Dark Specter (42 page)

“Jesus,” said Griffiths quietly.

He led the way across the open ground between the trail and the ruins of the hall. The silvery veil of moonlight made everything look unreal. Then they all heard the noise, and stopped again. It seemed to be coming from the piled ashes and debris, a kind of moaning sound. It had a human edge, like the wail of a baby you can’t ignore. The men looked at each other, none of them wanting to be the first to admit what they were all thinking.

At first they were almost relieved when the other noise cut loose, loud and insistent, mechanical, masculine. Its clamor chopped up the silence into orderly segments, and proved its reality by chipping timber off the trees with vicious slashes. By the time they realized what it was and had thrown themselves to the ground, it was over. They lay panting, retrospectively terrified.

For a long while, no one spoke. They all knew that if the gunman had aimed a little lower, they would now be dead. They also knew that unless he had aimed high on purpose, they would soon be dead anyway. The guy had some kind of rapid-fire weapon, a machine-gun or assault rifle. Returning fire would only draw attention to their position, and in any case they had no idea where the shots had come from.

“Pete?” said Griffiths eventually.

“Yeah?”

“You have your radio?”

“Nope.”

“Lorne?”

“Didn’t think we’d need it.”

There was another silence.

“OK, I’m going to try and make it back to the boat,” Griffiths said. “You guys cover me.”

He crawled backward through the scrub and rocks, high enough to make progress difficult but too low to give a man any serious cover. Hearing a sound behind him, he whirled over on his back, revolver pointed.

“It’s me,” said Joe Quinlan.

“Jesus, almost blew you away!”

“Two of us should go. That way one of us might make it.”

“I don’t believe this,” muttered the sheriff.

“It don’t need you to believe it,” Quinlan replied.

They had almost reached the woods when Griffiths stumbled on something. Another body, a guy in his forties this time, short but solidly built. He had a blond mustache and a ponytail and that was about all you could tell, because the whole back of his head wasn’t there.

“Ah, fuck it,” said Quinlan.

He stood up.

“Get down!” yelled Griffiths.

Joe Quinlan kept on walking. The sheriff wasn’t his boss. When he reached the trees, he started to run, dodging and weaving, feeling a thrill he hadn’t experienced for years, not since he was a boy playing war games up at English Camp with the Whitney kids and Lorne Fowler. It was fun! He tore through the woods, emerging on the trail about twenty yards from the pier. Only then did it occur to him that this wasn’t a game.

He backed into the trees again and worked his way down beside the path. He could see the pier now, the two boats riding at their moorings and the dead man. If this had been a trap, these were the jaws. He stayed there for a full five minutes by his watch. There had been no further firing back in the clearing. Then he stepped out on to the trail and strolled down to the pier. There was no point in hurrying. If there
was
anyone up there in the trees, they’d get him anyway.

He climbed over the police boat into the fire launch moored alongside. Sheriff had some kind of smart radio he wouldn’t know how to operate. Quinlan switched on the set and sent out an “Officer Down” call, adding that they’d found two bodies and were under fire. No one had actually been hit, but he wanted armed backup, and he wanted it now. If these guys were going to play hardball, let them play the pros.

T
HIRTY MINUTES LATER
, Sleight Island was thick with cops. State troopers, a SWAT team from Seattle, units from Skagit County and Bellingham, even a squad of MPs from the Navy airbase at Oak Harbor. A helicopter hovered overhead, pouring a cone of brilliant light down on to the clearing.

In the meantime, Pete and Lorne, the two deputies, had split up and circled around the remains of the hall to see what they could find. Joe Quinlan was about to offer to join them when he realized that would be uncool. He’d already upstaged the cops by volunteering to go to the boat and call HQ. He hadn’t even been thinking, but they had. He was in Vietnam, they thought. He figures he’s the hot-shit jungle warrior and we’re just a couple of farm boys.

Actually, nothing had been further from Quinlan’s mind. He hadn’t been trying to make anyone look bad, he’d just done what felt good. But he could see it from their point of view, and sat tight while they loped off through the bush with their .38s drawn, wagging their tails around like they were playing flag football. Quinlan prayed to God some guy out there wouldn’t blow their well-meaning asses over Orcas before they even figured out what they were doing wrong.

Ten minutes later, Pete Green was back, white-faced as a kid whose Halloween has turned bad on him.

“Another guy dead up there!” he exclaimed, pointing to the hillside. “Stripped down to his underwear. Jesus, made me sick to look at him!”

The five men crouched down, scanning the darkness for signs of movement, alert to every rustle in the surrounding undergrowth, trying to shut out the sporadic unnerving moans which emerged from the burned-out structure of the hall.

“I better go take a look,” said Darrell Griffiths.

Pete Green went with him. Joe Quinlan kind of tagged along. They found the corpse right behind one of the outbuildings. He was a big guy, over six feet tall, with a long beard divided into miniature pigtails looped together with some kind of silver threads. A ring in one nostril dangled suggestively over the bloody ruin of his skull, which had been dismantled with a brute force that even Quinlan found sickening. Mostly because it reminded him of other times, other deaths.

“Looks like someone shot him from behind,” Griffiths remarked, as though this wasn’t obvious.

“From about a foot away,” Quinlan added.

Then they heard the siren of the first backup team to arrive, and returned to the others. Lorne Fowler was back. He’d found a body too, on the far side of the clearing. This one had been shot in the chest, just like the guy down by the pier.

An hour later, with overwhelming force on their side and all the equipment and backup they needed, they still hadn’t found the shooter. The cleared area around the burned-out hall had been searched meticulously, as well as all the smaller buildings that had survived the blaze. They had located the source of the unnerving moans, a girl in her teens with a broken leg and severe burns lying in the dirt to one side of the charred hall. She was airlifted to the hospital in Bellingham by medevac helicopter along with another woman and a man, both of them suffering from third-degree burns.

Other than that, the search yielded only corpses. Some had been hauled from the wreckage of the hall, burned beyond recognition. Others were scattered outside the doorway, apparently shot down as they had tried to flee.

None of the survivors was in a condition to fire a gun, and no weapons were found anywhere near them. The conclusion was obvious. The person who had loosed off those shots after Griffiths’s warning had slipped away into the woods and was still at large. It was impossible to search the whole island until daybreak, but the sheriff wasn’t worried about the delay. Members of the SWAT team had secured the perimeter of the clearing, preventing any further threat to the safety of the law enforcement personnel on the ground, and there was no place the guy could go. Let him shiver alone in the dark. They’d pick him up the next day at their leisure.

There might well be more bodies in the burned wreckage of the hall, but that too could wait. Helicopters cost money, and the taxpayers of the county were going to get a stiff enough bill for the night’s operation as it was. Griffiths had the site sealed off with tape, and arranged for the loan of a set of mounted floodlights and a generator from the state. The Coast Guard agreed to provide a vessel with sleeping accommodation and communications facilities. Everyone was pulling together, the way they always did when things got tough. Griffiths was just beginning to think he might get to bed that night after all when one of the SWAT personnel called in to report intruders.

“Is he armed?” asked Griffiths.

“One of them is.”

“How many are there?”

“Two. No, wait…”

Joe Quinlan stood beside the sheriff, staring starkly up at the helicopter spraying light like some deadly defoliant.

“Use your discretion,” Griffiths told the SWAT man curtly.

Quinlan was peering toward the edge of the clearing, beyond the water tank on its metal trestle, his eyes narrowed. The helicopter blades whopped monotonously overhead. Then he started to run.

“Hold your fire!” shouted Griffiths into the radio. “One of our guys is …”

He broke off. What the fuck
was
Quinlan doing? Sprinting up the trail as if his life depended on it, toward the figures who had emerged from the woods. He reached them, turned and walked with them down the trail.

“Joe’s with them,” Griffiths told the men scattered around the clearing. “Hold your fire.”

The policemen waited, looking toward the three figures moving toward them. No, four. A child had detached itself from the grasp of one of the adults and was walking between them, holding their hands. Joe Quinlan walked to the right of the group, a little apart. They came steadily forward down the trail into the scorching circle of light, staring at the semicircle of armed men, who stared back.

I
t was dark outside when we were awakened by a loud roaring noise, and a lurid glare which made our shadows revolve like a carousel. A moment later it had gone, leaving us in the dark. I got the automatic rifle I’d taken from Sam and crawled outside. I could hear a strong rhythmic pulsing, but nothing was visible from where I was standing. It took me several minutes to clamber back up the chute of fallen earth to the path, and from there to the top of the largest rock mass I could find.

At the eastern end of the island, a blinding glare shone down from the sky, an inverted wedge of brilliant light against which the tips of the trees between stood out stark and black. This also seemed to be the source of the noise. It was much louder here, a throbbing mechanical racket that came and went at intervals, ebbing and flowing.

“What’s happening?”

A figure had appeared in the darkness below. I recognized Andrea’s voice.

“It’s a helicopter! It must be the police. Get David!”

It seemed to take forever to get them both up the slope to the path. I had been astonished at how well David had coped with the extraordinary events of the day, but I knew that there would be a payback. Unfortunately he chose this moment to throw a major fit, screaming his head off and trying to wrestle himself away from both Andrea and me. Since her arm was out of action, and the terrain had been difficult to negotiate even in broad daylight, the timing could hardly have been worse.

I was terrified that the helicopter might swirl off into the night at any minute, its reconnaissance mission completed. Presumably someone must have been alarmed by the sound of gunfire and called the police, but I had no way of knowing what the situation was by now. Maybe Sam and Mark had patched things up, as Andrea had predicted they would, and would put on a united front to get rid of the cops. A few people smiling and waving might convince the helicopter crew that it had been a false alarm. If they flew off, we would be stranded there at the mercy of whoever had gained the upper hand.

So it was with increasing desperation that I hauled David and then Andrea up to the path, picked the boy up and started to run as fast as I could up the steep hillside. Everything looked different in the dark, but the knowledge I had gained of the island stood me in good stead and I was able to find the trail meandering through the woods to the clearing. I put David down. It was totally dark here, all light soaked up by the tall trees to either side. We tripped continually over roots and outcrops of rock. I fell heavily once, gashing my forehead on the branch of a tree and almost putting my eye out. I didn’t even feel the pain. Nothing seemed to matter except reaching the clearing before the helicopter abandoned us to our fate.

It was only when I at last emerged from the woods into the felled area above the compound that I realized that my panic had been unnecessary. As well as the helicopter hovering fifty feet above, there was a substantial force of uniformed men on the ground. The clearing looked bigger than I remembered it, more open and raw. It took me a moment to figure out why. The hall had completely disappeared. In its place lay a heap of ash and smoldering timbers.

“We’re safe!” I told Andrea, and kissed her impulsively.

“Dad?” said David. “Who’s that funny-looking man?”

I turned to look, and my elation vanished. A man in a blue uniform was crouched in firing position about twenty feet away, a large gun trained on us. For a moment I thought it was Mark. Then the man spoke into a walkie-talkie, and I realized that it was some kind of police sharpshooter.

“Throw down the gun!” someone shouted.