The Sword of God - John Milton #5 (John Milton Thrillers) (33 page)

Lundquist stared into the slanting rain and saw a quick flash of movement.

“There!” he said. “In the mine.”

They both fired, again and again. Lundquist held his Ruger .223 steady, pulling back the bolt handle in his open hand, the jacket ejecting past his right ear, pulling the trigger, repeating, the rifle always held against his shoulder. He fired until he was dry.

“Did you get him?” he yelled out as he fished in his pocket for another magazine.

Michael was more selective, pulling and firing until the hammer clicked down on an empty chamber. “I don’t know,” he said, using a stripper clip to reload the magazine.

Lundquist’s hands were shaking. “Keep him penned in. The others can flank him.”

MILTON PRESSED himself against the rock wall. The barrage from Lundquist and Callow peppered the walls and ceiling of the adit, but he had moved out of sight, and now he could just wait for them to run dry. At least one of them was firing wildly, indiscriminately, and he was happy to see them waste their ammunition. He was badly outmatched in that department—he only had another four arrows clipped into their slots on the bow, plus two “specials”—and if their hysteria brought them nearer to parity, then that was to be welcomed.

But the firing stopped.

That second arrow had only missed by two feet, but it had missed. A moving target, at medium range, in these conditions, with a bow and arrow? It would have been a difficult shot to make if he had been healthy. The pain in his arm was affecting him badly, even with the ibuprofen, and it had been all he could do to ignore it and hold his arm straight enough to fire. But he had missed, and that meant at least nine of them were still alive: Lundquist, Callow, the five survivors who had come out of the trees and the two men who must have waited for him at the falls.

The noise of the rain was all he could hear. He glanced back down into the corridor. The tiny fire that he had set was burning, the smoke sucked down towards a vent in the wall at the end.

Milton had seen Chandler, the young cop, and the two other men sprint ahead, to the camp.

He had expected them to do that.

He had
hoped
that they would do that.

Lundquist would try to pen him here and send his men to flank him. If Milton allowed that, he would be at their mercy. There was no way out.

He didn’t plan on allowing it.

He had another arrow notched and ready to fire. Running to the cover of the shacks had bought them just a few extra moments to live. He would have picked them off otherwise.

A temporary reprieve.

The two shacks were fifty feet away from him.

There was a natural shelf in the corridor at the same height as his head. It was sheltered and dry. He unnotched the arrow that he had readied, reached across and took the first of the two modified arrows that he had left there. He had used medical tape to fasten a stick of dynamite to the shaft between the fletching and the arrowhead. He had balanced it as well as he could, but it was ungainly, and it would fly with poor accuracy, but that was acceptable.

He didn’t need it to be accurate.

Thunder boomed outside the entrance to the mine. The clouds were down low, right overhead, and the clap was louder than Milton could remember.

Rain cascaded down, the run-off pouring down from the rocks above the adit, screening him.

He reached down with the arrow and held the short fuse in the flames until it hissed and popped and fizzed.

He quickly notched it, drew the drawstring back, aimed it, and let it go.

The arrow arced out of the entrance, a graceful parabola, reaching up and then curving back down as gravity clutched it.

The rifle fire started up again. He pivoted back into cover.

LUNDQUIST FIRED and worked the bolt, fired and worked the bolt, but before he could run dry again, he saw a third arrow launch out of the darkened entrance and slide through the rain, apparently aimless.

But it wasn’t aimless.

It landed on the roof of the first shack, the arrowhead piecing the rotten old shingles, the shaft quivering. Lundquist stared at it. Something was wrong. He saw the tiny pinprick of light alongside the fletching, swaying back and forth as the arrow oscillated.

Oh no.

A second arrow was loosed from the mine, landing between the boards of the wall of the other shack.

That one, too, looked strange.

“
Run!
”

The first stick of dynamite exploded with a massive boom, a sudden cloud of dark grey smoke and debris billowing out. The shack was blown apart, the planks and shingles and the wooden frame torn into a million fragments and scattered for a hundred feet in all directions.

Lundquist pressed his arms over his head and pushed his face down, his mouth and nostrils in the wet muck.

The next stick detonated. This shack was closer to their firing position, and the shards of broken wood pattered around them, larger fragments caught in the branches of the trees overhead.

Lundquist looked up. Harley Ward and Dylan Fox had been right behind the first shack, and there was no sign of them anymore.

Tom Chandler had seen what had happened and had sprinted away from the second shack just before it, too, was destroyed. The blast must have picked him up and helped him on his way, for he had been flipped around and thrown down to the water’s edge. He was rolling onto his belly, slapping the sense back into his head.

Lundquist could smell gunpowder, heavy and acrid, hanging in the wet air.

There was a crashing through the undergrowth, and Lundquist swung the rifle around, his finger ready to pull back on the trigger. Leland Mulligan appeared from out of nowhere, his clothes and hair scorched from the explosion, and fell down beside Larry Maddocks.

“What the fuck!” Leland gasped, the words gushing out and fear obvious in his wide eyes.

Michael had saucer eyes, too. “Pops?” he asked. “What do we do?”

He pressed himself to his hands and knees, mud dripping from his face. He held onto his rifle with shaking hands.

“Run,” he yelled. “Run!”

MILTON CAME out of the dark entrance to the adit.

They had fled. He had watched them scramble back up the slope, heading for the ridge and the long run back to the south and the relative safety of the town.

Milton grimaced.

What had they been thinking? That this was going to be a simple manhunt? Chasing a one-armed man up here until he ran out of places to hide, put a bullet in him, and be done with it all? Lundquist had probably expected that this would be easy.

More fool him.

Other people had made that mistake before.

It was a mistake you only made once.

Lundquist would know that he had changed tactics. He wasn’t running any more. He had lured them up to the mine and trapped them. They had been fortunate. Three of them had been killed. More of them should have been dead. Lundquist knew a little more of what Milton was capable, and what he was prepared to do. He would know, too, that he was coming for them. That would make things more difficult. There would be no more complacency.

Now he was going to go after them and hunt them down.

The man with the dogs had dropped his shotgun, but it had fallen in the open, and Milton dared not risk trying to retrieve it. They might have doubled back, ready to pick him off. The two men behind the first shack had been carrying weapons, too, but the explosion had thrown them so far away that he might be looking for hours before he found them. He would have to rely on the bow.

He stayed off the path, climbing the slope in the cover of the trees and brush. It slowed him down, but he couldn’t risk a more direct approach. They still had their rifles and, if he got close, their shotguns and pistols. There was a swathe of long grass between the trees and the lake, but he dared not stray into it for fear that he would leave a path that Lundquist would be able to see from farther up the slope. The trees grew sparser as he started to reach the top of the slope. He moved more carefully, lying flat in the mud, propelling himself farther by digging his toes into the muck and pushing.

THE RAIN became a deluge. Larry Maddocks scrambled up the slope to the ridge, slipping and sliding through the slop and the mud, driven ever onward by the thought that Milton might be coming after them.

What had just happened?

Oh man. He was scared. Was he ever scared.

Maybe the colonel would decide that the time was right to put a lid on things, at least for a while until things calmed right back down again. Maybe now wasn’t the right time for what they had been planning. Maybe God's word could wait. Too much heat. Getting out of this in one piece was a sign. Larry was a devout man, like they all were, and he knew an omen when he saw one. There was no point in pushing things further than they were ever meant to be pushed. God had given them a message.

You need to be waiting.

He decided, right there, that he would bring it up with Lundquist the next chance he had.

They crashed and clattered through the trees. Larry gasped with the effort, hardly daring to look back, and then his leg snagged on an outstretched root and he fell into the mud.

The impact jarred the rifle out of his hands.

When he got up, he couldn’t see it.

He couldn’t see the others.

Shit, shit,
shit
.

Where were they?

He looked up into the sky, the midnight black, and saw a seam of lightning as it spread out for miles on either side.

He didn’t want to call out, but he didn’t want to stay silent, either, and have them carry on without him.

“Hey?” he called tremulously. Then, louder, “Hey?”

Dammit!

He looked down at the long grasses and underbrush, scouring it for his gun. He needed his gun. He couldn’t just leave it here.

He didn’t see Milton until it was too late. He came out of the darkness that had gathered beneath the canopy of branches, the light all gone, blanketed by the gloom from the storm. He had been hiding in the underbrush, and as he loomed up and took a quick step towards him, Larry noticed that his face and throat had been smothered with thick black mud. His whole head was daubed with it, just his pale blue eyes visible as he punched the serrated kitchen knife he carried in his right fist into Larry’s chest. He bent double, right over the knife, feeling the metal inside him as it probed and pressed in between the long slither of his intestines. The man pulled the knife out, and Larry felt his blood follow after it, a gush that splashed out onto the grass, red droplets that diluted and dispersed in the rain.

He felt light-headed, only vaguely aware as strong hands took fistfuls of his jacket and hauled him off the path. He was dumped in the undergrowth, face up, and he was still awake when he saw those cruel blue eyes again and then the knife, sheathed in his blood, the jagged edge descending to his throat and swiping across and up.

“LARRY?”

Lundquist cursed him again. The man was a liability, always had been. He wasn’t taking this seriously. Maybe he would when he was locked up, or dead, but it would be too late by then.

“
Larry?
”

The rain hammered down, sliding off the brim of Lundquist’s hat and washing down to join the quagmire that had formed where the muddy path had been.

They couldn’t wait for him.

“Keep moving,” he called out.

They climbed towards the ridge, their boots slipping on the wet muck underfoot.

“Lundquist, come in… Lundquist, do you copy…”

He had put the radio into his pocket when the rain started to fall again, and he heard it crackle into life. He reached inside, took it out, and put it to his ear.

“This is Morris Finch. Are you there?”

“I’m here, Morris,” he said between gasps.

There was a blast of lightning and a hiss of static that obscured Finch’s next sentence.

“What was that? Please repeat.”

“Said that there’s someone… wants to talk to you.”

“Who?” More static, more gasps for breath. “Jesus, Morris, I can’t hear shit.”

The line cleared, and a different voice became audible. “Officer Lundquist, this is Lieutenant Colonel Alex Maguire from the Michigan National Guard. Can you hear me?”

“Yes, sir,” Lundquist said, gasping again.

“I’m the commander of the troops assigned… help you find… fugitive.”

“Glad to hear your voice, Colonel.”

“You were lucky… at Fort Custer normally… up at Nicolet for manoeuvres… jumped onto a truck… over here.”

“How many men?”

“Five hundred, plus equipment… couple of Black Hawks… come in handy… reinforcing your cordon… advance and flush him out.”

“Come now. We’ve got three men down, maybe four!”

There was another squall of interference, and when it cleared away Morris was talking again.

“… and it’s all going to be fine.”

“Morris! Tell them to come now! He’s killing us up here!”

Another flash of lightning; another fizz of static.

Morris Finch didn’t respond.

Lundquist had to fight the urge to fling the radio into the trees. He put it back into his pocket.

He looked back.

Still no sign of Larry Maddocks.

Leland was running next to him.

He heard the
crack
of the rifle over the sound of the falling rain. Leland ran on for another two steps before he fell forwards, ploughing a furrow through the mulch. He pressed up with his arms and looked down in dumb incomprehension at his belly. The bullet had burrowed through his back, sliced through his guts and exited through the front of his raincoat.

Lundquist stopped running. For a moment, he stood there paralysed, his mouth hanging open.

Lightning flashed like the sun.

“Pops!” Michael screamed over the slamming of the water.

Lundquist thought he saw something moving in the undergrowth.

“Pops! He’s here!”

LUNDQUIST SQUINTED into the murkiness, his hands shaking with the sudden torrent of adrenaline.

Milton was behind them.