He wasn’t going to make that mistake. He had discipline. Philip and Roddie always badmouthed the blacks and Jews and Indians and Mexicans, but as far as Jack could see, a lot of those folks were victims even more than your average workingman. He was in charge, and he was going to nail only the ones who deserved it, at the right time, at the right place. The feds wouldn’t know what hit them. They’d just realize that suddenly they were the endangered species, and they’d better start listening to the real people for a change.
Four members seemed a little pathetic for a branch, but hey, it wasn’t like he lived in a big city and could muster up dozens of people. Damn Roddie, or Rocky, or whatever his cousin Rodney called himself these days. The kid came to the meetings, but always had some excuse to get out of the exercises. It was always just him and Allie and Philip out here. And now his group was even more of a twig than a branch: today there were only two.
He ran past the burn line into the green area, aiming for the next clump of trees. He silently lowered himself to the ground. Positioning himself on his elbows under the cover of low-hanging pine bows, he aimed the paintball gun in King’s direction. The sights were lined up squarely in the middle of his friend’s back and he was about to squeeze the trigger when he noticed King had thrust the barrel of his paintball pistol through the web belt at his waist. Clasped in King’s left hand was a nine-millimeter semiautomatic. It was aimed at a woman making her way through the woods toward them.
* * *
THE bait was gone, but the trap hadn’t been sprung. How the hell had the damn bear done that? Why hadn’t the stupid beast climbed into the cage like he was supposed to? Garrett Ford knelt and inspected the side of the cage. He reached through the bars, touched the sticky spot where he had hung the cake of honey-soaked pemmican. Three long scratches were etched into the plywood backboard. Just like that, that’s how the damn bear had done it, just reached in and snagged the bait. As Ford pulled out his arm, he noticed a rust-red stain on his sleeve. He rubbed it. Blood. There were spots on the floor of the cage, too. The varmint had probably torn its paw on the bait hook. The drops were drying around the edges, still slightly damp in the middle. Less than an hour old. He’d only missed that bear by minutes.
Mike Martinson sat on the tailgate of his truck, a disappointed scowl on his face. “No bear?”
“Obviously,” growled Ford. Teenagers.
“Should I break it down and put it back in the truck, or are we going to leave it here?”
The brush behind him rustled. Maybe the bear was still close by? There was a chance that this trip wouldn’t be wasted, after all. He darted to the truck, lifted the rifle from the rack behind the seat. “Stay here,” he told the boy in a low voice.
Using the barrel of the rifle to push aside a cedar branch, Ford ducked into the dappled shadows of the forest. He paused a moment, waiting for his eyes to adjust. There, a faint crackle. He crept toward the noise, holding his breath. He might not be so fast anymore, but his hearing was good and he was still an expert tracker.
He followed the sound of scurrying feet through the shadowy woods, pausing behind a tree when the sound stopped. For a moment, all he heard was the drumming of a woodpecker on a hollow tree. Then there was a snorting sound. He peered through the brush. About a hundred yards away, a man, dressed in camouflage pants and T-shirt, leaned against a thick fir. His left hand clutched a sleek black pistol. Looked like a semiautomatic of some kind.
Muscles clenched between Ford’s shoulder blades. The guy had damn well better not be aiming at his bear. Ford quickly sidestepped around the barrier of the tree. Farther through the woods, there was a flicker of movement. He recognized the gray-green of a park ranger’s uniform, caught a glimpse of a long silver-blond braid.
Summer Westin. Just the sort to be snooping around—the type that never could mind her own business. Her jaw was clenched, her expression anxious, oblivious to the fact that the thug was close by and had a pistol leveled at her chest. Camouflage Man tensed and sighted down the barrel of the nine millimeter. Damnation! Ford released the safety and raised his rifle.
THE hair on the back of Sam’s neck prickled under her uniform collar. Something or someone was ahead of her in the woods. Stepping into the shade of a tree, she searched the forest for movement, for the bulky shape of a black bear, for two-legged vermin bearing rifles or paintball pistols. A loud drumming reverberated somewhere above her. Not now, you stupid woodpecker! She strained to hear the whisper of footsteps beyond the staccato beats.
A rifle shot cracked ahead of her. She ducked, clung to the Douglas fir. Another bang, this one higher pitched, followed a fraction of a second later. The bullet smashed into the tree above her, showering her with bark and fir needles. A grain of bark caught under her right eyelid. Holy shit! Someone was shooting at her.
“Ranger!” she shouted. “Stop shooting! I’m a park ranger!” She rubbed frantically at her burning eye.
Another shot cracked through the woods. She dropped to her knees behind the tree trunk. Muffled footsteps thudded dully on the needle-carpeted forest floor. Sounded like at least two people. The racket moved away from her position. She wasn’t about to give chase. They knew exactly where she was, and she hadn’t even glimpsed them. She couldn’t even see out of one eye. She straightened and brushed her sleeve across her face, wiping more grit onto her cheeks, but dislodging the splinter from her eye.
Tears coursed down her face as she blinked rapidly to clear her vision. About eighteen inches above where her cheek hugged the trunk, a half-inch scar had been plowed through the bark. Her chest tightened. This was not a paintball game.
The intruders were probably retreating to the black pickup, moving down the trail on the other side of the lake. She started to jog back the way she’d come. With luck, she might make it back to the parking lot before they did. With more luck, Norm Tyburn might show up at the same time.
Her heavy hiking boots felt like concrete bricks on her feet. Tears streamed from her right eye, blurring the scenery on that side. She detached the radio from her belt as she jogged, clicked the Talk button, and panted, “Three-one-one, this is three-two-five, Westin here. Shots fired at Marmot Lake. Fired at me. Over.”
The toe of her boot whacked against a tree root. She nearly fell, caught herself at the last second. The radio crackled, “Three-two-five, three-one-one. Tyburn’s on his way.” Sam slowed, shoved the radio back onto her belt, forced herself back to a jog. She wanted to at least get a glimpse of the intruders, even though it might be a blurry glimpse. She rubbed at her burning eye, trying to stem the torrent of tears.
The big boulder was just ahead, marking a half mile from the parking lot. She rounded the rock and slammed headlong into a dark mass blocking the trail. A sound halfway between a grunt and a bawl erupted loudly in her ear. Her kneecap smacked down onto a rock, sending a shock wave of pain up her leg, and she crashed full-length to the ground.
She pushed her head up just in time to see the backside of a bear. The bear turned his head over his shoulder just enough to glimpse her with a fear-rounded eye. He raced down the trail, his rust-tinged rump bouncing as he vanished into the trees. She made out a flash of white on the back of his ear.
“Raider!” she coughed, spitting dust.
Blood soaked through her uniform trousers where her knee had struck the ground. Damn, it hurt. She stumbled on down the trail. In spite of the little stabs of pain that jolted with each step, she smiled. Raider was still alive and well. He’d even put on a few pounds if the solidity of their collision was any indication.
When she limped into the parking area, the black pickup was gone. She pulled her water bottle out of the truck and sat on the back bumper, trying to catch her breath between swallows. Maybe the close call had scared the hunters enough that they wouldn’t try poaching again. Yeah, right.
But Raider was okay, at least for now. She had almost caught her breath when Norm Tyburn finally drove in.
“YOU fuckin’ sho
t at me!” Philip King growled.
“Stop whining. It was only paintball. I’ve shot you plenty of times.” After the ranger truck zoomed past, Winner pulled out of his hiding place onto the main road.
“That was no paintball pellet, not the first one. Don’t be shittin’ me—you hit the tree right beside my head.”
“I only took one shot, and it was a paintball pellet,” Jack reiterated. “Why the hell were you aiming at Westin, anyway?”
King grinned. “Shit, why not? She was right there. Why not do it now?” He raised his hand, finger and thumb positioned like a revolver aimed at the windshield. “Bang!” He blew on his index finger as if it were the smoking barrel of a gun. “It would have been so easy.”
Winner had never realized how ugly the guy’s smile was before. A spark of anxiety flared in his gut. He was losing control. First Allie, now King. And Roddie was more interested in collecting a harem of girls than in focusing on the mission. Without control, it would just be chaotic violence without purpose. Like those stupid al-Qaeda guys. And whatever happened would all come back on him. He was supposed to be the leader of this branch.
He swallowed and slowly enunciated each word for King’s benefit. “We’re not going to kill her now. We are going to save her for the big show, remember?”
The Order was counting on him. Counting on him to be a winner, just like his name. He had promised that he could pull it off. And they promised to pay him when he did. He needed that money. He deserved that money.
The ugly grin was still plastered across King’s face. He held his hand pistol out again, made it recoil several times at a line of trees that guarded the road edge. “We’ll kill every one of the goddamned tree huggers. They’re gonna be the endangered species from now on.”
“Get a grip on yourself, man,” Winner urged in a low voice. “Have a little discipline. One target on the assigned date.”
“That’s just the beginning.” King regarded him with shining eyes. “It’s a holy war,” he said. “Bombs, bullets, or knives, it doesn’t matter how. But we’ll have to kill them all.”
Winner turned his gaze back to the road. Christ, he thought, grimly gripping the steering wheel, only a few weeks to go and there’s a psycho on my team. A goddamn mad dog.
13
SAM was grateful that Arnie Cole’s office was dark and empty. As she limped past the admin building’s tiny break room, she spied Mack Lindstrom folded into a chair. He sat hunched over, his hands pressed over his face. Kneeling in front of him, one hand resting lightly on his thigh, was Jodi Ruderman.
At the sound of Sam’s footsteps on the tile floor, they looked up. Their eyes were shiny with tears.
Jodi rose to her feet, and then put one hand on Mack’s shoulder. “It’s Lisa Glass,” she told Sam. “She’s dead.”
The words thudded into Sam’s brain. Dead? “But,” she protested, “yesterday she was awake. She had a headache, but—”
“Yesterday afternoon they discovered she was unconscious, bleeding into her brain.” Mack’s tone was strained. “LifeFlight took her to Harborview in Seattle around six last night. They did emergency surgery, but she didn’t make it. She died about three hours ago.”
Sam sank into a chair across from her colleagues. “Omigod.” She stared at the scuffed brown vinyl floor tiles, but saw only Lisa’s hospital room, the disfigured young woman on the bed, her hands pressed to her scalp. My head hurts so much.
She’d assumed that Lisa’s headache was a convenient excuse to escape her questions. And as always, Sam had been anxious to escape from those sterile corridors, from the beep and hiss of machines performing functions that the attached humans couldn’t, from all those sheet-cloaked bodies glimpsed through half-closed doors.
Her mother had succumbed to ALS nearly three decades ago, and still her death haunted Sam. And now Lisa. If she’d only mentioned Lisa’s pain to the nurse…Such a little thing to do, just a few seconds of her time on her way out of the hospital. If she had done that, would Lisa still be alive?
“What happened to you?”
She raised her head. “Huh?”
Jodi’s outstretched finger pointed first at Sam’s right leg, where her trousers were still damp with blood, and then rose to a level with her breasts. Looking down, Sam saw that her entire uniform was blotched with dark stains. She raised a hand to her hair. Slivers of bark and pine needles dusted the crown of her head. Her breath caught in her chest as she felt again the thwock of the bullet plowing into the tree trunk overhead, saw again the shadowy figures running through the forest. Had they intended for her to join Lisa in the morgue?
Peter Hoyle strode into the room, several folders tucked under his right arm. Sam had never seen Hoyle anywhere but inside his office in the main headquarters building forty miles away, and Mack and Jodi seemed surprised to see him, too. His gaze raked down Sam’s uniform. “You okay?”
Sam straightened in her chair. “I’m fine.”
Her boss squinted. “Tyburn radioed that your intruders had escaped.”
“I got their license number,” Sam said. “They were trespassing and firing weapons.”
“So I heard.” Hoyle frowned. “Didn’t I tell you to clear out of that sector and leave the incident to law enforcement?”
Sam made herself maintain eye contact. “Was that what you said? I couldn’t make it out. Reception’s really bad in that area.”
Hoyle’s steely glance told Sam he wasn’t buying her story. “I want an incident report. Ask Kowalski for the form.” He waited until Sam acknowledged his command with a nod. He cleared his throat, then said, “Guess you all heard about Lisa.”
“Yeah,” Mack said morosely.
Hoyle sighed heavily. “Westin, I haven’t seen that other report I asked you for.”
Sam gulped, just now remembering that she was supposed to write down everything she’d learned from and about Lisa. “I’ll get on that ASAP.”
“See that you do. Now we’ve got a possible murder on our hands.” Hoyle turned and his footsteps faded back down the hall toward the district ranger’s office.
Murder. Sam suddenly felt fuzzy with weariness. Her knee burned where blood had melded the khaki fabric to broken skin. Her eye still felt scratchy. After a few moments, Mack and Jodi rose and headed for their lockers. She pushed herself out of the chair and followed them.
The age-spotted mirror in the locker room revealed just how bad she looked. Her face was blotchy and her right eye was bloodred and watery. She’d forgotten about the ugly black stitches in her lip; curiously they didn’t hurt at all.
Her right pant leg was ripped across the knee and dark with blood, now dried to a rusty brown color that was nearly indistinguishable from the surrounding dirt blotches. Even if she could patch the knee, she’d never get the stains out.
Maybe she’d be able to salvage the shirt. The khaki fabric wasn’t torn, although it was smeared with dirt and bore a large dark bloodstain over her left breast. It looked like she’d been shot in the chest; no wonder everyone had stared. How the heck had she gotten blood from her knee onto her shirt? She frowned. Maybe it wasn’t her blood. She summoned up the image of Raider running away. Had the bear been limping? Had he been shot, after all?
In the mirror, she saw the reflection of Jodi leaning against the row of lockers as Mack pulled something from his. Jodi swiped at her cheek. Mack’s fingers gently touched her face, and then Jodi stepped into Mack’s arms.
It would sure be nice to step into a manly embrace right now. She wasn’t looking forward to returning to the bunkhouse. She wasn’t feeling strong and adult right now. She wanted hot water, dinner, a glass of cold white wine. Maybe a whole bottle. But most of all, she wanted someone to talk to. Letting herself out the back door, she leaned against the building wall as she tapped a number into her cell phone.
“LOOKS like our holdup artists are right-wingers.” Chase Perez stared at the plastic sleeve he held. Inside was an inkjet printout, dingy with fingerpri
nt dust. On the table in front of him was a pile of similar pages nearly a foot high, the partial contents of the vehicle belonging to their armed robbery perps.
“What makes you say that?” Nicole looked up from her own stack, her eyes meeting his over her reading glasses.
“Council for Conservation of America.” He waved the page. “This is an article about government giveaways to illegal immigrants.”
Nicole put down a hand-scribbled note she’d been trying to decipher. “What, you’re not buying into their ‘shared moral values of true Americans’? The CCA is on the watch list. Way right of center. They might consider me a true American, but you’d probably have to change your last name to pass.”
He scanned the article. “Brown stew?” Frowning, he quoted, “If left unchecked, the liberal elite will turn this country into gloppy brown stew.”
“Told you.”
His gaze leapt to another story on the page. “And guess what? The occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan were money-laundering gambits by Jews and major corporations, who are manipulating world politics for their own benefit.”
Nicole took off her glasses, stood up, crossed to his side of the table, and took the page from him. After scanning it, she made a tsk-tsk noise. “Shades of ZOG. Like zombies, aren’t they? They never die.”
“Yep.” Although it had happened long before he’d become an agent, Chase knew that the Zionist Occupationist Government was a conspiracy plot promoted by militia groups in the days before Timothy McVeigh brought down the federal building in Oklahoma City. After that, the militias got less vocal and less easy to identify, but the people attracted to their philosophy were always out there, railing against shadowy international Jewish banking corporations and nonwhites. In recent years, the so-called Patriot movement was coming back to life with a vengeance. Zombies indeed. The guy who flew his plane into an IRS office in Austin and the guy who shot up a Congresswoman were two of the most recent zombie heroes.
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