Joe Gores - Glass Tiger

‘Apart from Ingrid, Hal Corwin is the best friend I’ve ever had.’ A long silence. ‘Okay, he told me he couldn’t get the phone number the shooter called from Dutch’s payphone. But being the old country doctor type, I could. It was an unlisted Minneapolis number. I told Hal. The next day he sold the cabin and left for good.’

‘Why did you think it was for good? He came back.’

‘Because he took his bearskin. Old John, the Indian who trained him to be a hunter and woodsman, gave it to him when he was a kid.’ Corwin’s mentor, as Morengaru was Thorne’s. ‘When I saw it was gone, I called the number.’ Another pause. ‘Nisa answered. I hope I don’t live to regret this.’

‘Nisa didn’t,’ said Thorne, irritated, and hung up.

All the work and time he would have been saved if Hernild had told him this the first time they had talked! Hernild had known all along that Mather was the shooter. Mather had called Nisa after shooting her father, using her as an alibi — ‘Hi, honey, I’ll be home late...’

A betrayal. Despite it, she had sided with him. In June, Corwin got Nisa’s unlisted number from Hernild. He left Portage the next day, obviously thinking it was for good. But then he kept stewing about it. Mather shooting him, Nisa hiding that fact from him. Then five months later, in the Delta, he murdered them both.

Corwin must have done awful things as a merc — they all did. Things he couldn’t forgive himself for. The kind of things Thorne had never had to stew about, because he was still working for the government after he left the Rangers.

Even so, Corwin had been able to live with those things, because Terry and Nisa had always been behind him, his core, his center, his anchor, his Ground Zero.

Then Terry was killed. Nisa blamed him. Guilt, no longer suppressed, washed over him like blood. Bad dreams, too, Thorne was sure, much like his own after Alison and Eden were killed.

After Corwin himself had been shot, and partially crippled, Nisa came back into his life. She even started helping him on his hunt for his attacker. Redemption! A second chance! Then she turned on him again, turned instead to the man who had tried to kill him.

Love and hate were like the tusks of fossil mammoths curving back on themselves so completely that their tips touched. Perhaps love and hate had touched in Corwin. He killed them because together they had taken his last chance at redemption.

It almost explained everything. Except where he was and what he was doing during those five months between his flight from Portage and his reappearance in the California Delta. Except why Mather had tried to kill him in the first place.

And then, the jackpot question: why Corwin, after Nisa and Damon were dead, decided to go after Gustave Wallberg, soon to be President of the United States.

Carrying only an old WWII .38 revolver, his survival knife, and his rangefinder for a final check of distance, range, and elevation, Corwin left the Motel Deluxe in Salmon, Idaho. He had rented his room there for two weeks under somebody else’s name. His tripod was hidden up on the mountain, on site. He had zeroed-in on his first day there, so as usual, he left his rifle, ammo and scope in the room. No need to bring them back to the sniper nest until That Day.

A maze of narrow, unimproved roads lay west of 10,757-foot Trapper Peak, still mostly white-clad, framed by shorter peaks that had not retained their winter snow. Some ten miles north of Trapper, Corwin turned on to a minor national-park road, then a dirt road, then turned again into an abandoned logging trace. After half a mile on that, he bounced the 4-Runner off the track, covered it with fir branches cut the first day, and left the ignition key in front of the left rear tire as always.

He hiked with his slightly-limping gait five miles back to a subalpine valley on the near side of a range of granite peaks from the meadow where the president would soon speak. His way led him past a small mountain pond rimmed with ice and up around the northern edge of the massif. That was the only exposed rock he had to cross. He came back south on the far side in the cover of a mixed conifer-hardwood forest to follow a narrow, black, icy, rushing melt water torrent down the slope.

He was totally focussed on his hunt, giving no thought to whoever might be hunting him. He felt he’d covered his backtrail too well for anyone to decipher it.

Camp David, Maryland, was a U.S. Navy facility, maintained solely for presidential recreation and occasional meetings where the press was barred. It was inside a camouflaged electrified fence; thirty remote-operated, 128 all-weather scanning cameras were hidden in the trees. In camouflaged bunkers around the grounds was a platoon of forty highly-trained and attack-alert Marine sentries equipped with night-vision glasses.

Kurt Jaeger had arranged for Terrill Hatfield to drive him from the helipad to the Presidential cabin in a golf cart, the camp’s usual mode of transport. He wanted to have a totally private conversation with the FBI man.

‘I gather you don’t think much of Thorne, Terrill.’

Surprisingly, Hatfield said, ‘If anybody is going to find Corwin, it’ll be Thorne. I want him to do that, but I want to take Corwin down. Myself. I want to be Director of the FBI.’

‘I want to be Secretary of State in Wallberg’s next term.’

After this exchange of confidences, unexpected on both sides, they rode in silence for two minutes. Then Hatfield said, ‘We use Thorne to find him, then we send Thorne back to Kenya to rot in jail as a poacher. Out of sight, out of mind.’

‘Out of the President’s mind at any rate,’ agreed Jaeger. ‘Whom meanwhile we will have saved from a mad stalker.’

Corwin was facing east, the sun at his back, forty-five minutes before the president would be scheduled to arrive on speech-day. They would be in light, he would be in shadow, in a narrow V-shaped slot between two granite walls that were flanked by stunted pine shrubs. Not like the succession of cramped spider holes he’d worked out of in Vietnam.

He would be firing from the prone, the most stable of positions, with a tripod. The pines would make the opening invisible to scanning binoculars directed up the cliff-face from the meadow far below. The floor was dry packed earth. Where the slot came to a point a dozen yards behind him, the torrent he had followed down the cliff face would be his escape route.

Corwin pointed the Barr & Stroud prismatic optical rangefinder like a camera at the only place in the meadow where they could put a podium. It was 1,210 yards. A hellacious long shot: nobody would be looking up here before he pulled the trigger, and after he fired, it would be an hour of confusion before they scoped out exactly where the shot had come from.

By then he would be long gone, in the stream to confuse the inevitable bloodhounds. And instead of riding it down, he would climb uphill through the icy water to emerge into shielding trees, cut diagonally up across the face of the mountain below the tree line, go back around to the western side. No exposure, not even to choppers. Back to Janet’s 4-Runner by dark, start driving long before they could get their perimeter checkpoint system operational, be hundreds of miles to the west by dawn.

Not even the unknown tracker, even if he somehow got the location right, could know where Corwin was planning his ambush. He would have dozens of square miles of meadow, forest, and precipitous rock face to comb for shooting sites, with nothing to indicate that Corwin had ever been in any of them.

When Thorne stepped off the helicoptor at Camp David, he was picked up by a six-foot, hard-bitten man in a golf cart who said he was Ray Franklin, Hatfield’s hot-shot who had been outfoxed by Corwin not once, but twice. And, concomitantly, embarrassed by Thorne not once, but twice. Franklin was from a crack FBI field unit, and Thorne had made them all look foolish.