Linda Howard

by Cover of Night

  “Nobody tried to retrieve the bodies,” Billy said, sounding troubled. “That bothers me.”

  “If they’re going to, it’ll be tonight. They’ll have waited for dark.”

  “They have to have figured we got special scopes, that’s how we could hit ’em last night.”

  “Yeah, but maybe they’ve worked out something movable they can hide behind. We’ll see.”

  “You going to shoot if they go after the bodies?”

  Teague considered the question. “I don’t think so. Is Blake already in position?”

  “He relieved Troy about half an hour ago.”

  “I’ll radio him. Let them get the bodies. I don’t know what they’ll do with them, but I don’t think it’ll be pleasant, having all those dead people lying around attracting flies and turning black. Put a little more pressure on them.”

  “That it will.” Billy stretched, then got into a crouch and worked his way behind Teague, heading toward the tent. “Have fun tonight.”

  Teague carefully braced his rifle, then turned on the thermal scope and put his eye to it. Last night Trail Stop had been lit with thermal signatures; tonight there was nothing. The houses didn’t glow with heat, and none of the brightly lit little figures were running around making perfect targets of themselves. Considering how his head felt, he hoped the night stayed just as quiet as it was now.

  Cate checked the glowing hands of Cal’s watch, which he’d lent her, since hers wasn’t luminous. Eleven thirty. She pulled her blanket more securely over her shoulders and stared up at the cloudy sky, glad the night was cool but not cold. She would have preferred a nice bright moon, too, but her eyesight had long since adjusted to the darkness, which wasn’t total. She wouldn’t want to walk anywhere; she couldn’t see that well, but she could make out darker shapes and shadows. So long as nothing moved, and she didn’t hear any crashing sounds, she was good.

  Cal slept on his side on the thin pad he’d brought, blanket pulled up to his chin. They were keeping watch, for this first night at least, since they could have been seen working their way toward this location. Cate had the first shift; since the midnight to dawn shift was the hardest, he’d said, he would take that one.

  He’d fallen asleep so fast, so easily, that she’d been disconcerted. She wished the light had been sufficient for her to watch him, but she’d had to content herself with listening to him breathe. He’d shifted position once or twice, but for the most part he’d been very still. As nothing happened to keep her alert, after a while she stopped starting at every rustle, every tiny scratch and scurry, as the night animals and insects went about their business. Instead, she thought about him.

  Cal had said Trail Stop was shaped like a paramecium. The odd word had gone around and around in her brain as she followed him down the steep slope toward the river. Cate remembered what a paramecium was, from high school biology, but the word choice alerted her to yet another facet that made up the complicated whole of the man.

  The past few days had been one revelation after another, until she felt as if she had to be the blindest, most oblivious person in Trail Stop. Until just a few days before, she had seen him as a sort of nonentity: painfully shy, inarticulate, but able to fix just about anything. He was definitely a jack-of-all-trades, but she’d discovered that while he might be a quiet man, he wasn’t shy at all; in fact, he was well-spoken, educated, and decisive. He’d been in the military, about which she knew next to nothing, but evidently he’d been in some kind of exclusive unit.

  Everyone else in Trail Stop seemed to have known all this. How could she not have noticed the disparity between the way she had looked at him and the way they saw him? Of course, they had known him far longer, but still—she felt as if she were still missing some big piece of the puzzle, some magic piece that would bring everything into focus.

  The thick end of the paramecium slanted downward, which was good for two reasons: it provided cover, and the sharp slant down to the river wasn’t as high. On the highest side, the bluff was sheer and a good seventy feet, but here at the eastern end it decreased to a mere forty feet, at a lesser angle, which meant they were able to get down without rappelling. Cal used a short-handled trenching tool to cut footholds in the dirt, and they both went down in a mostly upright position.

  That close to the river the roar of the water had made conversation impossible unless they shouted, so she’d concentrated on not falling as they negotiated over jagged boulders. There was no riverbank, not in the sense that people usually thought. At the water’s edge were rocks, period: big ones, little ones, rounded ones, and sharp ones. Some were solidly placed, some rolled underfoot. Some were slippery. Some were slippery and rolled, and they were the most treacherous. She’d had to make certain she had a secure grip with at least one hand before placing her weight on any rock. The pace was necessarily slow, so slow that she had begun to worry they wouldn’t be able to get to more hospitable ground before dark, but they’d made it to the base of the mountain just in time. Cal had found a protected slope and that was where they’d stopped.

  There was no semblance of camping. It was just the two of them, sitting on the ground in the dark, eating muesli from a plastic bag and drinking a little water. Then he’d unrolled the pad and lay down to sleep, leaving her alone with her thoughts.

  At midnight she said, “Cal,” and just like that, he was awake, without her having to shake him or repeat his name. He sat up and stretched, yawning.

  “How did you do that?” she asked, pitching her voice low because sound carried at night.

  “Do what?”

  “Wake up that fast.”

  “Practice, I guess.”

  She gave him his watch, and he strapped it back on his wrist while she stretched out on the pad. She had wondered if it would be as comfortable as it looked. It wasn’t. It was a thin pad on the rough ground, and she could feel every root and rock; still, it was better than sleeping on the ground, because it kept the chill away.

  She spread her blanket over her as he took a drink of water and sat down where she’d been sitting. She tried to doze off, if not immediately as he’d done, at least within five or ten minutes. Fifteen minutes later she was still fidgeting.

  “If you’re not still, you won’t ever get to sleep,” he said, sounding amused.

  “I’m not a good camper; I don’t like sleeping on the ground.”

  “In different circumstances—” He stopped.

  She waited for him to say something else, but he seemed inclined to let drop whatever he had been about to say, rather than rephrasing it. “In different circumstances—what?” she prodded.

  More silence, broken only by a slight breeze soughing through the trees. He was just an indistinct shape in the darkness, but she could tell he’d raised his head, listening for something. He must not have heard anything alarming, because his body posture soon relaxed. His words came softly. “You could sleep on me.”

  The rush of blood through her body made her feel light-headed. Yes. Yes, that was what she wanted, what she craved. She heard herself saying, just as softly, “Or vice versa.”

  He inhaled raggedly, and she smiled in the darkness. It was good to know she could do to him what he’d just done to her.

  He shifted his legs, as if he was uncomfortable. Finally he muttered something, stood, and made some adjustments before cautiously sitting again. Cate smothered a giggle. “I’m sorry,” she made herself say, though she wasn’t at all sorry.

  “I doubt it.” His tone was wry. “You should have one of these for a little while, just to see how inconvenient they can be.”

  “If I had one, you wouldn’t be uncomfortable.”

  “I said for a little while. I definitely wouldn’t want you to have one permanently.”

  “I don’t need to have one at all.” A tiny devil prodded her to add, “Because you’ll let me use yours, won’t you?”

  Another sucked-in breath, and some rough breathing. He said, “Damn it,” and sto
od again.

  This time she couldn’t hold back a tiny hiccup of a laugh.

  “Tucker sounds just like that sometimes,” he said. “They don’t look like you very much, but sometimes the way they’ll say things, or hold their heads—that’s when I see you in them.”

  Just like that her heart squeezed. She hadn’t seen her babies since Friday morning, and it was now Sunday night. They were okay, though; that was the main thing. They were safe. And Cal was the only person who had ever said they reminded him of her. If he wanted to change the subject by talking about her boys, she was willing.

  “I have a confession to make,” he muttered.

  “About what?”

  He cleared his throat. “I’m the one—uh—I said some things I shouldn’t have in front of them.”

  Cate sat up on the pad, glad he couldn’t see her face. “Such as…damn idgit?” she asked suspiciously.

  “I hit my thumb with the hammer,” he said, sounding incredibly sheepish. “I—uh—said a whole alphabet soup of things.”

  “Such as?” she asked again, somehow managing to keep her tone stern.

  “Well, I—Cate, I was a Marine, if that gives you any idea.”

  “Exactly what should I be prepared to hear my children saying?”

  He gave in, his shoulders slumping. “Do you want the words, or just the initials?”

  Uh-oh. If she could recognize what he’d said by the initials, she knew it was bad. “The initials will do.”

  “It started with g.d.”

  “And then what?”

  “Um…m.f. and s.o.b.”

  She blinked. She could just hear those words coming out of four-year-old mouths—probably when her mother was in the grocery store with them.

  “I heard a giggle and looked around, and there they were, all ears. I couldn’t think of anything else to do, so I threw the hammer, jumped up, and yelled, ‘I’m a damn idiot!’ They thought that was hilarious, especially when I told them ‘damn idiot’ was a really, really bad thing to say and they should never say it, and I should never have said it in front of them, but that was what you said when you were really mad.” He paused. “I guess it worked.”

  “I guess it did,” she said faintly. He certainly knew how little boys’ minds worked. They had promptly forgotten the words deemed not as bad, and concentrated on what he’d told them were really bad words. She should count her blessings.

  She clapped a hand over her mouth as she shook with laughter, giggling and snorting. In that moment, listening to the sheepishness in his voice, delighting over the mental picture of him swearing a blue streak and suddenly looking into the fascinated faces of two little boys, she tipped over the emotional edge she’d been hovering on—and fell.

  27

  WHEN MORNING CAME, TEAGUE SAT UP AND ROLLED HIS shoulders, glad the night was over and nothing had happened. He’d forced himself to stay alert through the graveyard shift, knowing that if Creed had planned anything, that was when it would take place; a person’s natural circadian rhythm was at its lowest point in those hours—at least for those who waited and watched. Teague had expected something, anything, even if just a few experimental forays. But hour after hour he’d scanned with the scope, without seeing the bright flare of a human thermal signature. Blake had been on edge, too, getting on the radio way too often to ask if Teague saw anything, but nothing had come their way.

  Dawn was overcast, with sullen, low-hanging clouds that wreathed the tops of the mountains in mist. The warmer temperatures had held during the night, but now a chilly wind was beginning to blow. September weather could be iffy, as the seasons transitioned. Teague checked the level of coffee in his thermos; it was getting low. He’d need more if this wind kept blowing.

  He glanced across at Trail Stop. It looked like a ghost town, with no one moving around. No, wait—he was certain he saw some smoke rising from the far side. It was difficult to tell, because the sky was so gray and, with the clouds hanging low on the mountains, everything sort of blended together, but—hell, yeah, that was smoke. Someone had a fire going in their fireplace. That was where the people would be, where they could get warm, maybe heat some soup, make some coffee. He keyed the radio. “Blake. Check toward the river, the houses farthest away. Is that smoke?” Blake’s eyes were younger than his, more reliable.

  Blake came back with an answer in just a few seconds. “It’s smoke, no two ways about it. Want me to try getting a shot in there?”

  “I don’t think you have a clear shot, too much structure between here and there. I know I don’t.”

  A minute went by, and Blake was on the radio again. “Negative on the clear shot. Used my binoculars to check it out.”

  “What I figured.” Teague settled back on the blanket, once again studying the road and the houses closest to him. An uneasy feeling skittered up his spine. There was something spooky about the place today, but it could have been the grayness of the morning and the low clouds that made him feel sort of hemmed in. The empty road was somehow wrong. He froze, staring. The road was empty, completely so.

  The bodies were gone.

  He couldn’t believe his eyes. He blinked, stared, but they didn’t magically reappear. The bodies were fucking gone.

  He picked up the radio. “Blake,” he said hoarsely.

  “Come back,” said Blake.

  “The bodies are gone.”

  “Wha—?” Blake must have then looked for himself, because he said, “Shit.”

  Teague kept staring, unable to quite take it in. How in hell—? Creed. Fucking Creed. He’d figured out they had thermal scopes instead of night vision, and devised some way for the locals to move around without being detected. Thermal imaging wasn’t foolproof; going into water to mask your thermal signature was the best-known trick. But if they’d gone into the stream to the right, the water was damn rough from all the rocks and practically impassable; then they would have had to walk a good distance to get to the bodies, and by then they would have been showing a thermal signature again. Likewise, they couldn’t have gone to the left, because that would have put them right in Blake’s front yard, and he’d have seen them way before they got to the stream.

  Some other way, then.

  He narrowed his eyes, studying the place, then picked up his binoculars and made a slow sweep from house to house, pausing at what, from this distance, looked like a low block wall. There hadn’t been a wall there before. He’d have noted something like that when he made his reconnaissance. Besides, the top wasn’t level. Instead of a wall, it looked more like sandbags.

  Well, son of a bitch. The locals had been busy during the night. He felt perversely pleased that they hadn’t just rolled over and played dead; he’d have been embarrassed in front of the city boys if they had. He’d said they were tough, and they’d just proven him right. They were fortifying their positions and providing themselves with a safe way of moving about. Behind those bags, no bullets could reach them.

  He got on the radio again. “Blake. Take a look at those sections of low wall. Those aren’t walls. Looks like sandbags to me.” Even as he said it, he realized they wouldn’t have had access to sandbags. Something else, then, something in bags. Feed, concrete mix, something like that. Didn’t really matter; the principle was the same.

  Blake looked. “What’re we gonna do?” he finally asked, evidently agreeing with the sandbag assessment.

  “Nothing we can do, other than what we’re already doing. Don’t let anybody get by you; keep them hemmed up until they’re ready to give the city boys what they want.” Could take longer than what he’d planned on, though, which wasn’t good. This whole house of cards could come tumbling down at any time if the wrong person decided to come poking around. That was a risk he’d accepted, but he wasn’t going to let this situation drag out indefinitely. He’d stay with his own timetable, regardless of what the city boys thought.

  “Belay on?”

  “Belay on.”

  At Cal’s quiet reassura
nce that he had her if she fell, Cate stretched for a grip on the rock. Cal had searched for a better route, because scaling rock was time-consuming, but he hadn’t found anything that wouldn’t have left them exposed to rifle fire. Going up this rock face was the safest, most direct route. She was glad it wasn’t one of the tougher, higher climbs, since neither of them was in practice, and neither was wearing climbing shoes. She wasn’t in good shape to be climbing, either; her leg muscles were strong, from climbing the stairs she went up and down every day, but her upper-body strength was probably half what it had been when she climbed regularly.

  The weather wasn’t great for climbing, either; the wind was picking up, and the clouds were pressing lower and lower. If it started raining, they wouldn’t be able to go back down and wait for better weather; they’d have to press on, even though rain would make the rock more slippery. They’d just have to be extra careful. She thanked God this was what she would have considered an easy climb, back in the day. It was about a hundred yards, maybe a hundred and twenty, to the top—and it wasn’t vertical.

  Other climbers had been there before them; bolts and anchors were already hammered into the rock in various places. Some climbers removed them as they went, leaving the rock as they’d found it, others didn’t bother. Generally Cate didn’t like trusting a bolt she hadn’t set herself—or that Derek hadn’t set—but in the name of speed she was prepared to use some of the presets if they felt sturdy.

  Both of them were harnessed and securely roped together. Because she had the most experience, she was the lead rope; she set the way, and when she reached, literally, the end of their rope, she would stop and he’d follow. With the belay set, he would catch her if she fell. When she stopped, she became the belayer and would catch him if he fell.