He stepped over a deep set of ruts. Tracks had been along through here and there was water in the deepest ruts. He spotted the shotgun shells, but to him it was the spent brass that you see everywhere after a mad minute. The litter of a firefight, perhaps.
Everywhere he looked he saw the trash that was the calling card of both the multimilitary and civilian incursion/occupancy/habitation. The whole country was a garbage heap. He looked for bootprints, broken limbs, disturbed nature, as he tromped down away from the beaten path, his sensors purring as he moved toward the blue line.
Nature's noises were building in intensity the way they do the deeper you go into the boonies, and Chaingang thought he might be nearer the big ditch than he'd calculated. It looked just like a steep ditch bank and he was surprised not to see water as he came up over the rise, moving cautiously, keeping his boonie-rat cover down even with the surrounding tree and bush line, taken aback to see the huge, dry creek bed and the remnants of a blown bridge. He eased down into the fly-infested hollow. Eyes scoping across the cracked mud floor for sign. He found more shells. Spent brass from another firefight. The whole thing could be a bomb crater. He crossed the expanse of mud and pulled himself up the other side and felt something. He stopped.
There was somebody, something nearby, a living thing. He neither saw nor heard anything—just that stab of awareness. He felt it like a chill on his skin and it froze him to the spot. Absolutely motionless.
Stilling slowing stilling the vital signs. Breathing twice as deeply but half as often, slow, heavy, measured intakes of air, filling the immense lungs and slowing stilling slowing the heartbeat as he tuned in on the presence. He stayed frozen so long the birds began singing loudly as they will if you remain unmoving for several minutes. He heard loud animal noises, faraway engines, a chopper high in the sky and far away, and something moving close by. The killing hand held the taped tractor-strength chain, his “flexible club,” in a steel death grip and whatever it was was right beside him now and he tensed and it moved slightly and the camouflage was so good it had been very close all this time, and he had to stifle the cough of laughter as he spotted the tiny brown furry creature in the deep weeds.
Very carefully and gently his left hand reached down and scooped under the baby rabbit and he lifted it up to his level and looked at it like he'd never seen one before. He poked around in the weeds but could not find the mother or any other babies, so he tenderly sat it back down in the deepest thickest weeds he could see and backed away. His hands had become so toughened he had not felt the soft fur or the barely discernible thumping of its tiny heart. It was the first rabbit he'd seen in-country in a long while. The baby rabbit hunkered down in the weeds, having a small heart attack as the giant human moved off.
He thought about how they mistreated the animals here. Especially our soldiers. He enjoyed thinking about the one boy who had teased the duck. He watched him later, and when he went into a latrine to shit he rapidly fragged the door and when the punk came out ... He had to pull his twisted thoughts off the fragging of the punk, something was demanding all the powers of his concentration.
Chaingang was all but impossible to booby-trap. He could be shot, bombed, fragged, destroyed in any number of ways. But to expect him to step on a poisoned bamboo stake or to trip a bouncing betty or a whip or any of the hundred other traps they could deliver to the unwary, was simply to underestimate his abilities. So at one with his environs was this killer that the slightest off-key factor—the smallest detail out of harmony with its surroundings—and he would see it as if it wore a bright flag. The other thing man has never duplicated is nature, be it camouflage or neorealist art, and however impressive, man's artifice could do no better than a shiny wax apple.
It was not the fear of mines or bidden chi-coms that nagged at him. He had yet to put a label to it, but he knew that to ignore such vibes was to do so at his own peril. It could be this piece of ground. For just as there are persons in whom the trace of evil is prominent and assertive there are geographic locales in which that trace is strong. And as the men and women and children touched by evil reflect no obvious commonality, the traces can be found anywhere. At the bottom of the sea, in a complex of cities long buried by the winds of time and evolution, in a certain desert, or on a variety of hills, valleys, ravines, mountains, temples, desolate landscapes, shores, wastelands, swamps, urban sky-rises, remote countrysides, and boondock ditch banks alike. This was one such locale.
He tasted it, smelled it, it prickled his skin as the synergy of the place and person combined to form a deadly bond. He also was beginning to sense that unnamed thing again, and be realized what it was when he came over the next steep bank and saw that he was at the ditch. There was a Cong fishing boat, or what was left of one, tied to the overhanging willows by a piece of rope that had all but rotted through.
He pulled the boat up onto the bank easily and tipped it over on its edge, a 275-pound wooden jon boat, tipping it like it weighed fifty pounds, letting it plop back down in the muddy water. It had been badly caulked and the caulking was only partially holding in the cracks, but it appeared to still be halfway sound. Bunkowski checked to see how the bottom looked and, satisfied, he gingerly stepped in, propelling his bulk into the middle section of the boat. It didn't sink to the bottom with him, which he considered a good sign.
There was a broken piece of oar and a couple of old cans and milk jugs, which had probably been used to bail the old leaky tub with. He picked up the oar and shoved off from the bank. The water was probably quite shallow along here, he thought, with the bank only ten or twelve feet high and maybe—tops—six or seven feet of water beneath the boat.
Silently, with the powerful arms and wrists and back that possessed superhuman strength, the behemoth dipped the piece of wood into the water and sent the rowboat gliding upstream, aiming quietly in the direction of the enemy's heartbeat.
BUCKHEAD STATION
Lee clip-clopped down the steps into the squad room to find Eichord with his chair tilted back, one foot hooked onto a desk drawer, the room otherwise empty.
“I can't go off and leave you, can I?” Lee said, shaking his head. “I come back—it'sa same damn thing every time, hats, horns, drunken behavior, screaming, and wild parties. You're an irrepressible knucklehead, ya know that? What am I gonna do with you?"
Eichord calmly looked up from his book. “Well, look who's here, it's the Chinese Willie Sutton."
“Oh, cute. Real funny. Like they'd never think to put a you-know-what in here. Right?"
“I don't know. What's a you-know-what?"
“A mike. A fucking MICROPHONE,” he screamed.
“Jeez, pal. Take a couple dozen Valium and get a hold of it."
“YOU get a hold of it,” Lee said, dropping a newspaper on top of Eichord's book, The Gentleman's Clubs of London.
Eichord saw the headline “FBI links robbery gun to killing,” reading “A handgun taken from fugitive Wendell De Witt, 31, has been identified as the weapon used in the shooting death of a Buckhead bank guard on July 3, according to testimony given by a Federal Bureau of Investigation forensics analyst.
“The unnamed FBI analyst verified that tests conducted on a .38-caliber pistol taken from De Witt at the time of his capture showed conclusively that it was the weapon used in the killing of Floyd Coleman, 52, during the robbery of Buckhead Mercantile Bank and Trust.