He still had a deep affectionate respect for the Garand design, and had bought one from an accommodating supply sergeant as soon as he got out of the hospital; it hadn’t been difficult in the freewheeling chaos that accompanied demobilization after V-J day. The .30-06 rounds ought to make even a grizzly sit up and take notice; he tossed a dozen clips into a pocket of the rucksack on general principle—you never had too much ammunition.
Now I know what John Rolfe the First felt like, Rolfe thought. Wading onto the Virginia shore all those years ago, rapier in hand.
Cradling the rifle in the crook of his left arm, John Rolfe VI stepped into the wall of silvery light.
CHAPTER ONE
I joined the Department of Fish and Game because I couldn’t be a soldier anymore and I hate cities, Tom Christiansen thought, the Berretta cold and unforgiving in his hands. It didn’t have the heft of an assault rifle, which would have been comforting right about now. God is an ironist.
He and his partner were crouched behind the rear door of a car not far from the SWAT team; the FBI agent was up beside the front wheel. It was a typical early-summer day in LA; the ozone was enough to fry the hairs out of your nostrils, his eyes hurt from the smog that left a ring of dirty brown around the horizon, and the nearest vegetation was a tired-looking palm a block away, if you didn’t count weeds growing through cracks in the pavement. It was better than going after holdouts in the Hindu Kush, but that was about all you could say for it.
“Leave the ‘Freeze!’ and ‘Hands up!’ stuff to our esteemed colleagues of the LAPD, a.k.a. ‘those fucking cowboy assholes,’ Tom,” the FBI agent said quietly, glancing over at him. She was a thin, hard-looking black woman named Sarah Perkins. “‘Game wardens shot dead in LA bust’ doesn’t make a good headline.”
Tom nodded, grinning; it was an expression that came easily to his face. He was a broad-shouldered, thick-armed, long-legged man three inches over six feet, dressed in T-shirt, a Sacramento Kings jacket and jeans, with battered hiking boots on his feet. His short-cropped white-blond hair topped a tanned square-cut face and a straight nose that had been broken and healed very slightly crooked a long time ago. He looked every inch the east-Dakota Norski farm boy he’d been born thirty-two years ago, down to the pale gray of his eyes. A very slight trace of Scandinavian singsong underlay his flat Midwestern accent, despite the fact that his great-grandparents had left the shores of the Hardangerfjord a hundred and thirty years before. The wheat country north of Fargo hadn’t attracted a whole lot of newcomers since then.
“Ever hear what happened when they sent the LAPD to find the rabbit that attacked President Carter, back when?” he said softly.
Just sitting and waiting before action let you get knotted up inside. Gallows humor was the only sort available on a battlefield, but that was when you needed to break the tension.
“I’ll bite,” Perkins said.
“Well, the LAPD went into the woods, and half an hour later they dragged out a grizzly bear by its hind feet; it didn’t have any teeth left and both its eyes were swollen shut. And it was screaming over and over, ‘All right! I’m a rabbit! I’m a rabbit!’”
She snorted laughter, quietly, and without taking her eyes off the target. Tom exchanged a silent glance with his partner, and Roy Tully grinned back. It wouldn’t be tactful to mention the other part of the joke—the FBI burned down the whole wood and shot everything that came out on the grounds that “the rabbit had it coming.”
And there was no real reason to complain, even if working for Fish and Game was more like soldiering than he’d anticipated; he was a cop, sort of—he was part of the Special Operations Unit; the SOU was the enforcement branch of the DFG. That made him smile a little too; SOU, DFG, FBI, SWAT, LAPD, the alphabet soup of police bureaucracy. Still, guys like him were as necessary as the scientists and administrators; without them there wouldn’t be any condors left, or eagles, or cougars, and Lake Tahoe would be ticky-tack all the way ’round, and the whole of California would look like this. If that meant he had to crouch here next to a crummy little warehouse of rusting sheet metal in South Central LA, hoping he wouldn’t get shot and frying his sinuses when he could be hiking in the Sierras breathing air colder and cleaner than crystal, or canoeing in Glacier National Park, or even just taking a break to help out on his brother’s farm back in North Dakota, then so be it.
The SWAT troopers’ heads came up; something was going on, and they were getting the word through their ear mikes. He’d never liked the Imperial-Death-Star-Nazi look of the black uniforms they insisted on, like hanging out an “Oooooo, AIN’T WE BAD!” sign, but they had good gear.
There was a loud whump from within the warehouse. Flames shot out of windows at the rear—he could tell by the plumes of smoke—and the big sheet-metal doors at the front slammed outward as they were struck by an invisible fist of hot dense air; the clerestories on the roof shattered upward in a weirdly beautiful shower of broken glass, glinting in the harsh sunlight. Smoke followed seconds later. It wasn’t a big explosion, but it had obviously been linked to incendiaries; flames were licking out as well.
Subtlety might be a problem with the LA cops, but firepower and straightforward kick-ass aggression were things they did well; they all charged forward, M-16s and machine pistols at their shoulders. The other teams would be going in from around the warehouse, and the snipers were ready on the flat roofs of the neighboring buildings. The troopers went through the doors, leaving them swinging and banging—and almost immediately there was a second explosion, the sound much lower and sharper.
“Shit!”
Tom wasn’t sure if that was him or Tully or Perkins; they all reacted identically too, getting up and running toward the door. He found that comforting. Running toward trouble wasn’t always the right thing to do, but people with that reflex were generally the ones you wanted around you when things got rough.
There were two policemen down just inside the door, one limp, the other putting a field bandage on his own leg.
“Fire set off something,” he said. “Rodriguez is OK, I think.”
“Good pulse, no bleeding, no concussion,” Perkins confirmed, peeling back an eyelid and pressing her fingers to the man’s throat.
She and Tully helped the man with the wounded leg, swinging arms over their shoulders and carrying his weight between them; they were about the same height, five-six or so. Tom stooped and lifted the unconscious officer in a fireman’s carry, rising easily under the hundred and ninety pounds of man and gear—he was even stronger than he looked, and that load was fifty short of his own body weight. The waiting paramedics ran up to take the injured men, so that was all right; sirens of several types were screaming or yodeling nearby.
Tom scooped up a Colt Commando carbine someone had dropped as they went back in. This was the interior loading bay of the warehouse, with nothing in it but oil stains and orange paint on the concrete. There were two sets of stairs along the walls leading up to the higher interior floor, and two big orange-painted vertical sliding doors buckled and jammed in their frames. Smoke was coming out of those, but up near the top—that meant most of the fire was going out the roof for now. The dull roar was getting louder with every heartbeat, though, and the heat of the combustion was drying the sweat on his face faster than it could come out of his pores. Perkins nodded at him, and the three dashed through, ducking under the twisted sheet metal. There hadn’t been any shooting, and he could hear the members of the SWAT teams calling to each other.