The Gorge Page 3

  “What’s your 10–20?” came The Rook’s modulated voice. Though the broadcast was muffled, the words somehow echoed, as if a small cave yawned below him. That was just fucking wonderful. If he managed to wriggle free of his rocky vise grip and slide down, he had no idea how far the drop would be. Another ten feet, no problem, maybe a twisted ankle. Twenty feet, in that kind of terrain, meant broken bones, deep contusions, and the real possibility of head trauma.

  Then relying on The Rook to find him and drag him to safety.

  Derek Samford wasn’t technically a rookie, and wasn’t all that much younger than Castle. He’d put in three years as an Army officer, aced his courses at Quantico, and then eased into the unit known as Behavioral Sciences. He was more cerebral than hard ass, more Jodie Foster than Edgar G. Robinson, but The Rook had endured twenty-two-and-three-quarter days in the backwoods without a complaint and only a slight case of butt-crack rash. He consulted his wrist compass a little too often, tracking the sun’s path and acting the part of Nature Boy, though the wristband was of the blaze-orange variety that warned hunters not to shoot because a two-legged hairless monkey was on the other end. Castle could forgive him for the silly instrument because his partner knew north from south.

  The Rook would make the grade one day, keeping his hair groomed to whatever standard the FBI brass decreed, working overtime in exchange for having a life, and succeeding whether or not he lost a partner along the way. So Castle’s probable death meant nothing to the outcome of the case.

  Death? Assuming Goodall doesn’t blow your brains to scrambled eggs, you’ll probably live hours. Long enough to regret it.

  Castle’s decision to outflank Goodall and his companion had seemed like a solid strategy. The book on the Bama Bomber was “armed and extremely dangerous and likely to take a busload of nuns with him.” In a showdown, Goodall would use the woman as a shield, or kill her on the spot. While Castle and The Rook would be limited in their gunplay because of an innocent bystander, Goodall had nothing to lose. Rampant homicide was a blank check.

  Not that Castle believed the woman was truly innocent. Everybody was guilty of something, and then it was just a question of degree.

  A stone the size of his fist bounced within inches of his shoulder. The opening above him shivered again, as if bracing for the onslaught of winter. But the ground wasn’t cold yet, so it shifted and settled. A runnel of dirt sloughed down from his left, adding another few inches of weight against his waist.

  Suffocation was the most likely outcome, for sure. If Goodall didn’t come back to finish the job first.

  Castle had been edging up to the camp, guided by the thin thread of smoke from the fire. He’d gone from tree to tree, moving the way they’d taught in Hogan’s Alley. But shooting at cutout targets was a little different than shooting a breathing human being. Even when this particular human being deserved it, if “human” even applied to someone who taken at least four lives. Five if you counted the fetus.

  Castle had gone over every possible detail with The Rook before they made the approach. Every detail except the possibility of a booby trap. The plan was to capture Goodall alive if at all possible (though they both knew no one would question a kill), make sure the woman didn’t take one for posterity, cut off any escape routes, and use the cliff edge to block Goodall’s retreat. Castle from the left, with the sun at his back, and The Rook closing in from the east, aided by his hunter’s compass. No way could Castle have foreseen a trip wire.

  No way, because the brass hadn’t expected Ace Goodall to actually be in the Unegama. Otherwise, why would they have sent me?

  A bomb that matched the previous attacks had detonated in San Antonio a month ago, shifting the manhunt from the Southern states to Texas. The tip placing Goodall in the Southern Appalachians was one of those believed to be a complete waste of time, but one that had to be followed up nonetheless. Since experienced, knowledgeable agents were in short supply and needed for the primary investigation, mop-up was left to burnouts like Castle. The FBI hadn’t bothered to set up a regional command center or a communications post, and their radio batteries were all but dead.

  This was one mission he’d been stuck with, for sure. Castle was wedged tighter than a cork in a parakeet’s ass.

  “10–20?”

  The Rook. On the radio. Probably hunkered down behind a tree somewhere, analyzing the situation, measuring Goodall’s probable reaction with the blunt instruments of psychology and guesswork. No shots fired, so the situation was still under control. That was the book, and The Rook went by the book. Under control.

  “Control” was a military word, the delusion of a former officer. Over the past three weeks, The Rook had taught Castle plenty about Robert Wayne Goodall. The personality assessment was crafted from bits of the Unabomber, Eric Rudolph, Timothy McVeigh, and Imaginary cases and boondoggles.

  Something tugged on his boot, somewhere in that numb space below.

  Must be a loose rock falling, putting more pressure on him. That meant the little cavern was shifting. Another palm’s worth of dirt sprinkled onto his shoulders from above. So the bomb-spawned earthquake hadn’t finished its business yet. The mountain hadn’t settled. God still wanted to play with his latest plaything, like a cat batting a crippled mouse.

  The tug came again.

  “Jim.”

  Castle heard The Rook both above him and on the radio’s speaker below him. “Down here.”

  The Rook’s head appeared in the opening, silhouetted against the dusk. “Are you hurt?”

  “Not yet. Where’s Goodall?”

  “I didn’t see him.”

  Castle wiggled, kicking his foot, trying to free it from whatever had it snagged. “Take him down. I’ll be fine.”

  “I can’t leave you.”

  “Take him down, damn it.”

  “I lost him. What the hell happened?”

  “Trip wire. I blew it.”

  “Hey, we all make mistakes.”

  Castle grimaced. His mistakes were getting to be pretty frequent. But this might be his latest and greatest. This might be his last.

  The Rook lay on his belly and stretched an arm into the gap. Castle reached up, the shoulder muscle complaining, but a good two feet separated their fingertips. “I’ll have to find a branch or something to pull you out,” The Rook said.

  “Watch your ass. Goodall’s got to be around here somewhere.”

  “The camp was empty.”

  “I heard the woman scream.”

  “No shots, though. Maybe he took her. Hold on. I’ll check the camp.”

  Castle could hold on, all right. Not like he had anything better to do. Though the tugging on his boot had grown more insistent. Castle remembered the Jaws craze, when TV and newspapers were filled with shark frenzy. Bite victims often described their initial attacks as painless yanks, but then looked down to find the stub of a limb gushing blood.

  Attack. He wondered why that word had entered his mind. What did he suspect, that a giant mutant groundhog was chomping on his shoe leather, trying to get at the flesh inside?

  Something swooped over the opening, a fleeting shadow that strained against the dusk. Castle’s perspective was skewed due to the narrowness of the opening, but the thing appeared to flutter its wings like a bat. Except these wings hadn’t been frantic, guided by a blind pilot. They had moved as slowly as a crippled vulture’s, a bird that only needed a few strokes to lift its body and glide on the wind currents. The vultures couldn’t have found him already, could they? If so, he’d damn well show them he was far from carrion.

  Or maybe the vulture was after something else. Maybe Goodall had left a victim in the vicinity, either the girl or some unlucky hiker. Or maybe the Bama Bomber had been killed by his own shrapnel.

  No, God never dished out such fair justice. If justice is blind, then God is nearsighted.

  The bird swooped overhead again. Castle saw now that it wasn’t a vulture after all. Freshwater herons might live nea
r the river, or some other large fisher, but this creature flew without purpose. This thing didn’t even seem to have real wings.

  Sort of like the creature under his childhood bed might have looked. But Castle didn’t want to think about that. Besides, the bed was far, far away. But night was getting closer by the second.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  One of the bombs must have had a faulty trigger, because it had detonated a couple of seconds after the first two. Ace hadn’t expected the wire to set off all three bombs. The sulfuric stench of explosives filled the air, along with shredded bits of leaves. After Ace picked himself off the ground, it took a second to get oriented.

  Haircut Number One was prone on the ground, yelling into the radio. “Castle! You down?”

  A voice, most likely that of Piss-and-Vinegar, broke through the static and burst from the speaker. No words came out, only an angry moan.

  “What’s your 10–20?” Haircut said into his mouthpiece, rising and circling below the clearing, nearly disappearing into the gloom. In the silence that followed the explosion, Ace hustled to keep up. If Piss-and-Vinegar was down, then Ace could nail Haircut during the rescue attempt. Cops and soldiers had those stupid codes of honor that required them to risk their own lives for their fallen buddies.

  “Ace?” Clara called from the camp.

  Haircut, hearing her voice, headed toward the ledge that opened up onto the gorge. Piss-and-Vinegar must have tried to sneak up on the camp from that side, figuring to hide among the rocks. Haircut stopped, set aside his radio, and sprawled on his belly in the jumble of granite slabs. The bombs had triggered a landslide.

  He shouted down into an opening in the rocks. The roar of the river kept his words from reaching Ace, who gripped a dead tree at the edge of the clearing. Though the deepening darkness disguised the sheer expanse of the gorge, Ace could feel it in his gut, and vertigo turned his knees to jelly.

  Damn. He would have loved a two-fer, getting headlines in big type, but he wasn’t quite ready for the last hurrah. A cop killing would pretty much guarantee his own execution, and he wanted his death to mean something. The Lord had told him that life was sacred, even if that life was still in its mother’s belly. But all life wasn’t created equal. Ace scrambled away from the agent, glad to put some distance between him and the ledge. He doubled back to the campsite, expecting to find Clara there.

  The beans had turned black in the pan, the fire had burned low, and Clara was nowhere in sight. Damned high-toned bitch. Let the Feds have her. She couldn’t tell them much they didn’t already know, and by noon tomorrow the sky above the gorge would be filled with swarms of helicopters. SWAT teams would be jogging behind bloodhounds, and tens of thousands of acres of wilderness would be about as good a hiding place as a cop’s bedroom closet. Come to think of it, killing the two Feds might buy him a day or two, but he couldn’t force himself to face that black gulf beyond the ledge.

  He rolled up the sleeping bag and headed along the ridge, going upriver because the terrain was easier. As darkness gripped the forest, Ace had to feel his way through the trees, one arm raised in front of him to ward off branches. The roar of the river provided the only guide, and even its thundering steadiness was unreliable. He came to a clearing and paused, listening, wondering if the Feds had somehow found his trail.

  At the edge of the clearing stood a form that blended with the surrounding murk.

  Hunched like a monkey, too short and wiry to be Clara.

  Friggin’ Feds had tracked him.

  Ace reacted the only way he knew, fueled by the anger of being outsmarted. The gun was in his palm before he even thought about it, and three explosions echoed against the trees before he was aware he’d pulled the trigger. From twenty feet away, the slugs should have punched the Fed to the ground. Instead, the form lifted slowly, like a scarecrow on a wire, and drifted through the treetops.

  The fucker is FLYING, Ace thought.

  Unless secret agents had come up with Buck Rogers backpacks while Ace had been laying low, then something was seriously wrong. Ace fired one more time as the figure cleared a gap in the trees. Its outline was plain against the mottled sunset clouds. It was shaped liked a human, no doubt about that, but it was smaller, knotted up, its arms spread out to reveal short, ragged wings and legs trailing out behind. A keening wail arose from the thing, a cross between the hoot of a gut-shot owl and scream of a gang-raped wildcat.

  Ace turned and ran blindly into the woods. Turkey vulture, he told himself. Bald eagle. Kingfisher. Surely all kinds of big birds lived in the gorge.

  Except none were as big as a monkey. And this one hardly had any WINGS. And it wasn’t exactly flying, either. It was floating.

  There was one other possibility, one Ace kept pushing down to the bottom of his mind, the way you’d drown a pesky kitten. When you did the Lord’s work, you automatically made enemies. Most of those enemies wore sheep’s clothing and hid behind the cross themselves, hypocrites who shunned Ace’s kind while claiming to be pro-lifers themselves. Others upheld the laws of a government that tried to keep God out of every school, courtroom, and library in the nation. Still others didn’t care how many babies were vacuumed and shredded, as long as women got to make their own decisions, even though they were nothing but whores who would spread their legs for any man or doctor who came along.

  But those were all human enemies. When you took your marching orders from the Lord, you could expect to run afoul of things with deeper memories and longer hatreds. Them who walked with Satan.

  For all Ace knew, that might have been the Devil himself who had put in an appearance. Or maybe, just maybe, it was an angel sent to lend a helping hand.

  Either way, Ace’s work must be very important indeed. He ran into the woods.

  Fireworks erupted behind his eyelids and his skull thundered. A branch had cracked his forehead, knocking Ace to his knees. Blood trickled down his nose. He wiped at it, but a drop fell onto his lips. It was sweet and rusty. Ace rose to his feet and staggered on through the trees.

  Despite the tight sleeve of fear that squeezed his innards, a smile spread across his face.

  Important work.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Robert Raintree tuned out Farrengalli’s blathering, looking forward to reaching camp so he could go off on his own. For prayer, medicine, and peace and quiet. He didn’t understand how anyone could enter such an obvious temple of nature as the Unegama Wilderness Area and not be hushed by the spiritual glory. Though the North Carolina mountains had been logged heavily in the early 1900s, the terrain along the river was so treacherous that the lumber companies had left them alone. Hardwoods towered over the trail, knitting a rich, green canopy that filtered the dying sunlight. The undergrowth was robust and varied, with waxy-leafed rhododendron, lavender stalks of blazing star, the creamy white three-leafed trillium, and jewelweed with its fire-colored and drooping petals.

  Raintree was no botanist, but he suspected he was the only one in the group who had done any real homework on the region. Maybe because he was the only one who had a real connection with this land, though the connection had been severed through President Andrew Jackson’s forced evacuation of his people. The Cherokee had called the place Eeseeoh, which translated into English as “river of many cliffs.” The white people had named it Lindale after an eighteenth-century explorer who had been murdered here by the Cherokee. Collective and belated national guilt had led to the adoption of the name Unegama, Cherokee for “white water,” when it was added to the National Wilderness Preservation system in the 1960s. Unegama was a somewhat forked-tongue version of the language, but then, the whites had named the Cherokee tribe from a Cree word, not realizing the Cherokee language has no r.

  “Step it up,” Farrengalli shouted from the rear. “There’s a bonus if we reach the falls before dark.”

  Raintree wondered how Farrengalli would have fared on these trails three centuries ago, when buffalo and elk still made their seasonal passes and wildcats and
red wolves stalked easy meat. He somehow believed even the hungriest of predators would find the man’s flesh distasteful.

  Equally annoying was the man in front of Raintree, who peppered his dialogue with corporate slogans. The group had obviously been chosen with care, but the company man was a tenderfoot. Raintree couldn’t claim any true outdoor experience, but at least he was in shape. He’d won a bronze in the 2000 Olympics, wrestling in the middleweight class, and had gained a few weeks of notoriety as sportswriters worked the “noble savage” and “the last pure American” angles. Though he’d never won a collegiate championship, he’d survived the Olympic trials by somehow upsetting better wrestlers, and had been an Olympic long shot. He was dream copy, and it didn’t hurt that he had raven-black hair, piercing dark eyes, and the type of chest muscles that led to a few seminude appearances in high-brow magazines marketed to frustrated females.

  Raintree parlayed the fleeting fame into a fitness gym in Oklahoma, and his clients included a handful of minor Hollywood stars known more for their builds than their brains. Raintree expanded his network so that it now included six gyms, and ProVentures had partnered with him in developing a line of personal workout equipment. In truth, Raintree had offered little input, merely letting the company use his face and facsimile signature on the products. In exchange, he signed the checks and smiled for Dove Krueger, the company’s official photographer. Like him, Dove had also been recruited on this trip, though he suspected his motives were far different from hers.

  Ahead, Bowie Whitlock stopped and stood aside while the company man passed and took the lead.

  “Keep walking,” Bowie said to the ProVentures rep. He didn’t speak to Raintree, but their eyes met in mutual sympathy. Raintree noticed the guide was panting a little. Probably could have used the ProVentures Raintree Regimen, where “you measure your chest by the size of your heart.” Trademarked, copyrighted, satisfaction guaranteed, and your money back if you didn’t notice results within thirty days. Of course, most men were embarrassed to admit that they had failed a manly challenge of any kind, so refunds were few.