The Distant Echo of a Bright Sunny Day

by Patrick O'Brien

  51

  “You sure we can trust these fuckers?” Peewee whispered. Some of the euphoria he had felt earlier had begun to dissipate, the closer they got to the reality of their situation. He wanted to continue to have faith in the two agents, to believe their assurances, but despite whatever failings and shortcomings one might ascribe to him, he was no fool. And he had the instincts of a dog traumatized by the abuse of a bad master, though he also had an underlying need to have his trampled-upon ability to trust restored.

  “Your guess is as good as mine, amigo,” Rick whispered back. “In the final analysis, all either of us can do is go by what The Man tells us. And what he tells us is we got nothin’ to worry about. But let’s bring this kettle to a boil, Peewee, before we get buried in snow. Man, ain’t this a bitch!”

  “Next time, pay more attention to the weather.”

  “Ditto for you, little buddy.”

  Peewee and Rick had assigned the others to places along the top of the ridge: everyone was stretched out from one end to the other. They themselves had taken a central position, which gave them a view directly down onto the cattle pen, a hundred yards off. On their left, to the east and thirty or forty feet away, Ralph and Misty lay on their stomachs just at the crest of the hill and also had a more or less straight view of the pen. Ralph had the 30.06 cradled in his arms the way he remembered the drill sergeant had instructed them on the firing range. As he sighted through the scope and brought into view a whiteface steer, he held his breath and waited for the signal from Rick and Peewee to commence firing.

  A few yards farther off, Carlos had flattened himself out in a prone firing position and had his rifle pointed at a whiteface heifer that had settled down for the night. He had attached the scope he had bought for the rifle and, as he zeroed in, there was just enough light coming from the lamp pole to make the heifer a viable target.

  The remaining four members of the group had strung themselves along the hilltop for another thirty or so yards. Mike and Tony, with one rifle between them, had chosen to stay together and had decided to fire two bullets apiece, so as to share whatever guilt either might suffer. Neither expected to hit anything, but they were there and could hardly not make a show of participating. They had discussed it all beforehand, out of earshot of the others, and had agreed that even if they did manage to shoot one of the cows, they wouldn’t have to feel bad because the poor beast would probably be the victim of a potshot rather than anything intentional.

  Jody and Heidi were on the westernmost side of the hill. There was a large oak tree down-slope and to the right of their position, but otherwise they had a wide-angle view of the side of the barn and its adjacent pen. Each woman had a rifle and several rounds of ammunition. As had Mike and Tony, they, too, had discussed the ethical implications of shooting innocent bovines to avenge the wanton destruction of wild creatures. But unlike Mike and Tony, neither had let her resolve be blemished by the niceties of a guilty conscience. Having made the decision long ago to embark on a course of radical environmental activism, the need for occasional ruthlessness had been accepted as legitimate a price to pay. They were more focused on the message that shooting a few cows would send than on whether they would have to deal with remorse afterwards. If deer hunters could do it, they had told themselves, surely they, who had a more compelling and justifiable reason, could do it.

  “Let’s slam this puppy right now, Rick…”

  The others in the group had been told to wait until Peewee fired the first shot; that was the signal to begin firing themselves.

  “How’s everybody doin’ with your night vision?” he whispered down the line, to Ralph and Misty.

  “I took vitamin A earlier,” Ralph replied. “If you don’t count a few snowflakes, I can see like an owl right now.”

  “Good man, Ralph. Hey, Carlos—how you doing down there?”

  “Waitin’ for the word, brother!”

  Rick whispered up the line on his side. All the replies came back positive.

  “Let’s do it,” he said to Peewee. “Let’s unload this mother so we can get it over with.”

  Peewee’s Barrett weighted twenty-five pounds, had a thirty-two-inch barrel with a flash deflector, bipod legs two-thirds the way up its length, and a ten-shot magazine. It fired a .50 caliber bullet that at four hundred yards, with a muzzle velocity of twenty-eight hundred feet per second, was guaranteed to knock a bull moose or a buffalo flat. Outfitted with a high-powered scope, its effective sniping range was a thousand yards or more, depending on marksmanship skills. Several years before, Peewee had saved up money for the price tag; ever since then, once he had it in his possession, he had periodically daydreamed about positioning himself atop a vantage point, such as the rooftop of a tall building, and blowing away pedestrians on the sidewalks below. On one or two occasions, after a six-pack of beer, he had even carried his fantasy to the point of donning a camouflage outfit and going to a wooded spot that overlooked a freeway. Once there, hunkering down under a pile of dead leaves and fallen branches, he had come within a breath of sending a loaded flatbed or an oversize SUV careening into several lines of oncoming traffic. Numerous times, he had taken the rifle into the foothills east of Portland and, just to experience the thrill of its power in action, had fired it at random. So far, he hadn’t used it to kill anything or anybody.

  With an eye sharpened by practice, he peered into the scope. Adjusting the lens, he brought the cattle pen into immediate focus. A viridescent image of whiteface steers came into view. A handful of the creatures were milling about at one end of the fenced-off area, near a wooden ramp. The others were standing farther off, clustered together in a small group.

  Peewee pulled back the bolt and slid a shell into the chamber. He cupped one hand over the top of the scope. He touched the trigger lightly…

  Held his breath…

  Then squeezed.

  A loud report caromed into the night.

  As though slipping on ice, a steer in the second group pitched off its legs and onto its side. Raising their heads in mooing, wide-eyed commotion, nearby cattle skittered to get out of the way.

  Peewee cocked the Barrett a second time.

  He aimed…

  Fired again.

  He hit the second steer broadside; it slammed against a set of wood fence rails.

  He raised his head. “I need some help here!” he called out. “This ain’t supposed to be a goddamn one-man show!”

  Rick, whose marksmanship was assured by a night scope of his own, as well as by the high-powered sniper rifle, met the challenge with a single shot that concussed the darkness like a sledgehammer blow on steel.

  A .300 magnum shell smashed through hide, flesh, and bone and buckled the hindquarters of a steer that had scrambled to separate itself from the erupting panic around it.

  Less squeamish than the others, and only too anxious to inaugurate his newly acquired possession, Carlos picked a cow at random and squeezed off a round that hit wide of its mark, but nevertheless ripped through the cow’s stomach.

  The nonfatal wound caused it to react as though a sharp knife had been jabbed into its backside, and it plunged off against a section of the wooden railing and knocked loose the upper portion as it tried to climb over the top.

  Rick slapped another round into the chamber of his rifle and, aiming quickly, dispatched the struggling, maddened animal with a surgical shot into the back of its head. With the sudden shock of death written on its face, it crumpled onto the fence, then fell on its side, landing in a puddle of cow manure and piss.

  Momentarily stunned by the actuality of the event, the sudden realization that it really was happening caused those who had not yet participated to commence firing at will. Like Army conscripts on a night-firing range wanting to discharge perfunctorily their allotment of ammunition, they dutifully began ridding themselves of the few rounds they had between them.

  Firing into a mass of cattle now frantically locked in a free-for-all struggle to stamped
e out of the area, more by default than design, the late-starters managed to drop five more of the creatures beyond those that had already been singled out. By the time the firing stopped altogether, a total of nine cows lay either dead, dying, or wounded. The others had broken through the fence railing at various places and, amid plaintive, desperate lowing, had disappeared at random off into the darkness.

  As the noise of sustained rifle fire died away, the silence that followed brought with it a sudden wavering of certainty. Wordlessly, they all looked down at the wreckage of the cattle pen and the stricken brown lumps splayed about within it as though in doubtful awe of their own act. At that moment, with pristine flakes of snow swirling down out of the darkness, their noble purpose, given validity by imagination and desire, offered neither reassurance nor elation, but only an ill-defined numbness.

  “I suppose we should start back,” Heidi said, getting up from her spot and calling out to the others.

  Jody, lying a short distance off, also stood up. “What should we do with the rifles?” she asked.

  “Leave them here…We don’t need them now,” came Heidi’s reply.

  Jody dropped the M1 rifle at her feet and, as she started to turn to Mike and Tony, she felt a piston-blow to her upper ribcage that knocked her flat on her back.

  Groaning, she tried to raise up, but something snapped her head to the left, and a split-second later she closed her eyes into black nothingness, and lay dead.

  Mike, who had heard her groan, asked if she was all right.

  Whether or not she would ever respond, he never found out.

  Another 7.62 mm round from Hammerstein’s silencer-equipped rifle smacked into the side of his neck, just below the jaw line.

  A second later, a round from McCullers’ rifle tore into his upper chest. The shock from the impact temporarily paralyzed him, but a moment afterwards, like a cat trying to cough up a fur ball, he began spitting up blood.

  Finally, slumping onto the butt of his rifle stock, he exhaled for the last time and lay still.

  Tony, lying right beside Mike, realized they were being shot at.

  Immediately, he jumped up and started screaming, “THEY’RE SHOOTING AT US! THEY’RE SHOOTING AT US!”

  Heidi, who had heard Jody groan and realized something was wrong, stopped as though on a sharp command. As she turned to look off into the darkness, two bullets thumped into her almost simultaneously. The first one ripped through her liver and kidney and tore a small hole in her back the size of a fifty-cent piece. The second one struck like an arrow of molten iron being jabbed into her lungs. It tore apart sinew, flesh, and bone, and severed her spinal column midway up the back. The resulting cavity had a diameter the size of a lamb cutlet.

  Collapsing in place, she was alive long enough to realize she was dying but not to know why.

  The next few rounds came from the east, right after Tony screamed out. The first one hit Carlos in the upper torso, just as he jumped up. Its velocity not only lacerated and crushed bone and tissue, but created a shock wave that went beyond the wound track, damaging distant vessels, arteries, and soft tissue as well.

  The second shot cracked into his skull and exploded out the other side, spewing brain matter, blood, and bone fragments several feet beyond where he toppled over. The only thing he felt was a swimming sensation about the eyes, immediately followed by blackness.

  Just as she got to her hands and feet to rise up from her spot beside Ralph, a third shot caught Misty right behind the left ear. With a saucer-size piece of her skull blown away, she slumped forward and dropped over on her right side, falling against Ralph.

  Ralph had turned in Tony’s direction. He felt something warm and wet against the side of his face. Putting his hand out to touch Misty on the shoulder, he knew immediately that she was dead. He knew that he would die next.

  Holding his rifle, he got to his feet…

  Cocking the rifle, he peered out into the darkness…

  The wind blew and the snow fell…

  He put his finger on the trigger and as a bullet smacked into his forehead and plowed out the backside of his brain, the last thing he ever felt was the recoil from the Remington 30.06 he had borrowed to complete a rite of passage.

  Tony’s moment of consternation had turned into the kind of panic that develops into a mindless rout on the field of battle, when one side throws down its arms and attempts to flee from the other side.

  With an instinct of animal abandon, he left the hilltop and plunged down the slope, in the direction of the barn. Halfway there, he tripped and fell headlong onto a grassy surface now wet with falling snow.

  He picked himself up and continued to run, but before he reached the barn he saw a man at the far end of the cattle pen, coming up from the house.

  “THEY’RE GOING TO KILL US! THEY’RE GOING TO KILL US!” he shouted, waving his arms at the man.

  Seeing Tony, the man stopped.

  “NO, THEY’RE NOT!” the man shouted back. “THEY’RE NOT GONNA KILL YA! ’CAUSE I’M GONNA KILL YA MYSELF, YA SON OF A BITCH!”

  Taking in the dead cattle and the broken railings with a glance, he raised a rifle, took aim, and pulled the trigger.

  The impact of the copper-coated .357 magnum shell knocked Tony back a good five feet and flattened him onto the hard ground. With a shattered sternum and one lung rapidly filling with blood, he gazed up at the falling snow with dumb incomprehension, as though wondering what had happened.

  A moment later he saw the man standing beside him, pointing the rifle at his head.

  It was last thing Tony ever saw.

  Peewee and Rick had reacted with the instinct of those whose suspicions keep them on edge at all times. The closer either came to the moment of truth, the greater their anxiety about the outcome, the less certain they were that the two agents would honor the agreement. Naturally, to continue functioning without going to pieces, they had to incline toward the optimistic view. They had to believe they were not going to be betrayed. And, stoically, manfully, repressing doubts, they did believe—right up until Tony’s hysterical response. In that instant they both knew how wrong had been their assumption of a free pass.

  No words had been exchanged.

  Crouching low to the ground, both men had simply scuttled away from the hilltop and into the night. With weapons held at the ready, they glanced from side to side, not knowing where the enemy had stationed himself, but knowing that he could be out there, somewhere.

  52

  Whether it was the voices, the damp cold penetrating through his anorak and wool sweater, the snow falling on his face, or a combination of all three, Mitch opened his eyes and realized he had fallen asleep out in the boonies on a cold, dark night, with snow coming down all around.

  He looked at his watch: a good hour or more had passed since the others had gone ahead. He could only guess at their success; he supposed they should be returning. They had had ample time to trek the two miles, do the deed, and return. More than sufficient opportunity to kill a few placid bovines and scurry away.

  He heard the voices again: strong, masculine voices; urgent, angry, shouting into the wind and the blowing snow, coming from the ridge top, not quite directly above but close enough; and none of them belonged to anyone in the group. Whoever was up there, it had to be someone else. And it could only mean one thing…

  Whatever had happened, the plan had gone bust; even without knowing, Mitch knew it hadn’t worked as planned. Heidi’s group had run into trouble. Something unexpected had overtaken them. But what?

  His thoughts leaped back to earlier in the day. He recalled the black car. Its telltale antenna—it stuck out like a red flag. It had been a clue—he should have seen it. And the car itself—it didn’t fit the scenario. Alongside the two jeeps, it looked like a brand-new Lincoln or a high-status Buick on a car lot of twenty-year-old clunkers. It didn’t belong. On a paved city street, maybe, but not out here, where the roads ran the seasonal gamut of mud, deep ruts, snow, wind, rai
n, and dust. Only a four-wheeler made sense, not anything intended for the city; certainly not a luxury car.

  But more than that, Rick and Peewee’s explanation didn’t add up. Too many gaps in the time-line. By their admission, they’d been gone since ten that morning: an hour and a half to get there, a bit longer to come back, plus time to look things over. But what about the rest of it—two hours unaccounted for? What was the story there?

  And the information they did bring back? They hadn’t mentioned the black car, had, in fact, scoffed about it, dismissing its presence a little too easily. They were more interested in explaining it away than in considering how it might be significant. They had, in fact, shown reluctance to discuss any of his concerns—that in itself should have been cause for suspicion.

  Likewise the cattle. When he pointed out that a dozen head of the beasts constituted an incongruously small number for such a large ranch, they came up with an explanation that now struck him as adlibbed. It sounded plausible enough, yet he surmised that neither one of them knew any more about raising cattle and sending them off to market than he did. He had to wonder.

  He also had to wonder about Punch. Punch certainly fit the image of the old Navy man: avuncular, a bit gruff, fond of his whiskey, tolerant, and capable. But not of the environmental activist; not someone whose energy, drive, and passion take them beyond the limits. His way of life was too comfortable and secure to imagine he would jeopardize it just to accommodate a group of strangers bent on making an example of someone. He was too old and conservative and too possessed of the sagacity of experience to be roped into something as questionable as the deliberate destruction of property, no matter the justification used. Besides, for all the years he had been in the Navy he probably had a bedrock respect for rules, regulations, and for law and order in general. In hindsight, Mitch had to admit to a real problem with seeing him as a rebel, even one willing to play a marginal role.

  But whatever had happened, obviously it was too late now to begin considering the inconsistencies. Now wasn’t the time, anyway.