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Bubba disappeared into the trees at the far edge, and we ducked back in there with him.
A green Scott Pearse stepped out onto the cross and his footsteps banged hard off the wood as he half walked, half trotted past the equipment shed and then over to our side. He seemed about to burst into the woods when he stopped on the embankment and went very still.
His head swiveled slowly in our direction, and for one long moment, he seemed to look directly into my eyes. He bent at the waist and squinted. He held out his arms as if to silence the mosquitoes and mist along the bog, the distant slapping of the fruit in the water. He closed his eyes and listened.
After what felt like a month or so, he opened his eyes and shook his head. He parted the branches in front of him and walked into the woods.
I turned my head, but Bubba wasn’t beside us anymore, and I’d never heard him move. He was about ten yards ahead, crouched, hands resting on his knees as he watched Scott Pearse make his way through the woods.
I turned my head back toward Pearse, watched him stop about ten yards before the two windows and reach down to the forest floor. He raised his arm and a bulkhead door came up with it. He bent, lowered himself, and closed the door over his head.
Bubba was suddenly back beside us again.
“We don’t know if he’s got motion detectors or trip wires he turns on from inside, but I figure we got maybe a minute. Follow me. Exactly.”
He moved out onto the embankment again like the world’s swiftest, bulkiest jungle cat, Angie followed ten steps behind him, and I followed five steps behind her.
Bubba turned sharply into the trees, and we went in behind him. He never showed a stutter-step’s worth of hesitation as he raced silently across the same terrain Scott Pearse had trod.
He reached the door in the forest floor and waved quickly at us.
We reached him and I suddenly felt the strongest desire in the world to slow down, to backtrack, to put the brakes on for a moment. This was all happening faster than I would have imagined. Blindingly fast. Too fast to breathe.
“It moves, shoot,” Bubba whispered, and flicked the M-16’s selector switch forward to full auto. “Keep your goggles on until we know there’s light inside. If there is, don’t waste time taking them off your head. Drop them down your face, let ’em hang from your neck. Ready?”
I said, “Ah…”
“One-two-three,” Bubba said.
“Jesus,” Angie said.
“No bullshit,” Bubba whispered harshly. “We’re in or out. Right now. No time.”
I took my.45 from the holster at the small of my back, thumbed off the safety. I wiped my palm on my jeans.
“In,” Angie said.
“In,” I said.
“We get separated,” Bubba said, “I’ll see you back in the world.”
He grinned and reached for the door handle.
“I’m so happy,” he whispered.
I gave Angie a quick, bewildered glance, and she tightened her hands on her.38 to quell her shakes, and Bubba threw back the door.
A white stone staircase greeted us, dropping steeply fifteen steps before it ended at a steel door.
Bubba knelt on the top of the staircase, aimed his M-16, and fired several rounds into the upper left and lower left corners of the door. The bullets hammered the steel and erupted into yellow sparks. The noise was deafening.
The windows ahead of us shattered, and I saw muzzles pointing our way. We ducked low, and Bubba jumped to the bottom of the stairs and kicked the door off its shattered hinges.
We dropped in after him as the rifles fired from the windows, and then we were through the door and facing a cement hallway about thirty yards long with several doors opening off on the right and left.
It was bathed in light, and I dropped the infrared glasses down my face, let them hang around my throat. Angie did the same, and we stood there, tense, terrified, blinking at the harsh white light.
A small woman stepped out of a doorway about ten yards up on our right. I had time to see that she was thin and brunette and pointing a.38 before Bubba depressed the trigger of his M-16 and her chest disappeared in a puff of red.
The.38 flew out of her hand and into the corridor, and she slumped down the doorway, dead before she hit the floor.
“Move,” Bubba said.
He kicked in the door closest to him, and we were met with an empty study. Bubba rolled in a canister of tear gas anyway, then shut the door behind him.
We stepped over to the doorway where the woman’s corpse sat. It was a bedroom, small and empty as well.
Bubba toed the woman’s corpse. “Recognize her?”
I shook my head, but Angie nodded. “She was the woman in the pictures with David Wetterau.”
I took another look. Her head was upside down and askew, her eyes rolled back and blank, blood splattering her chin, but Angie was right.
Bubba stepped in front of the door across from us. He kicked it in and was about to fire when I swung up into his rifle with my arm.
A pale, balding man sat in a metal chair. His left wrist was bound tightly to the arm of the chair with thick yellow rope, and a blue racquetball served as a gag in the man’s mouth. His right wrist was free, strands of the yellow rope dangling from underneath it as if he’d managed to somehow extricate his wrist before we got there. He was about my age, and his right index finger was missing. A roll of electrical tape lay at his feet, but his legs were untied for some reason.
“Wesley,” I said.
He nodded, his eyes wild and confused and terrified.
“Let’s get him out of here,” I said.
“No,” Bubba said. “This is an uncontained situation. We don’t move him until it’s contained.”
I looked back at the stairwell. Just ten yards back.
“But-”
“We’re exposed,” he said. “Don’t you question my fucking orders.”
Wesley kicked at the floor with his heels, desperate, shaking his head, begging me with his eyes to untie him and pull him out of there.
“Shit,” I said.
Bubba turned to look at the next door, up the hall a few feet and on our right.
He said, “Okay. We’re going to do this by the numbers. Patrick, I want you to-”
The door at the end of the hall opened and all three of us spun toward it. Diane Bourne seemed to levitate into the hallway with her hands raised and her feet off the ground. Scott Pearse stood behind her, one arm wrapped around her waist and the other cocked behind her, pressing a gun to the back of her head.
“Weapons on the floor,” Pearse called, “or she dies.”
