probed under the blankets, and clamped onto the nearest boy ankle. The kind of The boy may have cowered into the wee hours, balled so tightly in the blankets that even a flea would have found a meal difficult, but Jim Castle had put away childish things. A bout with testicular cancer, three bad marriages, a stint in the Navy SEALs, and an assignment with the FBI’s Hostage Rescue Team had made sure of that. Faith and imagination had no more room on the stage. This wasn’t a world where monsters slithered out from shadowy crevices; in the twenty-first century, the monsters packed themselves with explosives and walked into a crowded market, carried automatic weapons into a post office, or put a torch to churches. Some of the worst monsters were fixtures on the nightly news, spewing their brand of poison as political ideology, letting others carry out their bloody work.
So the thing that had his foot wasn’t a monster. Though he and the Rook had ditched their backpacks while closing in on Goodall, Castle hadn’t forsaken all his gear. The small hatchet still hung in a leather holster on his hip. He disengaged his right hand from the rope, unsnapped the button, and freed the hatchet. The hole through which his leg dangled was too dark and cramped for him to hack blindly at whatever held his boot. At best, he could use the thick blade to probe around and maybe pry himself free. He rammed the hatchet head down beside his calf. It struck something soft and meaty.
From beneath him, a bleat arose, or maybe a chuckle the kind of sound that rolls off a sausage-chub tongue No, that was likely the last gasp of the radio he’d dropped, running down its NiCad battery in the dark. They’d limited communication to preserve batteries, and the FBI had not bothered to set up a command post in the area.
Because Goodall wasn’t supposed to be here.
He poked again, working the blunt blade around his boot. The chuckle turned into a slithering hiss, like that of an animal in pain. Castle pulled the blade up and in the gloaming half-light saw the edge was coated with a viscous liquid. Not blood, exactly, though the liquid was dark…
Castle yanked his foot with all the desperation of a five-year-old boy bundling blankets against the monster under the bed. This time it came free, accompanied by what sounded like fingernails on leather and a moan of disappointment.
“Pull me the fuck out of here,” Castle yelled, flinging the hatchet into the hole.
Samford gave no response, but Castle found now that his legs were free, he could scramble up the embankment with no problem. He gouged his boots into the loose dirt, sending rocks skittering down the slope. Castle hoped his actions would trigger enough of a landslide to bury whatever lay coiled in the deep recesses of the Earth with its long fire-hose arms as he worked the rope hand over hand, the slack curling around his legs. Dusk had gained a deeper hold, as if the hole below, now uncorked, had spilled its ink into the sky. He reached the raw lip of the bank, wondering why The Rook had gone silent, and hooked a knee up and planted it on solid ground. Then he wriggled his waist over, feeling more dirt give way below him in a damp avalanche.
“Samford,” he grunted, angry and a little scared. What if Ace Goodall had taken advantage of the shadows and crept up on his partner? He’d heard no gunfire, but Ace no doubt carried a hunting knife. Castle fumbled for his Glock as he wriggled the lower part of his body onto terra firma. He rolled, the pistol in his hand, forcing himself not to look down into the hole at the creature lurking inside Not a creature, just an old root, not a set of long, curling claws but a brittle branch The yell ripped the fabric of the night. It came from Castle’s left, maybe twenty feet away. At first Castle thought the sound had come from the woman believed to accompany Goodall.
Then: SkeeEEEEeeek.
The shriek phased in an arc overhead, like the stereophonic knob twiddling of a stoned-out rock guitarist or the rusty creaking of a giant coffin lid. Castle lifted the Glock and tracked the sound with the barrel, as if it were another Hogan’s Alley test in Quantico. At the FBI academy in Virginia, trainees were taught the basics of hostage negotiation, trigger jitters, and the kill shot. But Castle couldn’t recall any of those field exercises that had gone airborne.
Against the black sails of the sky, the shape was tangled and awkward, like a broken biplane. Or, he realized, an oversized bird with a healthy hunk of prey.
Like the bird he’d seen earlier.
Too large, too obscene, too out of place in this ancient but hushed wilderness.
A sick, soaring thing.
On clumsy, stunted wings, as if first learning to fly.
The soft moon on the mountaintops gave the creature a silhouette, and Castle’s finger tightened on the trigger. Not enough to squeeze off nine rounds, but enough to scare him. He’d almost broken the Hogan’s Alley code. Don’t shoot until you identified the target.
Because Castle recognized something in the disappearing jumble of wings, limbs, and limp meat.
The Rook’s wrist compass, blaze orange, torn and bobbing in the light of the quarter moon.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Gotta find the stupid bitch before the Feds do.
Ace Goodall plowed through the underbrush, all five-foot-six inches of him, as the branches and brambles plucked at his camou jacket. He figured the highfalutin bitch had turned on him, somehow signaled the agents and given away his position. Thinking back, he realized that bit with the campfire was obvious. She had probably been plotting against him for weeks, just waiting for her chance to betray him. Eve, Delilah, Jezebel. The Bible warned against such things. But God had put a little nub of weakness between each man’s legs.
But God in his infinite wisdom and mercy had also sent help from above. As Ace had watched from the shadows of the forest, debating whether or not to throw down on the pair of Haircuts, the fucked-up bat-thing had come to the rescue, swept down and scooped up the younger one, dragging it across the sky. Ace could have sworn a soft rain of blood had trailed from the struggling agent as the broken angel fluttered against the dusk. Ace could have easily taken the other one, the one who had fallen into the hole, but Ace figured maybe that was part of God’s plan, too. As if the Guy Upstairs had opened up the Earth to drag the Haircut straight to hell.
Proof that God was a patriot and approved of Ace’s holy work.
But Ace knew that God never took care of all the details. God only issued the commands, and left it to the foot soldiers to carry out orders. God might have steadied Ace’s hand while he built the bombs, but it was Ace himself who cooked up the nitromethane and mixed it with a gel of gunpowder and ammonium nitrate. Ace, who had dropped out of school in the seventh grade and never made it to basic algebra, much less chemistry, had learned from the best in a Dakota compound. He’d learned to wire an electric relay with a simple timer, stuff you could get at Radio Shack for less than ten bucks. The hardest part had been to pretend to be one of them, one of the baby-killing heathens in the human chop shops known as abortion clinics.
The first had been easy. He’d posed as a Birmingham municipal worker, gone in with his tool kit and a clipboard, clean blue coveralls, and no one had questioned him. In America, despite the post-9/11 fear of terrorism, a white male with a confident walk was never challenged. He’d set the bomb in a bathroom stall right next to the administrative office, figuring on luck and a little help from God. The blast the next morning had been spectacular, sending ceramic shards into the temple of the clinic’s top doctor, taking the murderous life of a nurse practitioner who’d just happened to be washing his hands (like Pilate) at the bathroom sink, and shutting down the clinic for three weeks.
The next two bombings were tougher, because security got tighter, and he wasn’t helped at all when some copycat amateur botched a mission in Los Angeles, the land of fags and liberals, where there were more baby- killers than bad actors. The La-La-Land bomber had hit a free clinic serving Hispanic immigrants, and while Ace figured there were enough illegal spics swarming the country, that was a mission for a later generation. The copycat had blown himself to bits while trying to plant the bomb, causing no other casualties and launching a week of media speculation over whether the Bama Bomber had met his end two thousand miles from home turf. The Feds knew better, though, because the MOs were different, as well as the chemical composition of the bombs, so the manhunt had scarcely eased.
Then Ace had picked up the bitch outside Atlanta and his luck had changed for the worse.
She had to pay, or at least get on her knees and beg forgiveness.
Just after the angel had delivered Ace from the Feds, Ace had stopped by the camp, retrieved his backpack-
