The Sword of God - John Milton #5 (John Milton Thrillers) (36 page)

He tipped his arm over and shook it, the engorged maggots falling to the ground. They lay there for a moment, bloated and stunned, before they started to wriggle and crawl away.

He would wash the wound in the water outside, use the ointment in his pocket and—

He heard voices.

He held his breath, straining his ears.

He heard a voice, a man’s voice, and then the squelch of static.

What did that mean?

Lundquist?

No.

He remembered: the National Guard.

Lundquist had warned him.

Five hundred men.

He crawled to the entrance to the cave and looked out.

The opening was nestled in the face of the cliff, screened by underbrush.

There was a patrol of four men at the foot of the fall. Ten feet away from him. They had stopped there, one of them operating a field radio that he wore on his back. The falling water obscured the conversation too much for Milton to be able to eavesdrop, but the occasional word was audible: “sector,” “nothing,” and an enquiring sentence that concluded with “orders?” The operator listened to the inaudible reply, nodded his satisfaction, and put the radio away. His comrades gathered around as he faced away from Milton and relayed what had been said.

Milton had no choice but to stay where he was. If they came any closer, they wouldn’t be able to miss the mouth of the cave. They would look inside, see the signs of his habitation, and find him. If they did that, he wouldn’t resist. They had done nothing to him. They were just following their orders. He could imagine how Lundquist had painted him. It was possible that their orders were to shoot him on sight.

Milton would have to accept that.

But they did not come in his direction.

Instead, they turned to the east and set off into the underbrush, following the line of the ridge.

Milton realised what had happened. The soldiers had carved the area into sectors. Each team would have been given a group of sectors to investigate. He had been fortunate; he was in the seam where one sector ended and the next one began. If there was a team from the uplands atop the falls above him, then they must have been tasked with the path down the face. Or perhaps the face was the boundary, and they had neglected to check it. These four boys were being routed away to continue the search in the adjacent map square.

Milton had enjoyed very little luck since he had arrived in Truth. This was luck. Perhaps it marked a change in his fortunes.

He knew that he would have a narrow window within which he could drive home his advantage. The search teams were likely to advance in a rough line so as not to leave gaps that he could slip through. That meant that the team that was adjacent to the one that he had just seen was most likely to turn east at the same time, and that they would be at the fall before too long. The cordon behind him, from the uplands heading south to his position, would also be moving. But the path directly to the south was open now. It had been searched and would have been reported as clear.

If Milton moved quickly, he might be able to slip between them and get out of the woods.

He hurried back to the fire, broke it apart, and returned to the mouth of the cave. He scoured the tree line again, but he could not hear or see anything. He emerged into the sunlight and trod carefully on the wet rocks, reaching the still swollen river that had carried Lundquist and Callow away, and then followed it to the south.

MORTEN LUNDQUIST and Michael Callow had been swept downstream. Lundquist was sure they were going to drown, such was the ferocity of the current as it was swamped with more and more water from the falls, the spate supercharged by the torrential deluge of the last few days. He had struggled to stay afloat for as long as he could, but he was old and tired and the water was cold, and he had started to feel himself slide beneath the surface. The water had pressed into his nostrils and then his mouth, and he was ready to submit to it when his son had surfaced next to him, grabbing him around the shoulders and holding him up, kicking for the quieter waters at the edge of the swell.

The current had spun him around so that he was looking back at the top of the falls. He had seen Milton on the lip of the rock face, trying to aim his rifle with one working arm, the barrel kicking as he had fired. The round passed harmlessly overhead, striking a rocky outcrop. He fired two more times, both shots harmless, and Lundquist realised that they were going to make it. The river would carry them out of range. Tom Chandler was still up there—he was dead, Milton had killed him, obviously—and they didn’t have to worry about him slowing them down any more. Milton would take time to climb down the falls, if he even could, and by then the river would have swept them out of his reach.

They were swept downstream for two miles.

Michael swam them across to the bank when the fierce downstream tug of the river had finally abated. They clambered out, shivering in the cold, the rain a foolish irrelevance now.

“Where are we?” Michael asked.

Lundquist looked around and tried to gain his bearings. “A good way to the south.”

“How far to town?”

“I don’t know. Three hours?”

“We made it. Praise the Lord.”

“Amen,” Lundquist muttered.

He couldn’t stop shivering.

“Do you have the radio?”

The radio! He had forgotten he had it. He reached up to his pocket and patted where it should have been, but there was nothing there, just the damp squelch of his jacket.

“Where is it?”

“Must have lost it… the river…”

He felt a sudden wash of helplessness. If he could have used the radio, he would have been able to call for help, send an SOS to the National Guard and have them send men or a helicopter or something, anything, to get them down out of these godforsaken hills and back to civilisation again.

He dropped to his knees. He was done.

“Come on, Pops,” Michael said. “We have to keep moving.”

“I’m tired.”

“We have work to do. God's word. He spared us for a reason.”

His chin slumped onto his chest. He didn’t have the strength.

“Remember the scripture:
‘Be strong and of good courage, do not fear nor be afraid of them; for the Lord your God, He is the one who goes with you. He will not leave you nor forsake you.’
”

“Deuteronomy 31:6,” he mumbled.

“If we stay here, it’s all finished. Think of all the work you’ve done. We can’t let that go to waste. We are the Sword of God. We have a duty. You preached it. These are the End Times, right? We need to strike the first blow.”

Lundquist nodded. The boy was right. He thought of the truck and the load that they had put together. All the effort it had taken. He thought about what they could achieve with it. The original plan, as he had conceived it, was dead. Milton had seen to that. But perhaps that plan was not God’s will. Perhaps he had another use for them. For Lundquist.

He grabbed Michael’s coat and used it to help drag himself to his feet.

“Come on.”

They set off, both of them aware that Milton was somewhere behind them. Lundquist was cold, and he knew that he needed warmth and dry clothes. Michael, too. Hypothermia didn’t take long to take hold, and if it did, Lundquist knew that they would be in trouble. Done for, most probably. He had seen plenty of hikers caught out by the weather, stumbling around in the woods with no idea where they were or even, sometimes, who they were. He trusted God to keep them safe.

They followed the camber down into the forest.

“Who is he?” Michael said. “Milton. Who
is
he?”

“I don’t know,” Lundquist admitted. “A soldier.”

“What he did… I mean…”

“Maybe he is what he said he is.”

“An assassin?”

“Maybe.”

“He’s not an assassin,” he said, although there was doubt in his voice.

“He’s killed…” Lundquist tried to remember how many people Milton had killed. Four? Five? He couldn’t remember. Seemed like there was a lot of blood and death all of a sudden. The dead flashed through his mind: a knife, the arrows, the detonations as the two shacks were blown to kingdom come. How many? No, it wasn’t five. He had forgotten Sturgess and Sellar. Stabbed and shot. Seven, then? No. More. What about Randy Watts and Archie McClennan? Where were they? He must have killed them. There was Pelham, too, his neck snapped and his body dumped in the field for them to discover. And Lars Olsen, who had to be cut out of his crushed car. Twelve. He had killed twelve men.

Twelve
.

Lundquist felt fuzzy headed, and as they stumbled ahead, a memory appeared through the haze. It was a face, grizzled and dirty, a man with evil in his eyes, and Lundquist remembered that this man had been a member of his patrol in Vietnam, a vicious man with no regard for human life and a particular talent for death. Lundquist could remember his eyes, icy blue and devoid of any flicker of humanity, as if the things that he had seen and done had burnt the compassion from them. Lundquist thought of that man many times through the years and, since his conversion, he had become certain that he had looked upon the face of Satan.

He had looked into Milton’s eyes as they had struggled with the rifle atop the falls, his eyes just inches from Milton’s eyes, and he realised that those cold blue orbs were just the same.

He doddered onwards, only half aware that he was leaning on Michael for support, when he felt his son stop.

“Hands up!”

Michael stiffened. “Pops…”

“What?”

“Hands where I can see them,
now
.”

Lundquist grabbed Michael’s shoulder and raised his head. There were four uniformed men blocking the trail ahead of them, two of them with automatic rifles raised and pointing straight at them.

Praise God,
Lundquist thought.

LUNDQUIST EXPLAINED who they were and what they were doing in the wilderness. One of the soldiers radioed their descriptions while the others stood guard. Their identities were confirmed, and the men escorted them the final mile south. They had blankets in their packs, and Lundquist wrapped himself in one, the shivering gradually easing. He was still in soaked clothes, though, and still cold. He needed to get changed. A hot drink. A long bath would have been nice, but that was out of the question. He didn’t have time. He had so much to do. He didn’t know if he could afford to stop.

They broke through the tree line into the fields of corn that fringed the northern border of the town. An olive green Humvee was waiting for them there. Two more soldiers were in the Humvee. They disembarked as the patrol brought them out of the trees.

“Lundquist?”

“Yes.”

“I’m Lieutenant Colonel Alex Maguire. We spoke on the radio.”

“I’m glad to see you.”

“I bet you are. Are you injured?”

“No, Colonel. Just cold.”

“We’ll get that straightened out. You want to tell me what’s been happening up there?”

“It’s a massacre.”

“How many?”

“Ten. Maybe twelve. He killed them all.”

He thought of those men, Christian soldiers ready to fight for the cause, and he felt a wave of nausea.

“Jesus. We knew it was bad; that’s why the governor sent us up here, but… well,
Jesus
. Who is he?”

“I have no idea.”

“You never spoke to him?”

“He said he was an assassin. I thought he was joking, now I’m not so—”

Lundquist felt the nausea rise up from his gullet, and before he could do anything to stop it, it was in his mouth. He bent double and let it pour out, splashing into the furrowed mud, spattering over his shoes and the bottom of his pants.

Michael put his hand on his shoulder. “Pops?”

Lundquist pushed his hand away, overwhelmed with embarrassment at such a show of weakness. It was ridiculous. It was pathetic. He had seen dead bodies before, many more than he’d seen today. The VC had been every bit as ruthless as Milton, and more inventive with the ways that they dealt death. And Uncle Sam had killed freely, too. He remembered foxholes full of dead gooks, a line of smoking corpses after an engineer with a flamethrower had flambéed a trench full of the bastards. What was this in comparison to that? It was nothing. And, he chided himself, what else did he expect? This was war. The word of God that they were about to fulfil, the culmination of years of planning, of course there would be blood spilled by the time he was done. Innocents would suffer. You could take that to the bank.

“Are you all right?”

“I’m fine. Tired. And I need to get warm.”

“Yes, deputy, in a minute. One more question. Do you know anything else about him? I mean, he obviously knows what he’s doing up there.”

The question lit him up. “Are you serious? He’s killed the sheriff, three deputies, an FBI agent, and the men I took up there to apprehend him. He very nearly killed me and my son. So, yes, I’d say he knows what he’s doing.”

“Yes,” the man said, embarrassed to have asked. “Of course. I can see that.”

“What are you actually doing to find him?”

The soldier flinched defensively. “I’ve got five hundred soldiers up there and, now that the storm’s passed, we’ve got Black Hawks in the air. He won’t be able to hide much longer. And you say he’s wounded, too?”

“I got a shot off. Hit him in the arm.”

“There we go, then. Matter of time, Lundquist. Just a matter of time.”

ARTHUR STANTON didn’t want to go.

“I don’t want to leave you here,” he said to Mallory as she untangled herself from his embrace.

“I don’t want you to, either,” she said, “but you have to. I’m not tall enough or strong enough to climb up there and get out. Ellie can’t do it, either. But you can, Arty. You can do it.”

She looked up at the pitched roof of the barn. It was an awfully long way up. Arty liked to climb, and he was good at it, but she knew he wouldn’t have chosen to try a climb as difficult as this. It was only because she had asked him that he had said that he would, but now that he realised what she wanted him to do when he got to the top, he didn’t want to go.