The Devils Punchbowl

Caitlin feels once more for a pulse. Nothing. Now the engine is a smooth rumble. How far is that sound traveling over the flat ground? A half mile? A mile?

With a silent prayer, she looks down at Linda’s body, then gets to her knees and hauls Linda onto her shoulder. It takes most of her strength to bear the dead weight, but this is not enough. She has to get to a standing position. Breathing hard, she redoubles her effort and drives herself to her feet.

Holding the body in a fireman’s carry, she turns until Linda’s feet are pointing toward the unbarred window and drives one of Linda’s heels through the brittle plastic pane. A chorus of coughs enters the stall. Then something heavy slams against the wall. The Bully Kuttas are leaping for the window.

Filled with shame and horror, Caitlin presses Linda’s lower legs together and shoves them through the window. Any worry about how she would push more of the body through the small space vanishes, for the moment the legs clear the frame, Linda’s weight is yanked from Caitlin’s arms and shoulders as though by a threshing machine.

The sounds that follow send a bolt of primal terror through her. After one paralyzed second, she breaks for the storeroom. The whole building is rattling from the force of the dogs trying to drag Linda’s corpse through the window. Caitlin feels her stomach trying to come up, but she forces down the bile and runs to the storeroom window.

No sound,

she thinks, like a child playing hide-and-seek.

I can’t make a single sound….

Standing on tiptoe, she pokes her head far enough through the window to make sure no dog waits below. The engine is much louder than before. The far wall of the building sounds as if a construction crew is demolishing it.

First, she tries to put her feet through the window frame, but she can’t manage it. She’ll have to go through headfirst, then roll and sprint for the fence. She checks the dark yard again, then wriggles through the window and falls facefirst onto the ground.

Bounding to her feet, she runs for the fence without looking to either side.

If I look back, I'm dead,

she thinks. Halfway to the fence, she hears a cough, then a sound like galloping hooves. Even as her

brain calculates how far the dog must run, she’s leaping for the top of the eight-foot fence.

Her fingers lock into the heavy wire, and she whips her thighs and ankles up beneath her, spread-eagling them like an Olympic gymnast as a Bully Kutta slams into the fence below her rump. She’s already climbing as the dog falls, and by the time he leaps again, her hands are on the top bar and she’s flinging her legs over.

Another dog has joined the first. They leap for her again and again, their frenzied hacking like the rage of mute wolves. Panting hard, Caitlin feels a dizzy moment of triumph, then drops to the far side of the fence and sprints into the trees. She hears no engine, no dogs—nothing but the dull thump of her feet on the sandy soil. If the engine was Quinn’s, she knows, those dogs will be set loose on her trail in moments. And if they are…

CHAPTER

60

“Penn?” Major McDavitt says in my headset.

“Yeah?” I jerk out of the nauseated doze into which four hours in a free-floating roller coaster have submerged me. Leaning forward and looking at the FLIR screen, I see that we’re flying along what looks like a one-lane road.

“We’re getting into a fuel situation. We’re into the reserve. My GPS is set to the airport, and we’re already going to be cutting it close. We need to get back and refuel.”

“Kelly?” I say. “You seen anything?”

“SOS, man. Sorry. We need the air cav for this job. A fleet of these bitches.”

“I'm willing to keep going,” says McDavitt, “but we’ve got to be honest with ourselves. Without more specific intel, these are really long odds.”

I rub my eyes hard and try to see the larger picture, but exhaustion and airsickness are taking their toll. The only thing I can hold clearly in my mind is an image of Caitlin standing on her porch with her arms folded, the night we had our last talk. Remembering this, I try to imagine telling Annie that Caitlin was kidnapped and won'’t ever be coming back.

“Let’s refuel and keep going,” I say. “I know it’s a lot to ask, but we all know what’s at stake.”

Nobody says anything.

“Am I being stupid? Is there no chance at all?”

“Outside,” says McDavitt. “But if it were my wife, I’d keep looking.”

“Carl?” I say.

“Keep going. All night if we gotta. If I’d kept my damned eyes open, she wouldn'’t ever have got took.”

“Forget that. You don'’t know that. Let’s head back to the airport and fill her up, Major.”

McDavitt starts to bank the chopper, but Kelly says, “Hold up. I’'ve got something on the road.”

“What is it?”

“Two legs, foot-mobile. Can you circle, Major?”

McDavitt takes us into a slow revolution of the bright white human form on Kelly’s screen.

“Looks female to me,” Kelly says. “We’re in Bumfuck, Egypt, too. Let’s set down and check it out.”

McDavitt descends rapidly, then touches the cyclic and flares at the last moment. As we settle gently onto the road, he puts the throttle into flight idle to conserve fuel.

“Where’d she go?” asks Carl. “Did she run?”

“There,” says McDavitt, pointing left of the cockpit. “She’s running!”

“I'’ll get her,” says Kelly, opening the side door and leaping down to the pavement. I'm still trying to get my harness off when Kelly climbs back into the cockpit, shaking his head.

“Who was it?” I ask.

“A drunk. Black woman, about sixty-five. I offered her a ride, but she told me to get the hell off her driveway. She thought we were a UFO until I caught up to her.”

Carl settles back in his seat, obviously demoralized.

“Let’s take this bird back to the barn and gas up,” Kelly says. “Caitlin’s still out there somewhere.”

I'm expecting the chopper to rise and tilt forward, but we don'’t move. Then I see McDavitt holding his headset tight against his ear. “Ten-four,” he says in an angry voice. “On my way.”

“Who was that?” Kelly asks.

“The sheriff of Lusahatcha County. We just lost our helicopter.”

“How come?” Carl asks, leaning forward again. “What does Billy Ray need with the chopper this time of night?”

“It’s not that. The guy from that hunting camp saw the insignia on our fuselage and called the sheriff’s department, screaming bloody murder.”

“Goddamn it,” Carl mutters.

McDavitt turns in his seat and looks back at me with genuine regret. “I'm sorry, Penn. We can probably get another chopper, but this is the only FLIR unit between Baton Rouge and Jackson.”

“It’s okay. It was a long shot anyway.”

The JetRanger rises on a cushion of air, then reaches translational lift. The nose tilts forward and we head into the darkness. As I look to the horizon, battling airsickness once more, something Kelly said pings back into my mind.

Let’s take this bird back to the barn.

…For the life of me, I don'’t know why, but I keep hearing the phrase, even in my semicoma of nausea and depression.

And suddenly I know why: The term

bird

doesn’'t remind me of helicopters, but of a young man I never met in life. Ben Li. A computer genius who told Tim Jessup to “ask the birds” about his insurance policy. What I don'’t understand is why, if Li had a cache of sensitive data, he didn't use it to save his life when Sands and Quinn began to torture him. If I can answer that question, maybe I can find what no one else has been able to: something valuable enough—or dangerous enough—to purchase Caitlin’s freedom.