Necessary Evil (20 page)

The hairs on a Tilok neck are better than a friend's warning.

—Tilok proverb

"
I
t wasn't confirmed," the authoritative voice said.

Kier listened to Tillman tell his men about the way Oregon had phrased his last radio call. And of course, Oregon wasn't answering any longer.

"Target One wants us to think he's headed down the mountain without the Fed. Oregon's either dead or useless. He's probably dead. Do we have one man with the boy?''

''Negative that. Somebody came and got the boy; left California unconscious."

"Say again!"

Kier could hear the shock in Tillman's normally smooth voice.

"California is unconscious, the boy is gone. Only one set of tracks came into camp. We can't figure out how they jumped him. Whoever it was just walked right up to California."

"You are saying some unknown person walked into camp and left with this boy?"

"That's affirmative, sir."

''Tell California to stay at the cave. They may come back," Tillman said quietly. He had obviously reacquired his grip.

"This is California," a voice cut in. "I can't walk. They cut me."

"All the more reason to stay put," Tillman replied.

"Nevada and Arizona are on a track. By the look of it, it's Missy the Fed," another voice cut in.

Kier's jaw clenched and his fingers went tight around the automatic.

"Switch and answer after colors. Switch and answer after colors."

Colors? Kier shook his head. Another radio scrambling code.

"Red. Magenta. Green. Yellow."

There was a pause. "Black. Red. Blue. Orange."

No more talking. They had changed frequencies and he couldn't follow. Switching quickly back to the channel on which he had last spoken to Tillman, he waited to see if he might try to contact him. In seconds, he did.

"Medicine man, are you there?"

He debated answering, but reminded himself again that the signal could be triangulated, and that any broadcast would enable them to locate his whereabouts.

"You should be sensible and talk to us. You were exposed to almost every deadly virus and bacteria known to man. I know you must have figured that out. You and the woman need treatment." It puzzled Kier that Tillman admitted to having the disease organisms. But then Tillman's men were logged onto a different frequency. Perhaps he was trying to get Kier's trust by appearing candid.

Kier had moved away from the stripped body of Texas to listen to the radio and wait for the mercenaries that he knew would arrive. Crouching now in a dense grove of young red fir fifty feet from their grenade-riddled comrade, Kier could hear men coming.

Above him was a tan oak that was outgrowing the fir. Eventually, Kier knew, that in the fight for sunlight the fir would overwhelm the broadleaf. But able to survive in shade, the tan oak would still stand after it lost the race. Kier hoped for a fate at least as good as that of the tan oak.

Near the tan oak, a wild onion had found a little bare soil, and there was just enough of a root to make a walnut-sized tuber. The first bite took half. It had the crunch of a fresh apple but no sweetness and the dry, stinging tang of the most potent domestic varieties.

Then he heard the
bang, bang, bang
—like a fast vibration— of automatic-weapons' fire from farther down the ridge. They had found Jessie. Forcing himself to wait, he knew the soul-wrenching pain of being helpless.

As luck would have it, the two men were beyond the trail on the side opposite the grove where Kier hid, making it impossible for him to see them. All he could do was follow and wait for his chance. It was getting late. More than two hours had passed since he left Jessie. He would need to find her soon.

Moving quietly through the trees was almost impossible, even for Kier. Branches heavy with snow dumped their loads when he brushed by, making sound. Worse yet, he was leaving a trail that a half-blind man could follow. He had to stay away from them, and behind them, so they wouldn't accidentally cross his track. It was spooky, and very dangerous. If one of them got behind him, it would be a simple matter for them to follow, guess at his direction of travel, and use radios to trap him. If they got him before he got them, Jessie would be next.

The man code-named California sat with his head hanging almost to his chest. A sizable gash gaped open across the back of his scalp. His brown hair was matted with blood, and his hands shook as they continually touched the wound as if exploring the damage would make it better. Blood oozing from a severed Achilles tendon spread in a huge crimson stain through the fabric of his camouflage suit. Tillman strode back and forth in the snow, filled with rage at the neutered soldier in front of him.

"You gotta get me back down the hill," California said.

"You're a damn coward. What happened?"

"I never saw him. I'm telling you he came out of nowhere. I was doin' the kid like Brennan told me, but I was bein' careful and lookin' around. Then Oregon called. He sounded scared. Said I had to stop or he was gonna die, then
wham!
—something hit me. Then he cut me. I can't walk. I'm gonna die up here."

The soldier's voice was cracking. No dignity remained in the man. The intensity of Tillman's feeling stemmed as much from this man's cowardice as the collective failure to capture Kier. He continued pacing, conjuring his next move. Occasionally, he directed an icy gaze at the man in front of him.

"I was looking around. I swear."

Tillman cursed himself for getting so far from the cave. He had been making a circle, figuring he would cross Kier's track as Kier came to save the boy. Then Oregon had called on the radio, panicked. Within seconds, California's attacker had come like a quiet breeze in the night. From the mark in the snow it was obvious that only one man had crawled here on his belly after dropping from the rocks above. If it was Kier who had held Oregon hostage, then he could not have gotten the boy. And if Kier rescued the boy, he couldn't have captured Oregon. The FBI bitch was way down the ridge dispatching two of his other men, so she couldn't have done it.

Someone besides the Indian and the woman was out playing in the snow. And that someone was intimately familiar with the wilderness.

"Please, you gotta get me off this mountain," California said. Tillman noticed the man had unconsciously moved to his knees. Then he was literally clinging to Tillman's boots.

Revulsion filled Tillman. Ridding himself of this soldier would be like weeding a garden. Like General Patton, he had no appetite for coddling cowards. The Romans killed them outright. Alexander the Great made men brave or made them dead. He reached down and took the man by the hair. A calm came over him as he reminded himself that this man was the only one who could place him on this mountain. The others believed he was in Johnson City speaking through a relay transmitter at Elkhorn Pass.

There was no equivocation on Tillman's part as he sank his knife an inch into the man's neck, making sure to take out the vocal cords.

Kier and the woman were near, and he would hunt them down.

A battleship-gray rock scarp the size of several high rises protruded from the mountain at the place Kier thought to undertake his ambush. Where the granite was vertical and smooth, little grew except lichen. Here and there, where the stony surface was flat enough to hold a sprinkling of soil, there were dabs of deer fern, five-finger fern, bleeding hearts, and huckleberry. Now the plants were mere lumps in the snow. The top of this massive rock formation was overgrown with evergreens.

Kier positioned himself on a high ledge under a dwarfed wind-sculpted pine. From his vantage point, he looked out across a shallow canyon with steep sides going to ridges five hundred feet above him on the opposite side. Most of the canyon was covered in forest. Fifty feet below him, there was the shadow of the trail on which the men would come. They would move slowly and watchfully. They would be spooked by the booby traps and fearful of ambush. Down the trail a short way was the small cave in which he and Jessie had taken their shelter.

The two men who now approached would be easy to hunt. They were both of average build, less than 190 pounds, and not accustomed to the wild. They missed obvious detours around thickets, tending to go straight down, their eyes mostly focusing forward. They easily became boxed in by terrain and windfalls that forced them to backtrack. Leaving a wide trail, they made a lot of noise and had a poor sense of balance. If they stood still, it would never be in mid-stride, but always with both feet planted firmly on the ground—putting them at a considerable disadvantage.

When at last they appeared, he realized he could kill them several times over. They walked single file, with at least twenty feet between them. After every step or two, they would look, but they saw little. When he was about to shoot the trailing man in the leg, something told him to wait. Perhaps it was because of the way they moved, or maybe the lengthy unexplained delay in their arrival, or just a hunch that it was too easy. The man who directed these men understood how to hunt an enemy. Why were these two neophytes sent by themselves to follow a trail, even to walk into an ambush? Why weren't they circling away and coming back?

The man nearest drew closer. After a few minutes of this stop-and-go travel, he would pass beneath Kier and out of sight. The hair stood on Kier's neck. He kept the open sights of the M-16 near his target, but lifted his cheek from the stock of the gun and watched. On they came. There appeared to be no one else.

Kier's eyes roved the hillsides and the canyon, famished for a clue. After a time, he turned his head to look above and behind him. Nothing. There was only the inner voice, the sense that not all was as it should be.

Where do you want to look?

Grandfather's voice came to his mind just as it had that day in the dead frozen winter when hunger was overtaking him. He opened his eyes, looking again to the opposite hillside four hundred yards distant. A movement, then nothing. Waiting, he watched, uncertain as to where exactly he had detected the motion. The first man walked below him, then the second. Almost ten minutes had passed since he first saw them. Any minute now, they would be gone from his sight.

There was another glint of something on the hillside and his eye found what it sought—a white-suited man moving against the snow. This man was very good, doing exactly what Kier would have done. By stalking his own comrades, he would find the other stalker. This one moved with his head up, stopping irregularly, always looking.

Kier aimed for the torso, waiting for one more movement to define his adversary against the far slope. But it never came. The man must have dropped to his belly. Why? Kier slipped back a foot, lying flat on the rock in a depression that hid him from view.

Grasping a branch that hooked over the lip of the snow-covered granite, he moved it slightly.
Smack! Smack! Smack!
Three bullets spattered against the stone, followed by loud, echoing reports. The man across the canyon had found him, perhaps using field glasses. Obviously the man was in a hurry and unwilling to take his time shooting. That was good. That told Kier that Jessie had killed somebody. Perhaps they believed they were running out of men, out of time. Darkness would soon come and there could be few, if any, new recruits.

Kier sidled back to a cleft in the rock completely hidden from view, then looked slowly around the canyon. Across the white silence, he found no movement; on the far hillside, there was no sign of anyone's passing. In the spot where the man had been, he could see nothing. Undoubtedly the shooter would have moved on his belly out of sight. Again the snow was starting.

A deep, tunnellike groove in the cliff enabled Kier to descend to the canyon floor without exposing himself. By the time he reached the trail to the hut, snow was falling in sheets and the far canyon wall became just a memory. Using his radio, the shooter would have alerted everyone on the mountain to the white-clad figure that was Kier—including the two men ahead of him. They would be halfway to the hut, wondering about the trail left by Oregon that headed mysteriously down the mountain.

Kier crept quickly through the forest parallel to the trail, staying in the young stand of mixed conifers, hunting the same two men. On his flank, he knew, would be the other stalker, a man who knew the woods and how to conceal himself. But it would take that man time to arrive—and during those minutes, Kier intended to disable the bait.

A strong spirit is the best medicine for a sick body.

—Tilok Proverb

O
nce Jessie had composed herself, she left the shrapnel-shredded soldier to locate the body of the man she had shot. He had fallen just off the path, with his head buried in snow-covered brush. Pulling the head from the snow, she studied the man she had killed. His blue-gray eyes were open and looked large and dull, like those of cod on ice.

Clean-shaven, he appeared relatively fresh for a guy who had obviously been living in the bush. There was a single gold earring in his right earlobe bearing a cross emblazoned on a small round button. Oddly, he reminded her a little of her younger brother—about the same age and build. No identification except dog tags. He carried no wallet, but had a money clip just like Miller's.

Forty-five-caliber slugs were big and the bullets traveled slowly, working well with silencers. When the hefty slug had finally arrived at its target, it had done serious damage, hitting with fiercely destructive power. In this case, the talon bullet had missed the steel breastplate and struck the edge of the Kevlar at the arm hole. At least portions of the specially made slug had entered the body. The result sickened her. While not piercing the Kevlar, the other portion of the bullet had cratered the vest, pushing the material through the man's ribs and into his body. Undoubtedly the energy transferred to the chest cavity, stopping the heartbeat.

The bleeding had been heavy, but most was under the flak jacket beneath the down-filled arctic suit.

By the time she had donned the man's coat and body garment, most of the blood had coagulated and frozen. Since the clothes were much too large anyway, she pulled them on over her own coat and clothing, substantially increasing the amount of her insulation. Her revulsion at his bloody coat felt trivial compared to her relief from the encroaching cold.

In his pack she found power bars and hungrily she opened one. As she bit into the bar, she noticed a small piece of translucent tape running along the edge of the wrapper. Instantly she realized the possibilities. Her jaws froze in horror. If only she hadn't taken a bite before she noticed the tampering. Immediately she spat it all out, then rinsed her mouth with handfuls of powdery snow. She had swallowed nothing, she was sure. If there had been more time, these men probably would have used some method for invading the wrapper that was completely undetectable, like a fine needle or a syringe.

In training they had taught her about poisoned food, and she now realized it had been incredibly stupid to eat what was in the man's pack. Obviously they would have anticipated that food would be taken from corpses or the wounded.

Thinking calmly, she decided that some of the power bars must be free of poison. Three had tape on them; twelve others did not. Further, the three with tape had been stored within easy reach, in a pocket on the outside of the pack. That was about as far as she got with the logic before the first cramp hit. The convulsion in her gut made her throw up. What was left in her stomach came up. She felt clammy; her heart pounded, and her head throbbed. Her insides churning, she vomited again. Instinctively, she curled into a ball, wondering how quickly she would die.
Maybe it's a virus,
she thought, as she began to fade.

Probably the fittest seventy-two-year-old in California, maybe in the country, Stalking Bear hiked at a pace that was an honor even to the young man who followed him down the mountain. The men in the white suits had seen Jessie's track. Stalking Bear knew his grandson, Kier, was fighting. They were perhaps a quarter mile from the Bear's Cave trail in the thickest brush to be found. He made a great circle around Jessie's old trail. He studied her steps, read in the ground the story of her ruse.

He sensed where she'd be. A feeling came over him. Something was wrong.

After passing through an oak thicket and a stand of tall fir, he found the small cave.

"I must sleep," he told James Cole. "You go ahead down the mountain. Go to the reservation. I will come after."

James hesitated.

"You can help them best by continuing on," he reassured the young man.

James thought a moment longer, then turned and trotted down the mountain. Unrolling his bedroll, Grandfather sat straight-backed, closing his eyes.

In his dream, Grandfather walks on. After heading across the mountain, through the windfalls, past the cabin, and into the red fir, he sees her track again. It is just where he expects. He follows for many paces. She
circles and comes back. Tirelessly, he follows. When the time is right, he looks down into the dying face of Jessie Mayfield. Urgently, he bends over her. She must drink. Nearby is a rivulet. Using all his energy, he watches her drag her body. He waits until she drinks deeply.

Grandfather gently touches her face. As his flesh presses hers, his spirit leaps within him.

He wondered at it as he awoke in his cave. He rose and followed the boy. He knew that he must return and try to save the Tilok people.

After swinging wide into the canyon to get below the men, Kier drew close to the rock wall, still moving downhill through the brush while working toward the hut. He expected that the men would be cautiously approaching his previous hiding spot on the ledge. By now the shooter on the far hillside would have alerted them. It wouldn't take long for them to find his trail in the snow.

Near the hut a large crease ran vertically across the rock wall. Kier pressed into it. Then, peering around the sharp edge in the granite face, he saw the shelter he and Jessie had built. It looked like a giant ice cream cone stashed in the rock, the door plug a small lump of white next to it. He saw no fresh tracks anywhere.

The men had obviously turned around before getting this far, no doubt to search the ledge where he was last seen. Kier laid a track to the mouth of the hut, dusted the snow off the plug, inserted it, then very carefully walked backward in his own footsteps until he reached the smooth, gray granite of the cliff. An experienced tracker would be able to detect what he had done, but a novice would not.

Quickly, he found a sheltered area under a tree with a reasonable view of the hut. And then, down a slight incline from his hiding spot, two men appeared, just barely visible. They had come much faster than he had expected, but these were the novices, not the stalker from the hillside. They looked to be thirty or forty feet from the hut entry, one of them talking on the radio. Where was the man who knew how to hunt? What was he thinking at this moment?

As if to egg Kier on, one of the men fired a long burst with his M-16 into the hut. Kier's trigger finger tightened, the shooter in his sights. But he didn't want to kill if it could be avoided.

"Drop your guns," he shouted at the men, who looked up, bewildered. A four-shot burst by Kier brought the men to their knees, guns thrown down.

He left them naked, huddled under the leaves in the hut, and burned their boots and clothes before their eyes. Next he destroyed their radios and rendered the rest of their equipment useless. It was better than a prison. Kier doubted the stalker would even bother to look for them, and if he did, they would do him no good without shoes and clothes.

Angling carefully up the side slope of the canyon away from the men, Kier found something that stopped him cold. Grandfather's track, headed down the mountain. So that was how James Cole got away.

Kier crossed their tracks and continued on. He picked up Jessie's trail about a mile farther along the ridge from Bear's Cave, and he began following it, relieved that the stalker had not yet arrived. Jessie had made a giant circle. He smiled. With a glance, he saw her first false side trail, but knew it was a dead end by the way she had backed out. It would fool the inexperienced. He found a more recent side trail that could be easily missed. She had jumped from the main trail to the base of a tree as he taught her. A cursory glance would reveal only the dislodged snow that had fallen from its branches.

Seconds later, Kier found a track through the trees. After twenty feet, she had stood still. A shell's dull brass finish caught his eye. She had fired the gun.

Tracing the general direction of her shot by the angle of her toe, he studied the terrain. She had run to a fallen tree. He could see where she had crawled.

Looking up, he saw that bullets had ripped through the woods. His heart pounded. A grenade or mortar had exploded. She had hid behind the log, then crawled again . . . his eye followed. Quickly, he moved down the track.

A great sigh of relief escaped his lips when he came upon a man who had apparently been blown to pieces by a grenade. She got him. But where'd she go? He found the berm, then followed her track to the first shooting spot, then into the woods. Oh, God, there was another body—a man, sprawled, partially stripped. Kier's eyes took in the food wrapper, the vomit, the partially eaten bar, and the spot where she had spat in the snow. Drag marks. She had crawled.

He found Jessie lying in a fetal position with her face next to a barely flowing stream. Her tousled hair fanned from under the helmet. When Kier saw the blood over her stolen white coat, his soul seemed to shrink. A moan escaped his lips. He rolled her into his arms and cradled her head. He pressed her neck.

A pulse. Her chest rose in shallow breaths. Frantically, he tore at her clothes, exposing her body. The delicate white skin bore no marks that he could see.

She was still alive because she had ingested only a minute quantity of the poison. Judging from her distended belly, she had thought enough to drink lots of water. He redid her clothes to keep her warm.

Certain he had too little time, he cast about for a more secluded spot, placed Jessie over his shoulder, and crashed into the brash, making no effort to be quiet. Scrambling over two large logs, he forced his way through a thicket of branches, crashed them to the ground, and cleared a small area surrounded by windfallen trees and brash. Returning to the dead man, he obliterated the evidence of the poison, then moved the man's body a hundred yards down the trail. The man who hunted him would easily find them, but the heavy brash would make it difficult to approach in complete silence, and the soldier's body would provide a momentary distraction.

When Kier returned, she was leaning against the log where he had left her.

"Bathroom." She tried to rise.

"Okay."

Kier moved her through the heavy brash to a spot twenty feet away. He found a foot-high log to sit her on with a smaller six-inch log suspended in the brash pile over which he could drape her elbows. It was what nature had to offer in the way of a convalescent toilet. Using mittened hands, he cleaned the snow off both logs.

She groaned. He lifted her eyelids. She looked barely conscious. Gently, he shook her. Nothing. He shook her again— vigorously this time. With a flutter she half opened her eyes, seemingly more aware of her surroundings. Putting his ear to her belly, he heard bowel sounds and knew that what was coming would not be pleasant.

"Bathroom," she muttered again, made more alert by her discomfort. "Get out of here."

Her fingers began straggling with her coat. Without saying anything, Kier unzipped it. He took the large overcoat off long enough to strip down the arctic overalls underneath, then put the coat back on her for warmth. When he began to unbutton her jeans, her hand grabbed his.

"Get out of here," she said again, her voice hard.

Kier stepped back. "You can do this?" he asked even as her body seemed to wobble on the log.

"Get out of here," she repeated evenly. "I'll do this myself, or die trying."

Then, as if the effort of asserting herself was too much, she began to slump forward. Kier jumped and grabbed her. Maneuvering behind her, he reached around and stripped down her pants. When she tried again to grab for his hands, he put them back on the small log.

"I don't like this any better than you do. Stop struggling and let's do the best we can," Kier said, hot with embarrassment. "Just go." His large hands supported her thighs with her knees draped over the log. ''Come on, come on, push, push, push. It's poison. Let's get it out."

Somehow, he thought, if he made it seem like some kind of weird athletic event it might be less horrible for her. Her humiliation made a lump in his throat.

"I'm going to hate you forever for this," she said through clenched teeth.

Then she evacuated her bowels and peed for more than a minute.

"I thought I had already earned that distinction," Kier replied, grabbing toilet tissue from the dead man's pack.

"If you wipe my ass, I'll kill you."