Baum’s pink face had brightened into a full-blown apple red during Dalton’s short, sharp rebuke, delivered in a flat and businesslike tone that lacked for nothing in force and conviction. When it was over, the atmosphere in the car was taut and electric.
“Nicky…?” said Dalton, clearly waiting.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Fremont,” said Baum, in a strangled tone. “I didn’t know your background. I sincerely apologize.”
“So do I,” said Delroy Suarez.
“You didn’t insult him,” said Baum. “I did.”
“I was apologizing for my choice of partners,” said Suarez, smiling at Baum. “Excuse Nicky, Mr. Fremont. He’s a tad insecure meeting new people on account of his mother was a lowly ungulate and he’s afraid people will hold it against him. I keep telling him that these sorts of bestial couplings happen all the time in Pennsylvania—”
“Shut up, Del,” said Baum. “Micah, this guy Mr. Fremont has been telling us about, this the same guy we’re going to see right now?”
“Yes.”
“And he was one of… he was company too?”
“Yes. He was a member of Willard’s Echelon unit.”
“And this is true, about him wrapping this Kearney guy up in a fresh deer hide and leaving him to get eaten alive by maggots?”
“That isn’t the kind of thing a healthy mind makes up.”
“Where would a guy even get an idea like that?”
“Plains Indian trick. The Comanches did it all the time.”
“This Gibson guy’s a Comanche?”
“No. But he’s studying real hard to become one.”
“The guy’s fucking insane,” said Suarez. “What’s his story?”
Dalton laid out what they knew — or hoped they knew — about Pershing Gibson’s struggle with the IRS, about his slow descent into madness, about Al Runciman’s death, last Friday evening’s attack on Crucio Churriga in Butte, and the earlier attempts on Fremont’s life up in northern Idaho. The two men listened intently, exchanging only a few sidelong glances, until Dalton got around to the death of Porter Naumann and his family.
“I knew Porter Naumann by reputation,” said Baum. “It’s hard to believe that anyone, even an ex-Marine Recon, could get to him.”
“Well it happened,” said Dalton.
“So why is this guy killing guys from his own unit?”
“We haven’t a freaking clue,” said Dalton.
“Mr. Fremont—” Suarez began.
“Call me Willard.”
“Did your unit have any contact with Porter Naumann?”
“Not as far as I know.”
“Then why’d this guy go all the way to Italy to kill him?”
“That’s why you’re here,” said Dalton. “We’re going to take him alive and then we’ll ask him. How’s that sound?”
“Can’t we just call in an air strike?” said Nicky Baum, only half-joking; their assessment of the target’s threat level and operational skills had been cranking up with every new detail.
“No. But we’ll keep it in mind. Show them the map, Willard.”
Fremont pulled a well-thumbed terrain map from the glove compartment and spread it out on the backrest. Both men leaned forward to look at it.
“This here’s the road were on, Highway 14. And here, about thirteen miles west, there’s this little town called Emblem. We turn off there and go south until we cross the Greybull River.”
He traced the route with a tobacco-stained index finger, drawing a line that led out into a huge flat high-desert plain bisected by the meandering course of the Greybull, bounded in the north by a chain of peaks known as Elk Butte and in the south by Sheets Mountain, a solitary volcanic peak that rose five thousand feet off the valley floor. He tapped a point in the middle of a wide flat nowhere about halfway between these two mountains.
“This here’s where Moot’s got his spread. Nearest town is Meeteetse, six miles to the west, and then there’s Worland way off to the southeast. Land around there is hardscrabble, small rocks and sagebrush, and the wind is always blowing in from somewhere, so it gets in your eyes, your gear. Nasty fighting ground. There’s every kind of crawling biting stinging thing you can imagine—”
“I can imagine a whole lot,” said Suarez, who had a deep fear of scorpions. “Any scorpions at all?”
“A few. The little brown ones, mainly. But they only come out after dark. Just don’t kick over a rock without a stick. Also rattlers, sidewinders mainly, and a few copperheads. Now, this—”
He pulled out a drawing he had made, from memory, of the layout of Moot’s ranch, the outbuildings, the type of fence, and everything he could recall of the main house.
“This here’s the basic layout. The main house here, its all on the one floor, but Moot dug a storm cellar under the summer kitchen at the back, which could be a hidey-hole for him, so when we go in, bear that in mind. Two front rooms, dining room and living room, and a third, which is his bedroom. Whole building’s about thirty-foot square—”
“What’s it made of?” asked Baum.
“Cinder block mainly, but he poured gravel in a latex compound into the chambers, so they will stop most long-distance rounds short of a fifty or a big magnum, and the roof’s flat adobe on plate iron, so’s he can catch the rainwater and run it off into a cistern by the rear of the house. Two small windows in each room and he fixed up some two-inch-thick solid-steel shutters — complete with fire slits in a cross shape so he can elevate as well as traverse — to bolt down over all the windows. Place is a right little fort, gentlemen.”
“How about the perimeter alarms?”
“Moot keeps dogs, four of them. Better than any electronic system you can devise. They live in this outbuilding here, far side from the privy, two mongrels, a half-blind mastiff he keeps chained up, but his main dog is a wolf-shepherd cross name of Irene, and she is a serious piece of work. Weighs a hundred pounds, scary-smart, can’t be tricked, won’t take strange meat, can hear a flea fart in a sandstorm, smell a man a mile off, and she can run like the very wind itself. I saw her run down a hare in a fifteen-minute chase. She never gave up until she had her teeth in his guts. She likes to kill, once she’s coursing, and if she gets you on your back she will have your throat out before you can say how do you do.”
Dalton, listening, privately noted that Willard Fremont’s response to the new arrivals was to slide back into his cowboy hillbilly persona, if only out of defensive habit.
“Other than these dogs, Moot had some trip wires laid out at a hundred yards off, all around the area, but these plains get a lot of antelope and the occasional rogue elk, so the trip wires got ignored, as they tended to go off a lot. Mainly this is a low, flat, heavily fortified bunker surrounded by three hundred yards of high-plains desert with very little brush and no man-size trees, and the fellow who lives there is a serious killing hand.”
There was a silence while Baum and Suarez studied the terrain map and Fremont’s detailed sketch. Then Baum, with a tentative look at Suarez and something of the air of a conjurer, reached into his kit bag and pulled out a sheaf of photographs, which he handed across to Fremont with a slightly sheepish air.
“I know this is operationally risky. I tried to make the request look routine. But I got a friend at NRO to e-mail me the most recent overfly shots of this area from the Condor Nine bird—”
“Condor Nine,” said Dalton. “How’d you do that?”
“She’s kind of a personal friend,” he said, blushing.