Garth shook his head. “This was Madison’s idea of revenge?”
“It was the foundation of it. Madison didn’t think Veil could survive for very long outside the army, where his need for violent behavior was not only sanctioned but rewarded. In fact, he had himself wheeled into Veil’s stockade cell to tell him just that. Madison told Veil that, in his opinion, Veil would self-destruct within six months, either from drugs, booze, or getting himself stabbed in some back alley.”
“It almost happened,” I said quietly, remembering Garth’s description of Veil’s first years in New York City.
“I know that better than you,” Worde said. “But there’s more. Madison thought he was being clever, and he was, but he wanted to make absolutely certain that he had all the bases covered. He informed Veil of the fact that, in the event Veil didn’t self-destruct, he would kill him anyway.”
“Madison told Veil this?”
Worde nodded. “It had already been agreed upon that the C.I.A. would keep Veil under constant surveillance to make certain he kept to his part of the bargain, and Veil would do nothing to hinder this surveillance. Madison guessed—correctly—that Veil had probably never known a day of real peace or happiness in his life. Madison said that if and when a moment, a day, came when Veil did find peace and happiness, that would be the time when Madison would have a bullet shot through his brain. In effect, Veil was put under a kind of life sentence of death, and he would never know at what moment that sentence might be carried out.” Gary Worde paused, drew himself up straight, and passed a hand over his eyes. “That’s all Veil told me,” he continued in a voice like a sigh. “It’s all I know.”
“Gary,” I said, “I didn’t mention this before, because Garth and I wanted to hear what you had to say first, but Orville Madison is alive and doing very well, thank you. This isn’t the first time we’ve come across his name in connection with this business.”
“In that case, you know who had somebody wing a shot at Veil,” Gary Worde said without hesitation. “You also know who’s hunting Veil, and you.”
“Agreed. But there are complications. Gary, do you have any idea of what’s going on in the country or the world?”
“Not a thing.”
“We have a new president, a man by the name of Kevin Shannon. Shannon seems like a pretty straight arrow, except for the fact that his choice for secretary of state is Orville Madison.”
Gary Worde stared at me for some time, then slowly shook his head. “That’s a good one,” he said in a soft voice. “And they call me crazy.”
Garth rose from his stool, stretched, and glanced over at me inquiringly. I was fairly certain I knew what he was thinking, and I had a lot of the same questions.
“Gary,” I said, “you’re the only person Veil has ever spoken to about Orville Madison, so we’d like to know your thoughts on a few things. Madison’s career not only survived the fiasco of Operation Archangel, it bloomed. Who knows? That could have been the price he exacted for his silence. We know that he’s been the C.I.A.’s Director of Operations for the past few years. Now he gets to leap right out on center stage in the diplomatic community as top dog in the State Department and probably in the cabinet. Now comes the question. For all these years, Veil has kept to his part of the bargain; even if he had decided to say something, nobody would have believed him. All of his damaging records—real and phony—would have been mysteriously leaked, and he would have been dismissed as a psychotic crank. The one thing Veil cares about, his painting career, could have been seriously damaged. Finally, it’s highly arguable whether anyone would really have cared about Operation Archangel—an incident that happened a long time ago in a war everyone wants to forget anyway. I can’t understand how Madison could perceive that he had anything to worry about. Why, then, should this very successful man risk losing everything by sending an assassin after Veil?”
“You want my opinion?”
“Yes.”
“I think you’re missing the point by trying to figure out what Madison might have been worried about. I don’t think he was worried about anything. I don’t think he planned to kill Veil because he thought he had to; I think he did it because he wanted to. Finally, he would take his revenge, and it would be a very satisfying way of capping off his other triumphs. He saw it as finally evening a score. After all, he certainly didn’t plan on having his man miss Veil.”
Garth grunted. “It could be, Mongo,” he said to me in the tone of voice of a newly converted true believer. “Once his man missed and Kendry disappeared, Madison suddenly really did have a problem, and he knew it. The truce had been broken, and now all bets were off. Now he had to kill Kendry, because—from his past experience—he would necessarily assume that Kendry would stalk and kill him, regardless of the consequences. Then you came on the scene, and Madison realized that what Kendry planned was far worse; Kendry planned to expose him in a way that couldn’t be ignored, and then—maybe—kill him. Madison panicked, and by torturing and trying to kill you proceeded to dig himself an even deeper hole. I’ll damn well see the bastard buried in this one.”
“If we can get some kind of proof, which we still don’t have, and if he doesn’t bury us first.” I turned to the hidden veteran. “Gary, will you come out with us and tell what you know to a Senate committee? If you do, I think Veil might be ready to come out of hiding. He’s accomplished one of his goals, to let Garth and me discover the story bit by bit, so that we’d believe and fully understand the enormity of the power he’s up against. If you’ll come out, I think he’ll surface. You’re the only person, besides Veil, who has anything more than secondhand knowledge about any of this. I realize that we’re asking you to willingly make yourself a target, and I know—”
I stopped speaking when Gary Worde abruptly threw his pipe to the floor and sprang to his feet. Startled, uncertain of what Worde intended to do, both Garth and I started to draw our guns. We stopped when we saw Worde reach over his head, grab the rim of the bottom of the rain barrel and tip it. Water splashed over the flames in the hearth, sending up clouds of hissing steam. The cabin went dark, and when the steam cleared all we could see was the silhouette of Worde’s head and shoulders against the window.
“Gary?” I said in a low voice. “What’s the matter?”
“Come here.”
Garth and I walked across the cabin until we were standing next to the bearded man.
“Do you hear it?” Worde continued.
I listened, heard nothing but the almost palpable silence of the mountains. I even held my breath, but still heard nothing. “No,” I said, and looked at my brother. Garth merely shrugged his shoulders.
“You’ve been living in noisy places for too long,” Worde said. “Keep listening.”
Slowly, like an aural mirage arising from a desert of quiet, there came a sound. But this was no mirage. A plane was approaching from the west.
“There are no airports around here set up for night takeoffs and landings,” Worde said quietly, “and no one would use them if there were. Also, I recognize the sound; it’s a big, two-engine job, and one of the engines is pitched slightly lower than the other. It’s the same plane that’s been flying around here for four days—since about the time when you say you showed up in Colletville.”
“Goddamn,” I breathed, fighting back the panic I could feel rising in my chest like a hot tide. All the time Garth and I had been traveling up the Thruway and looking back over our shoulders, we hadn’t once thought of looking in the right direction—up; and we probably wouldn’t have thought anything of it if we had seen a plane. Orville Madison’s men had known where we were all the time.
Garth and I picked up our backpacks, slipped the rifles from their sleeves, then followed Gary Worde outside and stood in the moon shadows beside the cabin. The plane finally came into view, flying low on the horizon, and the sound of its twin prop engines grew louder. It was a good-sized cargo plane, and as it passed over the top of a mountain in the distance
it began to bank and turn, heading straight for us. Putting out the fire hadn’t helped; the pilot obviously knew exactly where to find us, and his instruments would have allowed him to pinpoint our location even if there wasn’t a full moon.
The plane gained altitude, then started to bank in a circle around us. The first figure dropped from its cargo bay as it flew aross the moon. A few seconds later the man’s black chute billowed open and he started to drift toward the ground. Clearly silhouetted against the moonlit sky, the figure looked decidedly lumpy; our guest dropping into the night forest was a serious commando with some serious equipment.
Orville Madison had decided to end the waiting game; whether or not Madison knew about Gary Worde and what the hidden veteran had to tell, he had decided that Garth’s and my taking the time to find a man living in total isolation could bode him no good. Henry Kitten would undoubtedly be very angry and disappointed, and we would be very dead.
Soon the first commando had company. As the plane continued to describe a large, high-altitude circle around our position, five more lumpy figures leaped out into the night, opened their chutes, and began to float to the earth. We were caught in a deadly circle perhaps two or three miles in diameter, and the circle would begin to close on us as soon as the men landed.
“Brother,” I said, “I do believe it’s time we split.”
“Outstanding idea, Mongo. Gary—?”
We both turned around to find that Gary Worde had disappeared. Garth and I were alone.
17.
Our first thought was that Gary Worde had panicked at the sight of the commandos and abandoned us—but he was gone only long enough for Garth and me to work up a little panic of our own. When he reappeared, he had a huge bowie knife in a metal scabbard strapped around his waist. Nunchaku sticks, their polished mahogany gleaming in the bright moonlight, hung around his neck by their connecting chain. In his right hand he carried a packet about the size of a paperback book wrapped in dirt-encrusted, heavy-duty yellow oilskin. He squatted down, set the oilskin packet to one side, and started to rub dirt over his hands and face, indicating that we should do the same.
“Gary, I can’t tell you how sorry I am that we drew these people here,” I said as Garth and I quickly smeared dirt over our exposed flesh. “We thought we’d been careful to make certain no one was following us, and we wouldn’t have come here otherwise.”
“Don’t worry about it, Mongo,” Worde replied in a low, breathless voice. I could only guess at the nightmares that were going through his head at the moment; he was clearly frightened, but controlling it. His reaction was called courage. “Veil made clear to me from the very first time he came up here that any kind of association with him was extremely dangerous and that something like this could happen. It was one reason he told me the whole story of what had happened to him. I accepted the risk because Veil was the one person whose company I enjoyed—and needed.” He straightened up, hefted the packet. “I also accepted this.”
“What’s in it?” Garth asked.
“I don’t know,” the bearded veteran replied as he slipped the packet inside his coat.
“When did he give it to you?”
Worde thought about it. “It’s hard for me to say. It was quite a few years ago; I don’t know how many. I remember that it was in the fall. He brought it to me on one of his visits. He asked me just to bury it someplace and keep it for him; he said he might need it someday. I’m thinking now may be that time.”
I glanced at the luminous dial on my wristwatch, saw that four minutes had passed since the figures had begun to drop from the sky. “Gary, do you think you can get us out of here through that ring of commandos?”
“You just follow me,” Worde replied in a low voice that trembled with both fear and anger. “I don’t care how well trained or equipped those jokers are; they don’t know these mountains, and I do. They don’t know we’re on the move, so don’t do any shooting except as an absolute last resort. If we can break through the circle without being detected, I think we’ll be home free. We’ll walk in single file, and you should try to step exactly where I step. Okay?”
Garth and I nodded.
“Then let’s do it.”
Garth and I followed Gary Worde as he walked down to the stream. He picked up his rifle from the chopping block, then started back the way we had come. After a hundred yards or so he cut to his right and headed up a fairly steep embankment. As we had been instructed, Garth and I tried to step exactly where he stepped, and as a result found ourselves avoiding dead sticks and loose stones. Worde obviously had excellent night vision, for we were moving at a fairly brisk pace through a densely wooded patch of hillside where little moonlight filtered through the trees. We tried as best we could to imitate his silent walking—a curious, rolling gait that Veil had showed me and which enabled Worde to move silent as a ghost through the night forest.
Suddenly Worde stopped, and I almost bumped into him. He motioned for us to be silent, then cupped both hands to his ears. I listened, but could hear nothing but the sound of our own raspy breathing. After a few moments we moved off again, but we had gone less than a hundred feet when Worde stopped again and listened. After watching him pluck from silence the sound of the approaching plane, I had a great deal of respect for Worde’s hearing; still, judging from the positions of the commandos when they had dropped from the sky, I didn’t think any one of them would yet be close enough for us to hear his passing.
“Veil?” Gary Worde called in a low voice that was just above a whisper, and which sounded curiously like the soughing of the wind.
Veil?!
Suddenly, behind us, there was an explosion that shook the ground. We spun around in time to see a column of white and orange flame shoot up into the sky from the site where Gary Worde’s cabin had been.
“Shit,” Garth said. “One of those sons-of-bitches moves fast.”
“Satchel charge,” Worde murmured. “Whoever made it to the cabin knows we’re not there. Now we’ll see what kind of communications they have.”
As if in response to Worde’s thought, the cargo plane came flying in low from the south, gained altitude, and then banked into a tight circling pattern with the flaming cabin as its epicenter. Then flares began to fall, incandescent balls of fire that stripped the cloak of night from us.
We were in trouble; although the hillside was covered with trees, there was no foliage. There would be a spotter up in the plane equipped with high-powered binoculars to search for us, or signs of our passing. We threw ourselves to the ground next to the trunks of trees and froze as the plane flew off into the distance. Finally the flares winked out, and night rushed back in over the mountain. We waited, listening, but could hear nothing but the drone of the airplane circling somewhere out of our line of sight. After more than two minutes passed, I began to dare hope that we hadn’t been spotted.
Then the plane came into view; it banked against the moon, then began to descend rapidly, coming directly at us.
“Oh, no,” Worde moaned in a barely recognizable voice as the first black canister dropped from the belly of the plane and began to turn lazily end over end as it angled down toward us. “Oh God, no.”
We sprang to our feet. Worde threw his nunchaku away and we half-ran, half-fell down the hillside as fast as we could. There was an explosion, and I didn’t have to look back to know that the spot where we had been was erupting with napalm flame. We were flushed, and there was nothing left to do but run.
We’d become separated in the scramble down the hillside, but Garth and I found each other just inside the tree line by a small, open glen. Ten yards to our left, just beyond the tree line and bathed in moonlight, a trembling Gary Worde was kneeling on the ground with his hands crossed over his head.
“Gary!” I shouted as Garth and I ran to him and grabbed his arms. “Gary, get up!”
We managed to pull Worde to his feet and drag him back into the minimal shelter of the trees as another canister dropped fro
m the sky and splashed a river of flame through the forest on the opposite side of the glen. Still holding Worde, Garth and I started to run back through the trees. We had gone perhaps fifty yards when Worde suddenly broke free from our grasp, spun around, and screaming, ran back through the trees. Garth and I sprinted after him, but stopped at the edge of the tree line and stared in horror at the figure kneeling in the very center of the clearing. This time his head was neither bowed nor covered, but back; his rifle was in his hands, and he was pumping bullets at the fast-approaching plane.
“Gary!” I screamed. “Get up! Get the hell back here!”
But the hidden veteran was beyond the sound of any human voice; the spiritual barbed wire that had been holding him together for so many years had finally snapped and was flailing at him. He was back in Viet Nam, and this time he didn’t intend to come back.
I started to run toward the hopeless rifleman in the clearing, then felt my feet fly out from under me as Garth grabbed the hood of my parka and yanked me backward. It was Garth who darted forward as I scrambled to my feet—and then we both dropped to our bellies as automatic weapons fire suddenly erupted from the top of a rise a hundred and fifty yards to our left. Bullets raked through the bare, skeletal trees, snapping off branches which rained down all around and over us. When I turned my head, I could see the figure of the commando standing straight and with his legs braced to either side of him as the submachine gun he held against his hip bucked and chattered. Gary Worde’s lifeless body jerked spasmodically under the impact of the bullets, while above us the plane banked and reversed course for another napalm run.
If Gary Worde’s corpse went up in flame, so would the oilskin packet he carried. The only piece of evidence—if it was evidence—against Orville Madison would be destroyed.
“Cover me, Garth; throw some fire in that prick’s direction. We need that packet.”
“What—?!”
Garth lunged and grabbed for me, but I was already on my feet and scrambling through the snow in the clearing. Bullets kicked up little white fountains around me as I ran, rolled, and crawled toward Gary Worde’s bloody corpse. I heard Garth’s rifle shots—three, four, five. But a rifle in the darkness against a man equipped with a submachine gun wasn’t much of a match.
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