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Tripwire’s jaw couldn’t have dropped any lower had Hulk Hogan wedged a crowbar between his teeth and pried with all his might. Crosshairs looked like Iron Mike Tyson had just busted him one in the chops. Even Oddy had a tough time keeping a straight face.

One million dollars
each
?

“Wait a sec,” Zippo said, blinking away the dollar signs that flashed before his eyes. “You’re going to pony up a million bucks if we—”

“Five million dollars, one million each, if you track down and kill the men who slaughtered my wife and daughter, yes,” Grosevoir said. “Does that sound fair?”

Does it sound fair?
Crosshairs’s mind boggled at the concept.
A cool mil’ to rub out some degenerate rat-fucks who murdered kids and old ladies?
He’d have had a more profound crisis of conscience had he been asked to stomp a cockroach! Fifty grand would clear his debts, but a million would rocket him to the top of the high-roller list. He pictured himself at World Series of Poker, Binion’s Horseshoe Casino in Vegas, sitting at the final table behind multicolored stacks of chips, staring across the felt at Stu Ungar and T.J. Cloutier and Johnny Chan, matching wits with those leather-assed road gamblers. The other men entertained fantasies of their own. A
million
dollars. That kind of cashola could change anyone’s life.

“How do we know you’re gonna pay?” Oddy said. “We don’t know you from Adam.”

“Because I am neither bored enough to plan all of this as a hoax, nor foolish enough to believe you’d react charitably if I did,” Grosevoir said. “This venture requires trust on both sides. I trust you to kill Overton. You trust me to pay.” He removed an alligator-skin checkbook from his blazer. “Perhaps I should cut a check for, say, two-hundred thousand dollars to each of you—a good faith gesture?”

“Before you do, we’ll need to discuss your offer,” Oddy said. “In private.”

“Of course. I’ll wait in the bedroom.”

A strained silence followed Grosevoir’s departure. Zippo reached another bottle of Moosehead from the minibar, cracked the cap, drank deeply. “What’s to discuss? You want in, get in. If not, don’t let the doorknob hit you where the good lord split you.”

“Not arguing that,” Oddy said. “We’re grown men, each of us will make his own choice. But he contacted
all
of us. He wanted Blackjack. He wanted the Magnificent Seven.”

“No chance of that, is there, Sarge?” Answer said. “I mean, barring a séance.”

It was the first time anyone had invoked the deaths of Slash and Gunner. “You’re right on that, son,” Oddy said, biting back a caustic rejoinder. “But what I’m saying is, he didn’t want one of us, or two, but everyone.”

“I don’t know how you guys’ve spent the last twenty years,” Tripwire said. “But me, I’ve been sitting on my rapidly-expanding ass. The only explosions I’ve witnessed recently are Peter North cumshots. Any recruit fresh out of munitions training could run circles around me.”

“And I haven’t fired a rifle in years,” Crosshairs said, rapping his knuckles on the prosthesis. “My peripherals are all fucked. Doesn’t mean I don’t want in on the deal…but it
is
odd.”

“Ninety-nine percent of these deals
are
odd,” Zippo said. “Trust me. And at least this fruitcake has a decent reason for wanting someone dead.” Zippo’s tone suggested Grosevoir’s motivation was, in his experience, rare. “Hell, I’d cold-cock Jesus H. Christ himself for a million bucks, but this Overton fuck truly deserves to get smoked.”

Oddy said, “So you’re decided?”

Zippo nodded. “Hell, it’d be swell to have you boys along for old times’ sake, but I’m set to go this solo.”

“What about the rest of you?”

Crosshairs nodded. Answer nodded. Tripwire said, “Depends. Are you going?”

Oddy felt like a man trying to hold his ground against a tornado or a tidal wave. It was hopeless. You could only go limp, give yourself over to the gathering momentum, and pray you’d be left relatively unscathed.

“Yeah, okay. I’m in.”

Tripwire said, “Then so am I.”

“So it’s settled!” Grosevoir said, exiting the bedroom. He brought his stench with him; Zippo momentarily envied Crosshairs’s immunity to odors. “This is simply marvelous! Everything’s ready; I’ll have a limo take you to the airport, where a Learjet is waiting to—”

“Hold on,” Oddy interrupted. “We’re going to need warm clothes, maps, guns—”

“Yes, yes,” Grosevoir said. “All under control. But time is of the essence!”

The men rose. Grosevoir made a show of patting their backs, “It’s a noble thing you’re doing, terribly noble.” Crosshairs didn’t see anything noble about hunting down other human beings, even cold blooded killers, in exchange for a bagful of money. The gaudy specter of cash rendered any notions of nobility hollow as a termite-ridden elm.

Tripwire stared out over the blackened cityscape, even squares of darkness and light laid out in a patchwork grid. He had no idea it would be the last time he’d see Toronto’s, or any city’s, skyline. For a few of them, the following hours would comprise a series of lasts: their last car ride, their last decent meal, their last casual and thoughtless interaction with people other than the men they would fight and die beside.

Answer was the last to exit. Grosevoir grabbed his shirtsleeve. Answer stared down into Grosevoir’s wet-ruby eye, seeing his own image reflected in it, swelled and monstrous. The way Grosevoir appraised him was disconcerting: as if Answer was a suit coat that, with the proper alterations, would make a perfect fit. Answer tried to pull free. Grosevoir held him for a moment before releasing his grip. His gray teeth resembled weather-beaten tombstones.

“Run along now,” he whispered.

Answer did as he was told.

— | — | —

Excerpted from the
Slave River Journal
,

April 16th, 1986:

INTREPID REPORTER NEWEST MEMBER

OF THE MISSING

“A Good Boy, But Always So Curious,”

— Says Tearful Mother

By Adriana Fellows

Fort Simpson, NWT:
Michael Fulton, intrepid cub reporter for this newspaper, has gone missing somewhere around Great Bear Lake. Unbeknownst to family, friends, or his editor, Fulton hired famed backwoodsman Herman Kint and set off into the wilderness, following “The Path of the Missing,” as it is now called. This same path was set down by search and rescue parties headed by Ed “Mad Dog” Rabidowski and Earl Triggers—twenty men in total, all now missing. RCMP Spokesman Sid Grimes, fielding questions about an area that seems to be Canada’s equivalent of the Bermuda Triangle, had this to say: “The urge in cases such as this is to rush to conclusions. Well, I’m not a rusher. Never have been. We have assembled another search and rescue crew, and will continue with due vigilance.”

Stella Fulton, the missing reporter’s mother, said, “The boy would do anything for a story–for a ‘scoop,’ as he was forever calling them. Even as a boy he was curious, always searching, never satisfied.”

Aerial photography of the terrain indicates…

— | — | —

IV.

dream of a

northern land

Northwest Territories

December 6th, 1987. 2:17 p.m.

The thrum of CH-113 Labrador
helicopter blades filled the cabin. Five-hundred feet below, the snow-crusted scrubland of the Canadian Shield was a white-and-green blur at 350 mph. Out the west-facing porthole, the Rocky Mountains rose in sheer spires of schist and granite. Five middle-aged men sat in canvas web-seats, feet shod in ballistic nylon combat boots. Five Jack Wolfskin backpacks rested in the cargo hold, pockets crammed with camping gear and dehydrated food packets.

The pilot’s face was obscured by a smoked-plastic visor. He said, “Five minutes to drop-off.”

Oddy recounted the events of the past twelve hours. From the hotel, they took a limousine to Pearson International. On the way, Grosevoir made telephone arrangements to transfer a quarter of a million dollars into five Swiss bank accounts. They taxied to a private runway and boarded a Learjet, arriving five hours later at an airstrip near Fort Nelson, British Columbia. Waiting in a supply shed was an arsenal to rival a small war-mongering nation. Some of the weaponry was so cutting-edge that nobody had even
heard
of it.

“Gear up,” Oddy said.

Crosshairs selected a silenced Remington Model 700 sniper rifle outfitted with an Ajack telescopic sight. Tripwire took a DeLisle Carbine—a self-silenced machinegun used by elite commando forces—and strapped a bandolier of M14’s, PBX explosives, and white phosphorus grenades across his chest. Answer kept his Kirikkales and added a Sig Sauer SG540 light-assault rifle. Oddy choose a fifty-pound Heckler and Koch HK23 heavy machine gun and tucked a pair of Webley Mark 6 pistols into his waistband, remembering how well they’d served Deacon. Zippo loaded a pair of Llamas—the exact model he’d been using for years—and was leaning towards a Galil SAR assault carbine when Grosevoir motioned to a canvas-draped object in the far corner.

“Why not go for what’s behind door number three?” he said.

Zippo grunted and pulled the canvas clear. His eyes widened. “Is that—?”

“The M2A1-7,” Grosevoir said.

The M2A1-7 flame-thrower was developed in the early eighties by the U.S. military. Two lightweight alloy canisters held six gallons of jellied gasoline which, when drawn through an asbestos-coated tube into a pressurized mixing chamber, produced a forty-foot stream of liquid fire capable of melting flesh off bones in the time it takes to spark a cigarette. Zippo hefted it. The unit was much lighter than the LPO-50 he used in ’Nam. He shouldered it, snapping the buckles over his chest and stomach. He looked kind of foolish: a squat man in Brooks Brothers suit with a Buck-Rogersish jetpack contraption strapped to his back.

Then he thumbed the pilot light and stepped outside and unleashed a sizzling rope of flame that turned a nearby pine into a towering cone of fire. Everyone agreed he didn’t look so foolish anymore.

“I’ll take it.”

Crosshairs wondered if such massive firepower was really necessary to take down three poorly armed prisoners. Kind of like using a bazooka to kill a doodlebug.

Grosevoir outfitted them with tents, parkas, snow pants, boots, toques and gloves, all top-quality. They were also provided a set of collapsible snowshoes, fishing line and hooks, and an M-5 medical kit.

The Labrador helicopter idled on a nearby pad. Grosevoir clapped each man on the back as they boarded, face set in a mask of solemnity.

“Do it for Judy,” he told Oddy, the last to board. “Do it for Allison. Just do it.”

“Like the shoe commercial,” Oddy said, deadpan.

Grosevoir watched the Labrador lift off, carrying the men up and off into the night. The flashing red lights on the helicopter’s hull were only slightly more brilliant than his own crimson eye.

“See you soon,” he whispered.

The Labrador pitched side-to-side with turbulence. The men swayed with the familiar movement. Tripwire checked his watch: 3:00 p.m. Twenty-two hours since he’d met Oddy in
Canary Isle
. Now here they were, miles away from civilization on a fool’s errand for a lunatic millionaire. What the hell was he
doing
here? Had someone slipped an idiot pill into his vodka, making him submissive to this lunacy?