The bearded man shrugged his broad shoulders, touched the binoculars slung around his neck. 'I've been tracking you for the past two hours from the top of the lookout tower back there. From the way the two of you trip over your own feet, you're sure as hell not hikers-and there are no hiking trails in this area, anyway. So I asked myself, what would an odd pair like you two be doing around here? A mutual friend, Veil Kendry, talks about you a lot. Let's just say I put one big guy and one little guy together and came up with your names. Did Veil send you with a message for me? Is he all right?'
Garth unhurriedly unzipped his parka, reached inside, and withdrew his service revolver. He cocked the hammer, walked out into the streambed, and put the gun to the man's head. It wasn't a very friendly thing to do, but I definitely agreed with his next point. 'For some reason I don't believe you, pal,' Garth said in a quiet voice that carried clearly in the sharp, cold air. 'I try to put you together, and I don't come up with any answer at all. Now, what's your real name, and what are
The gun bore touching his forehead didn't seem to bother the man. His expression didn't change at all as he rolled his eyes in my direction and raised his eyebrows slightly. 'Mongo? Tell me why I shouldn't be who I say I am.'
'You don't match up with the report we got. Gary Worde's supposed to be the wild man of these mountains, and nobody's even seen him for nine years. You don't look or sound very crazy to us, but you do look too Goddamn well fed and well dressed to be the man we're looking for.'
'Who told you all this?'
'A friend of Worde's in Colletville.'
The man frowned slightly. 'Then Veil didn't send you?'
'No. As a matter of fact, you might say we're looking for him.'
'Why are you looking for him?'
Confused and uncertain of what to say, I said nothing. While it was certainly true that this man casually sitting on a boulder in the middle of a dry streambed didn't match up with anything Jan Garvey had told us about Gary Worde, it was also true that it wouldn't make any sense for our trackers-assuming they knew about Gary Worde, which was a big assumption-to sit this man down in our path to try to trick us. It bothered me, as did the man's seeming indifference to Garth's gun at his head.
'You'd best answer my question,' the man cautioned in a tone of voice that sounded oddly like a threat.
'When was the last time you saw Veil Kendry?'
'I don't measure time the way you do. It was three seasons ago.'
Spring. Veil had pulled one of his disappearing acts in the spring, for about three weeks. 'He came here?'
'Yeah. He visits me at least once, sometimes twice, a year.'
'Why does he visit you?'
'Because he's my friend,' the man said with a slight shrug of his shoulders. 'We practice together in these mountains.'
'Practice what? Martial arts?'
His answer was to execute a series of maneuvers so fast I couldn't follow them. The bearded man ducked forward and to his left beneath Garth's gun, which clattered to the rocks as the side of the man's hand hit Garth's wrist. In what seemed less than the flicker of an eyelid, Garth had been disarmed and turned around, with one of his arms held in a tight hammerlock. The bearded man's right forearm was across my brother's windpipe.
Feeling like nothing so much as a winded commuter who has just seen his train pull out of the station, I drew my Beretta and started to circle around to where I might get a clear shot at the man who called himself Gary Worde. 'Let go of my brother, or I'm going to put a bullet through your head.'
'Put the gun away, Mongo,' the man said easily. 'You're lucky I recognized you as the Frederickson brothers, or you'd both have been dead a few seconds after your brother here pulled his gun on me. Put yours away.'
'Let go of Garth first.'
'No.'
Garth was turning blue. I released the hammer on the Beretta, flipped it in my hand, and offered it to the bearded man butt first.
'I didn't say I wanted the gun,' the man continued. 'I just asked you to put it away.' I dropped the gun into the pocket of my parka. The man immediately took his forearm away from my brother's throat-but he didn't release the hammerlock. 'You still haven't answered my question, Mongo. If Veil didn't send you, what are you doing here?'
'We think you've got some answers we need to know.'
'What are the questions?'
'What was Veil doing in Saigon near the end of the war, just after he'd been pulled out of Laos? Do you know?'
Shadows moved in the man's eyes, and his jaw muscles clenched and unclenched. 'Why do you need to know?' he asked softly.
'It's a long and complicated story. The bottom line is that Veil's in big trouble; somebody wants him dead, along with us. We believe that the key to who's hunting Veil, and why, lies in something that Veil was involved in during the war. It's Veil's past we're hunting, and that's why we're here.'
'Oh, shit,' the man said as he abruptly released Garth and half turned away. He waved one hand in front of his face, as if trying to chase away invisible gnats-or something else. 'So that's finally going down.'
Garth and I glanced at each other in surprise as the bearded man suddenly started walking away. Garth picked up his gun, then ran after the man and grabbed his arm.
'Gary, I'm sorry! We don't understand. What's going down?'
Gary Worde shoved Garth's hand away, kept walking. His shoulders were hunched now, as if against the cold. Without looking back he motioned for us to follow him.
Garth and I walked in silence on either side of Gary Worde as he walked west in the dry streambed. His hands were thrust deep into his pockets, and his shoulders remained hunched. After a half mile or so he turned to his right and climbed up out of the bed. We found ourselves on a cleared path running up the face of the mountain on which the lookout tower stood. Panting and sweating from the quick pace Worde had set, Garth and I stopped to adjust our backpacks. Still silent, Worde helped us by removing some of the heavier articles from both our packs. He wrapped the articles inside my sleeping bag, hoisted it over his shoulder. Then we started off again.
'What you heard about me in Colletville is true,' Gary Worde suddenly said in a quiet voice so low that Garth and I had to strain to hear him. 'At least it was true back then. I couldn't-can't-make it anywhere there are people just going through their regular routines day in and day out. The fact that they don't know or think about the things that happened in the war only makes me think about them more; if you will, my memories are like air rushing into the vacuum of other people's forgetfulness or indifference. That's when I get… crazy. It's when the bad dreams come.'
Worde shuddered, cast an anxious look at Garth and me. We returned his gaze and nodded, but remained silent. Garth reached out, squeezed his shoulder.
'Some people would say that the army let me out of their nuthouse too soon,' the hidden veteran continued as we reached the top of the mountain and walked along its crest. Around us was nothing but forest, rolling hills, more mountains. 'That isn't true; I never would have gotten better there. They had me doped up with chlorpromazine, and all I did was sleep all the time. But I still dreamed. I would have died there, and I guess they finally came to realize that. They gave me a permanently refillable prescription for lithium, the name of a shrink at a V.A. hospital in the Albany area, and let me go. I came home to Colletville.'
We started down the opposite side of the mountain. Halfway down, beside a swiftly moving stream, was a log cabin which looked sturdily built and came complete with glass windows. Perhaps three-quarters of an acre of forest had been cleared around the cabin, and there were a number of patches of broken ground where I assumed vegetables were grown in the spring and summer. Pelts of raccoon, fox, muskrat, beaver, and deer were curing on stretch racks in the cold air and sunlight. A skinned deer carcass, half butchered and covered with a muslin cloth, hung from an eave of the cabin, and on a chopping block next to the stream lay an ax and a rifle. Cords of firewood were stacked around the sides of the cabin, and smoke drifted up from a stone chimney.
Gary Worde had again lapsed into silence for some time before we'd approached his cabin, and Garth and I
