Catacombs (36 page)

Jade stopped as he was taking off his Pendleton shirt and stared at the scarred man.

"Don't get carried away, Starger, it looks like only two guys. Get ready but give me an hour, then come in.

"You're going down there by yourself?"

"They've got Raun and they've got Lem. My house is built like a fort, you can't storm it. I'll try another way." He sat down to pull off his boots and jeans which left him naked except for socks, black nylon briefs, and his hat. "One of the fishermen is tied up in my truck. Bring him out here."

Two of the Vassals of the Immaculate Light opened the Bronco and lifted down Bill Sawyer, who was bound hand and foot and gagged with filament tape. He stood struggling in the light from the fire. His pants were still unzipped. Jade had cut the fishing line but hadn't attempted the delicate job of removing the blue-and-yellow plug from the top of his swollen pecker. It gave Sawyer a decidedly zany appearance. Starger couldn't take his eyes off it.

"Jesus, what did you do to him?"

"Violated all of his civil rights. He says he doesn't understand how a thing like this can happen in a free country, and he wants to call the FBI."

They walked Sawyer away for first aid. Cars were already heading down the long road off the mesa. Those Vassals staying behind were pulling on combat boots and applying black-and-green nightfighter cream to their exposed skin. Jade took his bulldogger Stetson off and placed it on the driver's seat of his Bronco.

"Where'd you get the kids on short notice?"

"Fort Bragg. Army brats. Their daddies are all officers in our antiterrorist units. Let me tell you, those sweet-looking kids are hard as nails. Goddam mad they won't get the chance to shoot a Commie."

Jade
 
nodded. From various compartments of his truck he collected items that he needed for the operation he was planning. He asked for two stun grenades, which, when detonated, created a nonlethal blast, or "thunderflash," that immobilized those exposed to it for up to six seconds.

When Starger came back with them, Jade was tying on a full-length Appaloosa horsehide coat. Laid out at his feet were turtle-shell and deer-hoof rattles, a calabash, and a
páho
, a Hopi prayer stick. He had darkened his face, hands, chest, and bare feet with oxblood boot polish. He went down on all fours and began tearing up clumps of moss and cinquefoil and applying handfuls of dirt to the sticky polish on his face and in his hair. Within minutes it looked as if he were wearing a beehive. Jade was very nearly unrecognizable as a human being.

Starger watched this makeup job in amazement, thinking of the stories he'd heard about Matthew Jade.
 
Tonight he was convinced they were all true. He was acting like one scary dude.

S
teve Roper was in Jade's office examining the contents of the safe he'd cracked when he heard a horse going crazy outside.

He went to a front window and pulled back one of the shutters for a slant look at the yard. The outside lights had come on automatically at dusk, floods mounted at the corners of the house and barn lot. It wasn't exactly bright out there–about as much illumination as a forty-watt bulb will provide in the average living room. He saw the piebald horse that belonged to Andy von Boecklin race by a couple of feet from the window; it startled him and he drew back, slapping the shutter in place. He'd had just a glimpse and wasn't sure the horse had a rider. There was some kind of hump on its back, like part of the horse itself, a monstrous growth.

Roper took the walkie-talkie from a pocket of his red-and-black wool jacket and summoned Clemons.

Clemons came quickly, trotting Raun Hardie along beside him. He had a nerve grip on her with one hand at the elbow. He put her in a chair and said, "Stay there." Raun sat with her head bowed humbly and gently rubbed the inside of her elbow where he'd pinched her.

They heard a scream like a leaking boiler. Shoo-Bob thudded by again, jumped a porch rail, and bumped against the front door. Clemons couldn't quite get a good look from the office window.

"What the hell?"

"Do you know anything about horses?" Clemons said.

"No. That one's not acting right, though."

"We'd better get rid of him before he kicks the door down."

"How do we do that?"

"Shoot him."

Clemons shook his head wearily and glanced at Raun.

"Bring her along."

He went into the main house through the kitchen to the living room, followed by Roper and Raun Hardie. Through narrow windows on either side of the door they could see Shoo-Bob, or part of him, as he turned around and around and let fly a kick that broke a pane of glass. Then the horse jumped to the yard and moved a little way off.

"He's too much animal to knock out with the darts I have," Clemons said. "I'll have to kill him."

"So what?"

"Fine-looking horse, that's all." Clemons loaded his gas-fired pistol with nitrogen mustard pellets. He opened the front door slightly, looked out. The horse was standing, head knifing up and down, side on to the house and about twenty feet away.

Clemons held the gun out and hit Shoo-Bob in the side of the neck with one of the explosive pellets. "Good-bye, Old Paint."

Shoo-Bob screamed, reared, came down shakily, took three or four steps, and fell over dead. At the moment of impact the horse seemed to separate into two pieces, or, for want of a better word, entities. Clemons, not quite sure of what he'd seen, stared in fascination.

The horse was stone dead, no doubt about it. But the other–thing–a misshappen lump of horsehide, began to quiver. A Hopi death song rose in the chilly night air, beginning like a dry hum of insects. Clemons felt the hairs on the back of his neck tingle.

"What's that?" Roper said behind him.

"I don't know."

The lamentation took on new shadings and intonations, growing louder. Something was rising out there in the yard, taking form, assuming stature. Clemons saw an asymmetrical, wattle-and-daub head like a hive, what might have been eyes gleaming deep in the cake of mud and vegetation. A horsehide arm brandished some sort of object decorated with feathers. The rattle of a calabash began as the chant, the prayer, the song, whatever it was, continued ominously.

"Will you look at that?" Clemons said, fascinated. He felt Roper behind him. "What do you make of it?"

"Local character, I suppose."

"Coming this way," Clemons said, as Ahóte, the Hopi spirit bringer of punishment, began to weave and shuffle and stamp the ground, making perceptible progress across the yard.

"Whoever he is, he doesn't like what we did to his horse."

"Get rid of him?"

"Now."

Ahóte was whirling, arms stiffly outthrust. The Appaloosa horsehide shimmered as it caught the light from one of the floods. Clemons raised his gun; a stiff breeze was blowing and it had just changed direction, which worried him, but he pulled the trigger anyway and potted the dancing, wailing figure.

There was a brief flash against the horsehide, a spurt of gas that resolved into a hovering mist. The death song stopped abruptly but otherwise there was no reaction. The calabash shook, Ahóte's jinking dance continued, his sunken enflamed eyes regarded them with implacable hostility.

"Popped right off that horsehide," Clemons observed. "And he must be holding his breath. What makes him so smart?"

"Hit him again!" Roper urged.

"You catch the way the wind's blowing? You want a snootful of that stuff yourself?"

"Let me have a crack at him," Roper said, and pulled his own weapon, a Colt .38 Super automatic loaded with wadcutters.

But Clemons was just a little slow making room, and Roper had to thrust the door open another foot to take aim. He was at an awkward angle and unable to get a shot off as something popped toward them from beneath the horsehide and the dancing Ahóte collapsed in a protective heap in the dooryard.

The stun grenade went off at their feet, the full force of it expanding into the living room.

R
aun was farther back in the room and suffered minimal effects from the shock wave she was standing and remained in contact with her surroundings. The two Cobra Dance men fell by the doorway and groped, blind and deaf, trying to get their bearings.

Matthew Jade appeared in his horsehide coat and reddish, lumpy, mummy's face. If she hadn't grown up in Africa and witnessed similar grotesqueries at tribal ceremonies, Raun might have fainted. But she was scared. She put her hands to her mouth and retreated, trying not to make a sound.

Jade glanced at her, then collared the two Russians as they were staggering to their feet. He smacked their heads together. They fell down again, dazed but not unconscious. Jade took Roper's Colt away from him and turned to Raun.

"Get away from me!"

"It's Jade."

"Matt! What–what are you doing? Why do you look like that?"

He made a curt gesture with the automatic, shutting her up.

"Any more around?"

Raun shook her head.

"What did you tell them?"

"I didn't know who they were. The blond man, Clemons, had identification. CIA. He said the mission was off. He seemed to know a lot about it. We just talked, that's all, and before I knew what I was doing--"

"Everything?"

"Yes! It's not my fault!"

"What about Lem?"

"Oh God. They shot him. I don't know how bad he's hurt. I don't think he's dead."

"Okay. Stay there."

"Where're you going?"

Jade didn't reply. He picked up the groggy Clemons by the back of his camouflage jacket and when Clemons struggled, like a kitten about to be popped into a sack, Jade hit him with the barrel of the gun to quiet him down. The gunsight drew blood. He dragged Clemons into the yard and came back up to the porch for Roper.

Raun followed this time, slowly, and looked out. Jade had propped the two Russians into sitting positions, back to back. Clemons' head lolled, he slumped to his left, Jade patiently reordered him. Roper moaned complainingly and scuffed at the grass with the heel of a boot. The wind blew; those were the only sounds. Roper looked up and squinted at Jade as Jade backed off a few steps. He raised an empty hand to Jade as if to make some kind of offer, as if it were a prelude to conversation. The gun ,in Jade's hand came up in a no-nonsense attitude, and Raun was drawing a sharp breath when the gun recoiled.

Roper's head flew apart. All she remembered later was an ear somehow perfectly detached and plunking into grass and bugs whizzing in the thin light and a pink smush in the air as if a kid had thrown a watermelon against a wall. There was the report of the pistol, which she felt rather than heard. Then Jade altered the angle of the Colt and killed Clemons too.

Without a thought in her head Raun turned and ran through the living room to the kitchen, out the back door, and around the garden plot into darkness.

Her feet found a trail she remembered; it took her through a pasture rising gradually beneath a dim drizzle of moon. She ran two miles, three, her bones aching, her heels bruised, her lungs on slow bake. Cold air from the mountain crests whispered through waves of tall conifer rising abruptly ahead of her. Sanctuary. She limped into the trees, slowed but determined not to quit until she'd put even more miles between her and the ranch. She was afraid they'd still find her if-
when
–they searched. But she'd get away. She wasn't having any more bloody cold-war games. Let them kill each other. No one was going to get another chance at her.

But it was too dark, she found, to keep on without risking calamity.

After a couple of painful scrapes she realized that the forest floor was littered with fallen trees, each with stubs of branches that could rip her apart if she fell on them. She heard water splashing and cautiously located a cove that had promise: moss ledges, a cold drink, a jumble of boulders that still held some heat from the day. She pressed in between two of them and sat with her knees up, trying not to dwell on what might be coming around, soundlessly, in the dark.

In ten minutes she was fast asleep.

"C
ome on out, Raun."

Her eyes opened a fraction, squeezed shut involuntarily as the light proved too bright. It was angled down at her, filling the cleft of rock in which she'd hidden.
How?
she thought numbly. Her heart felt cold and sore. She held up both hands, defensively, fingers acting as shutters. In front of the light she saw the clouded breath of Matthew Jade's horse, the prick of his ears, a big walnut eye. He snorted as if an insect had flown up his nose, and stepped restlessly in and out of hock-deep water.

"Rimmy, hold." Jade got down and, throwing the light to one side instead of full in her face, came closer. Raun got up stiffly. She wouldn't look at him, though he'd cleaned himself up and put on warm clothes for night riding. She shook her head in anger.

"You couldn't have found me this fast. Not at night. It. . . it just isn't human."

He turned on the radio receiver which he wore on a shoulder strap. It beeped loudly and rapidly.

"Every piece of clothing I gave you has a transponder about the size of a dime sewn into it. The battery is good for two weeks."