White Star

by James Thayer

  Elsa asked sweetly, "Might he like my other sandwich, too?"

  The agent growled, "Goddamn worthless cur." He yanked on the leash. "Get back to work, Dooley."

  The dog began his sniffing again, looking back over its shoulder several times at Elsa. The girls laughed and laughed. When the search was done, the dog handler exited the bus, the back of his neck still red as paint.

  Six miles northwest of the bus, high in the Sawtooths, Glen Reeves and Bob Valiquette hiked along a trail toward the base of Mount Ash where they were going to climb a crag known as Ben's Throne, a 5.11 bolted, four-pitch climb that would take them all day and would leave them twitching and stumbling and delighted as they returned at sunset to their car parked on a logging road below.

  Reeves and Valiquette were laden with ropes, harnesses, cams, holds, chalk bags, and lunch. They were bringing many runners rather than quickdraws for the crux pitch. A tough semi-hanging belay was near the Throne's roof. Stunning views awaited them on top.

  They climbed the steep hill of loose stones at the base of the crag, then slipped off their packs to ready themselves for the assault. They donned their climbing slippers and harnesses, then hung their gear on the belts' fixed racking loops. Their climb—the vertical pocked and cracked five-hundred-foot-high face—was two-thirds up Ash Mountain. Below them was a deep valley falling away to a narrow line of aspen at the valley's seam. Then the terrain rose again to ragged granite ridges two miles across from them.

  Valiquette dusted his hands with chalk. "Know how I know I'm getting old, Glen?"

  "New wrinkles around your eyes?"

  "That, too. But mostly it's that I increasingly prefer the safety of a bolt at my feet."

  Reeves rechecked his harness buckles. "What's the farthest you've ever fallen?"

  "You were there. Seventy feet."

  "That's right, on Mount Borah. You fell so far I couldn't see you." Reeves laughed. "I couldn't tell if you'd tumbled into the dihedral to our right or had simply fallen free."

  Valiquette was going to take the lead, and Reeves would be second. Just as Valiquette reached for his first hold and slipped his rubber-covered foot into a crack, a deep fluttering sound poured into the valley, an extraordinarily foreign noise.

  Both climbers instinctively ducked. Any strange noise was at first thought to be something falling toward them. A fist-sized rock would sound like a man screaming as it rocketed past them to the floor. But nothing fell.

  An ugly metallic nose edged around the face's vertical horizon, a frightening piece of brown machinery suspended in the fine air.

  "A helicopter!" Valiquette exclaimed. "What the hell is it doing so close?"

  "Bastard," Reeves said, prepared to ignore it. "Some rich Californians looking for vacation property. A Ketchum realtor probably hired the helicopter to impress them. They do it all the time. Let's go."

  Valiquette turned to face the copter. "That's no charter helicopter. Take a look."

  The machine closed on the climbers, nearer and nearer, blowing up dust from the scree.

  "You were in the army," Valiquette said nervously. "What is that?"

  Reeves licked his lips. "It's a Huey Cobra."

  "Jesus, what're those tubes with the openings?"

  "It's a 40-millimeter grenade launcher with 300 bombs."

  "And the thing under its snout?"

  "A 30-millimeter chain gun that fires something like a million rounds a minute."

  "All for us?" Valiquette asked.

  The helicopter drifted closer, its blades beating the air and the turbine engines howling. Sun reflected off the windshield, hiding the pilot. A loudspeaker attached to its nose crackled out with "Please turn fully to the helicopter and present your driver's licenses or other identification."

  Reeves quickly pulled his cloth wallet from his pack. His finger trembling, he opened it to find his Idaho driver's license. He held it up to the copter. "Do you think this is the Forest Service, and they're checking permits?"

  "The Forest Service using Huey Cobras?"

  "I wouldn't put it past them."

  Both climbers stood motionless, their licenses in front of them. They did not know that a Nikon TRL camera attached to the fuselage next to the loudspeaker was taking a photograph of them and the licenses.

  The loudspeaker squawked again, "Thank you."

  The turbines wound up. The Huey lifted away from the mountainside, bringing its tail rotor around and yawing downhill. The helicopter raced to the valley floor, low enough to blow up a trailing cloud of dirt all the way, then disappeared downstream just above the treetops.

  The climbers turned back to the granite and lichen face, and for much of the ascent they cursed the newly officious and newly high-tech United States Forest Service.

  Down in Hobart, Ray Miller sadly shook his head. "I'm sorry, miss. I don't have the work."

  "I've been a short order cook on and off for ten years," the woman argued. "All I need is a week's employment. I work hard and I don't steal."

  "I don't doubt anything you say," the Right to Keep and Bear Arms Saloon owner said. "But take a look around. It's lunchtime, but you and I are the only people in the place. I can hear my echo in here."

  The woman had walked into the saloon a few minutes before. She was in her late thirties. Her brown hair had a badger's streak of gray and was loose down her back, and a length of rawhide and ribbon was tied into it. She wore no eye shadow or lipstick. The bridge of her granny glasses had been mended with a small piece of duct tape. Her yellow and white print blouse was tucked in at her waist. A belt of braided cloth held up her jeans. Her old back-pack had a grease stain along a side. Miller guessed she dressed like a hippie to hide her poverty.

  "What's your name, young lady?" he asked. He had been standing behind the bar doing his paperwork. A hand-held calculator, a corporate checkbook, and a sheaf of bills were in front of him.

  "Susan."

  "Where you coming from, Susan?"

  "Calgary. My husband left there three months ago, gone to Texas to look for work in the oil fields. I'm on my way to join him. But he couldn't send me any money."

  "You hitchhiking?"

  "Yeah." She brushed her hair back with a hand. "You wouldn't believe the crap I have to put up with, guys picking me up in their pickups and semis."

  "How about a chili potato on the house? I make the chili from scratch, and I dump it into a baked potato and grate cheese over it."

  She grinned gratefully, then slipped off her backpack and put it at her feet. She slid onto a stool.

  Miller wrapped an apron around his waist. "I like to think my potatoes are famous, but I serve less than thirty meals a week. I cook and wait tables, and then I bus and clean the plates. I wish I could offer you a job."

  "I understand."

  "I used to make a pretty good living," Miller added. "But the town has dried up and is on the verge of blowing away."

  "Don't apologize." She smiled warmly. "I understand."

  The Right's door swung in and four men entered single file. They had the look of tough accountants, which meant they were FBI agents. They were all in slacks and windbreakers. They took chairs together at a round table under an elk head. The first to take his seat lifted the menu which was encased in an upright plastic stand.

  Ray Miller said to the hitchhiker, "I'll get these guys' order and be right back to start on your potato, Susan."

  As Miller rounded the bar to wait on the table, five more men and two women entered the saloon. All wore Idaho State Patrol uniforms. They took the table near the stuffed Chinese pheasant.

  Miller nodded at the State Patrol officers as he walked to the table of FBI agents. "May I help you? I recommend the potatoes."

  Before any of the agents could answer, the door opened again. This time two men in sports coats entered. Miller did not know it, but they were Boise plainclothes policemen. Before the door pulled itself closed, in came five more state patrolmen, then three Idaho National Guardsmen
in summer field uniforms.

  His pen poised over the pad, Miller asked the FBI agents, "You fellows looking for that Russian that Chief Durant told me about?"

  "That's right." The agent had a preacher's quick, confiding smile.

  "Lots of you folks coming to Hobart?"

  "Lots."

  "How many?"

  The agent asked, "What's an Oinker Potato?"

  "Strips of crisp bacon and chunks of tomato over melted cheddar cheese."

  "I'll have one of them."

  The door swung open again. A man and a woman entered wearing uniforms Miller did not recognize. He squinted at their arm insignia. Coeur d'Alene police.

  Miller tried again. "You could do me a big favor helping me plan my kitchen by letting me know how many of you are in town."

  "Couple hundred."

  "Going to be here for long?"

  "Four, five days, a week. Who knows? And a Diet Pepsi."

  "I'll be right back," the saloon owner blurted. He hurried to the bar, weaving between the full tables. He rushed to the stool where the hitchhiker Susan had been sitting. It was empty.

  "Gone," Miller breathed miserably. "Goddamnit."

  But she was still in the saloon. Wearing an apron she had found on a hook on the cooler door, she was behind the bar, bent over the ice machine, ladling ice into glasses. She put one under the Diet Pepsi spigot.

  She smiled again at Miller. "I take it I have a week's work."

  "Looks like it'll be a long, long week. Make both of us some money."

  He scurried back to the FBI agents, still smiling.

  So it was that Hobart and environs came to groan under the weight of law personnel. They emptied the Big Wood Grocery Store, bought all the gas at the Sinclair station, filled the Hobart Motel, and cleaned out Bud's Drug of candy bars and newspapers. But Ray Miller never ran out of potatoes, because if there is one thing Idaho has, it's potatoes, and as the state's license plate will testify, they are famous. The law officers and soldiers filled the streets with their vehicles, jammed the telephone lines, stood on the corners, swaggered and smiled, and added a sense of wonder and purpose to the lives of Hobart citizens.

  Owen Gray lay on his belly, the M-40A1 Marine Corps sniper rifle in front of him. His left hand was forward, with the palm against the stock ferrule swivel and the sling high on his arm. His wrist was straight and gently locked so the rifle rested on the heel of the hand. The fingers cupped the stock but did not grip it. His left elbow was under the rifle's receiver. The bones, not his muscles, supported the rifle. The wood butt was firmly in the pocket of his right shoulder. His right hand was wrapped around the checkered stock with the thumb extended over the narrow portion of the stock. Gray's left elbow was the pivot to move the barrel. His shoulders were level. His trigger finger lay alongside the guard.

  The barrel was free-floated, meaning that it was secured to the chamber but did not touch the stock. The gap between the stock and barrel was the thickness of a dollar bill, and this clearance prevented the stock from distorting the barrel from one shot to the next. The barrel was heavier than on most other rifles, and this distributed heat from the powder discharge more evenly, reducing warpage. Near his elbow was a box of match ammunition, so called because each bullet in the same box and each box in the same case had the identical serial number, indicating the bullets had been manufactured with the same batch of gunpowder on the same day, thereby eliminating the vagaries in powder that might randomly change muzzle velocity.

  He peered over the scope. Shepherd's Bowl was spread out before him. The bowl was misnamed, and was in fact a U-shaped valley. Fed by a small spring, Black Bear Creek originated in the valley and exited at the eastern end to wander two miles to the Gray ranch and then on to join the Big Wood River. Shepherd's Bowl was so named because a Basque shepherd— one of many who had come to Idaho in the early years—tried to raise sheep in the valley, had lasted one bitter winter, and had retreated with far fewer sheep than he had arrived with.

  Gray was three-quarters up the north side of the bowl. The area was two miles long, running west–east, and a mile and a half across. The valley's center was thick with trees and undergrowth, particularly dense where Black Bear Creek formed itself and dribbled out of the valley. The creek was only a foot across at the mouth of the valley, but it provided water for hundreds of mature trees that trailed like a snake along the bottom of the valley. Also along the valley floor were a dozen patches of wild grass, each a half acre to an acre. These swaths of grass had convinced the poor shepherd he might be able to graze his flock in Shepherd's Bowl. The small meadows were covered with red-top grass, wild oats, rattlesnake grass, fireweed, and cheat grass, most growing to the height of a man's waist, with the fireweed protruding a foot or two from the soft blanket of weeds. The slightest wind pushed waves into the grasses. At this time of year the grass was yellow and dry.

  Gray's hide was a small protrusion on the north slope, a cleft in the incline formed by stones and dirt sliding down the grade and building up behind a boulder over the centuries. The ledge was just large enough to lie on. By taking an indirect route, ducking through bushes and taking advantage of a few sparse trees on the north slope, it was possible to climb to the ledge without being seen from anywhere else in the bowl, but it took care and skill. Other distortions in the half-cone of the bowl's north side included more boulders, some with dogbane growing around them, banks of yellow-blooming Scotch broom, a few stunted lodgepole pines, and clusters of rolling brittle tumbleweed blown against outcroppings, but most of the north slope was open and clear. It curved around like the stands of a football stadium.

  High on the bowl's north side at about Owen Gray's ledge the grade increased. He glanced over his shoulder at the surface that rose like a wave behind him. Here stones lay on each other, not cemented by soil but loose enough to sink or roll away under a footstep. Reflected sunlight flickered from quartz flakes in the granite stones. Occasional blades of cheat grass grew in the rubble. Papery yellow and red lichen topped many of the rocks. A few sego lilies dotted the scree, their blossoms resembling white butterflies. But these few living things did little to change the arid, tumbly, sun-baked nature of the north slope.

  Gray looked back over the rifle to the other side of the bowl. The south side was hidden in shadows much of a summer day and all of winter, and was forested with pine and aspen and other trees. Gaps in the tree cover revealed green and flowering underbrush. So different were they that the north and south sides of Shepherd's Bowl could have been on different continents. Behind the bowl, jagged peaks were limned against the diamond-blue sky.

  He lowered himself over the rifle's butt, stock, and grip, which snipers call the furniture. Gray checked himself again. His right cheek and right thumb—curled over the small of the stock—formed a spot weld. He could not feel where his body ended and the rifle began. This firm weld would allow Gray's head, hand, and rifle to absorb recoil as one unit. He brought his eye to a position behind the lens's eyepiece, sighting on a low knot in a pine near the valley's mouth. He kept his eye back from the lens to protect it from recoil. Too close, and the scope would cut a bloody circle to the bone around the eye. When he took a deep breath, the crosshairs moved down straight through the center of the target, indicating he was well balanced over the rifle.

  Gray had always credited a rifle scope with magical qualities. He well understood the optics. He knew the objective lens at the front of the scope produced an upside-down and backward image of the target. In the middle of the scope, the erector lens magnified the image and returned it to its correct position. The eyepiece lens then magnified the image further. He knew that while the average eye can distinguish a one-inch detail at a hundred yards, a one-sixth-inch detail could be seen with a 6X scope. An object viewed from six hundred yards through a 6X telescope will have the same clarity as if viewed by the unaided eye from a hundred yards. He knew that the magnesium fluoride coating on his lens increased transmission of light from abou
t 45 percent to 86 percent. No sorcery in any of this.

  But those same optics that magnified the view and flattened the perspective also flensed away humanity. In Vietnam when Gray peered through a scope, the image quartered by the cross-hairs was not a human but a target, nothing but a mathematical problem of windage and velocity and direction. The scope had a marvelous ability to eliminate sloppy moral issues and extraneous questions of commitment to the cause. If it appeared through the scope, Gray could kill it.

  The scope's magic survived time and tragedies, it seemed. He had accepted the rifle with stomach-churning trepidation, but even after the decades he had felt its supernatural power of simplification on the Brooklyn roof as he found the target. Once his eye was on the crosshairs he was ready in all respects to pull the trigger. The ghastly outcome—the death of Mrs. Orlando—had sickened him, had left him exhausted with grief. Yet here he was on a perch high in a mountain bowl ready again to pull the trigger, as long as all the world's complexities were filtered out by the rifle scope.

  He lifted his head to avoid eyestrain. At the mouth of the valley, several low branches of a dogwood were rattling, whipping left and right. The only animals that would make such a commotion were a bear using the tree to scratch its back or an elk or moose trying to rid its horn of felt. Gray sighted in on the dogwood, not intending to pull the trigger, but saving himself from reaching for his binoculars. He narrowed his eye slightly. The rifle was dead calm in his hands, so still that a bead of mercury placed precisely on top of the barrel would have remained there.

  Adrian Wade's face popped into the crosshairs, her eyes like flares in the scope. She had emerged suddenly from under the tree, but now caught her jacket on a branch. She yanked on it and finally freed herself.

  Gray jerked his eye up from the scope.

  He pivoted the weapon aside. He found her with his unaided eye. Her red coat and black hair stood out like a sailor's emergency dye on a calm sea. He brought up the binoculars. She was scanning the bowl, moving her head randomly, an amateur's visual search that would miss him entirely. He stood, removed his coat, and waved it back and forth until she started in his direction. She crossed a wide clump of purple heather and ducked through a barricade of Scotch broom. She climbed the slope, coming at him from the southeast, gaining elevation as she hiked deeper into the valley.