Линкольн Чайлд - Crooked River

The abandoned slash pine plantations soon gave way to a swamp of cypress trees with knobby trunks and feathery branches. As expected, he lost his GPS, but he continued navigating using the screenshots, estimating his position with dead reckoning and keeping his cell phone’s compass always pointed west. Where logging roads crossed or divided, he tried to take the better one, but he sometimes found the roads completely washed out and was forced to backtrack. And then, quite unexpectedly, he came out on a freshly graded road — one with recent tire tracks. It was well hidden beneath tall, arching cypresses. This was it, he felt sure — the road to whatever had taken the place of the old sugar plant. He turned onto it, heart pounding; then stopped, killed his headlights, and stepped out to reconnoiter. Far off, where the road headed, he could see a faint glow in the night sky, reflecting off the gathering storm clouds. He estimated it was four miles ahead.

That was where they had taken his partner.

Getting back in the car, he proceeded slowly, keeping his headlights off, holding his flashlight out the window to illuminate his way. Gradually the glow brightened until a smattering of lights could be seen rising above the treetops. He stopped and took out his binoculars. It looked like a prison: a single concrete tower with roaming klieg lights, behind which sat a low industrial structure, maybe three stories high, punctuated with the yellow squares of windows. Next to the tower was a central cube of a building, brightly lit. That, he thought, must be the heart of the operation, situated as it was in the center of the complex. Coldmoon felt his guts constrict to think of his partner in there. The bastards .

Feeling his anger rise, he reminded himself once again to focus. This was a large complex and there would be a lot of people in there, alert, armed, and well protected. The place had the definite smell of government about it. Once again, he was glad he had not followed his first impulse to call Pickett. Aside from the time it would take to organize an assault, even using a Critical Incident Response Group, there was no telling where the information might be transmitted — and the still unidentified mole had done enough harm already.

He continued on and turned off the flashlight: the glow from the facility provided enough light to see ahead. That, of course, meant they could probably see him. He felt certain that at some point there would be a manned checkpoint in the road, with a gate and a fence.

He’d better ditch the Jeep.

He eased the vehicle to the edge of the road. There was really no place to hide it, except by sinking it. He hesitated just a moment. Then he rolled down all the windows and left the driver’s side door open; then, shifting into four low, he drove it hard into the water and muck beyond the shoulder, gunning the engine to get as much inertia as possible. As it finally got stuck and began to sink, he hoisted his pack and stepped out into the warm, murky water. The Jeep bubbled and hissed, sinking into the muck with surprising rapidity. He realized he was sinking, too, and, in a sudden panic, he thrashed and wallowed his way back to the road. His last glimpse of the Jeep was of the air rushing from the open windows, with a gurgling sound and flurry of bubbles as the black waters closed over it.

He returned to the roadbed, shook off as much mud as he could, and stared at the complex. This was insane. It was going to be a bitch just getting in there. He’d better come up with a plan, because just barging in would be pointless and stupid — not to mention suicidal.

As he looked at the concrete tower, his thoughts turned unexpectedly to his grandfather Joe Coldmoon, who had fought in the Pacific with XXIV Corps, Seventy-Seventh Infantry Division, during World War II. “We’re a warrior people,” he’d once told Coldmoon, explaining that his grandfather Rain-in-the-Face had put the fatal arrow into George Armstrong Custer at the Battle of the Greasy Grass. It had seemed at the time like a crazy contradiction, his grandfather’s patriotism and love of country combined with pride in killing Custer, but there it was. Many houses on the rez had a wall of photographs devoted to family members serving in the military.

We’re a warrior people . During the invasion of Leyte, Joe and his company were hunkered down in trenches opposite the Japanese, not two hundred yards of no-man’s-land between the adversaries. On the darkest nights, with no moon, his grandfather would leave his gun behind, strip down to his skivvies, put a knife between his teeth, and crawl out across that no-man’s-land. When he returned an hour or so later, his buddies would ask him, “How many, Joe? How many?” He never spoke, just held up fingers — one, two, three. Once Coldmoon asked his grandfather how he did it. After the longest and most uncomfortable silence he’d ever endured, his grandfather finally said: “Your spirit goes outside your body, and you become a ghost that nobody can see.” He had refused to say anything more.

Those words came back to Coldmoon while he stared at the complex. He had never quite understood what they meant: to be outside your own body, become a ghost that nobody could see. If only he could manage that now.

He shook his head. That old superstitious nonsense wasn’t going to help him get inside.

Or would it?

He started walking down the road.

As the boat with no name sped north, P. B. Perelman wondered just what the hell he’d gotten himself into.

The first two hours had been smooth motoring, the flat sea allowing him to go at the boat’s top speed of seventy-five knots. But as the light disappeared in the steady rain, he could feel in his bones the approaching storm, an electricity in the air. A slight swell was developing, the leading edge of worse to come, and the wind had kicked up, producing a little chop. Already the boat was starting to catch too much air, and at that speed, in the dark, it would be easy to flip over.

He throttled back.

“What the devil are you doing?” Constance asked sharply.

“I have to ease off in this sea,” said Perelman. He couldn’t believe her lack of fear. Any other passenger would be on the floor by now, begging him to slow down.

“Don’t lose your nerve.”

“I’m worried about losing my life. Our lives. We can’t help Pendergast if we’re dead.”

She said nothing, but let him throttle down to fifty without further complaint. Even at that speed, the boat was starting to take a pounding, the props coming out of the water from time to time with a terrifying roar. They were making for the mouth of Crooked River, a course that took them far offshore. Christ, if they didn’t get there before the storm hit, they’d be screwed no matter what speed they were going. This was no craft to weather a storm in.

He glanced over at Constance, who was standing on his left, her face barely illuminated by the dim red light of the helm. She was looking straight ahead, her short hair whipped by the wind: a crazy girl, he thought, with such peculiar mannerisms and old-fashioned speech. Although the look in her violet eyes wasn’t crazy — not exactly. They were more the eyes of a stone killer than of a young woman — eyes that had seen everything and, as a result, were surprised by nothing.

This whole business had taken a bizarre turn, and done so very suddenly. Looking back, he could see in retrospect the signs that the task force had been compromised. Whoever these people were, kidnapping a fed like that was the height of insanity — unless they were an arm of the government themselves. An arm of the government . Incredible as that might seem, it was really the only thing that made sense. That meant the only way to keep Pendergast alive was to make them think they’d gotten away with it; that nobody knew their location, that the cavalry hadn’t been called in. Of course, the chances that Pendergast was still alive were vanishingly low.