“Looks like someone shot him from behind,” Griffiths remarked, as though this wasn’t obvious.
“From about a foot away,” Quinlan added.
Then they heard the siren of the first backup team to arrive, and returned to the others. Lorne Fowler was back. He’d found a body too, on the far side of the clearing. This one had been shot in the chest, just like the guy down by the pier.
An hour later, with overwhelming force on their side and all the equipment and backup they needed, they still hadn’t found the shooter. The cleared area around the burned-out hall had been searched meticulously, as well as all the smaller buildings that had survived the blaze. They had located the source of the unnerving moans, a girl in her teens with a broken leg and severe burns lying in the dirt to one side of the charred hall. She was airlifted to the hospital in Bellingham by medevac helicopter along with another woman and a man, both of them suffering from third-degree burns.
Other than that, the search yielded only corpses. Some had been hauled from the wreckage of the hall, burned beyond recognition. Others were scattered outside the doorway, apparently shot down as they had tried to flee.
None of the survivors was in a condition to fire a gun, and no weapons were found anywhere near them. The conclusion was obvious. The person who had loosed off those shots after Griffiths’s warning had slipped away into the woods and was still at large. It was impossible to search the whole island until daybreak, but the sheriff wasn’t worried about the delay. Members of the SWAT team had secured the perimeter of the clearing, preventing any further threat to the safety of the law enforcement personnel on the ground, and there was no place the guy could go. Let him shiver alone in the dark. They’d pick him up the next day at their leisure.
There might well be more bodies in the burned wreckage of the hall, but that too could wait. Helicopters cost money, and the taxpayers of the county were going to get a stiff enough bill for the night’s operation as it was. Griffiths had the site sealed off with tape, and arranged for the loan of a set of mounted floodlights and a generator from the state. The Coast Guard agreed to provide a vessel with sleeping accommodation and communications facilities. Everyone was pulling together, the way they always did when things got tough. Griffiths was just beginning to think he might get to bed that night after all when one of the SWAT personnel called in to report intruders.
“Is he armed?” asked Griffiths.
“One of them is.”
“How many are there?”
“Two. No, wait…”
Joe Quinlan stood beside the sheriff, staring starkly up at the helicopter spraying light like some deadly defoliant.
“Use your discretion,” Griffiths told the SWAT man curtly.
Quinlan was peering toward the edge of the clearing, beyond the water tank on its metal trestle, his eyes narrowed. The helicopter blades whopped monotonously overhead. Then he started to run.
“Hold your fire!” shouted Griffiths into the radio. “One of our guys is …”
He broke off. What the fuck was Quinlan doing? Sprinting up the trail as if his life depended on it, toward the figures who had emerged from the woods. He reached them, turned and walked with them down the trail.
“Joe’s with them,” Griffiths told the men scattered around the clearing. “Hold your fire.”
The policemen waited, looking toward the three figures moving toward them. No, four. A child had detached itself from the grasp of one of the adults and was walking between them, holding their hands. Joe Quinlan walked to the right of the group, a little apart. They came steadily forward down the trail into the scorching circle of light, staring at the semicircle of armed men, who stared back.
22
It was dark outside when we were awakened by a loud roaring noise, and a lurid glare which made our shadows revolve like a carousel. A moment later it had gone, leaving us in the dark. I got the automatic rifle I’d taken from Sam and crawled outside. I could hear a strong rhythmic pulsing, but nothing was visible from where I was standing. It took me several minutes to clamber back up the chute of fallen earth to the path, and from there to the top of the largest rock mass I could find.
At the eastern end of the island, a blinding glare shone down from the sky, an inverted wedge of brilliant light against which the tips of the trees between stood out stark and black. This also seemed to be the source of the noise. It was much louder here, a throbbing mechanical racket that came and went at intervals, ebbing and flowing.
“What’s happening?”
A figure had appeared in the darkness below. I recognized Andrea’s voice.
“It’s a helicopter! It must be the police. Get David!”
It seemed to take forever to get them both up the slope to the path. I had been astonished at how well David had coped with the extraordinary events of the day, but I knew that there would be a payback. Unfortunately he chose this moment to throw a major fit, screaming his head off and trying to wrestle himself away from both Andrea and me. Since her arm was out of action, and the terrain had been difficult to negotiate even in broad daylight, the timing could hardly have been worse.
I was terrified that the helicopter might swirl off into the night at any minute, its reconnaissance mission completed. Presumably someone must have been alarmed by the sound of gunfire and called the police, but I had no way of knowing what the situation was by now. Maybe Sam and Mark had patched things up, as Andrea had predicted they would, and would put on a united front to get rid of the cops. A few people smiling and waving might convince the helicopter crew that it had been a false alarm. If they flew off, we would be stranded there at the mercy of whoever had gained the upper hand.
So it was with increasing desperation that I hauled David and then Andrea up to the path, picked the boy up and started to run as fast as I could up the steep hillside. Everything looked different in the dark, but the knowledge I had gained of the island stood me in good stead and I was able to find the trail meandering through the woods to the clearing. I put David down. It was totally dark here, all light soaked up by the tall trees to either side. We tripped continually over roots and outcrops of rock. I fell heavily once, gashing my forehead on the branch of a tree and almost putting my eye out. I didn’t even feel the pain. Nothing seemed to matter except reaching the clearing before the helicopter abandoned us to our fate.
It was only when I at last emerged from the woods into the felled area above the compound that I realized that my panic had been unnecessary. As well as the helicopter hovering fifty feet above, there was a substantial force of uniformed men on the ground. The clearing looked bigger than I remembered it, more open and raw. It took me a moment to figure out why. The hall had completely disappeared. In its place lay a heap of ash and smoldering timbers.
“We’re safe!” I told Andrea, and kissed her impulsively.
“Dad?” said David. “Who’s that funny-looking man?”
I turned to look, and my elation vanished. A man in a blue uniform was crouched in firing position about twenty feet away, a large gun trained on us. For a moment I thought it was Mark. Then the man spoke into a walkie-talkie, and I realized that it was some kind of police sharpshooter.
“Throw down the gun!” someone shouted.
It was a man running up the trail toward us. It occurred to me for the first time that my sudden appearance, covered in blood and holding an automatic rifle, might be misconstrued. I tossed the rifle aside and picked up David. The running man reached us. He wasn’t in a uniform and I had never seen him before.