Condemned (51 page)

“Maybe we ought to wait for Geraghty and Santiago, so they can pick out the blanket color they like,” said Hardie.

“You kidding? Come on,” Mulvehill said abruptly. He stood and looked at Hardie.

“I don't think it's a good idea to go right now.”

“It was your idea. And now it's become my idea. On your feet!” Mulvehill said forcefully. He stood facing Hardie, his legs spread, a determined look on his face.

Hardie looked around, thinking he might need a defensive weapon. Maybe, he thought, he could pick up a branch for a walking stick. Maybe there'd be something in the car.

The road leading away from the barracks was long and straight, cut through a forest of dense trees that stretched for acres on each side of the road. Once through the fenced perimeter of the Base, the road and the canopy of climax trees continued unabated. Hardie was in the front passenger seat of the Government vehicle. His hands were handcuffed together. He had checked the backseat quickly as he entered the car. There was nothing there he might be able to use to defend himself. He gazed out the side window as they drove through the forest.

“Sorry about the cuffs,” said Mulvehill, “Regulations. Supposed to be behind your back. But, that'd be too uncomfortable a position for you to sit.”

“No problem,” said Hardie. “Am I going to keep these things on when we're in the mall?”

“Don't worry about it. I'm not going to be parading you in front of all those innocent citizens at the mall in handcuffs—although I should. You've got to be able to get your hands in your pockets to pay for the blankets, right?” Mulvehill laughed.

“If I'm going to walk through the mall without any handcuffs, why the hell do I have to wear them in the car?” Red definitely did not like what was happening. Not at all. If regulations meant anything, Mulvehill shouldn't have taken him without at least one other Agent with him. Worse still, he thought, Mulvehill was too much a regulations guy to be taking him on this trip alone, unless he had received specific instructions from Becker to do so. Which meant that this whole thing was being orchestrated from New York.

“I can give you the answer in one word—rules is rules.”

“Regulations also require at least two of you to accompany me if I'm outside the barracks, right?” said Red.

Mulvehill neither answered, nor turned his head. He concentrated on the road. The car proceeded around a bend, descending downhill through the forest. Mulvehill's window was open. A damp, forest smell filled the car.

“I've got to take a piss,” said Mulvehill as the car approached a large rock formation, almost twenty feet high, on the right side of the road. He slowed the car onto the shoulder of the road, stopping a few feet from the rock face. “You got to go?” he asked Hardie as he opened the driver's door. The motor was still running.

“No, I'm okay,” Red said apprehensively.

Mulvehill walked toward the large rock formation, stepping behind it to be hidden from the road. “What's the matter, you don't want the trees to see you?” Hardie called out. Mulvehill didn't answer.

From the side of his eyes, Red saw something moving in the shadows across the road. Staring into the forest, Red discerned two shadows, two men, moving now into the open from behind large trees. They were both carrying rifles. Deeper yet in the wooded area, Red saw an off the road vehicle. The two riflemen moved forward toward the road, toward him. He glanced toward the rock. Mulvehill was not in sight.

“Mulvehill,” Red shouted. There was no answer. He glanced back at the men with the rifles. They were still advancing. Red ducked down in his seat, reaching forward with his manacled hands to push open the door handle. A shot rang out, a bullet splintered the front windshield as Red rolled out through the open door and fell to the ground. He struggled to his feet. Another shot exploded behind him, and a large chunk of a tree above his head burst away. He bounded upward and forward into the forest, running in a zig-zag fashion, behind trees, deeper into the forest.

He heard shouting in a foreign tongue. And more shots. Although Red ran as fast as he could, it seemed as if he were running in slow motion, excruciatingly slow motion. The foreign language echoed in the void of the forest.
What language was that?
he wondered, thinking of what Money had told him about Awgust and some people in the Flash Inn. “
Who gives a shit what language it is. Run
!” he screamed aloud to himself as he bounded between trees.

Further back in the woods, Sascha Ulanov aimed along the barrel of his rifle at the fleeing figure in the woods. He fired again. Behind, and to Ulanov's left, Uri Mojolevsky, fired another shot. Sascha took careful aim into the woods, cursed in Russian, and fired. Uri fired again as well. Sascha stared into the fastness, growling something in Russian to Uri. They both saw that the fleeing Red Hardie continued moving away from them. Sascha said something as he ran after Red. Uri turned and ran back toward where the vehicle was parked. He began shouting and waving his arms over his head.

The motor roared to life, the vehicle turning and driving toward Uri. He jumped into the passenger seat of a dark green Jeep Cherokee that bounded out of the woods, across the road, and back into the forest in the direction that Red had run. Uri leaned out the window and fired again.

Mulvehill stepped out from behind the rock where he had been crouched. He walked toward the middle of the road, took the 9 mm pistol from the holster on his hip, and aimed at the Government vehicle. He fired several shots into the body of the car, one through the window. From the woods, he could hear shots and shouting, and the straining sounds of an engine echoing through the trees.

Mulvehill took out a radio and flipped on the power. “May Day, May Day,” he shouted excitedly into the mouthpiece. “Being attacked. May Day! On the road to the Base. May Day. Do you read me?” he screamed. “Come in, for Christ's sake. Do you read me?” Mulvehill jogged to the far side of his car and dove to the ground, crawling around in the dirt on his hands and knees to dirty his clothes.

In the woods, the ground suddenly dropped away steeply before Red Hardie. He struggled in the densely overgrown bushes and between tightly growing trees, descending into some kind of valley. As his hands were still in manacles, Red was not fully balanced as he ran. He aimed himself into the trunks of trees, bouncing his shoulders into the trunks to keep from falling as he dropped deeper into the overgrowth. He could hear the growl of a vehicle chasing him. The voices spewing the foreign language were angry, shouting harshly. Red had an excruciating ache in his left side. He could hardly move forward. There was a crashing sound of the vehicle descending into the valley behind him, speeding through and breaking branches as it plunged. Red leaped forward with terror.

Mulvehill stood up and looked at his clothes. Not dirty enough, he thought. He lay down on the ground again and wriggled on his belly in the dirt. “Does anyone read me. This is Special Agent Mulvehill, D.E.A. I've been attacked on the road between the Base and town, South Road. We're being shot at. May Day, May Day.”

“Where are you, over,” said a voice on the radio.

“Oh Jesus. I'm on the road from the Base to town; we were going to town. South Road. Near a huge boulder on the east side of the road. Need help. Hurry. Shots, assassins.”

“Roger. We read you. We're on our way.”

Mulvehill studied himself in the rear view mirror of the car. He reached down and picked up a rock, flat, about the side of a baseball. He swung his arm and hit himself in the forehead with it. “Jesus Christ!” he exclaimed aloud, “take it easy. Don't break your own fucking head.” He scooped up some dirt and rubbed it over the lump he had just inflicted on his forehead. He could feel some blood trickling down.

Hardie was at the end of his energy. In addition to the gnawing ache in his side, he could hardly breathe. Ahead, he saw that a huge tree had fallen in the midst of the forest. The ball of its roots had pulled a great mass of earth out of the ground, leaving a deep excavation under the root ball. It extended into dark shadows. The thrashing noise behind him sounded closer, more threatening. He jumped down into the hole under the fallen tree, crawling in as far as he could under the root ball. The crashing and cursing of someone thrashing through the woods came closer. Hardie forced himself to stop panting and gasping for breath.

Two men, shouting in a language Red did not recognize, were quite near now. Hardie was perspiring profusely. The earth was dank, moist smelling. He thought that soon he would be part of that earth. If this guy above found him in the hole, he would be shot and left to rot, right where he was, to be eaten by worms and maggots, to spend eternity in the belly of little insects in a hole in the middle of a forest. He wedged himself further under the root ball.

Two separate foreign-sounding voices were nearby now. There seemed to be a third voice, and the sound of an engine idling. One of the voices was very close to Red's hiding place. There was a discussion of some sort going on. Hardie was sure they were talking about him, that they had seen some part of his body, his clothing. In his mind he pictured two men with rifles, stealthily approaching the hole in the ground where he hid. He held his breath. A bug, insect, something crawling, began to move across the back of his neck. Hardie began to grimace silently, almost screaming from disgust and fright. He dared not move, even to wipe the crawling something away. The voices came nearer, right above, he imagined.
What the hell had Mulvehill been doing
, he wondered at that moment,
holding his pecker behind a rock while was being shot at. That chicken-shit bastard, bullshit artist, faggot, phony, scumbag, treacherous, murderous bastard …

Mulvehill could hear new sounds of motors and vehicles coming along the road from the Base. He looked himself over once more, to be sure he looked sufficiently distressed, torn, and anxious.

Mulvehill
, Red Hardie thought with anger, as he waited for shots to tear through his body,
must be part of a goddam setup to kill me. Becker, too! Those two bastards are in league with whoever these bastards with the rifles are. This whole scenario has been orchestrated. Sending the other agents to the PX, they did that so Mulvehill would be alone with me! His stopping at that big rock. This was all worked out in advance! Assassins lying in wait to kill me! That treacherous, low-life, traitor, piece of shit, mother fucker, that fucking mother fucking fuck.
Red started to panic silently, raging internally. They had sold him out to—to whom? Red's mind suddenly stopped on a snag.
What did these foreigners have to do with any of this?
Red again thought of the foreign-speaking people Money told him had been in the Flash Inn, the ones Nichols had said were Italian. But Matthew, the waiter, said were not. Red knew the people above him were not speaking Italian.

Son of a bitch
, tore through Red's mind as he thought of Awgust Nichols.
That little son of a bitch! Money had been right all these years. That sneaky son of a bitch—in league with the Government and some foreign-speaking people—was behind this. He had arranged for Red to be assassinated, throwing the blame away from himself and The Brotherhood that he was planning to take over. How did the Government figure into this?
Red wondered.
That clever little fuck Awgust had somehow arranged for the Government to help him with this plot.

Clever son of a bitch to do all that
, Red thought.

The voices above stopped. Here they come, Red said to himself. He envisioned one of the men jumping down into the hole, pointing a rifle at him, and firing point blank.
Jesus Christ
, Red began to pray,
I know I haven't been good, I know I haven't been to see you in a long, long while, but I'm sorry, Lord, for everything I've done. Forgive me, Jesus Christ, forgive me, forgive me, forgive me. I'm sorry. So very, very, very sorry. Please have mercy on me, Lord. Please, please, please, please …

Red continued to hold his breath, even his thoughts, as he heard voices above him again. They seemed to sound a bit further away. He listened more intently. The thrashing through the woods was diminishing.

Red held his breath, straining to hear the sounds above. The sound of the car and the motor was also fading.

Yes, Lord. Thank you, Lord, Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Hardie reached both hands to his neck and rubbed away the crawling, ugly thing, whatever it was. He shuddered. He wanted to leap from the hole instantly. But he remained there a long time, until the forest was silent, until there were chirps, and tweaks, and noises of birds, squirrels, animals. A silent, natural, climax forest, alone, in the middle of nowhere, in the middle of the State of Pennsylvania, in the middle of the United States, in the middle of the world. Hardie imagined a movie camera, focusing on the spot in the forest where he lay in the hole, then watched the camera pulling back, pulling back, pulling back, until the spot disappeared, as the forest became only part of the landscape on the screen, until it was just a large tract of forest. The camera pulled back further, viewing the forest as only a part of the surrounding earth, pulling back further, streams, rivers came into view as the camera pulled back into a satellite view. Hardie didn't exist any longer, in his own mind he had disappeared forever into nothingness.

Mulvehill stood in the middle of the roadway, waving to the approaching vehicles. Men with rifles jumped out of the cars and military vehicles. Marty Geraghty and Bill Santiago were at his side.

“Foreigners, people speaking a foreign language, Russians, I think, with rifles, and a jeep. They ambushed us. Hardie ran. Must have been an escape plan. Sons of bitches went off that way.” He pointed into the forest where the Jeep had broken though the forest and disappeared. He pointed to tire tracks leading off the road and into the trees. The rescue squad mounted up into the cars and trucks, and turned off the road and into the forest. Mulvehill entered a car with Santiago and Geraghty.