wouldn’t just lie in here and wait us out. He’s moving now, by God, and
what he’ll do is head straight down the mountain toward the lake road.
He’ll try to steal some transportation down there, and with any luck at
all we’ll nail the son of a bitch as he’s trying to hot-wire some
fisherman’s car. Now come on.
Sharp still had that savage, frenetic, half-sane look, but Peake
realized that the deputy director was not, after all, as overwhelmed and
as totally controlled by hatred as he had at first appeared. He was in
a rage, yes, and not entirely rational, but he had not lost all of his
cunning.
He was still a dangerous man.
Ben was running for his own life, but he was in a panic about Rachael as
well. She was heading to Nevada in the Mercedes, unaware that Eric was
curled up in the trunk.
Somehow Ben had to catch up with her, though minute by minute she was
getting a greater lead on him, rapidly decreasing his hope of closing
the gap. At the very least he had to find a telephone and get hold of
Whitney Gavis, his man in Vegas, so when Rachael got there and called
Whitney for the motel keys, he would be able to alert her to Eric’s
presence. Of course, Eric might break out of that trunk or be released
from it long before Rachael arrived in Vegas, but that hideous
possibility did not even bear contemplation.
Rachael alone on the darkening desert highway…
a strange noise in the trunk… her cold dead husband suddenly kicking
his way out of confinement, knocking the back seat off its hinge pins…
clambering into the passenger compartment…
That monstrous picture shook Ben so badly that he dared not dwell on it.
If he gave it too much thought, it would start to seem like an
inevitable scenario, and he would be unable to go on.
So he resolutely refused to think the unthinkable, and he left the dry
wash for a deer trail that offered a relatively easy descent for thirty
yards before turning between two fir trees in a direction he did not
wish to pursue. Thereafter, progress became considerably more
difficult, the ground more treacherous, a wild blackberry patch,
wickedly thorned, forced him to detour fifty yards out of his way, a
long slope of rotten shale crumbled under his feet, obliging him to
descend at an angle to avoid pitching headfirst to the bottom as the
surface shifted beneath him, deadfalls of old trees and brush forced him
either to go around or to climb over at the risk of a sprained ankle or
broken leg. More than once, he wished that he were wearing a pair of
woodsman’s boots instead of Adidas running shoes, though his jeans and
long-sleeve shirt provided some protection from burrs and scratchy
branches. Regardless of the difficulty, he forged ahead because he knew
that eventually he would reach SHADOwFlRES 0 33s the lower slopes where
the houses below Eric Leben’s cabin stood on less wild property, there
he would find the going easier. Besides, he had no choice but to go on
because he did not know if Anson Sharp was still on his tail.
Anson Sharp.
It was hard to believe.
During his second year in Nam, Ben had been a lieutenant in command of
his own recon squad-serving under his platoon captain, Olin
Ashbornplanning and executing a series of highly successful forays into
enemy-held territory. His sergeant, George Mendoza, had been killed by
machine-gun fire during a mission to free four U.S. prisoners of war
being held at a temporary camp before transfer to Hanoi. Anson Sharp
was the sergeant assigned to replace Mendoza.
From the moment he had met Sharp, Ben had not cared for him. It was
just one of those instinctive reactions, for initially he had not seen
anything seriously wrong with Sharp. The man was not a great sergeant,
not Mendoza’s equal, but he was competent, and he did not do either
drugs or alcohol, which put him a notch above a lot of other soldiers in
that miserable war. Perhaps he relished his authority a bit too much