Joe Gores - Glass Tiger

The rangers slid up the steel barred cage doors. The bears were suspicious. Yes, over there was the forest, and freedom, but what if this were just another of the humans’ tricks?

Jaeger stared out over the crowd, but saw only Nisa Mather. His sexual obsession hadn’t ended with her death. Sharkey in LA would find him a woman who at least superficially resembled her, a woman he could possess phsyically, repeatedly, could bend to his will as he never could bend Nisa while she was alive.

Gus Wallberg looked out over the meadow, over the bears in their cages at the edge of the forest, over the faces upturned below him. But he saw only the millions of people at their TV screens that night. He felt the same surge of power he had felt when giving his acceptance speech, in his gut and in his groin, felt what sex was supposed to give him but never had. He lusted for their power, they offered it, he took it. Now it was his.

‘My fellow Americans, today we begin a grand journey...’

Thorne dropped to his right knee, brought up his rifle, released the safety, sat back on his right foot and braced his left elbow on his left knee, his upper arm jammed into the kneecap just above the elbow. He began taking controlled breaths to slow his pulse. He looked through the optic. There he was!

But Christ! In the scope, Corwin was taking up trigger slack! He was going for the head shot even as Wallberg started speaking! Thorne’s finger contracted ever so gently against the six ounces of slack in the trigger pull. The rifle bucked in his hands, and even before it steadied again he knew he had made his shot. But in the exact micro-second he had fired, Corwin’s rifle also had recoiled. He had gotten off his shot, too.

As Corwin’s rifle recoiled he was struck a great blow in the side. No pain, not yet: just the dizzying sensation of a giant fist swung against him. He had felt it all before, eighteen months ago. Then, Mather. Now, the tracker, not dead after all, had done him. So what? He had seen the red mist. The halo of blood around the ruined head. Nothing else mattered.

He crawled in a half-circle like a stepped-on landcrab, to face the rear of the V and the life-saving torrent. He was already going into shock, but he would make it. The stream would carry him down, far away from all pursuit forever.

Thorne paused to momentarily scope the scene below. Men shouting, women screaming, Secret Service agents springing to the platform. Smokey and Pooh, terrified by the noise, smashing out of their open cages and charging toward the forest and freedom.

The forest Rangers were making motions as if to draw their sidearms, but by presidential fiat they were unarmed this day. The students were slapping high-fives: the bears were free.

People were milling on the platform around the man lying on the planks with little of his head left.

Corwin was in the burn again on that icy November night, crawling for the cabin a thousand feet away. Blood stained the earth beneath his turtle-slow body at each movement. Dark, rich blood. Arterial blood? If so... No. He would make it. Get into the icy water so it would stop the bleeding...

Dead men. So many great shots. So many dead men.

Terry. Laughing with him in front of the fireplace on Marshall Avenue while Nisa, age ten, lay on the floor swathed in a blanket, watching TV cartoons.

Nisa, an adult, dead herself. No! No...

Crawl. Would the tracker get to him before he could get to the rushing torrent? His vision dimmed. Tired. Drop your head into the dirt. No. Crawl. Arm. Leg. Again. Again. He was trying to float up out of his body. No! Just a few feet now... He had done it all before.

Thorne covered the last twenty yards in one sustained rush and slide to drop down into the sniper’s nest, like running the half-frozen scree on Mount Kenya far above the tree line. Corwin’s gun was still in place. Away from it, going toward the stream, crawl-marks etched in blood. Like the scrabble of just-born turtles in the Seychelles, heading for the sea once they had broken from their shells and crawled up out of the warm sand.

At the very point of the V was Corwin, an arm moving feebly, a knee flexing, pushing. Trying to reach the stream. To escape. Except that he was already dead.

Crunch of boots. The tracker. Corwin found the strength to turn his head. He could see the man looming over him even though the light was dimming. No matter. He would soon be away, free, where they could never touch him.

Thorne knelt down, leaned in so his face was close. Corwin was deathly pale, dirt and blood were smeared across his features. He was trying to speak. A murmur. A whisper.

‘You, me... we are...’ The voice trailed off. Then, another great effort. ‘...the same man...’

Thorne said coldly, ‘I didn’t murder my daughter.’

‘I...’ Corwin stopped, his voice choking off.

Dead? No, Goddammit! Thorne had a sudden cruel need to take everything from Corwin, to send him on his way shorn of any smallest shred of triumph.

‘Corwin!’ he barked. The eyes opened. ‘Here’s something for you to take with you through the wall. You missed.’

Blood dripping from Corwin’s slack mouth outlined his teeth in red like the teeth of a Halloween warlock. Then, he grinned.

And asked, very distinctly, ‘Did I?’

He thrust with a foot, rolled over into the rushing water. Thorne caught a boot heel for a microsecond, then it was jerked from his grasp by the stream, and Corwin was gone. He stood up slowly, exhausted, silently mouthing Corwin’s final words.

Did I?

Thorne’s world had just been turned upside down.

Within hours, the headlines would shout it: WALLBERG SAFE CHIEF OF STAFF KURT JAEGER KILLED WOULD-BE PRESIDENTIAL ASSASSIN SHOOTS WRONG MAN

Gustave Wallberg and First Lady Edith Wallberg sat side-by-side in their luxurious aisle seats on Air Force One, unabashedly holding hands. For security reasons, there were no accompanying newsmen, thus no one to make public their private closeness.

For Edith, it was easy. Gus had cheated on her with Nisa Corwin, but she had stifled her anger and hurt and jealousy and had never spoken out, and the affair had ended. Now he was for her alone, alive, to become one of America’s great Presidents.

For Wallberg, not so easy. He had been terrified and was still shaky. It was only because some mountain wind had blown a tiny hurtling bit of lead a couple of feet off course that the shot meant for his chest had exploded another man’s head.

Beyond any normal survival guilt was the fact he was relieved that Kurt was dead. He had been forced to make Jaeger his Chief of Staff, and next term would have had to make him Secretary of State. Because on election night...

He could see the two of them vividly, knee-to-knee in straight-back chairs in the disused ballroom on the roof of the Beverly Hills Marquis. Like that famous photo of Jack and Bobby in a similar pose. Kurt was talking, using his hands.

‘Corwin must already be on his way to the Delta.’

How had Corwin even found them? Wallberg wondered.

‘What if we do nothing? That might solve—’

‘True, they wouldn’t be around to talk to the media, Governor. But Corwin would be.’ He leaned closer. ‘I know a man here in LA who can make all of this... go away.’

There it was: his bargain with the devil that had put him in Kurt Jaeger’s ambitious hands. But what else could he have done? Sometimes individual deaths had to serve the greater good.

‘Mr. President? I have that preliminary report.’

Shayne O’Hara was sliding into the seat across the aisle from him. Just as quickly, Edith slipped by her husband’s knees.