Ravenous Dusk (10 page)

Only one streetlight down the entire avenue appeared to be working. The Navy Yard was somewhere nearby, but this was the industrial portion of a netherworld of rowhouses and teeming projects. He steered through it as he had been trained to do in places like Lebanon or southern Turkey— stick to the middle lanes, never loiter at corners, and scan the traffic double-time for recurring vehicles that might be a tail. There were none.

Lt. Durban was two blocks short of the Navy Yard and beginning to feel that he had made it undetected. He turned down a narrow residential street and made it halfway down the block when he realized the directions had steered him the wrong way down a one-way street, and there was a trash truck coming at him at speed. At least, in the sudden winter dusk, it looked like a trash truck, as did the one coming up behind him.

He flicked his brights on and off, but the trash truck only seemed to speed up, as did the one behind him. It was like a berserk game of chicken. Parked cars on both sides of the street formed solid barricades, and there were no pedestrians on the sidewalks, no lights on in the blind gray concrete towers that hemmed him in on both sides.

Lt. Durban was not a stupid man, nor given to freeze under stress. He unfastened his seatbelt, unlatched the door and threw himself out into the street just as the aft truck made contact with his rear bumper. His car surged forwards, the door slamming shut as it was driven into the reinforced grill of the fore truck. Air brakes hissed. The car buckled with a symphony of snapping, whining metal and a single beleaguered honk before it came to a halt, before he stopped rolling, under a pickup truck and into the ice-crusted stream in the gutter. He fumbled around his back for the pistol, but it must've come loose when he bailed out of the car. He reached out onto the sidewalk, the overnight bag tucked under his body like a football. Melting slush dripping off the drive train of the truck onto his forehead, the trucks roaring at each other as they retreated and his car settled on its cracked undercarriage. A pair of motorcycles stopped beside his car and flashlights swept the interior. Voices shot quick, monosyllabic noises at each other, then the bikes took off.

His hand found something—a signpost, the leg of a newspaper machine—and he dragged himself out from under the truck. Hands seized him and hauled him out into the glow of flashlights.

A man barked at him in a speech devoid of vowels, all glottal stops and fricatives. Durban was no linguist, but he recognized Russian.

"I have nothing for you," he said. He rolled into a ball around the bag. "I just got lost—"

The heavy police-issue flashlight rose and fell on his ribs, and breath, reason and hope rolled away on a tidal wave of hurt. His legs kicked out but hit only the oversized tire of the truck he'd been hiding under. A gloved hand clamped over his mouth. The barrel of a short, ugly machine pistol smashed the bridge of his nose. Something scratchy and hot—a fresh new Spalding tennis ball, he would learn later—forced itself in between his teeth and electrical tape unreeled around his head four times before he could get out another sound.

They hit him again and again until he lost control of his legs and the bag rolled out onto the asphalt, and then they were lifting him up, one holding his arms and one his legs. He got a good look at one of them, but he learned nothing. The man wore a bandanna over his hair and a thick black beard covered nearly everything else. His eyes were black holes, but the light glinted off a gold upper front tooth. Crisp plumes of mist puffed out from his beard as he hoisted Durban across the street to his car. He thought they were going to stuff him into the driver's seat and finish crushing the car, and he fought as hard as he could with his legs tied together. They rewarded his efforts by banging his head into the doorpost as they brought him around to the trunk. It was stuck open, the mouth of the cargo space skewed by the initial impact. They dumped him in, and the one who'd been holding his arms leaned in close and said,
"Dosvedanya, tovarisch. The Organizatsiya will not forget your service."
He stuck a card in Durban's breast pocket, then he slammed the trunk. Lt. Durban waited in perfect stillness for them to shoot him. When it was clear they had gone, he passed out anyway.

The trash trucks were gone before Lt. Durban was dragged out from his hiding place. The drivers backed out of the narrow street and returned the vehicles to the waste management company lot from whence they came.

The two motorcyclists took off in the same way, one east, one west, the latter carrying the bag. He circled round the block once, then got onto the main avenue and shot up the southbound 295 onramp like a bullet from a suppressed rifle. Even if one were watching the motorcyclist intently, it would be hard to say for sure that one saw him toss a bag in the open front passenger-side window of a late model dark sedan parked on the corner at the last light before the overpass. One who had tailed Lt. Durban might have noticed that the sedan had also discreetly followed him into the capital from Ft. Meade, picking him up as he left the gas station.

After about a minute, the sedan drove over the highway and got on the 295 headed north, but got off again at Pennsylvania Avenue and entered a four-story parking garage attached to the Old Post Office Mall. A scant forty-five seconds later, a maroon minivan checked out of the garage and got on Pennsylvania headed southeast. A trained observer might have recognized that the driver of the minivan bore a striking resemblance to the driver of the sedan, except for his hair color, a mustache and a change of clothes, but there was nobody watching.

The minivan left Washington, DC and followed Pennsylvania Avenue after it became Expressway 4, getting off in the suburb of Suitland. Rush-hour traffic was thinning, but the van was still just one more oversized commuting module in a sea of same, and no one took notice of it as it pulled in to a corner mini-mall with a manicurist, a camera repair, an Atlantic gas station that was fenced off pending replacement of its underground tanks, and a donut shop which had been closed down for eighteen months. The windows and door of the donut shop were plastered over with layers of newsprint, and the marquee was a gutted plastic shell with one bare fluorescent light bulb still flickering inside, periodically lighting up the word TASTY.

The driver climbed out and unlocked the front door of the donut shop, let himself in and locked it. He peered out through a viewing slit torn in the newsprint just above the pushbar. The lot was a cemetery. He heard the squelched rasp and chatter of police-and souped-up cellular signal scanners. A wooden chair groaned as the massive man sitting on it rose and crossed the shop to take the driver by the arms and spin him around so fast his wig only half-spun with him.

"Got away clean, didn't I?" the driver asked in the flat, faint twang of the Oklahoma plains.

"Not even a 911 phone-in on the geek's car yet," the big man answered, taking the bag off the driver. He touched the man's shoulder once by way of thanks and brought the bag back into the former kitchen. The deep fryers and other cooking fixtures had been ripped out and replaced with a pair of computers, several scanning beds and a row of laser printers, all tied into a huge switchbox wired to the power and phone lines of the defunct Atlantic station. A balding, dark-skinned man sat at the terminals, tinkering with the magnification on the scanners. He took the bag and dumped it out on a long tray atop a wheeled utility cart. A pile of Zip disks rattled under his rubber-gloved hands as he silently set to work feeding them in.

The arrangement had eaten up a sizable portion of the man's savings, but a cursory examination of his financial records would reveal only that he'd recently purchased a beach-front condo in Costa Rica, hardly an inappropriate transaction for a recently retired military officer with no family. As far as anyone who'd care to investigate could tell, he was down there now, drinking and whoring and identifying himself to any who cared to know. The laundered nest egg had been more than enough to finance the computers and the Tasty shop lease, and to pay a man who matched his description to alibi him from one end of Central America to the other. The men hadn't cost him a dime. They were true believers, comrades in arms from one or another of the many units he'd led, and a few from the mercenary posses he'd run in Africa. They believed in Lt. Col. Mort Greenaway, and in the task at hand.

He, in turn, believed that he had finally secured the evidence he needed to pursue the task to completion, namely, the exposure of the covert terrorist organization that called itself the Mission, and its ties to rogue elements within the federal government. All the lies, all the bullshit that had piled up behind his back could be exposed, now, all the things that had made him look like a raving maniac at the sub rosa review of the Radiant Dawn incident.

In their recommendation for early retirement, the panel had explicitly noted that he suffered from paranoid delusions, that he was "probably unfit for society at large, let alone for active duty in any capacity." In their judgment, his sociopathic ego and bitterness over a stalled career drove him to withhold vital tactical information from the FBI arm of the operation, to violate the rules of engagement by pursuing the helicopter observed fleeing the burning Radiant Dawn hospice village, and to "fabricate a bizarre counteraccusation regarding possible government collusion with the perpetrators." Fabricate. They didn't even have the balls to call it lying when they accused him of it. But he could stuff their lies down their throats with these documents, and go to his grave a vindicated man. Or he could use them to get what he wanted all along: to hunt the egghead terrorist organization himself, on his own terms.

He knew there would be files. The government could do nothing without leaving a paper trail. Even at the star chamber level of black budgets and blacker ops, everyone wanted their ass covered, though they stood ready to shred the lot at the merest hint of Congressional oversight. Official documents would be outside the military's, and, thus, his reach.

But there was another assumption about government that had yet to steer him wrong. There was
always
someone listening.

It had been pathetically easy to play Lt. Durban; after reviewing his nonclassified military record, he had the punk's number and dialed it. He was a geek, but he dreamed of being regular Navy, a war hero. He needed somebody to pin balls to his chest, because he wasn't born with any.

What would he tell his geek bosses at No Such Agency? That he'd been carjacked by the Russian Mafia, probably. At least, that was what they hoped. About a week before he first called Lt. Durban, he'd begun placing ads in every website linked to the Soldier Of Fortune set, soliciting "Stateside wetwork" for a bunch of "hungry former Spz. Commandos," knowing full well that the FBI and/or the CIA would ferret out the Spz. as the common abbreviation for Spetznaz, the Soviet Special Forces. He had a host of responses placed through dummy e-mail accounts at Internet cafes in twelve states. They got eight more offers that they hadn't doped up themselves, which gave Greenaway hope for the future as a free agent.

The INS and customs were even now looking up the asshole of every Ivan who came into the country with forceps and a flashlight. The FBI was surely watching the criminals and white separatists across the nation whose credit card numbers he'd bought from a guy who hacked the IRS for a living.

Once before in his career, he'd turned away from the Army in disgust, and printed his own ticket back in when the time was right and Delta Force was looking for a few bad men. Now, in the teeth of disgrace, he would buy an even sweeter posting, and prove the truth to the only person whose opinion he, in the final analysis, gave a shit about.

The computer tech brought up the first page of a document.

ABOVE TOP SECRET-ROYAL CHANNELS ONLY

MAUVE Intercept 0121010-07-99

FW: MACHETE

07-10-99; 19:48:15 PDT

(No Match/ID for either Voice)

VOICE 1: Colonel, you've been less than cooperative in the course of this investigation.

VOICE 2: You've been less than baggage, Cundieffe.

VOICE 1: I expect it was under such an opinion that your goon squad left us in Titus Canyon a little while ago. Your conduct has been criminal if they were under your orders, and incompetent if it was not. All of this is being recorded and transmitted to my superior's offices in Washington, by

the by.

VOICE 2: Then I have nothing to say.

VOICE 1: I do. I thought you'd like to know where they are.

He didn't need to read the rest. He was Voice 2. And Voice 1, that junior G-man bookworm the FBI had scapegoated with the whole mess, was probably chasing stolen snowmobiles in Alaska, if he worked at all. "Print all of it," he said, "except that one."

Heilige Berg, Idaho

A snowy, moonless midnight in the mountains of the Snake River Valley is a scary time to be out in the woods alone with only a rifle you don't know how to use and a world of bloodthirsty subhumans lurking just over the perimeter. Time seems to stumble on the edge of the promised new day, and slip backwards out of thousands of years into the first dark age. Society could collapse and make not so much as a puff of smoke that one could see from here. Karl Schweinfurter would be eighteen in two months, and had never successfully shot a target with his rifle, let alone another human being. But he was sworn to duty, to the protection of his family, his hearth and his faith. They were one day into the new millennium, treading on the thin ice of borrowed time before the Last Days, Gotterdammerung, Ragnarok.

He reconnoitered the knob-shaped hill that overlooked the road on three sides before he sat down on his rock, waited ten minutes more before he knelt and began to dig in the snow and soft earth underneath. He wasn't worried about being caught unawares by intruders—in the thirteen months he'd been here, there'd been none. The Jägers were another matter. Most reserve sentries suspected they were only detailed out in the woods for the elite warriors' stalking practice. Guard duty sucked, but it beat graveyard shifts in the slaughterhouse, and it was the only time one could be alone for longer than a toilet trip.