Extreme Denial (49 page)

When Decker and Esperanza had walked around the property, assessing it from a tactical point of view, they had decided to make use of a game trail concealed by dense bushes at the back of the cabin. Unseen from the road, Beth was now moving along that trail and would soon reach a thick tree that the trail went around. There, Beth would lower herself to the forest floor, squirm down a slope through bushes, and reach a shallow pit that Esperanza had dug, where the two double-barrel shotguns lay on a log, ready for her to use.

Meanwhile, Decker crept through the darkness to a similar shallow pit that he himself had dug, using one of the camp shovels he had bought at the gun shop. Even wearing three layers of clothing, he felt the dampness of the ground. Lying behind a log, concealed by bushes, he groped around but couldn’t find what he was looking for. His pulse skipped nervously until he finally touched the lever-action Winchester .30-30. The powerful weapon was designed for midrange use in brush country such as this. It held six rounds in its magazine and one in the firing chamber and could be shot as rapidly as the well-oiled lever behind the trigger could be worked up and down.

Next to the rifle was a car battery, one of the other items he had purchased before leaving Santa Fe. And next to the battery were twelve pairs of electrical wires, the ends of which were exposed. These wires led to canteens that were filled with fuel oil and a type of plant fertilizer, the main component of which was ammonium nitrate. Mixed in the proper ratio, the ingredients produced an explosive. To add bite, Decker had cut open several shotgun shells and poured in buckshot and gunpowder from them. To make a detonator for each bomb, he had broken the outer glass from twelve one-hundred-watt lightbulbs, taking care not to use too much force and destroy the filament on the inside. He had gripped the metal stem of each bulb and inserted a filament into each canteen. Two wires were then taped to the stem of each bulb. The canteens were buried at strategic spots and covered with leaves. The pairs of wires, concealed in a like manner, led to the car battery next to Decker. The wires were arranged left to right in a pattern that matched where the canteens were located. If Decker chose a pair and pressed one end to the battery’s positive pole while pressing the other end to the negative pole, he would complete a circuit that caused the lightbulb filament to burn and detonate the bomb.

He was ready. Down the lane and across the narrow Pecos River, on the other side of the road, Esperanza was hiding in the forest. He would have seen Decker drive onto the property and would be waiting for Renata and her friends to arrive. Common sense dictated that when their homing-device receiver warned them that Decker had turned off the road, they wouldn’t just follow him into the lane without first taking care to find out what trouble they might be getting into. Rather, they would pass the entrance to the lane, drive a prudent distance up the road, and park, proceeding cautiously back to the lane. They would want to avoid the bottleneck of the lane, but they wouldn’t be able to, because the only other way to get onto the property was by crossing the swift river, and in the darkness, that maneuver was too risky.

The moment Renata and her group were off the road and moving down into the lane, Esperanza would emerge from cover and disable their vehicles so that if the group had a premonition and hurried back to the cars, they wouldn’t be able to escape. There would probably be two vehicles—one for the surveillance team at the airport, the other for the team in Santa Fe. As soon as Esperanza had made them inoperable by cramming a twig into the stem valve of several tires, the slight hiss of escaping air muffled by the roar of the river, he would stalk the group, using the .22 semiautomatic rifle with its thirty-round magazine and two other magazines secured beneath his belt, attacking from the rear when the shooting started. Although light, the .22 had several advantages—it was relatively silent, it had a large ammunition capacity, and it could fire with extreme rapidity. These qualities would be useful in a short-range hit-and-run action. The canteens would be exploding; Beth would be using the shotgun; Decker would be firing the Winchester, with the Remington bolt-action as a backup. If everything went as planned, Renata and her group would be dead within thirty seconds.

The trouble is, Decker thought, Murphy’s Law has a way of interfering with plans. Whatever
can
go wrong,
will
go wrong. And there were a lot of question marks in this plan. Would Renata and all of her group go up the lane at the same time? Would they sense a trap and check to make sure that no one was sneaking up behind them? Would Beth be able to control her reactions and fire at the right time, as they had rehearsed it? For that matter, would fear paralyze her, preventing her from firing at all? Or would—

18

Decker heard a noise that sounded like a branch being snapped. He nervously held his breath, not wanting even that slight sound to interfere with his hearing. Pressed hard against the dank ground, he listened, trying to filter out the faint country-and-western music from the radio in the cabin, ignoring the muffled rush of the river, waiting for the sound to be repeated. It seemed to have come from near the lane, but he couldn’t assume that a human being had made it. This close to the wilderness area, there were plenty of nocturnal animals. The noise might not indicate a threat.

He couldn’t help wondering how Beth had reacted to it. Would she be able to control her fear? He kept straining to assure himself that her presence was necessary. If she hadn’t come along, Renata might have suspected that Decker was planning a trap and didn’t want to put Beth in danger. At the same time, Decker kept arguing with himself that maybe Beth’s presence wasn’t absolutely necessary. Maybe he shouldn’t have involved her. Maybe he had demanded too much from her.

She doesn’t have to prove anything to me.

You sure made it seem that way.

Stop, he told himself. There is only one thing you should be concentrating on, and that is getting through this night alive. Getting
Beth
through this night alive.

When he failed to hear a repetition of the sound, he exhaled slowly. The cabin was to his right, the glow of lights through its windows. But he took care not to compromise his night vision by glancing in that direction. Instead, he focused his gaze straight ahead toward the road, the bridge, the lane, and the clearing. The lights in the cabin would provide a beacon for anyone sneaking up and make it hard for a stalker to adjust his or her night vision to check the darkness around the cabin. Conversely, the spill from those lights, adding to the illumination from the brilliant moon glow and starlight, were to Decker’s advantage, easy on his eyes, at the periphery of his vision. He had the sense that he was peering through a gigantic light-enhancing lens.

Crickets screeched. A new mournful song about open doors and empty hearts played faintly on the cabin’s radio. At once Decker stiffened, again hearing the sound of a branch being snapped. This time, he had no doubt that the sound had come from near the lane, from the trees and bushes to the right of it. Had Renata and her gang managed to cross the bridge without his having seen their silhouettes? That didn’t seem likely—unless they had crossed the bridge before he reached this shallow pit. But the bridge had been out of his sight for only a few minutes. Did it make sense that Renata would have had time to drive by (he hadn’t seen any passing headlights), conclude that he was parked up the lane, stop, reconnoiter the area, and cross the bridge before he came out of the cabin? She and her group would have had to rush to the point of recklessness. That wasn’t Renata’s style.

But when Decker heard the noise a third time, he picked up the Winchester. It suddenly occurred to him that Beth would be doing the same thing, gripping one of the shotguns, but would she have the discipline not to pull the trigger until it was absolutely necessary? If she panicked and fired too soon, before her targets were in range, she would ruin the trap and probably get herself killed. During the ride up from Albuquerque, Decker had emphasized this danger, urging her to remember that a shotgun was a short-range weapon, that she mustn’t shoot until Decker did and she had obvious targets in the clearing. The devastating spray of buckshot would make up for any problem that her injured shoulder gave her in aiming, especially if she discharged all four barrels in rapid succession.

Remember what 1 told you, Beth. Hold your fire.

Decker waited. Nothing. No further sound of a branch being snapped. What he judged to be five minutes passed, and still the sound was not repeated. He couldn’t look at his watch. It was in his pocket. Before arriving at the cabin, he had made certain that he and Beth took off their watches and put them away, lest the luminous dials reveal their position in the darkness.

What he judged to be
ten
minutes passed. He had talked to Beth about how it felt to lie motionless possibly for hours, about subduing impatience, about ignoring the past and the future. Get in the moment and
stay
in the moment. Tell yourself that you’re in a contest, that the other side is going to move before
you
do. At the Albuquerque airport, Decker had insisted that they both use a rest room, even though neither of them felt an urge, pointing out that at night when they were lying in the forest, a full bladder could make them uncomfortable enough that they might lose their concentration. Getting up to a squat to relieve oneself was out of the question—the movement would attract attention. The only option was to relieve oneself in one’s clothes, and that definitely resulted in loss of concentration.

Fifteen minutes. Twenty. No more suspicious sounds. No signs of activity on the moon-bathed lane or in the murky bushes next to it. Patience, Decker told himself. But a part of him began to wonder if his logic had been valid. Perhaps Renata had not hidden a homing device in his car. Perhaps Renata wasn’t anywhere in the area.

19

The night’s chill enveloped Decker, but he felt an even greater chill when the forest moved. A section of it, something low, about the size of someone crouching, shifted warily from bush to bush. But the movement wasn’t near the lane, not where Decker had expected it to be. Instead, dismayingly, the figure was already halfway around the tree-rimmed edge of the clearing, creeping toward the cabin. How did he get so far without my seeing him? Decker thought in alarm.

Where are the others?

His chill intensified as he saw another figure near the first one.
This
figure seemed not to be skirting the edge of the clearing but, instead, to be emerging from deep within the forest, as if coming from the north rather than from the west, from the bridge. The only explanation would have to be that they had found another way across the river.

But how?
I checked the river for a hundred yards up the road, as far as the group was likely to drive before stopping. There weren’t any logs across the river, any footbridges, any boulders that might serve as stepping-stones.

As a third figure emerged from the forest halfway around the clearing, Decker fought to subdue a wave of nausea, understanding what must have happened. After parking, the group had separated. Some had come southward down the road to guard the exit from the lane, to make sure Decker stayed put. But the others had hiked
northward
, a direction Decker had not anticipated. Higher up the road, they had come to another property and used its bridge to cross the river. The properties in this area tended to be a quarter of a mile apart. Decker had never imagined that in the night, feeling pressure, Renata and her group would hike so far out of their way. They had taken so long to get to the clearing because they had crept south through dense forest, moving with laborious slowness to make as little noise as possible. Members of the group would be emerging from the forest behind the house, also, doing their best to encircle it.

Behind Decker.

Behind
Beth.

He imagined an enemy creeping up to her, both of them caught by surprise but the killer reacting more quickly, shooting Beth before she had a chance to defend herself. Decker came close to shifting instantly out of his hiding place and crawling hurriedly through the dark underbrush to get to her and defend her. But he couldn’t allow himself to give in to the impulse. He would be endangering Beth as well as himself if he acted prematurely, without sufficient information. The trouble was, when he did have that information, it might be too late.

His hesitation saved his life as, behind him, sickeningly close, a twig snapped. As a shoe made a crunching sound on fallen pine needles, he felt his heart seem to swell and rise toward his throat, choking him. Slowly, a painstaking quarter of an inch at a time, he turned his head—carefully, with agonizing deliberateness. For all he knew, a weapon was being aimed at him, but he couldn’t risk making a sudden move to look. If he hadn’t been noticed, a backward jerk of his head would give him away,
would
make him a target.

Sweat broke out on his forehead. Little by little, the shadowy woods behind him came into view. Another footstep easing down on crunchy pine needles made him inwardly flinch. The speed of his pulse made him feel light-headed as he saw a figure ten feet away. Renata? No. Too heavy. Shoulders too broad. The figure was male, holding a rifle, his back to Decker. Facing the cabin, the man sank down, eerily vanishing among bushes. Decker imagined the scene from the man’s point of view. Music in the cabin. Lights beyond closed blinds. Part of Decker’s preparations had been to set up timers for the lamps and the radio, so that one-by-one they would go off within the next hour. That realistic touch would make Renata and her friends confident that they had trapped their quarry.

On the other side of the clearing, the three figures were no longer visible. Presumably they had spread out, flanking the cabin, preparing to attack it simultaneously. Will they wait until the lights are out and they think we’re asleep, or will they hurl stun grenades through the windows and break in right now?