Foreign Enemies and Traitors (21 page)

But as Zack peered at him, he noticed some things that didn’t fit.  The man had no rifle or machine gun; in one hand he held a pistol.  No point man would come this way armed with only a pistol.  But the lone man was wearing the new camouflage pattern uniform of the Mississippi Guard and the United States Army, and it was forbidden on pain of death for civilians to wear it.  So the man was a member of the Guard, or he was an Army soldier—or had been. 

The drone that had dropped a rocket on his father had been fired by such men.  His father was out after curfew, of that there was no doubt.  And he was carrying an illegal pump-action shotgun.  The government had, he guessed, every legal justification to blow him up with a rocket for violating those two laws.  That’s the way the world worked under martial law.  Zack understood this, but it didn’t make him feel any better about it. 

This soldier was alone, Zack finally decided.  He was one of the soldiers who helped to fly the drones, who dropped the missiles on the curfew violators.  Men like him had dropped the missile on his father.  Was he out checking the results of another missile drop, like the one that had killed his father?  No.  Alone and armed only with a pistol, he was more likely either a spy or a deserter.  He could be a military spy from Tennessee, on his way back to make a report.  Maybe he was even one of the foreign “peacekeepers” in an American uniform.

The man paused for a solid minute, looking in all directions, and stared up at the boxy deer blind.  Zack knew it must be clearly outlined against the pale dawn sky.  But the man had no heat-sensing infrared scope, so Zack trusted that he was invisible in his box—as long as he remained motionless and made no sound.

Finally, the man looked around in a wide circle and continued walking a few steps at a time, passing less than thirty feet away, directly in front of the blind.  Zack slowly shifted to another peephole in the long side of the blind, and he saw the man going away now, walking north up the game trail below the power lines, with brush and saplings and bushes up to his shoulders.  It was winter and the shrubs were mostly without leaves, so he could easily see the soldier through them.

Without thinking, operating on automatic, Zack twisted around in the box and rose to a one-knee crouch, his compact bow rasping against the interior plywood, almost but not quite silent.  The arrow was nocked into the string, his trigger release was ready in his right hand.  He rose to a crouch and took aim through the square cutout on the north side of the box.  He took in a breath and held it, drew back the seventy-pound pull string, and put the glowing orange plastic bead sight on the man’s back as he reached full draw.  The compound bow’s wheels rolled to a stop, held for a moment—and then he let fly.

****

Phil Carson heard something scrape
behind him and he turned to his right, just beginning to twist and dive when he was struck.  He fell onto his face in the wet underbrush, rolled onto his right side, his pack preventing him from rolling onto his back.  He saw the arrow buried in the ground just ahead of him, feathers aiming back at the tree stand behind him.  Already his leg was going numb, and his hip and backside burned.  What an idiot he’d been, taking the easy path, stumbling up the power line right-of-way, not even sure if he was in Mississippi or Tennessee.  The moment he was hit, he’d known the arrow had come from the wooden blind he’d just passed.  He had studied the boxy deer stand but he’d ruled out that it might be occupied.  He’d disregarded the potential danger, eager to make time and get as far as possible into Tennessee before full light. 

                Now he’d been skewered by an arrow, and he knew the unseen hunter would be drilling him again any second, would nail him to the ground.  He’d been sneaking up a game trail, surrounded by bushes that were head high or better, so perhaps he was now invisible from the blind, hidden down among the dripping ferns on the forest floor.  The arrow seemed to have sliced through his left thigh or buttocks, gone all the way through and out again.  There was no way to know how badly he’d been injured, and no time to examine the wound. 

Carson knew the hunter would be coming down out of the stand, following his wounded prey, looking for another shot, eager to put a fatal arrow through his vitals.  If he was going to survive even the next few minutes, he had to move, regardless of the pain, no matter how much he was bleeding.  The backpack was too heavy; he released the chest and belly straps and awkwardly slid his arms out.  He kept the pistol in his right hand, and using his elbows and his uninjured right leg, he began to push himself away from the game trail into an evergreen holly thicket.  He wormed his way into the almost clear space at the very bottom, and out again on the other side into an area of roots and wet leaves and bushes and small pines like Christmas trees. 

Seconds counted.  He ignored the pain and low-crawled ahead a dozen more yards, fully aware that he was leaving a trail of blood and broken vegetation a blind man could follow.  His creeping path brought him alongside a massive deadfall pine trunk, bare of bark to its yellow core.  It had fallen long ago, and once it became rotten it had broken into segments following the contour of the ground.  When he reached the end, where its roots had once upended the earth, he turned sharply around it and pushed his way rapidly back in the direction he had come, racing against time, against the bow hunter he knew was coming.  The earth was lower on this side of the trunk, lower and eroded, and he pushed his body into the hollow space alongside the bottom of the log.  When he came to a break where the rotted log had broken into two pieces he stopped, his face pressed against the pungent mud and wet wood punk and loose forest litter, and he waited, with just one eye looking up through the gap. 

He didn’t have long to wait.  The hunter was dressed in camouflage raingear, the pattern he recognized as something like Mossy Oak, so similar to the background of the wet winter forest that he almost appeared to melt into it each time he stopped.  He carried a small camouflage-painted bow, an arrow at the ready but not drawn back.  He was walking in a crouch, pausing to snake his way through the underbrush and, it appeared, to stoop down and touch Carson’s blood trail.  The hunter’s parka hood was pulled up, covering most of his face, a puff of vapor visible with each breath.

The hunter approached in short, quiet steps, until he was on the other side of the rotten trunk.  In spite of the pain and steady blood loss, Carson felt a measure of satisfaction.  The hunter was used to following the blood trails of herbivore game like deer, animals that went deeper and deeper into cover until they found a place to rest, and then to bleed out and die.  Deer didn’t double back.  Deer didn’t fishhook their own path, to lay an ambush for a pursuing hunter. 

The bow hunter moved silently, pausing to listen and look, then took a few more steps, the wet forest litter masking any sound.  He reached the break in the log on the other side of Carson’s head; Carson’s body was still hidden in the hollow beneath the log against the wet earth.  The bow was carried with the arrow pointing at an angle to the hunter’s left, away from his hiding place.  Carson held his Beretta alongside his cheek, pressed against the dirt and leaves.  His head was turned so that he could peek from under the brim of his boonie cap, up through the break in the deadfall log.  The hunter’s face slowly turned toward the foot-wide break in the rotted trunk, his arrow still aimed away, and he stared downward.  Carson saw in the hunter’s altered expression the very instant that he recognized the uniform in the forest litter on the other side of the log.  In that moment of mutual recognition, Carson thrust his arm and pistol upward through the break in the spongy log and began to squeeze the trigger, the Beretta’s first shot requiring a long double-action trigger pull.

The hunter’s bow swerved around, but the arrow snagged on a sapling branch and stuck.  In the next moment Carson saw a boy’s wide-eyed face looking back at him, and he stopped the tightening of his trigger finger in mid-squeeze.  The young hunter jerked at his bow, trying to free it, still staring into Carson’s face with huge brown eyes, his mouth wide open. 

“Don’t you do it, boy!  Don’t move, if you want to live.”

The young man froze, then seemed to relax, his posture sagging.  His open mouth formed into something like a smile, revealing crooked front teeth.  He said, “Shit.  You doubled back and ambushed your own blood trail.  My father showed me that trick.  He said men and mountain lions will do that, but I never hunted mountain lions.  Or men, till now.  I should have been ready.  I should have seen it coming.”  The half smile faded, but did not entirely disappear.  In a soft voice the boy asked, “So, are you going to shoot me now, mister?”  He did not seem overly concerned about the possibility.

Carson replied, “Put down the bow, and then I’ll decide.”

“I found your blood trail and I followed it.  You’ve lost a lot of blood already.  I don’t think you’re going to last very long.  You’re going to get weaker, then you’ll go into shock, and then you’ll die.”  The young hunter slowly lowered his bow toward the ground, keeping his gaze on the black pistol a few feet away, aimed at his chest.

“Do I look like a whitetail deer, boy?  I’ve been shot before, and I ain’t died yet.”

“Not with a hunting broadhead you ain’t.  That’s four razor blades through your guts.  You ain’t got long.  Better make your peace, mister.”

“You only shot me in the ass, through and through.  I’ll live.”

“I found your pack, back up your blood trail.  You turned, and the arrow went through your sleeping bag.  You’re damn lucky to be alive: I can hit a rabbit at that range.”

“Not today.  I heard you up there in the box, that’s why I turned.”

“Yeah.”  The boy was still smiling wistfully.  He didn’t seem entirely bothered by this sudden twist in outcomes.  “So, what now, old man?” 

“Old man, is it?  Well this old man has you dead to rights, boy.  I can shoot you, that’s what.”  Carson eased his gun hand over until the back of his wrist was against the broken trunk, to steady his pistol.  “Huh.  Some hunter you are.”

Still almost smiling, the boy said, “I think if you were going to shoot me, you’d have done it already.”

“Maybe.  Or maybe I’m deciding if you’re worth killing.  If you’re up to my own high standards.”  Carson sighed audibly, thinking of the three dead Mississippi Guard officers.  “Or maybe I’ve had enough killing for one night.”  Carson pushed himself up onto his left elbow, getting a better look at the young bow hunter, trying not to wince from the pain.  The boy couldn’t have been over twenty years old, with just a wispy adolescent mustache and smooth cheeks.  But he was right: Carson was going into shock from blood loss.  If he passed out, the boy could simply finish him off with an arrow or a knife at his leisure.  Or just leave him to bleed out and die.

So if he was going to shoot the boy, he had to do it right now or lose his chance forever.  But already he knew he wouldn’t.  He’d been unintentionally truthful: he’d had enough killing for one night.  He wasn’t going to begin this new day by shooting a smiling boy, an American kid.  Not even one who had just tried to put a hunting arrow through his brisket and had very nearly succeeded.  “You know, boy, I can shoot you right now, if I want to.  Right…now.  Keep that in mind…when…”

With that Phil Carson’s vision grew dark at the edges, diminishing like the end of a Looney Tunes cartoon down to a single point of light, and then the light blinked out.

****

General Mirabeau sent his chief of staff
out of his large but Spartan office at his Fort Benning headquarters.  They had discussed the case of the three murdered officers in Mississippi, and the general had briefly reviewed the preliminary case files.  Because of the sensitivity of the murder case involving three senior officers, he had kept a tight leash on the investtigation.  He had assigned the CID investigators, two majors who were personally loyal to him.  The Criminal Investigation Command in the emergency zone answered only to him, he had made damn sure of that.  After examining the personnel files of the dead officers and reading the preliminary CID investigative report, he pushed the intercom button on his desk and told his secretary to send in the medic. 

                Three sharp raps on the outside of his doorframe. 

                “Enter.”

                Sergeant Amory, in his pressed ACU camouflage uniform, marched the four paces to a position in front of the general’s desk and locked his eyes upon a spot on the wood paneling above and behind the general.  General Mirabeau sat upright in his executive chair and gestured at the gray-and-green government chair across the desk from him.  Amory was a shade or two darker than himself.  His hair was freshly shaved up the sides and back.  High and tight, in preparation for what he must have assumed would be the final stage of his inquisition.  Quinton Amory was a fine-looking black Army Soldier; he was almost recruiting-poster material.  Almost.  “Take a seat, Sergeant.”  The enlisted man was almost trembling, no doubt wondering if by the end of the week he would be shot or swinging from a rope.      

                “Thank you, General.”  Amory dropped rigidly into the chair, his hands neatly laid on his knees, his eyes still fixed on the wall above the general.

                “I have a few questions, Sergeant.  I just want some background information.  Maybe something that’s not in this stack of paper.”

                “Sir?”

                “Go ahead, Sergeant, speak freely.  Tell me what you think I really should know.  Something that’s not in this official report.”

“I…well…I just don’t rightly know what you might mean by that, General, sir, I…”

“Don’t try to run that jive routine on me, Sergeant Amory, it won’t work.  You had two years of college, before everything went to shit.  You’re a smart guy, so let’s get on with it.  I want to understand some of the intangibles.  What didn’t make it into these reports.”