The Echelon Vendetta

by David Stone

  The rear wheels were spinning out a spray of gravel and the men in the car had become strangely silent as Katie fought the wheel and swore softly to herself in a low growl. After an endless climb over rocky ground, the trail shrank down to a narrow path between encroaching brush and pines, stiff thorny branches scraping along the paintwork and clutching at Dalton’s sleeve. The temperature dropped almost ten degrees, and now there was a distinct chill in the clear air.

  “You boys doing okay?” asked Katie, taking her eyes off the road at a point in a goat-track hairpin curve that was already forcing Dalton to recall Naumann’s prediction that he had less than three weeks to live, and wonder if this car trip was exactly what Naumann had in mind.

  “Just fine,” he said, through gritted teeth, as the huge car lurched across a steel-slotted grate laid over a six-foot-deep storm ditch, pushed its blunt snout through a stand of twisted mesquite and stunted firs, and came to a grinding, bouncing halt in a clearing.

  On the far side of the clearing a narrow graded road, reasonably well finished in coarse sand, led in a blind curve around a cliff of yellow stone that soared upward, easily two hundred feet, its sawtooth peak lost in a gathering mist.

  “We better walk from here,” said Katie. “Can’t turn this beast around at Pete’s front yard and I don’t like backing up on the goat walk he calls a driveway. He usually leaves his truck here.”

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  This sentiment found much favor with Dalton and even more with Fremont, who had spent the last ten miles holding on to the handle of the back door, ready to open it and leap for his life before Katie drove the Lincoln off a cliff, which he was morally certain she was going to do at any moment. He peeled his bone-white trembling fingers off the latch and shoved the door open, cursing quietly to himself.

  Katie pulled her Winchester out of a scabbard sewn to the interior of the driver’s door and pushed the door shut, staring across the clearing at the narrow track that ran around the curve of the cliff face, a sandy track without a mark on it, not even the tracks of her own boots from her last trip up here only five days ago. She crossed the clearing, levering a round into the Winchester, and crouched down at the beginning of the road.

  “Nobody’s been here,” she said, touching the dry sandy soil with a fingertip and putting the tip to her mouth, tasting it. “Wind up here’s been blowing hard all weekend. Tracks are all gone.”

  She stood up and looked at the two men, Dalton with his Colt Python in his hand and his canvas cattle coat pulled in tight against the chill, and Fremont looking taut and white-faced, his pale skin contrasting oddly with his bright-red nylon vest. Fremont’s .45 was in his right hand, the hammer cocked.

  “There’s only one way in,” she said.

  “I know it,” said Fremont, “I been here before.”

  “Okay. How you want to do this?”

  “I’ll lead,” said Dalton, stepping forward. “If anything goes wrong, Willard knows who to call.”

  “That I do,” said Willard, happy to have a man back in charge, even if Dalton had no idea what was waiting for them around the curve. Katie followed the men at a distance of thirty feet as the three of them came slowly around the long slightly inclined grade cut into the wall of the cliff. Through a thin screen of brush on their right

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  they could catch brief glimpses of a far blue country spread out below them and thin wisps of pale cloud a hundred miles away.

  The sand was gritty and their boots crunched faintly, the sound blowing away on the strong cold wind that was flowing straight into the cliff face. Halfway around the curve Dalton caught—they all caught—a strong whiff of corruption, something very large and not too long dead, coming from close by.

  Dalton pulled the hammer back and stepped to the outer edge of the trail. The smell was very powerful now, carried to them on the wind flowing up from the valley. Katie was at his side, her Winchester in her hands. She leaned over and peered down through a long drop, a cliff face dotted with short spiky shrubs, a few needle-tipped pines jutting out like quills.

  “There,” she said, pointing the muzzle of the carbine at an outcrop of rock sixty feet down the face. Something red and broken lay on the ledge, partially impaled on a pine branch, white bones showing through torn pink flesh and purple entrails, a fan of shattered ribs bared to the sky like teeth from an ivory comb.

  “It’s a buck deer,” said Fremont, standing a little ways off and holding on to the branch of a pine as he leaned over the cliff’s edge.

  “Been there quite a while,” said Katie. “Should have smelled it last Friday, I guess, but the wind was coming the other way.”

  Dalton was studying the carcass carefully. “It’s been skinned,” he said, in a low voice.

  Katie squinted at it.

  “Yes,” she said, shaking her head. “What kind of a wasteful fool would skin a buck carcass and then just throw all that venison away?”

  Fremont and Dalton exchanged a look, which Katie caught, but they said nothing as they trotted around the last of the curve, where the ledge opened up to a plateau of flat yellow limestone about thirty feet wide. The whole of the Powder River country stretched out before them, hundreds and hundreds of miles of open grassland

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  fading into a deep, hazy blue. In the valley the long shadows of the Bighorns behind them were creeping out toward Ranchester as the sun ran down into the west. They turned and looked at Pete Kear-ney’s cabin, a stout, solid fortress of a home built out of square-cut timbers and roofed in slate, set hard up against the cliff face, a sheer rise that went soaring up a hundred feet before disappearing behind a thatch of scrub pine.

  The front of the cabin, sheltered by a low beamed porch, was shuttered with thick pine slabs, and the door, a flat panel of solid pine, was crisscrossed with steel bands. The cabin looked dusty, and dry leaves had blown up all along the windward face, as if the last man who had lived there had boarded it up and gone west in the dying days of the last age. A shrill cry from overhead made them all look up as a golden eagle circled far above them, three long sweeping passes traced against the pale blue sky, before he decided that they were not prey—at least not easy prey—and he wheeled away to the south, peeping absurdly.

  Katie walked up to the cabin door and kicked it hard, hard enough to make the dust bounce off the planks. Grit drifted down off the underside of the porch, glimmering in the late-afternoon light.

  “Pete! You in there? It’s Katie.”

  Nothing. The wind rolling in across the plateau. From an unseen spring bubbling up in the cliff face came the hissing murmur of racing water. In a stand of trees at the far end of the ledge a crow cursed them and then laughed raucously, joined in a moment by others of his kind—from the sound they made, a multitude, all of them well hidden in the trees, their cries echoing off the face of the cliff.

  “I don’t like all them crows around,” said Katie. “Isn’t natural. Now what, trooper?” said Katie, looking at Dalton quizzically.

  Dalton lifted the Colt Python and blew a fist-size hole in the upper-right hinge plate, the wood chips flying, the boom of the gun

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  sending a huge flock of crows soaring into the blue sky, braying and screeching madly. Another shot into the middle hinge, and a third into the lowest one, followed by a fourth round into the door latch. In the deafened silence that followed the only sound was the oiled metallic ratcheting as Dalton reloaded his Colt.

  Katie kept her Winchester leveled on the door. Fremont, his back to the two of them, was watching the curve of the road, the trees at the far end of the shelf, the open plateau, his .45 in both hands, the muzzle slightly lowered.

  Dalton stepped up to the door, put a gloved hand into the gaping splintered hole where the door latch had been, set himself, put a boot against the frame, and gave the door a massive pull. It groaned against the timbers, shifted a half inch, and then flew right ou
t of the frame, the huge door slamming to the ground with a thunderous clap and narrowly missing Dalton’s boots as he stumbled backward off the porch. Katie caught him in a wiry grip to keep him from falling. The doorway loomed open, the interior as black as a mine.

  Katie stepped forward, but Dalton caught her by the arm.

  “No. Wait. Listen.”

  Katie stopped, her head cocked. A low murmuring buzzing, rising and falling, deep, almost at the lower limit of hearing. The sound— terrible and frighteningly familiar—flowed over Dalton like a wave, stopping his breath. Fremont stood a little way behind them, listening to the same sound, his face going pale and his eyes widening.

  “What the hell is that?” asked Katie, shaking Dalton’s hand off and walking up the stairs. “It sounds like—”

  A single green fly flew straight out of the middle of the open frame, buzzing aggressively around them, followed by two more.

  “Katie,” said Fremont, “you better—”

  And then a torrent, a storm cloud of flies, a living horde of buzzing fat flies, their distended bellies glistening blue and green,

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  their wings a shimmering blur, poured, literally poured like black oil out of the open doorway of the cabin. The three of them bowed down under the stream of flies like people in a strong wind as the swarm flowed over them, and flies crawled down their necks, and into their eyes, and rustled up their open sleeves, slipping into their mouths as they gasped for air, buzzing and rattling deep in their ears, crawling busily over their eyes, in their hair—

  They all three broke and ran, stumbling away from the river that was pouring out of the interior of Pete Kearney’s cabin and spreading out across the open ground of the plateau, crawling, flying, buzzing, an unspeakable sickening flood. They beat the air around themselves as they staggered away from the cabin, Katie screaming as she ran, Dalton grimly silent, his lips set tight against the greasy flies he could feel crawling over his mouth, crawling up his nostrils, Fremont close behind, bellowing like a bull.

  They covered a hundred feet before the swarm diminished, before they could breathe without inhaling flies, and there they stopped, panting, stunned, horrified.

  In five long minutes the torrent of flies had slowed to a stream, and then to a trickle, and then to only a few bloated flies buzzing around the doorway, and a few more crawling up the outside walls, on the underside of the overhanging roof.

  The deep organlike note of their buzzing diminished into a constant burring sound, the chatter of their wings or the rustling sound they made as they rubbed up against one another in clusters, their bodies glimmering with gasoline colors in the dying light.

  The wind from the valley floor had been gaining in strength as the evening came on, and now it was racing across the plateau and into the open door, driving away the clusters of flies around the cabin, blowing them into the air by the thousands.

  The three of them stood there, in shocked stillness, staring in

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  bleak horror at the cabin until the wind had cleared most of the flies away, a time out of mind that turned out to be, by Katie’s watch, no more than ten minutes.

  A kind of suspended calm came back to the little plateau and the space around the darkened building, and in that false calm they walked slowly, warily back across the open ground, stopping at the foot of the stairs. Now an overpowering stench, the stink of dead meat and rotting flesh, drifted out through the door, forcing them back again. From inside the cabin they could hear a low, busy, murmuring hum.

  “Oh good Christ,” said Katie. “What’re we waiting for?”

  She raised the Winchester and strode firmly into the darkness. Dalton and Fremont looked at each other, and then both men followed her inside. Into the suffocating stench, the cloying reek of putrefaction. The interior of the cabin was as dim as a crypt, the only light coming from the open door, but they could see a large shape in the middle of the room, wrapped in a seething cloud, and the buzzing noise was very loud. The walls were moving, and the boards under their feet were thick with black cockroaches, their wings chittering and whirring. Fat cold slugs dropped onto their heads from the rafters, and tiny biting flies flew at their faces. Katie, her face set and hard, bone-white but steady, turned to Fremont. “Get those shutters open.”

  “Katie, I’m not sure I—”

  “Open the goddamned shutters, Willard!”

  Fremont went to the nearest window, his boots skidding on the crunching, slippery floor. He hammered at the steel lever and the shutters flew outward and away, and hard flat sunlight streamed into the cramped little room. The air was alive with buzzing flies. They crawled on every surface and hung from every fixture. They swarmed and buzzed and scuttled across the huge scrawled drawing spray-

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  painted right across the rear wall of the cabin, the drawing that Dalton, in the recesses of his heart, had been afraid that he would find here ever since they left Butte.

  And they swarmed in their millions around a huge shapeless mass in the middle of the room. Barely visible under the crawling layers of busy biting flies was the bloody hide of a big buck deer, and the hide of the buck had been wrapped tightly around what looked to be the figure of a man, although his shape was only vaguely human.

  “Oh...Pete...,” said Katie, softly, her voice breaking.

  “Katie,” said Dalton, gently, “we have to get out of here.”

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  tuesday, october 16 greybull air force museum greybull, wyoming 7 a.m. local time

  he CIA Gulfstream came in low out of the rising sun, skimming down the western slopes of the Bighorns and racing across the stony plains of the eastern Bighorn Valley less than a thousand feet off the ground, the banshee howl of its jets shaking the windows and rattling the nerves of everyone in the high desert village of Greybull.

  Watching this approach, the tower controller picked up his third coffee of the morning and said, “Fucking carrier pilot jet-jockey cowboy assholes” in a hoarse rasping voice.

  Across the room, Fremont and Dalton, sitting in ladder-backs and watching the same jet, said nothing, but they nodded in silent agreement. Far, far away in the ultimate west, the Yellowstone Rockies had caught the rising sun a full hour before it reached the broad valley, and the two men had sat there, stunned, silent, weary beyond belief, staring in a dull, hypnotized daze as the first rays of the sun touched upon the snowy peaks of the Beartooth Range and they flashed out suddenly, a blazing diamond-sharp light, the pine fields on their eastern slopes glittering like a forest of silvery spears, while the broad sweeping valley below them lay covered in a pale violet shadow.

  The air down on the plains was cold and sharp; the first bitter tendrils of winter hoarfrost had crept across the car windows during the night, and in the tower the overheated control room smelled of boiled coffee, cheap cigars, and the controller’s stale sweat, none of which bothered Fremont and Dalton in the slightest; they had spent most of the drive across the Bighorns trying to get the ruined face of Crucio Churriga, the smell, the sights, the sounds of Pete Kear-ney’s cabin, out of their clothes, their minds, their skins, with no success at all.

  They had talked, briefly and without enthusiasm, about the drawings on the wall of Pete Kearney’s cabin and the one on the wall at the hospice in Butte.

  Fremont confirmed Dalton’s intuition that the same drawing had been written across the kitchen wall right above Al Runciman’s flayed body in Mountain Home, and that the ATM records of Moot Gib-son’s travels seemed to coincide with Runciman’s death, with the abomination at Pete Kearney’s cabin, with the mutilation of Crucio Churriga in Butte, and with the series of attempts on Fremont’s life.

  A trail of tears.

  And then there was Katie Horn.

  She had seen them off, run them off, to be more precise, in the face of all their objections, their solicitude, all of which was firmly and at last vehemently re
jected, and their final memory of her was as she walked across the empty street and climbed the stairs of Hanoi Jane’s in Dayton, moving like an old woman, her shoulders bowed, her crazed-porcelain skin waxy and pale, her face dull and tearstained.

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  She had turned just as she reached the screen door and stared back up at the long-shadowed slopes of the Bighorns, where a column of dense smoke was still rising up into the very last of the sunlight, up into the high wind off the plains, where it was caught and whipped away in a long delicate thread, stretching out into the west and finally disappearing over the dome of Granite Pass.

  She stood there for a time, watching the blue smoke rising, and then, with a final listless wave to Fremont and Dalton, she went inside and closed the door. Dalton and Fremont had climbed into the Crown Victoria without a single word passing between them. In that same brooding inward silence they headed back up the mountain, staring at the smoke coming from high up in the hills as they went by the entrance to the gravel track, then looking blankly straight ahead as two state patrol cars and a volunteer fire truck came racing toward them in the oncoming lane a mile later, then, much faster, speeding away westward over the Bighorns on the Cloud Peak Highway, with the Flower Duet from Lakmé on the radio.

  They cleared Granite Pass around midnight, stopping for dishwater coffee and circular wads of cold clay that the pimpled, chinless, pig-eyed clerk stubbornly insisted were country-fresh doughnuts, and then they descended the treacherous ridges and jagged red cliffs of Shell Canyon in the early-morning hours, rolling down out of the Bighorns and out onto the desert plateau that ran all the way west to the Yellowstones, finally reaching Greybull a full hour before sunup.

  It was now past seven, and the company Gulfstream, carrying Delroy Suarez and Nicky Baum all the way from Topeka, was right on time. The plane flared up and touched down like a leaf on a pond, flaps lowered and jets howling loud enough to rattle the windows, and they got up, thanked the sullen controller for his hospitality— getting a prolonged parting belch for their trouble—and were stand-