The Gates of Babylon (25 page)

“I get it—you’re worried I’ll go on a killing spree. Like I told Jacob—”

“You think I care about a few dead outlaws? That’s not it at all.”

“What is this, rag on Miriam night? Get it out.”

“I served tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. I fast-roped from a helicopter over a doomsday cult. I know when a man is ready to break.”

“What are you saying, I’ve lost my nerve?”

“You tell me.”

“Shut up, Krantz. I don’t have time for this shit.”

He started to say something else, then apparently thought better of it and fell silent.

They rounded the corner and came upon the dirt road described by Alfred. It continued across the scrub-covered plain, he’d told them, before ending at an abandoned ranch house several hundred yards west of town. They couldn’t see any of that in the dark and tried not to stumble. The goggles had plenty of battery power, but these days you didn’t want to waste what you couldn’t easily replace.

Miriam regretted her strong language. Like alcohol, cursing was something she’d put behind her when she joined the Saints and accepted their difficult lifestyle. But these back-to-back conversations with Jacob and Krantz had her rattled. Neither man had guessed her problem exactly, but between them, they’d come close enough.

There was something wrong inside her head. She didn’t know how to fix it. She didn’t even know what it was.

Krantz put a hand on her arm and they stopped. She heard nothing but the sound of the wind knifing down from the mountains. He tapped her goggles, and she lowered them into place and flipped them on as he fiddled with his own.

The landscape came into focus in green and gray. They’d walked some distance now and the house at the end of the road was only a few dozen yards in front of them. Two trees, limbs bare of leaves with the approach of winter, waved their branches.

“What do you see?” she whispered.

“I heard something. Off to the right. Never mind.”

She looked to the right and saw a movement, two glowing eyes staring in her direction. It was a deer, maybe thirty or forty feet distant.

Miriam turned off the goggles, impressed. “You have good ears. I didn’t hear anything but the wind.”

They continued walking.

“This always happens when I go on a mission,” he said. “It’s like I’m back in Afghanistan and every mud hut holds a sniper. Every donkey is rigged with a bomb. Lot of guys earn a nasty case of PTSD. I came back with heightened senses. I’ll take it.”

PTSD. Maybe that was her problem, Miriam thought. Not the pregnancy screwing with her emotions, but post-traumatic stress disorder from the shootout in the tunnel. She’d been nervous that day—who knew why?—and now she couldn’t shake it.

They gave the house a wide berth and followed in a straight line across the desert as Alfred had told them. That ranch road had run parallel to the highway before ending, and if they continued in that direction, they would eventually reach the gulch, upstream from the bridge.

The terrain turned rocky, and they stumbled through sagebrush and turned their ankles in rodent holes. Every once in a while they put on the goggles to reorient themselves, and it was like flipping on a green light that illuminated the terrain, right down to the glowing eyes of jackrabbits, but then they turned off the light and continued to stumble and flail. It was still only drizzling, but the wind drove it at their faces like cold, stinging sand.

Once, Krantz stopped with a grunt and curse, and she came to his side to find him snarled on a barbed wire fence that stretched across their path. She scratched her hands getting him free and
lifting the fence for him to pass between the wires. When he was through, he held it up for her in turn.

The rain picked up, and the ground turned muddy and soaked her shoes until she was squishing along uncomfortably, with her feet turning numb and miserable. She struggled to keep up with Krantz, who was a dark, silent shape constantly pushing ahead.

He stopped and she stumbled into him. This time he didn’t speak but pulled her down until they were both squatting.

Miriam put on her goggles. A ravine cut across the desert plain in front of them. It would be filling with water.

Krantz tapped her arm and pointed. She picked out two tents on the far side. Scanning up and down the ridge, she spotted a van or panel truck on the road, which she pointed out to her partner.

He leaned down. “That van looks familiar. Think it’s our friend from Bryce Canyon?”

“I hope so,” she said. “I’ve got a score to settle.”

“After you blew up their driver, it seems to me that they’re the ones with the beef, not you. What time have you got?”

She looked at her watch. “Five after eleven. We’d better get going.”

Krantz glanced left. “Follow me.”

He led her to a clump of junipers, where they spent a few minutes breaking off dead branches and gathering sticks to form a makeshift blind between a pair of low-growing trees. Krantz set up his sniper rifle on a tripod, with the scope peering over the top of the sticks and the muzzle poking out between the branches. With any luck, he’d get off a couple of shots before they figured out they were under fire from a distance. And by then, Miriam would give their enemies something else to worry about.

While they worked, they refined their plan.

Miriam would cross the ravine and scope out the enemy camp. If she found more men, she’d return to give a report. If not, she would come into those tents and try to finish off their occupants while they slept. Krantz would cover her with the sniper rifle against guards or sudden movement from either the tents or the van.

“And if you take care of the tents without raising the alarm,” Krantz said, “what do we do about the van? A night like this, you know there’s someone sleeping in there.”

“I’ll take a look around and make sure I don’t see anyone else, then roll a grenade underneath the van and run like hell.”

“Yeah, all right.” He sounded uncertain.

“Don’t worry, by then Jacob and the others will be coming at the bridge top speed. We’ll have fire support.”

“It’s not that.”

“Then what’s wrong?” she asked.

“Couple of tents, a van—can’t be more than ten people out there. Not much of a force to hold Alfred and his friends captive.”

“They had a machine gun, remember? One guy with a .50-cal would be enough to stop a hundred farmers and ranchers with deer rifles.”

“But what about those men from the dunes?” Krantz persisted. “Or all those burned-out houses? It can’t be so easy as going in and knifing a few jerks in their sleep and tossing a couple of grenades.”

“We’ll find out, won’t we?”

He stared at her, his night vision goggles making him look like a giant insect. “You missed your calling in life, you know that? You should have enlisted, gone special forces.”

“What are you talking about?”

“You’re a machine. You—” He stopped. “Never mind. I thought you were feeling nerves, but maybe I was wrong.” He shrugged. “Last thing I want to do is talk you into it.”

And in that moment Miriam almost admitted it. The fear was now vibrating close to the surface, and if it had been her husband next to her she would have confessed. The moment passed.

She glanced at her watch. “Eleven twenty. I’d better go.”

He grabbed her wrist. “Don’t get cocky. And don’t take any risks. You see something funny, you come right back.”

“Just keep me covered,” she said. “That’s all you need to worry about.”

Miriam stripped off her poncho. It crinkled when she moved and would restrict her movement. She checked the battery on her goggles, double-checked her Beretta and her knife, and then accepted a couple of green fragmentation grenades from Krantz, which she stuffed into her jacket pockets.

Then she left him behind, moving in a direct line toward the ravine, which lay swathed in an eerie green glow through her goggles. Behind, Krantz’s knees popped as he settled to the ground to watch her through his scope.

Miriam approached the ravine upstream from the tents and the van. She scanned the opposite bank for movement, saw none, then half climbed, half slid down the muddy bank to the stream. She took off her shoes and socks, and tentatively stepped into the current. Sand and icy water swirled around her ankles. The water was no more than eight or ten inches deep yet but already moving swiftly. She took care in placing her feet. A dozen paces took her across.

Miriam squatted on the other side and pulled on her socks and shoes again then rose to her feet and continued up the hillside to the ridge. Something moved to her left with a creak. She dropped to her belly. When she looked up, her pistol had somehow found its way to her hand. When she saw what it was, she lowered her gun and very carefully put it away, afraid that her hand, so steady with the gun, would start to tremble.

Miriam looked back at the objects and shuddered. There were two people moving to her left. But they were not alive.

Instead, they dangled in the air, suspended several feet off the ground, with nooses around their necks, and hanging from the arm of a bent electrical pole. Their heads lolled forward and their dresses flapped in the breeze. The wind shifted and the rope creaked as the women twisted the opposite direction.

Miriam couldn’t look away, but she couldn’t stand to see those dead faces any longer and so she pulled off the goggles and let her vision blacken into night again. She lay panting and trembling, while cold rain splattered on her face and mud soaked through her pants. Her heart was pounding so hard it felt as if it would hammer right through her rib cage.

You’re a machine,
Krantz had told her.

But as she thought of those two women turning in the breeze like some horrific wind chime, dead for the crime of breaking some mysterious quarantine—Miriam thought Krantz couldn’t be more wrong.

She wasn’t a machine. She wasn’t even a highly skilled ex-FBI agent whose training would take over at the first hint of danger. At the moment, she felt like nothing more than a pregnant, terrified woman with a husband and child who needed her alive.

The only thing that got her moving again was the knowledge that Krantz would be watching through his scope, already growing alarmed at her delay. Had she sprained her ankle? Were the goggles malfunctioning? Any moment and he’d leave his blind to come after her.

Miriam summoned the last of her will, put on the goggles again, and wiped water from the lenses. She climbed shakily to her feet. Then she picked her way along the ridge toward the tents, where her enemies were waiting.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Jacob sorted the Colorado City refugees’ possessions, hauled out of the houses by women and children, and covered with tarps and plastic bags from the rain. He rejected most of it. Blankets, clothing, furniture, photo albums, even scriptures—all had to stay behind.

“No,” he said again and again. “Put it in the house. We’ll come back for it if we can. No, I’m sorry. No room. Not that either. No, I’m sorry.”

“Please,” one elderly woman begged him. “This was my husband’s uniform from the war. Everything else burned up in the house. Even his pictures. I don’t have anything else to remember him by.”

Jacob looked at the pain in her eyes. He was so tired of saying no that he decided to relent, just this once.

“Can you keep it with you?” he asked. “Okay, then. In your possession at all times.”

She clutched the uniform to her chest and put a dry, cold hand against his cheek. “Bless you, Brother Jacob.”

Once he’d bent the rules, it was hard not to do it again. He let two brothers keep their orange tabby, a girl carry her dolls but not their play baby carriage, and a woman bring her father’s diaries, since they were small enough to tuck under her arm. But he forced several other people to get rid of beloved keepsakes. The worst was a grandfather clock wrapped in plastic and carted out on a hand truck. Jacob owned its twin, a majestic clock that sat in the front room back home, carried across the plains by Great-great-grandmother Cowley, and he guessed that this clock had a similar history. He sent it back inside with its anguished owner, promising her that they would return for it later, if they could.

David came over from where he and Officer Trost were propping a plastic tarp over the truck beds to keep the refugees dry during the trip. “This is awful.” He lowered his voice. “They’ll never see this stuff again. You know that, don’t you?”

“Two hundred pounds of furniture equals one woman and two small children,” Jacob said. “Which would you rather leave behind?”

“I can do the math,” David said, his voice on edge. “It sucks, that’s all.”

“I know.”

“So let me get this straight. We’re dumping them in Vegas without so much as a change of clothing? And then we’re loading up our trucks with a bunch of crap, and leaving the people behind?”

“That
crap
is medical supplies, tools, pedal-operated sewing machines, a loom, some saddles, and a bunch of other useful stuff.
Oh, and silver coins,” Jacob added in a low voice. “The kind of crap that’s going to keep us alive.”

“I know that. It’s just—”

“And we’re not
dumping
anyone,” Jacob said. “A caravan of refugee buses leaves every day from Las Vegas on its way up the freeway to the Green River camps. It stops in Cedar City. They’ll be safe in Cedar City until we can figure out how to get them over the mountains to Blister Creek.”

“You sure they’ll take them in Cedar City?”

“We’ll have a phone in Vegas. Trost is chief of police—he’ll call headquarters and make it happen.”

“Speaking of phones,” David said, “Krantz’s sat phone keeps ringing.”

“It is? The system was down all day.”

“It’s up now. I tried to answer, but both times got there too late. There’s a number, but it doesn’t say who it was.”

“Bring me the phone,” Jacob said.

David left for the Ford 250 parked on the other side of the street, where Krantz kept his personal gear.

Alfred Christianson came down the porch with his children. He had three daughters and two sons, ranging in age from two to ten. The youngest wrapped her arms around her father’s neck and buried her sleepy head while he covered her with a blanket. The others, each wrapped in a blanket, held hands and huddled close to their father, who used his free arm to herd them gently down the stairs like a flock of woolly lambs.