by James Thayer
"And you didn't report this to your commander?"
Gray moved his head left and right, an almost imperceptible motion. "I didn't have the courage. I never learned who my victim was."
"Did Allen Berkowitz have the same trouble you had coping with this?"
"Berkowitz was killed by mortar fire two days after I left Vietnam." Gray continued with his dinner, chewing mechanically and tasting nothing.
"What happened after the accident?" she asked.
"The old-fashioned term for it is a mental breakdown. I had one. My captain found me sobbing, sitting on an upside-down bucket near the latrine. He hid me for several days, thinking I'd come out of it, but I didn't. So he drove me to the Fourth Marine Division Hospital at Phu Bai. They locked me up in a padded ward in a MUST. The kook cell."
"A must?"
"Medical Unit Self-Contained Transportable, a portable hospital that looks like an immense inflated tube."
"You attempted suicide?"
"I don't remember it very well because of the medication the doctors were giving me at the division hospital. I took a couple of stabs at my wrist with a scalpel I stole from a surgery cart."
Adrian reached for his left wrist. She pushed back his sleeve. Pink scars were only slightly visible on the underside of his wrist. She said, "These don't look too bad."
"After I got to New York, I had a plastic surgeon work on the wrist. So now I can pass it off as a childhood accident with a pop bottle."
She looked at his other arm. "You only took the scalpel to one wrist?"
"It hurt too much." He smiled weakly. "I quit after the first wrist."
"What about the scar on your neck Pete Coates talks about. Let me see it."
He pulled down the neck of his sweatshirt.
She said, "It looks like an egg fried over easy."
"The plastic surgeon worked on this, too. You should see the 'before' pictures."
"Any more scars?"
"Couple puncture scars on my arms and legs that don't amount to anything. And I clipped the side of my foot with a .22 bullet when I was seven years old." He tried to generate a waggish tone, but his voice wasn't cooperating. "I still wear a crease of red skin there. Want to see it?"
"I think I'll pass." She finished her wine.
He said, "You are the second person I've ever mentioned the ninety-seventh kill to. You and Mrs. Orlando. You've hypnotized me somehow."
"You didn't tell your ex-wife?"
"Cathryn couldn't handle ninety-six. No sense telling her about the last one."
"Why did she marry you if she couldn't reconcile you with your past?"
Gray spread his hands. "I lied to her about it. At first I told her I was an infantryman in Vietnam and only saw a little action, nothing much."
"When did you tell her you were a sniper?"
"Two years into our marriage I figured Cathryn knew me well enough—knew my good qualities, knew that I wasn't crazy, knew that it was behind me—that she could handle the news."
"But she couldn't."
Gray exhaled slowly. "She couldn't come to grips with me peering through a scope at ninety-six human beings and pulling the trigger. I argued. Christ, I argued. A war was on. They were the enemy. I was doing my duty. Made no difference to her." Gray wet his lower lip with his tongue. "I'm not sure I blame her. It's a hard number, ninety-six. Tough to push it around and come up with anything redeeming. It hit her hard, I guess." Gray paused, then decided to risk the confidence. "We never made love again, not once, after she learned I was a sniper."
"Have you come to grips with it?"
"The first ninety-six, yes. But the last one—the American I left dead in the Vietnam bush, and forever left his family wondering—is something . . ." Gray hesitated and again looked at Adrian Wade. He measured his words. "It's an inescapable pit of agony for me. That terrible moment is always present, every hour of the day and many hours of the night. You'd think a tough ex-Marine and federal prosecutor like me would be able to deal with it, but I never have. I make do, with my kids, with my job." His voice was barely audible. "But I know now that number ninety-seven is never going to go away."
They stared into the fire for a few moments. The fury of it had abated and now the flames leisurely worked on the blackened logs. Embers glowed at the base of the fire. Smoke twisted and rose up the chimney.
She gently patted his arm. "I'm going to turn in. You'll talk about this more tomorrow, won't you? You won't clam up?"
"Feel free to interrogate me further. It's your job, after all."
She smiled good night at him. She put her plate in the kitchen on her way to his parents' room, where he had made the bed earlier in the day. She closed the door behind her.
Owen Gray sat on the couch another two hours, utterly still, gazing at the fire. When he rose to go to his bedroom only blood-red embers remained.
"Are you on the run?" Andy Ellison asked, bringing his cup of chamomile tea to his lips. The hands shook uncontrollably, and the tea splashed over the cup's sides. His voice was as steady as he could make it but still sounded like he was entering puberty. The rush of confidence he had felt on learning this man was not a DEA agent had quickly evaporated.
"On the run?"
"A fugitive?" Ellison had quickly determined that the stranger knew no colloquialisms or slang, even the most common phrases. The foreigner had learned English from a book, probably an old book.
"Yes."
Ellison sipped the tea, wishing he could control his hands. He was terrified of this big man with the dent in his head and the bony face. The man's eyes were curiously flat, and they seemed to look through things rather than at them. His large nylon bag was on the floor near his feet.
"Who is looking for you?"
"U.S. Immigration Service."
"They want to send you back? To where?"
"To Russia." The big man plunged a cleaning rod into the barrel of the Mosin-Nagant rifle. A scope was mounted on the rifle.
"You handle that weapon like you know what you are doing." Ellison was determined to get this man to like him and therefore spare him.
The Russian said nothing, working the rod in and out. Half of the items in the farmhouse would have been recognized by the homesteader who built the place a hundred years before— the pine table and primitive chairs, the rocking chair, the washstand, a hurricane lamp, the glass doorknobs, and the lacy curtains. The homesteader would have been clueless about Ellison's additions—the poster of John Lennon, a wood tie-dye frame, a glass and brass hookah, a boom box near a rack of Grateful Dead and Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin CDs, a well-thumbed 1969 Volkswagen van repair manual, an incense bowl, and a bead curtain that hung in the door to the kitchen.
The Russian abruptly asked, "Have you ever been in prison?"
Ellison hesitated, wondering if he was being asked to incriminate himself. Then he said, "Yes."
Trusov wrapped a new patch around the tip of the cleaning rod and reinserted the rod into the barrel. "In the United States?"
"Yes, in California and Washington State."
"The prisons here are . . . " Trusov paused, apparently searching for the word. "Are fun."
Ellison was affronted. "Fun?"
"Not like in Russia."
"It was hardly fun," Ellison said petulantly. "And for what? I was just trying to make a living. I'm never going back to prison." He decided the huge stranger probably didn't want to hear any more whining, so he asked, "What were you in for?"
No answer, so Ellison tried, "Why were you sent to prison?"
"I wounded a Red Army officer."
"Accidentally?"
Trusov's mouth cranked up into what might have been a grin. "No." Then he returned his gaze to the window or perhaps he was staring at the blank wall above the window. After a moment he said, "I was in the army's First Military District Prison. It was called"—he glanced at Ellison as if for help with the language, then he tried —"Boulderhouse?"
"Probably stonehouse.
That's more poetic."
"Stonehouse, because its walls are made of a stone and concrete mix. It's near Podolsk, forty kilometers south of Moscow. The comforts of American prisons are not at the Stonehouse."
"Sounds like you did hard time."
"Twenty percent of Stonehouse inmates die each year. Some freeze. Some starve. Some kill themselves. Some just show up missing on the prison's papers."
"The prison's records," Ellison helped.
Trusov nodded. "Every day we would march out chained together for road work. Sometimes the snow on the sides of the road was over our heads. Sometimes ice would form on our faces and beards as we worked. If a prisoner fell, he was left on the road until night, when a truck would pick him up, pick the body up."
Ellison nodded, taking more tea. The Russian's hands were busy with his weapon, but he continued to stare at the wall.
"The cell . . . the alone cell."
"Solitary confinement."
"It was ten meters below ground, a three-meter-by-three-meter hole. No light. No toilet. No clothes."
"They took your clothes away in solitary?"
"First they beat you, then they take your clothes away." Trusov turned away from the wall to pull back his right cheek with a finger. His upper molars were missing. "A rifle butt."
"Is that also how you got that crease on your head?"
Trusov turned back to the window. "I was in the Stonehouse eight years, and I spent over five hundred days in that cell, two hundred of those days for my walk to Riga."
"You escaped?"
Trusov nodded. "I ran from the work line, ran across a field, the guards shooting, but they were poor shots, like most soldiers everywhere. I walked eight hundred kilometers west, with no papers or money, and only my prison clothes."
"But you were recaptured?
"The Riga KGB. I don't know how they found me, but they took me back. When my time was over, I was given a new suit of clothes and two hundred rubles, and I walked out the Stone-house's gate. I weighed seventy kilograms."
Ellison's eyes widened. Like all folks in his business he was good at metric conversions. "You weighed a hundred and fifty-five pounds?" The Russian appeared to now weigh close to two-twenty, all muscle and bone. He had indeed served hard time.
"You hungry?" Ellison asked.
"I was always hungry."
"I mean now. I've got dinner on the stove. There's enough for two." He pushed aside strings of beads and disappeared into the kitchen. He returned with two soup bowls, spoons, and a loaf of bread.
Trusov carefully placed the rifle across the table to accept the bowl. He dug into it with a spoon, turning the steaming contents over. Finally he asked, "Where's the meat?"
With proud defiance Ellison replied, "I don't eat meat."
"What is this?"
"Rice and beans and corn in a tomato base. Some oregano and garlic."
Trusov ate several spoonfuls, then pronounced, "You are a hippie."
Ellison beamed. "Yes, yes I am. How do you know about hippies?"
"I read about them in Red Army school at Rostok, a political class, a class about America. But I thought all hippies were gone many years ago."
"Not many of us are still around," Ellison conceded. "Only the strong of heart and the pure of purpose."
The Russian tore off a hunk of the bread and used it to ladle the soup into his mouth.
Ellison asked tentatively, "Why are the U.S. Immigration authorities looking for you?"
"After my release from the Stonehouse, I was not supposed to leave the First Military District. A condition of my release. But I did. I came here. Now the Red Army has asked the U.S. police to look for me."
That made sense to Ellison, except for one thing. "Why did you come to the U.S.?"
The Russian chewed. "I need to stay here tonight. I will go in the morning."
"Sure," Ellison said quickly. He wasn't going to press this man for answers. But he was emboldened by the man's statement that he was journeying on after a night's sleep. His hands were calming. After several more spoonfuls of soup Ellison ventured, "Can I ask, where are you going?"
"To your state of Idaho. I'm meeting someone in Idaho."
"Three minutes," the pilot called over his shoulder. Bruce Taylor had flown for the U. S. Army for eight years until joining the FBI. He wore a holster strapped to the leg of his blue flight suit. He scanned his gauges, then ordered loudly, "Check your safety harnesses."
"You ever done this before?" shouted the FBI agent next to Coates.
"All the time."
"You don't look too comfortable in that flak jacket."
Coates yelled above the scream of the General Electric free-turbine engines, "Don't worry about me, sonny. I'll do fine. That son of a bitch'll regret the day he came here."
The agent grinned. "The Russian's got your goat, sounds like."
"Something like that." Coates pulled his service pistol from under the jacket. He checked the load.
"Why don't you trade in that nosepicker for some pop." The agent's name was Ray Rafferty. He held up his assault rifle. "With this you just point and spray."
Coates shook his head. It was hard to think in the belly of the Sikorsky Black Hawk. The engines roared and the blades pounded and the wind whipped by. The helicopter rose and fell with sickening abruptness as the pilot followed the terrain. Coates and three FBI agents sat in the waist. The agents wore bush coats over their Kevlar vests, and "FBI" was inked on the back of the coats, hardly noticeable amid the green and brown camouflage colors. Their faces were blackened. Coates had been so awkward applying the grease paint Rafferty had finished the job for him. Between the agents' knees rested their M16s. At the rear of the compartment were two litters. They were approaching the farmhouse at 150 miles an hour.
Across from Coates was an agent named Buddy Riggs who had earlier told the detective he had earned a business degree and had become a certified public accountant, but after two years found the profession was "not meeting my needs for personal growth," so he had joined the Navy and had become a SEAL, then had gone on to the FBI. Riggs was missing an eyebrow, and it looked as if it had been burned off. Coates hadn't asked him about it. Next to Riggs was John Ward, a blunt-nosed special agent Rafferty had said could do six hundred push-ups.
Rafferty and Riggs and Ward were members of an FBI organization called Inter-Agency SWAT. These men were often called to assist sheriffs' departments and police forces who abruptly found themselves over their heads.
This helicopter was one prong of a three-way deployment. The Black Hawk was going to land a mile north of the farmhouse in a clearing that was close enough to the farm to walk in but far enough away so the Russian would not hear the approach. Another copter was landing two miles south of the farmhouse in a field. Yet more agents and police were hiking in from the highway and the dirt road. They would have the Russian surrounded.
"Here we go," yelled the pilot.
The helicopter sank and Coates's belly rose in his throat. The pink sky of dawn was visible through the portholes in the fuselage. Then the view turned dark green as the Black Hawk dipped into the trees. Dust and leaves blew up and the blades gained an even deeper throb. The pilot was skilled, and Coates did not know the helicopter was on the ground until Reardon slid open the hatch.
The detective popped open his harness and crouched low to approach the pilot. He tapped the pilot on the shoulder. "Keep your engines idling." He touched the radio in his pocket. "We may have to call you in."
The pilot nodded.
Coates dropped through the hatch to the ground. He squinted against the swirling dust. The turbines still shrieked. The FBI team waited for Coates to lead off. This was his show. The detective crouched low under the spinning blades even though they cleared his head by eight feet.
"You ready, boys?"
Rafferty gave the stock of his assault rifle an affectionate squeeze. "We're always ready."
The detective brought up his wristwatch. "The fa
rmhouse is a mile south. We've got eighteen minutes to get there. It's broken ground but fairly open. Let's go."
Coates led them away, the FBI agents running like infantrymen, their weapons across their chests, while Coates stumbled ahead, unused to traversing ground that wasn't paved. The sun had just begun its climb in the east.
The pilot watched them go. The detective and the agents crossed the meadow single-file, heading for the trees. Special Agent Ward brought up the rear, occasionally glancing back at the helicopter, checking the avenue of retreat in the best infantry-school fashion.
Dust blown up from the blades had coated the inside of the copter's windscreen. Taylor kept a soft cloth at his feet. He swatted the rag against the glass, brushing away the dust.
Just as the pilot's eyes refocused through the windshield, a red halo abruptly formed around Ward's head. Mist and light swirled and flickered. Ward crumpled to the ground and was still.
The pilot squinted. The distance and the sun reflecting off his windshield made Taylor unsure what he had just seen. All he could hear was the Black Hawk's turbines.
The three men ahead—ducks in a row—were unaware Ward had fallen. They had apparently heard nothing. They continued to cross the field to the pines. With Ward down, the last man in the single file was now Buddy Riggs. The pilot saw Riggs's head blur red. Riggs fell.
Coates and Rafferty marched ahead, the detective in the lead. They were almost to the trees.
The pilot leaned out the hatch to scream a warning, but the sound was lost in the noise of the turbines.
Then Ray Rafferty's head flew apart and he collapsed onto the cheat-grass. The three shots had taken less than ten seconds.
Panting and oblivious, Coates reached the trees. He glanced at his watch, then lifted a compass from a pocket. "Due south. We've got a lot of time." He turned around to confer with the team.
And only then did he see the horror, all three down and bloodied, a ghastly trail of bodies.
Coates dropped to the ground before he fully understood what had happened. His instinct saved his life, as the fourth bullet, the one intended for him, smacked into a lodgepole pine near where his head had been an instant before. Coates crawled behind a tree.