Joe Gores - Glass Tiger

The last was a sniper’s dream, a narrow V-shaped slot between two granite walls camouflaged by stunted pines. The floor was dry packed dirt. Behind, a narrow mountain torrent rushed down slope from the melting snow lingering in shaded areas far above. Good escape route for Corwin after the shot.

But the distance: over 1,200 yards! Twelve football fields laid end to end down the mountain face. Your slug would drop some twenty-five feet while the swirling, unpredictable winds of the 7,500 foot elevation played games with it. Utterly impossible.

Still, this was Corwin...

Day after tomorrow, Thorne was quite sure, both he and Corwin would be working their way over the summit and going down the far side toward the meadow. Two reluctant killers, one bent on murder, the other bent on stopping him. Stopping him how, if it actually came to that? With his Randall Survivor?

Reluctant as he was, Thorne had no choice: Hatfield had mesmerized himself and all the president’s men with the idea that if Corwin showed at all, he would try wet work, up close and personal. He also remembered Sean Connery’s scorn-filled line in The Untouchables about bringing a knife to a gunfight.

In a downtown Hamilton gun store, Thorne professed total ignorance so the clerk could sell him a bolt-action Winchester Standard Model 70 in .30–06 caliber with a Weaver K-4 scope. Thousands were sold every year. No waiting period, no papers to sign. Just another guy who liked to go out in the woods and blast away. Nothing to alert Hatfield’s men if they even bothered to check.

At four-thirty a.m. on speech day, Corwin checked out of his motel. He needed time to hide the 4-Runner and walk back. Afterwards, he’d call Janet’s cell to find out where to leave it. He’d be in everybody’s cross-hairs until they figured he had died or disappeared for good, but she would be well and truly out of it. As long as he was in her life, she would never find a man of her own.

For a moment, his resolve flickered. Today, he planned to commit murder. All those countless nights full of grotesque dreams and memories came back to him full-force. Would he have the seeds for any more killing?

Two rangers from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service were working with two college students from the Wildlife Biology Program of the University Of Montana’s School of Forestry at Missoula to release a young male grizzly named Smokey, and a female, gender-misnamed Winnie the Pooh, into the wild. Not that the bears knew they had names. They were wild, and wanted to be.

‘Just two lousy bears being released,’ groused Laura Givens. She was twenty and earnest.

‘It’s a start,’ objected Ranger Rick mildly — yeah, his name really was Ranger Rick, Rick Tandy. He was twenty-two, and more interested in getting into Laura’s pants than arguing with her.

Sam Jones, the other ranger, was thirty-five and secretly sided with the ranchers on this one, as did many in Fish and Wildlife. More grizzlies they didn’t need to pull down and maul their livestock.

‘Just two-hundred and seventy-eight bears to go,’ he said.

‘It should be six-hundred and twenty-eight bears to go,’ exclaimed Laura, eyes flashing. ‘That’s how many we need for a full recovery of the population.’

Sean McLean was twenty-five and completing his PhD. He said in support, ‘There are sixteen-thousand square miles of virgin territory here — just a couple of highways and a few unimproved roads through. Enough land for our bears to reproduce, and eventually bridge the gap between the existing populations. But you Feds are giving us only the area north of U.S. Highway 12 to work with.’

‘So two bears is a great sufficiency,’ said Sam. ‘What do you say to that, everyone?’

Neither Laura or Sean spoke. The bears, stalking their cages, growled in unison.

The press was in the back of Air Force One, the players were in the front. Wallberg distractedly riffled the pages of his speech. He and his entourage would be choppered from the Air Force base near Missoula, to an LZ near the speech site, and then motorcaded in armored limos to the meadow where the grizzlies would be released.

‘The grizzly bear is a keystone species, with stringent habitat requirements. They serve as a natural barometer of ecosystem health for hundreds of other species...’

The pages fell to his lap. Corwin had assumed mythic proportions in his mind. Thorne said Corwin would be here. He believed Thorne. He raised the speech, tried to concentrate.

‘Grizzlies cannot survive if their remaining habitat is broken up into small chunks through reduction and isolation...’

Superimposed on the pages was Corwin’s face from The Desert Palms Resort last fall. If only the Secret Service had been a few seconds quicker, had shot a little straighter...

‘Since the pockets of grizzlies in Yellowstone and the surrounding wilderness areas are not contiguous, they are not enough to maintain the population at a viable level...’

That night in the California desert, Corwin had no idea why Mather had tried to kill him. But before election night he must have found out: Mather was dead, and now he wanted Gus Wallberg.

Looking down at the distracted President, Jaeger felt only contempt. A man fearing for his life would hide that fact.

‘Mr. President.’ Wallberg looked up, startled. ‘Before you mount to the podium, you will shake hands and trade quips with the college kids who worked with the bears. Then you will move over to the cages, talk knowledgeably with the rangers...’

‘Uh... what sort of crowd will we have?’

‘Small, probably vocal, maybe hostile — they don’t see it as an environmental issue, they see it as a land-use issue. But with half the Washington Press Corps and all four networks right there, your speech will be on everybody’s dinner-time news.’

Wallberg rubbed his eyes. ‘That’s what counts.’

‘Hatfield and O’Hara have the site sewn up tight. If Corwin should be there and somehow got a shot, your Kevlar vest would stop the bullet cold. Any danger is minimal—’

‘I don’t care anything about any on-site danger,’ Wallberg blustered. ‘I’m trying to concentrate here.’

The man didn’t even try to hide his fear. ‘Sorry, sir.’

Wallberg pulled himself together enough to read aloud:

‘By releasing these two symbolic bears, Pooh and Smokey, into the wild, we will provide a biological corridor to link our nation’s last grizzly populations for genetic interchange...’

He lowered the speech. ‘I see the cage doors opening, the bears hesitating, then ambling forth, touching noses, maybe, then, realizing they are free, trotting off into the forest...’

‘It will bring down the house, Mr. President.’

Walking down the aisle, Jaeger remembered his first sexual humiliation after Nisa Mather had turned him down following Wallberg’s exploratory fund-raiser at Olaf Gavle’s house. Jaeger had pulled Nisa into a bedroom, started groping her. She slapped his face, hard, and stalked away with blazing eyes.

How different it all would have been if she had succumbed to his advances! She hadn’t, so, frustrated and vengeful, he had sought out a campaign worker named Kirsten who had milkmaid breasts, rounded hips, strong thighs, and was blonde all the way down. Then he couldn’t get it up, not even with her naked on a motel room bed. It had never happened to him before. After that night, it started happening to him a lot.

LA was their last stop on this trip: maybe give Sharkey a call. Get a blonde who looked a little like Nisa Mather...

He felt himself stiffen slightly at the thought. His mind was miles away from presidential security concerns.

Shayne O’Hara’s mind was filled with presidential security concerns. He was a russet-faced fifty-year-old who looked as if he should be leading the parade on St. Paddy’s Day clad all in green, shillelagh in hand. But under that bluff good-guy exterior was a shrewd, ambitious man who brooked absolutely no fuck-ups.