“Yes, sir.”
Paul looked beyond the helicopter. He could see the windows — most of them with light behind them — on the second and third floors of the main building at the end of the storage yard. If he could see the windows, anyone who happened to glance out might be able to see him, in turn, despite the darkness. He hustled the pilot closer to the helicopter, where they were pretty much hidden from the main building.
Sam joined them and said, “What’s your name?”
“Malcolm Spencer.”
“You are the pilot?”
“Yes. I am.”
“Where’s Leonard Dawson?”
“In the mill,” Spencer said.
“Which building?”
“The biggest one.”
“Which floor? First, second, or third?”
“First floor. There’s a sort of public sales area with—”
“And Ernst Klinger,” Sam said. “Where’s he?”
“He’s in Black River,” Spencer said.
“That can’t be right.”
“Sir?”
“You mean he’s in town?” Paul asked.
“That’s right.”
Paul and Sam glanced at each other.
“Something wrong?” the pilot asked. He seemed to be concerned about them.
“You’re lying,” Paul said.
Surprised, Spencer said, “No, sir.”
“I am the key,” Paul said.
“I am the lock,” Spencer said.
“Where’s Klinger?”
“He’s in Black River.”
Paul stared at Sam. “Christ!”
To the pilot, Sam said, “You took Klinger and Dawson to the logging camp, didn’t you? And then brought them to the mill?”
“No. Just Mr. Dawson. General Klinger went to town from the camp.”
“When?”
“A couple of minutes after we got there,” Spencer said. He smiled uncertainly. His teeth seemed even more radiant than his eyes.
“How did he go? Not in the chopper?”
“No, sir. He took a car.”
“Why—”
Before he could get out more than one word of the question, Sam screamed and stumbled forward against the helicopter.
In the same instant, the night silence was split open by a single rifle shot.
Instinctively, Paul dropped to the ground and rolled.
A bullet cracked into the pavement where he’d just been, ricocheted into the darkness.
A second bullet smashed the macadam on the other side of him, bracketing him.
He rolled onto his back and sat up. He saw the rifleman at once: down on one knee in a sportsman’s pose, thirty feet away at the edge of the woods. On the drive from town, Paul had reloaded the Combat Magnum; now he held it with both hands and squeezed off five quick shots.
All of them missed the mark.
However, the sharp barking of the revolver and the deadly whine of all those bullets skipping across the pavement apparently unnerved the man with the rifle. Instead of trying to finish what he had begun, he stood and ran.
Paul scrambled to his feet, took a few steps after him and fired once more.
Untouched, the rifleman headed away in a big loop that would take him back to the mill complex.
“Sam?”
“Here.”
He could barely see Sam — dark clothes against the macadam — and was thankful for the older man’s telltale white hair and beard. “You were hit.”
“In the leg.”
Paul started toward him. “How bad?”
“Flesh wound,” Sam said. “That was Dawson. Get after him, for God’s sake.”
“But if you’re hurt—”
“I’ll be fine. Malcolm can make a tourniquet. Now get after him, dammit!”
Paul ran. At the end of the parking area he passed the rifle: it was on the ground; Dawson had either dropped it by accident and had been too frightened to stop and retrieve it — or he had discarded it in panic. Still running, Paul fished in his pocket with one hand for the extra bullets he was carrying.
The wooden tower stairs creaked under Klinger’s weight. He paused and counted slowly to thirty before going up three more steps and pausing again. If he climbed too fast, the woman and the girl would know that he was coming. And if they were ready and waiting for him — well, he would be committing suicide when he walked onto the belfry platform. He hoped that, by waiting for thirty seconds or as much as a minute between brief advances, he could make them think that the creaking stairs were only settling noises or a product of the wind.
He went up three more steps.
Ahead, Dawson disappeared around a corner of the mill.
When he reached the same comer a moment later, Paul stopped and studied the north work yard: huge stacks of logs that had been piled up to feed the mill during the long winter; several pieces of heavy equipment; a couple of lumber trucks; a conveyor belt running on an inclined ramp from the mill to the maw of a big furnace where sawdust and scrap wood were incinerated… There were simply too many places out there in which Dawson could hide and wait for him.
He turned away from the north yard and went to the door in the west wall of the building, back the way he had come, thirty feet from the corner. It wasn’t locked.
He stepped into a short, well-lighted corridor. The enormous processing room lay at the end of it: the bull chain leading from the mill pond, up feeding shoots, into the building; then a cross-cut saw, a log deck, the carriage that moved logs into the waiting blades that would make lumber of them, the giant band saw, edging machine, trimmer saws, dip tank, grading ramp, the green chain, and then the storage racks… He remembered all of those terms from a tour that the manager had given Rya and Mark two summers ago. In the processing room the fluorescent strip lights were burning, but none of the machines was working; there were no men tending them. To his right was a washroom, to his left a set of stairs.
Taking the steps two at a time for four flights — the first level was two floors high in order to accommodate the machines in it — he came out in the second-floor hallway. He stopped to think, then went to the fifth office on the left.
The door was locked.
He kicked it twice.
The lock held.
There was a glass case bolted to the corridor wall. It contained a fire extinguisher and an ax.
He jammed the revolver in his belt, opened the front of the case, and took out the ax. He used the flat head of it to batter the knob from the office door. When the knob fell off, the cheap latch snapped. He dropped the ax, pushed open the ruined door, and went inside.
The office was dark. He didn’t switch on any lights because he didn’t want to reveal his position. He closed the door to the hall so that he would not be silhouetted by the pale light that spilled in.
The windows in the north wall of the office opened above the first-floor terrace. He slid one of them up, slipped through it, and stepped onto the tar-papered terrace roof.
The wind buffeted him.
He took the Combat Magnum from his belt.
If Dawson was hiding anywhere in the north yard, this was the best vantage point from which to spot him.
The darkness offered Dawson good protection, for none of the lights was on in the yard.
He could have turned them on, of course. But he didn’t know where to find the switches, and he didn’t want to waste a lot of time looking for them.
The only thing that moved out there was the clattering conveyor belt that rolled continuously up the inclined ramp to the scrap furnace. It should have been shut down with the rest of the equipment, but it had been overlooked. The belt came out of the building directly beneath him and sloped to a high point twenty feet above the ground. It met the furnace door forty yards away. Because the cone-shaped furnace — thirty feet in diameter at the base, ten feet in diameter at the top; forty feet high — was primed by a gas flame, the fire in it was never out unless the mill foreman ordered it extinguished. Even now, when the belt had no fuel for it, the furnace roared. Judging by the intensity of the flames leaping beyond the open door, however, several hundred pounds of the day’s input — conveyed out of the mill before Dawson had halted operations — had yet to be fully consumed.