David Dun - At The Edge

He tossed one gun in the pool and kept the other, replacing the clip. Now he had two guns and almost two full clips of ammunition. Quickly he removed a sample screw-topped capsule from his pack, took a sample from the pond, and put it in his pocket. One of the radios crackled to life.

"Where's McCall?"

"Answer," Dan whispered.

"Dead."

"Who's left?"

"Me and Willy."

"And one more," Dan whispered again with his gun prodding at the man's back.

"And Wilson."

"Jeez. How'd he take down Jansen and McCall?"

"It wasn't hard once he got a gun. You can't see anything down here. You got these damn suits on. Get us up; we're running low on air."

The cable started to rise and Dan stepped in the loop. In turn, each of the two men followed suit and they all rose toward the faint glimmer of light above.

There was a slight shimmy in the cable that Dan didn't recall. Probably they had damaged the assembly when jerking on the timber. Something wasn't as tight on his mask and he could smell petroleum vapor or something similar. As he rose, he strained to see what waited at the top, but it was useless. There could be an army with guns ready and there was nothing he could do except die fast in a hail of lead.

He wondered if the men below him knew he wouldn't bother killing them just because somebody was trying to kill him. No purpose in it.

When he got within twenty feet of the top, he could see the winch operator. Although he had an automatic in his hand, he didn't look very spooked. This guy hadn't heard the muted pops, the screaming men, nor felt the terror of hundreds of rounds smacking rock in the dark. Just sat up here thanking God it wasn't him.

As Dan reached the top, he realized that there was nobody topside to do the thinking. The operator was no candidate for higher education. Meat was perhaps a suitable moniker. Dan stepped off the cable, reached out, and took Meat's gun as if he were taking it from a child. Tossing it down the hole, he saluted the man who still hadn't been able to discern his face behind the mask.

"Hey," Meat said. "What're you doing?"

"Hey," Dan said. "You have a real good day, Meat. Afraid I gotta take your shoes, though."

"Who are you?" Meat said as the other two stepped off.

"I'm Superman. Hurry with the shoes."

"You bastard," Meat said as the other two stood by.

Dan stepped back twenty feet or so. "You gentlemen will want to stay right here, because if I should see you again when I go around that corner, I'll turn you into bratwurst. You got that?"

Dan watched Meat, cursing and swearing, untie his shoes. Interestingly, the man sat on the ground, almost as if he were a child having a tantrum.

"How does a guy get a name like Meat?"

"It's on account of his last name," Ed said.

"And what might that be?" Dan asked.

"It's Ball."

"That would explain it," Dan muttered to himself as he began running, desperately hoping that no one stood between him and the mine entrance.

The search warrant had turned up nothing.

Dan had taken to clicking his ballpoint pen with tedious regularity. The rumors were mind-boggling-namely, that when the police arrived there were no bodies and no blood to be found in the mine, even the footprints had been swept away. Given the number of men down there, it must have been a massive undertaking to remove all evidence of then-passage.

Sheriff McNiel walked in looking weary. "I'll be blunt, Dan. They say you must be hallucinating. There was a guard sitting right in front of that mine shaft."

"Yeah, reading a paperback novel. He never saw me go in, and he wasn't there when I came out."

"All we found was a massive cave-in that looks fresh, about two hundred feet in."

"A cave-in?"

"Yeah. Tons of rock. You'd have to dig a whole new tunnel just to get in there. And I'm telling you the county can't afford that. My deputies said it looked like somebody might have swept the place. There were no Hazmat suit hangers at the entrance and of course no Hazmat suits. We found no pool of anything, no fumes, no vertical shaft, and no winch."

"If it's plugged at two hundred feet, you won't find anything. And let me guess, to dig it out would cost millions?"

"More money than the county has."

"Well, if that isn't just mouse turds in the cornmeal."

"Stop talking like a hick," Maria said under her breath.

"They had all the time in the world to dynamite the mine,'' Dan said. ''It's twenty or thirty miles from anything. Nobody would hear it."

"We don't have evidence to prosecute," McNiel said with finality. "Who would we prosecute?"

"I understand," Dan said. "What do they say about the big reservoir out there and the plastic pipe?"

"They're growing pacific yew in hedges and they use that to mix pesticides."

"That's bullshit."

"Well, what do we do, arrest them for lying?"

"I've seen the hedges," Maria said. "I'll bet they've already run agricultural chemicals through the pond, so if we looked for residue, we'd find bug killer. But shouldn't we at least look?"

"I'll never get another search warrant. What is it we suspect they do with that reservoir that's illegal?"

''Do they have permits to spray pesticides?'' Maria asked.

"They do," the sheriff said.

"There's got to be something," said Dan. "Maybe the DA has-"

''Oh, believe me, we're talking to him. He wants evidence. Even if we took your testimony, Dan, we don't know who was shooting at you. Some guy named Meat Ball is all we have and you threatened him, not the other way around. We'll be watching them. If they sneeze, we'll be on it, but as it stands now we can't charge anyone."

Dan sat stunned, not quite believing it. Without saying a word he got up and walked to the door.

The woman's hands flowed over his back. She was an artist. Slowly she stripped the tension from his shoulders and loosened his lower back. Whatever his secretary paid her, it wasn't enough. Kenji was in the wintertime conference room that was something of a sunroom, a library, and a good place for a drink. It contained a collapsible massage table that he was beginning to use with regularity.

Nothing, not even the best massage, brought his stress level to normal, but it was an improvement over a back full of violin-string muscles. His enemies were everywhere, poking into everything. Blowing up the mine was only a temporary measure and would set back research immensely because now they had no volume of effluent on which to run their tests. And a ghost was stirring in the grave, thanks to Dan Young.

Hans Groiter entered the sunroom and dismissed the masseuse.

"He was in the mine," Kenji said. "Do you suppose he found the body?"

Groiter didn't bother telling him that if he did, it was headless.

"I hid it well."

"They're going to look into it. I guarantee you that."

"Let them investigate. There's a mountain of rock in the way. And we took everything out, including the photographer's body."

"You took the body out without my authorization?"

"Yeah. But you don't want to be involved in the details. You're better off not knowing."

"Who else knows?"

"Only those who absolutely need to know. You're safe. Relax."

"Don't tell me to relax. I told you to stop them. Since that time you've accomplished nothing. They have come onto Amada land, forced us to derail a major project, and set us months behind. They're going to cost us hundreds of millions and you tell me to relax."

''It takes time. We will get Maria Fischer. That will divert him, and we'll know everything they know."

Groiter's threat about the photographer's body was only implied, but it was just beneath the surface of his words. Of course Hans wanted Kenji to believe that if something should happen to him, the people who "needed to know" about the photographer's body might pay a visit to the sheriff. When the time was right, he would deal with Groiter. Probably send him off to the South Seas with a nice pension that would disappear if the photographer didn't stay buried. Right now the unnerving uncertainty was good for both of them.