Rampage

by John Sandford

  —

  Twist often used photographs as references for his paintings and had a large-scale, high-resolution photo printer in his studio. Cade and Odin had printed out full-color satellite photos of the ranch and the surrounding area for everyone. Odin got on his laptop and two minutes later was on the hotel’s Wi-Fi system. The first thing he looked up was the weather for Silver City. “Cooler than here. Mid- to high eighties,” he said. “Not too bad. Fairly cool at night, in the sixties. No rain.”

  Shay spent the next hour working on the daypacks that she, Cruz, Danny, and X would carry. In the human packs, there would be flashlights, one set of binoculars and one zoom-lens camera for each team, a short climbing rope, notebooks and pens, walkie-talkies, some energy bars, and four one-liter bottles of water. She stuck a half roll of toilet paper in each pack, squashed down to make it flat. X would carry his own food and water, plus a first-aid kit.

  They would all be wearing boots, jeans, long-sleeved shirts, and baseball caps. They would pack head nets and gloves to fend off mosquitoes, should any show up, and would carry bandannas in case they needed masks.

  Cruz and Shay would carry pistols. Danny refused to carry a gun, but Harmon would carry both a pistol and a .223 rifle.

  Harmon showed up right on time, with four black-market Kevlar helmets, with binocular night-vision scopes mounted on each, and a handheld GPS. “I hope you’ve got a use for the night-vision rigs in L.A.,” he told Twist, “because they cost as much as a new truck.”

  “Can always sell them on the street. Probably make a profit,” Cruz said. “You know, to burglars and so on.”

  “That’d make me feel good,” Twist said.

  “You worried again?” Harmon asked.

  “I’m always worried,” Twist said.

  —

  They would leave the motel for Dash’s ranch at eight o’clock. The ranch was roughly a half hour away, and they wanted it to be fully dark when they arrived. The two teams would be dropped off on a highway that paralleled one edge of the property.

  “We’re recommending that approach because you’ll be moving downhill most of the way, rather than on the flat that you’d get if you came up from the river side,” Cade said, drawing his finger across one of the map photos. “You should have a better view of what you’re getting into. And it means we won’t have to take the trucks off-road, which would be conspicuous at night, if there’s anybody out there watching.”

  “The downside,” Odin said, “is that you’ll be almost a mile out from the ranch buildings when we drop you off. It’s a rough walk, coming down that mountain. It’ll be slow going.”

  Harmon said, “We shouldn’t go in where the road runs closest to the ranch—if they’re watching, that’s where they’ll be, so we’ll start farther out. We won’t last two full days in the desert—we can’t carry enough water. If we go in tonight, we’ll have to get out by tomorrow night, probably right after dark.”

  “One really good thing is,” Odin said, tapping the satellite photo, “all these black dots you see are piñon trees. It’s not really what you’d think of as a forest, but the fact is, you won’t be able to see, or be seen, more than forty or fifty yards away.”

  Harmon nodded. “I once got pretty turned around in some piñons. Cloudy day, couldn’t see the sun, took six hours to make a half-hour walk.”

  Cade and Odin worked out the GPS readings for the revised drop-off point.

  “We’re gonna have to stop to unload; we need to put some black tape over the trucks’ interior lights so they won’t light up when we open the doors.” Harmon tucked extra flashlight batteries in his pack, then continued. “Oh, before I forget: no deodorant or anything with a perfume to it. If guys are hunting for us in the dark, they’ll be sweating themselves, and they won’t smell our sweat, but they will smell Old Spice.”

  “Good point,” Odin said. “Can’t believe you worked it all out.”

  “I didn’t—credit goes to Special Forces and the guys who trained me,” Harmon said. “We got operators risking their necks all the time, all over the world.” He chewed on his lip for another moment, the whole group watching him. Then he said, “We’re too close to the ranch right here for my taste. If they have reason to come looking for us, they’ll probably look first in Silver City. That’s closer to them and probably what they’re oriented toward when they go shopping and so on. That’ll buy us some time.”

  “You hope,” Shay said.

  “Yeah, I hope. Not that we got much choice. There’s not much out here; no urban areas to hide in.”

  —

  When they had the maps in their heads, they went to their various rooms to nap: it would be a long night.

  At seven o’clock, they were up again, dressed in dark clothing. Harmon took Shay aside and had her cycle through her pistol, a last-minute check to make sure it was working perfectly.

  At eight, they loaded into two vehicles—Twist driving the Range Rover with Harmon and Danny, and Odin driving the Mercedes with Shay, Cruz, and X—and started north toward the ranch. Five miles out of town, at a dirt trail pinpointed with Harmon’s GPS, they turned off the highway, drove over a low ridge, and stopped. Harmon demonstrated the night-vision gear, and they spent a while working with it. Shay found that when she moved her head too quickly, she became a little nauseated; she learned to move her head and eyes slowly, like searchlights scanning across a landscape. When everybody had adapted, they headed back to the highway.

  Fifteen miles up the road, Harmon called the other vehicle by walkie-talkie. “Five minutes. Get geared up. Trucks stop for two seconds, and then we’ve got to be off the road, with the trucks moving out. Make sure the tape’s still stuck on the interior lights, and, Odin, don’t use your brakes to stop behind me—stay far enough back that you can coast to a stop. We don’t want your taillights flaring.”

  “So damn sneaky,” Odin muttered. “Remind me to hack into Special Forces and download me some spy guides.”

  Harmon counted down, his voice carrying a slight buzz over the walkie-talkie speakers. “One minute. Twenty seconds. Ten seconds…Start coasting, Odin.”

  Odin turned his head to Shay, in the passenger seat, and said, “Nail them, and don’t get killed.”

  Shay nodded, and she, Cruz, and X slipped out. Cruz pushed the door shut with a barely audible click, and the truck moved on.

  Shay and Cruz and the dog darted twenty feet off the road, Cruz stumbling into an eight-foot-tall cholla cactus straight off, despite the night-vision lenses. He let out a silent scream as a pad of thorns lanced deep into his left palm. The pain wasn’t commensurate with the bite force of Dash’s trained attack dogs, but…it was close enough. He fumbled for his bandanna, and a bilingual string of curse words ran through his head as he yanked out eight or nine spines.

  “Over here!” Shay whispered sharply, unaware of his troubles.

  They crouched in the sandy dirt, turning their heads like searchlights, and waited. The night was cool and felt very dry, the air scented by piñon pines. A minute later, Harmon and Danny appeared, moving slowly along the edge of the highway; in the night-vision lenses, they were green-and-black outlines, and Shay could see the long shape of the black rifle in Harmon’s hands. Shay waved, and the pair angled toward them.

  “Okay,” Harmon said quietly. “Danny and I’ll go diagonally. You guys go straight in, several hundred yards, and then angle over toward the house lights. Stay in touch. Make sure you’re alone before you click us. One click means you want to talk. Two clicks back means talk; a whole bunch of clicks means don’t talk, that somebody’s too close.”

  “We’re gonna find the prisoners,” Shay said. “I can feel it.”

  “Don’t know,” Harmon said. “But if you do, click. No approach until we talk. And X…keep him close. One bad bark and none of us are leaving the Land of Enchantment. Ever.”

  In ninth-grade English, Shay had been given a choice of poems to memorize, and she’d chosen Robert Frost’s “S
topping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” because the last verse touched something in her:

  The woods are lovely, dark, and deep,

  But I have promises to keep,

  And miles to go before I sleep,

  And miles to go before I sleep.

  At the time, the poem reassured her that whatever her problems—and she had more than a few, as a foster kid—she had miles to go in her life and promises to keep.

  Now, walking into woods that were dark and deep and possibly even lovely, if she could have seen anything other than the black outlines of the trees in the starlight, she thought it was all coming true. Frost might not have recognized the arid desert landscape, but more than ever, Shay felt she had promises to keep and miles to go…before what she hoped would be a literal sleep and not a bitter, final one.

  Cruz was leading the way, moving slowly, X, a pale shadow in the night-vision scopes, either by his knee or a few feet ahead, nose probing the night air. Fifteen minutes and a couple hundred yards down the slope, Cruz stopped and put up a hand. “Got lights.”

  Far off to their right, at about a forty-five-degree angle, a single light hung above the low trees. The light amplification in the night-vision goggles made it look like a too-close star.

  “Keep going down,” Shay whispered. “When it’s straight off to the right, we should stop and sit for a while. And listen.”

  “You all right?”

  “Yes. I’m fine.” She touched the pistol on her hip and the knife at the small of her back, made a minute adjustment to the goggles. They were heavy and wanted to pull her face down.

  Cruz and X moved on. Shay waited until they were five yards ahead of her and then followed. The sky above them was like something seen in a planetarium, the huge, starry arc of the Milky Way hanging overhead, barely diminished by the light of a new moon rising in the east.

  Cruz did a tap dance, then said, too loudly, “Jeez.”

  Shay whispered, “What?”

  “Branch. I stepped on it, and it moved, and I thought it was a rattler.”

  “Gotta be quieter.”

  They moved on, still going slowly. In the next few minutes, they picked up another light and then, suddenly, a whole cluster of them straight ahead. “We were looking at pole lights, maybe on a driveway,” Cruz said quietly. “That might be a house we’re looking at now.”

  —

  The ground had flattened out and softened, but the piñons remained thick. While the trees provided concealment, they also kept Shay and Cruz from seeing what was up ahead.

  A walkie-talkie clicked at her. She whispered at Cruz to stop, then clicked back twice. Harmon said, “There are other people out here. Be careful. A guy just went by, and he had a gun.”

  Shay felt the hair rise on the back of her neck. “Okay.”

  Cruz whispered, “Listen again.”

  They listened for five minutes but heard nothing. X was nosing around but never came to an alert stance, and Cruz moved out again, Shay following. They crossed a narrow arroyo, and then another, deeper, and climbed the far bank to find themselves only a hundred yards from a sprawling log house that showed lights in several windows and the flashing-blue-light signature of a television screen. There were two SUVs parked outside.

  “Too close,” Shay said. She knelt, Cruz beside her. X looked back at them, went a few feet farther on, then came back to wait by Shay. “Just listen again,” Shay said.

  They sat and listened for what seemed like a long time but probably wasn’t much more than ten minutes. They hadn’t seen another human since they’d left Harmon and Danny, and though it was fully dark, it wasn’t that late.

  “Let’s move again,” Shay said. “That way.”

  She pointed toward one of the pole lights that Cruz thought might mark a driveway. That route would get them closer to the cluster of buildings but no closer to the log house.

  Cruz moved off, X beside him, Shay trailing. They’d gone a hundred yards, nearly to the pole, when headlights broke through the trees above them and a pickup rolled down what did turn out to be the driveway, crunching over the gravel. They crouched behind a piñon until the vehicle passed, then scuttled closer to the driveway. From there, they could see the pickup stop outside a small barn-shaped building, and a garage door lifted up.

  The barn faced a building made to look like an old-fashioned farmhouse. A woman in jeans and a Western shirt came out onto the porch and stood under a light until a man carrying a grocery sack came out of the miniature barn. The garage door rolled down behind him, and the woman called, “Benny’s on the phone! Got a real early flight coming in.”

  They heard the man ask, “Dash?” and the woman say, “No, she’s later….” But they couldn’t hear the rest of it until the man said, “…assholes from Washington…,” and then the door closed and that was all.

  Shay: “Did he say Washington?”

  “I think so,” Cruz whispered.

  “We need to be here when the plane comes. We need to see who’s on it. We need to get pictures.”

  “We should talk to Harmon now,” Cruz said. “Let’s get farther away from here.”

  Before they could move, Shay heard gravel crunching ahead of them. X spun toward it, silently pointing. Shay put her hand on Cruz’s arm to stop him and hooked a finger beneath X’s collar. A few seconds later, they heard another crunch, then another, the sounds resolving into footsteps. A man ambled down the driveway, a rifle over his shoulder. He didn’t look at them, didn’t seem particularly alert at all, but continued to the farmhouse, took a chair on the porch, and lit a cigarette. A very gentle breeze carried the smell of the burning tobacco toward them. They waited, and the man finished his cigarette, picked up the rifle, and walked slowly back up the driveway.

  When his footsteps faded, Cruz whispered, “I wonder if he just walks up and down, patrolling, or does he have a guard shack? Might be the same guy that Danny and Harmon saw….”

  “We gotta call, let them know he’s coming up.”

  They walked back the way they came, deeper into the trees again, then Shay got on the walkie-talkie and clicked the transmit button one time. Ten seconds later, she got two clicks back. “Where are you guys?”

  “By the largest house,” Harmon said.

  “We’re by the bottom of the driveway by the farmhouse-looking place. Listen, a guy just came down the driveway with a gun, like a rifle. He seems to be walking up and down….He’s heading back toward you now. Is he the same guy you saw?”

  “Could be. We saw our guy coming up the driveway….Haven’t seen anybody since.”

  “We need to talk,” Shay said.

  “We’ll come to you,” Harmon said. “Which side of the driveway are you on?”

  “We didn’t cross it—we’re by the bottom pole light, back in the trees.”

  “Ten minutes,” Harmon said.

  —

  Ten minutes later, X, who’d been lying down, suddenly stood and peered into the darkness. Shay put a hand on his back and said, “No bark.”

  X remained on guard until they heard Harmon say softly, “You there?”

  Even with the night-vision glasses, they couldn’t see anyone. Cruz: “Over here.”

  A few seconds later, they saw Harmon and Danny move out from behind a piñon, and Shay waved, and they ran, bent over, then sank to the ground next to her. Harmon said, “If there’s a guy on the driveway, we better move farther away.”

  Shay led them through the trees, fifty yards away from the driveway. They found a tight circle of piñons and crouched in the center of it and listened for the man with the rifle. Nothing. Shay asked, “You get to the airstrip?”

  “Not yet. We’re still poking around the main house and a couple outbuildings. Why’d you call us in?”

  She told them about the log house and the garage and the farmhouse at the bottom of the drive and the overheard conversation. “Sounds like some people might be coming early from Washington. Dash, too, but later. I think we need to s
ee who it is. Get some pictures.”

  “On the satellite views, the ground around the airstrip looked wide open,” Harmon said. “We’ll have to scout out a place to hide and still get pictures.”

  They talked about it and concluded that since Harmon and Danny had already worked the far side of the driveway, where the main house was, they should go back and continue the reconnaissance there. In the meantime, Shay, Cruz, and X would retrace their steps along the flatland, then make a wide circle around the far side of the ranch buildings to the landing strip and find a place where they could settle down and watch.

  “The driveway guard didn’t seem particularly careful: we heard him coming from pretty far away,” Cruz said. “But you gotta be careful crossing the drive.”

  “Was he wearing night-vision gear?” Harmon asked. “The guy we saw wasn’t.”

  “No. Not unless it was hidden in his cowboy hat,” Shay said.

  —

  Harmon and Danny disappeared into the night, headed back across the driveway. Shay, Cruz, and X slipped deeper into the piñons, headed toward the landing strip. The night-vision gear was becoming more familiar, and they moved easily over the landscape but tried not to look directly at bright building lights, which would flare up on the imaging screens.

  They’d gone the length of a football field when they saw more lights ahead and came to a brick building. The building had a row of small, high windows spaced at eight-foot intervals all down its length, only dimly lit, and a poorly lit parking lot in front with one SUV in it.

  “Look at the windows. Bars,” Cruz whispered.

  “Wonder if that’s to keep intruders out or prisoners in?” Shay asked.

  “Who’s here to keep out?” Cruz said.

  The piñons had been cut well back from the building, but they could see knee-high brush all around it—brush that could act effectively as a burglar alarm. The bars were intriguing, but they decided to push around the building and continue on toward the airstrip.

  A short way out, they saw another building that also had small windows, but without the bars, and this one was definitely occupied.