Then as they rounded a bend in the stream that twisted behind a bluff of earth and pines, he saw three armed men in fatigues.
He dropped Waxman to the ground and drew his gun in the space between one heartbeat and the next. Clare dived over Waxman as he crouched deep into a firing stance. “Drop your weapons,” he roared.
The three men paused from where they had been toiling uphill and stared at him. They didn’t toss down their weapons, just stood in a ragged line, curious, relaxed. One of them had his arms akimbo and another one wiped his forehead.
“Hey,” the man with his hands on his hips said. “We’re not—”
“Police!” Russ yelled. “Put your weapons down now!” He tightened his finger slightly and a round fell into the firing chamber with an audible snick.
“Holy crap,” one of the men said. “That’s a real gun.” All three threw their weapons into the ferns. They glanced at one another and raised their hands. The man who had spoken before said, “If we’re trespassing, we’re sorry.”
“We had the landowner’s permission to be on the property,” a man behind him said.
Russ lowered his gun and relaxed his stance. “Who the hell are you?”
They glanced at one another. “Um. We’re from BancNorth,” their apparent leader said. “We’re part of a paintball team.”
From the corner of his eye, he could see Clare clamber off Waxman’s half-hidden form.
“Our base camp called us maybe twenty minutes ago. Someone had reported a small aircraft going down, near our position. We decided to check it out.”
“They know where we are,” the man behind him said. “They’re sending in search and rescue teams and rangers right now.” The rest remained unspoken: So if you kill us, you won’t get away with it.
Russ was suddenly aware that he must look like an extra in Deliverance. He holstered his gun and stepped forward. “Please, put your hands down. Sorry I scared you. I’m Chief Van Alstyne, of the Millers Kill Police Department.” He thumbed back toward Clare. “This is, um, the pilot of the aircraft you’re looking for. We were transporting a badly injured man when our helicopter went down. We could use some help.”
The three bankers looked at one another. He could see the excitement crackle between them as they realized they were on the scene of a real live emergency. “Sure,” their leader said.
As they drew near, Russ could see their fatigues were streaked with dried paint. One of them had on an outfit so new, there were fold lines faintly visible on his shirt. They had the thickening waists and excellent teeth of successful forty-year-old businessmen. That he had mistaken them for soldiers was clear evidence that his in-country reflexes were running amok.
“Do you guys have a topo map I can use to figure out where we are?” he said.
“Yeah, but you may as well do it the easy way,” said one, a pale man whose cheeks were blotchy red from the heat. He fished out something the size of a glasses case and handed it to Russ. “GPS. Hooks us up to the satellite system and tells us the exact coordinates of where we are. You can zoom in and out on the map here.” He pointed to buttons along the edge of the device.
“You know,” said their leader as Russ switched it on, “that’s cheating.”
“I’m not using it during the exercise,” the pale man said. “It’s just in case we get lost.”
Russ looked at the blinking spot on the map and handed the thing to Clare. She glanced up at him. “This is the Five Mile Road,” she said. “We’re no more than a couple of miles away from the Stuyvesant Inn.” She started to laugh. The paintball team looked at her.
“Can we use those walkie-talkies to get your base camp to relay a message for us?” Russ asked.
“You could, I guess,” the leader said. “But it’d be a lot quicker using a phone.” All three fished into their commodious pants pockets and held out cell phones.
Clare laughed even harder.
Russ made a few phone calls while she calmed down enough to cobble together a better way of carrying Waxman. He watched the guys from the paintball team search for sturdy branches long enough to serve as crossbars as he confirmed the Millers Kill Emergency Department would send an ambulance to the Stuyvesant Inn. As the men worked the poles through the webbing, Russ briefed Noble Entwhistle, who was holding down the fort at the station house, on the situation. By the time he had called the volunteer fire department and warned them about the fuel explosion, the three bankers and Clare had shouldered the crossbars like native bearers in an old movie, with Waxman swinging in the middle like a bagged tiger.
“Okay, let’s go,” Russ said, closing the cell phone and returning it to its owner. “If we follow this stream, it’ll empty into a pasture just above the Stuyvesant Inn’s land. We’ll just need to follow the cow fence at that point. I’m thinking it’ll be maybe a half-hour walk. The hospital’s sending an ambulance to meet us there. Clare, let me take that for you.”
She shook her head. “The best way to do this, since we’ve got an extra man, is to rotate.”
“Okay, five minute’s rotation.” He glanced at the bankers, who quivered with suppressed excitement. “Fall in,” he said. “March!” Clare cast him a sidelong look, but the other three sprang to it like retrievers on the scent.
By the time Russ had taken his turn lugging the unconscious geologist and then rotated out again, they were clearing the woods and entering the upper pasture. They lifted Waxman bodily over the barbed-wire fence and struck off down the fence line, their path impeded by nothing more than the occasional large rock or cow patty. Within ten minutes, Russ spotted the inn’s mauve-and-turquoise exterior, and he realized he hadn’t properly appreciated that beautiful paint job before.
The group crossed over the fence a second time and headed across the rolling meadow toward the inn. He heard a chorus of high-pitched, frantic barks as they approached, and he thought he might get down and kiss every one of those mop head–size dogs. And when Stephen Obrowski and Ron Handler appeared at the back door, waving and hallooing, it felt as good as seeing his own men greeting him from the squad room at the station house.
They lugged Waxman around to the front of the inn, where Karl and Annie, two of the regular Millers Kill EMS team, were waiting to drive him to the Glens Falls Hospital.
“What’n the blue blazes happened to him?” Karl asked while Annie checked his vitals.
“He fell off a cliff,” Clare said.
“Then he crashed in a helicopter,” Russ added.
“Sounds like a bad comedy sketch,” the ambulance driver said. “You sure a marching band and a steamroller didn’t go over him, too?”
Standing beneath the shade of the big maple, watching them pull away with Waxman, Russ was still shaking his head. “I can’t believe that guy has survived to this point,” he said to Clare. “Maybe there is something to this God thing of yours after all.”
Up on the porch, the paintball–playing bankers were regaling Obrowski and Handler with the exciting tale of their adventures. The younger man was ushering them in through the double doors. “Chief, come on in,” Obrowski said. “It’s too hot to stay outside. We’ve got fresh lemonade.”
Russ shook his head. “I’ve got a squad car coming for me,” he said. “I’d better wait for it here.”
“Reverend Fergusson?”
“I think I’ll stay out here with the chief. You’d just have to burn any furniture I sit on anyway.” She plucked at her clothes. “I would surely appreciate some of that lemonade, though.”
“Coming right up.”
She plodded up the porch steps and collapsed into one of the wicker chairs. Russ followed her, dropping the backpack to the floor before sitting down. Beyond the shady maples and the thin gray road, the valley rolled away in pastures and cornfields and distant farms, a crazy-quilt landscape stitched by rocky outcroppings, steep rises, and stony brooks. The valley shimmered in the heat, oddly one-dimensional under the colorless sky, and for a moment Russ felt that he was in a dream, that the wicker furniture and the wooden floor and the far-off farms would disappear with a shake of his shoulder and he would be back in the green leaves, looking for death over every nameless, numbered hill.