Devil's Mountain

I The Yukon led the way, fishtailing toward the house, skewing its rear end around, and sliding to a stop about ten feet from the front stoop. The second driver geared down the Trooper and powered his way to the side of the house and toward the barn around back, spraying dead leaves and muddy gravel on Pierre, Molly’s old black Labrador, who by then had had just enough time to struggle to his feet. The barking was a little tentative at first, but as the four business-suited Secret Service types tumbled out of the far side of the Yukon and rolled to their respective feet, the dog regained his breath. The recoil from the ensuing barking was violent enough to actually force him backwards for three or four inches on each five or seven-yip salvo. All of this had taken maybe ten seconds. I had moved to the front door to watch the advance of what I assumed by now to be the enemy. I saw over my shoulder that Molly had jumped to her feet. She crammed the papers and the manila envelope into the front of her corduroy jodhpurs, and looked over at me as if to see if I thought that that had been a good idea. Before I’d had time to shrug, she’d grabbed the old 30/06 from the rack by the Franklin stove, and approached the broad, thirty-two-paned window to the right of the front door. She used the wall between the window and the door for cover. She broke a small, shoulder-height window panel, thrust the rifle through the jagged aperture, and fired two warning rounds into the cool mountain air. The blast cracked a neighboring pane. I headed for the back of the house, armed with the poker from the Franklin and thinking about the Browning in the trunk of the BMW. The barking had stopped when her shots were fired. The following two seconds of total silence made me stop at the dining room door and look back toward her. She was wiping her brow and leaning against the wall for support. The two seconds were all they gave us. There were no shouted and bull-horned negotiations or explanations of purpose. Nobody said anything. The thirty-one remaining panes in the beautiful old restored front window imploded on the front room, a millisecond before I heard the nearly simultaneous blasts of four sawed-off shotguns. Shards of glass and splinters of puttied and white-painted wood were sandstormed into the room, and I felt a hot, stinging sensation on my raised arm and the parts of my face not covered by it as I dived to the littered floor. Molly was down, near the window, trying to shake off the concussive effects of the blasts. She didn’t look to be otherwise injured. I slid across the room on my elbows and knees, and gathered up the rifle. She rolled to her feet and high-tailed it toward the other end of the room, making a pretty nice low hurdle over the two-foot-high balustrade that separated her doctor’s office from the rest of the room. Maybe she had some more fire power stashed in the back. I cranked another shell in from the magazine, and waited. These guys were pros. They knew how to get in and what to do when they got there. There was a loud crunch as the back door was bashed in by some sort of battering ram that was most likely the shoulder of a large man. I remembered having left the door unlocked. They seemed to prefer the shock value of the unnecessarily rude and noisy, and I had to admit that their tactics got the adrenaline going. All right. I didn’t know exactly who they were. But they obviously were not in the mood to explain their presence, and they were not all that worried about who I was or whether or not I got hurt; so, what the hey. I let go a couple of rounds through the dining room door, sighting on the label of a quart can of Sear’s Eggshell Latex next to the step ladder. Left, by about an inch and a half. I rolled over toward what was left of the window, and took a fast look outside from the lower left corner of the six-by-eighteen hole in the living room wall. I fell back to the floor. Pierre had been lying on the front lawn, barking feebly and trying to get up to help out. Somebody had conked him pretty good, probably with a rifle butt. Smell of cordite. No one else around. That was bad. I didn’t hear any bells, owl-hoots or phony bird calls, but somehow these guys had the synchronicity of the whole thing down to an art. Bang--zoom. Two more shotguns blasted out the thirty-two panes on the other side of the door, two Uzi-laden commandos vaulted into the room over the sill of the first thirty-two, three guys in white spacesuits and glass-faced helmets not made for motorcycling dived through the dining room door, and a fourth man in another business suit Nureyeved into a crouch behind the space guys and started spritzing the room with bursts from his Uzi, none aimed at any point lower than twenty-four inches or so above the floor; just to keep everybody honest kind of thing. I’m not sure they had known about my being there. But Jesus, it seemed like an awful lot of firepower for just the one woman, even if she was five-ten and a pretty good shot at that. I’d made up my mind, though. I shot the dining room door barrage-and-enfilade man in the left knee just after he’d rammed home his second clip; he did a finger-on-the-trigger back flip toward the kitchen, leaving a neat line of nine millimeter holes in one of his front-window friend’s pants and leg, across the ceiling and probably back into the kitchen. There were no more shells in the 30/06. I jumped up and approached the other front-window man. I must have brandished the rifle with convincing menace, because the damned guy jumped up and backed away from me, Uzi and all, making admonitory but defensive let’s-just-wait-a-goddam-minute-bub gestures with his free left hand. Then four arms, clad in a clammy, white, snakeskin-like fabric with the smell of antiseptic, quadruple-Nelsoned me and forced me to the floor, face down. The third spaceman had retrieved Molly from the small room at the rear of her office. He must have tapped her a couple of times. She wasn’t resisting, as he dragged her back across the floor and dumped her next to me. He put his knee in her back, expertly broke open a disposable syringe, and unceremoniously jabbed it into her left buttock, right through the cords and the yellow underpants I had watched her put on a half-hour earlier. Her eyes were still open, and I imagined I could see in them the reflection of the two white guys on my back preparing the same sort of treatment for me.