by David Stone
The cold had been building since late afternoon, a damp, biting chill with the smell of dry pine and wood smoke inside it. In the far distance a coyote sang a solitary song for no reason other than to let the rest of the world know he was still in business. Fremont breathed it all in and said, “Lovely country, isn’t it? A man with a good heart could be real happy in this valley.”
“There is an hour,” said Micah, pausing to call the memory up complete. “There is an hour wherein a man might be happy all his life, could he but find it.”
“That’s right. That’s very damn right. That yours?”
“No. George Herbert.”
“Walker Bush?” he asked, with some disbelief.
the echelon vendetta | 315
“No. Not that one...”
His voice trailed off then, and in his mind Dalton went far away to a long-ago summer afternoon in Cortona: Fremont let the silence run. The day was dying fast now and long blue shadows were creeping out from the cottonwoods. A few pale stars glittered in a cloudless arc of deep blue. The comfortable silence spooled out until the com set crackled once, and Dalton touched his throat mike.
“Nicky?”
“I’m in, Micah. I’ve got the house in my scope. Nothing moving. No lights. Truck’s right where it was in the satellite shots. No heat signature on the truck. One heat signature in the house but from this angle I can’t say where. I can hear a dog barking but I can’t see him.”
“Del?”
“Just digging in. Okay. I’m set. I’ve got my shot. Let’s go.”
“We’re moving.”
“Come ahead,” said Baum. “I got you in the palm of my hand.”
Dalton signaled to Fremont, who got up into a crouch, his lean face lit by the setting sun, making his right eye gleam like a shard of bottle glass, the left side of his face in darkness. He hadn’t shaved in two days and his hollow cheek was covered with short white stubble. He looked tired and old and Dalton felt a rush of affection for him.
“Willard...”
“Yessir?”
“Why don’t you just stay—”
Fremont’s thin face hardened up and his one sunlit eye glittered.
“Moot Gibson killed my best friend. The man needs to die.”
His hard look softened, and he smiled at Dalton. “Know what a friend of mine named Pascal once said? He said that the sole cause of a man’s unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room. If Moot had managed just that one little thing, sit quiet
316 | david stone
in his room, then Al would still be alive and Pete would still be running packhorses up to Medicine Wheel and Moot Gibson wouldn’t be going to die today. But he didn’t. So let’s go.”
THEY HAD A LOT of ground to cross and they crossed it at a flat-out dash, Fremont veering south, heading for the outcrop by the creosote bush, moving well for a man his age, the SAW at the ready, his boots heavy on the stony ground, Dalton running lightly, his eyes searching the terrain as he moved up toward the little collection of buildings. As he closed in on the house, he instinctively tightened up in the expectation of a round singing past his ear followed by the harsh crack of the weapon, but no shot came.
He reached the side of the larger outbuilding and rested for a moment there, sheltered from the fire line of the main house. Through the thin wooden walls of the shed he could hear the sound of a large dog growling and barking. He watched as Fremont, bent low, slipped into cover behind the rocky outcrop, vanishing from sight.
He moved around to the side of the outbuilding and found a small quarter-glass window. He braced himself and smashed the pane with the butt of his Colt. From the interior of the cabin came the hysterical howl of a badly frightened dog, but no rounds whacked through the walls and into his cringing belly.
He risked a quick look and saw a large pen, in the middle of which was chained a large shepherd cross, her muzzle covered with bloody foam, her eyes wide and the whites showing as she howled her fear and her rage at the timbers of the roof.
Around her were the bodies of three other big dogs, all of them horribly torn and bloody. There was nothing else in the shed but a few tools and some sacks of animal feed. He slipped back to the edge of the building and pulled in a long breath, letting it out through his nose,
the echelon vendetta | 317
willing himself into stillness. The moment hung there, suspended, and on the chill air he could smell the sharp tang of wood smoke.
A thin blue wisp was rising up from the chimney stack, slipping away on the wind. The setting sun lay full on the front door and the two shuttered windows, a flat shadowless look, giving it an ominous air.
He had a hundred feet of ground to cross and every foot of it was wide open. If Moot Gibson was waiting for Dalton to cross that ground, the chances were very good that Dalton had just begun to count off the last sixty seconds of his life on this earth.
He knew that as soon as Moot fired, Nicky Baum’s Barrett 50 would blow a football-size hole in whatever place the round had come from, but until Dalton moved and until Moot fired, Baum would have nothing to shoot at, and since the whole idea was to try to take Moot Gibson alive, and that first shot could very easily be the one that blew Dalton’s brains out the back of his head, the tactical problems were huge. Dalton understood only too well that he really did not want to try to cross that last fifty feet.
Not at all.
There had to be a better way. Maybe they could try talking him out? Yes. That’s the ticket. It sure as hell worked with Saddam Hussein. Reason with him. Think like the United Nations.
Just ask him real nice if would please pretty please—
Dalton cleared the corner in a convulsive leap and raced across the ground, his eyes fixed on the gun ports, braced to take a round in the head, thinking not in the face not in the face, as combat soldiers often do, cutting cards with death.
He slammed up against the wall beside the heavily barred door, dropped into a crouch with the Colt at the ready, and clicked twice on his com set mike. In a moment Fremont came lurching around the corner with his SAW, grinning at Dalton.
318 | david stone
He crossed to the far side of the door and held his hand up, shaped a fist, his face running with sweat. Dalton nodded, reached up, slapped a shape charge against the upper hinge and another against the lower hinge. They both turned away as Dalton clicked the trigger: two massive deafening cracks and the door blew into pieces.
Before the smoke had cleared, before the sound had stopped echoing from the distant mountains, they were through the door, Dalton going left with his Colt up, Fremont going right, covering the room with the SAW. They were in.
There was no one there.
“NICKY.”
“I’m here, Micah.” “We’re in. We’ve cleared the whole house. He’s not here.” “I see you. Willard says there’s a storm cellar—” “Already cleared it. The place is empty.” “Is it mined?” “If it was, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.” “You want me to come in?” “No. Hold your position. If you see anyone coming, let us know.
Del, you there?” “I am. Nothing moving in my sector. I might have a scorpion up
my pant leg. Other than that, I’m fine. Want me to come in?” “Yes. Come up. We still have to safe the outbuildings.” Suarez was with them in forty-five seconds, panting heavily, his
lean Latin face gritty with dust.
“You and Willard check out the other buildings for IEDs. And there’s at least one dog alive in that wooden shed there. She’s out of her head and if you have to you put her down.”
the echelon vendetta | 319
“Is it the wolf dog?” asked Fremont.
“Looks like it.”
“That’s Irene,” he said, looking at Delroy Suarez. “I’ll see to her. You check the other building. You going back in there, Micah?”
“Yes.”
“Moot had a thing about his personal effects. If you’re going to turn over
his drawers and things, watch out for blades and fishhooks.”
“You’ve got to be kidding.”
“Nope.”
The men moved off to secure the shed and the equipment shack. Dalton stopped in the doorway to raise a hand and wave to Nicky Baum, who very likely had his crosshairs centered on Dalton’s forehead right now. Thinking about trigger pull, resistance factors, and every harsh thing he had ever said to Nicky Baum, he turned away and stepped back through the open door into Moot Gibson’s home.
He had been expecting one of those serial-killer nest scenes, a squalid ruin with the look of a crack house, the walls covered with newspaper clippings, scrawled obscenities, filth-strewn floors, all the outward signs of Moot Gibson’s slow descent into savagery and madness. Instead, after he had moved through the place again and opened up all the steel shutters, he found himself in a crisp, clean, sparsely furnished four-room home that looked as if it had been decorated by Shakers; simple wooden walls, a spotless hardwood floor with a few colorful Navajo rugs here and there, a few pieces of simple pine furniture; in the dining room, a long trestle table gleaming in the half-light from the setting sun.
In the kitchen, a galley fit for a wooden sailboat, with a row of copper pots—graduated and gleaming—hanging over a center island, a small icebox in the corner, and by the sink a stack of neatly folded dishcloths and a fresh square of Sunlight soap.
In the bedroom, a single hard cot dressed barracks-style with a taut white sheet folded down over two soft Navajo blankets, and un
320 | david stone
der the bed three pairs of black combat boots, each one polished to a dazzling shine and the laces squared away. On the far side of the room, a tall dresser made of rosewood, as polished as every other wooden surface in the home, and on top of the dresser a standing mirror shaped like a gothic window, two bottles of Old Spice cologne, and next to the mirror what looked like a framed piece of ancient antelope or deer hide, butternut brown, into which had been burned— branded—the same familiar drawing that he suspected he would find in this place:
He reached out and took the picture down—it was surprisingly heavy, the hide being quite thick—holding it in his hand and feeling himself at the edge of a revelation. He turned the picture over and was in no way surprised to find a message taped to the back, a phrase he had first heard seventeen days ago in Venice, coming from the lips of a dead man’s ghost standing in the curtains that led out onto a balcony with a view of Saint Mark’s Basin:
the echelon vendetta | 321
To get the answer, you must survive the question .
HE DID A THOROUGH SEARCH, which delivered up no insight other
than that Moot Gibson ate only organic grain and home-tilled vegetables, that he had standing subscriptions to Harper’s, The Atlantic Monthly, National Review, The Economist, Soldier of Fortune, Jane’s Defense Review, and Utne Reader, that his taste in fiction ran to K. C. Constantine’s Mario Balzac books, and that he had $21,533.71 in the bank after a withdrawal of $500 at an ATM in a store called Picketwire Guns and Archery Supplies, according to scraps of ATM receipts he found in the half-burned trash outside the back door.
The trash also contained a tangle of knotted wooden twine and a bowl-shaped half of a hollowed-out gourd, on the surface of which had been painted a string of indecipherable pictographs: a sun, what looked like a daisy, little crosses. The figures had been executed with far more care than the drawings he had found in his global pursuit of Moot Gibson, but they shared the basic iconography of a crescent, a flower, and a cross. The underside of the gourd was coated with a thick black substance. He put the gourd to his nose and recoiled— the sudden flashing picture of the sunlit room in Venice and the spinning terra-cotta cylinder filled his mind and sent a bolt of terror through him.
He stuffed the gourd and the ATM receipts into a leather sack hanging on a chair in Moot’s bedroom, picked up the framed drawing, and left the house at far more than just a walk, with the muscles across his back tightening painfully and what felt like a hundred yards of gleaming hardwood floor to cross before he reached the shattered smoldering rectangle of the blown-open door.
He stepped out into the soft light of evening and found Delroy
322 | david stone
Suarez and Willard Fremont in the front yard, crouching solicitously over the trembling form of a large black-and-tan dog with a low blade-shaped head and teeth like a T. rex.
The dog was panting heavily in between tentative sips of water taken from Fremont’s cupped palm and she watched Dalton coming with one white-rimmed eye.
“Micah, I’d like you to meet Irene. Irene, this is Micah.”
Dalton knelt down and after a guarded look at Suarez and Fremont, held out the finger he was least unwilling to lose to this slit-eyed, wolfish bitch.
She rolled her eyes, whimpered at him, and then sniffed at his knuckles. Her muzzle was hot and her breath was foul. She smelled of what she had been eating, possibly her kennelmates, but in her manner there was only an intense sense of gratitude and a readiness to please.
Suarez, standing up and walking Dalton a few yards away, nodded toward the dusty black Dodge pickup sitting in the front yard, and said, “I checked that truck out. There was a can of Sterno sitting under the engine hood. Flamed out a while ago, but it would have been burning around the time Nicky checked the satellite shots.”
“I found another Sterno can in the fireplace. It was still hot. How long does a can of Sterno burn?”
Suarez shook his head. “Never used it. But a big one like the one under the hood, set on low, might burn for a couple of days.”
They both watched Fremont stroking the dog, who had now stopped quivering and was smiling up at him, both of them happy to see each other. They looked like old retired pirates at a reunion.
“What do you think?” Dalton asked, after a silence.
“Think? I think we’ve been outthunk,” said Suarez.
“Looks like. Willard,” he said, “say good bye to the dog. We gotta go.”
the echelon vendetta | 323
Fremont was standing up, his mouth open and formulating the first appeal on behalf of the dog (Dalton could see it coming) but Dalton was already on the com set.
“Nicky, you there?”
Fremont was walking toward them now, his face set and his manner determined. “Look, Micah, we can’t just leave—”
“Nicky, come in.”
“—her here to starve. She’s a good old—”
“Nicky...”
“—dog and she’ll be no—”
There was a hum, a definite humming burr, and a solid silvery flash. A heavy rifle round struck Fremont in midstride with a sound like a sledgehammer hitting a side of frozen beef.
The round blew him literally in half: his lower torso, legs still obscenely working, traveled another pace toward them while his midsection blew out to the left, an eruption of flesh and bone, guts, his belt buckle, three inches of spinal cord striking the wall of the house. The expression on his face as he died was shocked, indignant.
Then the sound of the shot, the deep reverberating boom of a .50-caliber rifle, came rolling across the desert from Baum’s position two hundred yards to the west.
Suarez and Dalton went for the house, Dalton a few feet in the lead, Suarez right behind him. Dalton heard Delroy Suarez clearly say “shit” just before something wet and hot and solid struck the back of Dalton’s neck.
Another crack of distant thunder.
The Remington clattered through the door as he crossed the threshold, tripping him up. He fell forward and rolled as another silvery humming blur cracked the air a foot over his head and the kitchen table in the back room exploded in a spray of splinters before the round punched out through the kitchen wall.
324 | david stone
A flash of motion darkened the door and Irene came racing in, her paws scrabbling on the hardwood floor just as a fourth round exploded through the wall just beneath the right-h
and window.
Dalton could see a piece of evening sky through the gap. Then came a fifth round that carved a furrow across the floor before punching through it and smacking into the rocks beneath the house. Then... silence . . . and Irene huddled up next to Dalton’s leg, her body shaking convulsively, uttering tiny yelping whimpers.
Of course.
Five rounds in the magazine of a Barrett.
He’d be reloading now.
How many rounds did Nicky Baum say he had for his Barrett?
A box of match-grade rounds was what he said.
How many rounds in a box?
No idea. Probably fifty.
But there was nothing, not a single thing, not even the engine block of that Dodge pickup out there (even supposing Dalton could reach it), that would stop a round from a Barrett 50 at two hundred yards. Not the cinder-block walls, even if they were filled with gravel in an energy-absorbing matrix. Not the fieldstones of the small fireplace. And Irene’s touching faith in the round-stopping ability of Dalton’s body (she was now shoving her damp bloody muzzle deep under his thigh) was sadly misplaced.
If this shooter— Face it, Micah: Nicky Baum was lying out there somewhere with his throat cut; the shooter was Moot Gibson. And if Moot Gibson wanted to empty the whole box of rounds into this place he could literally tear it apart.
The Remington lay on the threshold, just a few tantalizing feet away. In a last ray of the dying sun he could see spatters of Delroy Suarez’s blood on the wooden stock.
He gathered himself, leaned into the opening, and snatched it
the echelon vendetta | 325
back. Great. Now he could die with something to hang on to other than his dick.
He thought of the storm cellar, a stone-lined pit six feet deep under the floorboards in the kitchen. He decided against burying himself before he was actually dead. It seemed only fair that Moot would have to do the spadework, if that was how it turned out. One thing was certain, Moot Gibson was not taking him alive.
He looked at Irene, who had pulled her head out from under Dalton’s leg when the shooting stopped. He’d shoot her first, he thought, because God only knew what a thing like Moot Gibson would do to a dog that had gone over to the enemy.