Dirty Harry 07 - Massacre at Russian River (12 page)

The chains did not provide a formidable obstacle to men on foot and when Turk recovered enough, he order them severed. No one had an opportunity to carry out his instruction. At that instant several automatics opened up.

But the initial barrage did not come from the opposite side of the chains where the defenders could be expected to be dug in. The fire was originating from a point in back of them, and it was directed over their heads.

Turk wheeled around in confusion. “Who gave orders to shoot?” he yelled.

There was now fire from the opposite direction in answer to the first eruption.

They seemed to be trapped in a crossfire. The members of the eradication team appeared destined to be eradicated themselves if they did not take prompt and decisive action. Most of the men simply flung themselves into the muddy water. Others scattered off to the sides, seeking protection behind nearby trees that were rapidly becoming pockmarked with automatic fire.

Turk was still standing, trying to get a fix on the situation. Harry pulled him down.

At this point Harry realized that the fire was coming from only one direction—from directly in front of them. Whoever had discharged the first shots had abruptly broken off. There was no telling who was responsible or why. They now had to concentrate on the people who were still shooting at them.

“Open fire!” Turk commanded.

Harry did not see how this was going to do much good. All they could make out were successive blades of fire in the fog, giving them little in the way of targets. But the men complied with a fusillade from the M161As and AR15s they had with them.

Their retaliatory fire only invited a more heated response. An exchange continued for several minutes to no effect whatsoever. No one on either side had any idea where their shots were going. The defenders were just keeping the strike force pinned down.

Turk was completely baffled. “Nothing like this has ever happened before. One grower might put up resistance, yes, but to risk shooting on federal agents like this. I don’t understand it.”

“They didn’t show any hesitation about shooting down our helicopter,” Harry reminded him.

The shooting grew more desultory on both sides. Finally, Turk recognized the futility of maintaining the status quo and ordered a ceasefire.

Soon silence prevailed. It was impossible to know whether the defenders were merely waiting for the next round or whether they had slipped away in the fog.

“Turk, the best thing for you to do is retreat, go back to the trucks, and wait until tomorrow morning. No good is going to come of this.”

“Quiet. I’m thinking.” Turk wasn’t inclined to listen to anyone’s advice, however well reasoned.

He consulted his map again. “We can go around,” he announced. “We can circle around and hit them from the rear.”

“You don’t even know where the hell they are.”

Turk wasn’t listening. He’d made up his mind. Beginning to move about among his men, he alerted the squadron leaders to the strategy he’d just improvised.

Harry thus far had adhered to his role as observer. He had drawn out his .44 but had withheld his fire. But the way things were developing, he had a notion that he would be forced to employ it within the immediate future.

Half a dozen men of the eradication team, shadowy forms in the dark, raised themselves from the water where they’d been sprawled out and began to race forward.

They were heading onto an embankment off to the right of the road. Soon they were lost to sight.

A minute passed. Then there was a rapid series of shots followed by terrifying screams. More shots.

Turk looked into Harry’s face as though he expected to find the answer to his unspoken question.

Harry had no answer. He was waiting like everybody else.

There was silence. Then two men appeared. Both were running fast. “They’re killing us!” one of them shouted. He staggered toward Turk, looking as though he wanted to explain exactly what he meant. But then he stopped and looked around with dull unseeing eyes.

Turk approached him but the man failed to notice. He pitched forward, a big bloody hole under his right shoulder.

It took no time at all for word to filter through the ranks that five men had suffered critical injuries in an exchange of fire that could have lasted no longer than twenty seconds. Disgruntled enough already, the men openly began to talk of calling the entire operation off, defying Turk if necessary.

“There still may be men alive out there,” Harry said, “we can’t let them stay there.”

Turk seemed to have forgotten all about them. “What do you suggest we do?” he asked angrily, as though this fiasco was Harry’s fault, not his. “They’ll kill anyone who goes in there to recover them.”

“Not if we distract them.”

“Distract them?”

“Feign an attack on this front. I’ll go around and see if there are any survivors.”

“Alone?”

“If someone wants to volunteer his services, that’s all right with me.”

Turk was mulling this over.

“I don’t know,” he said.

“We haven’t much time. If there are any survivors out there, we might have to evacuate them quickly. Why don’t you radio back to Russian River and alert them that emergency medical aid should be ready?”

“Yes, you’re right, that’s exactly what I should do.” Turk did nothing, however. This whole business seemed to have overwhelmed him. He had drawn up no contingency plans, plotted no scenarios other than those that coincided with his perfectly imagined one.

“I am going to start out now. All right?”

Harry felt as though he were addressing a child, and a not particularly bright child at that. Turk looked at him with empty eyes and slowly nodded. “Yes, all right.”

Still uncertain, Harry left him. He then circulated among the beleaguered men to announce his intentions. To his surprise, he had little difficulty in enlisting three deputized volunteers to accompany him. It wasn’t the danger that concerned them so much, it was the man who was leading them. Harry was one thing, Turk quite another. They didn’t even know who Harry was, but at least he gave the impression that he knew what he was doing.

They moved out quietly, plunging into the woods where the ground constantly gave way beneath their feet and the air was filled with the scent of moss and decay. Sometimes there was so much mud that they sank nearly to their waists in it. The earth seemed hungry, ready at any moment to suck them in.

Harry kept listening for the sound of gunfire that would signal Turk’s diversionary attack. But he heard nothing. Was Turk so paralyzed that he could no longer dispense orders? Or had he forgotten the plan that they had only minutes before agreed upon? Anything was possible with Turk. He really wasn’t a well man.

Then, to Harry’s relief, the diversion came. But it was louder than he anticipated, a raucous and explosive affair that lit up the darkness with the sudden intensity of an electric storm.

One of the men with Harry paused for a moment and, observing the noisy spectacle, declared in amazement that now he would never have to rely just on old movies when he wanted to know what war was like.

Something was wrong. Harry couldn’t at first determine what it was. Then he understood. The battle was moving. The opposing forces weren’t retaining their positions as they’d been doing up until now but were coming closer together.

There was certainly no time to consider the implications of this. Harry had his own mission to attend to. They could not have much farther to go. The ambush had occurred only minutes after the six men had ventured into the woods.

They did find the four men who hadn’t returned but none of them was alive. If they hadn’t died immediately as a result of their wounds, then they had succumbed very shortly afterward. And it was possible that it wasn’t the bullets that had killed all of them. Some might have suffocated in the mud into which they’d fallen. They located a leg sticking up from the thick gooey blackness; they found a hand protruding from the muck. When they extricated the body and wiped the face clean, they looked into eyes filled with horror.

At first they could only discover three corpses. One of the deputies resorted to a flashlight to aid him in the search for the fourth. This was a mistake. His beam disclosed the fourth body, but it also signaled their presence to their enemies.

Two shotguns opened up but with so much gunfire that it was difficult to distinguish them. One of the deputies made a retching sound and toppled over into the mud. When Harry got to him, he was calling to his mother with a mouth engorged with mud. In the darkness it was impossible to detect how badly he was wounded. But as soon as he moved his stomach came pouring out of the gaping wound the blast had made. The deputy brought his hands down to stop the leakage, but it did no good. He shook his head in disbelief as if to say that such a thing could not be happening. Then, quickly, his eyes glazed over, and his body gave a short convulsive shudder. He lay still.

There were more shots, They took clumps out of trees and caused branches to shatter and go flying into the air. Leaves kept dropping, but nothing more lethal.

Harry was angry. The battle had been going on for perhaps half an hour, and at no time had he, or anyone else in the eradication team, gotten so much as a glimpse of the assailants.

He turned to the men who’d come with him—there were just two of them now—and instructed them to rejoin the main force. There was no sense trying to retrieve the bodies until the firing had ceased and the area was pacified.

“And what are you going to do?” one of them asked.

“I don’t rightly know as yet.”

“You watch out for yourself, you hear?”

Harry indicated he would. The two volunteers then proceeded on their way, headed in the direction of the battle that, far from subsiding, seemed to be gaining in intensity.

Harry began moving in the opposite direction. He was anxious to confront the men who’d just fired on them. When he had agreed to come along with Turk on this misbegotten expedition, it was mostly out of curiosity. But now he felt a personal stake in the affair. It might be a lost cause—Harry could not see how it could be anything but a lost cause—but it was important that he emerge from this with at least some shred of dignity left.

He didn’t move far from the site where they’d been fired upon, assuming that the attackers would expose themselves, if only to determine how much damage they’d inflicted.

To his satisfaction, one man did materialize after several minutes had passed, hesitantly weaving his way through the pines, his shotgun held at the ready.

Harry watched him, waiting for him to come closer. He was now standing over one of the men he had murdered. Then he knelt down, obviously ready to go through the man’s pockets.

“Hold it right there,” Harry said, sighting his .44 on him.

The man had a companion who’d been looking out for him. A shotgun roared, and the branches directly over Harry’s head disintegrated.

Though he was unhurt, the surprise attack distracted Harry momentarily. He instinctively moved back just as the first assailant picked up his shotgun and fired.

His shot went low, shattering the trunk of an alder and spewing a geyser of mud into the air. Harry fired his Magnum.

One round caught the assailant in his kneecap, the other in his thigh. He spun first to the left, then to the right, seemingly unable to make his mind up where to fall. Then he crumpled, becoming a small and bloody figure against a backdrop of damp and gloom. He made a horrible keening noise, mourning his own life as it seeped away into the mud that had turned into a burial ground for so many this night.

His friend, wise enough to keep concealed, fired twice more in rapid succession. Harry was relying on the darkness to save him, and the darkness cooperated. Both shells, in spite of the concussive sound of their explosions, failed to get anywhere near their intended target.

Although Harry had intended to get back to Turk’s force, he found that this was no longer necessary. The battle appeared to be coming to him.

Everywhere he looked there were men running. Maybe they had some purpose, but it was impossible to discern. They shot and ran. Sometimes they wouldn’t bother shooting but would just move. Were they advancing? Retreating? Harry didn’t know. He didn’t even have any idea whether these were members of the eradication team or were the men who had opened fire on them.

It was ludicrous to go anywhere or shoot at anybody under the circumstances. Harry was baffled. How had the situation been allowed to develop to this point?

When someone began firing at him, however, Harry had no choice but to answer in kind. There was a sharp exchange. Then Harry heard a muffled groan. He never saw anything, couldn’t be certain he’d hit anybody, but for the moment he seemed no longer to be a target.

It was then that he turned and saw a sight that positively astonished him.

Coming through the forest, with a delirious look in his eyes and a banshee yell rising from his lungs, was Turk. Blood covered nearly half his face, transforming it into a mask, at once grotesque and absurd. He was alone, but it looked as though he really thought he was leading the force. He might have believed that he was directing troops over the battlefield at Verdun. Or Gettysburg as far as that went. Whatever the case, Harry was certain he’d taken leave of his senses.

He was half-running, half-stumbling, frequently discharging the .38 he had in his hand, though he didn’t appear to be aiming it at anything. Harry realized what had happened. Rather than settling for a diversionary strategy, covering fire, which was all that Harry had requested, or a feint to confuse their antagonists, Turk had initiated a direct assault. How he had managed to convince anyone to go along with him was a mystery to Harry, but he had evidently succeeded.

Now Turk was alone and oblivious to the danger he was in. His troops were in disarray. The air around him was filled with bullets, and yet he made no effort to protect himself. It was as if he wanted to die.

Harry called to him. Turk didn’t hear. He kept right on hurrying forward, shooting at the unseen enemy.