Kenny nodded slowly, a distant expression on his face. “You think he’s dead?”
“I don’t know,” Cam said. “He could have flipped out. Living out there, growing a long beard, communing with the wildlife, and studying Buddhism.”
“And if that’s what he’s doing…”
“Right,” Cam said. “If that’s what he’s doing, then someone else is doing this shit. Someone a lot closer to home than Marlor. And I don’t even want to think about that.”
19
Cam wasn’t fond of helicopters, especially when they were of the two-seater variety, where you sat up there underneath those rotors, surrounded by what looked like semirigid Saran Wrap. Yes, you could really see; he’d grant you that. But his pilot for this little jaunt had flown warbirds of some kind in a past life and obviously missed it. Cam wasn’t airsick. He was afraid, especially when the pilot would drop down to treetop level to enter a canyon, without possibly being able to know what happened to the available airspace at the end of said canyon. He guessed wrong a lot, so then Cam was treated to that nifty sensation one got as a roller-coaster car flattened itself in the valley and then went up and over the top of the next hump. Each time he did it, Cam’s cranial helmet would drop down over his eyes. The pilot said he liked canyon hopping because that meant he would just appear over the target area without announcing that they’d been inbound for a half hour. That was when Cam realized the guy was doing this scary shit on purpose, and enjoying it.
They popped out of the final canyon after about fifty minutes of evading enemy missile sites and flared into a high hover over a patch of dense forest that stretched down the side of Blackberry Mountain. It was as clear a day as one got on the edge of the Blue Ridge, which was to say that it was clear where they were but not in the distance. The trees below were large and numerous, their foliage just beginning to turn to fall colors.
“Mark on top,” the pilot called cheerily over the intercom. He pointed to the small circle on his chart, which corresponded with the position given in the plat. Cam looked down and then stretched in his straps to see if he could spot the cabin. He couldn’t see a damned thing except more trees. The pilot obligingly tilted the aircraft, so now Cam was hanging sideways from his straps, but he could also see right below the aircraft. A small freshet sparkled through what looked like a crack along the face of the slope, and, yes, there was a structure of some kind down there in all those trees. But it wasn’t big enough to be a cabin. An outbuilding? They were not directly on top of it, so Cam asked the pilot if they could drop down so he could see better through the trees-an entirely wrong choice of words, as it turned out.
“No problem,” the pilot said, and then the helicopter dropped like a stone and flared out practically on top of the structure, sending clouds of leaves and other forest debris roiling through the rest of the trees as the chopper bounced gently from side to side, its rotors chopping frantically at the thin mountain air. There was a faint path leading from the structure, which looked now like a lean-to toolshed. At the end of the path was the cabin.
“See anyplace to land?” Cam asked. The only clearing he’d seen had the toolshed right in the middle of it.
The pilot nodded and then let the chopper sink sideways down toward the lean-to. When Cam thought they were going do a Cuisinart number on it with the rotors, the pilot halted the descent and reached over to release Cam’s harness.
“I’ll hold her right here,” he said over the intercom. “Open the door and step out onto the skid. Then sit down, turn around, and hang on to the skid with your hands, and I’ll get you close to the ground. Then let go and drop. Don’t touch the bird and the ground at the same time. Keep your cranial on until you’re on the ground. Put it back on when I come back to get you. Just wave, and I’ll come back down. Okay?”
Before Cam had a chance to protest that that was the dumbest damned thing he’d heard in his life, the pilot unjacked Cam’s intercom wire, stuffed the end of it in Cam’s jacket, and pointed encouragingly at the handle on the hatch.
Cam discovered that it was harder than it sounded, especially when his sphincter muscle was trying to wrestle his entire intestinal tract out the back door. The noise was terrific, the down-draft from the rotors was even more terrific, and purposefully dropping off that metal skid felt like suicide. But once he was hanging like a deer ready for dressing in a hurricane, the pilot nudged the aircraft to the right and Cam saw that his feet were barely a foot above the ground. Amazing, he thought as he dropped, rolled, and then got rolled when the pilot lifted the bird back up. The aircraft elevatored back up to several hundred feet and then began to fly in a lazy pattern around the site.
Cam sat up and took an apprehensive look around. Apprehensive, because if Marlor was a bad guy who had been zapping guilty bastards up here in his mountain aerie, he’d certainly had plenty of time to go get his black hat and tengauge double-barreled Greener. Kenny may have had a point, he thought. When he’d asked the pilot if he could give him any backup if things went noisy, the pilot had lifted an MP-5 from behind his seat and nodded. But nobody seemed to be around besides a million diseased ticks and one terrified squirrel who was cursing him from the denuded remains of his nest in a nearby pine tree.
Cam got up, shook the pine needles out of his hair, checked to see that his trusty. 45 was still firmly ensconced in its hip holster, brushed off his uniform, and then headed up toward the cabin. It was either one of those kit-made log cabins and had been dropped here a long time ago by a really big helicopter or it was genuinely old. It was a square box, with what certainly looked like hand-hewn logs, chinked with grayish petrified clay. The front porch sagged a good bit, and the one stone chimney seemed too big for the size of the cabin. Two small square windows flanked a stout-looking wooden front door, but there were none in the cabin’s sides. Trees grew quite close all around, as did large clumps of mountain laurel and other shrubbery.
He stopped in front of the porch and called out, feeling faintly ridiculous after all the noise that helicopter had made. He walked up onto the front porch and knocked on the door, and then peered through a window, feeling increasingly certain that there was no one here. In one sense, he was relieved. In another, he was disappointed. It would have been nice, he thought, to have found Marlor at home, sitting on his rocking chair on that front porch. He could have just asked him flat out if he’d been cooking up some justice. From what Cam had seen of him, he thought Marlor would have said yes or no, and been done with it.
As Cam expected, the front door wasn’t locked, so he opened it up and stepped inside. The first thing he noticed was a musty, faintly putrid smell, and he immediately thought of some murder scenes he’d been to. The light was dim because of all the trees and the tiny windows, but there was just a single large opened-ceiling room, with some rustic wooden furniture, a long kitchen table parked in front of a very large fireplace, and a single cotlike bed to one side of the fireplace. There were two antique chamber pots under the bed. There were lots of shelves, filled with canned food and some opaque plastic containers, which probably held boxed foods. Two doorless armoires held boots, stiffly dirty one-piece Carhartt jumpsuits, hats, blankets, two quilts, and two army field jackets. A stack of dusty dry firewood was racked up in a firebox, and there was a brass can next to it with slivers of what the locals called “lightered,” used for kindling. There was another door which went out the back, and he could see an outhouse twenty feet or so to the side and slightly below the cabin. If there was a well, Cam couldn’t see it, but there was that narrow, deep creek rushing down the hill right out front.