And then there was John Finley, tall, skinny, with sandy hair and shit for brains. Finley was a California surf boy who had his cocaine jones and his ass busted in the LA County jail. He’d found religion for comfort and the Aryan Brotherhood for protection and joined the True Christian Identity Church shortly after his release. Carter had shipped him out to Hansen’s ranch to keep his nose clean.
The Johnson brothers were bespectacled, benighted behemoths. Neal supposed they had first names other than Big and Little, but he never heard them. And Jory was Hitler’s poster boy.
There were a couple of others Neal didn’t have a line on yet, but they were pretty much the same type-men who saw an America that never existed slipping away from them, whose childhood horrors, or adult disappointments, or desperate need for pride had been transformed into a hatred for ethnic scapegoats.
Neal had all sorts of cheap psychoanalysis and snotty Freudian concepts to attach to his new playmates, but basically he thought they were scum. These were the men Bob Hansen had brought in to work his place, to turn a model ranch into a survivalist hovel.
Well, that’s his problem, Neal thought. I have my own. Come on, Bob, it’s dark enough. Let’s get going.
It was a night training exercise, because, as Bob Hansen had joked, “that’s when night fighters fight.”
“One technique you can use,” Hansen said, “is to leave out some fried chicken, and when the nigger smells it, he’ll smile. Don’t fire until you see the whites of his teeth.”
The small group gathered at the base of the spur chuckled. Neal joined in the laughter, but his stomach was fluttering.
Enough with the jokes, he thought. Let’s get on with it.
“Seriously,” Hansen continued, sounding like a fascist nightclub comic, “we’re very likely to do a lot of night fighting during the End Time. And even sooner, when we begin the shooting war against ZOG, which should be soon now, we’ll favor night attacks to make up for our lack of numbers. We must learn to be swift, silent, and lethal. So no firearms tonight, gentlemen. Just hand-to-hand combat.”
They broke up into two teams for a nocturnal, violent version of hide-and-seek. Neal hoped that his luck would hold out long enough to put him on the “hide” side, which would make what he had to do a whole lot easier.
The scenario was that a gang of marauding “mud people” were planning to attack the compound to get its food. The defenders would launch a surprise nighttime spoiling raid to scatter the marauders and track them down one by one.
Strekker said he would lead the defender’s team.
“I’ll be a nigger,” Neal volunteered.
“Figures,” Strekker commented.
“See you up there,” Neal said, pointing to the spur.
“Count on it,” Strekker answered.
You don’t know, Neal thought, just how much I’m counting on it, Cal.
Hansen made the rest of the assignments. Neal, Jory, Dave, and Craig made up the marauding band of blacks. Hansen, Strekker, Finley, Carlisle, and Big and Little Johnson were going to track them down and “kill” them.
“You have a ten-minute start,” Hansen said. “Make sure you spread out.”
You ain’t just whistlin’ Dixie, Neal thought as he took off at a dead run. I have to put as much space between me and everybody as I can in those ten minutes. Space equals time, and I’m going to need time.
He sprinted across the sagebrush toward the spur until he figured that no one could spot his silhouette. Then he turned right, running parallel to the base of the mountain. He trotted until he found a narrow ravine and dropped down into it. He hoped he had moved enough south to take him out of the main path of the exercise. He crawled out of his denim jacket and baggy canvas pants. Underneath he was wearing a black turtleneck and black jeans. He pulled a tin of black, water-based makeup out of his pocket and spread it over his face and hands. He put a black stocking over his face and then pulled a black watch cap over his head. He took two thin steel cables, each about two feet long, and tied them around his waist. Then he laid flat on the ground and waited.
He thought about chickening out, creeping back to his cabin and forgetting the whole thing. Then he thought about Anne Kelley and Cody and decided to go through with it.
He let a full ten minutes pass before he got up into a crouch and headed west toward the compound. He was hoping that no one would figure him to be this far south, and certainly not to be headed toward, instead of away from, his pursuers. He knew that Strekker was running like a greyhound toward the spur to find him and dispatch him in the most painful acceptable manner.
It took him twenty minutes to make it to the compound fence.
Graham, I wish you were here, he thought. I’m more than a little rusty and could use some coaching. Oh, well, it’s no different from breaking into a car lot or a warehouse. Except that if anyone’s home here, I’m likely to catch a bullet in the chest while I’m sprawled out on the fence.
He wrapped the denim jacket around his waist and tied up the sleeves at his waist. Then he jumped onto the fence, dug a toe into the space between the links, and began to haul himself up. He was sweating not so much from the exertion as from the thought that a searchlight might hit him at any moment, followed shortly by a large-caliber, high-velocity bullet.
He made it to the top of the fence and paused to catch his breath, get a good toehold, and think about the next step. Then he untied the jacket and laid it over the top of the two-strand barbed wire. He took one of the cables from around his waist and looped it underneath the bottom strand, pulled it tight, and tied it off on top. He did the same with the other cable on the other end of the jacket.
When the wire was pulled up tight under the jacket, he took another deep breath and swung his left foot over the top of the jacket, pivoted his hips, and planted the tip of his left foot into a space on the inside of the chain link fence. Then he lifted his right foot over, balanced himself with his hands on the jacket, and pulled himself over the top.
He paused for a second to listen. He didn’t hear any footsteps, or barking dogs, or the sound of a rifle bolt.
Holding himself to the fence with his left hand, he reached up, untied the cables, dropped them, pulled the jacket off, and let it fall to the ground. Then he lowered himself another couple of feet down the fence, listened again, pushed off with his hands, and dropped to the ground. He landed perfectly on the balls of his feet, then fell over backward and hit the ground with his butt.
Rusty, he thought. Definitely rusty. But not bad.
He was still congratulating himself when he heard a deep growl.
It was a Doberman, of course. It was advancing slowly in a low crouch, the hair on its spine standing up, its fangs bared, tiny speckles of spit dripping from its mouth.
Neal muttered, “You could have had the decency to growl while I was on the outside of the fence.”
But it wasn’t a guard dog, Neal realized-guard dogs are trained to bark. It was an attack dog, which was trained to… well, attack.
And this one had ambushed him.
The dog took another careful step forward. It was sizing him up and quickly arriving at the conclusion that this particular human wouldn’t be much of a problem. It showed even more fang and boosted the volume on the growl.
It would leap for his throat at any moment.
There’s only one thing to do, Neal thought.
Panic.
Turn and run for the fence and hope you can climb high enough before Hans here rips into your leg, pulls you backward off the fence, and tears your throat out of your neck.
Panic.
No, no, no, no, no. Think. Surely Graham must have covered this subject in one of his endless lectures. He had covered everything else. Barbed wire, alarm systems… dogs.
What you have to do, Neal, is pretty goddamn weird and presents an enormous initial risk… What you do is…