Ravenous Dusk (45 page)

Beyond the barricade, the road veered to the left, and the bend was lined with deuce-and-a-half Army trucks and olive drab school buses. An armored personnel carrier was parked in the middle of the road behind the sentry, who appeared to be holding the road alone.

"I'm Special Agent Cundieffe of the FBI, and I need to see your commanding officer immediately."

"This road's closed, sir, I don't care who you are, you're not getting by." He looked nervous, a bad high school drama student cold reading a poorly sketched part.

"Listen, Private: I am not participating in your simulation. I'm a real federal agent, and it is imperative that I speak with someone in charge."

"Mister, I don't care if you are a real federal agent. My orders—"

"Your orders are going to get you sent to Leavenworth for obstruction of justice, Private. Get me your commanding officer, immediately!"

The private blinked, out of lines, then got his walkie-talkie. "Tango One, this is Tango Eight, over."

"Tango Eight, what is your status, over?"

"I've got a guy who says he's FBI, wants to see the Major, over."

"Nobody comes through, Tango Eight, over."

"I think he's for real, Tango One. Just get the Major on the line for me, please?"

Cundieffe got back in his car and drove over both prone sawhorses, swerved to avoid the screaming sentry, then swung back the other way to bypass the parked APC. The car's heavy suspension locked up again, and he sailed into the high steel mud-flaps on the huge rear wheels. He heard metal gouging the passenger-side door panels and stood on the gas. Snow-tires bit down on ice, blinding the sentry with a rooster-tail of spray. The car launched out from under the APC and hurtled towards the guardrail of buses and trucks. He goosed the brakes and steered the car carefully through the labyrinth of parked military hardware cluttering up the road.

Guardsmen watched him pass, standing around, smoking, joking, overhauling vehicles on the shoulder. He looked them over, taking a rough head-count and scanning faces. He saw the same ones over and over, young, soft, unconcerned. Others turned away from him, and he looked long and hard, too sure they were hiding from him.

He came around the bend and stopped before a more formidable roadblock. Trucks were parked across the road, and a civilian motor home with a pair of very civilian high-performance snowmobiles in front of it was parked on the left shoulder.

A full squad of soldiers stood at the roadblock with laser rifles leveled on him. A red-faced middle-aged man in a parka stepped down from the motor home and crossed to his window.

"I'm Major Ortman. What the hell's this all about?"

Cundieffe introduced himself. "What exactly are you doing up here, Major, and by whose orders?"

"Good question. These aren't even my damned men. I'm a staff officer at the Boise HQ. I got ordered up here only yesterday with this bunch of retards, and we–"

Cundieffe showed him his badge. "You've been told this is a classified mission, and are under orders not to speak to anyone about it."

Ortman nodded.

"Where is the Radiant Dawn complex?"

"The what?"

Cundieffe gritted his teeth and pointed at the fence. "The front gate to this property. Where is it?"

"Oh, you definitely can't go back there," Ortman said. "There's…there's a live fire exercise in progress."

Indeed. "Major, you have your orders, and I have mine. All I can tell you is that this is much more than an exercise, and a lot of people could get killed on this mountain, and nobody but me seems to care. Now, do you know what's on the other side of this ridge, or not?"

Ortman purpled. "Now, don't take that tone with me, I don't care if you're part of the exercise, or not. There's regular Army over there—" he looked at the ridge, then looked back. "Special Forces assholes, actually. Secret exercise, very hush-hush. We're just watching the back door."

"You've got to let me in."

Ortman pointed up the ridge. "You'd never make it in this thing. The road goes straight up, almost no switchbacks."

"Then let me use one of those." Cundieffe pointed at the snowmobiles.

"Well, now, you got to understand…those aren't Army-issue. Those're mine—"

The Major drove him up the hill himself, Cundieffe clinging to Ortman's furred parka hood as they rocketed to the top of the ridge on one of his souped-up Arctic Cat ZRT 800 snowmobiles. Cundieffe rolled off and caught his breath on his knees while Ortman turned back and slalomed down to the bottom to the cheers of his company. Cundieffe stood on the summit and his jaw dropped when he saw the other side.

He had seen only photographs of the first Radiant Dawn compound, but he recognized the tower instantly. It was the same building, but they had learned from their mistakes, and adapted. A sixty-foot gorge split the plateau from the mountain, and the narrow bridge that spanned it was guarded by three sentries with very real guns. No housing development surrounded the tower, only a mass of trucks and trailers, and fields of barbed wire. A sheer granite cliff face rose up behind the tower to pierce the steel wool skies, and Cundieffe spotted three artillery emplacements on its peaks. He saw a squat concrete blockhouse built into the foot of the cliff directly behind the tower, and deduced ventilation shafts, tunnels, bunkers.

This was not a hospice community, or even a research facility. This was a military installation to shame Navarone, with real soldiers and an underground city, and who knew what else, and the local Sheriff didn't even know it existed. According to Karl Schweinfurter, it hadn't, a month ago.

A black APC roared out of the trailer park and crossed the field and the bridge, and took the switchbacks up the ridge at a maniacal speed. The armored car skidded to a stop almost on top of Cundieffe's toes. In the turret bubble, a soldier in a cowboy hat saluted him down the twin barrels of a .50-caliber machine gun. Then the side door swung open and a huge man in black fatigues leapt out. His bald head was stubbled in silver, and his full beard only accentuated the grievous scar that slashed his face from his right eye down below his jaw. He came at Cundieffe so fast the agent didn't quite recognize him until he'd been struck twice full in the face, and fallen down.

"God bless you for coming when you did, Agent Cundieffe," said Lt. Col. Greenaway. "I've needed to beat the shit out of somebody all morning, and I was afraid I'd have to clobber one of my own men."

Cundieffe shielded his face as Greenaway charged him again. Hot blood sluiced the back of his palate. His nose felt like it was broken, but he couldn't tell for sure. He hadn't been hit by another person since grade school. "Lt. Col. Greenaway! Cease and desist—"

Greenaway's boot smashed into his gut, lifting him bodily into the air. He curled up and hit the ice on his tailbone, slid halfway down the ridge. "You have illegally trespassed on private property, Agent Cundieffe. I am a private citizen, defending my rights as guaranteed by the United States Constitution, which you are sworn to uphold. So get the fuck off my mountain!"

Cundieffe rolled over, too stunned to get up and run, though Greenaway came crunching down the ridge after him. "Do you know— Greenaway—do you know who you're working for?"

"I'm in the private sector, now. Self-employed. Hunting eggheads."

"You don't know what you're dealing with," Cundieffe groaned, heaving himself to his feet and turning to run, or tumble, or whatever, away from Greenaway.

In the event, he only succeeded in presenting his hindquarters for Greenaway's boot, which sent him the rest of the way down to the fence. "You don't know what you're dealing with! Get off my mountain, G-boy! Get the fuck out of my war!"

Cundieffe slid into the iron fence posts and coughed, threw up oranges on the snow. Guardsmen laughed. Greenaway bowed.

Cundieffe pulled himself to his feet, leaned against the fence for a minute, looking over his shoulder to see if Greenaway was coming back. When he could stand on his own, he hobbled back through the gate to his car. Major Ortman, sitting on his snowmobile, shook his head. "I told you not to go up there."

Driving back down was even more nerve-wracking, now that gravity and his own momentum were conspiring to hurl him off the road. Clouds of pain and dizziness bubbled up in his skull, and the melted snow seeping into his heavy wool overcoat had transformed it into an antenna for radiating his core body heat out into the chill wind. His hands shook on the wheel, nervous twitches of impotent rage translated by power steering into drunken swerves. As he passed the abandoned Heilige Berg compound, and the ridge dropped away to reveal the yawning, fog-choked gorge and the valley beyond, he felt it all starting to slip away from him, and he stepped on the brakes, fighting the car's almost compulsive urge to slide out of control and over the edge. He wrestled the car over to the right shoulder and turned off the engine. Watching fat flakes of snow billow and pile up on the windshield, he sat for a very long time before he was composed enough to use the telephone.

Incredibly, he got a dial tone. He punched in the number with numb, shivering fingers and waited through six rings before a woman's voice answered. Though her crisp, emotionless voice was general-issue civil servant, she did not identify her office, or offer any other information. She simply said, "Hello."

"I need to speak to Mr. Hoecker, immediately. This is—"

"I believe you have a wrong number, sir. Sorry…" She hung up.

"Goddamit!" he screamed, and looked around to see if anyone had heard.

Cundieffe checked the number in his address book. He had an uncanny memory for such things, and knew in his bones he'd entered it right. Another game, another test. He wouldn't call AD Wyler until he got back to the sheriff's station, but once he did…

His mouth ached, and he still tasted a trickle of blood where Greenaway's fist had split his lip. His nose looked like a circus clown's honking red bulb, but he couldn't feel it at all. It was possible he had a slight concussion. At least the maniacal son of a bitch hadn't broken his glasses. Assorted bruises and minor contusions made their complaints known to the central nervous system as the dregs of adrenaline dribbled uselessly out of his bloodstream. His hands were steadier, now, but heavy. He barely managed to lift them to the steering wheel and turn the key. The engine caught and grumbled and he levered the shifter into Drive, leaning against the wheel as the car begrudgingly tore itself free of the snow on the shoulder and took to the frictionless ice slide of the road.

He felt like a cripple trying to negotiate a descent down ice-slick stadium steps, taking each bend with agonizing slowness, fighting the rising panic-impulse to throw himself to the bottom, to floor it and get it over with. As he crept along, he kept his eyes on the patch of road directly in front of the car, stealing glances at the gorge to his left, and the ranks of trees marching by to his right. In the silvery, omnidirectional sunlight, the flickering pattern of passing trees was vaguely hypnotic, and he found himself glancing at it so often that he began to imagine he saw something pacing him through the forest, moving just before the vanishing point where the trees became a uniform wall of winter-blasted gray bark and shadowed greenery.

He looked away, saw he'd strayed off the center crown of the road towards the left. Below his window, the gorge wall was jumbled with loose boulders and snowdrifts, forming a jagged but relatively gradual slope to the broad, U-shaped floor. Cundieffe momentarily flashed that the gorge appeared to have been carved out of the mountain by a glacier, and not a river, which explained why it plunged so deeply away from the Snake River, which lay just over the summit to the west. Among the rocks, like rusted remnants of an unfinished meal, were cars. Lots of cars. And then the road swept it away and he was back on the center-line, goosing the brakes and letting gravity do the rest. If he just watched the road and stayed in the center, he'd be fine.

The phone rang.

He tapped the brakes and fumbled for the phone on the passenger seat. Never taking his eyes off the road, he finally found and activated it, then tucked it between his ear and shoulder.

"Agent Cundieffe here."

"That was stupid," Hoecker snapped.

"What was stupid?" He wondered which of the morning's misadventures he already knew about, and how much to tell him. He was fast coming to conclude that he probably shouldn't tell anyone anything.

"This is a secure line, but talk fast. You're in Idaho?"

"Oh, I'm in Idaho, alright. I've been busy, this morning, what with getting outmaneuvered by other Bureau agents, made a fool of by the local sheriff, and beaten up—"

"Someone literally beat you up? Slow down, Martin, you're not making any sense."

His eyes darted right. He saw it again, and could not look away. The snow was knee-to waist-deep here, and the trees were taller, thicker and more densely packed than before, broken up only by the occasional house-sized granite boulder, but he could almost swear he saw something like a man running down the mountain along with his car. He sped up, eyes locked on the road.

"Brady, it is my conclusion that I have been brought up here on false pretenses, wasting Bureau resources to be tested on my ability to keep mum about something I can only assume is some kind of covert military action against the Mission. I don't care whether I've failed, or not, I just want to go back to Washington, and do my damned job."

"It's all true, Martin," he said. "About Radiant Dawn and the Mission. It's worse than even most of the Cave Institute will accept. Three hundred and fifty people, all of them terminal cancer patients. It just went into full operation about a month ago."