“There is an hour,” said Micah, pausing to call the memory up complete. “There is an hour wherein a man might be happy all his life, could he but find it.”
“That’s right. That’s very damn right. That yours?”
“No. George Herbert.”
“Walker Bush?” he asked, with some disbelief.
“No. Not that one…”
His voice trailed off then, and in his mind Dalton went far away to a long-ago summer afternoon in Cortona: Fremont let the silence run. The day was dying fast now and long blue shadows were creeping out from the cottonwoods. A few pale stars glittered in a cloudless arc of deep blue. The comfortable silence spooled out until the com set crackled once, and Dalton touched his throat mike.
“Nicky?”
“I’m in, Micah. I’ve got the house in my scope. Nothing moving. No lights. Truck’s right where it was in the satellite shots. No heat signature on the truck. One heat signature in the house but from this angle I can’t say where. I can hear a dog barking but I can’t see him.”
“Del?”
“Just digging in. Okay. I’m set. I’ve got my shot. Let’s go.”
“We’re moving.”
“Come ahead,” said Baum. “I got you in the palm of my hand.”
Dalton signaled to Fremont, who got up into a crouch, his lean face lit by the setting sun, making his right eye gleam like a shard of bottle glass, the left side of his face in darkness. He hadn’t shaved in two days and his hollow cheek was covered with short white stubble. He looked tired and old and Dalton felt a rush of affection for him.
“Willard…”
“Yessir?”
“Why don’t you just stay—”
Fremont’s thin face hardened up and his one sunlit eye glittered.
“Moot Gibson killed my best friend. The man needs to die.”
His hard look softened, and he smiled at Dalton. “Know what a friend of mine named Pascal once said? He said that the sole cause of a man’s unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room. If Moot had managed just that one little thing, sit quiet in his room, then Al would still be alive and Pete would still be running packhorses up to Medicine Wheel and Moot Gibson wouldn’t be going to die today. But he didn’t. So let’s go.”
They had a lot of ground to cross and they crossed it at a flat-out dash, Fremont veering south, heading for the outcrop by the creosote bush, moving well for a man his age, the SAW at the ready, his boots heavy on the stony ground, Dalton running lightly, his eyes searching the terrain as he moved up toward the little collection of buildings. As he closed in on the house, he instinctively tightened up in the expectation of a round singing past his ear followed by the harsh crack of the weapon, but no shot came.
He reached the side of the larger outbuilding and rested for a moment there, sheltered from the fire line of the main house. Through the thin wooden walls of the shed he could hear the sound of a large dog growling and barking. He watched as Fremont, bent low, slipped into cover behind the rocky outcrop, vanishing from sight.
He moved around to the side of the outbuilding and found a small quarter-glass window. He braced himself and smashed the pane with the butt of his Colt. From the interior of the cabin came the hysterical howl of a badly frightened dog, but no rounds whacked through the walls and into his cringing belly.
He risked a quick look and saw a large pen, in the middle of which was chained a large shepherd cross, her muzzle covered with bloody foam, her eyes wide and the whites showing as she howled her fear and her rage at the timbers of the roof.
Around her were the bodies of three other big dogs, all of them horribly torn and bloody. There was nothing else in the shed but a few tools and some sacks of animal feed. He slipped back to the edge of the building and pulled in a long breath, letting it out through his nose, willing himself into stillness. The moment hung there, suspended, and on the chill air he could smell the sharp tang of wood smoke.
A thin blue wisp was rising up from the chimney stack, slipping away on the wind. The setting sun lay full on the front door and the two shuttered windows, a flat shadowless look, giving it an ominous air.
He had a hundred feet of ground to cross and every foot of it was wide open. If Moot Gibson was waiting for Dalton to cross that ground, the chances were very good that Dalton had just begun to count off the last sixty seconds of his life on this earth.
He knew that as soon as Moot fired, Nicky Baum’s Barrett 50 would blow a football-size hole in whatever place the round had come from, but until Dalton moved and until Moot fired, Baum would have nothing to shoot at, and since the whole idea was to try to take Moot Gibson alive, and that first shot could very easily be the one that blew Dalton’s brains out the back of his head, the tactical problems were huge. Dalton understood only too well that he really did not want to try to cross that last fifty feet.
Not at all.
There had to be a better way. Maybe they could try talking him out? Yes. That’s the ticket. It sure as hell worked with Saddam Hussein. Reason with him. Think like the United Nations.
Just ask him real nice if would please pretty please—
Dalton cleared the corner in a convulsive leap and raced across the ground, his eyes fixed on the gun ports, braced to take a round in the head, thinking not in the face not in the face, as combat soldiers often do, cutting cards with death.
He slammed up against the wall beside the heavily barred door, dropped into a crouch with the Colt at the ready, and clicked twice on his com set mike. In a moment Fremont came lurching around the corner with his SAW, grinning at Dalton.
He crossed to the far side of the door and held his hand up, shaped a fist, his face running with sweat.
Dalton nodded, reached up, slapped a shape charge against the upper hinge and another against the lower hinge.
They both turned away as Dalton clicked the trigger: two massive deafening cracks and the door blew into pieces.
Before the smoke had cleared, before the sound had stopped echoing from the distant mountains, they were through the door, Dalton going left with his Colt up, Fremont going right, covering the room with the SAW. They were in.
There was no one there.
“Nicky.”
“I’m here, Micah.”
“We’re in. We’ve cleared the whole house. He’s not here.”
“I see you. Willard says there’s a storm cellar—”
“Already cleared it. The place is empty.”
“Is it mined?”
“If it was, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”
“You want me to come in?”
“No. Hold your position. If you see anyone coming, let us know. Del, you there?”
“I am. Nothing moving in my sector. I might have a scorpion up my pant leg. Other than that, I’m fine. Want me to come in?”
“Yes. Come up. We still have to safe the outbuildings.”
Suarez was with them in forty-five seconds, panting heavily, his lean Latin face gritty with dust.
“You and Willard check out the other buildings for IEDs. And there’s at least one dog alive in that wooden shed there. She’s out of her head and if you have to you put her down.”
“Is it the wolf dog?” asked Fremont.
“Looks like it.”
“That’s Irene,” he said, looking at Delroy Suarez. “I’ll see to her. You check the other building. You going back in there, Micah?”
“Yes.”
“Moot had a thing about his personal effects. If you’re going to turn over his drawers and things, watch out for blades and fishhooks.”