerprints. So having a guy show up to do just that wasn’t completely unexpected, he just hadn’t been 100% sure it would happen, even though he’d told Mickey otherwise. Dave wasn’t happy being right. Depressed didn’t even begin to cover it.

  There was a faint sound above him, and it took him a while to place it—the man up there was drinking something. So he’d brought refreshments….great. His—or maybe their—plan was to sit there and wait him out. They’d assume he was in the house. Shit, they might have thermal scopes, he realized. They might be able to see that he was in the house, or see who they thought was him. Dave was stuck where he was, in the open laying on the slope with just a few weeds for cover. He couldn’t move, couldn’t even make a sound, and was nowhere near the house, his rifle, his shotgun, or the night vision scope he’d just bought. Plus, Mickey was in the house sleeping away, without a clue. Fuck. At least he had a gun with him out here. A Glock wasn’t a rifle, but it was sure as hell better than nothing.

  He lifted his head again, slowly, and looked around the depression in which his house sat. If he was planning to hit the house, the guy above him was in a good position. He was side-on to the house, and as soon as Dave stepped out the front door he’d be in perfect profile and not looking anywhere near where the shots would come from. The distance was maybe seventy-five yards, not a problem at all for someone with a rifle, and he could cover nearly the entire valley except the far side of the house, the narrow slot between it and the far ridge. But….if there was more than one guy, where would the other person be?

  Neck starting to quiver from the strain of holding his head up, he moved his eyes left and right. Someone on the ridge directly to the south, facin
g the front of the house, would have a good view, but might get spotted out the front window. He didn’t think there’d be anybody on the opposite ridge; two people directly facing each other with guns was never a good idea.

  The washed out V-notch gulley behind the house at an angle, that would be a good spot to put someone as well. Someone in that notch would be out of sight from the rear window of the house, and yet only twenty yards away from the back corner—there was no way to get closer without being spotted. He squinted, looked a little to the left and right, but if there was anyone there he couldn’t see them.

  Dave gently lowered his quivering head and rested. If there was more than one guy, and they’d had a chance to recon the property, he knew they could be anywhere. He actually might be in full view of them right now, and the only reason they hadn’t spotted him was because he hadn’t moved and drawn attention to himself. Actually, thinking of that….

  Very carefully, very slowly, moving in increments, Dave uncrossed his arms. The windbreaker had a nylon shell over a thin fleece layer, and made a faint hiss as it rubbed against itself. Was color was his windbreaker? He couldn’t remember. How the hell could he not remember the color of the fucking jacket he was wearing? It was a solid color, and he was pretty sure it was dark, but his brain just couldn’t pull up the image.

  He moved his arms in slow motion, hands going down and in until they met near his waist. Then he placed his right hand over the glowing luminescent face of his watch, and took a deep, slow breath. No yelling, no gunfire, no pain as bullets tore through his flesh. So far, so good.

  “Are you shitting me!” Aaron nearly yelled.

  “Keep your voice down,” Ringo growled at him through his teeth. He knew this had been a bad idea.