Escape from the Ashes

by William W. Johnstone

  Burkett chuckled. “Your shootin’ at it had nothing to do with whether you missed or not. It was the Stinger that didn’t miss.”

  “Yeah, well, whatever,” Doyle growled. “The point is, I hit the damn thing and it went down.”

  “I don’t see smoke,” Cain challenged.

  “It went down,” Doyle said. “Maybe it isn’t burnin’, but it went down. I saw it.”

  “Okay, maybe it did go down,” Cain said.

  “No maybe to it.”

  “If it went down, they’re all dead now, so why are we even bothering to look for it?” Cain asked.

  “Because I want to make certain that Ben Raines is dead.”

  “You know that there is a possibility that we will never find him, don’t you?” Cain suggested. “I mean, there are about a million square miles of nothing up here.”

  Doyle shook his head. “No, it didn’t just fall out of the sky. The pilot still had some control over it as it was going down. That means he tried to put it in the nearest open spot he could find.”

  “Open spot? Ha, what open spot?” Burkett asked with a little laugh. “There’s nothing here but mountains and trees.”

  “There’s Maligne Lake,” Doyle suggested. “And there’s a wide ledge alongside it, before it drops off. That’s probably where he tried to put it.”

  “Yeah, tried,” Burkett said. “That was a big airplane. You don’t just set a four-engine airplane down anywhere, you know.”

  “Don’t sell them short. These bush pilots are pretty damn good,” Doyle said begrudgingly. “If he tried to put it there, my guess is he did.”

  “Then you’re suggesting that Raines might still be alive?” Cain asked.

  “I’m saying there’s a chance he is. And I aim to make sure, one way or another.”

  “You know what we should’a done? We should’a killed the son of a bitch when we were down in Louisiana,” Burkett said.

  “Well, you may recall, there was an outside chance he would have been at the school. They say he goes there from time to time to speak to the kids,” Doyle said. “Too bad we didn’t catch him there.”

  “He wasn’t there,” Burkett said. “So we should’ve gone to look for him, and we should’ve killed him then.”

  Doyle shook his head no. “That’s been tried many times,” he said. “And it has failed every time. This has all been carefully thought out. Our entire purpose was to get him to come after us, up here, away from his base of support. And it worked.”

  “What do you mean it worked? You said yourself, he may not be dead,” Burkett said.

  “All right, let me put it this way. If he’s not dead yet, at least he’s on our turf. And here, on our own turf, it will be easier to handle him.”

  “I hope we find him dead in the crash,” Cain said. “Because if Raines is still alive, he’ll be wandering around out here full of piss an’ vinegar and rarin’ for a fight.”

  “Yeah, and not only that, there’s something else we may need to think about,” Burkett suggested.

  “What’s that?” Doyle asked.

  “That wasn’t some single-engine bush plane we shot down. That damn thing was an airliner. A plane that big means he probably had more people with him. Maybe even a platoon. And if he did, then there’s no way just the three of us can handle it.”

  Cain shook his head. “No, there wasn’t anybody else with him.”

  “How can we be so sure?” Burkett asked.

  “Because nobody else was listed on the flight plan.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I hacked into the Port Hardy computer and got their flight plan, remember? That’s how we knew when and where the airplane would be. Then I crashed their system so that their flight plan didn’t go out, which means nobody but us will be looking for them. Brilliant, don’t you think?”

  “Yeah, well, let’s not get carried away with the sheer artistry of it,” Doyle said.

  “I’m still not convinced there’s nobody else on the plane,” Burkett said. “Don’t forget, this is a bush operation. They don’t always do things by the book.”

  “I don’t believe he has anyone with him. But even if he does, and even if they are still alive, they are going to be hurt and disoriented from the crash,” Doyle insisted. “All we’d have to do is start shooting. We’ll kill them all before they realize what’s happening.”

  “Yeah,” Cain said. “It’ll be like shooting ducks in a barrel.”

  Burkett chuckled. “I’ve always heard that expression, shooting ducks in a barrel. I’ve never really known what it means.”

  “Well, if Raines has anyone with him, you are about to find out,” Doyle said.

  SIX

  The crash site

  Ben looked at the two men who had been flying the airplane. The two pilots were dead. He did not recognize either one of them, but maybe they were carrying some identification with them. If so, he could examine their billfolds and . . .

  “Son of a bitch! I can check my own billfold!” he said aloud.

  Why didn’t he think of that before? Surely he would be carrying some identification that would tell him who he was.

  Quickly, Ben took out his billfold and opened it. He was both frustrated and confused by what he saw. Except for the fact that it contained ten one-hundred-dollar bills, his billfold, which appeared to be brand-new, was empty.

  “What the hell?” Ben said aloud. He searched all the pockets and windows of the billfold, just to make certain he hadn’t overlooked anything. “Who would carry a thousand dollars in cash, but not one piece of identification?”

  The answer came to him almost as quickly as the question was formulated: someone who was on a covert mission, that’s who.

  Was he the kind of person who would undertake a covert mission? And if so, what was the mission?

  He wasn’t aware of any such personal connection. On the other hand, the explanation that a billfold would be empty because the carrier would not want his identity compromised seemed, somehow, very natural to him.

  Putting his billfold away, Ben decided to check out the billfolds of the other two men.

  The one who had called him Ben was Gerald Parker. Parker was carrying a Canadian driver’s license and a Canadian aviator’s certificate.

  “Canada? What the hell am I doing in Canada?” Ben asked aloud. “Am I Canadian?”

  Ben wasn’t sure, but he didn’t think he was Canadian. He just didn’t “feel” Canadian.

  There was also in the pilot’s billfold a picture of an attractive woman, holding a baby in her arms. A young boy, his big eyes staring intently at the camera, sat on the bench beside the woman. Seeing the woman and children, obviously Gerald’s family, caused Ben to have a twinge of sorrow. It was sad to think that they were home now, comfortable in the belief that their husband/father would be coming back to them.

  The other pilot’s name was Edgar Parker. Edgar didn’t have a family picture in his wallet, but he shared the same last name as Gerald. Were they brothers? Ben looked closely at the men and saw that there was indeed a strong resemblance between the two.

  Ben wasn’t sure what to do about the bodies. It didn’t seem right to just bury them here in the wilderness. On the other hand, he didn’t think it would be good to leave the two men out where the bears and other wild animals could disturb them. He needed to bury them, or at least cover them up enough to protect them from the wild animals.

  There was no shovel in the airplane, and no way he could dig a grave with his bare hands, so he did the next best thing. He dragged the two bodies over to a shallow depression that lay just before the edge of a steep drop-off. Putting them in the bottom of the depression, he began covering them with small to medium-sized rocks. It was a poor burial, but it would at least keep the animals away from them. Besides, this was only a temporary interment. Once he got out of here, he would inform the appropriate people where he had buried them.

  If he got out of here.

  No, he w
ouldn’t allow himself to think like that. There was no “if.” He was going to get out of here, even if he had to walk back to civilization. Wherever the hell civilization might be.

  When he was finished, Ben turned back toward the airplane. He was startled, and pleasantly surprised, to see three men approaching the plane. All three were wearing black uniforms of some sort, though the uniforms weren’t anything that he recognized.

  “Hello!” he called to them.

  “Son of a bitch! It’s him!” one of the three men shouted.

  Puzzled by the strange reaction, Ben stopped, then saw that all three were bringing their weapons to bear on him. They were going to shoot him!

  Ben didn’t know why they were angry with him, but he had no intention of hanging around to find out. Reacting quickly, almost instinctively, he ran to the other side of the depression he had just left, then launched his body into a dive over the precipice, even as the guns roared and the bullets whistled past him.

  When their target was no longer visible, the men stopped shooting. Even after they stopped, though, the sound continued for a few more seconds as the last few shots came echoing back to them.

  “Holy shit!” Cain shouted. “Did you see that?”

  “Yeah, I saw it. Headfirst on the rocks down there,” Burkett replied. He chuckled. “That has to hurt.”

  The three men raced to the edge of the precipice and looked down, expecting to see a body sprawled out on the rocks below.

  They saw nothing.

  “What the hell?” Doyle asked. “Where did he go?”

  Ben stood on a second protruding lip, just below the ledge that Doyle, Cain, and Burkett were examining, a lip that wasn’t visible from their position.

  There had been a plan behind Ben’s leap into space. While covering the two bodies with rocks, Ben had seen a small sapling growing out from the ledge. When he dived over the edge, he was actually leaping into the top of the sapling. His weight, and the velocity of his impact, bent the sapling all the way down over the edge. He had planned, somehow, to find a way to cling to the side of the mountain, but was pleasantly surprised to find that there was a second lip below the first ledge. Timing his release perfectly, and at the very bottom of the sapling’s flex, Ben let go, dropping no more than three feet onto the lower ledge.

  A small path, probably used by mountain goats, led along this ledge, then back up to the table alongside the lake. Ben followed the path back up to the plateau, where he entered the dark of the forest. He listened hard for any sounds of his attackers, but heard nothing.

  Why did they shoot at him? Did they feel threatened by him in some way? Or was their shooting at him a random act?

  No, it wasn’t random. He remembered now that the pilot had said the airplane had been brought down by a missile. And he distinctly heard one of them say, “Son of a bitch! It’s him!” as if they knew him.

  Why would they say that, unless they intended to shoot him personally? Were these the ones who’d fired the missile? They could have. He knew that there were small but deadly missiles that could be carried by a man and launched from the shoulder.

  How did he know that? Was he in the military? He looked down at himself. He didn’t seem to be wearing a uniform of any kind. On the other hand, the three men who had attacked him were wearing black uniforms with some sort of orange armband. What did that mean? Were they from some enemy nation?

  No, he believed it was more personal than that. He believed that they recognized him specifically. But what did they have against him?

  Despite the situation, Ben couldn’t help but smile. How would it be, he wondered, if he called a time-out? Yeah, that would be good. He could call a time-out, meet with them, ask them who they were and why they wanted to kill him.

  “Oh, and by the way,” he would add, “as long as we are at it, could you tell me just who the hell I am?”

  Then, when the time-out was over, they could both get back to the business at hand, them trying to kill him and him trying to stay alive.

  Ben chuckled at the scenario.

  Back at the crash site

  “You think he’s dead?” Burkett asked.

  “I don’t know,” Doyle replied. “I do know that he’s a slippery son of a bitch, so I’m not ready to count him out yet.”

  “Hell, you know he’s dead,” Burkett insisted. “It has to be five hundred feet or more to the bottom. And he went over headfirst.”

  “If it was anybody else, I would agree with you,” Doyle said. “But this is Ben Raines we are talking about, remember? He doesn’t kill easy.”

  “You know what I don’t understand,” Cain said.

  “What’s that?” Doyle asked.

  “The way he started toward us. He had a big shit-eating grin on his face, just like he was glad to see us.”

  “Yeah,” Burkett said. “I noticed that too. What do you suppose that was all about?”

  “I don’t have the slightest idea,” Doyle replied. “Unless he didn’t recognize us.”

  “How the hell could he not have recognized us?” Cain asked. “We’re the ones he came up here for.”

  “Well, not us specifically,” Doyle said. “He obviously knows that Die Kontrollgruppe had something to do with the school bombing and the bank robbery, or he wouldn’t have come up here. And he might even know our names, but I don’t think he would know us by sight.”

  “We’re wearing Die Kontrollgruppe uniforms,” Cain said. “He would recognize those.”

  “You would think so, but maybe the sun was in his eyes, or maybe he was still stunned from the crash. Whatever it is, he certainly recognized that he was in danger in time to run.”

  “So what do we do now?” Cain asked.

  “Let’s look through the plane, just to make certain nobody else is on board,” Doyle suggested.

  The three men, their weapons ready, walked back over to the plane.

  Doyle put his foot on the badly crumpled wing, then held his right arm up, making a muscle. “How about this, guys? If I was flying a fighter, I’d be an ace now for bringing this son of a bitch down.”

  “You have to shoot down five to be an ace,” Burkett said.

  “What?” Doyle asked, challenging Burkett. “Who the hell says so?”

  “I don’t know who says so,” Burkett replied. “But that’s the way it is. That’s the way it has been since World War One.”

  “Piss on World War One, that’s ancient history,” Doyle said. “If I say I’m an ace, who the hell is going to tell me I’m not? The bastards who were flying this wrinkled piece of shit?”

  Cain laughed. “Hell, Doyle, far as I’m concerned you’re an ace,” he said. Cain stepped through the door and looked inside the cabin.

  “Anybody else in there?” Doyle asked.

  “No,” Cain answered.

  “You sure? Look around.”

  “Hell, I can see there’s nobody in here,” Cain said. Seeing a newspaper, he picked it up. “Well, well, look at this,” he said.

  “Look at what?”

  Cain stepped back out of the plane and showed Doyle and Burkett the newspaper he had found.

  “We made front-page, above-the-fold news,” he said.

  The story he was pointing to had a thirty-six-point, bold headline.

  SIXTY-ONE KILLED IN SCHOOL BOMBING

  “Read it,” Doyle said.

  Cain cleared his throat, then began to read aloud:

  Fifty-three children and eight adults were killed Monday when a large bomb was detonated in the Ben Raines Middle School. Carefully planned, the bomb was positioned to inflict the maximum number of casualties—

  “Carefully planned,” Burkett interrupted. “I hope to tell you it was carefully planned. I studied the blueprints of that building for two weeks to find the best places to put the bomb.”

  “Anything else of interest?” Doyle asked.

  “Yeah, here’s another story,” Cain said. “It’s on the front page, but didn’t make it above the
fold.” He read aloud again.

  The Security Savings Bank was robbed Monday afternoon at one-thirty, resulting in the deaths of two bank employees at the hands of the robbers. The timing was particularly unfortunate because at the time of the robbery, all available police officers and firemen were working the bombing. As a result the robbers, believed to be members of an organization known as Die Kontrollgruppe, had unobstructed access to the bank, and got away cleanly.

  Final figures on the amount of money taken aren’t available at this time, as the bank is still conducting an audit.

  Cain looked up with a broad smile on his face. “You think they really are conducting an audit? Or do they just not want to admit that we hit them for over five million dollars?”

  “I can’t believe the dumb bastards haven’t put two and two together yet,” Burkett said.

  “You mean that we hit the school and the bank?” Doyle asked. “You better believe Raines has put it together. Why do you think he’s here?”

  “We got his attention, all right,” Burkett said. “And we probably got him killed when he dived over the edge like that.”

  “Maybe we did,” Doyle replied. “And, maybe we didn’t. All I know is, I wouldn’t want to be the one who told the Gruppe Kommandant that Raines is dead if the son of a bitch suddenly shows up alive later on.”

  “Yeah,” Cain said. “I see what you mean.”

  “I think he’s dead,” Burkett said.

  “Are you willing to put your ass on the line with the GK?” Doyle asked.

  Burkett thought for a moment, then shook his head. “No, not unless I’m sure.”

  “I think at this point our best bet is to treat it as if he’s still alive and out there somewhere,” Doyle suggested.

  “I’m going to take another look inside,” Cain said as he went back into the cabin. He saw a canvas bag.

  “I found something,” he called back.

  “What is it?”

  “I don’t know, a bag of some sort. Looks like an old military B-4 bag.”

  “Bring it out,” Doyle ordered.