A War of Shadows

FOUR

The air was fresh and clear; the night sky over the eastern California mountains was ablaze with stars, and the night chill quieted the insects so that only the sound of gently rolling wind through the mountains could be heard.

Five men sat atop a ledge looking down into a culvert well off the main road. A small cabin was there, looking toylike and so natural that it was almost invisible but for a glow coming from a window. In reality it was a fairly good-sized cabin of tough hardwood, a mountain retreat that predated the National Forest in which it sat and which could be rented for up to two weeks by arrangement with the Forest Service. A thin trail of white smoke issuing forth from the small pipe chimney was the only sign, other than the flickering lantern glow in the window, that the place was inhabited at all.

One of the men shifted slightly. “Sure glad this is on federal land,” he said casually. “No hassle over jurisdiction.”

One of the others nodded and checked a shotgun. “Give ’em about five more minutes,” he told the others offhandedly. “They been going to sleep pretty early lately. Better if they’re in bed.”

The first man, a large fellow dressed in typical hiker fashion, picked up a walkie-talkie.

“Mountain Man to Tourister,” he said softly. “Tourister bye,” came the response.

“Five minutes,” he informed the unseen others on the opposite side of the culvert. “Check with the blockers for position.” He looked at his watch, touching a little stud so it lit up the time. “I have 2250 hours. Shall we say at 2300 exactly?”

“Good enough,” said the other team leader. “I’m getting pneumonia sitting here anyway.”

“Line of duty,” the other cracked. “A week in the hospital on Uncle.” He turned serious again. “Okay, count off if you’re in position. Tourister.”

“One,” said the other team leader.

“Blocker?”

“Two.” A different voice.

“Salamander?”

“Go—I mean, three,” came a third voice. “Bulldozer?”

“Four.” A dry, deep voice that sounded more bored than tense.

“It is now 2254,” said Mountain Man. “Check and sync. On my signal, go, 2300.”

They waited. The others in the Mountain Man team shifted into position, checking out sniperscopes, tear gas launchers, and the like. The cabin seemed blissfully unaware of all this activity, which suited them just fine.

They waited, peering anxiously at the target. Nobody spoke as the time crept onward to their zero hour.

Mountain Man stared at his watch, waiting for the numerals to change. Suddenly, they did, and tension reached the breaking point.

“Okay, hit ’em with One!” he snapped into the walkie-talkie.

Suddenly a mild, almost unnoticeable rumble far off increased in intensity, the sound of an engine echoing through the mountains as if a horde of giant super-trucks were coming their way.

Tremendous floodlights came on, centered on the cabin, turning night into day for fifty meters in all directions.

A small device atop a rifle in a Mountain Man team member’s hands suddenly issued a loud, echoing report, and a large object was hurled down into the culvert, landing near the cabin.

Mountain Man lifted the walkie-talkie. The device near the cabin was a miniaturized receiver-amplifier.

“You in the cabin,” his voice came back to them from below, hollow, gigantic, almost supernatural in tone. “This is the Federal Bureau of Investigation. You are surrounded. You have thirty seconds to throw out your weapons or we will gas the cabin. There is no escape, and gas may well set the cabin on fire. Throw out your weapons and file out of the cabin—now!”

The light in the cabin window went out, although it was almost impossible to tell it because of the brightness of the strobe lights.

From the window came the sudden sounds of automatic weapons fire, spraying the area around the receiver with a withering fire.

“Looks like a Thompson for sure,” one of the agents said. “Want to burn them?”

Mountain Man shook his head. “Naw, let’s do a little demo work first. Those logs are too thick to hurt anybody.” He turned to a different channel on the walkie-talkie.

“Salamander? Give ’em a steady stream. Don’t aim for the window or door, but pour it on. Thirty seconds. Then Blocker, give a Two directly in the window. Okay? Go!”

The rise to their right erupted in smoke and noise. The cabin was struck by an enormous, deadly hail of bullets at the rate of thirty per second, and wood flew in chips as it continued.

At the thirty second mark a sound like a mortar being launched went off not once but three times, whomp! whomp! whomp!

Computer-guided shells flew directly into the window one after the other and exploded with a flash of light.

“One’s coming out from under the cabin at the back!” came a cry over the walkie-talkie. “Must have a trap-door exit!”

“I’m on ’em,” Salamander assured the other, and fired.

No attempt was made to hit the figure, but a wall of bullets drove the person back under the cabin.

Tremendous clouds of smoke, along with a lot of yelling and screaming, showed that the shells had all gone off. The gas, a special product, made those who breathed it dizzy, off-balance, and so sick that they would do nothing but start retching, while the gas itself burned inside their lungs like fiery pepper and made their eyes almost useless.

The front door opened suddenly and a figure ran out, shooting a submachine gun in a random pattern. The person was in a lot more control than he or she had a right to be.

Mountain Man sighed. “Okay, Salamander, burn the bastard,” he said into the radio.

Immediately there was a line of fire that sliced through the runner’s legs, felling the fugitive in mid-stride.

It was a woman, they saw. She lay there, bleeding, in the full glare of the spotlights, and still she was firing, raising the submachine gun this time, aiming for the lights.

Salamander fired again, and she twitched violently and was still, even in death gripping the sub-machine gun which continued to fire its load, now harmlessly into the hillside, until its clip was exhausted.

“Whew,” Blocker said over the radio. “Man! They’re nuts!”

Mountain Man nodded, more to himself than to anyone else. He switched back to the receiver channel, and it was still operating. The cabin, they all saw, was almost engulfed in smoke, not only the yellow-white smoke of the gas, but with a darker color, thicker and grittier, mixed in. The scent of burning wood came to them.

“You in there!” his voice bellowed. “There’s no escape! You can’t even take any of us with you! Come on out! Come out or we’ll just wait for you to fry.

Now other figures emerged, two from the front door, three more from under the house, all running in different directions and spraying fire with semi-automatic weapons at the lights and hilltops.

Salamander and Blocker didn’t wait for the order. Small fixed machine guns with tiny minicomputers attached locked on to each target in turn and practically cut the runners’ legs off with intensive fire.

“Bulldozer! Four and plenty quick!” screamed Mountain Man into the radio.

More engine sounds, and now streams of chemical propelled at great force rained down on the cabin. The ground around the cabin became a quagmire of chemicals and foam, engulfing the wounded fugitives as well.

Two of the people on the ground seemed to realize this, and tried crawling through the foam toward the darkness beyond the spotlights.

With a roar a large truck-like vehicle on tank treads went over the side of the culvert. A device like a cannon on a huge turret turned under the guidance of an operator and a stream of water washed the area for many meters in front of the cabin, dissolving the foam.

Most of the fugitives were still moaning and writhing, no harm to anyone. Tiny figures quickly moved down into the culvert to get to them and retrieve their deadly weapons.

One had crawled almost all the way out of the lighted area under cover of the foam, but as he saw the leading edge of the darkness he also saw two feet in military-type boots, looked up, and stared into the face of a young man in military-style camouflage fatigues, looking at him sternly and holding a .44 magnum aimed at his head.

“James Foley, you are under arrest,” the man with the pistol said needlessly. “You have the right to remain silent, and the right to an attorney before any questioning. If you cannot afford an attorney one will be appointed without charge. Do you understand that?”

“You go to hell, you fascist son of a bitch!” the wounded man spat, and then collapsed, eyes open and starting to glaze. Salamander cautiously approached him, gave him a soft kick, then turned him over with his foot.

The man, still bleeding from no less than a dozen wounds, was quite dead.

Now Bulldozer’s special team went in. They were dressed in self-contained pressure suits, complete with air supply, and looked much like invaders from outer space. They approached the cabin warily, with shotguns at the ready. After probing gingerly, the lead man entered the cabin.

“God! What a mess!” came his voice over the radio. “Cabin’s clean, though. Holy shit! You ought to see the arsenal here! If they’d stacked it near the window this thing woulda gone off so big they’d have felt it in Sacramento!”

“And what the hell are these?” another, higher and thinner voice asked. “Oxygen? Scuba gear?”

Medics gave knockout shots to the survivors, and they were quickly placed on stretchers and carried up the hillside to waiting ambulances.

“Don’t touch them!” Mountain Man cautioned.

“One of ’em’s been turned on,” said the suited man who’d discovered the tanks. “Nothin’ comin’ out, though. Hah! One of the gas shells exploded too near it. Busted the valve.”

This worried the team leader. “Think anything escaped?”

“Naw, I doubt it,” came the reply. “But only because of blind luck. I’d say whatever’s in this was supposed to do us in or something.”

“Well, let them lay,” cautioned the leader. “Treat ’em like they were fused bombs. We’ll let the tech boys handle it.”

Inspector Harry Carillo, alias Mountain Man, walked down to the dead man near Salamander. Unlike the others, he wore the regulation coat and tie, and his nicely polished shoes and business suit were quickly splattered with mud. He didn’t seem to notice.

He went over to the body and looked at the dead man’s face. “Well, it was Foley,” he said more to himself than to the younger man. “I’ll be damned. I’da made good book he was still in Cuba.”

The man in fatigues shrugged. “He sure would’ve been better off there,” he said dryly.

Within two hours of the attack the cabin had been thoroughly searched and photographed from every angle, and the large amounts of explosives and ammunition had been carted away. A little before four in the morning a helicopter arrived with vacuum chambers for the mysterious cylinders, which were treated with a good deal of respect and handled only by pressure-suited technicians.

Inspector Carillo looked over the tagged and numbered set of more commonplace things removed from the cabin and set up on makeshift tables outside until they could be individually processed. He noticed a map, burned around the edges, and fished it out, opening it carefully.

It was a Pacific States highway map from a Utah truck stop. Two towns on the map had been circled in black crayon, and he stared hard to see which ones they were. The first was Evans, Oregon, in print so small it was nearly obscured by the crayon itself. The other made him stop short.

Boland, California.

Suddenly the tension was back full. Those blue cylinders, he thought suddenly. Foley—and Boland. He grabbed for the radio.

“Mountain Man to Street Sweeper,” he called anxiously.

“Go, Harry,” came a woman’s crisp voice.

“Those blue cylinders. Don’t take them to the west lab. I want you to ship them to NDCC labs, Fort Dietrick, Maryland, special courier. And get me a patch on the mobile to District HQ.”

The woman sounded puzzled, but said, “All right. What’s this about?”

“Just do it!” he snapped, and made his way quickly back up top.

By the time he reached the communications van they had the patch in. He grabbed the phone.

“Mark! I want you to put me through to Chief Inspector Edelman in Washington right away,” he said crisply. “Yeah, I know it’s past seven there, so try his office first, then his home. This is important! And Mark—I want a full medical team and decontam unit here as quickly as possible. I want everyone in on this operation isolated as if they had the Black Plague. Notify the local held office of NDCC to handle the medical.”

There was lots of confusion and consternation on the other end.

“Just do it!” he snapped. “And ring me when you have Edelman. Put it on the satellite scrambler!”

He put down the phone, and realized he was shaking violently.

Boland, California, he thought. My god! And Foley, too.

James Foley, alias Rupert, specialist in international terror, the man who’d once blown up six school busses in the Middle East, who’d poisoned a New York state water system, and those were only for starters.

Just the kind of fellow to blind an entire town for the hell of it, he thought. Just exactly the kind… The telephone in the mobile van gave an electronic buzz, and Carillo picked it up.

“Harry?” came a familiar voice from long ago. “What the hell is all this about?”

“You know about Operation Wilderness,” the inspector began. “I’m still on the scene.”

“Yeah, just got the report in on the telex. Nice job it looks like. So?”

“Jake, one of ’em’s James Foley, and there’s a map with Boland, California, circled on it.”

Edelman was suddenly excited. “So that’s it! God! You don’t know how long I’ve been waiting for this! This is the break, Harry! The link! Did you find out how they did it?”

Carillo sighed. “Well, in the cabin, along with the expected stuff, were six blue gas cylinders, look like scuba tanks with a fire extinguisher cap stuck on. I had them sent to NDCC at Dietrick. And—Jake?”

“Yeah?”

“One of ’em was turned on, Jake. We don’t know if any of it escaped.”

There was silence on the other end for a moment. Then Edelman said, “You’ve taken all the precautions?”

“Done,” said the field man. “We’re all going into quarantine. As soon as the lab stuff, which is also going under seal, is sorted out we’ll burn the cabin to the ground.”

Edelman was silent again, uncertain of just what to say. He knew the other man was scared, and he understood it. He’d be having the screaming fits himself if their situations were reversed. Finally he said, “Well, look. We’ll work on those things here as soon as we get them. In the meantime, we need blood samples, everything. I hope you haven’t got any problems, Harry—and I mean that sincerely but if you have, you’ll be the first people we know of within the three-day limit. If the active agent’s there, we’ve got a good crack at isolating it and getting it. It can mean a cure, Harry—or even a preventative!”

Harry Carillo nodded silently, but he had a numbed, detached feeling inside him. Three days. The terror starting now. Three long days…

“All right, Jake,” he managed. “Remember—we’re depending on your side.”

“Good luck, Harry—and good job,” Edelman said softly, and terminated the conversation.

Harry Carillo sat there for a long time with the dead phone in his hands, feeling the first effects of the disease called terror.