Andrew nodded. “I couldn’t see a name patch, but he was definitely wearing a uniform. And he had an officer’s insignia on him, one of those little silver pins. A first lieutenant’s bar.”
At this, Dani frowned, puzzled. “That doesn’t make any sense. There aren’t any lieutenants here. Not anymore, not since they sent Carter home to Arkansas.” Heading for the door, she said, “Come on. We need to go find Major Prendick.” She cut him a glance and a wry smirk. “You keep downwind, okay?”
He frowned. “Ha, ha.”
“Well, now, that’s quite the story you’ve come up with, Mister Braddock.” Prendick seemed completely blithe, even dubious about Andrew’s account of what had happened.
Which, needless to say, pissed Andrew off. “It’s not a story and I didn’t come up with it. It happened. I told you. Someone or something chased me through the forest.”
“Or something,” Prendick repeated pointedly.
Andrew nodded. “At least four of them. I was following the footpath Dani told me you use for patrols, then they forced me off it, into the trees. They followed me for at least a quarter of a mile.”
Crossing his arms, but not losing his bemused, aloof expression, Prendick regarded him. “Why would anyone do that?”
“Because they knew where the snare trap was. They were herding me toward it.”
Prendick rolled his eyes.
“I saw them,” Andrew snapped. “Moving through the trees, just for a second, but they looked a lot like the thing I told you I saw the night I wrecked my Jeep.”
“Mister Braddock,” Prendick began.
“I’m telling the truth, goddamn it,” Andrew snapped, planting his foot on the edge of Prendick’s desk and yanking up his pant cuff. “Look at my leg. You think I did this to myself?” He wrenched down his sock, revealing an angry red welt line encircling his ankle, the painful imprint left by the snare line.
Prendick frowned. “What I think, Mister Braddock, is that you hit your head pretty hard when you fell. And what I know for a fact is that in this forest, it’s easy to get turned around, mixed up. If you wander off the path, don’t recognize your surroundings, it’s easy to jump at shadows, every unfamiliar sound.”
“I work in forests like this pretty much every day of my life,” Andrew argued. “I wasn’t lost or imagining things.”
“Well, I’m at a loss to explain it.” Prendick threw up his hands. “Because you’re saying you saw a dead soldier out there in the woods, and I’m telling you we’re not missing any. We’re all present or otherwise accounted for, and this is a brand new facility. We’re the only unit that’s ever been stationed here.”
Any pretense of good humor had drained from his face and voice, and he glared at Andrew now, as bristled and close to angry as Andrew had yet to see him.
“Major, if I may,” Dani ventured, her voice hesitant, her tone courteous and deferent. “Upon our arrival here, sir, we were briefed on the possibility of encountering narcotics dealers out in the woods. These mountains have a reputation for hiding marijuana crops and methamphetamine labs. We were warned about the risks of booby traps, sir, set to protect their boundaries—nail-pits, pipe bombs, that sort of thing.”
“I remember the briefing, Specialist Santoro,” Prendick told her dryly. “I was the one who delivered it.”
“Maybe that’s what Andrew ran into, sir,” Dani said. Cutting Andrew a wide-eyed, tentative glance, she added, “Maybe this body he said he saw wasn’t really one at all, but some kind of effigy, like a scarecrow, that’s meant to keep people away.”
“No.” Andrew shook his head. “It wasn’t anything like that. It was a body. I stuck my hands through it. It was half-rotted, full of maggots and it stunk like hell. You can still smell it on me.”
“As I was saying, sir.” Dani’s comment was directed to Prendick but she glared at Andrew in unspoken imperative: Shut up. You’re not helping. “All of this land was held in federal reserve before this facility was built, which means they could’ve been out here for years, decades even, without being detected. Which also means, sir,” she added pointedly. “They could be growing or manufacturing illegal substances on federal land. That would put it in our jurisdiction to investigate, wouldn’t it, sir?”
Prendick studied her for a long, stern moment. “Et tu, Santoro?” he said. Then with a sigh and another scowl in Andrew’s general direction, he grumbled, “Get your squad together and meet me in the courtyard in thirty minutes. Mister Braddock, you go to your room, shower off and change your clothes—because you’re right, you do stink—then rendezvous with us in the yard, as well. Can you find the spot where you claim this body was hanging again?”
Andrew nodded. “I marked it on one of the maps in my backpack. I know how to find my way back there.”
“Fair enough,” Prendick replied. “Here’s your chance to prove it.”
Even though Andrew guided them along the trail, he stayed closely surrounded on all sides by armed members of Dani’s squad. Each of the soldiers carried live M16A assault rifles and despite the light, jovial conversation that they’d exchanged in the courtyard, once in the woods, they got down to business. Walking cautiously, keeping careful watch all around them, they ventured among the trees with the same sort of wary attentiveness they might have awarded a deceptively vacant street in some Afghani or Iraqi village.
“So Santoro says some guys were following you through the woods,” one of them, Spaulding, said in a low voice to Andrew.
Andrew didn’t feel like enduring the indignity of trying to explain that he didn’t think they had been guys at all. When he simply nodded in reply, the soldier, Spaulding, pressed, “How many, you figure?”
“At least four,” Andrew said. “Maybe more. It was kind of hard to tell.”
“What’d they look like?” Spaulding asked.
“I don’t know.” Andrew shook his head. “I never saw their faces.”
“What were they wearing?”
Andrew shook his head again. “I didn’t really get a good look.”
“You know, I’ve heard there’s a Bigfoot out here in these woods,” Hartford murmured from Andrew’s right.
“Hey, fuck you, Hartford, what do you know?” another, Reigler, growled. “Shut up, you dipshit.”
“Fuck you, Reigler,” Hartford grumbled back. “I know plenty. I read books and shit. Last fall, some guy out this way, he got pictures of one of them Bigfoots in his garden, eating his green beans.”
“Me, I’m more worried about drug dealers out here growing pot than any Bigfoot,” Boston remarked.
To Andrew’s consternation, the poke berry ink he’d used to mark the trail map had smeared on the page. He’d folded it too quickly and it hadn’t fully dried, and now streaked the map in splotches, with no discernable point of origin. This cost him brownie points with the soldiers, as several of them exchanged exasperated eye rolls when they found out.
“I can still find my way back on my own,” Andrew insisted, but even Dani looked somewhat dubious. “I know the general area. That’s still marked.”
The area may have been marked, but Andrew quickly recalled a quote he’d heard once from legendary woodsman, Daniel Boone: I can’t say I was ever lost, but I was bewildered once for three days.
Bewildered, Andrew thought, frowning. That’s a word for it. Along with fucked.
They’d left the rutted foot path some time ago, beating their own trail through the woods for a good twenty minutes or so. The silence this time had been broken not by the occasional rustle of footsteps in the leaves, but the sound of rain drops plopping heavily through the treetops, a light drizzle that quickly worked its way into something more steady. To his credit—and Andrew’s surprise—Prendick hadn’t said anything, and on those fleeting occasions when Andrew would steal a sheepish glance in the older man’s direction, he found the Major seeming unbothered by neither the rain nor their circumstances.