Ranger (The Bugging Out Series Book 5) (28 page)

A few inches from the audio transmit button was the control to activate the camera. I did so, and saw my friend’s expression change as our images became visible on whatever monitor they’d made available on his end of the transmission.

“Fletch...”

I wanted to return his greeting. To speak my friend’s name. The name of a man I knew now hadn’t betrayed us, but who had gone into the lion’s den to save us. Risking everything. His wife. His children. His own life.

It was time to make that sacrifice right.

“All you do by executing him is lose one of your own,” I said.

To my side, though I couldn’t see it, I felt Schiavo’s posture change as she shifted position, angling toward me. She sensed what I was doing. Or what I was about to do.

“He’s not one of our own,” Weatherly corrected me, errantly as it turned out.

“I’m not talking about Neil,” I said.

The general glanced behind, eyeing the traitor in their midst for a second, then looked back to me, perhaps realizing, as his counterpart had, that there was another party to this dance of deceit.

“We have your spy,” I said. “How much use to you will she be once she’s been shot?”

I dared not even glance Schiavo’s way. Chancing a look, a connection, might very well invite resistance to a proposal on which, for now, she was standing silent.

“One for one,” I said. “An even trade. Neither of our populations decrease.”

Weatherly did not reject what I’d offered. But he did not accept it, either.

“This is a numbers game, general. We both know that. Every person on our respective sides with a pulse matters.”

I wondered if, standing next to his wife, Martin was allowing any smile as I appropriated the argument he’d made early on in the siege. Surrendering a town was defeat, but surrendering an individual was failure. I understood that now. We needed every single person, no matter their limitations or faults, who wanted to be part of our tiny, wonderful community on the Pacific.

“Sheryl Quincy for Neil Moore,” I said. “It’s your call.”

Very purposely I laid the success or failure of my proposal at his feet. And, just as he’d avoided lingering in his decision to pull his troops from their siege of our town, General Harris Weatherly spoke his mind without hesitation.

“Agreed,” Weatherly said.

I didn’t smile. Neither did my friend. We looked at each other over the connection just before it ended, knowing that we would see each other once again.

*  *  *

J
ust outside, Schiavo asked Elaine if she could have a word with me. My wife obliged and let us peel off for a private moment.

“You have ice water in your veins,” the captain said. “Or brass ones the size of coconuts.”

“Excuse me...”

“You could have offered this trade when you were face to face with Weatherly the other day, except you couldn’t.”

“No, I couldn’t.”

I’d thought through that scenario, even before I’d been given the go ahead for my one on one with the general. What would the man have thought if I produced a vial of BA 412, then proceeded to demand he end the siege of Bandon and accept a prisoner swap involving my friend?

“Weatherly would have had doubts,” Schiavo said. “I know I would have. Who is this really for, your town or your friend?”

“Maybe his doubts are enough that he calls my bluff,” I confirmed.

Schiavo shook her head, in admiration, not doubt.

“Neil had no way of knowing we’d be able to swap for him,” she said.

“No, he didn’t.”

My friend, I knew, had been ready to give his life for us.

“He couldn’t run,” Schiavo said, processing the realities of my friend’s situation. “He had to stay. He had to play the double agent role right to the end.”

“If he doesn’t, then Weatherly realizes we don’t have the real thing. He turns his retreat into an attack.”

“Neil had to play up that he’d beaten Weatherly,” Schiavo said. “To the man’s face.”

Neither of us wanted to imagine what my friend, what our friend, had been through once his treachery was discovered. But what mattered was that he was alive. And he was coming home.

I
waited in the same field where I’d met with General Weatherly and noted the hush of exotic rotors somewhere to the east. Almost instantly after the sound reached me the familiar black craft glided over the dead woods and banked right, coming to a hover for a few seconds before it descended, landing with a burst of dust but hardly a whisper. As the cloud of dried earth settled, I looked to my right. To the prisoner we were sending back to her own kind.

“I saved your life,” I told Sheryl Quincy. “Not that it matters, but you should know.”

“You’re right,” she said. “It doesn’t matter.”

The gritty billows of earth parted, and across the field I watched the black stealth helicopter, resting like some lounging predatory insect. I could just make out the silhouette of the flight crew past the angular cockpit windows, but nothing more within. The side door facing me remained closed.

“Do you think this is going to end anything?” Quincy challenged me. “Just handing me over and getting your own traitor back?”

“No,” I said. “But we stopped you here. For now.”

“You delayed the inevitable,” she countered.

“The trend line of humanity should never favor more government control over the individual.”

Sheryl Quincy snickered openly at what I’d just told her.

“What naïve philosopher spewed that pablum?”

“Him,” I answered, nodding across the field toward the man stepping from the helicopter’s side door as it opened. “Neil Moore. That’s from a paper he wrote in high school. I always remembered that line. I think you should, too.”

Neil walked a few yards from the aircraft and waited. Behind him, in the din of the passenger cabin, I could just make out three silhouettes, blacked out from head to toe, obvious weapons in hand. But not pointed in my direction, their barrels directed downward.

“Time for you to go.”

I reached behind the traitor and slipped the key into the handcuffs that bound her. The bindings clicked open and fell into my hand. Quincy put her hands to her front and rubbed her reddened wrists.

“Walk halfway to the helicopter and stop,” I instructed her. “Neil will walk out and meet you. You then continue to the helicopter and get aboard. If you deviate from those instructions you will be shot.”

Quincy glanced behind. In the tree line behind us, Schiavo and Lorenzen stood with the remainder of the garrison, weapons also low but ready.

“If you shoot me, we shoot him,” Quincy reminded me.

The process had been agreed upon in an ATV exchange following my discussion with General Weatherly. I imagined it might be similar to the trading of spies during the Cold War, with each crossing a bridge at the same instant to return to their handlers and countrymen. Here, though, what each side was giving fell lopsided in our favor, relative to any damage done. Neil had gone into the enemy camp on a mission of necessity. Of his own choosing. By his own design. And he had saved us.

Sheryl Quincy had been a simple spy. A mildly effective turncoat.

But, besides the ability to weigh one’s worth against the other, what mattered to me was something more basic, yet more profound—I was getting my friend back, both physically and in esteem.

“Walk,” I instructed Quincy.

Across the field, Neil waited as Quincy began to move. At the halfway point, as instructed, she halted, and my friend walked out to meet her. Once he reached where she was she continued on, tossing a sideways look at my friend as she passed. Hardly a minute later she reached the helicopter and climbed aboard.

The rotor spun up and the door closed. With a whining whisper the stealth aircraft leapt into the air, banking severely, nose dropping as it accelerated, skimming the dead trees as it flew east. Gone.

My friend, standing a hundred yards away, watched it go. Then he turned toward me and began to walk, and I began to walk toward him. I would not have been surprised to hear Schiavo and her troops rushing out to join me, but I didn’t, and I understood why. She knew that this moment of reunion was for us. For Neil and me. There would be others, as he was reunited with Grace, with friends. The town, when they learned what he’d done, or the story of his exploits we allowed to be told, would be beyond grateful.

That, though, could wait.

We crossed the distance quickly until just a few feet separated us.

“Hey, Fletch.”

“Neil.”

He came forward and pulled me into a hug. I returned the gesture. For that instant we were back in high school, on the gridiron, celebrating after a stellar touchdown. The separation we’d endured for months melted away. We were together again.

My friend was back.

We eased back from our embrace and just looked at each other, smiling, in awe.

“I knew you’d get the message,” Neil said. “You’re such an anal nut job. Every wall has to be perfectly plumb. Use the right size nail. If something’s not right, it gnaws at you.”

“What if I’d been a closeted Hawks fan?” I challenged him. “This all would have fallen apart.”

“Like I wouldn’t know that.”

The tone of the exchange shifted right there. Neil’s mood quieted. Darkened by a degree. We’d come to that point in what had to be discussed, how one of us had never been the man the other thought he was.

“Fletch, I have to tell you some things.”

“No,” I said, shaking my head. “You don’t.”

“After all this, no, I do. I really do, Fletch.”

“Neil...”

“Let me—”

“Olin reached us,” I said.

Instantly, the mood I’d noticed darkening by a degree seemed to teeter on the edge of some abyss. It was as if the shadow of some hellish storm cloud had passed over him.

“Olin...”

“Yes,” I confirmed, worried that my friend might think my opinion of him had lessened because of his colleague’s revelations. “It’s all right. He told us everything.”

“Olin is here?”

I shook my head.

“He left. He said he’d be close by if you want to see him, but he was pretty sick. I don’t know if—”

I could no longer ascribe my friend’s expression and demeanor to mere surprise that I knew of his covert life. Something was troubling him. More deeply than anything I’d ever seen.

“Neil, what’s wrong?”

“Ty Olin was here?” my friend asked, seeming to seek confirmation of an impossibility.

“Yeah. He heard your transmission. He said the Ranger Signal was meant for him.”

What color there was in my friend’s face drained completely. He turned quickly away from me, his gaze scanning the far edge of the woods, manically searching the dark spaces between the trees.

“Neil, what’s wron—”

The sound from the far edge of the woods cut off my question. It was loud, and sharp. A rifle shot. Just one. One whose signature flat crack was unmistakable.

But even as my mind processed what the sound was, and from whom it had originated, my eyes were taking in a sight so horrible I was left frozen. Immobile. Just standing there as a single bullet tore into my friend’s chest and blew a hole out his back, dead center, destroying his spine.

“Neil!”

A shower of my friend’s blood sprayed over me as he dropped like a ragdoll. I dove to cover him as weapons behind me opened up, Schiavo and her troops laying suppressing fire on the shot’s point of origin.

“Neil!”

I grabbed my friend and rolled him over, kneeling on the damp earth, a few wisps of new green beneath me as I cradled my friend’s lifeless body.

“Neil, come on. Come on.”

His eyes were rolled halfway back, head just dead weight at the end of his neck, blood trickling from his nose and mouth.

“Come on, Neil. You’re okay. You’re okay.”

Lorenzen, Westin, and Enderson moved past, weapons up, not firing anymore as they pressed toward the woods. Schiavo stopped next to me as Hart knelt alongside and put his fingers to my friend’s neck. What he felt, combined with the volume of blood he saw on the ground, and upon me, left no doubt as to what he’d determined.

“He’s gone, Fletch.”

I looked to the medic, then up to the captain, tears in her eyes. Then, I looked down to my friend, my best friend, and I pulled him close, holding his body against mine as I wept.

F
unerals filled the following days. Carol Everett’s. Nathan Chester’s. And Neil’s.

My friend’s services were a blur to me. Much of the days following his death were, as well. I remembered Grace absorbing the news without hysterics. With strength and some odd measure of understanding as to just what her husband had done for us all. I remembered Commander Genesee, in full uniform, saluting my friend’s coffin as it was lowered into the ground at the cemetery. I remembered Schiavo reporting that a patrol led by Sergeant Lorenzen had located Olin’s hideout, just where I’d described it, but there was no sign of the man.

And I remembered the meeting.

“We aren’t what’s left of the United States of America,” Mayor Allen said as he opened the first Defense Council proceedings since my friend’s death. “For all intents and purposes, we are the United States of America.”

“What does that make everyone else?” Elaine asked.

“A threat,” Lorenzen answered.

Schiavo didn’t correct him. Didn’t massage his words down to something less ominous.

“Which is exactly what we are to them,” Schiavo said, adding emphasis to her sergeant’s point.

“So what do we do?” Elaine asked.

“We do what we’ve been doing,” Mayor Allen said. “Keep growing. Keep planting. Keep turning the world into something we remember.”

“And while we do that,” Schiavo said, “we stay ready to end anyone who tries to interfere.”

It was the hopeful politician and the pragmatic warrior, each stating their case. Through it all, I said nothing. I simply listened. No one pressed me to offer any input. If they had, I wasn’t certain what I would have said. Or could have said.

*  *  *

W
hen the meeting concluded, Elaine and I left, walking together along the road’s shoulder. To our right the sun was setting over crashing waves we could hear, but not see, long streaks of reddened clouds stretched across the sky. There was no talking head forecaster to tell us what the weather would be over the coming days, but you could feel it—a storm was on the horizon.