The Keeper

by George C. Chesbro

  She pressed a button on the face of the unit, and a white dot began to flash near the top of the grid. Someone was on the beach, and the position of the flashing light told her the intruder had not wandered onto the property on foot, but had approached from the river.

  The dot began to move down the screen, indicating that the intruder was approaching the house.

  Jade jumped out of bed and hurriedly pulled on jeans, a sweatshirt, and sneakers. Then she pushed aside a dresser to expose a hidden compartment beneath the floor. From the cache of arms there she took an Uzi, which she slung over her shoulder, a 9-millimeter Ruger pistol with a 15-shot magazine, and her black-handled SEAL knife with its deadly serrated edges and notch cut into the back of the blade. She slipped the knife in its scabbard into the back pocket of her jeans, and then ran through the kitchen, where she snatched a powerful flashlight from the top of the refrigerator, and slipped quietly out the side door.

  Keeping low, she quickly and silently moved around the side of the house toward the rear of her property. When she reached the end of the house she stopped, leaned back against the weathered clapboard and peered around the corner out over the back lawn to the beach, thirty yards away. She saw nothing in the chiaroscuro patterns of moonlight and shadow carved by the towering weeping willow in the center of the lawn.

  Jade shrugged the Uzi onto her back, then, gripping the Ruger in her right hand and the flashlight in her left, she got down on her belly and crawled forward, keeping inside the narrow band of moonshadow cast by the row of bushes extending along the southern perimeter of her property to the beach. Although the spring night was cool, she began to sweat. Moving very deliberately, she used the back of her hand to first wipe sweat away from one eye, and then the other, but never looking away from the expanse of lawn before her that could very soon become a killing ground. Then she began crawling forward again. When she had gone ten yards she stopped, set the flashlight aside and held the grip of the Ruger with both hands as she braced herself on her elbows and scanned the ribbon of darkness beside the row of bushes that ran along the opposite perimeter.

  Finally her patience and stealth were rewarded with the sound of a twig snapping across the lawn in the mat of leaves and branches she used for mulch. She aimed her Ruger in the general direction of the sound, reached out with her left hand to the flashlight and turned it on.

  She was already starting to squeeze the trigger of her Ruger when the crouched figure of Henry Bolo, caught and frozen like a startled deer in the bright cone of light, started, then slowly straightened up and turned in her direction.

  The six-feet, four-inch ex-sergeant was dressed for night patrol in combat fatigues. A black woolen cap was pulled down low over his forehead, and his face and hands were covered with lampblack. His blue eyes glowed like a cat’s in the bright light, glittering with surprise, rage, and madness. Jade would have fired a bullet into his brain without hesitation if not for the fact that in his right hand he held a grenade launcher that he was aiming directly at the back of the house.

  Jade knew that at this distance it would be nearly impossible for the man, even as he died, to miss his target with the incendiary grenade loaded in the weapon, and she could not risk having his trigger finger twitch spasmodically after she shot him. She slowly eased the pressure on the Ruger’s trigger, but kept the weapon sighted on the man’s head. Now would begin a war of nerves she could not afford to lose, and she knew that her tone of voice and projected attitude would be all-important. She licked her lips and swallowed, but resisted the impulse to clear her throat.

  “You’re unbelievable, Sergeant,” Jade said, her tone low and steady. “I would have thought that a man who’d had his balls shot off because of stupidity wouldn’t try something even more stupid that could get his brains blown out. Obviously, you’re not the average idiot; you’re an all-star. I’m sighted right between your eyes. Drop the grenade launcher, then lie down on your belly on the ground, legs spread out and hands behind your head. You know the drill.”

  “You’ll kill me the moment I put this down,” Henry Bolo replied in a guttural voice that was as steady and cold as Jade’s.

  “I’d be sorely tempted, but I’ll try to resist the impulse if you don’t give me a hard time. I’ll kill you for sure if you don’t put it down. If you were going to use that thing, you should have fired it from the beach and then run away like the sneaking coward you are. Now it’s too late. Give it up.”

  Bolo’s lips curled back from his teeth in a sneer. “I wanted to make sure you were home, bitch. Before I burned down your house, I wanted to watch your face while I fucked you to death.”

  “Fucked me to death? What were you going to use? Your nose?”

  “My knife,” the man said, slowly and carefully enunciating each word. “First the handle to ream you out, and then I was going to slice you up the middle like a melon.”

  Jade knew that the first few moments of a confrontation like this were critical, and they had passed without Bolo complying with her order. Now the situation would become increasingly tense and dangerous, and yet she still dared not fire. She could think of nothing else to do but keep talking.

  The strain of resting on her elbows and keeping the gun trained on the relatively small target of her enemy’s head was starting to make the muscles in her arms and shoulders cramp, and she lowered her aim to the broader target of his chest. She said, “This is what you get for trying to mix business with pleasure, Sergeant. Time’s up. Drop the weapon right now, or say good night.”

  Bolo did not move; the big man remained frozen in a slight crouch, his grenade launcher aimed at the back of the house. “You’re not going to shoot me, bitch. I know you’ve got two kids sleeping inside—a good-looking daughter, and a son with no brains. Even if you make your head shot, this thing will go off, and at this range I can’t miss. It’ll look like the Fourth of July in there, and you can listen to the two of them screaming while they burn to death. Is that what you want, bitch? If you don’t want your kids barbecued, you put down your weapon. Leave the flashlight on the ground and move out where I can see you.”

  “You must think you’re talking to Mother Goose. You seem to have a death wish, Sergeant, and if you don’t put that weapon down I’m going to grant it. Do you really want to end up worm meat for the sake of killing two kids you’ve never met? Somehow I doubt it. Consider the fact that I’ll be left alive to piss on your grave.”

  “I don’t believe you’d let your kids die. I’m going to count to three. If you’re not standing out in the light with your hands empty by then, your son and daughter are literally toast.”

  “Before you show off your math skills, Sergeant, you’d better consider my situation. I have a Ruger nine-millimeter aimed right between your eyes. The gun’s powerful and accurate, and I’m a crack sharpshooter. I won’t miss. I’m in a prone firing position. The manual doesn’t recommend that you remain in this position for more than a minute, or you risk suffering muscle spasms that could throw off your aim. I’m already well over the limit, so I’m going to have to go for it right now unless you drop the grenade launcher. I just don’t want you to be surprised when I blow your head off. Do it, Sergeant!”

  The huge, barrel-chested man’s response was to tentatively take a step backward, all the while keeping the grenade launcher trained on the back of Jade’s house. When Jade did not fire, he took another step, and then another. “I’m out of here, bitch,” he said evenly. “Remember that your kids fry if you pull that trigger.”

  Jade realigned the flashlight on the ground so that its powerful beam illuminated the retreating man and the lawn down to the beach. Without taking her eyes off Henry Bolo, she rose to her knees and readjusted the Uzi slung over her shoulder. Then, still using both hands to aim the Ruger at Bolo’s chest, she rose to her feet, circled around behind the flashlight and slowly advanced on the retreating man, matching him step for step.

  As she moved into the field of light, she knew that Henry
Bolo would now be able to see her, or at least her outline, even though the light was in his eyes. She positioned herself between the muzzle of the grenade launcher and the house, even though she knew this was a futile gesture; a phosphorous grenade would simply take her head off before it hit the house and exploded inside. Bolo kept backing up, and Jade kept advancing.

  She was aware that her exposure shifted the advantage to Bolo. It would be easier now for him to fire directly at her and then try to jump aside, with the chances slightly improved that the grenade would go through her before he was hit by her return fire, but she had to take the chance and hope that Bolo wouldn’t risk being killed as long as she let him continue to back away.

  She knew she had to take risk and be patient, just as she knew that Henry Bolo had to die this night while she had the opportunity to kill him, for she and her children might well die before she got another one.

  She had hoped that Bolo might step in a hole or trip over an uneven patch of ground, but he didn’t. Nor did he forget that there was a lip of earth where the lawn met the beach, and he successfully navigated his way down onto the sand while keeping the grenade launcher aimed at Jade’s chest. He shuffled backward in the sand, turning his body slightly sideways so as to present a smaller target as he headed toward a steel, motor-outfitted Grumman rowboat that had been pulled up on the beach.

  Jade stopped at the lip of the lawn, bent her knees slightly and braced, waiting for the tiny moment of time, the exact instant, when Bolo’s aim might waver, or he might look away, and she could fire a bullet into his heart. She breathed deeply and regularly, concentrating on the large chest that was her target.

  Bolo reached the boat, and then used his left hand and knee to push it into the water. Still keeping his weapon trained on Jade, he reached back with his left hand and pulled the starter cord on the motor, which began to purr. A swell rolled in and rocked the boat slightly. Bolo’s right hand, in which he held the grenade launcher, dipped slightly in reaction to the movement of the boat.

  Jade fired as Bolo fell backward into the boat over the starboard gunwale. A bullet hit him in the right thigh, turning him in the air, but both he and the grenade launcher landed in the bottom of the boat. Jade leaped onto the beach and sprinted across the sand, firing as she ran. Bullets ricocheted off the hull of the rowboat, but did not penetrate the steel. She saw his hand come up to turn the throttle, and she began firing at the engine housing as the boat turned and headed out into the river, gathering speed.

  She heard the chunk of the grenade launcher being fired even over the chatter of her own gunfire, and she cried out as a phosphorous tracer shot up from the water and painted a bright line of reddish-white light across the night sky. Bolo had fired from where he lay in the bottom of the boat, and Jade judged from the trajectory of the grenade that it would pass over her house—but it would certainly land on someone else’s home or on one of several apartment houses in the neighborhood behind her house, burning alive anyone who was inside.

  The Ruger’s 15-shot magazine was empty. Jade dropped the pistol to the sand, unslung the Uzi with its full clip from her shoulder, and then quickly lay down on her back. She brought the metal stock of the automatic weapon to her shoulder and pointed the weapon at the sky, tracking the phosphorous arc of the incendiary grenade, aiming just ahead of it. She knew that her timing and aim must be perfect, and then she was going to have to be very lucky. She judged that the deadly missile would be near the limit of the Uzi’s range when it reached its apogee, and the pattern of fire would be widespread; but that was the moment she must wait for, the time when the projectile would slow and then begin to plummet back to earth. When that instant came, she would empty her gun and hope that at least one bullet reached its target.

  The grenade reached its apogee and slowed, and then the phosphorous tracer winked out. Jade squeezed the Uzi’s trigger and held it as the weapon clattered and bucked against her shoulder, spitting bullets from its muzzle at the rate of hundreds of rounds per minute. Sweat ran off her face as she struggled to hold the wildly bucking gun in place as she swept the barrel back and forth, firing into the night just ahead of where she judged the projectile would be falling.

  The grenade exploded at almost the same instant as the gun emptied, lighting up the sky with a burst of red and white light, the sound of the blast mingling with the wail of approaching police sirens.

  Chapter Nine

  i

  She felt like some kind of exotic animal on display in a zoo as she stood on the beach in the moonlight, calmly and truthfully answering those questions Jeffrey Bond asked that she could answer, which weren’t many, and improvising lies for the rest. With the Ruger, for which she had a license, and the Uzi, for which she did not, resting in the sand at her feet, inventing a story wasn’t easy, and there was no doubt in her mind that the police chief knew she was lying, although she did it skillfully, as she had been so well trained to do.

  Standing on the beach at the borders of her property on either side of her, neighbors stared, occasionally pointing to the weapons in the sand and whispering to each other behind their hands. Up on the lip of the lawn, Roy stood between Max Jr. and Fatima, who were also gaping at her as if she were some mysterious stranger they had never met. In a way, Jade thought, that was the case.

  In the brief space of half an hour, perhaps less, secrets she had kept from her children all their lives had been at least partially revealed—her skill with weapons, the fact that she had deadly enemies, and a hint of the true nature of her Navy career. She was especially concerned with how Max Jr. would react to the discovery that his mother kept automatic weapons hidden in their home, was capable of shooting an incendiary grenade out of the night sky, and that the madman who had fired the grenade had emerged from her secret past and come to kill them all. She knew she was going to have a lot of explaining, reassuring and comforting to do.

  And now new, harsh steps had to be taken. The truce, if there had ever been one, had been broken.

  She could share virtually none of this information with Jeffrey Bond. She could not even tell him the name of her attacker, for to do so would only lead to questions of how she knew him and why he had come after her, and to answer those questions could open a trap door that Hubert Roberts would push her through. And so she stuck to her simple story of having no idea why anyone would want to harm her—not the assassins who had escaped from the Cairn jail in a helicopter, and not the killer who had come for her in the night.

  The facial expression and tone of voice of the Cairn Chief of Police revealed both anger and hurt, and he left no doubt that he believed Jade wasn’t telling the truth. Jade knew she was losing a friend, but she saw no alternative to her evasions. Jeffrey Bond would have to act in an official capacity on any information she gave him, and that would not only make her vulnerable to sanctions from the Navy under the terms of her agreement, but also limit her other options she knew she must now exercise in order to protect herself and her children.

  Under the circumstances she did not think the police chief would press charges for her illegal possession of an automatic weapon, but if he did she would worry about that when the time came. Her greater concern at the moment was the possibility that he would confiscate both guns, leaving her with only the Colt revolver she kept in another secret compartment in the house. She had always known that one day old enemies might come for her, and she had prepared for that possibility. Without the Ruger and Uzi she would be down to one single-shot weapon at a time when she needed firepower the most.

  At the moment what she wanted most was to be left alone, to be able to sit in a hot tub and wait for the screaming in her mind to subside, to let the warrior inside her drift back to sleep so that she could return and talk to her children as their mother who had to offer explanations.

  But she couldn’t do that yet, and so she ignored the agonized cries of Jade the mother and allowed Jade the warrior, the crack Naval Intelligence operative who had survived interrog
ation under torture and numerous other close brushes with death, to answer the policeman’s questions. Jade the warrior was cool and calm under pressure, unflappable in the face of danger, and could lie easily and convincingly. And so she continued to lie easily—although in this case not convincingly—until Jeffrey Bond, whose friendship and trust she hoped she could one day win back, snatched up the Uzi from the sand and angrily walked away, leaving the Ruger behind.

  Jade the warrior stuck the pistol into the waistband of her jeans, and then thrust her hands into her back pockets and watched with casual interest as Roy said something to Fatima and Max Jr. The two teenagers nodded, glanced in her direction with bewildered expressions on their faces, and then turned and headed back toward the house. Feeling distinctly bifurcated and apart from herself, Jade remained where she was as Roy spoke quietly but firmly to a group of neighbors who were continuing to stare at her. Finally they walked away. When they were alone on the beach, Roy came over to her.

  “How are you doing, Wonder Woman?” Roy asked quietly as he studied Jade’s face in the moonlight.

  Jade shrugged, suppressing the shrill laughter she felt bubbling in her chest. “Hell, I feel terrific. Why shouldn’t I? There are no bullet holes in me, my kids are safe, and the house is still standing. I’m just fine.”

  Roy continued to look hard into her eyes. Finally he said quietly, “No, you’re not.”

  “Don’t be silly. I just told you I was.”

  “It’s over, Jade. You’ve done it. Your children are safe, and you’re safe. You can come back now.”

  “Go to hell.”