“Yeah. You know about that?”
“That’s how I used to get to the Fergusons when we were kids. I was a trespassin’ little son of a bitch, Marie.”
She laughed in spite of her pain and fear. You never knew where you might find a friend in this world.
“I was always worried I might run across your daddy up there,” he went on. “I was scared to death of that guy.”
“He was a grump, but he was harmless.”
They rode along through the fog, the horses puffing steam from their flaring nostrils. Marie was shivering with cold, and she was grateful for the heat of the animal between her legs.
Dusty dismounted at the northwestern border of the Chatham ranch and used a pair of side cutters to snip the barbed wire fence. “I can still remember when this fence line used to run another couple hundred yards over that-a-way.” He pointed in the direction of the McGuthry ranch.
Marie smiled. “If we survive, I’ll let you move it back to where it was.”
He laughed and pulled the wire back out of the way so it wouldn’t snare the horses’ legs, and they crossed over to pick up the old Indian trail, following it through the rocks just below the foothills toward Marie’s ranch.
Back at the Chatham residence, Oso quickly concluded that Marie wasn’t coming back for him anytime soon. The scent of the house and the man who lived in it were foreign to him, and he was growing increasingly anxious about being alone in the foreign environment. Already missing the familiar comfort of his leather chair, he decided that it was time to leave and got up from the floor near the back door to hunt for a way out.
He caught the scent of fresh air coming from the back hall and followed it to the source at the end of the corridor, where the door to the laundry room stood ajar. He nosed his way inside and stood in the dark, listening. A distant flash of lightning illuminated a half-open window above the washing machine. The screen was down, but that didn’t concern him. He had learned young there wasn’t a screen window or door on earth that could keep him in if he really wanted out. It hadn’t taken Marie or Gil very long to learn that frustrating little fact of life either.
He jumped onto the washing machine and, with his head, pressed against the screen until it bowed outward. Then he gave it a shove, and the screen tore away from the old wooden frame. After that, it was just a matter of shouldering up the sash and leaping out into the fog. He put his nose into the air, but Marie’s scent was undetectable in the mist. That didn’t matter. He knew his way home.
64
Special Agent Spencer Starks was not looking to become a hero. Far from it. To begin with, most heroes wound up dead, and he had no intention of concluding his FBI career as the thirty-seventh Service Martyr in the Hall of Honor. On the other hand, he believed fully in the old dogface axiom that had been drilled into his head during basic training: “Do something—even if it’s wrong!”
And those dudes back at the crossroads didn’t have the slightest clue. That didn’t make them bad guys, it just made them the wrong guys for the job, and it was probably a good thing they knew it. The problem for Starks was that even if he wasn’t exactly the right guy for the job, he wasn’t exactly the wrong guy, either, and he couldn’t just stand around back there listening to their hemming and hawing while people were fighting for their lives five miles up the road.
Sure, he might get there too late to do any good, but somebody had to try, and since he was the only combat vet on the scene, the responsibility fell to him.
At least, that’s how he saw it.
Starks was making pretty good time driving through the fog with the parking lights on, and according to the odometer, he was almost at the ranch. He was glad for the fog, thinking it might allow him to approach the scene without drawing fire. The main gate appeared out of the mist, and he pulled the car to the side of the road, killing the lights and the engine. He dismounted with a pair of Heckler & Koch MP5 submachine guns, one slung around his back, and the other in his hands with the stock extended.
The night was dead quiet, and he couldn’t see more than five feet in any direction. Missing the protection of an Abrams tank and its Chobham armor, he knew that to continue directly up the dirt road would be unwise, so he took the iPhone from his pocket and checked to make sure that the compass app was functioning correctly. The agent took a bearing and left the road moving east, hoping the house would be more or less directly north of the main gate.
His load-out consisted of six magazines for the machine guns and three mags for his laser-sighted Sig Sauer .40 caliber pistol. He promised himself that he would withdraw if he lived long enough to run out of machine gun ammo. If he couldn’t get the job done with ninety machine gun rounds, he wasn’t likely going to turn the tide of battle with a pistol.
He came to a barbed wire fence and followed it north. Suddenly Starks stumbled over a dead body. Crouching down to examine it in the dim blue glow of his iPhone screen, the first thing he noticed was a vicious bite wound to the back of the neck.
“Looks like a Montana werewolf got your ass.” He rolled the body onto its back and noted immediately the Arab features of the face. “Welcome to America, asshole.” Starks peeled the night vision goggles off the dead man’s head and was about to move out, when he heard someone trotting toward him in the fog.
He slid to his belly, resting his thumb on the laser button of the MP5.
A figure appeared out of the fog gripping an AK-47. Starks’s laser sight appeared green in the night vision. He fired a six-round burst, and the man flew backward off his feet.
Starks jumped up and pounced on the body, bashing in the face with the stock of the MP5, as he had been trained to do as a soldier. Quickly stripping the body of the rifle and ammo pouch, he slung the MP5 and moved forward with the AK-47, feeling suddenly invincible as he muttered his uncle Steve’s old catchphrase from an all but forgotten war: “Charlie owns the night — but we’re taking it away from him.”
65
Flanked by a pair of security officers, CIA Director of Operations George Shroyer and Deputy Director Cletus Webb walked into the computer lab, where Pope was still sifting through the data he had pulled from Kashkin’s hard drive.
Pope looked up from his computer and smiled. “Have you come to revoke my clearances, George?”
Shroyer shook his head. “No, not yet.” He signaled the two security men to wait outside in the hallway. “But that’s coming. I just spoke with the president. He’s grateful for what you’ve done to help us track the bomb to DC, but he’s decided the time has come for you to think about retiring from government service. The reason we’re here is to begin your debrief.”
Pope glanced at the clock on the wall. “Debrief at two o’clock in the morning, George?”
“Well, frankly, Bob, we’re all a little nervous about what else you might be up to.”
Pope looked at Webb and smiled. “Are you nervous, Cletus?”
Webb shook his head, returning the smile. “No, Bob. I’m your biggest fan, but the president is right. You’ve taken things too far; you’ve become a loose cannon.”
“The loose-cannon metaphor implies that I’m equally dangerous to both sides, and that’s not true.”
“You’re right. Poor choice of words.”
Shroyer cleared his throat. “DOD is moving the ISIS machine into downtown DC as we speak. It’ll begin sweeping the city within the hour. So we’re very confident.”
The ISIS was the Integrated Standoff Inspection System specifically designed to detect SNM (special nuclear material, such as plutonium and certain types of uranium) at a distance. The multimillion-dollar machine was enclosed within a fifty-three-foot trailer towed behind a semi-tractor. It worked by aiming gamma rays at containers suspected of holding SNM. These rays of high-energy photons penetrated the suspect container and excited the radioactive particles within the nuclear material by inducing a reaction called photofission. The result was a burst of high-energy particles that could be detected by the ISIS up to a hundred meters away. However, the machine’s primary application was scanning shipping containers from overseas.