“Gray — old Dodge Colt.”
“License?”
“Canadian. Sutters are Canadian — stay all summer and fall. Thelma,” he called back to the woman in the cabin, “you got that license plate number Mick gave you?”
“It’s RCV—” said the woman, timidly emerging from the cabin with a piece of paper, her hands shaking, pulling jerkily at her bath robe. “—RCV 625.”
Choir backed the Explorer out quickly, throwing gravel. Freeman made contact with Sal and Aussie via their headsets. “You still have a beep?”
“Affirmative. It’s coming from what’s indicated on the Tac Nav chart as a campground, a new one — Melson Campground — near the top of the lake. Possible they’re changing into civilian—” There was the crackle of static, and then Aussie and Sal could hear Freeman telling them that now that the rearguard action was over they should wait at the helo until further notice. The general had no sooner finished talking with Aussie and Sal than he heard Eddie Mervyn coming in on his MIR line informing him that, as suspected, all the rearguard terrorists — six of them — were dead. Freeman thanked Eddie and Gomez, telling them that he, Ruth, Choir, and Johnny Lee were only a quarter mile up the road, they had an SUV, and would pick them up within a few minutes.
After Mervyn and Gomez were in the SUV, the team headed north on the lone road. The Ford Explorer was doing a maximum of thirty miles per hour, Ruth on the passenger-side running board, the general on the driver’s-side running board, both looking ahead for any sign of an improvised booby trap. The Explorer’s defroster was on the fritz, so Choir had to use his free hand to wipe the condensation from the windshield. Thirty miles per hour on the straightaway was Choir’s compromise between getting there quickly but still having time to jam on the brakes, should anything suspicious appear on the road that was now funneling into a dark tunnel of trees.
Freeman figured Choir’s speed was a bit overcautious, but one anti-personnel mine on the road could rupture a tire and bring everything to a screeching halt.
There was no mine, but an all-but-invisible cable strung tautly across the road.
“Brake!” yelled Ruth, Choir shouting, “Heads down!” Choir’s controlled skid saved the Explorer from taking the impact full-on, its right side slamming against the cable. Ruth, caught by the cable, was lifted up by it, his helmet flying off, his severed head rolling along the road’s shoulder in a flurry of dead leaves, his torso gushing blood. The nose-clogging smell of burnt rubber wafted over the others as the SUV stopped, everyone in utter shock, their obscenities rending the air. Recovering first, Douglas Freeman said, “God watch him,” then “Put him in the back! MOVE!” As they did so, the pungent odor of burnt rubber hung about the vehicle like a funeral pall.
Choir was as white as a sheet. It had been Ruth yelling, “Brake!” but it had been Choir who made the mistake of swinging the wheel instead of letting the vehicle hit the wire full-on, in which case it would likely have twanged over the roof without touching either Ruth or Freeman. Freeman ordered Choir to get back in and drive. Again Freeman took his position on the driver’s-side running board. “Go!” To prevent them from hearing the head rolling around, Johnny Lee, in the back, almost sick to his stomach, wrapped it up in a bunch of old clothing the owner had obviously dumped in the backseat, and stuffed it into a corner. No one spoke save Freeman, who, riding the driver’s-side running board, bellowed into the window against the slipstream, his eyes on the road all the time, “Stay focused! We can’t do anything to help Ruth now. But we can make those bastards pay for every—” Freeman’s body lurched forward, his left wrist jammed against the driver’s-side mirror as Choir braked hard, a swirl of leaves rising from the road’s shoulder under the impact of the skid temporarily blocking Freeman’s view.
“Mines!” screamed Choir.
“Six of them, right?” said Johnny Lee.
“Yes!”
Now Freeman saw them: six small, black objects, no more than a hand’s span wide, placed, staggered, across the road so that it would be impossible for a vehicle to pass without making contact with at least one of them.
“Back up,” he ordered Choir, “till we’re at least fifty yards away.”
Choir had no sooner stopped the Explorer than the general, regretting that neither Sal nor Aussie’s longer-range weapons were at hand, ordered Gomez and Eddie Mervyn to concentrate on two targets apiece while he, Freeman, would deal with the remaining two. Choir turned the SUV’s engine off. The ensuing silence was eerie. They could smell the rain in the air. An ominous deep green color curdled the sky, promising heavy snow to the north along Idaho’s border with B.C. Leaves scuttled across the road with unnerving urgency. Although superbly trained, Gomez and Eddie Mervyn were showing signs of stress, Mervyn unusually jumpy, Eddie breathing rapidly. Still, their aim was true, and through the roar of the submachine guns Freeman could see the targets disintegrating. But something was wrong. There were no explosions.
“What the—” began Johnny Lee.
“All right,” said the general. “Let’s go.” He told Choir to stop momentarily by the targets then quickly stepped down from the driver’s-side running board and retrieved part of what they had thought were mines. “Son of a bitch!”
“What is it, General?” pressed Choir as Prince, on high alert, cocked his head inquiringly, Gomez glancing anxiously at his watch, figuring that at the speed they were going they were less than six miles from the campground. Eddie Mervyn and Johnny Lee were watching the road intently through a shower of ice-cold rain.
“China!” said the general. “Saucers. They put six damn saucers upside down across the road!”
“Probably got ’em from the cabin they busted into,” Eddie Murphy suggested.
Choir wasn’t interested. All right, so they were cunning. But right now, hunched tight over the wheel, eyes straining, the SpecFor veteran was preoccupied, watching the rain-slicked road, the calf of his right leg a tense bundle of nerves and muscle, ready to stab the brake at the first sign of another wire, the terrible, dull thud and thwack of Ruth’s decapitation burned into his memory forever.
The general guesstimated that they were about five miles — around seven minutes — from Melson Campground, and he knew that the terrorist he was after, this “Ram,” if that was what he was called, was infuriatingly smart, almost, the general allowed, as smart as he was. Well, hell, the general told himself, one thing that he and the team weren’t going to do was drive pell-mell into the campground. It was early fall, and though he doubted there would be many campers, if any, after the Labor Day weekend, he’d have to be careful not to get any more civilians involved. They’d stop the Explorer a quarter mile before the objective and go in for the kill on foot.
Approaching the campground on the run, Prince, on point, was panting so loudly, Freeman thought, that he could be heard a hundred feet away on the narrow, potholed road that led through a tunnel of trees to the campground. It was hoped that Prince still had the scent and that the eager spaniel could lead the general and his four-man team to exactly where the terrorists were, or to what hiking trail they’d selected to take them northward to the Canadian border fourteen miles due north.
Freeman’s SpecFors halted fifty yards from the campground. They could see bodies strewn by the entrance where a bullet-ridden Winnebago stood facing them. Its driver, a woman, her door open, was slumped over the wheel. Two children, seven, possibly eight years old, were lying very still on the ground, the nearby grass so green it contrasted vividly with the pools of blood. The children’s faces were horribly disfigured, abdomens disemboweled. Prince became rigid and pointed. Several gray wolves, tails down, were slinking away on the off side of the camper, one of them baring its blood-smeared canines at the intrusion on what obviously, from the gruesome state of one of the children’s bodies, had been the predators’ meal.