His command was cut off by the sputter of semiautomatic weapons fire. Two hundred yards.
Coats processed the most important part of that information: semiautomatic. Their AKs had been customized by Rupert Folkes in Jerome to be single-shot and full automatic; they weren’t rigged as semiautomatics.
At the same moment, the doorknob turned without knocking. His guys were trained to show him the respect of announcing themselves.
Coats snatched the.45 off the table and delivered three rounds into the cabin door before the damn pistol jammed. Pissed off at the self-loads, he hurled the gun across the room at the door before instantly regretting his action.
He looked around for another weapon.
The smell of cordite filled his nostrils. Blood trickled from the broken scab, as he stood painfully from the chair.
Another quick burst of semiautomatic fire.
The camp was under attack.
67
ONE OF BRANDON’S ALL-TIME FAVORITE MOVIE SCENES WAS in Indiana Jones, where Harrison Ford, faced with a sword-wielding Egyptian, simply ignores the flamboyant swordplay, pulls out his sidearm, and shoots him. Stepping out from behind the tree, hands in the air, he waited for the man shouting at him to show himself. Once he did so, Brandon gave it all of about five seconds before lunging to his left with a hip check, the momentum from which carried the M4 around his body and straight into his open hands.
He squeezed off a semiautomatic burst-three rounds-and watched the guy’s kneecaps explode. The guy went down like a folding chair, his weapon flying out of his hands and catching on a branch stump sticking out from the trunk of the tree he’d used as shelter. The gun strap caught under his chin and snapped his head back as he fell, so that he bobbed like a puppet; his obliterated knees folded, so that he looked like both legs had been crudely amputated. The gun then disengaged from the branch stump, and the man fell face-first into the snow, which swallowed him like sea-foam.
Brandon saw all this dimly, in the haze of a partial moon, knowing enough to make for cover as the rifle dropped down into the snow and on top of the man.
Brandon dove.
The fallen man fired at him.
Brandon returned two more quick bursts and got lucky: a piece of the man’s head took off like a frightened bird.
The dead guy, his skull open, sat up on the injured knees, waved his hands frantically like a drowning man searching for a rope, then fell forward again before Brandon could get off another shot.
Brandon came to standing in the lee of a wide fir, lowered the night vision goggles, and confirmed the kill.
Ugly.
His hands were trembling; he felt frightfully cold all of a sudden.
Just then he heard three pops from the direction of the compound. Forty-five Magnum. It wasn’t the sheriff’s gun.
68
WALT LAY FLAT ON HIS BACK, HIS CHEST HOT WITH SEARING pain. Two of the three shots had scored; the third had narrowly missed, so close to his left ear that he’d heard its whistle. Keeping the gun aimed at the cabin door, he wiggled off his left glove and felt for his chest, his fingers worming into a hole in the Kevlar vest where the bullet was still warm. The other was embedded in his radio. The pain when he breathed was unrelenting due to a cracked rib, and it took him a moment to fully understand-to believe-he wasn’t on his way out.
Then he rolled and pushed himself up to standing, knowing what it felt like to be hit by a bus. Keeping the thicker logs that formed the cabin wall between himself and the shooter, he ducked and twisted the doorknob and threw the door open.
“Sheriff!” he announced.
Where the hell was Brandon?
Now, in the very far distance, came the mosquito buzz of approaching snowmobiles. Both teams were converging on the compound from a mile out.
Walt struggled for breath. Every movement caused blinding pain. He stood, banged off the door, throwing it fully open to make sure no one was hiding behind it, and then pushed himself into the doorway, fell to his knees and rocked forward, his gun gripped in both hands.
Clear.
The.45 was on the floor to his right. He grabbed it, ejected the magazine, and tossed both halves out the door into the snow.
He used the furniture as screens, flipping the only table and hiding behind it, then working past the woodstove to the only doorway. Trying to draw a deep breath and then regretting it for the agony it caused.
He turned the doorknob. Tested the door. Swung it open.
A bunk room: two bunk beds, meeting in the near corner. No closets. Clothes on hooks on the wall.
Clear.
Open window, the blind undulating in waves, still in motion.
Walt poked his head out the window, then quickly back inside. Right. Left.
Clear.
He followed out the window.
A confusion of tracks in the snow.
But one line of tracks called to him above all others, leading directly to a shed fifteen yards behind the cabin. The right leg was wounded and trailing badly, dragging behind, the left leg doing all the work. Walt thought this explained why the shooter-Coats?-had not rushed the cabin’s front door to finish the kill.
Walt pulled down the night vision goggles and the landscape before him came alive in monochromatic green and black. But it was as if someone had turned on a searchlight: he could see not only the shed and the corral next to it but well beyond to a stack of chopped wood.
His weapon extended, his arm braced and steadied, he punched his way through the thick snow toward the shed, the beat of his heart painful in his bruised chest.
Where was Mark? Did they have him in the shed? Had Coats moved toward his bargaining chip?
A sound from behind turned him. He dropped to one knee, swung the gun around, and took aim: the figure stood over six feet tall, with shoulders as wide as a truck. Walt blinked, and he eased his finger off the trigger.
A bear. A big bear raised onto its hind legs. Ten, fifteen yards. Even through the goggles, Walt saw the foaming saliva spilling from its mouth. An angry bear. A mad bear. And then: the dark spot on its shoulder. A wounded bear.
He could try to kill the bear, though it would take most of the contents of his magazine, and the bear would likely maul him before actually succumbing. It took a perfect heart shot to drop a bear. Walt had heard stories of direct hits to the skull that glanced off without effect. He turned and ran for the shed. He didn’t need a rearview mirror to know the bear was following at a gallop.
He blew through the shed door and slammed it shut, turning and once again dropping to one knee. The eerie black and green played out through the goggles, depicting a garage and slaughterhouse in one. It was cluttered with tools and sacks, tires and lumber. An enormous dead cow hung from a block and tackle, its long black tongue swollen and drooping toward a dirt floor where a slimy mass of afterbirth and a fetal calf lay cut open and splayed. The smell was suffocating-not even the cold could freeze out death.
The entire wall shook behind him as the bear collided. Past the hanging cow was an old tractor or truck on blocks, reduced to a steel skeleton and surrounded by parts. He heard the wheeze of his own painful breathing and then another crash as the bear bid for entry. The thing hit the door so hard that a shovel fell from the wall and clanged into some fuel canisters.
Then silence.
The front half of the rectangular shed was clear, meaning if Coats was in here he was hiding back amid the remains of the tractor. Walt stood and moved carefully forward, keeping his back to the wall, staying as close to it as possible, without getting his feet caught in the tangle of clutter. Several seconds had passed without an effort from the bear, but Walt found himself stealing glances in that direction, where the door hardware was now splintered and partially torn from the jamb. He crept a few more paces forward in the churchlike silence.