Judas Horse ag-3

by April Smith

  Thirty-nine

  We drive to a turnout where a chain hangs across a dirt road. When we emerged from the tunnel, we ran across a hundred yards of open wash beyond the perimeter, clouds of ink black smoke roiling behind us. We kept on going — a call on the satellite phone to an associate of Mr. Terminate — and then a grandma biker chick right out of Omaha, a wrinkled witch a hundred years old, met us and took us to a safe house in a trailer park, where we were given a stolen car. We drive for ninety minutes into the national park. Only when we passed a green sign for the parking lot for the Hard Edge Trail do I realize that our destination is the place where Steve Crawford died.

  Stone gets out and unhooks the chain, gets back in and drives the sedan over it. Branches sweep the windshield as we ascend a rutted fire road. The Northwest fir is as impenetrable as the Virginia woodland surrounding Quantico; voracious organisms choking one another out for the sun.

  At times the car is almost engulfed by closely growing colonnades of young Douglas fir, and I am gripped with a claustrophobic unease, as sickening as having crawled through that tunnel. Spring rains cut deep gullies in the moist terrain and now our heads hit the inside roof of the car as we launch out of our seats. Ten miles an hour seems way too fast.

  “Watch out!”

  “Got it,” Stone mutters, slowing to a stop before a huge tree felled across the road.

  We stare at an impassable tangle of branches and fine sprays of dark green needles spewing out in all the wrong directions. Nothing looks more like a forbidding mistake than a huge horizontal tree lying across your path.

  “We’re not that far,” Dick Stone says, arming himself with the Colt, a Commando submachine gun, three hundred rounds of ammunition, and a collapsible snow shovel.

  We climb around the tree and follow the road on foot. During the drive, we gained altitude, and the mountain air is pure and chill.

  “I’ve been in some odd situations, Dick, but this is one of the strangest. Ever zoom out of yourself? All the way out, so you’re looking down from somewhere else?” “Not sober.”

  “What are we doing in the woods? I don’t even like the woods. There’re ticks and poison oak.” The road is wide enough to walk side by side, but sometimes one of us will walk ahead, over gullies cut by cascading rocks, sometimes along the lip of the road. We continue that way, flowing around each other, as Stone twirls the shovel lightly over one shoulder.

  “Why are you and I always digging another man’s trenches?” I muse.

  “Some of us are soldiers. Born that way.”

  We are walking single file where the road washes out. At the bottom of a huge rounded boulder split by a tree, Stone takes a turn onto the well-kept Hard Edge Trail. A Forest Service sign points back to the parking lot at 5.7 miles.

  We continue up, retracing Steve Crawford’s steps.

  We crest a ravine and look down at the creek where the hiker found the remains. I recognize the rock formations from the postblast photos.

  “Good God!” says Stone. “What are you two doing here?”

  Toby Himes and Mr. Terminate are sitting on a fallen log. Toby, always appropriately dressed for whatever occasion, wears an impeccable hiker’s outfit — clean boots, wind-resistant pants, lightweight black quilted vest, orange hunter’s cap. Mr. Terminate, wearing a T-shirt with a faded message that has to do with sucking, is smoking a cigarette, the AK-47 cradled in his arms. His presence is so improbable that it instantly reframes reality.

  Before, the forest was treacherous.

  Now, it is incendiary.

  “Figured you wouldn’t leave town without saying good-bye.”

  “Course not,” says Stone, climbing down the slope. “I owe you, big.”

  “No problem, it was a lot of laughs,” says Mr. Terminate. “I see you still got your shadow.” “Hi, John,” I say, just so he can ignore me one last time.

  Stone bums a cigarette and puts one foot up on the log.

  “Megan is dead.”

  “Really? Oh shit! Oh man!” Toby’s eyes grow round in surprise. “Deepest condolences, my friend. What happened?” “They mowed her down. About how many bullets would you say she took, Ana Grey?” “I don’t know, Dick.”

  “When I was on the Los Angeles bank robbery squad, we ambushed a gang of bandits in an alley. The guy driving the getaway car — it was a convertible — took a hundred thirty-two hits. He was hamburger. Those were the good old days, am I right? I’ll make them suffer a thousand times worse. A hundred thousand. I should have followed the very first rule: Never negotiate with terrorists. It’s the Bureau I’m talkin’ about.” “We know exactly what you’re talkin’ about.” Toby lays trembling fingers on his friend’s arm.

  “But, no,” says Stone, squeezing his face up. “I talked to them, and she walks into an assassination.” I stare at the thick bed of mulch under my feet. I am thinking how many papery layers of brown oak leaves have been laid down over how many centuries and with what patience, and about the beetles gnawing dumbly through the fertile dregs.

  “Make no mistake,” says Mr. Terminate, his growl downshifting to first. “She was a good lady.” Stone smokes some more.

  “Anything I can do?” the biker asks.

  “I have some thoughts.”

  Mr. Terminate nods. A switchblade appears like the tongue of a snake from his hand.

  “Then we split the turquoise. Three ways.”

  Stone sighs. “There is no turquoise. It’s just a rumor, John. A story I made up to mess with their minds.” “I knew it.” Toby slaps his own leg.

  Mr. Terminate is not convinced. “Why are you carrying a shovel?”

  “To cover up…whatever.” He jerks his head toward me.

  Whatever’s left.

  Mr. Terminate considers. He gets up from the log. Yeah, okay. He walks toward me, the knife held low.

  “It’s cash,” I say.

  “Come again?”

  “Dick calls it ‘the turquoise,’ but that’s a cover, so he can cheat his best friends. He stole a hundred and fifty thousand dollars from the FBI, and it’s buried right there.” Mr. Terminate squints at Stone. “You wouldn’t cheat me.”

  “Oh for Christ’s sake!” cries Stone, fed up and totally frustrated. “This is the turquoise!” And he pulls the PalmPilot from his pocket. In the sage forest light, the plastic cover sparkles like sea green semi-precious gems.

  “O-kay,” says Mr. Terminate slowly.

  Toby blinks. “It’s blue.”

  “You dumb fucks. This is my manifesto. This is the truth. This will sink the FBI. Names, records, and documents going back to the seventies, when they fucked Megan and they fucked me, and who was in charge of the undercover operation? My own boss. Peter Abbott. I’ve got his signature on memos that approved the whole damn bag of dirty tricks. But that’s nothing. That’s just the warm-up. I’ve got the drop on his fucking corrupt father, too.” Mr. Terminate has planted his feet like a gunslinger.

  “I stood by you. All these years, I delivered the goods.”

  “I’ll get you the money,” Dick Stone says impatiently. “After we take care of business.” Mr. Terminate isn’t stupid. “You didn’t have to bring her all this way to do the deed.” “I came to collect some papers I’ve got stashed. Buried in a metal box. I’ll show you.” “Papers?”

  “Travel documents.”

  “Cash! He’s lying to you, John. He’s a psycho liar.” “I’ll bet it’s over here,” says cocky Mr. Terminate as he heads for a boulder veined with rose quartz. The rock is standing in a growth of chokecherry. The distinctive glassy pink markings make it look as if it had been rolled there to mark the spot. And he’s right. A trip wire — thin as a spider’s web — glints in the underbrush. It is the same kind of setup Steve Crawford must have walked into when he was looking to rip off a stolen fortune.

  Stone yells, “Don’t!” as Mr. Terminate lumbers toward it.

  The shock wave of the explosion pummels my body, arms wind-milling backward
, then slams me up short against a granite outcrop, loose earth like burning sparks raining in my hair. The force of it crunches my left shoulder at a bad angle against the rock and I feel that sickening snap, when you know something has dislodged somewhere important.

  As I stumble forward, a big inhale of chemical smoke causes me to choke and cry. Mr. Terminate’s disarticulated body parts have been launched in a radius fifty feet wide. Coming to rest within my view is a facial fragment containing a partial set of bloody teeth, and a hand still wearing the silver rings. Above the blasted ridge of rock, a rhododendron bush has silently caught fire. Everything is silent because my eardrums have gone numb.

  A tall, thin figure stumbles across the orange backdrop of burning trees and kneels beside Dick Stone, who was knocked down flat on his back.

  “Doc!” I’m hearing as if underwater. “It’s Toby, brother.”

  Thick wine-dark blood has pooled beneath Stone’s body. Toby kneels and cradles his head.

  “He’s got a skull fracture. Small hole you can just stick your finger through.” Toby wipes brain matter on his jeans.

  “For God’s sake, don’t touch it!”

  Dick Stone’s face is pale and shocky, but he’s still breathing. He opens dull and searching eyes.

  “Get me up.”

  The fire is dancing across the highest canopy of branches. Black smoke boils and intense heat presses against our skin. In moments we will be trapped inside an inferno.

  Stone’s lips say, “Water.”

  Toby has a bottle in the pocket of his vest. Carefully supporting Stone’s wounded head, he maneuvers on his knees to wet his mouth.

  “What are you up to now, you crazy coot? Is this the famous Big One?”

  “It’s happening,” Dick Stone murmurs. “The salmon are running.”

  I’m trying to lift Stone’s shoulder over mine. “Let’s get out of here.” The choice is get him up or let him burn to death. We lift, but then Stone’s heavy legs give out and he ends up sitting. His bloody head lolls forward. My heart contracts with dread.

  Toby shakes him. “Stay awake. Help us out.”

  Dick Stone relaxes back toward the ground. A mischievous smile plays around his lips. To the last, I don’t know what he’s playing.

  “Dying’s no big deal,” he says quite clearly. “People who get upset about it haven’t lived their lives the way they wanted to.” “Medics!” Toby yells. “Code blue! Abort!”

  He looks around, but nothing happens.

  “Where are you?” he shouts.

  I think that he’s gone nuts, flashing back to a burning jungle in Vietnam, but then SWAT advances from the forest like surreal toy soldiers in Nomex battle gear, with automatic weapons drawn.

  Stone is whispering and motioning for me to hear. I bend close to his bloodless lips. He gropes for my shirt. Although our faces are almost touching, Stone’s roaming eyes cannot find me.

  “He has taken advantage of all I stand for.” Dick Stone must have realized with his dying thought that beneath the tidy hiking gear, Toby Himes is wearing a bulletproof vest. And a wire.

  “But you…” His voice trails off. He presses something into my hand. It is the PalmPilot. “Take this.” Angelo and Donnato, festooned with earphones, ID tags, and gun belts, wearing bright blue FBI windbreakers, emerge from the blur, shouting questions.

  I find that I am holding Dick Stone’s hand, and I place it gently on his chest while slipping the device into my pocket. There is nothing more to be learned from the half-open eyes of the dead.

  I get to my feet. A malevolent presence fills the sky. The sun looks distorted through an atmosphere of brown, an orange-red alien disk. Black smoke billows toward the north, but ash is falling like the frozen drops of hail that tapped against our parkas on a turbulent day last spring as we waited in the lee of a volcanic plain to save the last free wild horses in the West.

  “Who the hell is Toby Himes?”

  Donnato takes my elbow, but I jerk away.

  “Who is he? Is he an agent? He’s wired, he’s wearing a vest, and I’m playing it out. I’m for real. I’m involved with these people, and he’s—” “I hear you.”

  Which is difficult, because I’m blubbering and trying to keep my mouth clamped shut at the same time.

  “It’s been tough on him, too.”

  “Tough on him?”

  Donnato maneuvers so he’s blocking my view; his face is all I see. “Toby Himes is a source.” “A source?”

  “He is Peter Abbott’s pocket source.”

  “The deputy director of the FBI has a pocket source? He’s been off the street for years.” “Toby Himes has been Peter Abbott’s unpaid informant, pretty much since they came back from Vietnam. We’ve known they were talking. We thought Abbott might be involved in a conspiracy. We ran an investigation under Galloway’s command. Abbott finally gave it up that Mr. Himes has been providing him with intel on criminal activity in the Northwest for years. Himes is nowhere on the books because he refuses to take money or be acknowledged. He’s an unsung hero. Doing the right thing for his country. When he told us Stone had recently acquired half a dozen cast boosters, we knew it was on.” “What are you talking about?”

  “High-energy explosives. They provide the initiation you need to ignite a major amount of Tovex. Do serious damage. We knew Stone was onto the Big One.” Angelo approaches, having grabbed Toby Himes.

  “A Highway Patrol officer picked up the APB on Jim Allen Colby, also known as Slammer, getting off a Greyhound bus in Cascade Locks. What does that mean, Mr. Himes?” Toby replies, “That’s the Bonneville Dam.”

  We should be running for the helicopters, but instead we are drawn to watch in respect as the paramedics strap Dick Stone’s heavy body onto a gurney.

  Toby Himes’s face is tight. “Why did you wait and let him die?”

  “We thought he might say something important. You did right,” Angelo assures him.

  “It speaks to what we do to ourselves,” says the former Marine, and he walks away.

  Sadness is rising. I swallow hard. An empty space is opening up, much like the empty space around my grandfather. Disappointment, mostly, in what might have been.

  As for Darcy DeGuzman, without Dick Stone, she is lost.

  Good-bye, soldier, Darcy thinks, and dies there, too.

  Slammer gets off the fourth bus of the day at the Bonneville Lock and Dam, a National Historic Landmark. What a complete and total pain in the butt — but still, he is happy to have been chosen, back in the good graces. The old dude better appreciate this, hours and hours of waiting in stinky old bus stations in nowhere towns, and it’s late in the day and it’s cold and he’s starving.

  Slinging the backpack, he crosses the parking lot toward the visitors area and picks up a brochure, as instructed. This thing is huge. It spans the river a mile wide, connecting the states of Washington and Oregon. The powerhouses are kind of scary, huge networks of high-tension wires and transforming stations that produce electricity from turbines deep inside the dam — enough to power the entire city of Portland, it says.

  He opens the map and locates the Fish Viewing Building.

  Two huge luxury tour buses have pulled up to the entrance, and quicker than you’d imagine, hordes of white-haired old folk have disembarked in a parade of walkers and wheelchairs, limping through the glass doors. Slammer holds the door politely for a chalk-faced living corpse attached to an oxygen tank, then heads for the elevators, totally freaked by the guy at the desk — an old fart from the Army Corps of Engineers wearing a black eye patch, who is staring directly at him with one lucid eye.

  But it’s a great day for the fish. The Visitor Center is filled with tourists. The benches in front of the underwater window are crowded with kids and strollers, in a claustrophobic room that smells of old radiators and cafeteria lunch. Slammer stares through the glass at the silver forms flying by as they climb the fish ladders that get them over the dam — hundreds per hour. Some old lady is s
tanding in a booth, clicking each one off by hand. People are staring at her like she’s another exhibit.

  Okay, he’s seen enough. He can’t wait to drop the dye. Man, it would be cool to see it happen from this window as the water slowly fills with red like a slasher movie. Better than blood and harmless to the fish, Julius promised. He checks his watch. Allfather said to pull the cord at precisely 4:15. It is 4:10 now.

  Slammer takes the elevator to the top level, where you can walk outside and have a view of the whole river, and get close to the salty smell of the fish ladders, which are basically steps flowing with water. You think of a dam like something out of a children’s book, all neat and sparkly, but when he looks around, he decides the place looks more like a prison. There are high barbed-wire fences to keep people away from the banks of the river. If you somehow fell in, you’d be swept into the rotor blades of giant turbine engines. The skies are gray and the water dark. He trudges up to the top of the weirs, out onto a catwalk where a toddler is squatting and pointing to the water.

  He fingers the rope dangling from the backpack. Remembering the small explosion of gunpowder bound to occur when he pulls the switch, he moves away from the family.

  “Don’t let the little dude fall in,” he advises.

  “Slammer. Stop.”

  Still smiling, he answers to his name, and there’s the chick from the farm coming toward him. She looks all different. She’s got on a baseball cap and a vest that says FBI, and she’s walking funny, tilted over to one side.

  My left shoulder is bandaged up underneath the blastproof vest, but the pain is breathtaking.

  “What are you doing?” Slammer asks.

  “Don’t move. Do not pull that cord.”

  “How’d you get here?”

  Military helicopters fill the skies. On the shore, a fleet of cop cars and ambulances is lining up along the road.

  I keep a distance.

  “Slammer, please don’t move. Do you know what’s in that backpack?”

  “Nothing is going to happen. It’s just dye, to stop them from destroying the salmon runs.” “That pack contains explosives. Not just a blood bomb. Something a lot more powerful.” “Why?” the boy asks, confused.