by Bob Mayer
“And what’s the other level with my father?”
Rivers shook his head. “Got no time for that. Why are you here?”
“Vladislav.”
The ice got colder in those eyes. “Go on.”
“I know who he is. Who he’s pretending to be. His cover. The name the CIA gave him.” Chase was almost running on at the mouth, but he knew the look Rivers was giving him was the last thing a lot of people had ever seen.
“What is it?”
“Peter Watkins.” Rivers didn’t bother to ask Chase how he’d found the information. Chase knew it didn’t matter to him now. Chase lifted his hand and Rivers eyes followed it as Chase slowly pulled out his satellite phone. “I have his number.”
A small line furrowed between those deadly eyes.
“It ends up here,” Chase said. “Tonight.”
The line disappeared and Rivers slowly nodded. He put down the AK and reached for the phone.
Chase handed it over and then dictated the number. He really hoped Watkins was home because Chase wanted to spend as little time as possible on this mountain with Rivers.
Watkins was.
Rivers rattled something in Russian. Then listened. Several exchanges later, he turned the phone off and handed it back to Chase.
“He’s on his way.”
“Why’s he coming?”
“Because he needs it to end too.” He stood. “We got work to do.”
“No, you have work to do,” I said. “It’s not my fight.”
“So you’re really not here in an official capacity?” Rivers asked.
“No.”
“Then why’d you come?”
“So the body count in town stops where it is.”
Rivers shrugged. He loosened the straps on his ruck.
“Why did you kill the baby?” Chase asked.
Rivers didn’t even pause. “It was a mistake. That asshole drug dealer hid behind the crib. I didn’t even know there was a kid in there when I hit the door, the lights were off and all I could see was the muzzle flash of his weapon. I returned fire.”
“So that makes it OK? It was a mistake?”
“The baby was fucked up already. Both by its druggie parents and by Vladislav who’d just been there. I must have missed him by a couple of minutes.”
Chase tried to fit those pieces. “So Vladislav tied the Barnes up and tortured their baby, then just let them go? Then you showed up and shot everyone?”
Rivers pulled out four green canvas bags that Chase recognized. Claymore mines. He’d memorized the specs on those when he was an eighteen-year old plebe at West Point. It was a fragmentation, directional mine. Seven hundred steel ball bearings packed in a curved, rectangular fiberglass case, with six hundred and eighty-two grams of composition C-4 explosive behind the spheres. Fifty meter kill zone in front, with a sixteen-meter danger area behind. It could be fired by hand using a clacker on the end of a long cord, or a trip wire could be rigged.
Rivers hands began pulling pieces out of each of the bags, checking them, unrolling wires, making sure there were no tangles. Chase knew Rivers could do that blindfolded because he’d been trained doing it blindfolded. Rivers used the testing clacker to make sure they were functional. Rivers spoke as he worked.
“I was looking for Vladislav. I’d tracked him to the Boulder area. I knew he’d be dealing-- what else could he do? The Agency gave him a new identity, a new life, but people don’t change. Scum is scum. So I started working my way up from the bottom of the cesspool. I hit up dealers, showing them Vladislav’s picture, threatening them to give him up to me. It wasn’t working too well because they were more scared of Vladislav than they were of me. Plus, he provided their livelihood.
“Then the Barnes called me that night. Said Vladislav had just left. Said he was threatening to kill them. I headed over.”
“Why was he threatening to kill them?”
Rivers inserted a blasting cap into the top of one of the Claymores, screwing it down, like other people might work on a bottle of ketchup. “They owed him money for a drug shipment. Except they claimed they never got the drugs.”
Rachel Stevens’ gym bag, Chase thought. That’s what had started all of this. For Chase it had started two nights earlier when the Patriots had delivered the drugs to Vladislav and he’d been alerted to Wyoming.
“So you went over there and just shot them?”
“No. It was an ambush. The wife was waiting for me downstairs. She tried to get me off-guard with her feminine charms.”
Chase felt sorry for Trina Barnes. She’d probably used her body all her life with success to get men to do what she wanted. She just hadn’t known she was dealing with a single-minded psychopath when Rivers showed up at her door.
“When she realized I didn’t want her body or her blowjob or any of her, she drew down on me and I shot her. I heard the husband upstairs. He was with the kid, except I didn’t know there was a kid there. Like I said. Vladislav had been there not a half hour earlier. Working his magic on the kid to let them know he meant business about getting his money. The husband ambushed me in the kid’s room. Fucking scum. I heard the sirens and left out the back. Disappeared into the dark.”
“Why would they ambush you?” Chase was trying to keep up. “They called you to give up Vladislav.”
“No, they called me to give me up to Vladislav. If they didn’t have the cash, they must have figured they could use me as collateral. Vladislav knew I was looking for him. He had a bounty on my head. The Barnes must have hoped they could wipe out their debt with Vladislav and maybe even make some money by capturing or killing me and calling Vladislav back.”
Double-cross and triple-cross. It was life in the world Rivers had lived in for over thirty-five years. Chase thought of Tim Barnes asking Chase to shot him, saying he was responsible. Rivers had shot the kid accidentally, but it had been Barnes’ fault for hiding in that room behind the damn crib. At least he’d accepted that before he died. Except he hadn’t had the guts to shot himself. He’d wanted suicide by police.
Rivers had all four Claymores rigged. He held one up, looking at it almost wistfully. “One time in ‘Nam I saw an ARVN pull in his Claymore after we’d set up a night ambush that didn’t catch anything. Instead of disassembling the mine like he was supposed to, he simply rolled the wire around the mine; clacker still attached, and stick it in his ruck. A couple of minutes later he did a rucksack flop, which depressed the clacker, and the mine blew him into two pieces. The price of stupidity.”
Ah, the good old days of combat, Chase thought. He’d met many vets who would whisper over a couple of beers that whatever war they’d been in was the best time of their lives. When they’d felt the most alive. Chase didn’t feel that way, he realized with a start. He thought of his mother’s letter. Could a person have a new life if their old one was the wrong one?
The politicians and the CIA had ruined Rivers life for him. The wars his CIB indicated had to be three of the five most recent-- Vietnam, probably one of the Iraq invasions and Afghanistan. None of them particularly good wars. Afghanistan had been close with the connection to Bin Laden, 9-11 and the Taliban, Chase knew, having gone in with the first wave, but then it had gotten warped like everything else.
“What about the Patriots?” Chase asked.
“Vladislav used them too,” Rivers said. “They supplied him.”
“You dropped the dime on them that got that cop killed.”
“That was a shame,” Rivers allowed. “I didn’t think that would happen. Figured they’d get pulled over, picked up. I tracked them in Boulder, hoping they’d lead me to Vladislav, but they were good. They did a half-dozen dead drops and I didn’t know which one was the real one. I never got a line on the Russian. So when they left and headed back home, I called their plate in. Tried to at least bust that connection.” Rivers had all the Claymores ready. “Who do you think is running those guys from the shadows anyway?”
Chase thought of Cardena.
“The CIA runs the Patriots?”
Rivers shook his head. “Not run them. Influence and keep tabs on is better. There are always guys like the Patriots around. The CIA helps get those kinds of guys together. Organize them.”
“Why?”
“The enemy you know is better than the enemy you don’t know. Ever since Oklahoma City, everyone’s been trying to get a handle on these militia people. The CIA’s way is just sneakier and dirtier, as usual. They infiltrated and influenced the Patriots so they could keep a good eye on the organization and use it when they needed it. I wanted to help expose that. It’s wrong both ways. It’s wrong because it supports those assholes in the first place and it’s even wrong about the assholes because it’s setting them up. I don’t like it when bad guys break the law and I don’t like it when the supposed good guys break the law.”
It all made sense to Chase in a perverse way: after all, how had the Patriots and Vladislav managed to hook up in the first place? Dialed 1-800-DRUGS ARE US? There was probably at least one, if not more, person in the Patriots on the CIA’s payroll.
“What about York?”
“Who?”
“Jim York. The man who intercepted the drug courier to the Barnes. Did you pay him to do that to set the Barnes up?”
“I have no idea who you’re talking about.”
Chase saw no reason why Rivers would lie to him at this point. Had it all just been bad luck for Rachel? He’d thought that in the very beginning-- that Rachel Stevens had just run into the wrong person. Now it looked like that was true, but in a much more twisted way than he could ever have imagined.
Her death had trigged a landslide of events-- the Barnes not getting their product to sell. Then not having the money to pay Vladislav. The Russian then showing up and torturing their baby. The Barnes calling Rivers and trying to betray him to Vladislav but that going bad and Rivers taking out the family. And it looped back to Linda Watkins and her husband in that swingers club giving Rachel the product in the first place. And it was going to end tonight, here on this mountainside.
The tentacles the reached further out and further back to Afghanistan and Iraq and into the halls of the CIA and Gods know where else, Chase didn’t even want to dwell on right now.
“And the woman? Did you cut her throat?”
“What woman?”
“Rachel Stevens. She was the drug courier for Vladislav.”
“No.”
Chase knew it was time for him to go. “Can I have my weapons back?”
Rivers was no longer interested in him. “Get your stuff and get out of here.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Chase left Rivers’ camp in the same direction he’d arrived-- up slope and to the north and west. He walked until he went over the crest of James Peak, then he sat and waited for dark, before coming back over the mountain and settling down in his current position, which could overlook both Rivers’ campsite and the road.
Rivers was nowhere to be seen, but Chase knew he was down there waiting.
Vladislav arrived an hour after nightfall. His four-wheel drive Land Rover stopped about a half-mile from the East Portal. There wasn’t much illumination and Chase was glad he had the night scope he’d picked up from Thorne. Chase had tracked the headlights coming from over twenty miles away, far down the valley. He knew Rivers, two hundred feet below and a quarter mile south of Chase’s location, had also.
In the night scope, the headlights were like two huge searchlights and when they suddenly went off, Chase had to wait a second as the computer in the scope adjusted. The scene that reappeared was as if he was watching through a regular four-power scope in daytime, except everything was in shades of green and black.
Chase’s hands tightened around the stock of the M-21 as he saw that Vladislav had not come alone. Two other men got out of the Land Rover with him. Both had automatic weapons and they moved up the road warily, Vladislav following about fifty meters behind. Chase didn’t know how much the Russian was paying those two, but he couldn’t have paid Chase enough to take point into Rivers’ camp. Of course, Vladislav had probably lied to them, telling them it was an easy set-up or, more likely, they owed Vladislav big time. They were bait.
Chase squinted. The person on point was a big man with a bushy beard carrying an AK-47-- the Patriot who had finished off the deputy lying in the road. Cop-killer. Chase shifted to the second man. He couldn’t identify him, but he had little doubt he was the driver, the first shooter of the deputy. Vladislav would want men who had nothing left to loose, men who were facing the death penalty. So much for the Medicine Bow Mountains being sown up tight, Chase thought.
Chase watched them continue to move up the road as Vladislav slipped off among the pine trees and boulders on the uphill side. Chase caught his image intermittently among the rocks and trees. He moved stealthily, a bulky weapon in his hands. Chase recognized the silhouette-- an M-203. An M-16 with a 40mm grenade launcher attached below the barrel. Cardena had been right about the weapon of choice. A large canvas bag was slung over Vladislav’s non-firing shoulder.
The two killers on the road lengthened the distance between themselves and that saved the trail man’s life as the point man hit a Claymore’s tripwire. The wire popped the firing cap, which ignited the C-4, blasting seven hundred ball bearings in a waist-high swatch across the road. Steel hit flesh, parted it, ripped through bone. The sharp crack of the mine reached Chase’s ears as the two halves of the man’s body hit the dirt road, blood and viscera oozing into the ground. Chase felt a moment’s satisfaction.
The second man was frozen twenty meters behind the body. He yelled something, the sound very faint at this distance. There was no reply.
Chase checked for Vladislav, but he couldn’t see the Russian. Chase swung the rifle back to the road. The second man was moving forward, stepping very carefully. Vladislav must have promised him a hell of a lot of money or threatened to turn him in. The man passed his partner’s body, checking for another tripwire.
Rivers would have to clacker-detonate another Claymore to get the guy on the road or shoot him. Either of which would give his approximate location away. That was what Vladislav was hoping for.
Chase checked once more, but couldn’t find Vladislav among the boulders and scrub pine south of the road.
The man on the trail reached the campsite. He slowly turned in a circle and then called out.
His hands flew up to his neck. He staggered, then dropped to his knees. He fell forward and was still. Chase had heard no shot and seen no muzzle flash. What the hell had Rivers used?
Vladislav must have been worried about the same thing, because Chase heard a flat thumping noise that he immediately recognized-- the grenade launcher being fired. Four seconds later, the round went off in the vicinity of the camp in a blossom of flame. Even as the explosion echoed across the mountain, there was another thump.
This went on for a minute with over twenty 40mm grounds being fired, before Vladislav paused. The sounds of the last grenade resounded across the mountains and after the echoes faded, silence reigned. He’d peppered the area around the campground. Vladislav’s position had been secure because other than the sound, the launcher gave off no firing signature.
“Colonel Rivers!” Vladislav’s voice was surprisingly loud in the sudden stillness. “Come out, Colonel. Let us settle this like men.”
It was difficult to pinpoint where he was and Chase had no doubt the Russian had a big rock between him and the campsite. He could fire the M-203 over the boulder and continue to pepper the area with indirect fire as long as he had the rounds. Chase remembered the big bag he carried. He’d come prepared.
The thump of the grenade launcher began another round of firings. Chase counted twenty-one forty-millimeter rounds going off and he still had no idea where the Russian was firing from. Chase felt for Rivers, who might already be dead.
Silence once more.
“Colonel,” Vladislav’s voice was lilting, almost seductive.
“Colonel. Colonel Rivers. Come out. I give you my word that I will not shoot you like the dog you are. I will give you a chance. A small chance. But a better chance than hiding in the rocks, waiting the next grenade to kill you.”
Silence played out. Chase had the M-21 in his hands, his cheek resting against the wood stock. He could see his breath with each exhale. The night scope glowed green in his left eye. His hand was perfectly steady.
“Ah, Colonel! I know where you are. I was told about you. That you were a warrior. What kind of warrior you were.”
Thump.
The 40mm round went off right in front of the dark black mouth of the east portal. Three more rounds were fired, each one getting closer to the opening, until the last one hit just inside. Then silence.
“You can run down the tunnel, Colonel. You can run away. Or you can come out. And be a man.” There was a slight pause. “If you do not come out of that tunnel, I will have your brother’s family killed. His two pretty daughters. Their husbands. The four grandchildren. You know I will do that. I will end your bloodline’s presence on the face of this planet.
“You called me and said you wanted to end it. Then let us end it. Here. Now.”
Chase knew the man part wouldn’t work. What would work on Rivers, though, was reality. There was no doubt in Chase’s mind after listening to Cardena and seeing the DVD, that Vladislav would do what he threatened. Chase knew Rivers had seen the carnage in that village first-hand and probably much more of Vladislav’s handiwork.
A figure appeared in the tunnel, limping forward on the tracks. Rivers’ hands were empty and raised to his shoulders. Chase tensed, waiting for the shot that would kill the old colonel.
“Very good,” Vladislav called. “Very good. Come ten feet more and then remain still, keeping your hands up.”
Chase could see Rivers now. His stick-thin figure was slightly bent. Chase turned the focus on the night scope. There was something on Rivers’ back, not a pack but something. His body was between it and Vladislav, who had suddenly appeared fifty feet down the tracks, walking up the grade to the portal.