Radiant Dawn (11 page)

Storch minded his own business and took their money, until about four months ago. The emcee was trying to hustle Hansen into procuring Thiopental for them in industrial volumes, and Hansen must have complained to the Field Marshal, who chased them out of town. Storch visualized the two or three underage girls he'd spotted in the van that tore out of his parking lot inches ahead of the Field Marshal's half-track. They'd never stopped in town again, but the vans kept coming and going.

The mysterious combatants whose secret war had trampled his life whirled about in his mind. He couldn't figure out which side was which. The feds—if they were feds—had raided the weapons cache that Harley was sitting on for someone involved in a race war, but had shown little or no interest in him. If he were under surveillance, they'd surely have stopped him by now. They'd have Hiram, and they'd have the girl. The girl…

What did the body of a girl kept alive for nine years, then unceremoniously dumped into the San Andreas Fault, have to do with a militia group? The skin traders were strictly business, however depraved. Why did the militia want so desperately for him to dig up a body and hide it? Why not call the police, or the media? People far less clever than Storch had concocted less far-fetched schemes to frame someone for murder. It had to be something they wanted
him
to see, to provoke him to take action. Harley's last words swam into his thoughts, that incomplete sentence that at the time had told him only that he wasn't alone in his room, and probably not holding his own gun to his temple.

Don't what? Don't believe them? Don't lead the feds, real or fake, to them? Don't do anything? DON'T—

Thinking made what he was about to do seem more absurd by the moment, and it was like throwing burning sticks into the cave of the Headache. For all that he had already lost, for all that he believed in, Storch stopped thinking.

He drove up a service road that paralleled the gravel track to the mining hut. A quick glance told him the hut was a losing proposition: two sentries in desert camo milled around out front. Storch counted eight ATVs and two pickups out front. All the real action was downstairs, anyway. He drove another half-mile up the service road before he found what he was looking for. A ventilation shaft, ten feet in diameter, bored into the sandstone beside the road. Chain link fencing stretched across the mouth of the vertical shaft, a rusted sign warning that the shaft was CONDEMNED BY ORDER OF THE U.S. GEOLOGICAL SURVEY. He looked around again. The road was rutted with knobby ATV tracks; they patrolled up here regularly.

He'd seen men in combat who sought their own deaths in action, and seen in them a cowardice that other idiots mistook for fearlessness. Had he already snapped?

He climbed back into his truck, drove it back out and two miles up the highway, pulling over at the beginning of a nature trail. He climbed out, filled a knapsack with his MP5, four extra clips, a modified Beretta, a hooded flashlight, a compass and a canteen, and began jogging. The awesome heat fired his blood like clay, burning all flexibility out of him. Any outcome short of victory or death would shatter him.

Twelve minutes later, he belly-crawled across the road and up the rampart of tailings around the shaft. With a tool off his belt, he snipped out a semicircle of fence and lowered himself into the hole. He shined a light down below. Sand and rocks and soda cans, fifty feet below his feet. He dropped a fist-sized rock, waited. It hit the bottom with a raspy thud, but the ground around it rippled, an oily motion, like waves in taut fabric.

Storch took out a compressor gun and fitted a piton into the barrel. The walls of the shaft were conglomerate, a peanut brittle of well-worn igneous rocks suspended in adobe and sand. Granite boulders littered the tailings below the shaft, in plain sight from the road. He drove the piton into one of these, hoping that the meth-crazed mob soldier who pulled patrol duty would be too busy trying to run over jackrabbits to notice the cable dangling from the rock into the shaft.

He lowered himself into the shaft, rappelling off the walls, sending showers of pebbles and larger rocks ahead of him. His feet scraped the bottom, dimpling matte black canvas. He shifted his weight to hang head down on the rope and drew his knife, listening. He heard water spraying from sprinklers. Beneath the dust of the shaft, he smelled a palpable musk of mold, sweat, shit and sinsemilla. He slashed the canvas and paid out another foot of rope through his clenched fist. An evil purple glow bled through the hole.

Storch descended into a Martian jungle. Hydroponic troughs lined the floor; ten-foot marijuana plants filled the tunnel as far as the eye could see in either direction. Each was laden with clumps of livid ultraviolet buds the size of coconuts. Their pungent funk curdled his brainwaves, so strong it became a noise, a fuzzed-out sub-bass under lilting sitars. He inserted his nose plugs, slipped on a surgical mask.

The stifling air was pregnant with mist, a sea of quicksilver mirrors in which Storch could almost see pointillist reflections of himself, stalking himself amidst black and violet phantoms. He rubbed gobs of resinous sleep from his eyes. Mist-irrigation hoses snaked along the canvas-lined tunnel walls, and fluorescent grow-lamps and space heaters made the mine a subterranean sauna. Storch dropped to the ground on a narrow path that divided the crops in half, listening. Beneath the white hiss of the sprayers, he could hear, no, feel, music, a throbbing bass pulse that shook motes of dust from the tunnel walls. His compass verified that it was coming from the direction of the hut. There was a junction of three shafts about five hundred yards ahead, where the generators were located. Storch hugged the right-side wall, wading through the pot plants. The music continued to wax louder, covering the sound of his passage. He moved as quickly as he could while scanning for tripwires, mines or cameras. He saw none. Apparently, the sweaty emcee trusted his remote location and perimeter security to deter intruders.

He sidled through two bushes and ran into a barricade of translucent heavy plastic, stretched taut across the mouth of the shaft. Storch dropped back and knelt between the five-gallon plastic tubs in which the plants grew and peered out. At the intersection of four or five shafts, the slavers had erected a little studio, complete with a glassed-in dubbing booth, three tripod-mounted camcorders and a satin-sheeted bed large enough to have its own zip code. They were indeed in the porn business, but not the kind Storch, or any sane, healthy human being, could watch for pleasure.

Chains and leather straps dangled from a wrought-iron cage that enclosed the bedroom set, and from them hung a girl, limp, hooded. There was no one else in sight. Storch sliced the plastic with his combat knife and stepped into the studio. The air was cold and gelid with air conditioning. He could already feel the migraine building in his head.

A rack beside the cage was stocked with whips, riding crops, cattle-prods, a soldering iron, an acetylene torch, and something Storch had seen once in the museum of torture inside the Medieval Times theme restaurant in Anaheim. It was called the Pear, and it was designed for extracting confessions from wanton women. It looked like a lemon juicer made of steel, with a handgrip and an artichoke-shaped knob sticking out of it. When the inquisitor squeezed the grip, the knob opened up like a cruel flower, its edges honed to wicked sharpness. Storch couldn't eat his microwaved Medeival banquet meal for thinking that some member of the same species as him could conceive of such a thing for the express purpose of mutilating wombs.

Storch crossed the studio and took the girl's pulse. She was alive, but drugged into a stupor. He yanked off her hood. She was pretty, and probably not even fifteen. A rubber ballgag was stuffed in her mouth. Gingerly, he pried it loose, squeezed her earlobe to wake her and whispered in her other ear.

"Hey, miss, hey, don't make a sound. I'm gonna get you out of here. Hey, can you hear me, miss?"

The girl's head lolled back, her cheeks flushing with the pressure on her ear. Her eyes fluttered, opened and looked at him, a girl who should have been in junior high school regarded him with that same stoned, disgusted look that whores gave him when he turned them down. "Jimmy, are we on? Is this the show?" She started giggling, and Storch, backing away towards the slit in the plastic, began to think,
this is stupid, this was the very beaucoup fucking stupidest thing he could be doing right now.
He'd never been on a mission alone before, never went in without locking himself away with the team and the mission plans, without rehearsing them so when it happened he was just watching his body running through it. He was here for a girl he'd found in a ditch, who just might have some connection to why men posing as feds burned down his store, and now the girl was screaming for somebody or something called crank, and a Latino man in a mesh tanktop and Speedos with a Glock 9 stuffed in them entered the cave, a bag of corn chips in one hand and an Ithaca pump shotgun in the other.

Storch ducked through the slit just as the man looked around. "How the fuck did you get your hood off?" he screamed at her. Coked to the gills, he was likely to shoot anything that confused or challenged him the way a couch potato changes a channel when Jeopardy stumps him. "Who's here with you? Is somebody fucking here with you?" He prowled the room, passing the slit twice without noticing. Storch, smothering in sinsemilla stench, held his breath and waited to see how many more of them there were.

"Some fag, Leon. I'm broken, daddy. Fix me." Twirling on her restraints, the girl trying to coax more drugs out of Leon and see where he'd gotten to at the same time. Her glazed, light-blinded eyes passed over the rent in the plastic without registering surprise, passion, life.

Leon set down the shotgun and pulled her to him by the rope binding her ankles together. His hands slid up her nubile young body with a loan shark's eye for value, came to rest cradling her head. Tender caresses made her swoon, dangling in his arms.

"You want a rush, baby? There's all kinds…" Gripping her ears fiercely, he shook her head like a master bartender mixing a really good martini, the way the Shah's SAVAK secret police were trained to torture their prisoners without marks. The girl whimpered as her brain rattled against the walls of her skull, then went horribly silent. Leon let go and stepped back, genuinely enjoying her suffering as only one who has never known any other way of touching a woman can. "Just remember, baby, only the first one is free."

The sprinklers came on full-blast behind and above Storch, who hunched over his rifle. The wet white noise muted his involuntary cough of disgust. On top of everything else he was forcing himself to ignore, the sight was simply too much. If he could've held it in, he might've heard the rustling of the plants behind him even over the splattering water. The first blow from the baseball bat drove his head down into his shoulders; his teeth clicked together through the tip of his tongue. The second scooped him through the slit and out onto the cavern floor, where his legs carried him across the studio to crash into a wheeled toolcaddy. His brain soared on, out of the park, and into the dark.

Leon hogtied Storch and sat on his shoulders, grinding his face into the gravel floor as he came awake. Scattered screws and bolts from the toolcaddy cut into his cheek. Still reeling from the bat blows, he wrenched his head free and, stretching out his tongue, scooped a three inch screw into his mouth. Leon raised one knee and brought it down hard between his shoulder blades. Storch coughed, almost swallowed the screw. Leon's arm came around with a pair of adjustable pliers and clamped the bridge of his nose. The pain of the ridged steel biting into his skin was scorched away layer by layer as the slaver cranked it down, vising the join of nasal and frontal bones. The pain was so intense he could hear the ocean in his skull, could feel his forehead catch fire. He made the ocean louder until the pain became manageable.
Shit,
Storch thought to himself.
Leon here reads one book in his whole life, and it turns out to be the CIA Manual of Interrogation Protocols.
"Torture away, asshole," he hissed through gritted teeth. "I just hope you don't have a batch of crack in the oven, 'cos we're gonna be here all night."

"Fucking big balls! Turn over so we can get a good look at you, big-balls." Still gripping the pliers, he knelt hard on Storch's right arm, bending it in a direction it wasn't meant to go, so he rolled over. Leon sat on his midriff. His arms immediately began to fall asleep.

The man who'd apparently sucker-whacked Storch spoke up. "Just kill him now, dude. He's probably a fucking pig."

Leon's face leaned in to his, and Storch gagged on his breath, a melange of corn chips, vaginal mucus, unfiltered Camels and rampant tooth decay. "Shut up, Keith. He's just some survivalist shithead. He's pretty ugly, but I think we can use him. Hey, jarhead, you ever been in a snuff video?"

Storch spat the screw like a watermelon seed into Leon's right eye. The eye popped with a wet sucking sound, like the float bladders on a piece of kelp. His face split open in a scream as he jolted back, allowing Storch to sit up and drive his forehead into Leon's nose at an upward angle. Storch made cartilage buckle and slide up the sinuses into yielding brain matter. Leon sat down hard, eyes wide open, one russet brown, the other a flathead notch in steel. His last breath gushed out, and he flopped over.

Storch humped out from under the corpse, wrangled the automatic free of the Speedos and pointed it at Keith, a fat guy in a jungle camo poncho. Keith halfheartedly brandished the bat he'd used to brain Storch, staring at his dead friend until Storch shouted at him.

"Hey! Untie me!"

"Fuck you!" Keith, backing away, turned to run. The gun barked in Storch's hand, kicking Keith's right leg out from under him and toppling him into the wall. Keith goggled at his own half-severed leg, lost, so Storch had to shout again.