He got out and locked the truck. What he had to figure out was how to get back in there and get a piece of that pretty naked thing in the nitro building. He knew how to make her behave now, so maybe he’d
sweet talk her this time, talk some sense into her, then give her the ride to glory.
He adjusted his considerable sexual equipment, smiled, and then went to check on the dogs. He refilled their water. They were lethargic, but there was no more kennel mess. He had a beer while he checked through the day’s mail, and then he went to bed.
At just after 2:00 A.M.” Jared snapped awake and sat up in bed. He tried —to figure out what sound had awakened him. The windows were open, and the night was filled with the normal woods noise of insects and a chirping chorus of tree frogs. He rubbed his face and listened carefully.
Maybe he’d been dreaming. Then it came again: the distinct sound of a dry branch breaking, and not far away, either. One of the dogs woofed softly, but they raised no general alarm. Was someone out there in the trees back of the trailer? He swung his feet over the edge of the bed and listened again. A few minutes later, it came again, the distinct crunching sound of someone stepping through the forest undergrowth, then the snap of another dry branch. He got up and went to the edge of the back window. His backyard was bathed in the orange glow from a security light mounted on his power pole. The light illuminated the yard, but it had the perverse effect of making the woods even darker. Keeping an eye out the window, he reached into the drawer of the night table and pulled out his government-model .45 auto. He stepped back from the window, racked in a round, and then crossed to its other side. He could see almost nothing out in the darkness.
He depended on the dogs to alert him to intruders, and they normally did a noisy job of it. But now there was silence in the woods. He went through the trailer, checking the other rooms and the locks and all the windows. There were no signs of intrusion. Then he went back to bed, leaving the .45 out on the bedside table. He was just about asleep, when he distinctly heard the muffled sound of a portable-radio transmission outside, followed by a distinct squelch of static. He sat back up and listened, wondering again if he had been dreaming. Then he got up and went through the whole trailer again, gun in hand, checking to see if he’d left the television or the radio on this time. It was
just past 3:00 A.M.” and this was pissing him off. Then he had a cold thought: A radio—were there cops creeping around out there?
He spent the next half hour going from window to window, looking for any signs of movement in the woods. He could not figure out why the dogs weren’t raising hell. There was no wind, so maybe they heard the noises but caught no scent? Then he wondered if there was any connection between their being sick earlier and the possible intruders outside.
He kept watch for another half hour, and finally went back to bed, this time falling heavily asleep. He would have to tell the old man about this shit in the morning. Except there was always the chance he’d dreamed the whole thing.
Kreiss came to and tried to lift his head but could not. He was pinned facedown to the cold concrete, lying now beneath several objects. The moon was down and he couldn’t see what had him. His right arm was caught, but his left could move. The back of his head hurt like hell, and there was a wet sensation on the back of his neck. He felt around and closed his fingers over a cold steel pipe, about an inch and a half in diameter.
He felt around some more and realized he was under a pile of pipes.
He tried to move his legs and found they were both free. After a minute or so of struggling, he was out from under the pile.
He rolled over on his back, fingered the trip wire at his feet, and looked up at the nest of steam lines looping over the main street between the buildings. Someone had gone to a lot of trouble, climbing up the steel rungs on the pipe crossover structure and piling a couple dozen lengths of steel pipe up there, rigged to the trip wire. The top padding in his head hood and the Kevlar shoulder pads along the top of the jumpsuit had saved him from serious injury. The Kevlar ribs that ran down the jumpsuit on his chest and back had also taken some of the shock, aided by the soft bulk of the chest pack and backpack. Otherwise, a couple of hundred pounds of steel pipe falling from twenty feet might have killed him. He stretched out on the concrete, took some deep breaths, and felt for bruises.
So they’d known he was in there. He’d walked down that street coming in and had not hit any wire. Plus, they’d gone to some trouble to rig that deadfall, which meant they’d expected him to come back. Not good. He looked at his watch; it was 3:30, Friday morning. The night was perfectly still, with not even the slightest breeze. He had some satisfaction in knowing that the little black box on top of brother
Jared’s trailer was going to make him lose some sleep tonight, too, unless he was dead drunk in that trailer.
So, how had they known? He had used the same ingress point twice, the answer must be there. He got up gingerly, brushed himself off, and explored the swelling cut on the back of his head. He got out a military battle dressing and taped it over the cut. Then he walked painfully down to the rail gates, where he quickly found the electric-eye counter. The counter went to 001 when he passed his hand through the beam. He hit the reset button to zero it, then recorded twenty-six hits. Let them think about that. He went over the gates, walked the three miles down the rail line to his truck, got in, and sat there for a minute in the pitch-black. He was no closer to finding Lynn, and he was still in the dark as to what these people were doing in the arsenal. If he went to the Roanoke feds, he would confirm the sharks from Washington’s worst suspicions.
McGarand and his helper had been sure enough about an intruder to set up a deadfall. Hell with it, he thought, as he started up the truck. My objective is to find out what happened to Lynn. I can deal with the likes of Bellhouser and Foster if I have to. They’re just admin pukes with fancy titles and privileged access. There was no more point to creeping the arsenal, where those two guys would always have the home-ground advantage. He decided to just go have a little talk with Mr. Jared McGarand. With a little luck, Jared would maybe give him the other one.
Hell, Jared will absolutely give me the other one, he thought. And between the two of them, I’ll get a line on Lynn. After that, well, with all the unknowns in the equation right now, there was no sense in making long-range plans.
He drove back toward his cabin west of Blacksburg, which would take almost forty-five minutes. He stopped in an all-night gas and convenience store out on Highway 460 to get some coffee. The clerk gave him a sideways look, and he realized he must look more battered than he knew.
While he was refueling the truck, it occurred to him that perhaps the two Washington people had brought along some operational help. Who might be waiting at the cabin for him to return. He finished fueling, paid for his gas and coffee, and then pulled over to one side of the parking lot.
He extracted a local county map from the glove compartment and examined the roads surrounding Pearl’s Mountain. He knew that there was one paved county road that ran along the stream at the bottom front of his property, and another one that ran along the back slope of Pearl’s Mountain.
As he remembered, the two firebreaks that bracketed the big hill on
either side ran all the way to that back paved road. The map confirmed this. If he could get his truck onto one of the firebreaks, and it wasn’t too rough, he could drive partway up the slope and then hike up and over, ending up in a position above his cabin, where he had some toys stashed.
He checked his watch. It was 5:15. It would take another half hour to get to the back of the mountain, and then at least forty five minutes to hike up and over. Sunrise was around 7:00 A.M. With luck, he could be in position just before dawn. If they had been waiting for him all night, they’d come out at daylight to Kreiss’s version of the welcome wagon.
Jared called Browne at just after seven o’clock Friday morning. He told his grandfather what had happened the night before.
“And you hadn’t been drinking? This wasn’t some dream?”
“No, sir, I came home, had me one beer, checked on the dogs, and hit the sack. This shit started sometime around two this morning, a little after.”
“And the dogs didn’t alert on it?”
“No, sir. That’s the weird part. You know them dogs—someone comes around here, they make like it’s dinnertime.”
Browne was silent for a moment.
“I don’t like the sound of this,” he said finally.
