’em by the bicycle count — may have commandeered a civilian vehicle to save travel time between Pend Oreille and Priest Lake. For them there’ll be no need to worry about identifying friend or foe. Everyone is now their foe, so they’ll be quick on the trigger. I’ll try to stay in contact with the Hawkeye and in whisper contact with you via your MIRs.” The general paused. “Questions?”
“We have any idea what they look like?” asked Salvini. “They could still be in U.S. battle dress.”
“They could,” the general agreed. “But my guess, Sal, is that they’ve gone civilian. The media will have the story out by now, or at least their version of it. Reporters can be sat on for a day, maybe, but there’s no way that the murder of ten American scientists and a security guard in a small community can be hushed up for much longer. So, Sal, my answer has to be that the creeps could still be in our battle dress uniform or hunting gear. But not many hunters use automatic weapons, which I presume they’re carrying.”
“True,” said Aussie, “though I know some so-called sportsmen who hunt deer with AK-47s and M-16s.” He shook his head in disgust.
During the remainder of the flight, Freeman and his team did a quick study of the list of cabins and of ten people who, the sheriff had told him, had fled civilization to live year-round by the now storm-caged lake.
Jake McCairn, sixty-five, had a bad back from too much stress, he thought, and had retreated from the world into his wild, primeval domain. He enjoyed not having to shave or wear his dentures. He liked animals more than people, and when he saw this army guy coming out of the forest at the edge of the lake and calling out, “Mornin’!” Jake ignored him and continued checking the float-lines he’d set for rainbow and Dolly Varden trout.
“You Jake?”
“Eh?” Jake checked another of the lines — nothing.
“You’re Jake McCairn, right?”
“What of it?”
“Signs on the way up from Sandpoint on Pend Oreille say you’ve got a boat for rent.”
“Sometimes. Why?”
“My name’s Ramon. My squad and I need a boat to go up the lake for a while.”
“Should’ve brought your own boat. What d’ya expect, big marinas with neons flashing?”
“We had a boat, a Zodiac, but it got ripped up by a bear or something up—”
Jake McCairn emitted a guttural cough that was a stand-in for a laugh. It could be heard by Ramon’s men thirty feet away in the woods fronting the lake. Low nimbostratus was coming lower, gray mist leaking from it and wreathing the lake in banks of bone-chilling fog.
“So,” said Ramon, producing a wad of fifty-dollar bills. “Could you let us use your boat for a bit?”
“Nope. Going out to the island soon. Gonna get me a wolf skin.” With that, Jake turned his back on the stranger and went back to his line casts.
Jake heard Ramon’s footfall behind him and turned to see about ten or twelve men approaching him from the marshy edge of the lake, and heard the unmistakable sound of an approaching helicopter. He looked up, could see nothing but gray cloud no more than five hundred feet above a gray sheen on the lake, a sign that the sun still existed and was trying to get through here and there.
Ramon grabbed him in a hammerlock, and now the other men were running across the marshy margin between the woods and lakeshore, McCairn protesting violently until one of the men punched him so hard McCairn could hear his jawbone crack.
“Now,” asked Ramon, dark brown eyes appearing almost black in the weak daylight, “where’s your fucking boat, before we break your—”
Jake tried to spit at them but only bloody dribble came out, running down onto his beard-stubbled chin.
“Break his leg,” ordered Ramon, glancing anxiously at the leaden sky for the helo.
Jake attempted to speak but couldn’t, the pain of his broken jaw so intense it came out as “Boa’s…up ’bou’ three hundred yar’.”
“Get him to his feet!” Ramon ordered. “Rashid!”
“Speak English!” Ramon snapped. “You and Omar deal with the helo if it looks like it’s going to land.”
“Yes, Captain.”
“C’mon!” Ramon told Jake, jabbing him hard with a Heckler Koch 9 mm sidearm. “Take us to the boat and fast or we
Jake stumbled along through the reeds and fist-sized rocks, and in his hurting fury managed to ask, “You ’mericans?”
The soldier ignored him. When they found the boat, two of Ramon’s men brought the outboard from their torn Zodiac. Then they cut his throat. They started the outboard, a gray wolf howled, and Ramon realized that the dead man’s boat could carry only six men.
There was no argument as to who would go and who would stay behind. Ramon’s commandos from GUPIX, the Government of Palestine in Exile as they called it, always knew that such difficult tactical situations might arise. The four of them, including the two American citizens from one of the vehement anti-federalist Idaho militias who had helped them in their mission against the U.S. government, had trained long and hard, and each man understood what he might be called upon to do in order that those with the disk could escape. And so morale remained high as Ramon told five of his men that he would go with them and the disk in the boat, while the other six men would stay behind.
The sound of the helicopter had now shifted from being eastward, near Montana, back toward them in the thick soup of nimbostratus. Ramon took comfort in the knowledge of how stressed the pilots must be. It would be tough enough on a clear day, flying in the tight airspace in the mist and cloud-shrouded amphitheater of the Rocky Mountains and surrounding hills, but this must be a nightmare. It was nothing like the Iraqi desert, Ramon mused, and he was struck by the sweet irony that in Iraq, in the desert, the terrain had favored the infidels’ infiltration, whereas here America’s rugged terrain helped by inhibiting a helo’s maneuvers.
“Son of a bitch!” shouted Tony Ruth, who, struck by the loudness of the strong, resurrected “beep” being amplified over the Chinook’s internal bay speaker, declared, “We must be on top of the mothers!”
“We are!” confirmed the loadmaster.
“Gonna be tricky!” opined Aussie, looking down at the wide, marshy margin between the lake proper and the edge of the woods.
“That’s what we
“When we land,” began Freeman, “I want every—” He glimpsed a bluish tail of exhaust at the edge of the woods.
“Missile!” yelled the pilot.
They felt the helo jink sharply right, then—
The explosion was earsplitting, and for several moments neither the general nor the rest of the team, who were slammed hard against the fuselage in their H-straps, could hear anything. Then the high whine of the rear rotors’ portside engine took over the world, screaming as it fought to compensate for the loss of power from the knocked-out starboard engine.
“Going down!” yelled the loadmaster.
Nothing sounded or smelled right anymore, the usually loud but reassuring sounds and odors of a Chinook in steady flight now replaced by decidedly out-of-whack noises and the nauseating smell of leaking hydraulics as pilot and copilot fought to get the machine under control, flares still popping through gray stratus and mist. For a moment the big helo rose promisingly against a violent wind shear, but then they began to plummet.
“Hard landing!” shouted the loadmaster, and Choir, holding the spaniel close to him, could hear Prince whine.
They were out of the gray world, the metallic sheen of the lake sliding downhill, the helo’s nose rattling like crazy and rising insanely, the forward rotor spinning, the rear blades slowing arthritically before stopping altogether, fuselage gyrating in the pilot’s unequal battle with gravity; then they saw a long streak of dark woods west of them
