Wells knew the remark was meant as an insult, but he shrugged it off. “We’ve got good reason to believe he was at the base in Arkansas.”
“So have we finally eliminated him this time?”
“With McCracken there are no guarantees. But even if he did manage to survive, there is nothing he can do that can possibly hurt us now. Without the rest of the rebels, he is alone.”
“He has been alone from the beginning, Wells.”
“Now, though, he is up against our island fortress, assuming he’s even aware of it. An army couldn’t penetrate its walls.”
Dolorman’s eyes dug into Wells’s single good one. “Your men checked this base in Arkansas thoroughly?”
“Enough to find no survivors.”
Dolorman turned to Verasco. “And everything is arranged at the airport?”
“I’ve bumped the schedule up a bit,” Verasco reported. “It seems Maine is going to be blessed with a white Christmas. There’s a blizzard in the forecast.”
The figure sat in the grove as the wind whipped snow from the sagging branches above him. He dropped a huge hand into a pouch worn on his belt and came out with a fistful of feed. He waited. Barely a minute later the first of the winter birds dropped down, followed swiftly by a pair of others. As always, they moved toward him tentatively, at last settling just close enough to peck the feed from his outstretched palm.
Birds had always been able to tell him much. On the day he had stepped into his greatest personal horror of the hell-fire, they had shown him the fruitless agony of death without reason, of women and children staggering with their insides sliding through hands cupped at their midsections and of men continuing to fire just for pleasure. He had not rested until those responsible were found. The birds would not have forgiven him otherwise, nor the souls of the tortured dead he had happened upon first. Discovering them made the souls his responsibility and the balance would be forever off if he failed them.
Today, though, the birds told him nothing. What was coming was beyond them, beyond all perhaps, its shape great enough to envelop everything at once so that even the birds wouldn’t feel the change. But nothing was ever shown to him without reason. He understood now that it would be left to another to lead him to the source of the shape. The past and present were swirling together, intermixing until the lines of distinction he had come here to forge became lost. He smiled, certain now who the other would be.
The birds emptied his hand without breaking flesh and the figure reached into his pouch for a fresh batch.
Part Five
Horse Neck Island
Christmas Eve and Christmas
Chapter 27
“You’re fuckin’ nuts, pal!” the pilot screamed again. “You know that?”
“I’ve been accused of it before,” McCracken told him. “I want one more look at that island, a closer one.”
“The winds over that water will rip us apart. No way. Not for all the money you can whip out of that pocket of yours.”
“Just make one more run up the shoreline. For an extra hundred.”
The pilot hesitated only briefly. “This is the last one.”
And the small plane banked again.
Blaine sat in the copilot’s seat. Sandy huddled in a third chair with her arms wrapped tightly over herself. The temperature was barely out of single digits and the storm had started to intensify savagely when they neared the coast. The snow was piling up in huge drifts. The water stood out dark against the whiteness.
“Satisfied?” the pilot asked.
Blaine looked away from Horse Neck Island and nodded. “There’s a small airfield about twenty-five miles north of here near a town called Stickney Corner. I want you to put down there.”
“No fuckin’ way, pal! This has gone far enough. I’m bringing this junk heap down at home in Portsmouth and putting her to bed. And I don’t care what you say or—”
McCracken didn’t say a word, didn’t even bother tempting the pilot with more money. He just froze him with a stare colder than the air outside the windshield.
“You’ll have to direct me,” the pilot relented.
“No problem.”
The plane headed north.
Blaine had pulled Sandy from the rubble of Terrell’s Arkansas headquarters a little before six that morning. Over two hours of walking and hitchhiking had brought them to Little Rock Airport, where they were able to book a nonstop to Boston. Blaine used his government issued credit card to get plenty of cash from an automatic dispenser in Logan Airport. It was typical, he reflected, that the CIA should wipe his existence off the books but forget to cancel his credit card. With some of the cash he bought winter coats and a change of clothes for himself and Sandy in airport shops, where he also learned that the entire New England coast had been put under a winter storm watch.
It was all rain when they left Boston, a drenching winter downpour. Blaine rented a car and started northward with a still-shaken Sandy in the passenger seat. By northern Massachusetts the rain had frozen to sleet, and before they reached the New Hampshire border, snow had taken over. There were already two inches on the ground, with the intensity increasing by the minute. Road crews struggled to keep up with the mess, but it was rapidly becoming too much for them. Blaine was forced to cut his speed back to forty-five, then forty, hands twitching nervously on the wheel. At this rate they might never reach the Muscongus Bay area in time to pull off what he was planning.
He had spent the flight east going over the bloodied map lifted from Terrell’s pocket. Horse Neck Island was located in the bay due east of Port Clyde. It was a small island close to an isolated peninsula that jutted out into the water. The island’s shape was indeed erratic and its coastline looked to be a dangerous mix of crags and crosscurrents. Even during daylight and in the best of weather, approach would be difficult. And Blaine would be going in at night into the teeth of a killer blizzard.
In the sketch the island was dominated by the fortress Terrell had spoken of. It was a spacious mansion built with its back to a steep, low mountain and its other three sides enclosed by a high stucco wall. A courtyard lay between the wall and the mansion, lots of ground to cover in an open assault. In this weather, and given the limitations of time, approach over the mountain was not feasible. That left getting into the complex over the wall. There would be lots of guards beyond the wall, on it, and within the courtyard itself. If even one of them saw him or suspected something and contacted the people inside the mansion, Blaine’s plan would be destroyed. Luckily, though, the weather would keep patrol boats from the shoreline and that should assure him a free approach.
If he made it safely past the rocks.
If he found a boat to begin with.
Blaine and Sandy had arrived at the private airstrip in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, to find their pilot closing up shop. An absurd sum of money waved in his face led to his acceptance of the risk involved in making a run up the Maine coastline, specifically to an area twenty miles northeast of Boothbay Harbor. The pilot started complaining as soon as they were airborne, and Blaine was forced to raise his fee at regular intervals just to keep him quiet.
Now he would drop them at a small airfield near Stickney Corner, because getting there was the key element of Blaine’s plan. He could not possibly hope to take Horse Neck Island alone. He needed help.
There was help available in the woods around Stickney Corner.
Blaine had exchanged few words with Sandy Lister through the duration of the trip. She seemed tense around him, uneasy, not very trusting in spite of the fact that he had saved her life.