Echo of War

by Grant Blackwood

  Again Oliver paused, scanned the room, and said, “Any more questions?”

  No one spoke.

  “Okay, then. Thanks for coming. If all goes well, we should be out of your hair in a day or so.”

  The attendees stood up and began shuffling out, some muttering to one another, others casting glances back at Oliver. Once the room was empty save Chief Nester and the Lancaster county sheriff, both of whom Oliver had asked to stay behind, McBride turned to Oliver. “Collin, just when I think I got you pegged, you surprise me.”

  Oliver shrugged sheepishly. “What can I say? Sometimes you gotta play the bastard.” He turned to the two cops. “What I told the rest of them—it wasn’t meant for you. I just needed to clear the deck a little, you know?”

  Both men nodded.

  ‘If we’re going to catch this guy, it’ll be because you and your people know the area, its citizens, its patterns. Our subject’s an outsider; somebody will notice that.”

  “What do you want from us?” asked Nester.

  “How far could that pontoon boat have gotten by now?”

  “Give or take, thirty miles either way.”

  “Between the two of you, how many people can you put in the field?”

  The two cops exchanged glances, then the Lancaster sheriff said, “Whatdya think, Jerry? Eighteen, twenty?”

  “ ’Bout that.”

  “And I’ve got about the same,” said Oliver. “That gives us about forty. Here’s what I’m thinking: We pair them up—one agent, one local—put them in plainclothes, then canvass every launch, dock, and camping site within thirty miles. Somebody has to have seen our guy. Thoughts?”

  The sheriff nodded. “I like it.”

  “Me, too,” said Chief Nester. “Sundown’s in about two hours. We can get all the fishermen coming off the river. That’s a lot of eyes.”

  “Good,” Oliver said. “Let’s get to it.”

  “One question,” said Nester. “Now that we’re all friends and such, how about the real scoop? I mean, how dangerous is this guy?”

  “Three days ago he and his cohorts murdered four security guards—shot each one execution style in the back of the head. Does that answer your question?”

  “Oh, lord.”

  “Tell your people if they see him, stay away. If this guy gets even a whiff of trouble, we could have a mess on our hands.”

  As Nester predicted, their first tip came twenty minutes after dusk from a pair of fishermen who’d spent the afternoon jigging for bass near Bair Island. “They’re sure,” the chief told Oliver and McBride. “It was a pontoon boat, one guy at the wheel.”

  “And it was coming downstream, not up?” Oliver asked.

  “Yep. He came around the bend at House Rock Creek doing a good eight knots. They were pissed; he had water slopping over their gunwales.”

  “I don’t get it,” McBride said. “If it’s him, he’s had all day to get a head start. Why come back?” And then a reason occurred to him. He glanced at Oliver. “You don’t think …”

  Nester said, “What?”

  “Maybe he dumped her,” Oliver explained.

  “Aw, shit.”

  “Did they see where he was headed?”

  “Duncan’s Thumb,” Nester answered. “It’s a little spit of land that sticks out between Reed Creek and Brubaker Creek; it forms kind of an inlet. Last they saw, he was heading for the mouth of it. That don’t make much sense, though.”

  “Why?” asked McBride.

  “After about a mile it dead ends, narrows down to nothin’. Hell, with a pontoon, he wouldn’t get more than a couple hundred yards before he’d be stuck.”

  Oliver grabbed the map from the table and started unfolding it. “How far is it?”

  It was fully dark when Oliver and McBride pulled their rented Lumina to a stop behind Nester’s cruiser. In the driver’s seat Oliver pressed the dome-light overide and they climbed out. Behind them a pair of GMC vans, headlights dark, pulled up, gravel crunching softly under the tires. Without a word, Scanlon and his team began piling out and unloading equipment.

  Though they were only two miles upriver from Bob’s Boat Rental, it had taken forty minutes of backtracking and circling to reach the spot. The forest bordering the Susquehanna’s eastern shore was thick and the roads weren’t as much roads as they were dirt tracts. Even Nester, a lifelong resident of Erbs Mill, had to stop several times to consult his map under the glow of his dome light.

  A half mile to their west lay the bank of the inlet and, according to the report they’d received just before leaving, a dilapidated fishing shack Which an unidentified man was seen entering earlier that afternoon.

  Whether it was Hekuran Selmani or not was anyone’s guess, but the fluttering in McBride’s belly was telling him they were close. Whether that was imagination or premonition he couldn’t tell. The report of Selmani’s mysterious trip upriver before returning to Duncan’s Thumb troubled him, but if it had been a dump job why would Selmani have come back? No, McBride told himself, if she were dead, he’d be on the run, not holed up in a shack.

  Now outside the car’s air-conditioned interior, the heat enveloped McBride like an electric blanket. The humidity hovered in the mid-nineties and he could feel the damp clinging to him. Cicadas buzzed in the brush along the tract. He felt the sting of a mosquito bite on his cheek and slapped at it.

  Walking up, Nester tossed him a can of bug repellant. “Coat yourself. Without it an hour from now you’ll be one big welt.”

  “Thanks.”

  Oliver stood staring at the tree line. “Please don’t tell me we’ve got to chop our way through this,” he said to Nester.

  “There’s a trail around here somewhere; it should take us to the water. The bad news is, if you wanna reach the spit we’ve got two choices: wade across the inlet, or go upstream and pick our way through the swamp.”

  Oliver had earlier assumed they would take a boat and put ashore on the other side of the peninsula, but Nester had advised against it: The fishing shack in question sat on a rise with an unobstructed view of the river. Unless Selmani were deaf and blind, they wouldn’t get within fifty yards of the shack before being spotted.

  Oliver asked McBride, “Gotta preference, Joe? Swamp or swim?”

  “Whatever’s got less mosquitos.”

  “Better to wade,” Nester told them. “Unless your commando boys are gluttons for punishment, I’d steer clear of the swamp—it’s just a good way to get ass-kicked before they even get there.”

  Scanlon’s commander walked up. “This swamp—would it give us a better approach on the shack?”

  “A little, but if we’re quiet it won’t make much difference.”

  “I say wade,” the HRT commander said.

  Oliver nodded. “Whenever you’re ready.”

  After fifteen minutes of searching, Nester found the right trail and the group set out. McBride could see little in the darkness, but he could sense they were moving downhill into the river bottom. He kept one eye on the trail and another on the green glow of the chemlight one of the HRT men had clipped to the back of Nester’s shirt. It hovered in the trees ahead of him, winking like a firefly.

  After fifteen minutes they reached the inlet. McBride could hear the lapping of water and the croaking of frogs. The air was heavy with the tang of algae and something else McBride couldn’t quite put his finger on. Rotting something, he thought. Sun-baked dead fish.

  Scanlon gestured for them to wait, then he and three HRT men continued to the water’s edge, where they began loading their equipment onto a life raft they’d borrowed from the Erbs Mill Fire Department.

  Crouching beside McBride, Oliver said, “Not just a job, it’s an adventure.”

  “Uh-huh. Damn, I hate mosquitos. If this turns out to be some dopehead using the shack to get high, I’m gonna be unhappy.”

  “I don’t think it is. Neither does Jerry.”

  Nester sai
d, “It’s a regular stop on the game warden’s route. Nobody’s been in the shack for years.”

  McBride said, “That still doesn’t answer the big question: What’s Selmani doing here? If she’s dead, why stay? If he’s still got her, why here? Why travel only a couple miles?”

  “All good questions,” said Oliver. “We’ll know soon enough.”

  They watched as Scanlon and his team ferried the raft across the inlet. Once on the opposite bank, Scanlon disappeared into the foliage, then reappeared a few minutes later. At the double wink of his red-hooded flashlight, the rest of the HRT waded across then vanished into the underbrush. Another double red blink appeared.

  “That’s us,” McBride said, and started crawling toward the water’s edge.

  Nester put a restraining hand on his shoulder. “Uh, when you get to the other side, you might wanna check yourselves,” he said.

  “What for?” asked Oliver.

  “Leeches. Best to get ‘em off quick before they get burrowed in too deep.”

  McBride sighed heavily. “Mosquitos, leeches … better not be a dopehead.”

  They were met by Scanlon, who helped each one climb up the muddy bank then waited with a patient grin as each one examined himself. Oliver won the overall leech count with thirteen, but McBride drew collective shivers as he plucked a fat one from what Nester delicately called “the giblets.”

  They huddled around Scanlon who said, “Shack’s about fifty yards to the east. We’ll walk the first forty, then crawl the last ten. Haven’t seen anybody yet, but there’s light coming from one of the windows and we heard footsteps inside. Once we get into position, there’s no talking unless you’re mouth-to-ear. If you need something, double click on your transmit button; I’ll come to you. Questions?”

  There were none.

  Scanlon led them inland on a winding, overgrown trail, his flashlight beam pointed at his feet. As he had with the green chemlight, McBride kept his eyes fixed on the floating red circle as it skimmed over the ground.

  After a few minutes, Scanlon halted then dropped to his belly, waited for the others to do the same, then started crawling. The rocks bit into McBride’s forearms. A mosquito buzzed into his nose. On impulse he snorted it out, then mouthed “sorry” at Scanlon’s backward glance.

  Joe saw the trees thinning, and through them a faint pinprick of light. Scanlon crawled left off the trail and they followed. After another ten yards they came to a small clearing of foliage, a natural cave in the underbrush. Scanlon’s communication man sat in the center, his face pressed to a rubber hood attached to a monitor the size of a paperback book. McBride could see faint blue light seeping from around the hood’s edges.

  Scanlon gathered them in a tight circle. “The shack’s about twenty yards out,” he said, pointing. “I’ve got one of my snipers trying to get a peek in the window.”

  “What’s he looking at?” Nester asked, nodding toward the comm-tech.

  “Something new we’re trying out. Our night vision scopes are tied to the monitors.”

  “Bluetooth?” Oliver asked.

  “Yep, working out pretty good, too.”

  McBride had read about Bluetooth in Popular Mechanics a few months earlier. Though still in its infancy and far ahead of the hardware it was intended to support, Bluetooth was the generic name for truly wireless networking. Running on a personal area network—or piconet—of coordinated radio signals that change frequency up to sixteen hundred times per second, Bluetooth was able to link devices that had once been incompatible: cell phones to computers; computers to printers; sniper scopes to monitors.

  Instead of having to string cable and worry about maintaining line-of-sight infrared connections between his lookouts, Scanlon could place them exactly where he needed them and let Bluetooth worry about synchronizing communications. With a single monitor he could see exactly what his snipers had in their crosshairs. Moreover, he could transmit to his snipers images from fiberscope cameras planted around the scene, giving them a multiple-angled view of the target.

  Scanlon pressed a palm against his headset, listened for a few moments, then whispered, “Roger, stand by.” Then to the others: “He’s in place and transmitting.”

  McBride watched the comm-tech. The man cupped his hands around the monitor hood, then turned and nodded to Scanlon, who took the monitor. After ten seconds Scanlon pulled his face away; his eyes shone in the blue glow. “Two subjects,” he whispered. “One looks like our boy. The other is … well … Joe, why don’t you take a look? Maybe you’ll know better.”

  McBride wriggled forward and pressed his face to the hood. The rubber was warm and slick with sweat. It took his eyes several seconds to adjust to the display. What McBride had thought was blue light was actually the washed-out green of the sniper’s night-vision scope. The image swam into focus. Every few seconds, it pulsed slightly—the sniper’s heartbeat, Joe realized.

  Through the shack’s window he could see the torso and head of a man sitting against the far wall, his arms wrapped around his knees. It was Hekuran Selmani. A semiautomatic pistol dangled from his right hand. Beside him was a red-and-white cooler, in the corner a five-gallon plastic pail. Food, water, and latrine, McBride guessed.

  A few feet away was another figure—a woman, Joe assumed, seeing the lace hem of her nightgown. She lay on her side, a black hood covering her head. She stirred slightly and the nightgown shifted, displaying her calf.

  “Can you have your guy zoom in?” McBride whispered to Scanlon. “Right ankle.”

  “Stand by.”

  A few seconds passed as Scanlon relayed the message, then the picture shimmered slightly before refocusing on the woman’s lower leg. McBride squinted, looking … There. A crescent moon-shaped scar on the knob of her ankle. He was about to pull his face away when his eye caught something else.

  “Scan up to her neck,” he ordered.

  The sniper made the adjustment and the picture skimmed up her body. McBride studied it for a few seconds more, then pulled his face off the hood. He blinked his eyes clear.

  “It’s her,” he whispered. “The first night I asked Mr. Root for distinguishing marks. Three years ago she twisted her ankle in the garden and tore a tendon; they had to do surgery. This woman’s got the right scar.”

  Oliver and Scanlon exchanged relieved glances. “Thank God,” Oliver said.

  “Not so quick,” McBride replied. “There’s a wire around her neck.”

  “What?” Oliver said. “Like a garrote?”

  “Like an electrical wire. I couldn’t see all of it, but it leads over toward Selmani.”

  “Goddammit,” Scanlon said.

  “I don’t get it,” said Nester. “What’s going on?”

  McBride said, “He’s got her wired up to something. And whatever it is, I’m willing to bet there’s a button attached to it.”

  15

  Plancoet, France

  Tanner knew staying in one place for long was a risk, but he judged it safer than traveling during the day, so he and Cahil lounged about their room at the Mainotel and waited for nightfall.

  Using a butterfly bandage, Bear had managed to close the cut on Tanner’s cheekbone, but the bruise and swelling had nearly closed his eye. If the police were looking for someone with a similar injury, only darkness could give him adequate disguise.

  Though the unanswered questions about Susanna’s involvement with Litzman weighed on Tanner’s mind, there were more immediate issues to consider—namely, the murder of Jim Gunston. Though an assumption on his part, he had little doubt Litzman’s men from the Black Boar were responsible. The question was, How? How did they know where to find Gunston? Incapacitated at the Black Boar, they couldn’t have followed them to the Hotel du Louvre. They must have already been aware of Gunston’s presence in St. Malo. If so, did they also know who and what he was? Again, how?

  There were two possible answers, neither of which he found comforting:
Either the magenta-haired teenager from the TGV—if in fact she was anything more than a drifting panhandler—had followed Gunston, or Susanna had burned her own controller. Of these two, Tanner desperately wanted to believe it was the former, but that still wouldn’t explain how Litzman had been tipped to Gunston in the first place. No, the original tip had to have come from Susanna. Had she in fact gone native? Through either choice or a break with reality, had she allied herself with Litzman? Or was it coercion? Imagining Susanna as Litzman’s puppet left a dull ache in Tanner’s chest. He squeezed his eyes shut and tried to shut off his imagination. Stay focused, Briggs, he commanded himself.

  Back to the teenager at the TGV station: If she’d been a tail for Litzman, it was best to assume the German now knew the make, model, and license of their rental car. With the right connections he could easily track them.

  Tanner kept one eye on the sun as it dropped toward the horizon, the other on the door, half-expecting it to come crashing in at any moment.

  At nine o’clock they left the hotel and headed southeast, exiting and rejoining the highway to check for tails until they reached the town of St. Meen le Grand, where they traded their Renault for the only car the office had available, a three-cylinder, 60 horsepower Peugeot.

  “I feel like a clown in a circus car,” Cahil muttered, hunched over. “My legs are falling asleep.”

  “Let’s hope we don’t run into many hills,” Tanner agreed.

  “Wanna flip a coin to see who gets out to push?”

  They toured the town’s narrow streets for thirty minutes and then, confident they were alone, rejoined the highway to Lorient.

  They were in the heart of the Morbihan region of Brittany now—Bretagne to the locals—France’s borderlands between the inland and the rugged coastline along the Bay of Biscay. Covered with green fields, apple orchards, and forests of beech and oak, Morbihan’s interior was broken by rolling hills, sunken rivers, and ancient stone walls separating checkerboard farmland.