Hunting Season (17 page)

“They got the same as always. They still ain’t right.” He drove through the concrete barrels and down the fire road with his lights off. There was a sliver of new moon up, which gave enough light to see the road and the high fence.

“You get that counter put up?”

“Yep. It’s just inside the inner gates, waist-high.” He pulled the truck into their regular parking place, between four bushy pines.

“With them side fences, won’t be no critters settin’ it off. I got a line on some more copper, but it’s gonna take some cash money.”

“All right. We’ve got nearly thirty pounds of pressure in the truck tank now. I’ll be shifting over to the big pump at fifty psi.”

They got out and stood at the edge of the trees to night-adapt their eyes. There was a slight breeze blowing pine scent at them, and the railroad tracks gleamed dully in the dim moonlight.

“I did one other thing ‘sides that counter,” Jared said. His

grandfather looked at him.

“I set me up a deadfall along the main street—wire trigger.

Left the wire down for now. We get something’ on that counter, I’ll set the wire when we come out.”

“We get a hit on that counter before we even go in, we’re not going in,” Browne said.

“I may come back tomorrow during the day and do some hunting. Can you get some time off? Bring your dogs?”

“I can if there ain’t a lot of tickets up on the western lines. Don’t know about them dogs.”

“All right,” Browne said, picking up the bag of food and water for the girl.

“Let’s go check your toy.”

They walked up the spur to the security gates, stopping a hundred feet out to watch and listen. Then they stepped through the flap of fencing and Jared walked over to the side fence and squatted down next to a high weed. He straightened back up and came back to where Browne was standing.

“We’ve got us a visitor,” he whispered.

“Counter’s showin’ one.”

“And that wasn’t you leaving, after you set it?”

“Nope.”

“Damn,” Browne said, keeping his voice low. He had been hoping that the intruder the other night had been a onetime thing.

“How far up is your wire?”

“Between the ammonia plant and the shell-casin’ dip station. There’s two hydrants, face each other across the main street. Got some pipe stock racked up on the overhead steam pipe crossovers between them two buildings. He hits that wire, it’ll avalanche his ass.”

Browne pulled out his gun.

“You go up there, set your wire. I’ll follow, fifty feet behind you. Then we’ll back out, reset that counter to zero.”

“What about the stuff for the girl?”

“Not tonight. Not if there’s a chance there’s someone in there. Let’s see what your trap does first. We have to find out who this is, why he’s here.

We’re too close for any mistakes now.”

Kreiss was on the roof of the last building on the right side of the main street, listening to his cone. He was much closer to the power plant this time. The main street came over a low hill and turned slightly to its right as it approached the power plant, so he did not have a perfectly straight acoustic shot all the way to the rail gates at the other end. But if anyone came walking up over that hill, like they did the last time, he would be in position to hear their footfalls and then this time see into which building

they went. There was enough moonlight tonight that he could use high magnification binoculars rather than a night-vision device. He had put the stethoscope up to his ears when he first heard the truck approach the rail gates over the hill.

He’d been tempted to look around the complex of buildings when he first came in, right at sunset, but decided he would be better off getting set up in a good vantage point. Besides, there were nearly a hundred buildings, large and small, plus several wooden sheds that seemed to have been deliberately built down in circular earthen depressions. A methodical search would take hours, if not days. He was dressed out in a black one-piece overall, with the mesh head hood, gloves, and both packs. His plan was simple: watch to see where they went, creep that building to see how many entrances there were, close all but one, and then get the jump on them. The few buildings he had examined seemed to have only one human-sized door, but he had not had time to really look this place over.

Besides, it didn’t much matter: These guys had shot at him, which meant they were doing something in here that they should not be doing. If Lynn had worn that hat into the arsenal, these were the guys who would know something about what had happened to her. He settled back down behind the roof parapet to wait some more. They should be coming pretty soon, he thought.

Browne waited for Jared to pull the fence wire flap closed and to set the clips.

“All right,” he whispered when Jared joined him.

“If there is someone up there, he heard the truck. We have to make the truck sound like it’s leaving. You drive it out to the edge of the main gate plaza, then walk back in. I’m going to wait here and listen.”

“This could take all goddamn night,” Jared said.

“Let’s go back in there and find his ass.”

“How? And where would you look? He could be anywhere. He could be wandering around, or he could be inside a building, waiting. No—we pretend to leave, he’ll move.”

“What if he goes into the power plant? Or knocks on that door at the nitro building?”

“Why would he knock on a locked door? All those buildings are shut tight, including the power plant. There’s nothing to see, especially at night. He’ll wait for a while, and then he’ll walk out. We were going to be out here until almost eleven anyway. This way, we have a chance of nailing him. We can’t let this go on, boy. Not now.”

Jared grunted in the darkness.

“Awright. I’ll move the truck. Where’ll you be?”

“That pine tree over there. That deadfall going to make some noise?”

“Oh yeah.”

“You hear it, come running, ‘cause I’m going back in if he trips it.”

“We take him, what then?”

“He goes into the acid tank where those boys went. Get going.”

Kreiss waited for two more hours before giving it up. He’d heard the truck leave and that had bothered him. The last time, they’d shut the truck down and then come right into the complex. Tonight, they’d come, spent about half an hour doing something, and then left. The worst possibility was that they had driven the truck away and then walked back and were waiting for him to move. That would mean they knew someone was here. The best possibility was that they had left and he now had the place to himself. But why the hell would they do that? They were doing something in one of these buildings. Why come and then just leave? Had he left some sign of his intrusion? It was almost eleven o’clock. He was tempted just to curl up and go to sleep up on the roof. Put the motion detector on the parapet to catch anything coming down the street and set it to buzz rather than beep. Then search the place at dawn. But suppose they waited, too? Or came in, set up, and waited? He’d walk right into them at first light. Going in circles here, he thought. He decided to get off the building and look around.

There were four large buildings at this lower end of the main street, which ended at the big power plant. He went down the ladder and set up the motion-detector box to point back up the street. He set the alarm to chirp like a cricket if it detected anything moving toward it. It wasn’t much protection, but better than nothing. Then he spent half an hour circling each of the large buildings, creeping from shadow to shadow in the faint moonlight. The buildings were connected by what looked like steam and other utility lines that ran in bundled pipelines over the street. The musty smell of old chemicals was everywhere. The only identification on the buildings was a number, under which was a name printed onto a white block of paint near the entrance. The four buildings were called Ammonia Concentration, Nitro Fixing, Mercury Mix, and Case Heating. Each of them had large steel industrial cargo doors on the front, with a human sized walk-through door to one side. None of them had any windows, and three of the four had a rail spur leading

under the cargo door. He silently examined all the walk-through doors, but they were locked with massive padlocks. He didn’t even bother raiding them.

Then he walked down to the power plant, keeping to the side, not wanting to make noise on those big metal plates out in the street. The power plant’s doors were also locked. He was once again struck by the fact that there appeared to be nothing living in the industrial area: He had heard no rats, mice, birds, or insects, and seen little vegetation growing up through the cracks of the concrete. He concluded that not all of the nitro, ammonia, and mercury had remained in the buildings. There were parallel streets on either side of the main street, with more concrete buildings and pipe mazes running overhead. This was hopeless: Unless he could follow those people to a specific building, he could be here for weeks. He had located and identified one of the men, Jared McGarand;

maybe he would be better off taking him down at his trailer and finding out what he knew.

He gathered up his motion detector and started back up the street toward the rail gates. It was now 12:30, and the moon was setting. When his foot hit the taut wire, his instincts propelled him forward and down, since whatever was coming was probably coming from the sides. To his surprise, there was a roar of metal from above him, and then he was pounded flat by an avalanche of steel pipes. One of them connected with the back of his head and he blacked out.

Jared dropped his grandfather off at his house in Blacksburg just after midnight and then headed home to his trailer. They’d waited until almost 11:30 before giving up, but nothing had happened up in the industrial area. He still thought his grandfather had been wrong about waiting outside.

They should have gone in and rousted that sumbitch, whoever he was. Even if the guy tripped the wire, he could still get away if the pipe deadfall didn’t put him down hard enough. But he had learned the hard way not to cross the old man, and especially not now.

He’d seen Browne McGarand focused before, but never like this. This whole bomb thing was all about William, of course. The old man was positively obsessed with William. That was how Jared thought about his father—William, not Father. Unlike the old man, Jared did not give two shits about William or what had happened to him. His mother, a swelling bride at seventeen, had decamped when Jared was only six, driven to desperation by the responsibilities of a motherhood aggravated by the fact that his younger brother, Kenny, has been born

retarded. Not quite three years later, William pulled the plug as well, running off to California initially, and then eventually to beautiful downtown Waco, Texas, where he got himself mixed up with all those nutcases at Mount Carmel.

He slowed to make the turn into his trailer lot. If only William had just stayed home and done the right thing, none of this shit would be happening.

But old Grandpaw Browne, he was a scorekeeper. He had raised both kids with a firm, often biblical hand, and to this day, Jared was still a little afraid of his grandfather, especially when he got some of that Methodist fire up his ass. His grandfather’s eyes reminded him of pictures he had seen in history books of Stonewall Jackson or that abolitionist, John Brown. That old man, he wanted to make him a bomb, Brother Jared was not even going to get in the way. Even if it was about Saint William.

He sniffed as he turned down his own road. He thought he deserved at least some appreciation for helping the old man. He wasn’t sure what old Browne would have done to those kids in the traps if that flash flood hadn’t come along, but Jared knew he owned at least a piece of their deaths. Not that he cared too much—like the old man said, they shouldn’t have come sneaking around like that. But he was now on the hook as at least an accessory, and had the old man even thanked him? He had not.

He pulled his truck into the yard and shut it down. There was other shit, too. He had stolen that propane truck for him. And hadn’t he paid at least lip service to all that Christian Identity bullshit? Now there was another bunch of nut brains, always praying that the world would end when the year 2001 rolled around. Armageddon on demand, yahoo. He and the boys up in the Black Hats always had a great laugh when all those Doomsday Christians and their woolly-headed blood-and-fire predictions came up. Hell, he knew this wasn’t about Armageddon or the second coming, or the so-called saints versus the sinners. What Browne was fixing up was pure mountain-style revenge, aggravated by his feelings about an oppressive government, out-of-control taxes, even more out-of-control federal lawmen, and the UN with its secret new world order. He’d told the boys his grand paw was making a hydrogen bomb, and they’d laughed at that, too. Well, they’d see. The federal government had snuffed Saint William, and now Browne McGarand had gone and set his face against the whole damned government. The government was dead meat walking.

He got out and locked the truck. What he had to figure out was how to get back in there and get a piece of that pretty naked thing in the nitro building. He knew how to make her behave now, so maybe he’d

sweet talk her this time, talk some sense into her, then give her the ride to glory.

He adjusted his considerable sexual equipment, smiled, and then went to check on the dogs. He refilled their water. They were lethargic, but there was no more kennel mess. He had a beer while he checked through the day’s mail, and then he went to bed.

At just after 2:00 A.M.” Jared snapped awake and sat up in bed. He tried —to figure out what sound had awakened him. The windows were open, and the night was filled with the normal woods noise of insects and a chirping chorus of tree frogs. He rubbed his face and listened carefully.

Maybe he’d been dreaming. Then it came again: the distinct sound of a dry branch breaking, and not far away, either. One of the dogs woofed softly, but they raised no general alarm. Was someone out there in the trees back of the trailer? He swung his feet over the edge of the bed and listened again. A few minutes later, it came again, the distinct crunching sound of someone stepping through the forest undergrowth, then the snap of another dry branch. He got up and went to the edge of the back window. His backyard was bathed in the orange glow from a security light mounted on his power pole. The light illuminated the yard, but it had the perverse effect of making the woods even darker. Keeping an eye out the window, he reached into the drawer of the night table and pulled out his government-model .45 auto. He stepped back from the window, racked in a round, and then crossed to its other side. He could see almost nothing out in the darkness.