"Do you think this is really dangerous?" Buddy finally asked, as he pulled the Blazer off the field and took the highway west, toward the Black Hills. He sure didn't want to meet the commandos who had stolen his son's body, and he certainly didn't want to come face to face with a silver-haired murderer and his band of freight-train-riding fanatics.
"I don't think it's dangerous, not anymore," Stacy said. "The whole place caught fire. I think the people from the Devil's Workshop are gone."
Buddy nodded, and the freeze in his stomach thawed. Maybe he could regain his self-respect without getting himself killed. After all, he was stepping up. He was driving into a threatening situation, risking his life. If nobody was up there, that wasn't his fault. He hadn't chickened out. He'd put himself in harm's way. Would that allow him to reclaim his outlaw persona? he wondered. Thank God Cris Cunningham knew what the hell he was doing.
A hundred miles to the east, Fannon Kincaid, Dexter DeMille, and forty heavily armed members of the Christian Choir and the Lord's Desire jumped off the slow-moving freight where the tracks passed a mile from Vanishing Lake. They walked down a wooded incline toward the burned-out village at the far end of the lake.
"We'll need to get a boat," Fannon said. "There's probably some still down by the dock." His white hair was billowing wildly in the breeze, making him look more and more crazy, Dexter thought.
They marched him resolutely toward the burned-out fishing village, near where the Pale Horse Prion was waiting in the deep.
Chapter 27
In Special Forces Recon, they always said Cris Cunningham was best after dark. They said he came alive at twilight, like a coyote. He could find an enemy as if by magic. It was uncanny. He would be on reconnaissance patrol when suddenly he would just point right and there would be a bunch of unfriendlies dug in some hole, ass down in the mud and completely out of sight. On more than one A. A. R. (After Action Report), under Initial Enemy Engagement it stated, "Captain Cunningham smelled them."
As they approached the town of Vanishing Lake, Cris felt the same uneasy prickle on his neck. He felt his body tense in the eerie blackness. "Turn off your headlights and pull over," he instructed Buddy.
"We're not there yet."
Cris leaned over and pushed in the headlight button. "Get on the shoulder over there!" he commanded.
Buddy reluctantly pulled over and parked.
"What is it?" Buddy asked.
"I don't know," Cris said, his senses tingling.
There was a tense silence in the car as Stacy and Buddy waited for him to tell them what he was doing. Cris sat with his nerves jumping, feeling stupid. Then, to cover his embarrassment, he opened the door and got out.
"What the hell is it?" Buddy whispered impatiently.
"I don't know. Sometimes I get hunches," Cris said, feeling lame and unsure, but Buddy easily accepted it as wisdom. It was like John Wayne in The Green Berets knowing Charley was hiding up in the hills without ever seeing them.
"I'm gonna go take a look," Cris whispered, and moved away from the car. He was now almost sure that what had caused the "combat sensation" was his alcohol-shot nervous system. He wandered a short distance away from the car and unzipped his pants to take a leak. He froze again. This time the sensation was more pronounced. His instincts were screaming at him. He stood absolutely still and listened. He strained to filter the multiple sounds of night: Wind? Bugs? Nightbirds? Mansounds? What was it that had alerted him? He didn't know. Then he emptied his bladder. In "Snake Eater" school, when they were in survival training, he had been taught that sounds carry a long distance over water. So he quietly zipped his fly and moved cautiously down toward the lake.
He could feel the old Recon training kick in as he descended, but it was like looking at something through a gauze curtain. His senses were muted and sluggish. It had been eight years since he had called in an air strike on his own position. He had been on Recon with Sergeant Tom Kilbride, with orders not to engage. They were hopelessly lost when they stumbled into a Republican Guard unit, bivouacked on the desert. Cris ignored his orders and wormed up close, dropping a homing package, then backing out and calling for an Alert-5, Fly-by-Wire air strike with a ten-minute E. T. A. A scant two minutes after their request, six F-i6s were catshot off the deck of the Constitution. Cris and Tom had still been trying to retreat out of the fire zone when the F-16 ground pounders came in low, three minutes ahead of schedule. The Falcon pilots zeroed out their position and fired before Cris and Tom could get away, so they found a hole in the sand and dug in. The Republican Guard unit panicked, running in all directions. Cris and Tom opened up on the confused troops as the F-16 missiles targeted on the ground package. Tom Kilbride had been blown away when one of the Iraqi soldiers machine-gunned him from ten feet away, before Cris was able to shoot. The way Cris saw it, all he had done was get Tom Kilbride killed. He had put that damning self-evaluation in his A. A. R.
That night he got roaring drunk. He had a bad case of survivor's guilt over Kilbride's death, but the war needed heroes, especially ground troops. He got the Silver Star for gallantry under fire and Kilbride got a battlefield grave.
He hated the medal. He refused to wear it, and had thrown it in the trash. His father wrote the Marines, got it replaced, and hung it in his bar, right next to the picture of Cris scoring the damn touchdown. These had been Richard Cunningham's victories. They defined him, but left Cris empty and confused.
As Cris moved out of the trees, the lake came into view. His hands and senses were tingling as he crouched down at the water's edge and looked out. He slowly swept his gaze 180 degrees, looking for anything that seemed out of place: a glint of reflected moonlight off distant metal; a sound; a smell. Anything that might point to an enemy position. As he sat there, he again distrusted his alert system. He felt foolish squatting in soft sand wearing dress loafers, trying to convince himself that despite three years of drunken malnutrition, he still had combat sharpness. Then, almost without thought, he was moving slowly along the perimeter of the lake. He moved in total silence, stepping light. Then again, without knowing why, he suddenly froze. Something was wrong. He remained still, his head pivoting, both ears straining. He could smell the minty-green scent of pine needles. This patch of ground had escaped the devastating fire. He could smell the deep, fragrant richness of moist earth. He could hear the slight, rippling sound of water lapping against the shore. He remained very still for almost a minute, identifying nothing out of place, wondering what the hell it was that had alerted him. Then, after a moment, he sorted it out. It wasn't something that he had heard; it was something he hadn't. A distant chorus of night insects had suddenly stopped keening, causing a slight change in the background sounds he had subconsciously set his ear to monitor. Something, some foreign sound, had frightened them. It was only when they started up again that he realized it.
He moved slowly, one foot carefully placed in front of the other, choosing safety over speed. After he had traveled almost four hundred silent yards in the sand by the edge of the lake, he heard a distant soft tapping sound, metal on metal. This was not a sound made by wind against a loose door. This was a man-made sound, a controlled tapping with a rhythm. Again, he moved forward, then went to his stomach, snaking along the ground. In the pale moonlight, he could see the burned-out dock that had once fronted the Bucket a' Bait restaurant. He could see the burned-out husk of the coffee shop, with its few remaining cedar posts poking up at the sky, charred reminders of that night of insanity. He inched toward the shoreline and slipped silently into the lake.