George Chesbro - Two Songs This Archangel Sings

"Here, Mongo," my brother called softly. "I've got him."

Moving in the direction of Garth's voice, I found him standing over a large man dressed in a camouflage uniform of brown and white. The man had night-vision goggles draped around his neck, a large pack strapped to his back, and his lifeless hands held an Uzi submachine gun. He made a formidable-looking corpse, but it hadn't been Garth who'd killed him; the commando's throat had been deeply slashed from ear to ear, and the thumb on his right hand had been amputated.

"Goddamn," I said when I'd recovered from my initial shock. Gary Worde had been right on target when he'd called out Veil's name.

"Yeah," Garth murmured as he reached down and picked up the Uzi. He took two ammunition clips from the man's belt, dropped them into his pocket. "If Kendry had really wanted to make me feel good, he'd have hung around just a few minutes longer. Which way is the truck?"

Taking out my compass, I held it in the palm of my hand and squinted at the needle in the moonlight. "That way," I said, pointing to my left. "But we can't cut over that way until we're sure we're outside the ring. For now, I think we should keep on going straight."

"Right," Garth said curtly, and we started down the opposite side of the rise at a trot.

Our thoughts with the man who had died of the disease called Orville Madison which we'd brought with us into his place of solitude, we walked due north in silence for better than three hours, until the sun began to rise over the horizon to signal a cold, white dawn. We'd paused often to listen and watch, but we had detected no sounds of pursuit. Now we stopped at the top of a mountain and scanned the surrounding landscape through our binoculars, saw absolutely nothing except distant plumes of smoke rising from the forest fires started by the canisters of napalm.

There was no cargo plane, no sign of the five surviving commandos. There was also no sign of Veil, although we knew he had to be out there someplace.

Puzzled but relieved at the absence of any kind of pursuit, we checked our compasses, then started off to the east. With a little luck, I thought, the Jeep would be where we'd left it, and it would start.

A half hour later two New York State Police helicopters appeared in the distance, heading toward the fires.

"Do we want to be rescued?" Garth asked as we stood inside a shadowy copse of fir trees and watched as a third helicopter passed almost directly overhead.

After some consideration, I shook my head. "I don't think so."

"It could save us a long hike, and a very cold night in the mountains; we can't risk a fire."

"We need time to think about what we're going to do next and who we're going to see. I think we're better off if we keep our options open. If the State Police get hold of us, they'll have an awful lot of questions I'm not sure we want to answer yet-at least not to them."

"You're right. Why don't you open the packet and see what the hell's in there?"

"I was thinking it might be better to open it in the presence of at least one official witness. It's sealed pretty good, and as long as we leave it that way there are tests that can establish the fact that it's been sealed and underground for a few years. That could be important."

Garth nodded his agreement. "You sure the Jeep is in this direction?"

"Ask me in a day or two," I said, and started down the side of the mountain.

We'd headed in the right direction, and the Jeep was where we'd left it; unfortunately, we never got a chance to see if it would start. New York State troopers were waiting for us-in force-when we emerged from the forest on a ridge just above the place on the highway where we had parked the Jeep almost a week before. Suddenly, grim-faced men in blue and gray uniforms seemed to be popping up or out all over the place, surrounding us with their guns drawn.

"Freeze!" a tall, burly state trooper standing fifteen yards ahead of us shouted as he leveled a shotgun between Garth and me.

We froze, slowly raised our arms in the air.

"Where's the other one?!"

"What other one?" I asked. "Look, Officer, we were just out for a little hiking."

"With a submachine gun?"

He had a point. Almost as an afterthought, Garth relaxed his fingers and the Uzi clattered to the frozen ground. One of the troopers quickly stepped forward and snatched it up. Then we were grabbed, hustled down to the road, slammed up against a car, and roughly frisked.

"You're making a mistake, Trooper," Garth said in his most reasonable tone of voice. "Look in my wallet; you'll find a detective's gold shield. My name's Lieutenant Garth Frederickson, and I'm on special assignment for the NYPD. This is my brother, the criminologist Dr. Robert Frederickson."

"We know who you are, Frederickson," a big, black trooper growled from somewhere behind and above my right ear. The man found my Beretta and Seecamp, relieved me of both. "But you're no longer on assignment for anyone, and it's likely that both you and your brother are going to be learning a lot more about criminology from the inside of a prison. Both of you are under arrest for violation of the Federal Espionage Act. Now, where's your buddy?"

"We don't know who you're talking about," Garth replied in a low, rasping snarl that no longer sounded quite so reasonable.

"Veil Kendry. When and where did you split up?"

Garth and I both started to turn around, stopped when a rifle barrel knifed down between us and smashed against the hood of the car.

"Who's Veil Kendry?" I asked, and heard Garth softly grunt his approval. These were definitely not the right people to talk to or show anything.

"Shut up, you little bastard," the trooper behind me said as he prodded me hard between the shoulder blades with his rifle butt. "He's the man you and your brother have been selling our country's secrets to for the past five years, and he works for the Goddamn Russians. Don't bother trying to deny it, because the government people have you cold. All three of you are fucking spies."

It seemed the rope I thought Orville Madison was supposed to be hanging himself with still had a few kinks left in it.

Garth and I were handcuffed, bundled separately into the backs of two State Police cars, and given a speedy ride-complete with wailing sirens-to a headquarters building just off the Thruway, near Albany. We were strip-searched and all our possessions taken away. We were placed in separate cells in a small lockup facility at the rear of the building, given a meal, and allowed to sleep under the supervision of a trooper sitting in a chair in the corridor just outside our cells.

In the morning we were served a breakfast that was surprisingly good for jail food. A few minutes after the dishes were taken away, I heard the cell door on the opposite side of a tile partition open and close, and then two sets of footsteps walking away down the corridor, toward the front of the building.

Garth was brought back about an hour later, and a young, attractive female trooper came through a door to my right, opened my cell, and motioned for me to come out. I was led down the corridor to a pale green door which the woman opened for, and then closed behind, me.

The small interrogation room was bare except for a metal desk and chair set back against the far wall, and a second folding metal chair placed in the middle of the room. A heavy set trooper in a uniform with a captain's insignia sat very erect behind the desk. To his right was a tape recorder, which he turned on as I entered the room, and on the desk top in front of him was a yellow legal pad and felt-tipped pen. The man had close-cropped brown hair, and dark, expressive eyes. I went to the chair and sat down, crossed my legs and smiled at the trooper. He didn't smile back. We sat and stared at each other for close to five minutes, while the recorder kept running.