Necessary Evil (14 page)

Walking back to the cabin driveway was an ordeal. Frozen to the skin, numb from cold, his muscles no longer did his bidding, his fingers worked only minimally, and a shrapnel burn irritated his leg. He needed rest.

Fear formed in his gut. When Jessie freed the trapdoor, she'd be dead if any of the remaining killers saw her. That spurred him on. When he reached the driveway to his cabin, he pulled out the radio.

"This is your new leader. Wanna talk?"

Nothing. He could not believe that every last man had followed him. Slowly he advanced along the tree line, looking for any shadow in the falling snow. The cabin still burned.

He moved back into the trees, keeping the cabin barely in sight until he was behind it, near the now-burned back porch. As he emerged from the trees, Kier saw a form backlit by the firelight next to the pump house. He moved forward, stealthily at first, then stood, relieved. He knew it was Jessie from her size and form. Silently, she raised her pistol, pointing it at him. He stared intently and raised a hand to waive.
Pfffft.
The silenced shot missed his head by mere inches and made a hollow
thunk
behind him. Kier whirled to see a man fallen in the snow. Jessie had shot him in the face.

She came forward with her pistol still leveled in his direction. Her demeanor telegraphed her anger. As she closed the gap between them, she finally began lowering the pistol. He found himself sighing in relief.

Tillman sat quietly in the Donahue kitchen, his large hand wrapped around a sizable mug. He squeezed the ceramic vessel rhythmically as if his hand were a beating heart. His men were spread around the house, leaving him alone except for Doyle, who sat nearby, seemingly engrossed in an old magazine.

Tillman had twenty men left, a formidable group with him in the lead. What stopped him from undertaking a manhunt around the burned cabin was the fact that he didn't want to underestimate the Indian's resources again. Eight men were now dead or incapacitated. Sheer numbers would accomplish nothing for Tillman unless he could outthink Kier Wintripp. He now expected the Indian to flee to the mountains he knew so well. It was what Tillman would have done. Troops could block roads and search cabins easily. It was tougher to find a trained survivalist in the wilderness.

From his reading, Tillman knew that the Tilok was historically a highland, not coastal, tribe. Before Europeans arrived, they had been hunter-gatherers, living in the mountains and migrating to the high country in summer. Kier's ancestors were people hardened by migration and living off the land. Any man could learn what Kier knew, but if heredity counted, Kier had a better beginning than most.

Tillman had to remind himself that he had bigger responsibilities than killing this Indian for his own satisfaction. Admiration for the man's skill was all well and good. A sporting sense and its attendant need for victory were as normal as
Monday Night Football.
But this hunt was about none of those things. The Indian and the woman had to be neutralized.

Lesser men allowed petty concerns to overcome common sense or anger to compromise their morality. It would not be so with Jack Tillman. A living, breathing Doyle was proof of that. He glanced at Doyle, who still held his eyes on the magazine.

"Order the men on the road to move to the area around the Indian's cabin. They should be there in five minutes. Tell them I'd prefer the Indian and the woman alive, but I'd rather have them dead than escape. Leave the men around the plane in place. Leave two here. I'm taking five men with me to the cabin. You and Brennan follow me in ten minutes with the rest. Radio to Crebbs at Elk Horn to hurry up and get me the helicopter. I want to know the minute they have one lined up."

Doyle had that puzzled look.

"The weather won't stay like this forever," Tillman said. "The minute it changes, we can use the chopper. This Indian is going to be more difficult than you might imagine. I can feel it."

Doyle nodded as if the mystery had been solved. "I wonder how long he can survive," he said.

"You mean you wonder if he's a match for me."

"I wouldn't underestimate Brennan either," Doyle said.

"Of course, you wouldn't. He's your superior officer."

Tillman was amused at the subtle maneuvering. He knew he had thrown Doyle a bone by telling him the plan first and letting him tell Brennan. Soon he would do the reverse for Brennan. Competition was good. It kept men from becoming complacent.

"We're going to need some food. Tell the men to butcher that damn llama. And tell the men who stay here to search through those family albums over there. Have them figure out which one is Jessie. There must be pictures. I want to see what she looks like."

"I've already done that." Doyle walked to the counter and returned with a picture.

Tillman turned the photo in his fingers. She was a brunette. Proud and confident, she showed a slight cockiness in her understated smile. This was a woman who might stir him.

For as long as he could remember he had been attracted to such women. They were the opposite of his mother—a short, bespectacled, obsequious person who always acted afraid. She had been a shadow over his life. He hated her and frankly admitted it to himself. Early in life Tillman had understood that identifying such unconscious hostilities was an important part of growing up.

Probably his most vivid recollection of his mother was of her cowering in a corner as his father ranted and raved in a drunken fit. He was nine at the time. Shortly thereafter he'd been sent to a boarding school. He never saw his mother again. She disappeared one night and his father never mentioned her name or acknowledged her existence. After age eleven, Tillman missed a lot of school in favor of hunting trips. He spent a cumulative total of three years in Africa before his eighteenth birthday.

From the beginning Tillman had known he must be his own parent. At eighteen, he joined the military; at twenty, officer's candidate school, followed by army intelligence training and secret ops in Cambodia after Vietnam.

As comfortable as he had felt at war, army life did not ultimately suit Tillman. Its structure became for him a mental straitjacket. Business and science, he decided, were his calling, and he used the GI Bill to earn an MBA and a degree in pharmacology. Still, his military training and hunting experience proved useful more than once in his business life. Now it would help him catch the Indian.

And with luck, the woman.

When people of the plains come to the mountains, the mountains get no flatter.

—Tilok proverb

K
ier probably could have stopped Jessie's stinging slap, but he didn't try.

"You son of a bitch. You ever lock me up again and I'll have you prosecuted for interfering with a federal officer."

"I thought you had decided to become a postman."

"It's no joke."

Kier looked into those eyes, thinking if it were another life, he'd kiss her. He gave her a little smile, waiting to see if she would smile back. She didn't.

Overcome with fatigue, he bent and put his hands on his knees. "My cabin's burned. Let's get some supplies before they send in the next wave."

She turned without another word and led him toward the burning cabin. He stopped briefly at the pump house to recover the remaining volume.

His body, covered in sweat and snow, was out of adrenaline, out of energy, and numbing quickly. Even with the heavy wool shirt, sweater, and the thin white topcoat, he would weaken and eventually suffer the effects of exposure unless he got more insulation or warmed himself. They went to the heat of the burning cabin. They would need to pull supplies from the root cellar as soon as the fire cooled enough. While they waited, they could strip some of the clothing from the bodies of the men who had come to kill them. Quickly his mind began cataloguing what they would need.

Then, like one more symptom of a deadly illness, he heard the sound of snowmobiles.

"Let's go."

We can't. We've got no supplies, no clothing. Nothing."

"We have all we need," he replied and grabbed her arm, pulling her into the forest.

A second wind is a strange thing. Athletes near the goal line, soldiers in the heat of battle, mountain climbers struggling against the elements, all accomplish far more than even they— the champions of the flesh—imagine might be possible. And they do this after their bodies tell them that exhaustion is complete.

Despite their fatigue, Jessie and Kier went at a bounding lope up the mountain through a tunnellike opening in the trees that marked the trail. They used only the small light that Kier had taken from the fallen mercenary. He slowed to a brisk trot a few hundred yards later to lead her along a rock face that had shed boulders now slick with snow. Crouching to scramble over chunks of granite, scraping her shins and banging her knees—it reminded Jessie of screaming FBI drill instructors, of competition, of gutting it out on pure desire.

Moving with an ease and grace that she could not duplicate, and that utterly astounded her, Kier occasionally slowed and turned, as if to measure her endurance and progress. At other times, he wordlessly reached back to pull her up a particularly troublesome spot, seeming to anticipate her difficulty.

After myriad tiptoed and hopping steps, they cleared the boulder field and began winding up the mountainside through heavy tree cover. Flickering off the boughs on either side of the trail, their dim, hand-held light gave only sufficient illumination for the next footfall.

An hour and a thousand vertical feet later, Kier stopped. He shone the light on a house-sized boulder projecting from the cliff. Its overhang sheltered them from the weather.

"Dig," he said, throwing snow away from the cliff's base to expose what looked like a small cavern beneath.

When Jessie began knocking the drift out of the way, she discovered dead leaves on the floor of a little cavern. Farther back, wind-driven whiteness gave way to a cave floor spongy with moss.

As they climbed under the overhanging rock and out of the wind, Kier removed his heavy sweater and cut the sleeves off his shirt. Stuffing the shirt sleeves full of moss and leaves, he made what looked like a sausage and tied it over her ears, then did the same over her nose and mouth. After putting his sweater back on, he began taking huge handfuls of the green moss and stuffing them between his sweater and his long Johns, even down his arms.

He nodded at Jessie. "You do the same."

Then, over the moss, he packed in leaves until he looked like a scarecrow in a white camouflage windbreaker. They finished packing Jessie's coat and stuffed their pants before tying off the trouser cuffs with ribbons of cloth cut from Kier's sleeves.

"Now if we keep moving we might live and avoid frostbite until we get to shelter."

"Can we build a fire?" Outside the little hollow she saw nothing but icy blackness. She hated the hint of weakness in her voice. ''I suppose they might find us more easily if we did that," she added, trying to redeem herself.

''Sometime I'll tell you what frightens me and you'll laugh."

"Who said anything about being frightened?" Her voice came to life.

"No offense intended. I know the mountains aren't your favorite place."

"Yeah, well, you put up with things in this world. We don't always get what we want." But her mind leaped ahead to her one phobia. "Are there any really steep drops where we're going?"

"In the mountains we call them cliffs."

Hanging her head and gripping Kier's belt, Jessie once again struggled to keep up in the thigh-deep snow. Labored breathing, screaming muscles, icy air like razor blades down the throat— all commanded her mind.

After climbing across the mountain's face for more than an hour, they came to the knife-edged spine of a ridge. When she saw the ground fall away sharply, she stopped and tugged on his coat.

"This is steep," she said.

"Not very," he replied, turning to continue on.

She forced herself ahead, most of the time unable to see the drop she knew must be there. At the crests where it became the sheerest, the snow tended to scatter on the dull gray rock, keeping it shallow. No matter, she would have rather walked through the snow.

The icy wind punished her—aching the bones, freezing the flesh, pounding the inner ear with dull, thick pain. Thinking ahead was debilitating, grist for despondency. Misery was better contemplated one moment at a time, she thought to herself, remembering grueling hikes through bug-infested swamps at Quantico.

Other people's troubles had kept her going then. Her mother's waitressing work, followed by a quick marriage and grandkids. Dad's tunnel vision of Jessie as the supplicant daughter, obedient, grateful, bound to marry a good boy with a not-too-threatening job. When she announced she wanted to go to college, and had a partial scholarship, and a research assistant's position at the university, her parents had been dumbfounded.

They were good people, lovable in their way, and even adaptable to change. Once she graduated from college, her younger brother followed, and then her older brother began night school. Claudie never went. What really blew the Mayfields away was Mom's decision to go to college. After all, she said, the kids were grown, and it was the way of the world. That had been a blockbuster. Jessie smiled, remembering how close she had finally felt to her mother when she enrolled in junior college.

Such thoughts helped keep her mind from the bleak present, where each step was labored, where she sometimes foundered on rubberized muscle. Then she began wondering if the next step would come. But it always did, and they kept climbing for what seemed several hours. In the dark her watch was useless.

Abruptly, she noticed that they were out of the snow. Only rock and leaves lay underfoot. Kier stopped.

"We're here," he said. "It's called Bear's Cave."

As Kier shone the light around, she was able to make out rock walls and ceiling. There was a fire pit, dry wood, a brown backpack hanging from a pole spanning the cavern, along with three pairs of snowshoes.

"Was there ever a bear?"

"None that ate people."

She thought he was smiling.

''I wasn't sure the bag would be here,'' he said. ''Inside that pack there are blankets, twine, a hatchet, things that aren't necessary but very nice. We don't let the boys get in it. They make do with what the mountain provides, and so do we. We bring the young boys here in the summer. The older ones come in winter."

Kier quickly climbed the almost vertical face of the cave, which had only the most meager handholds; then, twenty feet off the cave floor, he went hand over hand along the pole, which bowed under his weight. Loosening the leather thong that held the pack to the pole, he dropped it at Jessie's feet. Then he dropped two pairs of the semi-oval snowshoes.

For a moment, Jessie's weary frustration gave way to exhilaration. She marveled that she could have such feelings over a few blankets. Pulling open the pack, she took out two, wrapped them around her shoulders, and promptly began shaking.

"We can have a fire, but only in the night, or during the day in very heavy snow. Otherwise they will see the smoke." Kier had climbed down and joined her. "Even without the smoke they'll find this place quickly."

Once the fire was burning, Kier went out into the darkness without a word.

"What are you doing now?" she muttered out loud, and was not surprised when he didn't answer.

Kier returned to Bear's Cave, dragging long pine bows. He stripped the smaller branches off. Then he went out to retrieve two more twelve-foot branches, each roughly three inches in diameter. By cutting one into three equal pieces, he created a four-foot-tall tripod, binding the three poles together at the top with a short piece of line. Next, resting one end of the last branch on top of the short tripod and letting the other lie on the ground, he had fashioned the sloping ridgepole of a tent or lean-to.

"But why in a cave?" Jessie asked.

"There will be no fire tomorrow. We will want to be warm enough that we can sleep by day."

''How can I help with whatever it is we're doing?'' She rose with a groan.

"Lean the shorter sticks against the low end of the log," he said, even as he began placing the longer branches at the high end of the ridgepole near the tripod.

Each leaning piece of wood lay close to the next, just inches apart. Kier corrected Jessie a couple of times, then nodded his approval, and disappeared—only to return a few minutes later, dragging two small trees. Once again stripping the trunks, he cut them into short segments and lashed them and each of the smaller vertical pieces to the ridgepole. They had what looked like the upside-down keel and ribs of a crude boat. Kier finally wove some sticks horizontally through the vertical ribs.

When at last the skeleton seemed sturdy and complete, a giant pile of needled boughs remained. From this Kier made two beds, side by side. He put one blanket on each.

"Try it out," he said.

She did, and he followed. Rolling toward her on his elbow, he studied her face in the firelight. He found himself thinking about one large bed. Without a doubt she wanted to tell him all over again how dumb it was to run into the wilderness, but instead she just shook her head.

"We might as well get used to each other." He broke the silence. "Say what's on your mind."

"I think it's this overwhelming sense I get that you don't respect me."

He allowed himself a puzzled frown, as his way of asking for more information.

"Well," she began, as if he had actually spoken, "there's the 'one man against the evil empire' mind-set that seems to be operating here. You know what I mean?"

"You want to go to the city, the government."

''I want to work with people who can do something—people whose job it is to do something."

Kier remained impassive.

"So what's wrong with that? If my horse were sick, I'd call you. If someone were breaking the law, I'd call the police."

"This is different. First, we can't get to the city any time soon. Second, this is no normal crime. This is huge. You know that."

"All the more reason—"

"The government could be involved," he interrupted.

"Just what is it with you and the government?"

Kier rubbed his jaw and decided to tell her.