A Different War

by Craig Thomas

  Pyott's expression was one of foreboding; then he became angry with Aubrey.

  "Your confounded curiosity, Kenneth," he growled.

  "Is this it, my dear?" Aubrey urged, moving close to the bed.

  Her eyes fluttered open.

  "Kenneth," Giles warned.

  That's it…" Marian managed. She smiled briefly, as if someone had told her she had passed an examination. Then, in another moment, she was asleep.

  Aubrey, despite Giles Pyott's irascible expression, switched on the tiny recorder. A youngish male voice, Campbell for sure… speaking from the mortuary.

  '… the decision was David's, the planning was his… He needed people like me, Laxton he called us the European connection to shuffle the cheques from one envelope to another…" The voice was heavy with fear.

  Aubrey continued to listen until Campbell's voice died away and there was a long, hissing tape noise which masked the small, distant noises of traffic. Realising the calm before the storm, he stopped the tape running.

  Giles' hand gripped his wrist, the fingers of his other hand snatching the recorder from Aubrey's grasp. Angrily, his eyes glowering, he switched on the recorder.

  "Look out! Ben, for God's sake, look out!' Then the screaming of the car's metal as the undoubtedly arranged accident occurred. Only then was the tape silent.

  Giles looked up at him after staring at Marian for a long moment. His face was ashen, his eyes like last hot coals.

  "Did he—?" he began, but his voice failed almost immediately, like a poor and distant radio signal.

  "David?" Aubrey nodded gravely.

  "Oh, yes, Giles he did' Giles had returned his hand to his daughter's, and pressed it ever more protectively.

  "She's safe now, old friend. I promise you. David thinks he has closed the last gate behind him. He must be feeling secure. Until I confront him with this…"

  Aubrey turned away from the bed. There would be nothing on the tape concerning the sabotage. Campbell wouldn't have known about it. David may have trusted people like Fraser, but never Campbell with that kind of knowledge. But… David had to pay the entire price.

  It was as if he had written it on the wall of the room in huge black letters. For Marian's injuries, for Vance's ruin, for fifty and more deaths, David must pay in full. They had to prove the sabotage against him, not simply the fraud.

  There had been no word from Gant. He was still out there, somewhere, like a perturbed spirit in pursuit of Strickland. He had to find him.

  For fraud, David might receive a token sentence if he went to prison at all. Everyone, including most of the Cabinet and the European Commission, would want no fuss, would rather there was no evidence at all against David. Murder, however, they could neither excuse nor bury.

  He turned to glance once more at Marian, pale as death, symbolising how close she had come to her demise. Mitchell, he thought, as if attempting some kind of telepathic contact… find me the proof.

  Otherwise, David might yet slip through their hands. Marian would be safe, of course but David would, in all probability, just be reprimanded for fraud; he would be damned only for murder… Was Gant even alive—? The thought chilled him.

  "Strickland, this is beautiful," Mclntyre said. The man's hand was heavily, unreassuringly on his shoulder for a moment, then he retreated to the armchair that had been dragged out of the sight lines of the two windows of the room.

  The enthusiastic, ingratiating tone of his voice had been denied by the greedy stare of his eyes.

  "A man has a right to protect himself, Mac. Even a duty," he replied studiedly.

  "You take your duty seriously, Strickland." That was Fraser, who was more subtle and deliberate in his mockery. The ambient music that seeped from the speakers like an anaesthetic gas seemed to have no dulling effect on their anticipatory malevolence.

  The electronic surveillance had been disarmed when the FBI arrived.

  He'd been in the bedroom, packing for Vancouver the next day. Their guns had been drawn as he opened the door of the lodge, while his was still concealed behind his back, not wanting to cause alarm to a neighbour. Mclntyre and Fraser had arrived in the early afternoon, with the bustle of businessmen after a long flight. There were now a half-dozen of them in and surrounding the lodge.

  The lights of the den made it full dark outside. Only he was visible from the windows to Gant, who they promised with malicious humour was coming. He sat before the surveillance console and its bank of monitors and screens. They wanted Gant to see him alone. From scraps of their conversation, Gant must know they had beaten him here his airplane had disappeared from radar. He'd been forewarned.

  They promised him protection from Gant, assuring him that Gant wanted to kill him… as they did. Fraser was there as if deputised, but it must be he who was leading the parade. Mclntyre's pension could go up in pieces he, Strickland, held the grenade — because of the things they'd gotten away with in Latin America in the eighties. Mclntyre had to let Fraser run the show.

  Strickland swallowed carefully. His mouth and throat were dry as he watched the screens. The low-light TV cameras showed him the small clearing, the grey washed trees, the flicker of a big owl between branches, the movements one of them made as he patrolled. But not Gant not yet. The ground-level radar he had installed swept its arm across the screen. Most evenings, it revealed the presence of bears, the occasional dog or cat, the quicker blips of night birds

  He realised the very sophistication and thoroughness of the electronic surveillance would be his downfall. There was no way Gant could penetrate it undetected.

  They knew that. The two armed men outside were surplus. Gant would appear on the TV monitors, the radar, and wouldn't be able to get to him. Strickland knew Gant was his only chance. Maybe he didn't want him dead, at least not right away.

  Perhaps he wanted proof, a confession. A gap of time in which Strickland might turn the tables, kill Gant. Not like Fraser and Mclntyre. He was absolutely certain of their desire to eliminate him.

  The bear lumbered away on the TV, remaining a shadow on the radar. The clearing was empty, the trees, massing like an army around the lodge, were a grey fence. Mclntyre scratched at his stubble. Fraser he listened intently, to be certain had begun checking his pistol. In anticipation.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Night Action Now, he was certain. The night-vision glasses wearied his eyes, the single, camera like lens heavy in his grip. But he was certain. Low-light TV cameras fenced the clearing around Strickland's lodge, moving slowly but ceaselessly, able to pick up anything that might come out of the surrounding forest.

  He put down the binoculars and was shocked by the darkness. He could only make out a thin, last glow on the western horizon, with the closest of the mountains, South Sister, a ghostly snow-glow to the north.

  The electronic surveillance was as he had anticipated. Strick-land protected himself as naturally as an animal; his claws and teeth were TV cameras and radar.

  He returned the binoculars to his eyes. Maybe he didn't always use it, but it was operational now… Strickland-there. Framed like a painting in the window of the room on that side of the lodge, helpfully lit.

  Watching his screens, waiting. Gant had seen no one with him.

  Just one shadow moving in another darkened room, perhaps the kitchen.

  He could not know how many there were other than the two outside and Mclntyre, who just had to be there.

  Gant was seated with his back against the hole of a withered, storm struck pine, on an outcrop of rock only a few hundred yards from the lodge. He could look down like a raptor into the clearing, into the single lit room. The two patrolling men in the trees went about their business without imagination or variation.

  A little after four, he had left the jeep two miles away around the shore of Bonner Lake, then skirted the tiny settlement of Squaw Camp.

  Those were the cabins and lodges that had formed the background of the snapshot that had betrayed Strickland's locati
on. He had climbed up to Strickland's lodge in its small clearing by means of a hiking trail that wound up the side of the mountain. Knowing all the time that Mclntyre would be ahead of him.

  In the late afternoon, he'd caught the reflected light off what was, to all appearances, nothing more than a satellite TV dish. It hadn't been moving when he first saw it, then, just before dusk, it began swivelling on the low roof, back and forth. It was a radar dish used for military surveillance. Its one blind spot was the lodge's chimney

  … which problem the low-light TV system cancelled. The four cameras covered every foot of open ground. They could just sit and wait for him to step out into the clearing.

  He ate a bar of chocolate and listened to the rush of an owl's wings somewhere near, even heard the intensified rustling of its landing in undergrowth and its almost immediate takeoff. Heard beyond that the grumble of a bear, like the noise of a car that wouldn't start. Farther off, the dim noise of music from the little encampment of wooden buildings down by the shore. The lake seemed to hold the last light as if it was irradiated by a nuclear spillage.

  Carefully, he checked the equipment he had removed from the rucksack.

  Especially the stubby tube of the fifty-round helical feed magazine that belonged with the Smith & Wesson Calico 9mm pistol. Alan Vance had a collection of guns like so many Americans who had never seen anything that wasn't feathered or furred blown apart. It came in useful now, though… the Ruger rifle would even take the short-range thermal sight, big as a video camera that he had found. Barbara had told him where to look. It was a patented design of Vance's early years in electronics.

  He silently slid it home on the mount and raised its surprising lightness to his eye, rifle butt against his shoulder. The eyepiece showed him the night trees on a miniature screen. Two minutes later, it showed him one of the patrolling FBI agents, walking cautiously, just inside the trees. Clear shot Gant put down the Ruger Mini-14 carefully. The air was still soft, the evening breeze hardly evident.

  He smelt pine resin and the fainter scent of something frying. Soon, he would have to move again, try to discover how many of them there were. He pushed aside the thought that he was going up against the FBI. The body-count would be in Federal agents… Even if he could prove what Strickland had done to Vance Aircraft, and on whose behalf, there would still be charges that he had assaulted, wounded, even killed, FBI special agents.

  The last of the light had gone and big stars had begun to appear in the moonless sky. It wouldn't be up until around midnight. South Sister was just an afterimage on the retinae; the other, more northerly volcanic peaks had vanished. The lit window in the clearing shone out more warmly. There were dotted lights down by the lake, the chug of a small motor as a boat slipped across Bonner Lake, its lights as much like specks as the stars.

  He raised the binoculars to his eyes. There were two sedans and a four-wheel drive vehicle parked close to the lodge. That could mean as many as ten people or more in total, plus Strickland. It hadn't seemed that many, from whatever vantage he had observed the lodge during the last hours of daylight. Two men outside, Strickland posed at the one window, the blinds down or the lights not on in other rooms. Could there be as many as another eight he hadn't seen? The stars gleamed like silver. He studied the lodge, after glancing at his watch dial. A little after seven. He had to wait, maybe for most of the night, just wait… And count.

  The room he had decided was the kitchen registered a tiny spillage of light a little after eight. To the infrared binoculars, there was a shadowy shape in the room, a human heat source… By nine-thirty, he was certain there were two more men in an upstairs room, its window jutting like a wedge from the steep slope of the roof.

  Presumably, they were sleeping. In the trees, the two on patrol continued their routine. An occasional engine fired from the lakeside settlement, even laughter, raucous and abrupt, once. Then it was cut off as if a door had closed on it. The binoculars showed smoke in the starlit sky from a couple of tourist cabins. Faint noises from a small boat that had put out from the jetty on which Strickland had been photographed years before.

  Ten-fifteen… There were six of them beside Strickland. Just before ten, an anonymous hand had passed him sandwiches and beer, the body to which it belonged kept carefully from view. Mclntyre would be in the room with him… just had to be.

  Strickland had become increasingly restless as the evening had progressed. The lit window, the proximity of whoever was in the room with him, eroded him, made him begin yawning. His head had turned occasionally, at other times he appeared to be responding to someone, even challenging the man Gant couldn't see but who had to be Mclntyre.

  The two men upstairs were still resting heat sources. There was, from time to time, another figure in the dark of the kitchen.

  His surveillance gave him power, control rather than weariness. They were the ones really waiting, growing uncertain and edgy with heightened nerves. He glanced at his watch. Ten-twenty. They would believe he was outside. They had waited long enough to begin to imagine he must have some strategy, that he was waiting out of confidence in the darkness of the trees… They could wait some more.

  He had all night. He was ready. Time was on his side, not theirs Eleven-thirty. The three minutes since Mclntyre had last looked at the big dial of his watch had dragged inordinately. The enforced silence of the lodge, the brightness of the lights in the room, the flicker of the monochrome TV screens, the wash of the arm of the radar screen unnerved. Fraser and Strickland had begun to irritate, like a rash on his arms and chest, then slowly, deeply anger him, as if they were three prisoners unwillingly flung together and confined, he the only innocent man.

  The thought of Gant, who must be out there in the darkness, able to see Strickland, spotlit as he was, was a goad, prodding him out of confidence with sapping electric jolts to his calm and assurance.

  Mclntyre chewed at the last uneaten sandwich on the plate that had been placed between himself and Fraser. The bottles of beer were empty.

  Their chairs were squeezed into the angle of one of the room's corners, out of sight line from both windows. It was, this late in the evening, as if he was tied into his, unable to break out of biting restraints.

  Eleven-thirty-one.

  He heard soft footsteps from the bedroom above the den and shuffled restlessly in his chair. A few moments later, Chris opened the door.

  The young man hovered, bleary-eyed, in the doorway.

  "We Sam and me'll relieve the others now… sir." The respectful politeness was added like a tag from a dead language, strange-sounding.

  Chris' tired blue eyes seemed troubled, uncertain. Scared of the dark, Mclntyre thought dismissively, and of who's out there.

  "OK, keep alert, Chris. Keep moving, keep quiet, keep alive!" Fraser snorted derisively. Chris' cheeks reddened.

  The young man glanced once at Strickland, as em pathetically as at a fellow prisoner then nodded.

  "Sir."

  Chris closed the door behind him on Fraser's brief laughter, the sound of nails scraping down a blackboard. He shivered, then reluctantly opened the lodge's main door and stepped furtively on to the verandah.

  The stoop seemed betrayingly silvered with the first moonlight. Sam's breathing was laboured behind him. Chris fitted the earphone and checked his mike's throat strap to greater comfort. He adjusted the harness of the transceiver that hugged his left side like a poultice.

  Then he murmured:

  "OK, you guys, come on in. We'll cover you from the verandah—" Thank sweet Jesus," he heard in response.

  The night was chilly or was it just the change of temperature from the warm tension of the lodge? Chris couldn't be sure, but his skin shivered at the touch of the cold. Sam remained to his left, an infrared monocular pocket scope clenched in his hand. It was as if he were giving some freedom-fighter's salute. He scanned the clearing in front of the lodge methodically, nervously. Chris knew he should be doing the same. Gant — everyone said was out th
ere for certain, just waiting to get to Strickland. And he could only get to him through a half-dozen FBI agents.

  So he was desperate. He wouldn't be stopped from even taking on the Federal authorities… The first of the two-man patrol emerged from the trees with exaggerated, comic caution, then began hurrying across the open ground, hunched as if against taunts rather than a bullet. But why was all this happening? It had no real shape. What was Strickland to Gant?

  The second man came out of the trees. A night bird shocked him into rigidity, then he hurried for the lodge. The two men passed them with laboured breathing, their fear palpable. The door closed behind them with a dull, carrying noise and Chris whirled on his heel to remonstrate'Well?" Sam asked.

  "OK here goes nothing…"

  He walked off the stoop into the moonlight, senses alert, nerves stretched. They crossed the clearing with moonlight between them. On the hole of a tree, a low light camera swivelled like the nose of a scenting dog. Chris felt observed rather than reassured. His feet hurried him into the trees. Sam disappeared fifty yards to his left.

  Moonlight filtered weakly, like some powder dusting his shoulders and hands. He gripped the Springfield carbine more tightly, pressing it across his stomach as he began his patrol.

  Gant… The murmurings and asides of conversation between Mclntyre and the Englishman, Fraser, flitted through his thoughts, as alarming as the rustle of investigating wings above his head. Fraser was relying on Mclntyre using him?

  There was a mutual, fierce determination to kill Gant rather than arrest him… and Strickland, too, was destined to be shown the end of the pier and invited to dive off… Gant?

  He shook his head, making the infrared pocket scope image of the ghostly trees joggle like something in a child's toy. He almost expected snow. The trees massed again, white-grey, the darkness between them empty. He began circling the perimeter of the clearing, a hundred yards into the trees. A brief gap showed him the flanks of South Sister, gleaming with moonlit ice and snow. A glacier like an old man's beard. From a rise, another gap revealed the sheen of Bonner Lake below. Gant… was sitting out here somewhere, maybe even aware of him right now.