Дэвид Балдаччи - No Man's Land

He rubbed his shoulder where Donohue had slapped him twice. He did not like people jacking him around like that. It was an insult.

Donohue finished packing and drove off. Rogers followed.

Donohue pulled into the drive-through of a McDonald’s and bought some food.

Rogers had seen the man’s Pennsylvania license plates. Maybe he was headed home.

Donohue then made it easy for Rogers. Instead of pulling over and eating in the parking lot of the Mickey D’s, he headed on down the road. About a mile or so along he pulled off down a dirt road and into what looked to be an old picnic area.

Rogers cut the lights on his ride and slowly followed the truck. It turned off onto another dirt road and pulled to a stop.

Rogers didn’t make that turn. He would finish this on foot.

Donohue switched off his lights and then must have cracked his window, because Rogers could hear music coming from the truck’s radio.

Rogers killed his engine and got quietly out of his car. He approached dead center of the trailer so Donohue would not be able to glimpse him in the side mirrors.

He reached the door of the trailer. The padlock was a solid-looking Yale with a key entry instead of a combo. The metal clasp it was inserted through was stainless steel and about a half inch thick. It was designed, of course, so that all of the screw points on the two plates were covered when the door was closed and the lock engaged. But the designers had not counted on someone with Rogers’s strength. He gripped the clasp and slowly pulled it and the support screws right out of the wood.

He quietly went inside the trailer and shone his light around. He saw the box and hefted it in one hand.

He stepped outside of the trailer.

“What do you think you’re doing?”

Rogers stopped. Next he heard the click of a gun hammer being drawn back.

Using his peripheral vision, he could see Donohue standing next to the side of the trailer, gun in hand, a paper napkin stuck to the crotch of his pants.

“You can just put that down right now, asshole.”

Rogers set the box down. Out of sight of Donohue, he slipped the knife from its holder.

“Good, now I can shoot your ass and you won’t drop the box and damage that gun, dickhead.”

Rogers pivoted on one foot, swung his arm back and around, and slammed the knife into Donohue. It went right through the center of the big man’s chest and stuck into the wooden wall of the trailer, pinning him there like a moth to a corkboard.

After one long scream, the man died.

And still the screams continued.

For a moment Rogers couldn’t fathom how the dead man could still be making noise, until he looked past the body and saw a small boy leaning out of the truck’s driver’s side, a Happy Meal in his hands, a smudge of ketchup riding on the outside edge of his mouth.

The boy must have been sleeping in the front seat when Rogers had been checking out the truck and trailer.

The boy was looking right at him. But it was dark. He couldn’t possibly–

Rogers’s brain jolted and jerked and misfired under his skull. He had contemplated every possibility except this one.

He had no choice.

He lunged, grabbed the boy’s arm, and pulled him out of the truck. The boy dropped the Happy Meal and was still screaming until Rogers placed a hand over his face. He squirmed and struggled, but as his lungs and brain were deprived of oxygen, his thrashing slowed.

Rogers counted in his head, his gaze not on the boy but on the dead Donohue, probably the boy’s father.

Eight…nine…ten.

As soon as the boy fell limp, Rogers removed his hand. He checked the pulse. It was there. Weak, but the lungs were inflating, the small chest rising and falling.

He was alive.

Rogers stared down at the little boy. The hair was blond, the limbs stick thin. The back of his neck covered in large freckles.

Rogers’s brain misfired again.

What was he doing?

You never left witnesses behind.

You never left anything living behind.

Just finish it. It would only take seconds.

Instead, he put the boy back in the front seat of the truck and closed the door. He pulled his knife free from the dead man and Donohue slumped to the dirt. He wiped it clean on the grass and stuck it back into its holder.

He hefted the box with the gun and ran back to his car, got in, and drove off. He hit the main road and punched the gas.

As he roared down the road he ran his hand over the box containing the M11-B.

A collector’s item.

The vaunted M11.

More than thirty years ago a revolver had been held against his head for five minutes. Only the M11 wasn’t a revolver; it was a semiautomatic with a magazine to hold its bullets.

That’s why Rogers had not simply taken the revolver from the woman he’d killed in the alley.

Unlike a revolver, which could only fire once the cylinder with a bullet in it lined up with the hammer, a semi would fire if there was only one bullet in the mag or thirteen. You couldn’t play Russian roulette with a mag pistol, not unless you wanted no chance to live.

And Rogers wanted no chance for the person to live.

He was fifty miles away now and still didn’t know why he had not simply killed the child.

There had been something in his head that had held him back. He thought he knew all there was to know about what went on up there.

Obviously he’d been wrong about that.

As he fled east with the spoils of victory, Paul Rogers wondered what else he’d been wrong about.

PULLER PASSED THROUGH Richmond, where Lynda Demirjian was spending her last days in hospice, and continued on south and east. He was in his Army-issued black Malibu, which he liked because it had no bells and whistles, just an engine, four wheels, and something to steer it with.

He drove fast down Interstate 64 and arrived in Hampton in time to check into a motel and grab a few hours’ sleep.

He was up with the dawn. He grabbed a cup of coffee and a bagel from the breakfast room in the motel lobby, climbed into his Malibu, and drove on to Fort Monroe.

The installation had been decommissioned in 2011. Part of it had recently been designated a national monument by President Obama. It had been named after the fifth president, James Monroe. Surprisingly, the fort had remained in Union hands during the entire American Civil War and was the launch pad for General Grant’s successful assaults on Petersburg and the Confederate capital in Richmond that had essentially ended the war. Former Confederate general Robert E. Lee had been quartered here when he was still with the United States Army. And Confederate president Jefferson Davis had been imprisoned at Fort Monroe following the war. A memorial park there bearing his name had subsequently been created in the 1950s.

Puller thought it must have been one of the few times a prisoner was honored with his very own park.

The fort, at the southern tip of the Virginia Peninsula, had guarded the navigational channel between Hampton Roads and the Chesapeake Bay since the early 1600s. The seven-sided fort was the largest stone fort ever constructed in the United States. It had officially opened and been named Fort Monroe in 1819. The fort was built to prevent any foreign enemy from landing there, marching up the coast to Washington, and burning the city down, as the British had done during the War of 1812.

Fort Wool was across the channel and had been erected so that crossing fields of fire across the water could be deployed. That meant that ships trying to get through here could not hug one side of the channel in order to escape a pounding from the shore guns.

It was all a moot point now. Fort Monroe had never been fired upon in nearly two hundred years, and had never fallen into enemy hands. And it never would unless the completely impossible happened and a foreign enemy managed it.