turned the case Jed Culver had made into a real indictment. Hell, it could even lead to the mad bastard trying to secede. But Kipper didn’t see that he had any choice. If there was some link between the Governor of Texas and the Emir’s forces in Manhattan, the President had to maintain as much distance from the investigation as possible. When they finally went public, there could be no suggestion of political interference. Jed, however, wanted to handle the whole thing in as Machiavellian a fashion as possible.
‘Why?’ asked Barb. She turned around to face him on the couch.
‘Huh?’ She’d surprised him. Was she talking about Jed - about Monroe even? Had he mumbled something in a beer haze? ‘Er, why what, Barb?’
‘Why does it make us stronger than them?’ she said, dragging him back on topic.
Kip’s heart sank. He really didn’t want to get into this, not on pork chop night. On the other hand, at least he hadn’t inadvertently blown the Blackstone investigation …
‘A couple of things,’ he began. ‘The strong forgive, because they can, and because holding on to their hatred makes no sense past a certain point. You beat your enemy, and then you move on. If you can’t do that, you become as obsessed with your never-ending war as he probably was to begin with. You start to see everything as part of the war. In the end, you’ll lose your life to it, as surely as you would getting killed on the battlefield.’
He finished his own drink, but unlike his wife he decided to have another one. He stood up to go to the kitchen, picking up her glass too as he did so. Barb shook her head.
‘I thought we might go to bed early,’ she said. ‘We could snuggle a bit.’
‘I’m all up for snuggling,’ he replied, heading for the door while at the same time finding he was warming to his little dissertation. ‘But, you know, the other thing is, we can
‘And Texas?’
‘I have no idea,’ said Kip unconvincingly. ‘Jed’s forever scheming against Blackstone. He leaves me out of it, thank God. In some ways they’re made for each other. But I’m not sure exactly what he’s up to at the moment. Guess I’ll find out tomorrow. Gotta say, though, my gut feeling is that I should just go down there and have it all out with Mad Jack myself.’
His wife looked sceptical. ‘Kip, he’s such an asshole.’
‘Yeah, but maybe he’s a well-intentioned asshole. I really think he only wants what’s best for the country. It’s just that, you know, he’s an asshole about it.’
‘Well, I’m sure if you fly down and tell him that, man to man,’ she said, cocking one eyebrow at him, ‘he’ll totally come around to your way of seeing things.’
He could tell that she’d be just as hard to convince as his Chief of Staff. The more he thought about what Jed had told him, however, the more likely it seemed that he was going to have to go down and confront Blackstone, even if it was all behind closed doors. Because if the FBI did confirm a link to Baumer and New York, there was no way Mad Jack would go quietly. He’d scream and kick back and fight this thing every inch of the way.
It made the option of sending somebody like Special Agent Caitlin Monroe down there even more tempting. Not to whack the guy, but perhaps to ease him out of power quietly, informally. Kipper was adamant, however: Monroe was going nowhere near Fort Hood.
38
TEMPLE, TEXAS ADMINISTRATIVE DIVISION
Forget about coming up with a plan to sneak into Blackstone’s lair at Fort Hood. She might not live that long. There were five dogs in the pack. Not wolves or coyotes, but vicious and hungry-looking ferals, with none of the light of kindness of man’s best friend in their eyes. They had been born to the wild and had the rank stench of it about them. They circled in front of her, growling. She was almost backed up against the brick wall in a laneway behind the supermarket. The pack could not get behind her to rush in and snap at her heels, but nor did she have anywhere to fall back to.
Sofia tracked the largest of the beasts with her handgun. She could shoot it down and drive away the other dogs, but to do so would bring the soldiers running. There were two patrols out on the streets of Temple that she knew of this evening. They were proper American soldiers, and as much as she held no fears that harm would come her way from them, the Mexican teenager had no intention of being taken into custody, protective or otherwise. Shooting the dogs, while not out of the question, would not be ideal. She hefted the machete in her other hand, waiting for the right moment to make that choice.
She knew it was coming. The growls were getting lower and more intense, turning into short, aggressive barks. Her flesh crawled, an ancient reflex she was powerless to control. She had learned this when she was last in Texas. A brave woman was not fearless. She simply refused to become a prisoner of her fears, to let them rule her. The feelings that coursed through her body, the racing heartbeat, tensed muscles, the way all of her senses seemed to open wide and let the world flood in, were all symptomatic of the fear that wanted to cripple and kill her. But she’d survived on the trail because she had learned from her father, from Maive and Trudi and the others, that the very same feelings could be channelled into a killing rage.
And so she waited.
The pack snarled and skinned their lips back from long yellow fangs. She fancied she could smell the foul odour of their breath, and even in the darkness there was light enough from the moon and stars that their eyes shone like silver dollars laid on the orbs of a dead man. She knew the attack was moments away when two of the animals moved, attempting to flank her on both sides. Ears pinned back, they lowered themselves onto their haunches, where massive knots of muscle and meat quivered and twitched with anticipation of the kill. The sound of their growling slowed, like a powerful engine winding down.
Sophia took a long, deep breath.
The pack leader lunged forward ripping out a fusillade of barks, snapping its jaw like a threshing machine, as its pack-mates launched themselves in from the side. They came flying at the girl as though hurled from catapults. But she had already moved, leaping towards the dog to her left as she swung the machete in a vicious blur of sharpened steel that connected with the animal just below its ear. The sickening crunch of blade on bone and gristle was simultaneous with the horrified, outraged howl of the beast and the crack of the pack leader’s skull as it impacted the brick wall where she’d been standing. A fraction of a second later, and she heard the dull thud of the third animal colliding with the top dog as she used the momentum of her first strike to draw the blade down and out while she pivoted around for an upward stroke that sliced off the snout of the nearest dog, halfway along its jawline.
The attack collapsed in a hideous discord of animal shrieks and yelps. She was drenched in hot blood and urine; the dogs’ and her own. But the threat had dissolved in a heartbeat as those that could flee did so. The beast she had all but decapitated spasmed at her feet. She brought one booted foot down on its head in a hammer kick, telling herself she was putting the mutt out of its misery as her father had always taught her. But knowing that, in a darker place, she was punishing the thing for having attacked her, taking vengeance out on a dangerous but defeated enemy.
And then it really was over.
The protests of the vanquished pack drifted further away until she could hear them no more. Adrenaline backwashed through her nervous system, bringing with it nausea and tremors. She had to lean up against the wall and take a minute to breathe deeply and slowly. For the first time since Sofia had realised she was being hunted, she heard the twittering song of night-birds again. She listened hard for any sound of footfall or human voices. But heard nothing. The short, savage caterwauling din of a dogfight was not unusual in Temple, as she had learned.
Time to move.
The grocery market lay next to a railway line that ran through the eastern side of town. On the far side of the tracks, a wasteland of charred ruins stretched away to the horizon. A few houses stood undamaged, but the further away from the train tracks she looked, the more the scene recalled the devastation of a city beset by war. Sofia did not dwell on the reason the firestorm that had burnt so many acres of housing had died out before leaping to this
