Keeping Watch (33 page)

Then somebody said, “Why aren't there any kids?”

There were children, but only a handful, and none older than about three. Allen had never seen a farming village where the children didn't at least match the adults in number. Had there been some kind of childhood epidemic here?

Brenda called up his translator, an ill-tempered local named Lo Don, whom everyone called Lowdown. He translated Brenda's query about the village's children, and received only loud protestations and demonstrative fingers pointed at the babies.

“They say, these only children.”

“I suppose the Cong are recruiting five-year-olds now?” Brenda said in a mild voice.

“You want I ask them that?”

“No, there's little point. I think we'll need to be a little more direct.” Brenda looked around at his platoon of wolves, his eyes coming to rest, as always, on Allen. Then they shifted to the man standing next to Allen, and the amused smile came onto his lips.

“Tobin.”

Mouse straightened. “Yessir?”

“How about you taking charge of this interrogation?”

Oh, shit,
thought Allen.
The fucking bastard, here it comes.
Brenda must've decided that using Allen's squad-mates was the only way of levering up Allen's defenses.
Damn it all,
he thought, looking at Mouse's startled face.
How do I get us out of this one?

“Me?” Mouse asked apprehensively.

“Yes, soldier. You bring your sixteen over here and shoot a couple of these kids, see if their mothers will tell us where the others are hiding.”

Mouse stared down at the naked, round-bellied infants, appalled. “I can't do that, sir. They just babies.”

“We're at war with the babies, too, Tobin. Shoot them.”

He was talking to Mouse, but he was looking at Allen.

Allen felt as if the ground was falling out from under him. His private war had just moved to encompass the others, and he reached out to grab the only solution he could find. He cleared his throat and said, “I'll do it, sir.”

The platoon turned as one to stare at him. Allen thumbed his safety on, handed the rifle to Mouse, and walked up to the villagers, gesturing to Lowdown to follow him.

At the cook-fire outside one of the hooches, Allen squatted on his boots. The people on the other side of the fire were a man and a woman, both looking about a hundred and twenty years old, toothless, terrified. He met their eyes, first hers, then his, before he spoke over his shoulder to the translator.

“You tell these people that we don't want to hurt their children. We just need to be sure they aren't hiding VC. Tell them that.” He waited until Lowdown's voice had stopped, and he saw the disbelief on the old faces. “Now you tell them that the man with the dark glasses is crazy.
Dinky-dau,
you understand? Crazy as a rabid dog. That's right,” he said when both wrinkled faces glanced with apprehension at the lieutenant's glasses. “That man will shoot everyone, including the children. Then he will find your other children and shoot them, unless they come out now. Do you understand what I'm saying?”

They understood, and they believed him. The villagers murmured among themselves for several minutes, the younger women protesting, one of them wailing in terror. The old man finally looked into Allen's eyes.

“They come out, you not hurt?” the ancient voice asked.

Allen swiveled his head to look at Brenda. “He wants to know, if their kids come out, you promise you won't hurt them?”

“ 'Course not, unless they're VC.”

“No VC,” the old man declared.

“I have your word?” Allen persisted, holding the lieutenant's gaze.
I'm not giving in, not this time, you bastard.

“Carmichael, get on with it.”

Allen got to his feet and surveyed the platoon. “You heard Lieutenant Brennan. We've just promised that we're not going to shoot this ville's kids.”

When he was sure, he looked down at the old man. He said, “We won't shoot your children.”

The old man unfolded until he was on his feet and led the way, most of the ville trailing behind, the women's voices providing a chorus of apprehension as they went up the worn path. Two hundred yards away, the man stopped and pointed to some bushes. “There.”

The bunker was a cave, its entrance hidden by vegetation and rocks. The old man rattled a singsong phrase, and in a moment two children came out, then three more. Soon ten kids were blinking in front of the cave, all under the age of nine.

Brenda nodded, satisfied, and walked over to examine the nearly invisible opening of the bunker. Allen let out the breath he didn't know he'd been holding, the other soldiers relaxed, and the villagers, reacting to the change in their stances, began to chatter. Then Brenda said casually, his voice echoing from the open space below him, “Tobin, shoot the old man.”

As one, the platoon turned to look at their lieutenant, who chose that moment to step down into the cave. After a moment, Brennan's head reemerged, to fix Mouse with a look of mild surprise. “I gave you an order, soldier.”

“Sir, the old guy—”

“You let them get away with this, next time they'll think it's okay to shoot at us. Waste him, Tobin. Hell, he's half-dead anyway.”

With that, Brenda ducked back into the hole. Had he not demonstrated such a casual lack of interest in the whole matter, had he stayed to see his order carried out, things might have gone very differently. Mouse might have firmed up his resistance, while Brenda's authority teetered and began its downhill run. But with the order stated and left, in the vacuum of Brennan's absence the order took on its own authority. After a moment, Mouse brought his gun up and began to swivel to face the villagers.

With that motion, with the sharp rising wail of the women, Allen's world suddenly shifted. Silence came down over him. The faces of the people around him—white, black, and brown—became both achingly beautiful and ineffably strange. Certain things became transparently clear to him, above all the knowledge that if he did not act, then Mouse would live the rest of his days under an intolerable memory. Allen didn't even need to think about what he was going to do, because will and action were one, and the cool mountain air brushed his face, sweet as a kiss. It was time.

“No,” he told Mouse quietly.

Four leisurely steps took Allen to the cave opening. A gentle tug and the grenade dropped into his palm like a ripe peach; a twitch and the constricting pin was freed. His ears registered the small
tink
of the spoon handle and his right arm curled smoothly down, back, and forward, the fingers relaxing at precisely the right point in the arc to allow the heavy metal handful to continue on its way like a miniature bowling ball, bouncing along Brenda's path through the entrance of the cave. The universe counted down the seconds before Allen would need to step to one side—all the time in the world for one final glance down into Brenda's face.

The lieutenant had taken off his sunglasses in the dim cave, and the pale eyes seemed to glitter with their own light. They widened slightly at the approaching grenade, and although Allen had a fleeting impression of something that might have been fear, it passed in an instant, replaced by the smile that already haunted Allen's dreams, amused and triumphant. The two men held each other's eyes, locked into an intimacy such as Allen had never known, as the grenade bumped and slowed and came to a rest at the toe of Brennan's polished boots. And then, an instant before Mouse tackled him, a heartbeat before the mouth of the cave vomited out fire and chunks of metal and rock, Allen knew the reason for the triumph and humor in the insane blue eyes.

There had been a noise from the cave in back of Brennan.

There were children in the cave.

Chapter 29

Allen didn't know how long he stood in the motel room with the twice-folded sheet of paper in his hand before the facts all came together in his mind with the impact of a grenade in a cave. He heard the spoon handle's tiny
tink,
registered the impact of Mouse's flying tackle, felt for the millionth time the exquisitely painful cut of the final irony: that the entire platoon had been looking toward the wailing villagers, leaving Mouse the only witness to the source of the grenade. In rescuing his last surviving squad-mate from one atrocity, Allen had delivered him to another. Brennan was ultimately granted a posthumous medal for venturing into a cavern full of armed VC children, and Mouse said not a word. He said nothing to Allen, either, and put in for a transfer soon after. Allen had saved Mouse and lost him in the same motion.

And now: instructions for bringing down a plane; the honed instincts of Karin Rao and Gina; the news anchor telling of Jamie's long-held interest in his father's Cessna; both Jamie and his father, describing an airport visit as the last thing they had done; the boy's weird reaction to the crop duster, and his unusually knowledgeable questions about blowing up trees; and his father's recent bout of rage after Ms. Rao's call from school at about the same time he “broke” the boy's computer—
Jeez, I thought it was about all over,
the boy had said, with a laugh to cover the tremor in his voice.

Any parent, any school administrator knew the lessons of Paducah and Jonesboro and Columbine: shame and social isolation to assemble the raw material for atrocity; a brutal upbringing coupled with a knowledge of weapons to shape the device; with a recent and intolerable event to trigger it. The facts had all been there, right in front of him, from his covert recordings of a solitary and abused boy to Jamie's casual remark about dynamite, but Allen hadn't seen the deadly mixture until it blew up in his face. The violence of revelation splintered his mind, leaving him standing with the paper in his hand; and then it hit him with the force of Mouse's tackle:
Move move MOVE!
and the thud of rotors seemed to fill his bones, making it hard to think of anything but sprinting for the car and jamming his foot on the accelerator until he reached Montana.

Only the decades of training kept his brain in charge. He was dimly aware of packing his clothes into garment bag and carry-on, couldn't have said later how he'd made his plane reservations, and nothing but the compulsive tidiness of patrol reminded him to change back the dead bolt—one loose end securely tied off. Another went with the mailing service on the way to the airport, where he bought a mailer big enough for all Gina's papers. He took the page he had found in Jamie's book, the instructions for crashing a plane, and photocopied it on the service's machine, then put the original into a smaller envelope, writing on the outside:
This should be checked for prints, and see if G can find out where it's from.
Into another envelope went the plastic bag with the tiny scraps of wallpaper from the bare room in the O'Connell house; on that one he wrote,
Have these stains tested.
He slid both small envelopes in front of the other pages, added the diary and the miniature tapes, and paid to overnight it all to Alice's service near Seattle.

But when he hurried into the terminal, hearing his flight number being announced over the speakers, his eye caught on the rank of phone booths, and the other, more problematic loose end dangled before him: Alice herself.

He should phone her. He owed it to her, to keep her abreast of everything that was happening. But what would he say?
Listen, Alice; you know that triad of psychopathy the psychologists toss around: bed-wetting, fire-setting, and animal abuse? How would it feel to know we'd got one of those, that you and I had taken the hand of a sixth-grader whose bed still had a waterproof cover on it, whose school once burned down, whose dog died mysteriously? A kid who had shown a particular interest in the plane his father just crashed in? That we'd taken his hand and led him to the arms of a family that was generous and loving and horribly ill-equipped when it came to being suspicious of a child?

No, he wouldn't call her. What did he actually know? What gain would there be in alarming Alice? If the kid hadn't burned down the Johnson farm in the last eleven weeks, he wasn't likely to do so in the next eleven hours. Allen had said that he'd see her on Sunday, and he would. Only, he'd have the boy with him.

But the urgent beat of helicopter rotors seemed to follow him, all the way to Montana.

He made his tight Portland connection and touched down in Helena late the same night, mildly aware that some self-congratulations were in order: Had his instinctive side been given its way, had he just gotten behind the wheel of his rental car and unthinkingly rushed north, he'd only be halfway through Nevada. He strode to the taxi ranks and told the driver he needed to go to the downtown bus station. The man looked at him as if he was nuts, but he drove there, and left him.

What Allen wanted was not a bus, but a person, of a type that didn't tend to hang out in airports, not in this country. He walked up and down until he found the man he wanted, in this case the driver of an unmetered taxi, and told him what he needed.

“You wanna buy a car? At this hour?”

“If you can't think of anyone, just say so, I'll go on looking.”

“Didn't say that. Just kinda surprisin', you know?”

“I'm in a hurry. There's fifty bucks in it for you.”

“Couple of those would be better,” the man noted, studying the grimy ceiling.

“If I have the keys inside of an hour, we'll go to an ATM and there'll be three of them.”

“Then let's go.”

With this sort of arrangement, there was always the danger that the driver would turn on him and take what he could find, the misleading statement about the ATM notwithstanding. But Allen's luck held, and he didn't find himself staring down the business end of a gun, and the man's cousin-in-law hadn't actually gone to bed yet, and he was happy to show Allen the cars in his lot.

There were two dozen vehicles under the glaring lights, and a Rottweiler bellowing its fury and biting madly at the doorknob inside the shack marked
OFFICE.
Allen ignored its threats while he walked up and down the rows, then asked for the keys to three of the vehicles. The cousin-in-law went inside the shack, shouting the animal into submission, and brought out the keys. One car Allen rejected on the basis of its reluctant starter, another by the dark stink of burning that rose up around him. The third car was a five-year-old, manual-shift Honda with the aroma of mildew and the beginnings of rust-lace along its wheel-wells. However, the engine started obediently, and a drive around the block betrayed no ominous noises, smells, or shimmies. It even had Washington plates, an added advantage once he crossed the state border.

“How much?” he asked the cousin.

“It's a sweet car, isn't it? And only twenty-seven thousand on the clock.”

Allen hadn't even bothered glancing at the odometer, assuming it would show a fraction of the actual miles driven. “How much?”

“Night like this, nice guy like you, I'll let her go for six thou.”

“I'll give you two. Cash.”

The last word caught briefly at the salesman's attention, but he rallied fast. “Two! That's less than I paid for it.”

“Then you were cheated.”

“Might let you have it for five.”

“Three.”

They settled for thirty-seven fifty, and the man's eyes got wide when Allen took off the innocent-looking belt and started pulling the crisply folded hundred-dollar bills from its innards. Even pressed flat, the bills made a nice stack.

“I'll need the pink slip,” Allen told him.

“'Course you will,” said his new best friend, and went to wrest the ownership papers from the guard dog. Allen traded the money for the papers and gave the taxi man his finder's fee. He was out of Helena not much after midnight.

He followed the main highway through Bozeman, past the last blandishments for Yellowstone, until finally he turned onto the lesser road that he and Jamie had passed over the final days of May. The gas station where they had filled up the tank and bought a sack of fresh, fragrant doughnuts was dark now. Ten miles later he caught the smell of the sleeping dairy farm that had made Jamie screw up his face in disgust, unaware of what Fate had in store for him just up the road. It was two-thirty in the morning when the Honda's headlights caught the Johnson mailbox. Allen bumped down the lane and pulled up to the dark house, leaving his high beams glaring on the front porch, and ran up the wooden steps to pound on the door. Dogs barked; a light went on, a man's voice came, sleep-thick and apprehensive, asking who it was.

“Pete, it's me, Allen.”

The lock rattled, the door drew back. Allen was through it before it was all the way open, pushing aside Pete's questions as he went past the man's pajama-clad form. The farm's resident watch dog, an arthritic old retriever, grumbled its mistrust.

“I've come for the boy, Pete, I can't tell you why, I just have to take him.”

Rachel was stopped on the stairs, her hair awry, dressed in a fuzzy bathrobe and out-at-the-toe slippers.

“Allen, what on earth has happened?”

“I have to take Jamie.”

“You're taking Jim? Right now?”

That brought Allen up short. The family was fine, no smoke was curling from the eaves; did he really need to turn the entire household upside down at three
A.M.
in order to remove his cuckoo child from their midst? Nothing was going to happen before morning.

He passed a hand over his hair. “No. Jeez, I'm really sorry. Go back to bed. I'll have a snooze on the sofa.” Not that he intended to sleep.

Rachel came the rest of the way downstairs. “As if I could get back to sleep wondering what is going on. Pete, why don't you try to get another couple of hours?”

Pete looked from his wife to the madman intruder, and shrugged. He locked the door, patted Rachel on the shoulder in passing, and retreated up the stairs. The bedroom door shut behind him. Rachel tightened the belt of her robe around her, and led Allen into the kitchen. The old dog came along, settling back onto its bed behind the stove with a sigh.

“We can talk in here,” she said. “Just keep it low.”

“I'm really sorry,” he told her again. “Why don't you go back to bed, too? We'll talk in the morning.”

“Oh, sure, while Jim is sitting there with his big ears. You want cocoa, or tea?”

Allen wanted a lot of strong coffee, but he settled for tea.

“What has happened?” she asked, moving from stove to refrigerator.

She was such a sensible woman, and Allen was desperately tired; he craved the relief of telling her all of it, of dumping his entire shitload of suspicions and fears onto someone else and letting her tell him what to do. But the very length of the story itself saved him, made him hesitate long enough to realize that he could not tell her, not until he knew the whole of it. In the end he just told her, “The boy's father died.”

Rachel set his tea down on the oilcloth and settled across the table from him with her cocoa. She had switched on a wall heater; the growing warmth combined with the fragrance of hot milk made him want to curl up next to the old dog.

“Why does the father's death bring you up here at this hour?”

Allen cupped his hands around the mug, seeing the reflection of the overhead light dancing on the surface. “I've discovered that the man was involved in illegal activities. There may be a lot of money involved. It appears that he was murdered.”

All true, however misleading.

Rachel frowned. “Are you saying the people who killed the father may come after the son as well? But why?”

“Rachel, I honestly can't go into it here and now. You'll just have to believe me when I say, I have to take the boy away.”

“You can't, Allen, you just can't. Last week we had his first night without horrible dreams. He denies he has them, but he sleeps with the light full on. He hurts himself, or puts himself at risk to be hurt. He's been here for three months and he's only now on the edge of putting out lines of communication. He's just beginning to trust us.”

Trust: the hardest lesson of all for abused children to learn. Most never did.

“It may not be for long. I'll try my best. But if the father's dead, circumstances have changed. We can't simply leave him here.”

“Why not?”

Because he may have killed the man,
was the response on the tip of Allen's tongue.
Because his father's systematic emotional torture may have been more successful than he could have imagined, and he's built himself a killer for a son. Because I know how it feels to hate an abusive authority figure so much that in the end you become him. I know how it feels to murder. And I have to take Jamie aside to a quiet place where I can look into his eyes, and know if there's a killer looking back at me.

But he could say none of that here. Merely, “I'll make sure he understands that I'm the one to blame, not you and Pete. It's possible that I'll be able to bring him back here, and if so, it would be better if you appeared to be victims, too.”

“But why would anyone want to harm Jim?”

Why indeed, if the father was out of the picture? “I don't know that they do. But I need to be sure, before I can let him stay here.” That much was true.

“And if they come here, and find him missing? What will they do?”

He was so tired he wasn't thinking straight. Of course his nightmare scenario led straight to this question, which would be a valid concern if any of the rest of it was true. He needed to reassure her that there wasn't some band of murderous thugs on the boy's trail, about to burst in some night and murder her family, but he couldn't very well do that without telling her that the only potential murderous thug was an adolescent boy already sheltering under her roof. “Rachel, look. No one is after him. His father's plane went down, apparently with him on board. They haven't recovered the body yet, but surely you can see that it changes everything. The father's not there, and the boy will probably inherit a lot of money. I have to take him back.”