He felt an unexpected wave of pessimism. Maybe it was the miserable weather or the dying of the day. His only child being brushed by the wings of the dark angel. The feeling that the four of them were all alone with no friends and a whole host of red-eyed enemies.
He walked slowly along, blinking at the snow. To his left the land rose steeply in a series of deep gorges and valleys. All of the hollows were filled with wet whiteness. Way above, like a snake clinging to the wall of a house, Jim knew there was the north-south highway, now invisible in the gloaming.
The man with the gun… or it could’ve been a woman. In his early days as a young airman, Jim had encountered problems with political correctness. Then the fervor seemed to die away, and life settled down in a more balanced way. But he still caught himself thinking of a gunman. Wondering where he… or she… had gone.
A short while ago Heather had been looking out at the ocean and had claimed that she thought she’d heard some shooting. But when the others had come to listen, there had only been the soft whispering of the waves and the lonesome cry of a circling gull.
Jim stood still, head on one side, then realized that the quilted hood was muffling his hearing. He pulled it back, feeling the butterfly kiss of the drifting flakes of soft coldness on his stubbled cheeks.
Visibility was vanishing quicker than a lawyer’s conscience, and night was racing in across the lonely stretch of beach. Jim took a deep breath and turned around, ready to go back again toward the hut.
He paused as he heard, far off to his left, over the gray water, the echoing, mournful cry of a great whale. One of the saddest and most mysterious sounds in creation.
“Know how you feel,” he said to himself.
JIM HAD WALKED all the way past the cabin, looking in to make sure all was well. Only Carrie was awake, sitting against the far wall, staring into the night. She didn’t see him pass.
A snatch of an old folk song came to him, unbidden. And he hummed it to himself. “I’m drunk today, and I’m never sober…” He tried to remember the last time that he’d been drunk and realized that he couldn’t even recall it.
A glance at his watch told him that it was about time to let Heather and Sly take a watch together. Only after they protested did he agree to let them be on guard for an hour, before finally going to bed for the night.
He was within sight of the hut when he heard the metallic click of a firearm being cocked and a cold voice out of the shadows at the bottom of the hillside telling him to keep real still.
Chapter Twenty
Margaret Tabor received the follow-up message just as she was getting dressed and ready to lead her sixty-eight-strong force out to the waiting Chinooks. Her clock told her that it was three minutes after five in the morning of December 22.
“One repeat one bird down hunter retired repeat hunter retired.”
She had read it through twice.
So, after all, only one of the crew members of the Aquila, or one of the hangers-on traveling with them, had been removed from the board.
And Xavier Burnette had been killed.
That was the biggest shock.
He’d been one of the best. He’d trained with Special Forces and been seconded to the faceless suits of Central Intelligence years back. He’d been approached by contacts from the fledgling Hunters and enlisted without a breath of trouble. One of the best.
The Chief of the Hunters of the Sun sat on the side of her bed, thinking again about the retired female schoolteacher that they’d had in their cells. Sadly the men responsible for that had already been punished. It would be nice to punish them all over again, but torturing a corpse wasn’t much pleasure.
Still, it looked as if everything was going to come together nicely. From the limited Intelligence available to her, Margaret was beginning to think that the missing pieces in her Aquila jigsaw were likely to be forever missing.