‘Chase’ Chapters 25-29

“How are we going to get through? Swim? It’s filled with water.”

“No, this way,” Rosalind said, going left around the oblong pond. “They used to send you through in paddle boats, Tunnel of Love–style, Grandpa said, but there’s a walkway. C’mon.”

As we stepped in under the cathedral-like ceiling, Roxie started barking.

“Stop your fidgeting, Roxie. I like it as much as you do.”

I turned on one of the flashlights Joe Walke had given us. We also had some water bottles, and the shotguns—they held about twenty rounds, most of them number 7 birdshot, but there were a few shells of double-ought buck.

What wasn’t in our favor was that the shotguns were over-and-under break-open style, so they could only hold two rounds at a time. If we got into a firefight with these professional military folks, it was going to be over very quickly.

The beam of the flashlight revealed some beer bottles and graffiti on the rough rock wall, but they looked old and faded. I pointed the flashlight down the cement lip of the path beside the canal-like waterway. The path continued for at least a football field and then seemed to disappear to the right.

“You sure the other side isn’t blocked or anything?” I asked.

“No way. The other side is even more open than this one. It would take an earthquake,” Rosalind said.

We walked deeper into the eerie, dead-silent cave. The rough rock walls had a lunar quality, seeming to shift as the light moved over them. Some sections had weird patterns and folds. Embedded minerals in other areas glittered and threw back the light in disco-ball constellations.

Even on a day when I’d had a gun to my head, in this claustrophobic space my nerves ached to turn around. It was like we’d just walked in through the gates of hell.

“Marshall, Will, and Holly, on a routine expedition,” I sang, as I pointed the light up at cone-shaped rock stalagmites—or were they stalactites? It had been a while since I’d been underground, in the middle of nowhere, in the middle of the night.

“What’s that?” Rosalind asked.

“From a show I used to watch when I was your age called Land of the Lost. Ever hear of it?” I asked.

“No,” she said, leading onward into the dark. “We don’t have a TV. Grandpa says TV makes people stupid.”

“He may be onto something there,” I said. What a brave and capable little girl.

We finally reached the opening. When we stepped into the glorious open air from the long and nightmarish tunnel, I saw that the canal led into a huge lake. We were on the other side of the hill now. We’d walked straight through the mountain.

I looked back. The roof of the tunnel was an almost perfectly rectangular slab of rock about ten feet thick. It looked like a knocked-over monolith, like the roof of Stonehenge half-buried in the earth.

“People actually paid to do that?” I said.

“So I’m told,” Rosalind said, shaking her head.

“How long is it to this town? What’s it called?”

“Chapman. About eight miles around the other side of this lake.”

“Wait! Get down!” I said. “I see something.”

About a mile away, along the left shore of the lake, there was a light. A flashlight. Somebody walking, coming toward us. Worse than that, I thought I heard a short bark.

“You gotta be kidding me,” I mumbled. What are we going to do now?

I looked back at the mouth of the cavern, then toward the slope of the hill above it. It was steep, filled with trees, but manageable.

“But that heads right back up the hill to their camp,” Rosalind whispered. “Don’t we want to go away from there?”

“We have no choice. C’mon,” I whispered, and slung the shotgun over my shoulder.

 

CHAPTER 27

DAWN WAS BREAKING as we topped the crest of the ridge.

The whole top of the mountain was covered in a silver mist that turned to a spectacular rose-gold in the light of the rising sun. If I wasn’t being hunted down like a rabbit by a group of what had to be Special Forces soldiers, I bet I would have appreciated it even more.

Rosalind and I were freezing and exhausted. We’d only slept a little the night before, forty-five-minute catnaps in two different spots up the hill. We’d heard the helicopter twice, but it hadn’t sounded very close, thankfully.

There wasn’t a peep out of Rosalind or Roxie during the climb. I couldn’t believe what a great dog that setter was. She, too, knew we were in very deep trouble.

We had been walking down a small wooded rise for about twenty minutes when the mist started to lift. You could actually see the moisture rising slowly, like a stage curtain showing the feet of the trees.

And then a few seconds later, we stopped when we suddenly saw something.

Ahead of us about a hundred feet away, there was a man sitting on the ground, his back turned, leaning against a blown-over tree.

 

CHAPTER 28

THOUGH SEATED, HE appeared tall and lanky, wearing camo, a gun propped on the log next to him.

Gripping our cold shotguns, we knelt on the forest floor and watched him for a very long and silent five minutes.

He didn’t move. Was he sleeping? Dead? Or was it a trap?

Very slowly I began walking down toward him. When I was about ten feet away, the guy sort of stirred and reached for his weapon.

I closed the gap and put both barrels of the shotgun to the back of his head. “Don’t!” I said.

I made him lie on his belly, searched his outer pockets, and found zip ties that I used on his hands. Twenty feet away from where he’d been sleeping, the trees gave way to a clearing I recognized as the firing range I’d seen the day before. Beyond it were the trailers.

We’d done it. We’d made it back to their camp. I told Rosalind to head to the tree line and wait for me there, while I went back to the soldier and lifted his weapon—an actual grenade launcher! Just amazing. These guys had to be CIA or something. You couldn’t get grenade launchers at Walmart. I’d never even seen one.

The man remained silent as I removed his camo balaclava. He looked boyish, in his late thirties, a pleasant enough curly-haired guy with a goofy gap in his teeth. His driver’s license said his name was Justin De Souza, with an address in San Jose, California.

“Long way from San Jose, Justin,” I said. I found a Clif energy bar in his bag, ripped off the wrapper, and started chewing.

“Where are the others?” I said, spitting crumbs.

“Where the hell do you think they are? Out looking for you.”

“You’re the only one here?” I said skeptically.

“Yes. I mean no. Therkelson is in the trailer with a broken back. And the old man is here. They got him locked up.”

“The old guy in the blue truck? He’s here?”

“Yes. He’s okay. A little roughed up, but okay.”

“Get up and show me,” I said, kicking him.

We walked to the clearing and stopped.

“Rosalind, I’m going to take this guy back over to those trailers. If something happens, I want you and Roxie to try to get to Chapman by yourself. But if it’s okay, I’ll whistle and you and Roxie run as fast as you can to the trailers, okay?”

“Okay,” she said. “Where’s my grandpa?”

“In one of the trailers, I think. Just let me go check first.”

I turned back to Justin.

“Okay, buddy. Showtime. If you’re lying and somebody takes a shot at me, I won’t shoot back at him. I will pull this trigger on you, Justin, and we can die together. Now get moving. Fast.”

The twenty seconds it took to run out in the open toward the trailers were the longest of my life. Any moment, I thought I would know what it felt like to take a high-powered bullet to a vital part of my body. But we made it. There were no shots.

We found Joe Walke in the second trailer, sitting against the wall in his orange vest.

“You got the drop on them!” he said, leaping up with surprising energy. “I knew it! Where’s Rosalind?”

I whistled.

Their hug moments later on the edge of the firing range was epic. Roxie, who couldn’t contain herself any longer, let out a happy bark.

“Okay, Joe. Here’s what I’d like you to do. Find some keys, take one of the vehicles, and head down the hill.”

“What are you going to do?”

“My job,” I said, shoving Justin back into the trailer in front of me, “is to end this thing. Now go.”

 

CHAPTER 29

I MADE JUSTIN sit against the wall.

“You ever want to make it back to San Jose in the vertical position, you better start explaining just what in the hell is going on here, Justin. Because I’ve had a long night, and I’m not in the mood.”

“We’re training at the camp.”

“Training for what? The coming alien invasion? I’m a cop, Justin. NYPD. I know what happened to Eardley. How he didn’t die in the crash back in ’07. How his old buddy Haber is here running a paramilitary operation, and decided Eardley should take a dive off the side of a building. What are you guys? CIA?”

Justin looked at me.

I took a chance. “Look, man. I have no stake in this, except that I tried to solve a murder and now people keep shooting at me. But I was just at the Pentagon, asking how this guy turned up dead again, and the brass are all over this. The secret is out.”

Justin grunted, so I continued. “And this little training camp is gonna look pretty strange when the powers that be start sniffing around. I wouldn’t be surprised if Haber took that chopper and flew away. If not, I’m gonna wait here with your weapon to greet him in style. But if you tell me what’s going on, I can help you.”

He exhaled and slumped down. “Give me a cigarette, man. They’re in my bag. I’ll tell you the whole thing. This mission is cursed.”

I lit his Marlboro for him with his Zippo and placed it between his lips.

“Okay, Justin. Now, from the very beginning,” I said.

He took a breath.

“It all started in Iraq. On the night of May 1, 2007, we ran a raid from the Special Forces command in Balad up north all the way down south. Near the shore of the Persian Gulf in Basra.”

“In Eardley’s C-130?”

“Yeah. It was a big CIA-run operation. There were Rangers, Green Berets, and SEALs. I was just a weatherman and forward observer.”

“Weatherman?”

“An Air Force weatherman. They bring us out on potentially longer raids to read the sky, just like the guys on Channel 6. Weather’s important to pilots and planes. Like life-and-death important.”

I nodded.

“Go on.”

“Anyway, so the top special operators, mostly veteran SEALs, were real jazzed about grabbing some bigwig al-Qaeda asshole they got intel on, so they brought all the toys way down there. Little bird choppers, some Humvees, some dirt bikes. There were about thirty of us altogether.

“So the hot dogs do a recon, to suss out a plan while a contingent of Rangers and B-level folks like myself are supposed to hang back at this remote staging area, as backup in case some heavy-duty shit goes down. While all the hotshots were on surveillance for hours, us peewees were sitting around shooting the shit. And this one Ranger, this guy Toporski, goes exploring on the outskirts of this remote craphole suburb of Basra. After an hour, he radioes us to come running because somebody took a shot at him.

“We run over there, and there’s another shot from this hut’s window, and we light it up and kick in the door ready to grease Osama, who we hadn’t found yet. But it was better than that. A million times better. It was the mother lode.”