Wildfire

WILDFIRE

Ken Goddard

www.kengoddardbooks.com

www.kengoddardnovels.blogspot.com

www.spectrumliteraryagency.com/goddard.htm

Copyright © 1994 by Ken Goddard

Cover design by Passageway Pictures, Inc.

Books by Ken Goddard

BALEFIRE

THE ALCHEMIST

CHEATER

CSI: IN EXTREMIS

Special Agent Henry Lightstone series

PREY

WILDFIRE

DOUBLEBLIND

CSI Detective-Sergeant Colin Cellars series

FIRST EVIDENCE

OUTER PERIMETER

FINAL DISPOSITION

Dedication

This book is dedicated to George and Jane

Acknowledgments

I owe a debt of gratitude to Bob and Linda Crites, whose ever-dependable commentary is always right on the mark; and to all my special agent, police, and wildlife officer buddies, whose dedicated efforts and cheerful comradery continue to provide the inspiration.

Prologue

The supervisory ranger at the Sequoia National Park stood in front of the all-too-familiar sign and shook his head in frustration.

It was exactly where the woman had said it would be. Just off the main hiking path through one of the most spectacular stands of great redwoods in the entire park. The supervisory ranger figured that a minimum of a thousand tourists had probably seen and read the sign before one of them decided to go to the effort to report it.

Like the first three signs, the letters on this one appeared to have been machine-carved out of what looked like an aluminum alloy blank that was precisely thirty inches long, eighteen inches high, and three quarters of an inch thick. Prior to the machine carving of the letters, the blank metal sign appeared to have been chemically coated with a dark green/ brown camouflage pattern. As a result, the machined letters seemed almost to glow in the shaded light of the old growth forest.

If it hadn't been for those letters, the supervisory ranger realized, the highly effective camouflage-patterned coating would have made the sign almost completely invisible. Which didn't make any sense at all.

Unable to help himself, he read the deeply imprinted words once again.

and one day soon when the ember falls, and the sky is filled with fire,
 
he shall rise up from out of the darkness
 
 
and none shall stand before him.

For reasons that he couldn't quite explain, the supervisory ranger found the words chilling. He shook his head again, and then examined the bolts . . . confirming the worst, which was exactly what he had expected.

The heads of the two lag bolts used to fasten the sign to the seventy- two-foot redwood were about three inches across, completely rounded, and cast with a new three-dimensional notch design in the center that would require a special matching tool for removal. In addition, the bolt had been countersunk into the sign to a depth of approximately an eighth of an inch, which meant that there wouldn't be any way to get a grip on the rounded head with a pair of pliers or channel locks.

And if the lag bolts were like those on the other three signs the park rangers had found so far, they would be about three-quarters of an inch in diameter and eighteen inches long and cast out of hardened steel. Which also meant that the only way to remove the sign, without causing extensive internal damage to the tree, would be to drill a series of holes through the aluminum around the bolt head.

The last such removal had taken five hours because the power needed to cut through the tough aluminum alloy had rapidly drained the batteries on their portable drill. And all that, of course, had attracted a lot more attention among the hiking tourists.

Which was probably exactly what the idiots who put it there had in mind,
the ranger thought morosely.

He decided that he'd better call the local hardware store and order more batteries and charging units for their drill. It could turn out to be a long season.

"Goddamned religious nuts," he muttered, still feeling uneasy, because in spite of what he and his fellow rangers had been telling the public, none of them were completely convinced that religion was the issue.

There was another possibility that he didn't want to think about at all.

It was eight-thirty in the evening when the Lear jet touched down at the Mahlon Sweet Municipal Airport in Eugene, Oregon, and then taxied over to a small butler building at the far end of the tarmac.

To the aircraft mechanic who would spend the next four hours making a routine service check of the Learjet's two powerful engines and related electronics, the man who stood up from the controls and then exited the plane through the drop ramp with a nylon kit bag in his hand looked a lot more like a defensive end for a professional football team than a skilled private pilot.

The mechanic watched the man walk through the chain-link gate and get into a small dark-gray minivan, then shrugged indifferently as he began to lay out his tools. Regardless of who the man was or what he did for a living, he was paying twice the normal rate for a non-routine service check on what appeared to be a very well-maintained aircraft. As far as the aircraft mechanic was concerned, that was all he needed to know about his client.

At nine-thirty that evening, the extremely tall and muscular driver of the dark gray minivan turned off a main road about twenty miles south of Eugene, Oregon. He continued on for about a quarter of a mile on a narrow, winding dirt road surrounded by a dense growth of scrub oaks and firs. Finally he came to a stop at a wrought-iron gate.

Reaching out the driver's side window, he pushed the call button and then waited.

'Yes?" the electronic voice rasped.

"I'm here to pick up my merchandise," the tall man said, speaking slowly and carefully in the direction of the post-mounted microphone.

'Tour name?"

The man hesitated for a brief moment, and then said: "Riser."

"The number of primary items in your order?" "Eight."

"You're early," the electronic voice said accusingly. "Your appointment is for tomorrow afternoon."

"My schedule has been changed," Riser responded.

"Can you come back tomorrow morning?"

"No, I need the items today."

As Riser started to turn away from the microphone, a movement in one of the nearby trees caught his attention. His eyes followed the leap of the gray squirrel from a bare-limbed oak to the protective foliage of a tall evergreen. That was when he spotted the reflection off the glass.

There hadn't been a camera lens in that tree six months ago, when he had last come by to pick up the disposable tools of his trade. Or maybe there had been, but he simply hadn't noticed it, Riser reminded himself. Even now that his attention was focused, it took him a good thirty seconds to locate the entire system.

There were two separate video surveillance units, each mounted in a sealed and weatherproofed box about twenty feet off the ground on opposite sides of the road. Each of the boxes had been carefully painted in an irregular camouflage pattern to match the surrounding vegetation. Even the barely visible segments of electrical conduit that wrapped around to the back of the trees and then—presumably—extended down into the ground and out to the main house, had been carefully colored to blend in with the supportive tree bark.

This was a new and unexpected development, and one that Riser didn't like at all.

"We will have to reschedule the other appointments," the electronic voice finally responded. "That will require a ten-percent penalty charge for the inconvenience."

"Fine."

There was another, shorter pause.

"Do you have all the money with you today, including the penalty charge?"

"Yes."

"Okay, drive in through the gate, take a left at the Y intersection, and drive up to the door marked C as in Charlie. When the roll-up door opens, drive inside, stop the car, and shut off the engine. Stay in the car until someone contacts you. Can you remember all that?"

"Yes."

Riser waited patiently for the wrought-iron gate to open. When it did so, he drove in, took the left-hand turn at the Y, and stopped in front of the warehouse door marked C as in Charlie. After a few moments the large roll-up door started to rise. He drove inside the sheet-metal warehouse, parked in the middle of the three parking spaces facing the darkened indoor range, turned off the engine, and set the keys on the floor just under the driver's seat. Then he sat there and waited for the warehouse door to close.

They had directed him to the largest of Hoffsteadler's three test firing ranges, the man realized. He remembered from previous visits that this one had eight firing positions with staged target sites at three, seven, fifteen, twenty-five, and fifty meters.

For a brief moment he wondered if their selection of the larger range was significant. Then a muscular young woman with intriguing but clearly understated facial features, deep blue eyes, French-braided light-brown hair, loose-fitting overalls, and canvas deck shoes appeared out of the shadows and walked over to the driver's side of his car.

Had she made the effort, he decided, she would have been extremely attractive, perhaps even seductive. He wondered why she chose not to do so.

"Mr. Riser?"

"Yes."

"Mr. Hoffsteadler is ready for you now."

"Where?"

"Up the ramp and to the left. You enter the range through the second door . . . after I check you for weapons," she added in a calm and controlled voice.

He noticed, as he stepped out of the van and stood to his full height of six feet ten inches, that she hesitated for only a moment before she stepped forward, shaking her head and smiling briefly at the realization that the top of her head barely reached the center of his sternum. Deliberately leaving herself open to any number of possible strike or control moves, she brought both of her hands inside his jacket, up to his armpits, and then around his thickly muscled back in a slow and careful manner.

As her practiced hands slid behind the waistband of his jeans, he wondered if she realized that she was the designated sacrificial lamb—the one that Hoffsteadler had set up to die first, in the event that anything went wrong.

Yes, she knows,
he decided after a moment.
She just doesn't care.

He smiled as he considered that last part.

Submitting himself to the thorough pat-down search with complete indifference, he observed that she was wearing a police-model Kevlar vest under the overalls, and that the restraining strap on her hip-holstered double-action, 9mm Beretta 92FS semiautomatic pistol was secured. The weapon was designed to hold fifteen rounds in a staggered magazine, and one in the chamber, and was rigged for a right-hand forward draw from a protected holster. An extra magazine pouch was mounted horizontally on the left front side of her webbed belt, with the snaps opening toward the belt buckle, combat-speed-loading style.

He also observed, as he led the way up the ramp and in through the narrow doorway, that she maintained a constant distance of about eight feet between them, with the outer edge of her left shoulder lined up with the inner edge of his right arm. In doing so, she was keeping her left hand in a position to deflect easily a grab or lunge, and her right hand clear for a smooth draw.

That's good,
he nodded approvingly. At
least give yourself a chance.

He judged her to be approximately five ten, twenty-five to twenty-eight years of age, professionally alert, sexually attractive in a hard and uninterested sort of way. And probably absolutely deadly if given the necessary stimulus, he decided.

The only thing that bothered him was her sense of indifference, or overconfidence, whichever it was.

There were some interesting possibilities, but he reminded himself that it would all depend on how things went with the confirmation and the payment.

They entered the staging area, and he immediately lost interest in his female escort. The first things he noticed were the fifty-five-gallon drums that had been placed in the middle of the range, just beyond the twenty-five-meter mark.

In firing lane five, six of the barrels had been lined up, one behind the other, on a two-foot-high wooden platform.

In firing lane six, four more barrels were double-stacked side by side, with two on the top and two on the bottom.

Riser paused for a moment, more out of curiosity than anything else, to examine the unusual arrangement of targets, if that in fact was what they were. Then he turned his attention to the far side of the range.

There he observed five men—all of whom were visibly armed—a portable workbench, and two display tables, all arranged side by side to the left of the firing positions. The workbench was on the far left. The two display tables were covered with black velvet. The one on the far right held what looked like a wooden case that measured about twelve inches on a side by three feet long.