Atlanta Extreme (15 page)

The colonel slapped at it with a look of wild distaste on his face and finally grabbed it by the hair and flung it away. Warren's head hit the fuselage with a thud, and the vibration caused Pendleton's head to pivot in the other seat slowly, eerily, staring wide-eyed, mustache salt-encrusted, directly at Curtis.

Curtis sat staring in disbelief, his chest spasming as if he had just had cold water thrown on him. “Jesus Christ … they're … they're …
Somebody cut their heads off!”

He whirled away on his horse, then stopped cold. His eyes frantically searched the line of trees. He yelled to his troops, “Separate!
Dispersar, dispersar
. Meet at B Camp, Camp B!”

There were about seventy or eighty men. Hawker had seen them before, coming across the field that day when they massacred the boys of the village. This, though, was a different situation. The men saw the heads, and they knew what the heads meant. They meant that someone—probably government troops—waited in the trees, ready to attack. And these men were murderers, not soldiers, not fighters.

All of the men tried to run at once, on foot or on horseback. There was panic, chaos, much shouting, many collisions, but they finally began to move in a wild herd away from the plane.

The vigilante waited calmly, and when the troops were near enough, he picked up the detonator and flicked the first toggle switch.

There was a deafening explosion that brought grass and human debris raining down through the forest.

Overhead, the monkeys shrieked.

The men who survived sprinted away in the opposite direction. On the other side of the clearing Doug Miles used his detonator, and there was another huge explosion.

Now the survivors scattered in all directions. One by one Hawker touched the other toggle switches and watched as the grassy clearing became a boiling inferno of dust, of flames, of quaking earth.

Then there was silence or what seemed to be silence: all along the far end of the landing strip, men lay scattered, a few of them moaning, as debris continued to clatter through the high canopy of forest.

James Hawker stood still. He had insisted that none of the charges be planted close enough to damage the plane—he wasn't about to spend another week with Miles fighting his way out of the jungle.

So now only the plane remained, and it was in the plane that Wellington Curtis and the woman had taken sanctuary. In that moment the vigilante realized his own stupidity. He had expected them to run with the others. But, of course, they wouldn't, because Laurene Catacomez was a pilot.

The red Dakota barked and shuddered, and then the single propeller began to blur.

Hawker was running. He raised the Colt Commando, knowing that he could destroy the engine or explode the gas tank with a long burst of fire—but then how would he and Miles get out?

The plane jolted, began to move slowly, and pivoted on the strip toward Hawker and the long expanse of open runway.

Hawker ran out into the middle of the field. From the corner of his eye he saw Miles lifting his rifle awkwardly in his one good arm. There was the muted clatter of fire, and dirt exploded near the landing gear of the moving plane. The plane jolted and swerved as one of the tires gave way, and now it was coming right at the vigilante, gaining speed despite the blown tire. Hawker could see Curtis and the woman clearly now, as if in eerie slow motion: Curtis's face a pasty mixture of fear and rage; the woman looking preoccupied, intense, as if concentrating on nothing more than getting the wounded craft off the ground.

The vigilante did not move as the plane bore down on him. Calmly he raised his submachine gun and brought the grooved sights to bear on Curtis's face. The little colonel, the war historian who had lost his personal war in the jungle, raised his hands as if to fend off a blow, but he was too late. Hawker squeezed off four single shots as the plane swerved to a halt, engine still running, only a few yards away.

Hawker jumped onto the wing root and pulled open the door. Curtis fell out onto the wing, then fell off onto the ground, bleeding badly from the neck and shoulder.

The vigilante looked down on him as his eyes struggled to open. “I am dying?” he whispered, but in an oddly clear voice. It was not the voice Hawker associated with the insane guerrilla leader. It was a softer, more refined voice, touched with the dignity of the Old South.

“Yes,” said Hawker. “You are dying.”

Curtis nodded as if in agreement, then his eyes closed for the last time as he whispered, “What took you so long, Mr. Hawker? What took you … so … long?”

Behind him, the woman stepped out onto the wing and jumped down to the ground. She looked at Curtis's body for a moment, then looked up at Hawker. “I'm glad,” she said, looking hard into Hawker's eyes. “I've wanted him dead for so long.”

Hawker stepped down beside her. “Have you, Laurene? Have you really?”

She fell against his chest, holding him while Hawker stood icily, not looking at her, not touching her. “How can you believe anything else, James? That night we spent together, didn't you know then? God, how I hated that man! How I wanted to vomit when he touched me! I knew you were going to escape; I wanted you to escape, even though it broke my heart to know that we probably would not see each other again. But now …” Her dark eyes looked up into Hawker's, and he noticed again how beautiful her Latin face was. “But now that's all behind us, James. We've both been through hell, but we can start again. Start fresh, just the two of us.”

“If that's the way you felt, Laurene, why didn't you leave Curtis earlier?”

She pulled away, her small hands squeezing Hawker's arms, trying to shake him to make him believe. “He had my brother, James! He would have killed my dear Mario—”

“But Mario
was
killed.”

“Yes, but I haven't had a chance to escape since his death. Curtis knew I wanted to go, so he had me watched constantly after Mario's death. I think he always knew how much I hated him—”

“And how much you hated killing? I saw you, Laurene. I saw you and Curtis ride down into the village, hacking little boys to death. You thought I would be miles away, running. But I wasn't. I was sitting on the hillside, watching. And you know something else, Laurene? You enjoyed it. You enjoyed every second of it.”

Slowly the woman's face changed. It changed from the mirror of breathless, frightened beauty into something bitter … tormented … vile; a snake's head on a beautiful woman's body. “You saw that, did you?” she said, her lips contorted. “Yes, then you know. Enjoy it? Of course I enjoyed it! You saw them as boys—I saw them as men. Pigs! The bastards! They play in the fields when they could be fighting for the return of our land. Were they not of Mayan blood like me? Yet their blood has grown so thin, so cowardly, that they are worthless. Worthless! Yes, I hacked them into little pieces, and I would do it again in a moment.” Slowly she began to back away from Hawker. “They bowed down to men like Curtis. I said that Curtis made me want to vomit? I told the truth. For a time I thought it could be different with you. For a time it did
seem
… different; you with your muscles and your tenderness and your strange, quiet ways. But you are an
Americano
, like all the rest—”

Hawker stepped toward her. “Laurene, stop. It doesn't have to end this way.”

From somewhere a snub-nosed revolver appeared in her hand, and she leveled it at the vigilante's face. “Doesn't it? Do you forget that time at the bar in Belize? I looked into your eyes then. I
knew
that you would kill Curtis but led you to him, anyway. I used you! I have used your filthy kind all of my life. A rich American bought me food and clothes, sent me to a school so that I could learn to speak properly and not embarrass him. A fat American kept me until I was old enough to live on my own—he taught me to fly. Curtis helped me wage war; war the way it should be waged. And always the price was my body, and that was a fair price to me because I love the feel of a man inside me. Any man! I have always used your kind, and I have always hated your kind, and in the end I have killed each and every one of you, just as I now must … must kill you!”

“Is that the way you saw it that day in the bar, Laurene? That you would kill me?”

Her eyes softened for just an instant. “No … but that is the way it must end. Not the other way; it can't end the other way.”

Hawker took another step. “You need help, Laurene. Let me try to—”

“No! Not another step. I must kill you, I must, or—”

“Freeze, bitch!” Doug Miles had come limping around the tail of the plane, his submachine gun half raised. Frightened, the woman jumped. Then, with the same look of surprise on her face, she got off two quick shots and Hawker dropped backward to the ground, and then she turned to sprint away … and ran directly into the moving propeller of the plane.

“Jesus,” Miles whistled softly as he knelt over Hawker. “Did she hit you?”

The vigilante got shakily to his feet. For some reason he couldn't take his eyes off the thing that had once been a woman. “What? No … no, she didn't hit me. That close, I don't see how she could miss.”

Miles sat down heavily and began to massage an obviously swollen ankle. “Me, neither, Mr. Hawker. I've seen her shoot before. She's one hell of a shot”—he looked in the direction of the dead woman—“or was, I mean. She almost had to
want
to miss not to hit you at that range. Either that or she wasn't seeing too clearly.”

James Hawker picked up his submachine gun and began to walk toward the fresher air of the rain forest. “I don't know,” he said without emotion. “Maybe she saw too clearly for her own good.…”

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one

James Hawker knew at a glance that the woman and her two kids were in trouble.

The three of them had been brought to this remote valley of grass and wild flowers high above Denver in the Colorado Rockies. They had been housed in the old herder's cabin by the cold trout stream that rushed through the aspens, out of the snowy peaks.

They had been told to live quietly in the cabin, to stay away from civilization until their “problem” had been resolved.

Hawker was familiar with the woman's problem: there were men who would happily torture or kill her and her children to get what they wanted from the woman's father.

Hawker also knew that the only way to resolve her problem was to eliminate those men.

Now, Hawker decided, was the time to do some eliminating.

He reached into his canvas duffel and withdrew a black alloy bow attached to an abbreviated rifle stock.

It was a Cobra crossbow, military issue. The crossbow had a killing range of nearly a half-mile, and it could send its dart-size arrows traveling through the heart of a man at a speed of a hundred yards per second. Each dart was specially made so it could be fitted with tiny weights to compensate for distance or windage. The bow itself had a 4×–7× zoom scope with a built-in self-illuminating compass.

As Hawker picked up the bow, he wondered what the Arapaho warriors who had hunted in these mountains three hundred years ago would have thought of this strange dark-red-haired man in his camouflage jump suit and black wool watch cap, holding this strangest of all bows.

They would have probably thought he was some kind of weird mountain god.

In a way, they would have been right.

Today, anyway, he was playing God. Today he would save a few lives and he would take a few lives.

It was a role he had played many times before, all across America.

Hawker used the self-cocking lever to break the bow almost double, like an air rifle. The bow locked back into place, and he fitted one of the arrows—bolts—onto the shooting track. After checking to make sure the safety pin was on, he rested his eye against the scope and used his left hand to dial to its lowest power.

The scope melted the two hundred yards between the cabin and his position on the mountainside into almost nothing. He could see the heavy logs of the cabin mortised by gray wattle, the planking of the slanted roof, smoke drifting out of the raw stone chimney, the Appaloosa mare grazing among the sheep on the hillside, and the wide door on its rusted hinges as it opened out onto the dirt path that led past the split-timber fence to the river.

He could see, too, the woman, with a towel in her hand, walking toward the river where the aspens and the willows met in a screen of yellow and white leaves, could see her using her fingers to brush her buttock-length black hair.

Hawker swung the scope back toward the cabin. Where were the two kids? There they were, two sets of big dark eyes at the window: K.D., the nine-year-old boy, and Dolores, the lovely, fawnlike seven-year-old girl.

When the vigilante was sure the children were all right, he focused the scope on the back of the woman as she swayed toward the river.