No, the five hundred feet between him and the tree line was not a problem. Shaw simply didn’t want to puke. That, he hated more than pain. Well, most pain.
Maybe inevitable, maybe not. Teeter-totter. He inhaled deeply. Bad idea; exhaust and fuel fumes were coconspirators.
LaDonna Standish was strapped in beside him. They were riding backward, facing two tactical officers, dressed in black, with matching body armor. POLICE was printed in white on their chests — their backs too, Shaw had seen, in larger type. They were holding Heckler & Koch machine guns. Standish was not enjoying the trip either. She refused to look out the open door, and she kept swallowing. She clutched an airsickness bag and Shaw hoped she didn’t start in with that. He really hoped she didn’t. The power of suggestion is formidable.
She wore body armor and had only her sidearm. Shaw too was in a Kevlar vest, without weapon, per the rules. The out-of-harm’s-way dictate had obviously gone to hell.
How they happened to be here was thanks to the creator of The Whispering Man, Marty Avon. The CEO had explained that the game’s algorithm randomly assigned three of the five items that players were abandoned with, like Sophie’s fishing line, scarf and glass bottle. The other two items might vary but fell into two categories: sustenance and communication. Food or water — Sophie had been given the latter — and some way to signal for help, to let an ally know where you were, or to warn about danger. Matches, in her case. Players sometimes got a flashlight or signal mirror. More often, they received a way to start a fire. If not matches, a cigarette lighter or a flint-and-steel kit. This could also help players stay alive in some of the colder game settings, like mountaintops and caves.
“If the victim’s in a forest and he has matches or a cigarette lighter, he might try to start a fire,” Avon had suggested.
Shaw had said, “A brush fire in northern California? That’s one thing that’d be sure to get somebody’s attention.”
Drought, heat and winds had helped fires ravage part of central and northern California lately. Shaw and his family had battled one on the Compound years ago and nearly lost the cabin.
“He won’t be a fool,” Standish had said. “He’ll control it. Probably set a small bonfire in a clearing or on rock, where it’ll be noticed but won’t spread.”
Standish had called the Park Service, which used drones and satellites mounted with thermal sensors to see if any of the systems had registered flames. She learned that, yes, the service had monitored a small blaze on a rocky hilltop in Big Basin Redwoods State Park. It had flared up about midnight, burned for a brief time and then went out. Infrared scans showed that by 1 a.m. the ground was fire- and ember-free once more. They’d marked the site to check it out later but sent no crews at that time.
Shaw had looked up the location on the map. It was a forty-minute drive from where Henry Thompson had been kidnapped.
Via speakerphone, the ranger had explained that it was curious there’d been a fire at that location at that time of the morning, since it wasn’t near any hiking trails, and the only road nearby, an old logging way, was chained off. Odd too that there was a fire at all, since there’d been no lightning strikes and the blaze was limited to a rocky shelf that didn’t seem to have any natural brush growing from the cracks in the stone. “Best we could figure, some campers went off road.”
Standish had then asked, “Satellite images of the site?”
The ranger had sent some and she, Shaw and Avon huddled over the game maker’s high-def monitor.
They were looking at what might have been a configuration of rocks or shadows but also might have been a human form, standing near the fire.
“Good enough for me,” Standish had said and grabbed her phone, pressing a single button to make a call.
Standish and Shaw had sped to Moffett Field, an old military air base north of Sunnyvale and Mountain View — only ten minutes from Destiny Entertainment. At least, ten minutes the way Standish had been driving. Shaw had held on to the armrest and enjoyed the NASCAR ride.
The military air functions of the field, Standish had explained, were shrinking, though an air-rescue operation remained. Google leased much of the field and the internet company was involved in the restoration of Hangar 1, which was one of the largest wooden structures in the world, built in the ’30s to house dirigibles and other lighter-than-air craft.
There they had climbed into the Task Force’s Bell chopper, which was now — after only a twenty-minute flight — closing in on the spot where the fire had been tagged. Four other tac officers were in an Air National Guard Huey, old and olive-drab, presently thumping away fifty yards to the starboard.
Through his headphone, Shaw heard Standish’s throat making tiny retching sounds and he pulled the unit off. It helped.
The hazy suburban sprawl of the valley became hills and trees, then the landscape turned tough, with lush, spiky redwoods giving way to rocky terrain, skeletal trees, dry riverbeds. This was the heart of Big Basin. Shaw had thought the rugged land would send updrafts skyward, making the ride worse. Oddly, though, the air was smooth; the bumpiness had been severe when they were over suburbia.
Standish’s head tilted slightly. She must have heard the pilot say something. Shaw put his headset back on and entered the conversation.
“Negative,” Standish called.
The pilot: “Copy. I’ll find an LZ.”
Shaw looked at Standish, who said, “Pilot asked if I wanted a flyby of the site. I told him no. Don’t imagine the perp’s here after all these hours, but he came back to the first site with a weapon. He’ll hear us land, but I don’t want him to see us.”
The odds he was back at this particular time? Shaw figured them to be low. Yet still vivid in his memory was the horrible collapse of Kyle Butler as the bullet struck him.
Two craft hovered over a clearing atop a plateau, two hundred feet from the valley floor, then touched down in tandem. Shaw was out fast, ducking his head unnecessarily — even though the rotors were high, you did it anyway. Almost immediately his gut felt better. And he didn’t react when Standish jumped out the other side and bent over, vomiting. She then stood up, spitting. She rinsed her mouth with water from a bottle the pilot handed her, as if he kept them on hand for that very purpose.
She joined Shaw. “At least there’s nothing left for the ride home.”
They and the two officers with them jogged to the edge of the clearing, where they were joined by the four-man team from the Huey, also in tactical gear. They nodded to Standish and Shaw, who was examined with glancing side looks. The detective didn’t introduce him. The Bell pilot joined them and unfurled a map of the area. He’d been given the coordinates of the site of the fire and had marked it in red pen. He looked around, trying to judge where exactly they were in relation to it. Shaw glanced at the map, then the surrounding hills. He’d done orienteering on the Compound and, in college, had competed in the sport, a timed trek through the wilderness, following a route using only a compass and a map.