John Sandford - The Fool's Run

"What?"

"The belt's very close to the celestial equator. When the middle star hits the horizon, either coming up or down, it'll be almost due east of west. Within a degree or two."

"Did you learn this stuff when you were a teenage nerd?"

"Right," I laughed. "That's when I learned it."

We were quiet again for a while, and finally she said in a small voice, "Where'd you put the shovel?"

"Beside the outhouse," I said.

We slept off and on until daylight. My watch alarm beeped, and I woke to find LuEllen watching me. She had circles beneath her eyes but she said she was okay. We ate from the cooler and drank Cokes, and we packed Cokes into our day-packs with the extra ammo. The radio handsets had pagers so we could beep each other.

"I thought of something during the night," I said. "There's a good chance they'll come in early, earlier than we should expect. Like in the next hour. Trying to catch us off-balance. But there's also the possibility that they'll come later than we expect, like two o'clock in the afternoon. Hoping that we'll break cover to talk it over, or to eat, or get a drink, or pee, or whatever. When you get up there, stay put. I'll call if we should move. Victory goes to the iron butt."

She waved and went off to her hiding place.

My ambush site was a shallow depression on the edge of the ravine, behind a clump of brush and dried-out weeds. I retrieved a three-foot chunk of rotted log from the ravine and placed it on the edge of my hole, so I could brace the M16 on top of it. I settled in, using the sleeping bag as a cushion, and got comfortable. The camouflage coveralls were warm, and 1 was tired. I drank a Coke for the caffeine, and then another. A fat black-and-yellow bumblebee floated around me for a few seconds, and I started to worry that I might be on his nest. He left, and I settled back again, more awake now.

They came neither early nor late. It was eighteen minutes after noon when I saw the motion in the trees below. It was hard to follow, and at first I was uncertain whether it was really there. Then I saw it again, and then another movement, again slow, but farther up the hill and closer to me. Two of them, at least. In camouflage. I let out the breath I was holding.

Moving like molasses, I eased the binoculars up to my eyes and found them. They were walking unaccountably slowly, until I realized they were trying to pick their way silently through the fallen leaves. Given the choice between the woods and the open hillside, they chose the cover, but the leaves underfoot were giving them fits.

I beeped LuEllen and said, "Two. Two." She returned with, "Two." A few minutes later she beeped back and said, "Blonde." I returned the call. The Blonde code meant Maggie was on the way in, alone, as far as LuEllen could tell. I looked at my watch. Two minutes since I spotted the first movement. I began scanning the woods behind the two men I had already spotted, looking for a backup. LuEllen should be running down the hill.

The shooters were only sporadically visible as they moved closer, about fifteen feet apart. Then one of them lifted a handset from his belt and listened. I clicked around the channels on my CB, but there was nothing. Their sets were more sophisticated than ours and probably used dedicated channels.

Their conversation went on through several exchanges. It meant, I hoped, that Maggie had seen LuEllen running across the hill and believed we were at the bottom of the road. The man with the handset hung it back on his belt, said a few words to the other, and they moved up, a little quicker now. They were only fifty yards away, coming up to the ravine. They stopped on the lip, looked down at the creek, talked for a moment, then turned uphill.

As they got closer, I eased the Ml6 into position over a low tangle of vines and brought it to bear on the bridge. My heart was thumping wildly, and it was suddenly hard to breathe.

The first one stopped below the bridge, where I could see only his head, and waited for the second one to come up. When he arrived, they talked for a second, and I was afraid they would decide to cross the bridge one at a time, providing cover for each other. Then they both scrambled up on the road, crouching, their heads turned down toward the cabin. The big guy dangled an Uzi from his right hand. Ratface was two steps behind him, carrying a police shotgun with a pistol grip below the stock. With my cover, the Uzi was more dangerous, so I decided to take the big guy first. Once on the road, they moved fast. Staying low, they scuttled onto the bridge, using the low railing as concealment from the cabin.

I let the big one get two-thirds of the way across the bridge, held the Ml6 at waist height, and when he was about to intersect the sight, I pulled the trigger. An Ml6 doesn't roar so much as clatter; it clattered in my face, and the first squirt pitched the big guy over. I tracked back to where Ratface had frozen for a split second, and I was almost there when he simply leaped off the bridge, head first.

The move was so startling that I half stood and instinctively dumped the rest of the clip under the bridge, punched out the used clip, and fed in a new one. There was no thrashing around in the brush below the bridge, and I said, "Shit," and started sliding to my right toward the road.

The beeper on my radio went off. I said, "What?" and she said, "Maggie's out of the car and heard the shots. She's just standing there."

"Well, we got problems," I said. "It's the right guys, but one of them jumped off the bridge and he's on the loose. He may be hurt. It was a hell of a fall, and I sprayed the place down."

"I'm coming down," she said.

"You keep an eye on Maggie," I said.

"Fuck that."

I tossed the radio on top of the backpack and crawled along the upper edge of the road until I was thirty yards from the ravine and around a shallow curve. There was no sign of Ratface. If he was uninjured and sat tight, he would be almost impossible to get at. On the other hand, he might be unconscious under the bridge, helpless from the fall. Either way, he might not expect me to be on his side of the road. I moved up the road, ran across, then dropped flat on a game trail. Nothing. Moving slowly, slowly, I turned back toward the ravine. Still nothing. I stopped, waited, moved up, stopped.

I was fifteen yards from the bridge when Maggie gave him away. They had radios, handsets, and his had been clipped to his belt. She beeped him. I heard the beep, high and electronic, as distinct in the woods as a raven call would be in a computer lab. It came from the near bank of the ravine, over the lip. Was he still with the radio, or had he dumped it? There was no second beep, and I crouched, watching, ears straining.

LuEllen broke the impasse when she came down the hill over my old position. She touched a tree, or stepped on some brush, and Ratface heard it and moved. He was hurt, all right. His face was covered with blood, one leg was apparently twisted at the knee, but he still had the gun. He dragged himself up beside the roadbed opposite my ambush site. I waited until he was fully in the open and brought the Ml6 down on him. At the last second he apparently sensed me behind him, because he twisted and threw out a hand and, like Dace, said, "Wait." I unloaded the Ml6 into his side and back. He was dead before the bullets stopped shuddering through him.

"LuEllen!" I shouted across the road. "Two down."

"Are there more?"

"I don't think so. I didn't see a backup."

"Maggie."

LuEllen started running along the hill parallel to the road, an awkward galumphing in the camouflage suit. I followed on my side. We came through the bend and saw Maggie running back toward her car.

"Shoot her," LuEllen screamed.

I dropped to one knee and put the scope on her back. She ran so well. I watched as she took five steps, ten, long, lithe strides like a college runner.