Dream of a Falling Eagle

Chapter 12

Well, well," Garth said. "Check out the action over in the clearing at two o'clock. Are those your poster boys?"

I trained my own pair of powerful binoculars in the direction where Garth was pointing, and nodded. "That's them."

We were squatting down just inside a copse of fir trees on the crest of a mountain top in north-central Idaho, with the horses we had ridden in on tethered in the trees behind us; they were blowing and munching contentedly on a mound of oats we had spread out over the ground. Below us, at the foot of the mountain, sprawled a kind of ramshackle shanty town of tents and lean-tos scattered about among towering cords of stacked firewood. The only structure in the compound that looked even semipermanent was a crudely built log cabin set off from the tents and lean-tos in its own clearing an eighth of a mile or so to the south, and we assumed this was the lair of the Maximum Leader. To the north, where a rutted dirt road snaked into the compound, there was a wart of shiny black metal that was a motorcycle parking lot. We'd hoped to find Guy Fournier taking some rest and relaxation at the isolated compound, despite Mackintosh's description of the group, but from the moment we'd trained our binoculars on the site we'd realized this would not be a particularly hospitable spa for a Haitian, no matter how light-skinned. This was the neo-Nazi chapter of Gingivitis, biker division, with a scurvy band of long- and short-haired, greasy-looking, leather-clad young to middle-aged wannabe storm troopers wandering about, all armed to their swastikas with everything from enormous Magnums sticking out of their waistbands to Uzis slung over their shoulders. Some of the men wore bandoliers stuffed with ammunition, most of it not of a caliber that would fit the assorted automatic weapons they carried-whether this was just stupidity, ora bizarre form of costuming, we didn't know. There were perhaps a half-dozen women, all standing around smoking cigarettes and looking bored. Nazi regalia was everywhere, from the crude swastikas painted on the tents and lean-tos to the helmets some of the men wore.

The sartorial standouts in this motley crew were the two young men off in the clearing taking target practice under the watchful eye of a man wearing a leather jacket, despite the heat, wrap-around sunglasses, and a black fedora pulled low over his forehead. The shooters were clean-shaven, wore crew cuts, were untattooed, and wearing Oxford shirts with button-down collars. They could have come to the compound straight from church choir practice, and they were the same antiabortion protesters whose heads had been circled in the photograph I had found in Guy Fournier's office.

The target practice the two young men were taking was specialized, obviously in preparation for some special occasion. There were two straight-backed chairs placed a few feet apart in which the men sat stiffly, as if at attention. A crude wooden platform was set up about twenty-five feet in front of them, and above the platform were strung a number of paper targets, two of them painted red. At a signal from their trainer, the men would, in unison, quickly reach under their chairs and retrieve two handguns fashioned from some kind of clear material that was probably a type of acrylic. Then they would rise to their feet, take precisely five steps forward, raise their guns, and fire one round each at the red targets. Then the targets would be torn down and carefully examined for placement of the bullets. The targets would be replaced, the guns returned to the mountings beneath the chairs, and they would start all over again. They could be getting ready for the upcoming convention, assuming the shooters had been seeded into a state delegation sitting in the first few rows of the recently converted convention hall at the Jacob Javits Center in New York, but the exercise could just as well be suited for any of the dozens of barnstorming or fund-raising events at which the president and vice president would be appearing within the weeks following the convention.

I watched target practice for a while, then set aside my binoculars, lay back on a bed of pine needles, closed my eyes, and listened to the munching and blowing of the horses behind me. I was bone tired, suffering a fatigue that was more than a little exacerbated by the fact that I was more than a little anxious about the constant headache I was enduring and the fact that I had awoken the past two mornings to find my pillow soaked with saliva.

It was our second day in Idaho, and I was also more than a bit concerned about things in general in the United States of America-or at least in this particular section of America. On the morning we had arrived we had rented a car at the airport, driven to this area indicated on the map Mackintosh had drawn for us, then checked into the nearest motel, which was about twenty miles to the east. From there we had set out on a series of preliminary sorties to get the lay of the land, as it were, and its populace. As far as I was concerned, the majority of the people we'd talked to could have come in on the last UFO shuttle, and they obviously regarded me in the same way, treating me not so much with curiosity, to which I was accustomed outside of New York, but with thinly veiled hostility and suspicion, as if I might have been cursed by God. Garth, on the other hand, with the rustic Nebraska air he had never lost and his natural reticence, fit right in; he could have been one of them, to all outward appearances, and the people took to him, forgiving him his odd dwarf companion. There seemed to be an inordinate number of retired L.A. cops.

This part of Idaho seemed to me a kind of Loonyland, an open-air asylum for mild-mannered crackpots. There were no black, brown, yellow, or red faces-at least none that I had glimpsed during that first day, and it was startling to hear people who looked like they could have stepped out of some Norman Rockwell painting calmly expounding viciousness, paranoia, and hatred to an extent that made even William P. Kranes sound like a moderate in comparison. In country stores and gas stations and restaurants we-or Garth-were told harrowing tales about an impending United Nations takeover, menacing black helicopters with inverted Vs painted on their sides, and ZOG, which everyone in the countryside called the government, which they maintained was controlled by a mysterious Zionist organization masterminded by a man called Rothschild. The Holocaust was a myth perpetuated by ZOG-and even if a few thousand Jews had been killed by the Germans, the victims had deserved it. A large number of people living here against a magnificent backdrop of snow-covered mountains were patiently waiting for the End Times, Armageddon, the Rapture, and the Second Coming, events they confidently expected to transpire any day. We, meaning Garth, heard lurid tales of identification chips being implanted in people's skulls, and before long, ZOG was going to announce that every man, woman, and child would have to be tattooed on the forehead with the Mark of the Beast. These people didn't really want the government to change; what they truly lusted for was the end of the world, with rebirth in a Kingdom of God, under the benevolent dictatorship of Jesus Christ, entirely populated with people who looked and thought just like them. Through all this mad palaver over coffee, or beers, or lunch counters, Garth just kept on grunting and nodding. I kept looking away in embarrassment and anger. Certainly not every soul expressed these views, nor did everyone appear to be racist and anti-Semitic, but there were enough in the region to make me feel most uncomfortable, slightly disoriented, and almost totally alienated from the country of my birth. The insanity in the atmosphere had nothing to do with education, or birth rates, or school lunches, or the National Endowment for the Arts; these people's ignorance was willed, their superstitions and hatreds carefully cultivated and nurtured, and as far as I was concerned they deserved William P. Kranes and his dedication to make them even poorer and more ignorant, and he deserved a nation filled with them. They might represent the buttocks end of his constituency, but he shamelessly pandered to them. Thanks to people like Kranes, the sickness of these people was poisoning the country, spread through the veins and arteries and capillaries of America by rabid and irresponsible radio talk-show hosts who, for rating points and money, both fed and manipulated these people's ignorance and hatred. Perhaps in the end our efforts were senseless, and it did not make any difference whether or not the assassinations took place right on schedule, nor whether or not the CIA had its way with all of them. In the end, a democracy got the democracy it deserved, and the people had certainly spoken loud and clear in the last election. I was beginning to seriously consider the notion that, basically, America was a nation of nitwits.

I was sick of it all, and I was afraid. I just wanted to get our business wrapped up and go home, and I wanted to stop drooling in my sleep.

Throughout the day we sat, watched, and waited. The two shooters practiced for two more hours, then drove off with their trainer in a

Jeep. The merry band below whiled away the rest of the afternoon wandering around and showing off their guns to each other, the women continuing to smoke and look bored. After nightfall we sat through a cross burning during which everyone got drunk. A half hour after the last reveler had stumbled off to his or her lodging, we began clambering down the mountainside under the faint glow of a half moon. On his right hand Garth had donned a weighted black leather glove, a souvenir of his long-ago days as a county sheriff when he'd had a lot of territory to cover, with little help, and the hot prairie wind made a lot of people unpredictable and dangerous.

We came down behind Paul Piggott's cabin and went around to the front door, where Garth knocked. There was no answer, and he knocked again, harder, while I looked down the pathway behind us to make certain we were unobserved. Finally the door opened, and Paul Piggott, silhouetted against the light cast by two hurricane lamps, stood staring at us somewhat uncomprehendingly with bleary, greenish eyes that were the color of jungle mud. His long black hair hung in greasy ringlets around his puffy face. His shirt and sleeveless leather jacket were open, and his paunchy beer belly hung down over his wide leather belt.

"Howdy, Pilgrim," Garth said in his John Wayne drawl as I drove the stiffened fingers of my right hand up through rolls of fat into the man's solar plexus. "The little dogie and I are doing a survey to see what the folks in this area think of vigilante justice and fluoride in the water."

The breath exploded out of Piggott in a beery, belchy whoosh, and as he doubled over I brought my stiffened fingers up into his larynx, not hard enough to crush and kill, but with sufficient force to keep him talking in a hoarse whisper for an hour or two; it was a neat trick I'd learned from Veil Kendry, my sensei. Garth placed his hand on top of the man's greasy head and shoved him back into the crude, one-room cabin. I followed after Garth, closing the door behind me. Garth stood in front of the wheezing, doubled-over man in the center of the room, waiting for Piggott to catch his breath, and then, as Piggott suddenly lunged for him, swatted the man in the face with the back of his gloved hand, breaking the biker's nose, knocking out two teeth, and sending him crashing onto a sagging, ratty sofa bed set up along one wall.

Garth unhurriedly pulled up a stool and sat in front of the couch, and while he waited for our breathless and bleeding host to compose himself, I looked around. Guns of all shapes and sizes were mounted on the walls, which were also festooned with Nazi flags and other regalia that loomed eerily and almost seemed to wave in the flickering light from the hurricane lamps. Cases of beer were stacked up on either side of the doorway. In one corner were a grill and two cans of Sterno, and in another a grimy, stained, portable toilet, apparently for use when it was raining, or too cold-or when he was just too lazy- to use the latrine outside. Against the wall opposite the sofa was a table, and on it was set, most incongruously, a shiny shortwave radio powered by four chunky dry cell batteries linked in series; the outside aerial had been too thin for us to see through binoculars.

Finally I turned and went to stand beside my brother, who was leaning forward on the stool, crowding the cowering Piggott, who was dripping blood from his broken nose and mouth all over his bare chest and stomach. The man's eyes were glazed with shock, and he had the look of a cornered animal.

"So, Paulie," Garth said in a casual tone. "How's the assassination plot coming along?"

Piggott wiped his mouth with a trembling hand, then spat blood to the side, over the armrest of the sofa bed. "Who the hell are you?" he croaked, massaging his bruised larynx with his bloody right hand.

"We are the marvelous flying Frederickson brothers," I replied, rapping my knuckles on his left kneecap. "We're annoyed by something that happened to an acquaintance of ours, and we're going to take it out on you. My advice to you is to simply answer my brother's questions the first time, truthfully, because he gets impatient easily. Don't bother trying to lie, because the man's a veritable human lie detector. You're liable to lose the rest of your teeth."

He didn't take my advice. He obviously recognized the name, for he drew his breath in sharply. Then, whether out of misguided bravado or an even greater fear of someone or something else, he suffered a severe attack of stupid. "I'll die before I tell you anything," he rasped, then spat blood at my brother.

"Suit yourself," Garth replied evenly, then hit Piggott so hard on the side of the head that the man catapulted over the armrest and crashed to the floor, where he lay half conscious, moaning and holding his head as he drew his legs up into a fetal position. Garth rose from the stool, walked across the room, and took a shotgun from a mount on the wall, then came back and pressed the wooden stock against the man's temple. In the same easy tone, he continued, "If I crack your skull open, how much shit do you think I'll get on my shoes?"

"All right!" Piggott burbled. "All right!"

"When and where are the assassinations scheduled to take place?"

"I don't know anything about any assassinations!"

"Wrong answer," Garth said, tapping the stock none too gently on the man's head. "We saw the two shooters going through their paces this afternoon. Do you expect us to believe they were tuning up for duck season?"

"I don't know what those two plan to do," Piggott whispered in a barely audible voice. "I don't even know their names, or the name of the guy who brings them around. I was just told to let them practice here. Nobody's supposed to even talk to them."

Garth took the stock away from the man's head, then tossed him a dirty pillow from the sofa bed. Piggott pressed the pillow to his beer belly, wrapped himself around it.

"Do they ever stay in the compound?"

"No."

"Where are they now?"

"I don't know. I never know when they're going to show up to practice, and I don't know where they go when they leave."

Garth apparently believed him, for my brother's response was to look over at me and shrug his shoulders.

I asked, "Where's Guy Fournier?"

Piggott moved his head slightly so as to look at me. His eyes shone with pain, humiliation, and fear. "I don't know any Guy Fournier. It sounds like a frog name, and I don't know any frogs."

"What makes you so accommodating to these people who come here and go as they please? They're obviously not the types you normally associate with."

"I'm just following orders."

"Whose orders?"

"A woman. I don't know her name. She talks to me on that radio over there."

"Jesus Christ," Garth said. "It's like the fucking Wizard of Oz."

"Pay no attention to the woman behind the radio."

"It's the truth!" Piggott wheezed.

I walked over to the radio, turned it on, and tapped the microphone. "Maybe I'll give her a buzz. What frequency does she use?"

"The one it's locked on. It's the only frequency on the radio that works."

That was interesting. It was also interesting that the steel casing of the radio didn't have a serial number in the place where one would normally expect to find it, nor anywhere else that I could see.

It looked like a specialized piece of company equipment. I considered the notion that beneath his tattoos and greasy hair and potbelly Paul Piggott might be a highly skilled, expertly camouflaged, and very gutsy CIA operative, but just couldn't wrap my mind around the idea. He was just one more company pawn, like so many of the other people we were wading through. I asked, "Do you have a code name?"

"No."

"How do you contact this woman when you want to have a chat?"

"I don't. She contacts me when she wants to talk. I carry a beeper when I leave the cabin. When it goes off, I come to the radio and turn it on."

I leaned over the microphone, pressed the switch on the base. "Hello, hello, hello? This is spook radio. Anybody out there? Over."

I released the switch and turned up the volume, but there was nothing but the crackle of static on the speaker. When I turned the dial, even the static disappeared. I looked over at Garth. "What does your bullshit antenna tell you?"

My brother shrugged again. "It indicates he's telling the truth."

"Things just get curiouser and curiouser."

"It makes sense that they'd seal these pinheads off tighter than a bulkhead."

I walked over to Paul Piggott, who had rolled over on his back and pressed a dirty handkerchief to his broken nose in what appeared to be a successful attempt to stop the bleeding. I asked, "Does the name Thomas Dickens ring a bell with you?"

He didn't answer right away, and seemed to be thinking about it. He rolled his eyes first to the right, then to the left, and finally back to me. "I think that's the name of the nigger you were using to-"

He abruptly stopped speaking and sucked in his breath when I rested my foot on his bulging stomach. I pressed down, but not too hard. Piggott was finished, and needed only to be asked the right questions. There conies a point, probably already passed in this cabin, where a little appropriate physical persuasion becomes torture. I did not need nor want to inflict any more pain. I said, "Watch your mouth."

"For Christ's sake, is that what this is all about?!"

"What did you think it was about?"

"What do you want from me?!"

"Who told you to call Taylor Mackintosh and tell him to come to my office and try to bribe me?"

"The woman on the radio," Piggott mumbled, rolling over, getting to his feet, and collapsing once again on the sofa bed. "I'm answering all your questions. Your brother isn't going to hit me again, is he?"

"That depends," Garth said quietly.

"What exactly did this woman say to you?"

Piggott took the handkerchief away from his face, touched his crooked nose, winced. "She said you were using this nig-this African American to blackmail some guy by the name of Cranny, or Crans, or Kranes. I had it right at the time, but I'm not sure of the guy's name right now. She said this African American was going to claim that this Crans guy had stolen some poems. It didn't make a whole lot of sense to me, but the woman said it was important."

I glanced over at Garth, who looked as incredulous as I felt. I asked Piggott, "You don't know who William P. Kranes is?"

He regarded me with a combination of suspicion and fear. "That's the guy's name. I don't know who he is. Should I?"

"Do you have any idea who you're carrying out these little chores for?"

Light glinted in his murky eyes, and the corners of his bloody mouth pulled back in a malevolent grin. "People who are going to make this country a fit place for decent Christian white folks to live in again."

"That's encouraging. Precisely what did this woman want you to do?"

"She said the situation was unclear, and she wanted to explore it-those were her words. She said it looked like you and the African American guy might be cooking up some plan to make this Cranny guy look bad, and she couldn't allow that to happen. I was to send some suit from our organization to talk to you and see if you and the African American guy would take money to make the problem go away. I didn't understand how there could be so much fuss over some poems, but she insisted it had to be taken care of. The suit would be authorized to offer you up to two hundred thousand dollars to keep quiet about whatever it was you knew. A couple of days later she gets back to me and tells me to forget the whole thing, that the problem was going to be handled a different way, but by then I'd already called Mackintosh."

I removed the checkbook I'd taken from Taylor Mackintosh from my pocket, flapped it in front of Piggott. "The money would have been taken from a Guns for God and Jesus checking account?"

"Yeah."

"Where do you get that kind of money?"

"The woman and her people put money into the account when we need something, or when they want us to do something that requires cash."

"Why did you pick Taylor Mackintosh as your bagman? Is he the only suit in your organization?"

"No, but he's the most famous. He's a movie star. I figured you'd be impressed."

I glanced over at Garth, who sighed and looked down at the floor. I knew what he was thinking, shared his sadness and outrage, and sense of total frustration. In the final analysis, Moby Dickens had lost his life because of no other reasons than the company's paranoia, indecision, execrably poor choice of personnel to task, and the sheer stone stupidity of those personnel combined with Guy Fournier's hubris and indifference.

"Hey," Piggott continued. "You want to tell me now what's going on? How come you two have got such a hard-on for me?"

I looked at him, replied, "Thomas Dickens was murdered by people associated with your lady friend on the radio."

He just couldn't help himself; he leered, then barked, "Good! One less nigger we'll have to kill when the war starts."

Uh-oh. I'd obviously been wrong about Piggott being finished, and his psychotic hatred appeared to have given him a second wind. I considered smacking him in his broken mouth, but didn't have the stomach or heart. Besides, considering his remark, it was beginning to occur to me that Paul Piggott had not really found the beating he'd already taken all that unpleasant, and I didn't want to do him any favors. Garth apparently felt the same aversion-although he might well have some other punishment in mind for Paul Piggott, like a quick death. He walked across the room to where a collection of knives was mounted on the wall and selected a huge Bowie knife. Then he walked back to Piggott and pressed the tip of the blade up under the now thoroughly terrified man's chin. For a moment I was afraid he was going to drive the blade straight up through Piggott's skull, but he didn't. Instead he lazily worked the tip back and forth in the sweaty flesh until a tiny hole had been opened in Piggott's quivering jowl. A drop of blood became a stream that ran down the man's throat and over his chest.

"Garth. .?"

"Not to worry, Mongo," Garth replied in a whisper. "Everything's under control. I'm just lowering his blood pressure."

"Hey, all I ever did was send around somebody to try to lay a lot of money on you!" Piggott burbled. "I didn't kill the African American guy!"

I said, "We know that. Let's get back to your lady friend. What makes a big macho guy like you so eager to act as a gofer for some woman you've never met?"

Piggott's eyes were wide and crossed as he gaped down his nose toward where the tip of the Bowie knife was stuck in his jowl. "Take the knife away," he mumbled. "I can't talk."

Garth took the knife away from the man's jowl. Piggott cowered as he pressed his blood-soaked handkerchief to the fresh wound in his throat. He croaked, "Are you going to kill me?"

"A distinct possibility," I replied. "The only thing you've got going for you is my brother's deep sympathy for the mentally handicapped, and your continued cooperation. Answer my question. Why are you so hot to do everything this woman tells you? Because she and her people give your group money?"

In an instant the light in his eyes had flickered from fear to hatred, and he glared at me. "I don't have any say where that money goes," he said through clenched teeth. "And none of it goes into my pocket. I do what she asks because she and her people get things done."

"Explain. Start by telling us how you got your hands on this particular radio in the first place."

"It was delivered a little more than a year ago, along with some batteries and the beeper."

"Who delivered it?"

"Some guy in a pickup truck. He didn't say anything-just put the radio and stuff down on the ground and gave me an envelope with a grand inside along with a note. The note said the radio and money were from people who wanted to help us fight ZOG. It said that if I was really serious about fighting for the rights of white Christians, I'd take the radio, set it to that frequency, and wait to be contacted. Me, I'm not stupid, so I figured it was just the goddamn government trying to trick me into doing something they could nail me for. But I figured it couldn't hurt to set up the radio and see what happened, so I did. Then the woman started calling me."

"And she asked you to do certain things?"

He shook his head, mumbled, "Not at first. I wouldn't have done anything for her in the beginning because I didn't have any reason to trust her. She said she understood that, so she was going to provide me with what she called her bony fideys. She said her people were going to do certain things to show me I could trust her, and they did."

"What did they do?"

"They killed people," he replied nonchalantly, wiping blood off his chin. "Kikes, niggers, spicks. Mud people. So-called community leaders around the country. First I'd get newspaper clippings about some troublemaker. Then, a few days later, I'd get an obituary notice saying the man or woman had been killed in an accident. I knew they were no accidents, because I'd been told about them in advance."

I shook my head, swallowed hard to try to work up some moisture in my mouth. "This still goes on?"

"Sure, it still goes on. ZOG is still in control, isn't it?"

"Who delivers the clippings?"

"A guy on a motorcycle. He doesn't stop. He just drives in, drops an envelope with the clippings on the ground, then drives off again."

"Does he have a schedule?"

"No."

"When was the last time he was here?"

Piggott thought about it, shrugged. "Last week-a couple of days after that lady kike on the Supreme Court died."

"The woman on the radio told you that Mabel Roscowicz was going to die?"

"I just said so. I knew about the guy who died just before her too. Any outfit that can take out two ZOG kike justices like that is one I'm going to take seriously. That's why I take orders from the woman."

"So what else has this woman asked you to do besides send somebody to try to bribe me and provide a shooting range for the two crew cuts?"

He looked away. "I said I didn't kill the poem guy. I didn't have anything to do with that. I wasn't even told about it."

"That wasn't the question. How many people have you and your friends here killed?"

"We haven't killed anybody. And the woman hasn't asked me to do that many things. Our main orders are to sit here and wait."

"For what?"

"To fight ZOG when the time is right. The woman says there are big changes coming in the country, and we're going to be foot soldiers on the front lines." He paused, glanced back and forth between Garth and me, then continued, "You're both white guys. You'd better start thinking about lining up on the right side before it's too late."

Garth said, "Pretty slim pickings here, Mongo. This is just a reserve unit of thugs and errand boys who probably don't know what day it is."

"Yeah, well, the trip hasn't been a total waste of time. Paulie here will make a colorful witness to the mystery lady's predictions. Also, we now know that they're not planning to use snipers at long range; the shooters plan to do their work up close and personal. The information will help the Secret Service."

"Maybe, maybe not. The president and vice president aren't going to let the Secret Service lock them up in a closet until November. The shooters get to pick the time and place, and they expect to die. It's going to be hard to stop them."

"True. But we've done our bit for the Republic. We have verification that the two justices were murdered. The FBI will want to chat Paulie up, and he shouldn't be too hard to find if and when congressional hearings are ever held."

Piggott's voice was coming back. "Hey, wait a minute!" he said, sitting up straighten "I'm not testifying to anything! You guys are likely to be dead soon! ZOG will be on its knees!"

Garth ignored him. "Yeah, but we've used up two days going on three, and we're no closer to finding Fournier or identifying his associates in the company. Those are the people you and I are after."

I nodded as I sighed in resignation, then walked across the room to the radio with the single, preset frequency. "This is a dandy piece of CIA equipment. No serial numbers, but experts might be able to trace some of the components and identify the manufacturer, who might be able to link it to the company. Too bad it's too heavy for us to lug out of here."

"What do you mean, CIA?" Piggott said with genuine indignation. "The CIA's an arm of ZOG!"

"They're the people you've been taking money and orders from, shithead," Garth replied without looking at the man.

I walked around the radio, peered through a cooling vent on the side. I'd turned the radio off, but there was a small blue bulb still glowing inside. I felt my stomach muscles tighten. "You leave this radio on all the time, Paulie?"

"What, do I look stupid? That would run down the batteries. I turn it on when the woman wants to talk to me."

"When she contacts you on your beeper?"

"Yeah. I already told you that."

"And you carry your beeper with you all the time?"

"Sleep with it under my pillow, carry it with me to the crapper. Those are my orders. What was that shit you were saying about the CIA?"

I reached under the table and disconnected the cables linking the radio to the dry cell batteries. When I peered through the vent again, the blue light was still on. The radio had its own internal power source, and this was not good. I glanced at my watch; forty-five minutes had passed since we'd entered Paul Piggott's cabin.

"Bad news, Brother," I said tersely. "It's like Kranes's offices. The radio and beeper are bugged. Our company friends have known where we are from the moment we walked in here. They're not going to like what they've heard. I suggest we depart henceforth."

"Or sooner," Garth said, abruptly stepping close to Piggott and clipping him under the chin with the palm of his left, ungloved hand. Piggott slumped to the floor, unconscious.

Together we scurried out into the night, sprinted around to the back of the cabin, and began clawing and scrambling our way back up the mountain.

Fear is a powerful motivator, and we made it back up the mountainside in twenty minutes, not much longer than it had taken us to climb down, but the all-out exertion was wasted, and we would probably have been better off fleeing on foot in a different direction. Now it was too late.

We heard the THWOP- THWOP- THWOP of the helicopter rotors a few seconds before the unmarked Apache rose like some giant, malevolent bird of prey over the crest of the mountain. Mounted searchlights probed the dark mountainside, and one finally caught us in a blinding glare. We scrambled to the copse of trees, where I snatched loose the reins of our horses from a tree limb, handed Garth's to him. The horses were frightened, rearing.

Garth hesitated. "We'll be easy targets on horses, Mongo!" he shouted over the thrashing roar of the helicopter, which was hovering just above the tree line, raising a cutting, abrasive cloud of broken branches, needles, and leaves all around us.

"Not if we keep to the trees!" I shouted back, vaulting into the saddle of my horse, which immediately reared. I wheeled the animal around and brought it under control, then reached out and grabbed the reins of Garth's horse, which was wide-eyed with panic. "It's our only chance! They can contact the compound by radio. There'll be a dozen of those people after us in a few minutes, and more dozens of searchers by dawn. I don't recall the locals as being too friendly."

Garth looked at me, then at his horse with its flaring nostrils. "Mongo, I can't ride like you! I'm not sure I can stay on in these conditions. You go! I'll keep them busy here. The helicopter can't follow both of us!"

"Just talk to her in John Wayne and you'll be fine! Now get on the fucking horse! Remember what I told you about posting!"

"You're on, Pilgrim!" Garth shouted as he put a foot in a stirrup, and lunged up and onto the back of his horse.

I immediately dug my heels into my horse's side, and the animal responded, lurching forward as I ducked under a limb, heading through the trees. I rode a hundred yards, then sensed something was wrong. I reined in the horse, turned to look back, and knew we were going to have a problem.

In my years with the circus I had ridden on the backs of everything from Bengal tigers to Asian elephants, so, even under these conditions, riding a well-trained horse in a well-fitted saddle was a walk in the park, in a manner of speaking. Not so with my brother, who wasn't used to riding anything that didn't come with four wheels and a motor. He had barely gone ten feet. His horse, sensing the nervousness and lack of confidence of a novice rider, was now even more panicked. He was rearing, bucking, and corkscrewing, and threatening to throw off Garth, who had dropped the reins and had his arms wrapped around the horse's neck, at any moment. In addition, the backwash from the helicopter's rotors was surrounding us in a storm of debris that was not only blinding but could also literally put out an eye. We could not go back the way we had come. When we had ridden in during the day, I had noticed dried-out stream beds leading down the other side of the mountain to a broad, forested valley, and other mountains in the distance where there appeared to be narrow canyons and washes where it would be difficult for the helicopter to maneuver. If we were going to escape, that was where we would have to go. I wheeled my horse around, rode back.

"Change of plans!" I shouted as I grabbed the reins of Garth's horse and brought the animal under control. "Just hang on to the pommel with both hands! We're going down the other side of the mountain! When we head down, let go of the pommel, grab the edges of the saddle, and lean back as far as you can! The horse will take care of the rest!"

Garth released his grip on the horse's neck and grabbed the saddle pommel. Gripping the reins of my horse with one hand and the reins of Garth's horse with the other, I urged my mount forward, out of the trees and onto the bare ground of the mountain's crest. There were perhaps three hundred and fifty yards of open ground to cover before we reached what I remembered to be a reasonably negotiable slope down the other side, and now I spurred my horse forward at a full gallop. The helicopter followed directly overhead, one searchlight turned downward and bathing us in a moving pool of bright white light. I wouldn't hear the report of a gun over the deafening roar of the helicopter rotors, but I cringed as I expected at any moment to feel a bullet ripping into my back. It didn't come, perhaps because the angle was bad, or the pilot figured he had plenty of time to run us down and give his gunner a better shot. We reached the spot I had been riding for, a rocky but negotiable dry wash that had been carved out by spring water.

I couldn't control my mount and lead Garth's at the same time, and it would have been dangerous for his horse if I tried to do so. I pulled the second horse after me over the crest and into the wash until it had reached a point of no return, then flung away the reins and shouted over my shoulder, "Here we go, Duke! Lean way back and hang on!"

I relaxed my horse's reins and leaned back, posting in the stirrups and letting my mount pick its way between and over rocks and hard-baked rills. We were over a quarter of the way down the mountainside, still with no shots being fired, when I began to think we actually might make it to the cover of a copse of trees a hundred yards further down, where we would be shielded from view and the decline was less steep. Then I sensed, rather than heard, Garth's horse stumble and go down, and my brother soared, none too elegantly, over my head and landed on his back in a clump of thorn bushes growing out of the right wall of the wash. His horse recovered, shot past me, and disappeared into the trees below.

I reined in my horse, jumped to the ground, and scrambled up the bank of the wash to the clump of thorn bushes where Garth, dazed and struggling feebly, was entangled. I drew my Beretta and fired blindly at the white light and roaring cascade of sound above my head, groping through the cloud of dust thrown up until my fingers wrapped around Garth's shirt. Still firing my gun overhead, I pulled with the other hand, trying to help Garth out of the bushes.

"Mongo, get out!"

"You get out of the fucking bushes! Come on!"

"I'm stuck! It's important that one of us get away from here! Go!"

"It's important to me that both of us get away from here! Come on, goddamn it!"

I emptied my gun and stuck it back into my shoulder holster, then worked my way deeper into the thick vegetation. I grabbed Garth's shirt front with both hands, dug my heels into the rocky soil, and tugged. Finally he broke free, and we both tumbled back down the wall of the wash to the bottom. I was reaching for my horse's reins when suddenly a net dropped down through the cloud of dust and settled over both of us. Cursing mightily, I struggled in the net. I managed to get the Seecamp out of my ankle holster, but it was a wasted effort. I felt a sharp, burning sensation in my right shoulder-not the smashing, tearing impact of a bullet, but something more along the lines of a wasp sting. I turned my head, saw a dart sticking out of my flesh near the collarbone.

"Shit," Garth said as he was struck by two darts, one in the right thigh and one in the belly.

I ripped the dart from my shoulder, and was still struggling to get out from under the net when the deafening thrashing of the rotors overhead dropped in volume and pitch to a low hum with a deep bass that throbbed in my head, chest, and stomach. The swirling dust around us suddenly became a kaleidoscope of garish greens, reds, and yellows. There was the taste of bitter chocolate in my mouth. Then, for the first time in two days, my splitting headache winked out. There was nothing to worry about. All was well with the world, so I stretched out on the ground and began to dream of emerald eagles with golden eyes and red beaks falling from a purple sky.