Chesterfield's eyes had gone wide. With facial tics as subtle as a baseball bat to the back of the head, he tried to warn the lieutenant not to speak in front of Remo. The officer didn't get the hint.
"You think he killed them?" Remo asked, surprised.
"It wouldn't be his first, sir," the lieutenant replied.
Remo wheeled on Chesterfield.
Chesterfield's face froze mid-tic. He pretended it was an itch. He scratched at it with his riding crop.
"How many has he killed so far?" Remo demanded.
"Ohh, let's see now...."
The lieutenant answered for his commander. "Eight MPs confirmed, two now suspected." Chesterfield started to signal anew.
"He's killed ten MPs?" Remo asked, stunned.
"And a dozen civilians," the lieutenant offered.
Chesterfield gave up trying to signal altogether. "Lieutenant!" the general interjected.
The younger man snapped away from Remo. "Sir!"
"I'm sure you didn't join this man's Army to chatter away like a member of my dear sweet departed mother's quilting circle, God rest her soul," Chesterfield menaced.
"Sir, no, sir!"
"Then kindly stow the hearsay until we've got some damn solid facts!" The general screamed so loudly his beefy head looked ready to explode like a tomato with a firecracker packed inside.
"Yes, sir!" the lieutenant shouted back.
"Why hasn't this made national news?" Remo asked, baffled. He spoke more to himself than to the others.
"We've been keeping a lid on things so far," Chesterfield offered. "Don't want to alarm the populace."
"What about warning them that a maniac is on the loose?" Remo commented, annoyed. "Who is this guy? Has he had some kind of special training or something?"
"That is Army business," Chesterfield announced in a superior tone. He wheeled his great girth to the lieutenant. "Ready my chopper. I want everything we've got thrown at him. Is that understood?"
"Yes, sir!" The man spun to go.
"Wait a minute," Remo said, grabbing the lieutenant by the arm. "You're doing all this for one man?" he asked Chesterfield, his voice betraying his complete bewilderment.
"One Army man, yes," Chesterfield replied impatiently.
"As opposed to one Spider man," Remo said aridly.
"He's not under my command," the general retorted, his ruddy face clouding.
"Forget it," Remo said. "And while you're at it, forget sending any more of your men in. I'll go."
"Alone?"
"That's the general idea."
Chesterfield snorted loudly. "You? Against Roote? The desert sun's getting to you, boy."
Remo's face was deadly serious. "Humor me." When he saw that Remo was not joking, the general's laugh slowly petered out.
His keen military mind instantly went to work. He began weighing the idea of sending all the troops under his entire command after Roote against the prospect of sending Remo in alone. For him to go along with the outlandish scheme, there would have to be a mighty big benefit for Delbert Xavier Chesterfield. The plus side of the scenario immediately presented itself.
"You've got authority to override me?" he asked.
Remo shrugged. "I suppose," he said. "If it's necessary, I can go right to the top."
Chesterfield's eyes narrowed. "Washington takes the blame for any screw-ups?" the general asked cagily.
"Yeah, sure, whatever," Remo said indifferently.
General Chesterfield happily slapped his swagger stick against one massive thigh. His smile was as wide as the New Mexico desert. "Son, I think you and I can come to what my grandpappy used to call an understanding."
Chapter 5
The drab, brownish-green U.S. Army Apache advanced attack helicopter swept across the sunbaked landscape like a lone, angry wasp. It soared northeast, just skirting the periphery of Lincoln National Forest as it raced on toward the likeliest location of Private Elizu Roote.
General Chesterfield sat in the gunner's seat behind the pilot. Remo was crammed in beside the general's bulk.
"It would have been easier to drive," Remo complained into the slender microphone that was connected to his thick headset. Although he didn't require the protection the earphones offered, Chesterfield wouldn't have been able to hear him without them.
"Easier, but not quicker," the general replied loudly. Grinning, he turned to Remo. Large parts of his anatomy spilled over into Remo's seat. "What's the matter, boy? Don't like the company?"
"Not particularly," Remo answered.
Chesterfield laughed. "You're lucky you're not under my command with a mouth like that, boy."
"Speaking of mouths, does every word that comes out of yours have to be shouted?"
"That's the way they taught us to command respect in general school," the officer bellowed. Remo had heard a great many military men in his life-both in his personal experience and on television. Although he could easily picture Norman Schwarzkopf shouting, he couldn't remember hearing him doing so even once on TV. Rather than hear a shouted further explanation, he decided not to press the issue.
They swept across the desert for a few long minutes, the muted, constant noise of the rotor blades the only sound in the cabin.
As the helicopter soared toward their rendezvous, the general glanced surreptitiously at Remo several times. Curiosity finally got the better of him.
"You CIA, boy?" Chesterfield boomed into his mouthpiece.
Remo stared out the curving windshield to the endless desert below. "Maybe," he replied without much interest.
"You don't look like CIA. NSC?"
Remo sighed. "You know, a good general would have asked to see my ID before schlepping me out into the middle of nowhere like this."
"I take umbrage at that, sir. I am a good general." Chesterfield stabbed a large finger at the two stars on his right shoulder board. "You know what I got these for?" he demanded in a booming voice.
Remo shrugged. "Base pie-eating contest?"
"They were awarded to me for being a very good general. What do you think of that?"
"I think it's a telling comment on the all-volunteer Army," Remo replied.
"I don't much like your tone," Chesterfield announced.
"Double," Remo replied, bored.
"I'm not even sure you're CIA."
"That's good, 'cause I'm not." He was still staring out the window. The desert wasn't very pretty.
"Let me see your identification," the general demanded.
"No."
"I will set down this helicopter right now and put you out in the desert if you do not comply."
"And I'll let you take the blame for the body count your man has accumulated."
General Chesterfield thought long and hard over this prospect. He finally settled into a sullen, reluctant silence.
It was several minutes more before the chopper came upon the road that led to Roote's last suspected location. Huge plumes of sand and dust were thrown up by the swirling rotor blades as the Apache helicopter settled on the soft shoulder to one side of the strip of baking asphalt.
"What happened there?" Remo asked.
He pointed past the pilot's shoulder out through one of the front bubbled windshields.
A sorry line of telephone poles sulked along the side of the road. Until quite recently, the nearest had apparently had an old-fashioned goose-neck light attached high atop it.
But now the metal was black and peeled back in large strips where the streetlight had exploded. What's more, the pole itself looked to have suffered in the blast. The top was cracked apart like a viciously stubbed-out cigar.
Through the haze of swirling dust, it was apparent that two more poles down the road had suffered a similar fate.
"Lightning storm," the general explained hastily. "We get them in the desert from time to time. Can be pretty nasty when they hit."
It was obvious to Remo that Chesterfield was lying. By the look of the operation he was running down here,
Remo wouldn't have been surprised if the general's men had shelled the poles by mistake during mortar practice.
Truth be told, Remo wasn't that interested in an explanation. He just wanted to get this over with. "That way?" he asked, slipping off his headset.
"Follow the road. It's the first small town you hit."
Remo popped the door. "It would have helped if you'd landed a little closer," he complained.
"Any good military man will tell you surprise is half the battle, boy," Chesterfield shouted.
"Find me a good military man so I can confirm that."
Remo climbed out the helicopter and down to the desert sand, slamming the door back into place. The open expanse of desert was a welcome relief to sharing a seat with Ironbutt Chesterfield.
Inside the helicopter, Chesterfield wondered if he shouldn't warn Remo about Roote. In the moment it took the general to consider, the helicopter lifted off once more, stranding Remo on the ground.
Inwardly, Chesterfield was relieved. If it came to an inquest after Remo's charred body was discovered, he'd blame the pilot for beating a too-hasty retreat.
The matter of a scapegoat settled, General Chesterfield sat back into the gunner's seat.
The Apache tore back toward Fort Joy, leaving the lone black shape of Remo Williams to be consumed by the swirl of desert sand.
THE FIRST HOUSE on the way into town was no more than a toolshed with a half-rotted carport. A mangy dog lay in the shade of a rusted 1947 Studebaker, which sat on rocks beside the shack. Clumps of desert brush grew up around both dog and car.
Next came a pair of larger homes, sand-ravaged wooden structures roughly the size of small house trailers. They sat across from one another on the flat roadway. Tin mailboxes perched like sentries before their short, hard-packed driveways.
Remo saw no sign of any police activity whatsoever as he walked up the long stretch of highway.
Chesterfield had dumped him farther out in the desert than he had let on. It had been a five-mile trek beneath the scorching sun to the first lonely buildings.
Several times on their flight from Fort Joy, the general had expressed concern that the Apache might be heard, but it was caution taken to the extreme for him to drop Remo so far away from the AWOL private's location.
As he wandered down the road between the pair of larger houses, Remo wondered what on earth the general thought one man could do to defend against a heavily armed piece of military hardware like the Apache. He chalked the extreme caution up to Chesterfield's apparent general incompetence.
As he walked down the desolate desert road, Remo sensed eyes following him.
A dark figure was peering from behind a set of ancient gauzy curtains in the ramshackle home to his right.
Up ahead was the Last Chance Saloon. Remo ignored his audience of one as he pressed on toward the bar.
He got no more than a few more paces on the gummy road when the black shape slipped from the window. A moment later, the screen door opened at the side of the house. A short man in dungarees and a grimy, untucked T-shirt gestured frantically to Remo.
"Senor!" he rasped. Snapping his attention up the road to the bar, he dropped his voice lower. "Please!" he begged, beckoning Remo over.
Remo didn't want a detour right now, but if the desperate old man decided to hound him all the way to the bar, he might alert Roote to Remo's presence. And if the private bolted, it could extend Remo's time in this desolate town by minutes. Annoyed, Remo left the road, hurrying through tufts of brittle brush to the old man.
"What's wrong?" Remo asked once he'd reached the stranger.
"You do not want to go there," the man whispered. He had a bristly white mustache and a threeday growth of black stubble across his dark cheeks.
Remo followed his gaze to the bar. "You a friend of Bill W.?"
It was as if the man didn't hear him. "The Army has already come for him," he pleaded. "It has done no good. I see them go in hours ago. They did not come back out."
Remo looked again to the Last Chance Saloon.
From this angle, he spied a military jeep beside the battered wooden structure.
"You know who I'm looking for?"
The old man nodded desperately. "He come during the night. I see him kill Tommy. He own the bar." The man's eyes were wild with fear. "He use his hands." He threw his own hands out before him like a witch casting a spell. "He kill Tommy with his hands. I don't know why he no kill me. He want a drink, I think." He jabbed his hands in the air in a dramatic and inexplicable re-creation of the bartender's last moments alive.
Remo couldn't figure out the man's pantomime. But judging by his breath, he'd been drinking pretty steadily since his encounter with Elizu Roote.
"Relax," Remo assured him. "He's probably passed out by now. Just do me a favor and keep the yelling to a minimum the next few minutes, okay?"
He turned to go. The old man bullied in front of him.
"He is el Diablo," the man insisted, grabbing his shirt. His rheumy eyes were pleading.
"In that case, I've got a date with the devil," Remo said evenly. He pulled away from the surprisingly powerful grip.
As he headed up the road toward the saloon, the old man made a rapid sign of the cross. Afterward, he hurried back to the safety of his ramshackle home. To drink. And pray.
ROOTE'S HEAD WAS BOWED over the bar, fists clasped at his temples.
Some of his shot glass lay in fragments before him. The endless tapping had eventually grown in ferocity until the thick glass shattered beneath the metal pad of his index finger. He'd swept most of the fragments to the floor.
His charge was low. He'd been taught to recognize the signs. He felt drained. Physically and mentally.
He had loosed too much juice on the pair of MPs. The baked corpses lying on the floor of the saloon were a grisly testament to the horrible power of the force within him. He thought he had held back, but drunkenness and insanity had impaired his judgment. If there ever came a day when he finally climbed off his stool, he'd have to recharge.
An intense silence gripped the desert beyond the bar's clapboard walls. He thought he'd heard the distant sound of a helicopter more than an hour before, but it had been swallowed up in the desert wind. No matter. Even though they hadn't found him yet, they were still looking.
Only a matter of time... Recharge. Had to recharge. Sniffling, Roote lifted his head from his hands.
Only then did he see the reflection in the bottles behind the bar.
Stomach knotting, Roote whirled on his stool. He wasn't alone.
The stranger had somehow gotten inside the saloon without the creak of a single floorboard or the squeak of the half-rusted door hinges.
The intruder had a look of death in his dark eyes. Roote had seen the same expression countless times in the past. Virtually every time he looked in the mirror.
"You're Roote, I assume?" the stranger asked.
"Yes, sir," Roote replied. He wore his eyes at half-mast. His Southern drawl was slurred.
His charge was still low.
Dang! He shouldn't have let it drain so far. It was easy enough to recharge. It was only a matter of finding the nearest electrical source. The outlet behind the bar would have been sufficient. But he had sat morosely at the bar for hours, not even caring that they were looking for him. Now he regretted his apathy.
As the stranger closed in, Roote hoped the limited energy stored in his capacitors would be enough.
Bracing his back against the bar, Roote rubbed his thumbs against his fingertips. Weak blue sparks began to pop inside his palms.
He wouldn't take any chances. He couldn't afford to miss. Roote would let this latest intruder get in close. Then he'd fry him like an egg.
ACROSS THE BIG BAR FLOOR, Remo was trying to figure out what Elizu Roote thought he was doing with his hands.
As he watched the pale man raise his hands up beside his shoulders, images of the old Mexican man's impersonation of the Army private popped unbecko
ned into his mind.
And strangest of all, it appeared as if Roote's conjuring was working. There was a sporadic blue flash coming from between his curled fingers. It illuminated the bones in his hands like some weird, palm-size X-ray.
Probably palming a couple of joy buzzers. His unique serial killer's stamp.
That Roote was insane, Remo had little doubt. The bodies of two of the men he had killed still lay on the floor, charred beyond any hope of identification short of dental records. The private must have soaked them in gasoline and burned them alive.
Remo wondered why he would have brought them inside afterward. Obviously they hadn't been killed in the bar. The saloon's bone-dry wood would have gone up like a struck matchstick if he had done it in here.
The two pairs of boot marks were the only evidence Remo did see of any kind of fire residue.
The boot prints were burned into the wood floor. As he walked toward them, the prints seemed almost like a brief map to some macabre dance step.
When he looked up, he saw that Roote was smiling proudly. He nodded to the footprints.
"They died with their boots on," he said. He was still leaning against the bar, rubbing his fingertips on his palms.
Remo kept coming.
There was a strange tingle of electricity in the air. It seemed to be coming from Roote's direction, though Remo couldn't determine the source.
"It ain't really my fault," Roote speculated. "The Army's what made me a monster."
That was enough for Remo. Roote was just another kook who wanted to blame his training for everything wrong in his life. Not my fault. The Army told me to kill. The devil made me do it. An old argument.
"You-all are here to arrest me, I suppose," Roote said as Remo closed in.
Eyes flat, Remo shook his head. "We're way beyond that. Just for the record, how many people have you killed?"
"Today or all told?" Roote asked with a proud smile.
Remo's dead expression didn't change. "Does the term 'you just sealed your fate' have any meaning to you?"
Roote began slapping his fingertips in unison against his palms. The soft clapping sound was accompanied by an increased sparking.
"You don't have no gun," Elizu Roote said. He sounded a little disappointed. "How about handcuffs?"
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