“Okay,” Nick said sullenly.
The doctor tried to say something, but the words caught in his throat.
“Hey, Doc,” said Bob, “in three tours in Vietnam, I’ve been in some scrapes. It’s okay to be scared shitless.”
Dobbler cracked a wretched smile.
“If Russell Isandhlwana could see me now!” he finally said.
“I don’t know who he is, but he’d crap in his pants, that I guarantee you,” said Bob.
He winked, actually happy, and they set off.
“Okay,” said Shreck. “1000 hours. Set, Payne?”
“Let’s do it, sir.”
“It’s going to be a long day. Fire the first flare.”
Payne lifted the flare pistol, pulled the trigger, felt the crispest pop, and watched as a red arc of intense light soared overhead, caught on its own parachute, then began to drift flutteringly to earth. In twenty seconds it was out; in thirty seconds it was down.
They walked to the little silk chute and the blackened, sulfurous husk of the burned-out illumination round.
“Leave a round there,” said Shreck. “A green one.”
Payne threw a brass flare round into the furls of the parachute.
“Now, we move to our next position. They’ve got a long hard climb to make this one, and we don’t have very far at all. In fact we should be able to watch them come.”
They pushed the woman along, and walked the crest of the ridge. It was easy moving, because the ground was clear and stony and the air bright. They covered a mile in fifteen minutes, then plunged downhill for a swift half mile. There, nestling in a grove, was a canoe that Payne had planted days ago. He righted it, plunged it into a stream, and the three climbed in. Propelled by Payne’s powerful strokes, they made three miles in the remaining time. Then, hiding the canoe, they came to another ridge. Payne bent into the underbrush, pulled out a lank rope, and yanked it tight so that it coiled and slithered under his tension, like an awakening snake. It extended halfway up the ridge to where it had been pinioned into the stone. At that point, Payne had dangled another rope from still higher on the ridge.
“All right, Mrs. Fenn. You just pull yourself up as you climb. You’ll find it’s much, much easier than climbing unsupported.”
At each stage, Payne coiled the rope and hid it.
When they reached the crest, none of them were even breathing hard.
“The telescope,” said Shreck. “They’ll be on the ridge soon enough.”
Payne pulled a case out of his pack and unlimbered a Redfield Regal VI spotting scope with a 20?-60? zoom lens, mounted it to its tripod and bent to its angled eyepiece, jacked the magnification up to maximum, and found a clear view of the ridge across the way.
“All set, Colonel Shreck.”
“Well, they’re late. This early in the game and they’re late. They’re losing it.”
“They had a long pull. They had four miles, over two ridge lines, with a stream to ford. They’d only just now be making it.”
Finally, with three minutes gone over the hour deadline, the green flare rose and floated down.
“All right, fire quickly. Don’t give them any time to rest.”
Payne fired a blue flare into the air and in the last moment of its arc, he saw a figure come straggling over the surface to take a fast compass reading.
Just barely made it, bubba, he thought.
A few minutes later three figures were visible on the crest line two miles away. Magnified sixty times, they were still ants, but recognizable ants.
And it became immediately obvious what the difficulty was.
It must have been Bob out front. He looked as if he could go for another ten years.
Too bad they don’t make a two-mile rifle, motherfucker, Payne thought. I’d have a snipe at you myself.
The middle one would be the younger guy, Memphis. He remembered Memphis. Memphis wore an FBI raid jacket, and its initials almost yielded their individual meanings before collapsing back into blaze-yellow blur. Memphis’s face was lost behind a mask of camouflage paint but his body language looked stolid and determined.
The problem was the third one.
Jesus, it was Dobbler. Face painted like a commando or not, he was still recognizable by his pansy body and that prissy lack of strength in his flapping limbs.
“It’s Dobbler!” Payne yelled. “Colonel Shreck, for Christ’s sakes, they brought Dobbler along and he don’t look happy.”
Dobbler had gone to his knees and his mouth was open – Payne imagined he could hear the ruckus even two miles away.
“I can see he’s yelling. Jesus, I can just hear him: ‘I can’t make it, I can’t go on, why did I ever do this,’ that kind of candy-ass shit.”
“Let me see,” said Shreck.
Payne moved to let Shreck at the scope.
“Swagger, you fool,” said Shreck, with a contemptuous snort as he watched. “You should have shot him.”
Eventually, they saw the other two get the abject figure to his feet.
“I wonder how long he’ll last,” said Shreck.
Payne would shoot Dobbler, just as he knew Shreck would. If you ain’t up to the field, you die. That was all. That was the rule. He himself had shot a captain once who’d fucked up so bad in an A-camp fight and was weeping piteously in the bunker. He’d bet Shreck had done it too.
But not Bob. Bob was a secret pussy. He didn’t have what Shreck had and what Payne had: he couldn’t do the final thing. He couldn’t get it done. That’s why now, at the end, when it came down to balls and nothing else, he’d lose.
Dobbler finally gave up around one o’clock. It was surprising that he lasted that long. They saw it happen, having extended their lead and now sited themselves on another ridge for a checkup.
“Look, Colonel Shreck, look!”
Shreck bent to the scope and saw what Payne had seen: a mile and a half away, Dobbler had quit. He lay in the high grass, clearly begging for mercy. Memphis appeared to be the angry one. They saw him try and pick Dobbler up but Dobbler simply collapsed. Dobbler would not rise.
And giving up had its dire implications. Who would come back for him? Shreck knew these two wouldn’t; in two hours they’d be under the gun of Lon Scott. Dobbler would perish in these mountains, though he couldn’t know this now. He’d wander, winding down further each day. Maybe he’d be lucky and run into a party of hunters, but they were so deep in the fastness of the Ouachitas now, that prospect seemed unlikely.
“If he stays, he’s dead,” said Shreck.
“And if he goes, he’s dead,” said Payne.
Bob appeared to have disengaged. He stood away from them, unmoving, as Memphis did all the screaming. Finally, Shreck could just barely make out through the scope that he was saying something; then he turned and walked away. Shreck watched Memphis bend quickly to Dobbler, the yellow letters of his FBI raid jacket flashing as he opened it to peel his own canteen from his belt, and hand it to the man. Then he turned to run after Bob.
Shreck, Payne and the woman had achieved Hard Bargain Valley from the southwest, coming across a screen of trees and over a little creek. They were more than an hour ahead of Swagger and Memphis, though in the hours since dumping poor Dr. Dobbler, the two pursuers had closed the gap considerably.
It had not been an easy approach, for no roads lead to the valley and it must be earned by several hours of desperately difficult hiking over rills and hills and gulches, up stony mountainsides, through dense trees.
And then a splurge of yellow openness. A mile wide at its most open, it is one of the largest, flattest geological phenomena in all of Arkansas, a virtual tabletop in the middle of the mountains.
At one side is the ridge that could be said to overlook it, although it’s not high, and it doesn’t afford much in the
