VIABLE (12 page)

Of course he could have contacted Fitzpatrick and arranged to be brought in. The commander would have sent a Black Hawk with a team of his own men to pick him up without batting an eyelid. They might be well-resourced, but his abductors were unlikely to have the means or the will to attempt to take him again under those circumstances. He had almost made the call.

But whoever had sent the men to Salt Wells had gone to significant lengths to plan his abduction; he had to assume that sooner or later they would try again. Unless he planned to remain within the confines of the base indefinitely he would at some stage need to venture out, at which point there was a good chance they’d be waiting. No, it was better that his abductors didn’t know where he was.

Besides, returning to Fallon was likely to present its own set of problems, like how he would explain his recovery from the injuries he had sustained. He might have had some chance of playing the incident down if it were just Fitzpatrick, but the hospital would need an explanation. And the media were already involved, even if they didn’t yet know what they were dealing with.

But now the time was approaching to decide where he would go he found himself delaying, reluctant to take the step that would begin the next stage of his life. He had been at Fallon for almost ten years. A good run, more than he could have expected. And he had been happy there. He had always known this day would come, however. He could read the looks on the faces of each new batch of candidates the first time they met him. It would only have been a matter of time before someone at the base had started to pay closer attention. But this time the decision was harder than usual, for he knew that he would need to leave the United States. The genetic tagging that all service personnel were now required to submit to meant that it would be too risky for him to attempt to find a new identity and re-enlist.

Even if the authorities weren’t putting too much effort into finding him it was probably still too risky to chance an airport. Which meant north to Canada or south to Mexico. Choose a town on the border, try to slip over un-noticed. But first he needed to gather some things. What little cash he had in the bank couldn’t be touched – he had to assume his account was being watched. But he had learned from experience that the opportunity to disappear could present itself unexpectedly, and the importance of being ready when the time came; he knew how hard it could be to make a fresh start without at least a small amount of money. A few years back he had buried an ammo can with a portion of his savings in a piece of scrubland just north of where White Pine County Road ran off the highway. Each time he had ridden out as far as Humboldt he had checked that the box hadn’t been disturbed, adding to the stash. There should be enough to keep him going while he worked out a new identity and sorted out where he would start again.

And then he would disappear for good.

15

IT
WAS
AFTER nine when the plane touched down in Baltimore. Her mother had wanted to meet her at the airport but Alison had insisted she would take a cab. It was late, the weather was bad and the roads were likely to be busy with Christmas traffic. Thankfully the driver hadn’t seemed in the mood to engage her in conversation. He had turned the car’s heater up against the cold and she had sat back in the seat for the thirty-mile drive to Manchester, letting her thoughts wander. It had been a strange day. She had spent the three and a half hour flight from Denver trying to remember why Gant seemed strangely familiar to her but she was no closer to figuring it out. In the end she decided that if she just let her mind relax it might come to her.

Her mother was waiting at the front door as she paid the taxi driver and collected her small bag from the trunk. They went inside, closing the door against the cold. The house smelled of her mother’s cooking. It was late and she wasn’t particularly hungry but she knew it would cause disappointment if she didn’t eat something and so she sat at the kitchen table while her mother transferred a healthy serving of lasagna to her plate. Alison had caused consternation when she had announced in high school that she was becoming a vegetarian and she suspected that her mother had for a long time nurtured the hope that one day she might simply grow out of it. After fifteen years that hope had probably died, but not Violet Stone’s belief that she needed to compensate for the deficiencies in her daughter’s diet by doubling the size of the portions she served whenever she came home.

When she had eaten as much as she could manage they moved into the small sitting room. For an hour or so they talked in front of the fire, her mother eager to hear every detail of her daughter’s life in California, trying but ultimately failing to hide her disappointment when Alison informed her that no, she still hadn’t found a nice young doctor to settle down with. The question made her think about Rutherford. She couldn’t tell her mother about his proposal, or the implicit threat he had made. There was nothing she could do about it and it would only make her worry. In an attempt to divert her mother from one of her favorite topics she told her about the visit she had had from the sheriff from Hawthorne earlier that day, and how she had been trying all day to work out why the young soldier who had been abducted from the base at Fallon seemed familiar to her.

‘Well do you have a photo of the man? Maybe I might recognize him.’

Alison had been about to respond that it was a waste of time. Gant was from Nevada - if she had seen him anywhere it was probably somewhere she had been since she moved out to California. But then she realized her mother was simply trying to help solve a problem she had brought to her; as fruitless as the exercise was likely to be there was nothing to be gained by pointing this out. Besides, the distraction might be sufficient to prevent the conversation from returning to the subject of her non-existent love life. She went back into the kitchen to retrieve the file containing the picture of Gant from her bag.

By the time she had returned her mother had found her reading glasses and was sitting forward in her chair, waiting for her daughter to produce the photo. Alison flipped through the pages in the file until she found the photocopied image and handed it over. She was apologizing for the quality of the picture and already had her hand out ready to take the sheet back when she saw her mother’s eyes widen with surprise.

‘Mom, what is it?’

Without saying a word her mother got up from the chair and walked over to the sideboard next to the small dining table at the far end of the room, the piece of paper still in her hand. There was a single picture frame on the top of the sideboard, which she was now bringing back. Alison knew it well – the frame contained the black and white photograph of her father standing next to the helicopter he had flown in Vietnam. She must have looked at that photo thousands of times growing up. It was how she liked to remember him, young and brave. In that photo the terrible disease that would in the end strip him of the very qualities that had made him her father did not yet exist; it was still part of some other man’s future. But why was her mother bringing her
that
picture? Alison felt something stirring deep in her memory.

Her mother sat next to her on the small sofa. The fire had died down and she flicked on the small lamp that sat on the occasional table beside her. She gave the photocopied image back and then handed her the picture frame, her finger pointing to a man standing to the right of her father in the photo.

Alison had never really paid attention to it before but now she saw that there were three other men in the photograph. Sitting inside the open cargo bay of the helicopter, their legs hanging over the edge were two men in fatigues. Her father was to the right of the photograph, standing in front of the swept-back cargo door. To the left of the photo in front of the cockpit door was another man, taller than her father but wearing the same baggy flight suit, his dark hair cut short, his features immediately familiar. There was no mistaking it. The man her mother was pointing to was the same man in the photocopied image from the records the sheriff had given her that morning.

It was Gant.

She stared at the photo for several seconds, barely aware that her mother was still talking.

‘The man in the photo with your father is Luke Jackson. Pete was Jackson’s co-pilot for the first six months of his tour. Your father never talked much about what he’d done once he got back, but he wrote me regularly when he was out there. It was what kept me going that year. I read enough from those letters to know that your father worshipped this man. Wouldn’t leave his side. I think your father would have followed him to the gates of hell if Jackson had asked it of him, and I suspect on more than one occasion he probably did.’

‘So what happened to him? Did Dad stay in touch with him when his tour ended?’

‘No. Jackson never made it back from Vietnam. Your father was with him when it happened. They’d flown somewhere – a lot of the time he wasn’t allowed to say where they were flying, so don’t ask me – to pick up some soldiers who’d got themselves into trouble. It had gotten pretty hairy I guess and well to cut a long story short their helicopter was shot down just as they’d got the men on board. Your father said he was sure at that moment it was all over. But anyway somehow Jackson and your father – Pete said it was Jackson but I suspect he had a hand in it as well – managed to get their helicopter on the ground. Anyway they got the men out and loaded them into another helicopter. They were all ready to take off when this young kid comes running out of the jungle. I guess he’d been left behind by his squad, or perhaps he was too frightened to run out into the open to get in one of the helicopters. Anyway, he ran right up to the helicopter your father and Jackson had gotten into - it was the last one left, all the others had loaded up and were on their way out – and tried to climb in. Well the helicopter was already full, it just wouldn’t lift off with the weight of one more man aboard, but Jackson grabbed this kid and hauled him in anyway. They were taking fire from all sides but they couldn’t go anywhere, and the enemy were coming out of the jungle towards them. Then all of a sudden Jackson just stepped off the helicopter and they took off.’

‘Your father took it pretty bad. He used to write me every week, regular as clockwork. After Jackson died I didn’t hear from him for almost a month. It was the longest month of my life, I can tell you. I was sure each day I would get a telegram telling me he’d died over there. It got so bad I wouldn’t answer the door. Then finally a letter arrives from him, telling me what had happened.’

She paused, as if uncertain whether to go on. In the end she seemed to make up her mind.

‘Your father said that Jackson had looked right at him the moment before he stepped off the helicopter and in that instant he had known what he was about to do. I believe Pete would have jumped off that helicopter in place of Jackson if he could have, but he was stuck behind one of the machine guns. Instead he drew his service pistol. He told me afterwards that he was ready to shoot the kid if Jackson hadn’t jumped off before he had a chance.’

Alison looked up at her mother.

‘Oh, you shouldn’t think any less of your father for this Alison. I doubt anyone would have criticized him if he had gone ahead and done it. Hell, I suspect half the men in the back of that helicopter were thinking the same thing. If someone hadn’t gotten off that helicopter they were all dead. I was so relieved when I got that letter and learned he was alive I couldn’t have cared whether he’d been planning to shoot everyone in the damned helicopter. But I think a little part of me was also relieved that Jackson was gone. I never said it to your father of course but that man inspired him so much it scared me. I think to this day he would have signed up for another tour just to stay out there with him. But after that he was just counting the days ’till his tour ended, which suited me just fine.’

Her mother was silent for a while, the only sound from the dying fire as one of the embers shifted in the grate.

‘So I guess that’s where you recognize this Gant from. They must be related in some way I guess. Jackson had been in Vietnam since ’65 and was a few years older than your father, even though from that photo you wouldn’t think it. He’d be pushing seventy now if he were alive. This young man is probably his grandson.’

She examined the photocopied image of Gant a moment longer.

‘The resemblance is uncanny however. Why they could be twins.’

With that she got up and squeezed her daughter’s shoulder, telling her not to stay up late.

Alison sat on the sofa for a long while after her mother had gone to bed. The mystery of why Gant had seemed familiar to her had been solved, but what was the connection between Jackson and Gant? Gant didn’t just bear a resemblance to Jackson, it was like her mother had said - they were identical. She guessed the sheriff would be able to look up both men’s service records and determine whether they were related. She would call him the following morning. Maybe she would walk into town and find one of those print and copy shops and see if she could send him the photo. There was nothing more she could do tonight. She checked that the fire had died down sufficiently, placing the old metal guard in front of it just in case. Then she returned the picture frame containing the photograph of her father and Jackson to its place on the sideboard before heading upstairs to bed.

16

LARS
SET
OFF before sunrise, anxious to make good time. An hour later as he drove east towards Tonopah a bright yellow sun was rising in a clear blue sky. It was going to be a beautiful winter’s day.

He’d lived in Nevada all his life and in those fifty-seven years Lars had never ceased to wonder at the beauty of his state. Normally he would have taken time to appreciate the spectacle, pulling his cruiser to the side of the road to enjoy a cup of coffee from the thermos Ellie had prepared for him that morning, taking time to stretch out his leg. But today he was troubled, and for once the splendor of the scenery did little to ease his mind. Besides, it was four hundred miles to Draper. If he wanted to make it there and back in a day he needed to keep moving.