Joe Gores - Glass Tiger

From the FBI report, Thorne knew Ray and Johnny had missed Corwin by only twenty minutes: they scared up a flock of crows when they burst into the clearing, and the embers of the campfire were still warm. He slid off his stool, leaving the $100-bill.

‘How about you sell me way too much beef jerky?’

Meanwhile, up in Minnesota, Corwin had gone ninety feet in thirty minutes in his totally silent stalk across a wet, crackly surface. Up by his cabin, three miles away, the snow was gone except under the densest stands of pine and there was the constant tinkling of ice-melt. Down here in the silent river bottom, receding floodwaters had laid down a springy foot-deep bed of driftwood under the leafless hardwoods.

Three yards away, oblivious to his presence, a sly-faced red fox nosed at something on the ground. Twenty feet above his head, a brilliantly-colored wood duck sat on a limb of a leafing oak that until the week before had been standing in flood water.

Corwin crackled driftwood, the duck shot indignantly away, jinking through the branches like a maneuvering jet fighter. The fox fled. Corwin went to see what it had been sniffing. A snowy owl and another wood duck, both dead. He gingerly picked up the owl: still warm. The duck came with it, clutched in the spasmodic death grip of the owl’s curved, needle-sharp talons.

He stood holding the two dead birds for a full minute, motionless except for almost minuscule movements of his eyes. The owl was big — four-foot wingspan, weight about five pounds, grey-brown banding in her feathers. A female. In Alaska he had seen a female hit a man who threatened her nest so hard she had knocked him right off his feet. So what could have killed this one? Not the fox: snowies often hunted foxes for food.

He looked up. Directly overhead was a high-tension electric line strung through openings cut in the branches by the power company. The duck waddling around on the driftwood, the owl’s sudden swoop — snowies hunted both day and night. Wings beating, she rose through the trees — and hit the power line rubbed bare of insulation. Instant electrocution for them both.

Corwin laid the dead birds back on the driftwood for the fox to feed on. He was ready. Ready to seek, rend, destroy...

A giant fist shattered his chest. He felt bone and muscle and meat give inward, snap, tear...

Once predator, now only prey... Shot from ambush. Then, Nisa’s betrayal...

Nisa, wet with blood and semen, him standing over her, all passion spent, looking at her with dazed, horrified eyes...

Goddammit, he would continue to search the Internet for the president’s travel plans. Couldn’t quit anyway. By now, he was sure, someone would be working out the puzzle of his carefully obliterated backtrail.

‘Come and get me, you bastard,’ Corwin said aloud.

Thorne knew, when he saw the clearing a quarter-mile off the ridge trail in King’s Canyon, that this was where Corwin had been bivouacked. The perfect place to melt into the trees and be gone if pursuers appeared. But Corwin had wanted them out in front of him, so he could double back and be free of them. Hide in plain sight. It was what Thorne would have done.

Ray and Johnny. The same members of Hatfield’s Hostage Rescue/ Sniper team who had sat on the muskrat house in the Delta smoking cigarettes while Corwin hid right below them. He wondered if either of them had been aboard the Gulfstream jet that had taken him from Nairobi to Washington and the White House.

Corwin’s campfire had been banked against a huge old hollow fir log, its open end laced with root fungi. The bark on the upper side had been pecked or literally torn away.

A flock of crows. Way too much beef jerky.

Thorne sat down with his back against the sun-warmed curve of the log. He let himself melt into the forest sights and sounds and smells. At dusk, the far-off calling of the crows coming up from the meadows where they had been feeding roused him from a reverie close to sleep. He ripped off pieces of beef jerky and thumbed them down into the bark of the ancient log as yelling crows swept unseen into the top of a ponderosa.

Thorne gave a single rusty caw. He hadn’t mimicked a crow’s call in a lot of years. The noises above stopped abruptly. He tried two caws. Nothing. But three caws brought a huge black shape sweeping down to circle the clearing and settle on the nearest tree. Big as a raven, black and shiny as the phony lead Maltese falcon Gutman had hacked at with his pocketknife. The breeding male. The dominant bird of the flock.

As Thorne knelt and backed into the open end of the log, the big crow gave the feeding call: a dozen more black silent shadows drifted down to the log.

After ten minutes, Thorne crawled back out of the log through the veil of root fungi. The crows were gone. The jerky was gone. In the morning, he would leave them the rest of it.

Thorne slept well that night, in the log. No nightmare.

Gelson Hennings was a big, balding man with cold eyes and a hook nose, a retired four-star Army general who had been teaching military strategy at the Command and General Staff College when tapped by Wallberg for National Security Advisor.

‘How about you come up with a new set of options for the President on our current Iran strategy?’ demanded Jaeger. At these daily security meetings, his job was to keep the confrontations between Hennings and the President to a minimum.

‘How can I come up with options when I’m still not sure just what our present Iran strategy is?’ Hennings said bluntly.

‘The American people are sick of terrorist plots and nuclear scare tactics,’ Wallberg snapped. ‘Iran is not America’s problem. Iran is the world’s problem. Let the UN—’

‘Keep sucking its collective thumb, as usual?’ Hennings leaned across the table. ‘I have to tell you, Mr. President, that if we don’t act, the Israelis will. Unilaterally. They’ve done it before. The Entebbe Raid in the eighties, their strike on the Iraqi nuclear facility a few years later. The UN says Iran will have a nuke within four to ten years. The Israelis are giving it a year. We need to elucidate our policy now.’

Wallberg covertly glanced at Hastings Crandall, who said immediately, ‘Ah, I’m sorry, Mr. President, but the delegation of school children from Chicago...’

‘Damn!’ said Wallberg. ‘I forgot.’ He stood up. ‘Sorry, gentlemen, but that’s all the time we have for this right now.’

Jaeger stayed behind. Wallberg sat down again, heavily. There was no meeting with school children from Chicago, but he had been having trouble keeping focussed.

‘I’m coming to feel Hennings was a mistake. Too abrasive. No rounded edges. Not a team player. He doesn’t get what this administration is all about.’

‘He’s the best we’re going to get for the job.’

‘I know, I know,’ he said petulantly. He leaned forward suddenly in the big executive chair he had brought to Washington from his governor’s mansion in Minneapolis. ‘The polls show I need to get out of D.C., let the people see their President...’

‘That’s dangerous until we have a fix on Corwin.’

‘I thought you were going to end the Corwin problem,’ he said shrilly. He softened his tone. ‘What is Thorne doing?’

‘He’s in California, where Corwin eluded Hatfield’s people. Twice. He says he’s trying to find out how Corwin thinks.’

‘That sounds like B.S. to me, but maybe not. Have him report directly to me here immediately he gets back.’

Thorne made Jaeger uneasy: no give in him. Thorne closeted with the President made him even more uneasy. As long as Hatfield kept Thorne away from the President, Jaeger would help Hatfield with his as-yet unstated but obvious ambitions.