by Dan Simmons
“He’ll see us when we cross that open space going back up,” said Natalie. “It’s so narrow here that I’ll have to back up the hill until we get to that wide area two turns back. Damn!”
Saul thought a minute. “Don’t back up,” he said. “Go on down and see if he stops you.”
“But he’ll arrest us,” said Natalie.
Saul rummaged around in the back until he came up with the balaclava and dart gun they had used with Harod. “I won’t be in the truck,” he said. “If they’re not hunting for us, I’ll rejoin you on the other side of the clearing where the road turns east to go over that saddle.”
“And what if they are looking for us?”
“Then I’ll rejoin you sooner. I’m pretty sure this guy is all alone down there. Maybe we can find out what is going on.”
“Saul, what if he wants to search the truck?”
“Let him. I’ll get as close as I can, but keep him occupied so I can get across that last bit of clearing. I’ll come from the south side, behind the van on the passenger’s side if I can.”
“Saul, he can’t be one of them, can he?”
“I don’t see how he could be. They must have the local authorities involved.”
“So he’s just . . . sort of an innocent bystander.”
Saul nodded. “So we have to make sure that he doesn’t get hurt. And that we don’t get hurt.” He looked down the wooded slope. “Give me about five minutes to get in position.”
Natalie touched his hand. “Be careful, Saul. We only have each other now.”
He patted her cool, thin fingers, nodded, took his gear, and moved quietly into the trees.
Natalie waited six minutes, started the van, and drove slowly downhill. The man leaning against the Bronco with county markings seemed startled when she pulled into the clearing. He pulled his pistol from its holster and braced it by laying his right arm across the hood. When she was twenty feet away, he called to her through an electric bullhorn he held in his left hand. “STOP RIGHT THERE!”
Natalie shifted into park and left her hands in clear view on the top of the steering wheel.
“SHUT IT OFF. GET OUT OF THE VEHICLE. KEEP YOUR HANDS IN THE AIR.”
She could feel her pulse in her throat as she killed the engine and opened the van door. The sheriff or deputy or what ever he was seemed very nervous. As she stood by the van with her hands up, he glanced into his Bronco as if he wanted to use the radio but did not want to relinquish either gun or bullhorn. “What’s going on, Sheriff?” she called. It felt funny to use the word sheriff again. This man looked nothing like Rob; he was tall, thin, in his early fifties perhaps, with a face etched in wrinkles and lines as if he had spent his life squinting into the sun. “QUIET! MOVE AWAY FROM THE VEHICLE. THAT’S IT. KEEP YOUR HANDS BEHIND YOUR HEAD. NOW LIE DOWN. ALL THE WAY DOWN ON YOUR STOMACH.”
Lying in the brown grass, Natalie called out, “What’s the matter? What did I do?”
“SHUT UP. YOU IN THE VAN—OUT! NOW!”
Natalie tried to smile. “There’s no one but me. Look, this is some mistake, Officer. I’ve never even gotten a parking . . .”
“QUIET!” The law officer hesitated a second and then set the bullhorn down on the hood. Natalie thought that he seemed a little sheepish. He glanced toward his radio again, seemed to make up his mind, and came quickly around the Bronco, keeping his revolver trained on Natalie while he nervous ly watched the van. “Don’t move a muscle,” he shouted at her as he stood behind the open driver’s door. “If anybody’s in there, you’d better tell ’em to get the hell out now.”
“I’m all alone,” said Natalie. “What’s going on? I haven’t done anything . . .”
“Shut up,” said the deputy. In a sudden and awkward movement, he lunged into the driver’s seat, swept his pistol toward the interior of the van, and visibly relaxed. Still half in the vehicle, he aimed his gun at Natalie again. “You make one move, missy, and I’ll blow you in half.”
Natalie lay uncomfortably with her elbows in the dust, hands behind her neck, trying to look over her shoulder at the rangy deputy. The pistol he was pointing at her seemed impossibly large. A place on her back between her shoulders physically ached with the tension and the thought of a bullet striking her there. What if he was one of them?
“Hands behind your back. Now!”
As soon as Natalie’s hands touched above the small of her back, he loped over and slapped handcuffs on her. Natalie’s cheek went into the dust and she tasted dirt. “Aren’t you going to read me my rights?” she said, feeling adrenaline and anger beginning to burn away the semi-paralysis of fear.
“To hell with your rights, missy,” said the deputy as he straightened up with an obvious release of tension. He holstered the long-barreled pistol. “Get up. We’re going to get the FBI up here and see just what the hell’s going on.”
“Good idea,” said a muffled voice behind them.
Natalie twisted sideways to see Saul in the balaclava and reflecting glasses coming around the front of the van. The Colt automatic was extended in his right hand and the blocky-looking dart gun hung at his left side.
“Don’t even think about it!” snapped Saul and the deputy froze in mid-motion. Natalie looked at the pointed weapon, the black mask, and the silver, reflecting glasses and felt fear herself. “On your face in the dirt. Now!” commanded Saul.
The deputy seemed to hesitate and Natalie knew that his pride was warring with his sense of self-preservation. Saul racked the slide of the automatic back, cocking it with an audible click. The deputy got to his knees and dropped to his stomach.
Natalie rolled away and watched. It was a tricky moment. The deputy’s pistol was still in his holster. Saul should have had him throw it away before having him lie down. Now Saul would have to get within grabbing distance to remove it. We’re amateurs at all this, she thought. She wished Saul would just shoot the deputy in the butt with a tranquilizer dart and be done with it.
Instead, Saul moved quickly forward and dropped onto the thin man’s back with one knee, forcing the wind out of him and pressing his face forward with the muzzle of the Colt. Saul tossed the deputy’s pistol ten feet away and then threw a ring of keys to Natalie. “One of them will undo those handcuffs,” he called to her.
“Thanks a lot,” said Natalie as she struggled to get her hands under her behind and to pull her legs through one at a time.
“Time to talk,” Saul said to the deputy and pressed harder with the pistol. “Who organized these roadblocks?”
“Go to hell,” said the deputy.
Saul stood up quickly, took four steps backward, and fired the automatic into the dirt four inches from the man’s face. The noise made Natalie drop the keys.
“Wrong answer,” said Saul. “I’m not asking you to reveal state secrets, I’m asking who authorized these roadblocks. If I don’t get an answer in five seconds, I’m going to put a bullet in your left foot and start working my way up your left leg until I hear what I want to hear. One . . . Two . . .”
“You sonofabitch,” said the deputy. “Three . . . Four . . .”
“The FBI!” said the deputy. “Who in the FBI?”
“I don’t know!”
“One . . . Two . . . Three . . .”
“Haines!” shouted the deputy. “Some agent named Haines out of Washington. He came on the radio about twenty minutes ago.”
“Where is Haines now?”
“I don’t know . . . I swear.”
The second shot kicked up dust between the deputy’s long legs. Natalie got the smallest key in and the cuffs fell away. She chafed her wrists and scrambled to retrieve the deputy’s gun from the dust where it lay.
“He’s in Steve Gorman’s he li cop ter, flyin’ along the highway,” said the deputy.
“Did Haines put out descriptions of people or just the van?” snapped Saul.
The deputy raised his head and squinted at them. “People,” he said. “Black girl, in her twenties, accom
panied by male Caucasian.”
“You’re lying,” said Saul. “You would never have approached that van if you knew there were two people wanted. What did Haines say we did?”
The deputy mumbled something. “Louder!” snapped Saul. “Terrorists,” repeated the deputy in a surly tone. “International terrorists.”
Saul laughed behind the black cloth of the balaclava. “How right he is. Put your hands behind you, Deputy.” The mirror lenses turned toward Natalie. “Handcuff him. Give me the other gun. Stay to one side. If he makes any move toward you at all, I’m going to have to kill him.”
Natalie snapped the handcuffs on and backed away. Saul handed her the long gun. “Deputy,” he said, “we’re going over to the radio and make a call. I’ll tell you what to say. You have a choice right now of dying or calling in the cavalry and getting a chance to be rescued.”
After the charade on the radio, Natalie and Saul led the deputy up the hill and handcuffed him with his arms around the bole of a small, fallen pine sixty yards up the south-facing slope. Two trees had tumbled together, the trunk of the larger one falling onto the top of a four-foot-high boulder. The proliferation of branches concealed the rock and made for excellent cover and a good view of the clearing below.
“Stay here,” said Saul. “I’m going back down to the van and get syringes and the pentobarbital. Then I’ll get his rifle out of the Bronco.”
“But Saul, they’re coming!” said Natalie. “Haines is coming. Use the tranquilizer dart!”
“I’m not pleased with that drug,” said Saul. “Your pulse was way too high when we had to use it. If this fellow has a heart condition, he might not be able to handle it. Stay here. I’ll be right back.”
Natalie crouched behind the boulder while Saul ran to the Bronco and then disappeared into the van.
“Missy,” hissed the deputy, “you’re in a shitload of trouble. Undo these cuffs and give me my gun and there’s a chance you’ll get out of this alive.”
“Shut up!” whispered Natalie. Saul was running up the slope carrying the deputy’s rifle and the small blue knapsack. She could hear the sound of a helicopter in the distance, growing closer. She was not afraid, only terribly excited. Natalie set the deputy’s pistol on the ground and thumbed off the safety on the Colt automatic Saul had handed her. She practiced bracing her hands on the flat rock in front of her and aiming at the van, its back doors open now, even though she knew it was too far away for a pistol shot.
Saul burst through the screen of branches and dead needles just as the helicopter roared over the ridge behind them. He crouched, panting, filling a syringe from an upended bottle. The deputy cursed and protested as he was injected, struggled for a moment, and slumped into sleep. Saul pulled his balaclava and glasses off. The helicopter circled again, lower this time, and Saul and Natalie huddled together under the roof of branches.
Saul dumped the contents of the backpack out, setting aside a red and white box of copper-jacketed shells and feeding them into the deputy’s rifle one by one. “Natalie, I am sorry I didn’t confer with you before doing this. I could not pass up the opportunity— Haines is so close.”
“Hey, it’s OK,” said Natalie. She was too excited to stay still, moving from one knee to a squatting position and then back to her knees. She licked her lips. “Saul, this is fun.”
Saul looked at her. “I mean, I know it’s scary and all, but it’s exciting. We’re going to get this guy and get out of here and . . . ouch.”
Saul had grasped her shoulder and squeezed very hard. He set the rifle against the rock and put his right hand on her other shoulder. “Natalie,” he said, “at this moment our systems are full of adrenaline. It seems very exciting. But this is not tele vi sion. The actors will not stand up and go out for coffee after the shooting is over. Someone will be hurt in the next few minutes and it will be no more exciting than the aftermath of an automobile accident. Concentrate. Let the accident occur to someone else.”
Natalie nodded.
The helicopter circled a final time, disappeared briefly over the ridge to the south, and came back to land in a cloud of dust and pine needles. Natalie lay on her stomach and pressed her shoulder against the rock as Saul lay prone with the rifle against his shoulder.
Saul breathed in the scent of sun-baked soil and pine needles and thought of another time and place. After his escape from Sobibor in October of 1944, he had run with a Jewish partisan group called Chil in the Forest of the Owls. In December, before he began working as an aide and orderly for the group’s surgeon, Saul was given a rifle and put on sentry duty.
It had been a cold, clear night— the snow blued by light from the full moon— when the German soldier staggered into the clearing where Saul lay in ambush. The soldier was little more than a boy and carried neither helmet nor rifle. His hands and ears were wrapped about with rags, his cheeks white from frostbite. Saul knew instantly from his regiment insignia that the youth was a deserter. The Red Army had launched a major offensive in the area the week before, and although it would be ten more weeks before the Wehrmacht was to be totally beaten, this youth had joined hundreds of others in headlong retreat.
Yechiel Greenshpan, Chil’s leader, had given explicit instructions on what to do with solo German deserters. They were to be shot, their bodies thrown in the river or left to rot. No effort at interrogation was to be expended. The only exception to this execution order was if the noise of the shot would reveal the partisan band to the infrequent German patrols. Then the sentries were to use knives or let the deserter pass.
Saul had called out a challenge. He could have fired. The band he was with lay concealed in a cave hundreds of meters away. There was no German activity in the area. But he had challenged the German instead of firing immediately.
The boy had dropped to his knees in the snow and begun weeping, imploring Saul in German. Saul had worked around behind the boy so that the muzzle of the ancient Mauser was less than three feet from the back of the blond head. Saul had thought of the Pit then— of the white bodies tumbling forward and of the sticking plaster on the Wehrmacht sergeant’s cheek as he took a cigarette break with his legs dangling above the horror.
The boy wept. Ice glinted on his long lashes. Saul had raised the Mauser. And then he had stepped back and said “Go” in Polish, watching as the young German stared over his shoulder in disbelief and then crawled and stumbled from the clearing.
The next day, as the group moved south, they had found the boy’s frozen body lying facedown in an open spot in a stream. That was the same day that Saul had gone to Greenshpan and asked to be made an aide to Dr. Yaczyk. The Chil leader had stared at Saul for some time before saying anything. The group had no time for Jews who would not or could not kill Germans, but Greenshpan knew that Saul was a survivor of Chelmno and Sobibor. He agreed.
Saul had gone to war again in 1948 and in 1956 and in 1967 and, for only a few hours, in 1973. Each time he had gone as a medical officer. Except for those terrible hours under the Oberst’s control when he had stalked Der Alte, Saul had never killed a human being.
Saul lay on his stomach in the soft bed of sun-warmed pine needles and glanced at his watch as the helicopter landed. It was in a bad place, on the far side of the clearing, partially obscured by the deputy’s Bronco. The deputy’s rifle was old— wooden stock, bolt action, with only a notched sight. Saul adjusted his glasses and wished it had a telescopic sight. Everything about this was wrong according to Jack Cohen’s advice— a strange weapon that he had never fired, a cluttered field of fire, and no avenue of retreat.
Saul thought of Aaron and Deborah and the twins and used the bolt to slide a round into the chamber.
The pilot got out first and moved slowly away from the he li cop ter. This surprised and bothered Saul. The man waiting in the right side of the bubble was armed with an automatic rifle and wore dark glasses, a long-billed cap, and a massive vest of some sort. At sixty yards, with the glare of the setting sun on the Plexiglas
, Saul could not be sure that the man was Richard Haines. Saul held his fire. He felt a sudden nausea rise in him along with a certainty that this was the wrong thing to do. He had heard Haines’s call to Swanson on the deputy’s radio when he was retrieving the rifle. This had to be Haines. But all the FBI man had to do was sit and wait for the others to arrive. Saul set the deputy’s bullhorn next to his left hand and sighted down the barrel again. The man in the flak jacket moved then, running in a combat crouch to the cover of the Bronco. Saul did not get a clear shot, but he did see the strong jaw and carefully trimmed hair under the cap. He was looking at Richard Haines.
“Where is he?” whispered Natalie. “Shhh,” whispered Saul. “Behind the van now. He has a rifle. Stay low.” He set the bullhorn on the ground in front of his face, made sure it was on, and braced the rifle with both hands.
The pilot called something and the agent behind the van shouted back. The pilot moved slowly toward the helicopter and five seconds later the other figure appeared, moving swiftly.
“Haines!” shouted Saul and the amplified boom made Natalie jump and came echoing back from the opposite hillside. The pilot ran for the trees as the flak-jacketed figure swiveled, dropped to his right knee, and began raking the hillside with automatic fire. Saul thought the popping sound tiny and toylike. Something whined through the branches eight or nine feet above them. Saul squeezed the oiled stock against his cheek, took aim, and fired. The recoil slammed the butt against his shoulder with surprising strength. Haines was still up and firing, sweeping the M-16 in small, deadly arcs. Two bullets struck the boulder in front of Saul and another buried itself in the fallen log above him with the sound of an ax splitting wood. Saul wished he had handcuffed the deputy deeper under the woodpile.
Saul had seen the pine needles jump ahead and to the left of Haines. He raised his sights up and to the right and was vaguely aware in the periphery of his vision that the pilot had turned and run for the trees. Saul could see the muzzle flashes from the M-16 as Haines blazed away. A final rattle of bullets struck the boulder where Natalie was curled in a fetal position, the firing stopped abruptly, the kneeling figure threw a rectangular clip away while pulling another from his vest pocket, and Saul took careful aim and shot Haines.