Mammoth (40 page)

He was in the control center of a security company with headquarters at Sea-Tac. Howard had chartered virtually the entire firm for the duration. He had two assistants. The aptly named Wesley Blackstone was a big, no-nonsense black guy with a shaved head. Blackstone had been given to him as the best man for knowing the terrain along the border. He was an outdoorsman, was in fact still wearing the plaid flannel shirt and heavy boots he had had on when he got a phone call and was plucked from a backwoods campsite a hundred miles from here. He seemed to know his business.

The other assistant was the owner and operator of the company, a white man fully as big as Blackstone and bald as an egg, though not by choice, by the name of Crowder. He claimed to be the best at urban environments. Warburton wasn’t quite so sure about him. They were looking at a wall-sized electronic map of Washington State and lower British Columbia. Locations and unit numbers of all the aerial and ground search teams currently in operation were displayed. There were a lot of them. A whole lot of them. Maybe even enough to do the job…

The dots and numbers representing searchers moved every few seconds, adjusted by the GPS units each team carried. Most of the air units and many on the ground were now converging on the border.

“Legal crossing points at Blaine, the big one,” Blackstone said. He moved a controller and highlighted as he spoke. “Then here at State Road 539, here at Sumas, and not another until way over here, at Lenton Flat. Pretty rough country through there. I wouldn’t want to climb it with a mammoth.”

“Hannibal crossed the Alps with war elephants. Patrol it anyway.”

“Sure. Then there are seven more before you get to Idaho. You figure they’ll try to drive across, or follow one of these roads close to the border and walk it?”

“Hard to say. Either way will be tough.”

“Here in the west it’s fairly flat, farmland, they’d stick out like a sore thumb. Fewer people in the eastern part, a lot of it’s pretty arid. Desert. I wouldn’t go that route, myself.”

“What would you do?”

“Given what you told me? I’d try to drive up to one of the crossings out here in the boonies, go right up to the customs station and turn myself in.”

“They’ve got to cross first. Do we have a team at all of them yet?”

“We will in fifteen more minutes. Stopping them could be awkward, though. U.S. Customs will probably object if you shoot out their tires this side of the line.”

“They can use a knife on the tires. Anyway, if they get to a crossing then Plan A, keeping it all quiet, is pretty much busted. They’ll make a citizen’s arrest, customs will take a
look inside and realize there is only one juvenile mammoth on the
planet
and he belongs to Howard Christian, and the whole thing will be confused long enough for me and Howard and fifty lawyers to get there. Susan will realize that, too. If I was her, I’d try to find a place to get close to the border, and walk it. If we spot them doing that, we land and take them prisoner. And you didn’t hear me say this, but if they happen to be a mile or two over the border…Christian wants them back. Are you reading me?”

“Loud and clear.”

“Crowder, you’ll continue looking in the Seattle area on the ground, and we’ll give you a few helicopters to screen the freeways, but send most of the teams into the country up north. I want somebody in a four-wheel drive within ten minutes of every logging road in that forest, every dirt trail in that desert. I want at least one cross-country motorbike in the back of every vehicle. They have to leave the trailer on a road somewhere if they try to cross on foot. I don’t think they’ll try to cross at Blaine, I understand there are traffic jams up there.”

“They can stretch for miles,” Crowder agreed. “We’ve got three teams there, and we can stop them before they even
see
the border.”

“Good. When it gets dark we’ll get the satellites to work, and I’m betting we spot them somewhere out in the wilderness within an hour. We have to be ready to move on them. Anything else?”

“What about ferries?” Crowder said.

“Ferries?”

Crowder touched the keyboard and the map view zoomed in on the waters of the area, from the entrance to the estuary at the Georgia Strait, running between the Olympic Peninsula and Vancouver Island, to Olympia at the south end, and the city of Vancouver to the north. There was a lot of water, and a lot of islands. A spiderweb of lines appeared, running all over the water.

“We’ve always had good ferries up here.”

“Never been on one,” Blackstone said with a grin. “I get seasick in the bathtub.”

“Last ten years they’ve been adding more. Federal grants or some shit like that, ease the freeway congestion, not that it
did a damn bit of good. There’s three times as many ferries now as when I was a kid.”

“How many go to Canada?”

Crowder touched the keyboard again, and most of the lines disappeared.

“You got your B.C. ferries, and you got your Washington State ferries. One from Port Angeles, on the peninsula, to Victoria, on Vancouver Island. From here at Anacortes to Sidney and Vancouver. Also from Bellingham to Vancouver, and from Everett to Victoria and Vancouver.”

“So you cover Port Angeles, Anacortes, Bellingham, and Everett.”

“It’d be a dumb way to go. Sometimes you can wait for hours to get aboard.”

“Cover them anyway. It would be a perfect place to catch them quietly.”

“Will do.”

Warburton leaned back and sighed. He realized he hadn’t eaten yet today, and it was almost evening. He asked someone to have a pizza delivered.

We’ll catch them tonight. The satellites will find them.

MATT
left the unit at eight that morning, and saw the rain had stopped and the sky was beginning to clear. Bad luck. He walked to the truck and pulled the trailer around the block and into the storage yard. Susan was waiting to direct him, and they lowered the ramp.

Susan had noticed that most places like this were virtually deserted most of the time. This one had half a dozen rows of buildings with garage doors facing each other. Her two units could not be seen from any road or house in the area. There was always a chance somebody would pick that morning to visit a unit close to theirs, but if that happened they would just have to wait.

Matt walked to the end of the row where he could see the entrance gate. He signaled to Susan, and she opened the garage door and led Fuzzy out and up the ramp, and closed the ramp, then the door. Thirty seconds, total.

Matt hurried back and entered the trailer through the side door. Susan was strapping a leather harness around Fuzzy’s middle. She attached it to each side of the trailer with heavy chains.

“He traveled a lot before Fuzzyland opened, you know,” she said. “He had his own private train. He’s been in the back of trucks, too, going to and from the shows. Pachyderms are pretty good at keeping their balance, a lot better than you’d think. But we always used an arrangement like this as a sort of seat belt. I’d appreciate it if you tried not to stand on the brake, though, okay?”

“I’ll keep
way
back from the cars ahead.”

They went back outside and carefully peeled off the red contact paper Susan had applied in a big red swoosh after
painting the rig a uniform beige. She grimaced as she touched the long indent where a tree branch had scraped the side.

“I did that last week. A computer recognition program would pick that out pretty quick, even from high up, don’t you think? I was going to paint over it but then I thought it might be better to leave it that way until I was through the security gate.”

“Good thinking. Now they may be looking for it. Did you bring the paint?”

“Have I forgotten anything so far?” She got out a bucket and two brushes, and they quickly slapped on a coat of paint. So maybe the showers stopping was a bit of good luck, after all. They got on I-84 and headed west. Traffic was stop-and-go for a while, especially around the Rose Garden mess where the freeway joined I-5. Lucky thing the Trailblazers didn’t play games in the morning.

Over the Interstate Bridge traffic eased up, and they headed north. Just south of Tacoma, traffic backed up again. They crept along, nervously watching the sky.

THEY
missed the ferry they wanted in Tacoma, at Point Defiance, which put them an hour behind where they had hoped to be. It was a short hop to Vashon Island, at Tahlequah.

Vashon Island was pretty, still partly rural. They weren’t able to make up any time; in fact they missed another ferry. Every minute sitting still in the parking lot was agony, but eventually they were waved aboard and undercover again.

This was a larger ferry and they were on the lower deck. They stayed close to the trailer in case Fuzzy started to bellow—which he hardly ever did, but he was in strange surroundings and, besides, Susan didn’t want to get more than about fifty feet from him. Through a wide opening on the starboard side they could see planes on approach to Sea-Tac Airport from the north, then the city of Seattle itself. These waters were teeming with boats, many of them other ferries crisscrossing Puget Sound. They pulled into the terminal at Kingston, far behind schedule, knowing they would not get to the last departure of the ferry they wanted. When they drove past the terminal, they could not even see the departing ferry. It was long gone.

Susan had a backup plan, but she was discouraged. They pulled into a big RV park where Susan had booked a space a week earlier under another name. Matt found their space, was relieved to see it was a pull-through, and they parked as the sun was going down. There were trees around them, but not the complete cover they would have liked. Neither of them was sure if the satellites could spot them through trees, anyway.

But there was nothing for it. They would have to spend the night, and hope the search was, by now, focused far away to the north and east.

THEY
made a meal from cans and ate it in silence. They hadn’t bothered to hook up anything, not even the electricity, but the refrigerator and stove used propane. There was no reason not to turn on all the lights and have a party—Susan had stocked some beer. But the instincts of the hunted left them huddling beneath a single light over the kitchen table. Susan sat facing the back, where Fuzzy stood, maybe ten feet behind Matt’s back. Every once in a while she got up to pet him or feed him a treat. He seemed tired of this whole bye-bye business by now.

“He’s restless,” she said as she sat back down opposite Matt. “He missed his daily run. Hell, he’s probably even missing doing his show.”

“He’s a creature of habit,” Matt said. “He’ll get used to new habits. You did the right thing.”

“Keep saying that every ten minutes, okay?” She yawned. “I thought I’d never be able to sleep again, but I’m afraid I might drop off right here in the middle of a sentence.”

“I hope you can stay awake a little longer. There are some things I have to tell you.”

She looked up, more alert.

“The rest of your story?”

He smiled.

“Yeah. The good parts…well, the better parts. Anything would have felt good after getting out of that cell. And some things you need to know.”

“Why don’t we get to that part first? We’ll have plenty of
time to catch up on the rest, even if we have to do it by mail from our separate prisons.”

“I need to build up to it. I’ll keep it as short as possible. I’m pretty sleepy, too.”

FOR
most of the first year after his release, Matt hadn’t been able to do much but dodge reporters and continue his researches with his computer on the Internet.

He tried a few times to elude them, managed to shake them off once in a while, got into the habit of withdrawing money from his bank accounts when he had the chance and never using his credit cards, but they always found him again. It wasn’t hard to do in this day and age. Few people had the skills to stay hidden for long, and Matt finally admitted it wasn’t worth the effort. He decided to wait them out. He had plenty of money, his needs were modest. He stayed at inexpensive hotels and moved every few nights, just to inconvenience the media. Time travel was a very big story, he was one of only two people known to have done it, and the world wanted to know all about it.

At first there were actual satellite trucks that followed him around as he drove from city to city. Those gradually dwindled to a few pool vehicles with cameras recording him every time he got out of his car or left his hotel. One shot or another of him showed up on most newscasts for almost a month. If he sneezed, it would likely get on the air. A stumble was apt to cause a flash newsbreak.

He tried to go to Europe, which was a mistake. A good percentage of his fellow passengers were reporters, and they weren’t shy about crowding around and asking questions. When he got off the plane in London he was facing a whole new set of reporters, even more aggressive than the ones at home. You would have thought he was a rock star or the president of the United States. He walked straight to the airline counter and bought a ticket back to America.

Gradually, as he continued his silence—he learned early that even saying “no comment” only encouraged them—the crowds lessened. It helped that Susan was giving accounts of
their adventure—always on tape, never live, and always carefully controlled by Howard’s spin doctors. The story she told was the truth, in the sense that she didn’t lie about anything, but there was much she did not or would not tell.

“WE
were both sort of in moving prisons, I guess,” Susan said. “I stayed in places where Howard controlled the security. When I went out I had to sneak around, and I had bodyguards.”

“It must have been awful.”

“Not as bad as what you went through. I watched them hounding you. I did more interviews than I wanted to so maybe it would take some of the pressure off you.”

Matt smiled. “You know, I thought it might be something like that. Thanks.”

“I have no idea if it did any good.” She looked down at the table. “I have a confession to make.” She looked up again. “It was during that first year, after wondering where you were while they had you locked up, and then seeing what they were doing to you…it was then that I realized that I loved you.”