Hunting Season (64 page)

Janet was staring at the secure phone in disbelief. Greer told them to get moving and hung up. Farnsworth put the phone down slowly, as if it were very fragile.

“Son of a bitch,” he said softly.

“Amen to that,” Janet said, sitting down in a chair by the phone console.

“I never agreed to anything like that with Kreiss,” he said.

“He shows his evidence, we send it up the line, and they force those people to recall their operative and get the girl back. That’s the fucking deal. I never agreed to turn Kreiss over to anybody.”

“But in a way, you just did,” she pointed out.

“No, I did not,” the RA said, his jaw jutting out.

“Kreiss used to be one of us. It wasn’t like he went dirty. I don’t

care what he knows or what he did up there in D.C.; I’m not going to be part of just handing him over to some bunch of out-of-control spooks.”

“Let’s take it one step at a time,” she said.

“Let’s get to Kreiss. See his so-called evidence. I also want to know what happened with Jared McGarand; I think that his getting killed may have been an accident. And what he did up there in that car? Well, considering where they were taking him, I’d have tried the same thing, only I’d have probably screwed it up. But first, let’s get Kreiss. Nothing happens until we have him.”

Farnsworth nodded, staring down at the phone as if it smelled bad.

“Okay,” he said.

“Find Keenan. We’ll need everybody.”

Kreiss approached the bunker from the front, along the gravel road that led between one row of bunkers and the next, staying close to the mounded structures in case a security patrol popped over the hill behind him. The bunker number was still visible, black lettering on a dirty white field: 887. The ramp leading down to the heavy steel doors showed no signs of recent human activity. There was a large rusty-looking padlock on the huge steel airtight door, just like all the rest of the bunkers had.

The grass growing around the bunker was a foot deep, starting at the front face of the bunker and growing all the way around it, making it look like the bunker had grown naturally out of the ground. The building appeared to be 150 feet long.

Kreiss walked down the gravel and concrete ramp and examined the lock. It was securely made; there were no bright metal scratches to show evidence of any tampering. The steel door was blast-resistant, with heavy airtight seals overlapping its mounting. There was some Army nomenclature on the side of the lock, so it was probably part of a series set. He walked back up the ramp and around to the side of the bunker, climbing through the thick wet grass to stand at the bottom of the rounded top.

The front ventilator was still; the rear one was just barely moving, making a repetitive pinging noise as a rusty bearing complained. But it was definitely moving. Stepping softly, he climbed up the rounded concrete top of the bunker, sliding his feet instead of stepping. That concrete was probably a foot thick, but if there was someone inside, he didn’t want to be heard. When he got to the rear ventilator cowl, he smelled kerosene smoke. It was very faint, but recognizable. He put his nose to the cowl and the smell was stronger. Kerosene lantern or heater in there.

Someone was in the bunker. And since the front door was locked tight from the outside, there must be another way in. He slid back down the

roof of the bunker and walked all the way around it. It was solid, with no other entrances or exits. He checked the boundary area where the grass met the sloping concrete of the structure, looking for a trapdoor, but it was all solid ground. He looked back up at the ventilator, then went to the front of the bunker and climbed to the front cowl. He sniffed that, but there was no smell of anything but the wet grass on his boots. He studied it, then went to the back cowl to see what was different, and he found it immediately.

The base of the rear ventilator cowl was hinged. The hinges had been tack-welded on and then painted flat black to match the tar that sealed the cowl flashing to the concrete. The tarred flashing, however, was gone. He put his fingers under the base of the cowling and lifted just a tiny bit. The whole structure moved. He went back to the front cowling and tried the same thing. Solid as a rock. He shuffled back to the rear cowling, looked on the side opposite the hinges, and saw a crude latch. The latch was made so that the ventilator cowling wouldn’t move sideways if the turbine head really began to spin. He was willing to bet there was a ladder down there.

He squatted down on the roof of the bunker. Someone was hiding in there. Now who would be hiding out in the ammunition-storage area of an abandoned military facility? No, not military. Civilian. This place had been a GOCO installation—government-owned, commercially operated.

McGarand had run this whole installation as the chief chemical engineer.

He had set up his hydrogen laboratory in the most secure building on the site, the one that offered the most sound and physical insulation, the power plant. That must have taken months of effort. He had set up traps along the approach perimeter, and he had rigged the industrial area itself to destruct if anybody came around to take a serious look. Which meant he had had all the time in the world to prepare something like this, for the aftermath of his revenge bombing. If the kids hadn’t come along, he would probably still be living in Blacksburg, watching the feds reel from another bombing that, somewhat like the OK City bombing, had no clear motivations. The bunker farm was a perfect place to hide, just like the industrial area had been the perfect place for a bomb factory. It was another case of hiding in almost plain sight: The one place no one would look for McGarand would be back in the damned arsenal. It had to be McGarand.

He stood up. McGarand had held his daughter prisoner for almost a month, after allowing the other two kids to die in a flash flood like bugs.

Then he had simply walked away, leaving Lynn in the nitro building to starve. This was an opportunity for justice such as rarely had come along in his previous life in law enforcement. He walked down the bunker roof and out to the gravel lane, looking along the ditches. He finally found what he was searching for, a piece of thin steel rod, about two feet long. It was rusted but still solid. He climbed back to the top of the bunker and quietly inserted the rod through the latch at the edge of the cowling base.

Then he bent the two ends up to form a wide vee, so that the rod could not be shaken out. The hinges were solid steel and mounted on the outside.

The cowling surrounding the turbine head was heavy steel, designed to allow a controlled release of combustion gases should the ammunition that had been stored there ever cook off. Rusty, covered in bird lime, but solid steel. Then he went down and found a stick, brought it back up, and jammed it roughly into the turbine housing, stopping the motion. No motion, no reason for anyone else to notice there was anything different about this bunker. And, best of all, McGarand had locked the front steel door from the outside before climbing back in through the ventilator.

He slid back down the concrete and examined his handiwork. Then he remembered the plastic bags out on the fence line. Even better. He trotted back out to the fence line, gathered up three of the largest plastic trash bags, and returned to the bunker. He climbed back up and hooded the front vent grill with one of the bags. Then he covered the immobilized vent with the other two. Before knotting on the final piece, he fished in his backpack and extracted Lynn’s weather-beaten high school ball cap, which he had carried with him ever since recovering it from the logjam.

He pushed it through the grill, dropping it into the bunker below, and then finished wrapping plastic over the vent grill. The bunker was now sealed. In twelve hours or so, there would be no more oxygen in there, even less time if McGarand kept a kerosene lamp going.

“Burn in hell, Browne McGarand,” he said not so quietly.

At noon, Janet Carter checked through the arsenal’s main gate in a Bureau car and drove down into what was left of the industrial area. The new civilian security guards reported that an aTF forensics team was going to be on the site today, although they had not signed in yet. She told him that there would be four more vehicles with FBI agents coming behind her. She parked her Bureau car near the windowless administrative building at the top of the hill, shut it down, and opened the car’s windows. She could see what she assumed to be the aTF CSU van down near the rubble

of the power plant, but not the technicians. The hole in the main street, into which she had driven her car, was still visible. Several of the overhead pipe frames had been blown down in the blast and remained where they had fallen, looking like piles of steel spaghetti in the now-cluttered street.

The windows in the administrative building had been blown through the building and into the parking lot, which sparkled as if covered in new frost. There was a fifteen-foot-high ring of rubble surrounding the site of the power plant.

Farnsworth and Keenan had worked up a quick plan back in the Roanoke office. They would post two-man teams at the known incursion points, such as the rail spur, the back gates, and the creek penstock. The rest of the tactical squad would go through the main gate and then deploy on foot into the tree line overlooking the open meadow above the industrial area. Farnsworth had briefed Abel Mecklen, the SAC of the Roanoke aTF office, as to what they would be doing at the arsenal, and he had requested that the aTF launch one of their small surveillance planes. The aircraft would be tasked to orbit the arsenal perimeter at ten thousand feet with its engine muffled. A county hospital MedLift helicopter was put on short standby at the hospital pad; after their last exciting visit to the arsenal, Farnsworth was taking no chances.

The RA had taken AD Greer’s direction literally and pulled everyone into the operation, even Billy Smith, who was again assigned to tactical communications. Janet, like the rest of the agents, had changed into tactical gear: jumpsuit, Kevlar vest, tactical equipment belt, and FBI ball cap.

She had a portable radio with collar microphone and her SIG was bolstered on her right hip. Her personal .38 revolver was in the glove compartment.

She looked at her watch: The tactical radio circuit would be established in twenty minutes, after which the various elements of the team would check in onstation. After that, she would be cleared to do whatever she needed to do to find Kreiss. Which was probably nothing, she realized. Kreiss would probably just step out of one of these wrecked buildings and come over to the car. That’s when it might get hard.

She still had a residual headache from the carbon monoxide, and she would have loved to have had a bottle of oxygen to suck on for a while.

Goddamned woman. The frustrating thing was that once they had Kreiss and could get what he had into the right channels, they would then all have to wait some more, for the right pressure to be applied and the Agency’s black widow to turn loose her hostage. The nagging question in the back of Janet’s head hadn’t changed: What if Misty wouldn’t go along?

What if she had gone off the tracks and was now engaged in some personal vendetta against Kreiss? If this didn’t work for some reason, and Kreiss didn’t get Lynn back, there would be hell to pay. Coupled with the implied treachery in what AD Greer had said, she felt pretty uncomfortable about Kreiss’s prospects.

She shook her head to clear her thoughts and focused on what was going on around her. Too many what if’s could be very distracting. The aTF van hadn’t moved and there was still no sign of their techs. She wondered where they might be working, since most of the structures at that end were demolished or too badly damaged even to be safe. For that matter, she thought they now pretty much knew what had caused the blast: a concentration of hydrogen. Then she remembered what the civilian gate guard had said: aTF forensics hadn’t signed in on-site yet. Then what-The radio squawked in her left ear as Keenan came up on channel one, establishing the tactical net. She acknowledged when he polled the various teams. He reported that the aTF’s aircraft was still at the local airport, down temporarily with a parts problem, ETA one hour. Here we go, she thought, stuff going wrong before we even get going. She scanned the wrecked buildings down the hill for signs of Kreiss. She had parked the car in plain sight, and he could surely recognize a Bu car. She looked at her watch again: 12:20. They were now in the window.

Where are you, Kreiss? she thought, beginning to feel exposed out here in the sunlight. She thought of the stark contrast between what he’d been doing for all those years, on his own, and the way the rest of the Bureau did business. Dependent solely on his wits and cunning, with no partners, no backup, no base, and no rules. Every new mission coming with its own fresh hunting license. The silence around her was palpable.

C’mon, Kreiss. This is your only hope of getting Lynn back, this, or giving yourself up to those people. Now you need us. No more Lone Ranger. She drummed her fingers on the steering wheel. The sooner the better, Kreiss.

Kreiss was in the trees above the creek, flat on his belly, scanning the entire industrial area through his binoculars. He had seen Carter drive down the main access road and park near the admin building. He was waiting to see if he could detect how much backup there would be and where they would set up. And he was curious about that van down by the flattened power plant. It looked like a CSU van, except there was no lettering of any kind to identify whose CSU might be there. He couldn’t see

the license plate, either. He knew aTF would work a scene like this for weeks, even if they had already figured out what had happened. They liked to gather a ton of evidence, and bomb sites often yielded literally tons of evidence.

He scrunched around in the pine needles to get a better visual line on the van. Ford, fall-sized, tan. It could be a piece of the FBI backup team, too. Except he was pretty sure he remembered seeing it earlier, when he had gone into the bunker farm. He studied it carefully. The windows facing into the morning sun were clear; the others, toward the back, still had dew on them. It had definitely been there awhile. He scanned up the street to Carter’s Bu car; he couldn’t make out the details of her face, but it looked like her, sitting alone in the driver’s seat.