Stephen Hunter: Night of Thunder

So far, so good-Miko had a rhythm and a patience that even a generally stoic animal like a horse could feel and love. She had magical ways, or so Bob believed, and he would have gladly given up the other hip-or anything-for Miko.

Gracefully, she took a jump, without a twitch to her posture, a tightness to her spine, a twist to her landing.

“That was a good one, sweetie,” he called.

“I know , Daddy,” she responded, and he smiled a bit, wiped his brow, then looked up at a flash of movement too fast for good news and saw Julie coming from the house. He knew immediately something was wrong. Julie never got upset; she’d stitched up enough cut-open Indian boys on the reservation where she’d run a clinic for ten years, and kept her head around blood and pain and emotional upheaval and the occasional death. So if she was upset, Bob knew immediately it could be only one thing: his other daughter, Nikki.

“Sweetie,” he called before Julie reached him, wanting to bring Miko in before the bad news arrived and he lost contact with reality, “you come on down now, just for a second.”

“Oh, Daddy, I-”

He turned to Julie.

“I just got a call from Jim Gustofson, the managing editor of Nikki’s paper-”

Bob felt constriction through his heart and lungs, as if his respiratory system had just blown a valve and was leaking fluid. His knees went weak; he’d seen violent death, particularly as inflicted upon the young and innocent, in both hemispheres, and he had a bleak and terrifying image of disaster, of his daughter gone, of his endless, terrible grief and rage.

“What is it?”

“She was in some kind of accident. She went off the road out in the mountains, ended up in some trees.”

“Oh, Christ, how is she?”

“She’s alive.”

“Thank God.”

“She was conscious long enough to call 911 and give her location. They got to her soon enough, and her vital signs were good.”

“Is she going to be all right?”

“Mommy, what’s wrong?”

“Nikki’s been in an accident, honey.”

It killed Bob to see the pain on his younger daughter’s face; the child reacted as if she’d been hit in the chest by a boxer. She almost crumpled.

“She’s in a coma,” Julie said. “She’s unconscious. They found her that way, with minor abrasions and contusions. No paralysis, no indications of serious trauma, but the whiplash must have put her out, and then she hit her head hard, and her eyes are blackened, and she’s still out.”

“Oh, God,” said Bob.

“We have to get out there right away.”

Yet even as Julie said that, Bob knew it was wrong. His oldest and darkest fear came out of its cave and began to nuzzle him with a cold nose, looking him over with yellow eyes, blood on its breath and teeth.

“I’ll go. I’ll leave soon as I can get a flight. You book me on the Internet, then call me as I head to Boise for the flight out.”

“No. No, I will see my daughter. I will not stay here. We’ll all go. Miko has to see her too.”

“Come over here,” he said, and when he drew her away from the child, he explained.

“I’m worried this could be linked to something I’ve done to someone. It’s a way to get me out-”

“Bob, not everything-”

“Not everything’s about me, but you have no idea of some of the fixes and the places I’ve been. You have no idea who might be hunting me. You have a scar on your chest, and memories of months in the hospital when that fellow put a bullet into you.”

“He put it into me because of me, not you.”

It was all so long ago, but he remembered hearing the shots and finding her, almost bled out, along the trail, Nikki screaming, another man dead close by.

“I don’t say it’s my business,” he said. “But I can’t say it ain’t. And I can’t operate if I’m thinking all the while about your safety and Miko’s. I have to recon this alone. If it’s safe, I’ll let you know.”

It was gunman’s paranoia, he knew it. All the boys felt it, all the mankillers, good, bad, or indifferent. At a certain age, faces come to you unbidden, and you can’t place them quite, but it’s your subconscious reminding you of this or that man you took down and you think: Did he have brothers, parents, cousins, friends, peers, colleagues? Maybe they were as savaged by that unknown man’s death as he had been by the deaths of those he’d known himself, like Julie’s first husband, Donnie Fenn, such a good young man, the best, his chest torn open by the same sniper who put the bullet into Julie. Bob remembered, I killed the sniper.

But maybe the sniper’s brother was here and couldn’t get at Bob in Idaho where Bob had friends and family and knew the land and where all the creeks were, so he figured out how to draw him onto unfamiliar land, and maybe it was his pleasure to see the pain on Bob’s face by taking his family first, one by one, first Nikki, then Julie, then Mi-

He cursed himself. Every time he came home alive and more or less intact, he thought about going underground, going into his own private witness protection program. New identity, new start, new place, new everything. But another part said no, you can let it drive you crazy, it’s nothing, it’ll take your life if you let it. You win not by surviving but by living, by having the things you need and love: family, land, home.

“Please,” he said.

“Bob, this can’t be yours alone. That is my daughter. That is my daughter. I cannot stay here; I have to be at her side, no matter what it costs or what the risk. I feel that so powerfully I can hardly face it.”

“Let me go, let me figure it out, and as soon as I can, at the absolute soonest, I will let you know and you can go. If it’s dangerous at all, I will have her moved, I will hire bodyguards, I will set up a secure place for you to come. But I have to know first.”

She shook her head. She didn’t like it.

“I know I can be wrong,” he said. “I’m wrong all the time. It ain’t about me being wrong or me being-what was the word Nikki used?”

“Narcissistic. Someone who loves himself too much, even if he can’t admit it. You’re not a narcissist. No narcissist would be as shut up, cut down, beaten, bloodied, dragged, and kicked in the head as much as you. I give you that. Whatever your flaws, and God knows there are hundreds of them, you’re too insane to risk your life for this or that or nothing whatever to be a narcissist. So your scars buy you two or three days. Then we’re coming.”

“Thank you. Now I’ve got to get packed.”

As he’d just seen Miko atop a large, muscular horse, controlling it and taking such delight in the process that morning, he now stood next to his older daughter and remembered her atop the same large, muscular animals, how she thrilled at them, how she loved them, how she made them do her bidding, how they loved her.

But Nikki was far from horseback. She lay in the intensive-care unit of the Bristol General Hospital, monitored by a million dollars’ worth of gizmos. Beeps beeped, lines dashed across screens to symbolize breathing, brain activity, blood pressure, and so forth. She was still, her seemingly frail chest moving upward and downward just a fraction of an inch to signify the functioning of her taxed respiratory system.

“Those roads can be so dangerous at night, Mr. Swagger,” said Jim Gustofson, the managing editor of the newspaper Nikki worked for. “If she weren’t such a good reporter she would have come home earlier, when it was light. But she stayed, she got every last thing out of the day that she could have. Oh, this is so awful. I just don’t know what to say.”

Gustofson was a tall man in his early fifties, with a full head of hair and a shocked expression. He had repeated this statement about ten times. It was all he could say.