Burned Bridges

by A. J. Stewart

  He’d had his fill of the smell. He glanced around the barn, a full three-sixty. Lots of machines, lots of rubber. No Hutton. But there was another door.

  It was another access door at the opposite end from the one Flynn had entered through. He checked it over. Unlike the first door, this one wasn’t built into a larger barn door. This one was built into the wall. But it wasn’t obvious. There was no trim, no jamb. It was as if a rectangular section of the wall had been cut out and then fixed back in place by cheap hinges and some wire. As if someone wanted to hide the door but hadn’t done a very good job of it.

  There was a wire attached to the door that was clipped to a loop fixed to the wall. Flynn lifted the wire out of the loop with his finger. Held his Glock ready and pulled the door open a foot. Then, leading with his weapon, he stepped out.

  He found himself back outside, on the far side of a barn. Unseen from where he had watched with the scope, where Beth sat waiting for him. That thought gave him a new sense of urgency. Thirty-five minutes down. He let the door fall closed behind him. Large pines and oaks towered over him to his left. To the right was the back end of the tire fort. He could smell the rubber from fifty feet. He moved to the corner of the barn and looked around the open gravel area and saw nothing new. Just the same stuff from the other side. The tires, the farmhouse, the driveway, the car on cinderblocks. He pressed his back against the rear wall of the barn and looked out across the field behind the farm. It was a grassy field, maybe a half mile deep. It stopped at the base of the far side of the valley, where the pines took over and reached up the mountain. Flynn glanced left, past the door he had just come through.

  There was another door. This one was a trapdoor, built into a concrete collar in the ground. It was the kind of thing that led to a basement if it was in Kansas. A tornado shelter. Double doors that opened out, so they couldn’t be blown in. Flynn wasn’t aware of any tornados in the Pennsylvania Appalachians. The door appeared to lead under the barn, but the barn was built on a concrete slab. There was no basement down there.

  Flynn knew what it was. The barn wasn’t original. The original had burned to the ground. He recalled that from Cameron Dennison’s prison record. She had burned it down with her parents inside. But the new one had been built in its place. Much more recently. The storm shelter doors were heavy steel items. They wouldn’t have burned. They were original too. From when the barn hid a still. The hatch was an escape route, from back in the bootlegging days. Flynn had read all the stories. There were lots of them, about distilled liquor cooked up in the mountains. Most of the tales related the stories of the southern Appalachians. In Georgia and Tennessee. But there was plenty of anti-Prohibition activity in Pennsylvania as well. He pulled at the door. It was heavy. It required two hands, and even then it didn’t budge.

  Flynn left the trapdoor and returned to the corner of the barn. Still no movement. He decided to chance a look in the farmhouse. He ran across to the tire fort. At the front of the pile stood two towers of semitruck tires. Big and wide and heavy items. Stacked ten high. One tower was on his corner, on the barn side, the other near the house. He moved around the back. The pile of tires was high, about the same height as the farmhouse. The lower tires seemed to be bigger, and the higher ones were smaller, like regular car tires.

  He clambered around the mound and saw the far side of the house. There was a wide porch that ran the full length of the building. An old rocking chair sat in the shade, overlooking the open fields of grass. A bucolic view. Flynn left the shelter of the tires and stepped past some fifty-five-gallon oil drums against the house. He made it to the side of the house and turned back toward the rear porch. There were no stairs, no access to the field. It was a porch designed for sitting back and relaxing after a hard day’s work. He climbed up over the railing of gray weathered wood and onto the porch.

  It wasn’t in great shape. The boards were warped and splintered. They creaked with every step. Better than a Doberman for guard duty. And less upkeep. He moved as quietly as he could, sticking close to the wall of the house, where the boards were less likely to creak. He took long, slow strides, keeping the number of steps on the creaking boards to a minimum.

  There was one door leading from the porch into the house. Flynn tried the lever and found it open. He slipped inside. The daylight was fading fast and the house was dark. He was in a living space. There was a ratty sofa covered in a burgundy blanket. A fireplace with cold ash in it. Behind the sofa was a round pine table with four matching chairs. There were three interior doors off the room. He moved to the first and spun through it, Glock held high. It was a small kitchen. An old oven, an ancient fridge. The cabinets and countertop were more pine.

  He left the kitchen and tried the next room. It was a bedroom. Two small beds, like prison cots, and a tallboy dresser. The beds were made up with blankets only. He touched the end of the first bed and saw a puff of dust rise in the air. Then he moved out.

  The third room was another bedroom. This one looked lived in. A double bed with a wrought-iron headboard. A side table, pine. And an armoire. It was a massive unit, polished rosewood. It bore ornate woodwork inlaid into the doors. It was an impressive piece from a time long gone. Flynn suspected he might have survived a nuclear blast inside it. There was a small iron key hanging in the lock of the one of the double doors. He opened the door and found drawers. Plain women’s underwear. Some T-shirts. He closed the door and opened the other side. There was hanging space. Some dresses that didn’t match the underwear. Fancy items, in a black-and-white movie kind of way. Frills and lace. And way too small for whoever wore the underwear. There was an old canvas greatcoat and a man’s suit. Black with a layer of dust across the shoulders.

  Flynn closed the door and felt up on top of the wardrobe. People often put certain things on top of such pieces in their bedrooms. He found nothing. Then he had a thought and he opened the second door of the armoire again. He pushed apart the greatcoat and the suit and reached for the back of the armoire. Thoughts of lions and witches as he did. He fumbled around, running his hand across the back of the cabinet.

  His hand stopped around the twin barrels of a shotgun. He pulled it out through the hanging clothes. It was a fine weapon. A Winchester Model 21 with side-by-side barrels. The wood was old and pockmarked but shiny. Flynn cracked the weapon open. It was a breech-loading design, one 12-gauge shell in each of the barrels. The barrels were oiled and clean, but not loaded. It was a working gun, a farm gun. It had outlasted its original owner and was in fine condition. He put the shotgun on the bed and rifled through the drawers in the other side of the armoire. Underneath cotton bras and underpants made from some kind of stretching material, he found the box of shells. Opened it and took four for his pockets and then slipped two into the gun. Then he returned the box to the drawer and replaced the underwear.

  Flynn left the house via the rear patio and jumped down onto the hard dirt. He moved along the side of the house to where one of the large turrets stood sentry over the house. Beside the turret sat some oil drums. One was capped, and a tap of his knuckle revealed it to be full. Another two had their tops removed and were charred black on the inside. He crouched behind the capped drum and laid the shotgun down in the long grass that grew at the base of the house. Then he walked back behind the pile of tires. The sun dropped below the nearby peaks, and although the sky above was a light gray the valley descended into darkness. Flynn skirted around the tires and looked back down the driveway. Still nothing. He hadn’t found Hutton, and he didn’t feel great about that, but he wanted to get back to Beth before his hour was up and she drove away.

  He skipped across the open space to the rear of the barn, and then around the far side of the barn, and disappeared into the pines. He had decided that Beth should leave. That was certain. But he didn’t want her getting panicked and stopping at the first police station she hit, before he had time to do what needed doing. So he counted five hundred paces through the pines and then turned left back to
the road. It was close on full dark down at road level, and he jogged across and clambered up the hillside. He hit the mark for the tree line and turned back toward their position. The light was slightly better high on the hill, but only by degrees. The sunlight was drifting up the mountain leaving a blanket of night behind it.

  Flynn saw the Yukon from a hundred yards out. He quickened his pace and tucked the Glock into the back of his trousers. The lights were off, so the cab was dark. He was twenty yards from the truck before he was sure that no one was sitting in the front. He stopped by the driver’s-side window to confirm. Then he yanked the rear door open. No one in the backseat, no one in the cargo area. Flynn spun around in place. It was too dark to see very far, and too dark to bother checking footprints. And Hutton had the flashlight.

  “Beth,” he whispered to the night.

  He waited for a reply but heard nothing but breeze in the pines and the chirping of insects.

  “Beth,” he said again.

  But there was no reply.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Beth was gone. Not to Philadelphia or Washington or New York. Not to the local cops. The keys were in the Yukon, and Hutton’s courier bag was in the back. Flynn’s daypack was right beside it. Hedstrom’s scope was gone. Flynn stood still and let his breathing settle so he could hear the sounds of the night. Most night noise outside of cities is made by insects. There are a million varieties and their combination of sounds make each location unique. Flynn suspected there was probably an entomologist at a university somewhere that could tell him where in the world he was just by listening to a recording of the bug noise.

  But bug noise was most of what Flynn heard. There was some rustling in the trees—a combination of breeze and squirrels—and rustling on the ground—rodents and cottontails. But there was no human noise. No voices, no crunching of underbrush by human tread. He couldn’t even hear his own breath.

  What caught his attention was the light. He saw the first flicker in the corner of his eye, and moved to the tree line to observe. The source of the light was the farm. Someone was lighting fires in the empty fifty-five-gallon oil drums that were scattered around the property. First one, then two, then three. Like a moat of flame around the perimeter of the tire fort. Without the scope, he couldn’t see any people, but it was not the work of a timer, like in a suburban house. Someone was lighting the fires. Someone was drawing attention to the farm.

  His attention.

  Then he noticed the spread of the flames. They were contained within the drums, each like an individual spotlight, but the drums being lit were spread from a central point. Starting at the front of the tire fort, close to the center of the driveway, then moving to drums left and right. Simultaneously. That meant at least two people were lighting fires. He figured neither Beth nor Hutton would be helping. At least not without a gun to their heads. And that meant at least two enemies.

  Flynn pulled back and dropped to the ground, his back against a tree. He felt the cold sweat on the back of his neck, and his breathing became shallow and rapid. It was, various psychologists had told him, a panic attack. He had searched long and hard, read hundreds of textbooks and papers on the subject, but had not found a solution. Somehow the reaction had become ingrained in him. Just as he had been raised to serve, just as he found it second nature to run toward the battle not from it, so he had been programmed to fear the flames. While the basis for his fear was rational—flames burned, that was a fact—even when they were under complete control, in a fireplace or a pit at a camp, he could not overcome the notion that the control was illusory. He had been happy to move into Beth’s townhouse back when she had suggested it, not because it was modern and convenient and cozy, but because it had no fireplace and an electric stovetop.

  Flynn fought himself. This was not the time and not the place. He had always been adept at suppressing emotion and fear, compartmentalizing it while the job needed to be done and dealing with it later. He would take a bottle of bourbon and his thoughts into a private place and let the smell of the liquor pervade his senses. It had been his father’s drink, and the scent of it brought forth his father’s memory and that of his family, and of their deaths. And then the flames would come and he would see the hotel in Abu Dhabi, smoke and flames. And then he would see another house, the family who had slept while their house burned as Flynn lay passed out in the barn, empty bourbon bottle by his side. He had not been responsible for any of those deaths, but he had not saved any of them either. The images came and went and so did all the other demons. And in the morning Flynn would pour the bottle of bourbon down the sink, his soul cleansed in a temporary kind of way, the flames defeated at least for that moment.

  But he didn’t have time for that now. The flames glowed from the farmhouse where both Beth and Hutton were sure to be. Flynn closed his eyes and bit down hard on his lip until he drew blood. The acrid taste on his tongue, anything to distract his mind. He tried to slow his breathing, but his heart rate refused to yield. The panic cared nothing for his predicament. Then he thought about Beth, brought into a world that she had no understanding of. He had tried to find a new place, a family away from all that he had known before, and for a fleeting time he had believed he had outrun his past. But he had been wrong. A man cannot outrun his past. Wherever he goes, his past goes with him.

  Flynn opened his eyes. There was no fighting the panic. There was no suppressing the flames. There was only forward momentum, taking head-on that which would defeat him. The action that should create real panic—going into battle—never had. He had been afraid during battle, but that wasn’t the same thing. Not by a long shot. So he stood. He licked the blood from his split lip. And he turned toward the flames.

  There was now a perimeter of light right around the tires. It was a basic military strategy. Build a stronghold with a wide perimeter. Easy to defend. Hard to attack. And it made your enemies come to you. It was a tactic used since prehistory. It was the basic idea of castles and fortresses. Flynn figured the enemies would be somewhere within the tire fort, waiting.

  There was really only one major drawback to the tactic. Supply. Even a well-provisioned stronghold couldn’t last forever without supplies from outside. Eventually food or ammunition or raw materials ran out. Or often just patience. It took a lot of willpower to sit tight under sustained attack. Sometimes the willpower was there. Flynn had studied the siege of Candia in Crete. Those guys had held out for twenty-one years. But Flynn figured the tire fort was somewhat less resilient. It was designed for confrontation, not siege. He preferred to sneak up in the darkness and take them out, but he had neither the weapons nor the advantage for such an approach. Hutton was down there. Beth too. He’d spent a lot of time hunting terrorists. He knew the tactics. And one of their preferred tactics was to use human shields.

  Unlike the shields, Flynn was Teflon. The B-team had abducted Beth because they weren’t capable of kidnapping him and they couldn’t kill him. The A-team had arrived at the house in Katonah with plenty of firepower, but none of it had been aimed at him. He thought about his approach. They were drawing him out, but he needed to do some drawing out of his own. Sneaking around in the dark wouldn’t work. He had learned playing football at school in Belgium that sometimes it paid to use the flanks and cross the ball into the box. And sometimes it paid to just run straight at the defense.

  It was time to run straight.

  He didn’t drive fast. There was no stealth involved. No surprise. They would see the headlights well ahead of time, and he couldn’t drive the dark road without them. Even if he could, they would hear the throaty roar of the Yukon’s eight cylinders before they ever saw the headlights. So he took his time. He headed back down across the hill, following the fence line. Then he turned a hard left and moved onto the smoother road. He rounded the bend and saw the firelight ahead. It looked like a campground. But there were no campers gazing lazily into the flames, marshmallows on sticks, camp songs sung to the stars.

  Flynn pulle
d into the driveway and felt the crunch of the gravel under the tires. His headlights swept across the scene. What he saw was good and bad. Good, because he saw both Beth and Hutton, and they were both alive. Bad, because they had each been tied to one of the turrets of truck tires. Beth was fixed to a turret on the left of his field of view, on the side of the tire fort that opened up to the gravel turnaround area and the large barn. Hutton was similarly fixed but on the opposite side, close to the house. Flynn sat in the Yukon and considered his moves. There were many. Too many. He would need to narrow his options.

  He stopped with the Yukon blocking the driveway and turned the engine off. Left the headlights illuminating the two women and the tire fort between them. Opened the door and stepped onto the gravel and closed the door, nice and easy. His Glock was held down by his left thigh, away from the light.

  He stepped forward. Flynn’s body was split in half by the sharp light coming from the Yukon. His left side in darkness, his right in full light. He felt the warmth of the fires. The flicker of the flames was lost in the arc of bright headlights. Beth’s head was twisted away as if the headlights were flames themselves. She slowly turned back around. And Flynn saw the message on her face.

  Terror. She was white with fear. Her hands were fixed behind her. Lengths of oily rubber had been wound around her and the large truck tires. He could see tears on her cheeks, but she made no sound. Hutton was tied to her turret of tires in a similar fashion. But her face was different. It was tight across her jaw. Angry. Perhaps angry at herself for getting caught, or angry at Flynn for involving her at all. Unlike Beth, Hutton had tape across her mouth. Clearly she had something to say, and her captors didn’t care to hear it. Her eyes connected with Flynn’s. She blinked. Hard. Twice. Then she waited a few seconds and repeated the move. Two blinks. Two enemies.