currently in town was Joe Billy Dunn, the new guy who had just arrived from Delta Force. He strolled in after lunch that Monday, fresh from a training session for new recruits.
“You’re in charge for the rest of the week,” I told him. “I’m going to be out of the office on assignment. I’ll call you from time to time, see how things are going.”
Dunn was thirty-two, a few inches short of six feet, wedge shaped, and hard as a brick. He threw himself into his chair, plopped his feet on his desk, laced his fingers behind his head, and sighed contentedly. “Three weeks in headquarters and already I’m in charge. Cream always rises to the top, my mama used to say.”
“Right.”
” ‘Course my ol’ daddy said that shit floats.”
“Philosophers, both of them.”
“The rate I’m going up, about Christmas they’re gonna put me in charge of this-here outfit.”
Dunn wasn’t a yokel, although he liked to play the role. He had a trace of southern accent in his voice, which he exaggerated from time to time. He struck me as one of those people who are best taken in small doses.
“Don’t start World War III while I’m gone,” I told him.
Why the powers that be assigned Dunn to my section was a bureaucratic mystery. The people in my section traveled the world breaking and entering, planting bugs, tapping lines, and running wireless surveillance equipment. We didn’t do it all by ourselves, of course; we were merely the experts called in when the local station chief needed more expertise than he had available.
Dunn’s field was counterterrorism operations. He could jump out of planes in the dead of night, handle and repair any weapon in the army arsenal, speak Arabic and French, and survive indefinitely on mice and snakes in places I wouldn’t even want to fly over. He was quite adept at unarmed combat. Armed combat, too, for that matter. He knew very little about clandestine surveillance. Maybe they expected me to train him. Oh, well.
So here I was on Tuesday morning, watching rain fall from a slate sky and stream across the windshield, thinking about the problems at the office. I wasn’t in the mood for the radio. The monotonous sounds, endless traffic, and subdued light all had their way with me, so I stopped at a McDonald’s near Front Royal in the Shenandoah for coffee. The hot Java and the pit stop helped and I soon felt better.
I took 1-81 southeast down the valley. Sandwiched between trucks, trying to avoid the spray from their tires at seventy-five miles per hour, I rolled by the towns of Strasburg, New Market, and Harrisonburg. I was relieved when I saw the exit I was looking for near Staunton and got off the interstate.
Another stop, this time for gas as well as coffee, and a handful of paper towels to wipe off the water from the passenger seat of the car. On through the rain I went, westward along a twisty two-lane highway into the mountains. The road attacked the grain of the mountains at right angles, so soon I was downshifting and working my way through switchbacks and blind curves. Over the top and through switchbacks and blind curves down the other side. Across a small stream and up the next one.
The clouds came down, shrouding the mountaintops in dense fog as the rain grew even heavier. The road ran through a great hardwood forest; in the rain all that could usually be seen was vivid wet, dripping green. The road was so slick I didn’t have time to do much looking. After creeping over three mountains I went through the village of McDowell. A mountain later, Monterey. Three more mountains and I found myself driving through a widening valley toward Bartow. At the bridge across the Greenbrier River I turned south.
Five miles later I entered another wide, open valley, the largest I’d seen since leaving the Shenandoah. When I saw the barn and hangar in the huge meadow on the right side of the road, I turned in at the gate and drove slowly along. I knew that the security gang was watching me on cameras mounted on the barn, so I took my time, even stopped alongside the hangar, got out and stretched my legs in the rain so that they got a good look at my face and had time to do a computer check of my license plate. I didn’t want anyone jumping from behind a bush, sticking a submachine gun in my face — shocks like that were hard on my adrenal system.
I was dressed for the hinterlands today: hiking boots, jeans, and a dark green Gore-Tex windbreaker that shed the rain nicely. I pulled the collar tight to keep water from trickling down my neck.
A half dozen deer grazing in the meadow a hundred yards or so away lifted their heads and watched me, more curious than afraid. I stared right back. One of them was a buck growing a decent rack of antlers. They ignored the cold rain. Finally they tired of watching me and went back to munching grass, which reminded me that I, too, was hungry. And cold.
It was cooler here than in Washington … at least fifteen degrees cooler. If the air cooled off much more, I thought, this rain could turn to snow. Wouldn’t that be the icing on the cake? From the tanned bikini babes of the French Riviera to an early summer snowstorm in these old mountains! I shivered at the thought, turned up my collar, and got back into the car.
Speaking of babes, I had a date for this coming Friday night. I had forgotten to cancel it. I removed my cell phone from my coat pocket and looked at it. No service.
Of course not. Now I remembered! We were only a few miles north of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, smack in the middle of a huge radio quiet zone.
I put the cell phone back in my pocket and made a mental note to call the lady on a landline.
I drove on, crossed over a narrow bridge with no guardrails, then followed the road into the wet, dark, dripping forest.
The road came to a four-way intersection, and I took the road to the left, which was hard-packed gravel. The road paralleled the valley for several hundred yards, then turned to follow a creek into the hills. Two hundred yards after the turn there was a wide place, a pullout barely large enough for one car. I parked, got out, and stretched, sucking in a deep lungful of cool air smelling of wet earth and fragrant blossoms.
The woods were quiet, the treetops enshrouded in clouds, the leaves glistening.
There was a dim pathway up the slope to the right. It was difficult to see, but I knew it was there and didn’t have to search for it. The forest floor squished under my feet.
Fifty yards up the hill was a small one-story security cabin made of logs. It was surrounded by laurel and difficult to see from more than ten yards away. This was the security post that monitored the surveillance cameras trained on the barn and hangar and mounted high in trees at various places. The people here could use a radio to summon armed guards in four-wheel-drive vehicles to intercept intruders.
The door to the cabin was ajar. I climbed the steps, crossed the small covered porch, and went in.
“Hey, guys, don’t you—“
There were two men in the single room, both dead. One sat slumped in a chair facing the bank of monitors; the other lay on the floor in the middle of the room. Both had been shot numerous times. There was little blood. Several dozen spent 9 mm cartridges lay scattered on the floor.
I froze. There was a small restroom in one corner of the building; the door was closed. It was unlikely the shooter was in there answering nature’s call, but…
I turned the man on the floor just enough to pull the pistol from his shoulder holster. It was a 9 mm auto. I thumbed off the safety, tiptoed to the restroom door and opened it with my foot. Empty.
I knew the man in the chair from my prior tours here. His name was Fred. I touched his cheek. Still warm. Very warm. His hand was limp and supple. He had at least eight bullet holes in him that I could see, and none of them had bled much. I fingered one of the wounds. The blood was still fresh and oozing.
These men hadn’t been dead long. Just a few minutes.
I had seen no traffic on the road. Now that I thought about it, the pathway up here showed no footprints. I glanced at the radio — it had a half dozen bullet holes in it. The telephone … I picked it up, didn’t get a dial tone. I put it back on its cradle.
Something was going down, but what?
I stepped to the door and looked at the porch. I could see other wet footprints. I slipped out onto the porch, walked along it to the end. Depressions in the leafy forest detritus were visible, at least two trails. One coming, one leaving? Perhaps the shooter had come this way, along the side of the hill through the forest, parallel to the road below. Then he retraced his path leaving. I knew what lay in that direction — the main complex.
I went back in the cabin and looked at the surveillance camera monitors. They were still working. The killers must have shot these men immediately before I pulled up at the hangar or after I left it. Or perhaps they were so busy drilling these guys they didn’t notice me on the monitors. If they had seen me, they would have met me down on the road or here at the cabin and killed me, too.
Later on I realized that this would have been an excellent time to jog down the hill to my car and beat a
