Nick didn't have to think a second. He was in. Always had been. Had to see how it would finish. He'd given himself to this strange bird, and so he elected to stay the course, not that he had a real choice.

"Sure," he finally said. "It's fine. We'll do it your way."

"I haven't told you everything," said Dobbler. "And now I will."

They both turned to look at him.

"What makes Shreck such a powerful antagonist. One of my duties at RamDyne was to interpret tests. He had once been tested, when he went to work there. The psychologist then was an idiot and didn't understand. But the results are clear. Shreck is more than a sociopath, he's one of those rare men who is simply not afraid to die. Who, in fact, wants to die. Payne is the same way. You see, that's why they are so frightening. Most men care about life. In the end, most men always act out of self-preservation. But these two don't care and won't act that way. It's a function of self-hatred so passionately held that it's off the charts."

Another pause. Then Bob said, "You know, doctor-man, you must come from some pretty soft places to find that so remarkable. You could be describing one half of the world's professional soldiers and both halves of its professional criminals. Truth is, I used to be one of those boys. Didn't give two hairs about surviving. Now I have something to live for. Now I'm scared to hell I'll die. Will it cost me my edge?"

He almost smiled, one of the few times Nick had ever seen anything so gentle play across the strong, hard features of his face.

"Sure is going to be damned entertaining to find out, isn't it?" Bob said.

Chapter THIRTY-SIX.

Nick said he'd do it.

Bob was stern. "No funny business. No heroics. You play hero, you kill us all. Do you understand?"

"Yeah, I understand. I can handle this."

"I know you can. I'm just telling you. Whatever they say, you agree. You listen hard, and you agree."

Nick climbed into the pickup and drove down the mountain in the dark. It was a wet, shaggy predawn and tendrils of fog clung to the hollows and valleys. For Nick, it was like driving through some half-remembered land from his childhood, as if dragons lurked in the tall pines and the deep caves.

Many switchbacks and crossovers later, he came to flatland, farmland and a highway, passed the burned church, and then drove on in to the town of Blue Eye itself, which even in the rain looked festive. The sun was up as he arrived. THE BUCKS ARE STOPPED HERE, the sign still said, fluttering over the town square. Bright shiny pickups and Rec-Vs lined the street, rifles visible hanging in the racks in their back windows. Everywhere Nick could see men proud in their blaze-orange camouflage. Tomorrow was the first day of deer season.

Nick parked and pushed his way through the crowd, which seemed to have been drawn to some epic pan-cake feed put on by the Kiwanis or Jaycees. The boys were talking rifles and loads, hunting techniques, telling stories of giant animals who'd soaked up bullet after bullet and then walked away. There was a common anticipation and a sporting crowd's fever in the air. All agreed that, what with a moist and succulent summer, the Arkansas whitetails were everywhere. It would be, everybody said, a great year for a venison harvest.

But Nick, melancholy as always with the approach of action, ignored all this, went to the square, and sat himself down on a bench near a statue of some ancient Confederate hee-row in pigeon-shit-green copper. There he slumped, a glowering figure in jeans and a rough workman's coat, his Beretta in a speed holster upside down under his left arm, not three inches from where his right hand just happened to fall.

He sat and he sat, and in time -- he had no sense of it at all -- a man came and sat with him. It was very smoothly done, but then everything these birds did they did smoothly. They were professionals.

"Memphis?"

"Yes."

"Good. There," said the man. "Can you see her?"

"No," said Nick.

"See, the Plymouth Voyager van. The back door is open. She's sitting there. Can you see her?"

He could. She was a lean middle-aged woman, handsome and composed, dressed in a sweater and jeans, and with a grave look on her face. There was something stiff in the way she sat.

Sitting next to her was Payne. He remembered Payne from the swamp, and the jaunty, relishing way he had interrogated Nick and got him ready to die. And he remembered Payne from Annex B: Payne, of the Sampul River.

"Yeah, I see them."

"Do you want to talk to her?"

"No."

"You have the cassette?"

"The cassette, you bet. But we've got more than that. I also managed to dig Annex B up."

"Oh," said Shreck.

"There's enough to send you and Payne to the electric chair three times. Man, they'll deep-fat fry you to a crisp."

Shreck laughed.

"Not this time, sonny. Now you know how this has to happen. We need that cassette. Swagger thinks the woman is important. And we both know Bob has a stubborn, romantic streak, don't we?"

Nick turned. He looked at Raymond F. Shreck for the first time. He wasn't disappointed. He thought of the word tough and imagined it carried out to some science fiction degree. Short-haired, steady and strong, the colonel looked like a .45 hardball round in flesh. He was all blunt force, hard eyes, sitting ramrod straight, not a tremor or a line of doubt anywhere about him.

"You know if it were up to me, and I was still with the Bureau, I'd bust your ass so fast you'd leave your teeth in the street."

Shreck smiled.

"Sonny, people have been trying to kill me for nearly forty years. They're all dead and buried and I'm still here. So don't try to scare me. It's a little late in the day for that."

He was wearing a Trebark camouflage suit and a blaze-orange baseball cap that said in gold sans serif across the front, AMERICAN HUNTER AND DAMN PROUD OF IT. His eyes met and held Nick's as forcefully as an assault, and it was Nick who finally looked away.

"Tell Swagger if he crosses me, I kill the woman. Kill her dead. Cut her throat, watch her die, walk away. I've got tons of money and a thousand new identities I can slip into. I'm home free at any second if I want to be."

"But you want that cassette. And those documents."

"Frankly, I don't really give a shit about the documents. But the cassette does have my face on it; it's the only absolute record of my appearance. Life could be difficult if it got out. But the people I work for will be excited about the documents. So bring them too, or I kill the woman. Now this is how we play it."

Nick listened intently as the colonel laid out the plan.

At the conclusion, Shreck handed over a map, a geodesic survey of the high Ouachitas, with the start point laid out, and a 40mm brass flare pistol.

"We don't want the Nailer nailing us. We have to see him moving so we know he isn't setting up somewhere above us to take us down from eight hundred yards."

"Maybe you'll have a guy to nail him," Nick said.

"No way. We can't nail him because he may not have the cassette and Annex B with him. He's got insurance, I've got insurance. Mutual deterrence. It kept the world alive for fifty years. I'll set it up so the final exchange is in the wide-open spaces, way beyond any rifle range."

"Uh-huh."

"And when the exchange is made, we walk away. It's over. We're out of business, but so is he. He has his woman and his freedom. The Feds think he's dead. He can have his whole life back if he lets it lie. He's had a hell of a war, but the war is over now. It's time for him to go someplace in Montana, where beaucoup deer and antelope roam, and just shoot and fuck all day long."

Toward late afternoon of that same day, a banal van left a motel and drove to a civilian hangar at a small airport twenty miles south of Little Rock. It contained three men: one of them was Eddie Nickles and another was a dour figure with the head and shoulders of a Greek god and a broken body, who sat alone with his rifle in a wheelchair in the back. He spoke to no one. It made Eddie Nickles nervous.

If Bob scared him, this guy scared him too, especially in that he wasn't even whole. He had the aura of death to him, that was for sure; he was like a butcher or an embalmer.

"Guy fuckin' scares the shit out of me," Nickles said to his companion, one of the morose survivors of Panther Battalion's assault on Bone Hill, another lad who'd lost his sand.

At the hangar, they pulled up next to a DC-3, glistening silver. ARKANSAS CENTRAL AIRLINES it said in green art deco print under the windows. A double cargo door had been opened two thirds down the fuselage toward the tail.

Nickles got out, went over and conferred briefly with the pilot. Then he leaned into the open cargo bay and saw the ATV, a three-wheeled Honda with soft fat studded tires for gobbling up the rough land and steep inclines of the wilderness; it had been staked to a board with heavy yellow rope; a bulky pack that he knew was a cargo parachute was lashed to it.

"Everything okay, chief?" he called to the cargo master still checking the rigging.

"Thumbs up, Bud," said the man.

Nickles went back to the van.

"Sir, I'm going to load you now," he said.

"Don't touch me. Get the ramp down and stand aside."

"Yes, sir."

Nickles pulled the ramp out of the van. He stepped back and watched as the man leaned over and took the blocks out from under his wheelchair tires. Then he forcefully rocketed himself to the edge, shot down the ramp and headed to the plane.

The man wore a black baseball cap and had smeared his face with black and green paint. He wore black boots and a black and green camouflage tunic. The rifle, encased in a plastic sheath against the damp weather, lay in his lap; he had a Browning Hi-Power pistol in a black shoulder holster.

"Okay," Nickles yelled up to the cargo master. "We need the winch now."

The crewman swung out the device and with an electric purr, the wire descended from its pulley, bearing a hook.

"I have this harness for you, sir," said Nickles.

The man looked at him and Nickles recognized with a stab the fury and humiliation in him; to be that helpless among all these robust men! But, uncomplainingly, the man slipped it on and cinched it tight. His jaw trim, his eyes set, he adjusted himself to the indignity of being loaded aboard the plane like a haunch of beef.

Lon was free. He fell in darkness feeling the wind pounding at him. For just a second he was a boy again, stalking the hills of Connecticut twenty miles west of New Haven with his father. The sun was a bronze smear; the earth leaped toward him.

Then with a thud, his chute opened, rustling in the wind like a sail. He remembered sailing when he was a boy on the Sound. His father had taught him to sail. Those had been wonderful times.

Hard Bargain Valley hit him with a bang. He lay in the grass. He struggled with the harness, and the chute fell away. He sat upright. He could see the ATV a few hundred feet away, its chute plump in the breeze that coursed along the valley floor. But no sign of Nickles.

He looked at his watch. It was almost five. And suppose Nickles had killed himself in the jump; his parachute hadn't opened, he'd hit the ground at eight hundred feet per second?

Lon laughed. After all the planning he'd gone through in his life, wouldn't that be a final joke?

He looked around, alone on the floor of the valley. To the east he saw the ridge, sweeping and grass covered; to the west a line of trees as the elevation fell away toward the forest below. He saw other mountains, too. It was completely quiet except for the popping and snapping of the chute on the ATV.

"Sir?"

He turned; Nickles was approaching him from the south, with the rifle in a sling over his arm.

"Where the hell have you been?"

"My chute opened early and I carried about a half mile away."

Lon realized the boy had panicked, not trusting the altimeter device rigged to blow the chute out at six hundred feet, and had pulled the emergency ripcord. But it didn't matter now.

"Okay. Get the ATV rigged, collect the chutes and let's get the hell up the ridge."

"Yes, sir."

Payne woke Julie Fenn early in the back of the van, around four, yet when they drove through the dark town, the streets were crawling with men.

On the first day of deer season, the animals would be stupidest and least wary, and the hunters were moving into the woods to be in position by sunup for that first shot.

"You just keep your mouth shut," Payne told her. "You got another day. Then it's all over for you and you get to go home."

But he was lying. She'd seen the other man's face. She knew that doomed her. There was something secretly savage in his eyes; he could look at her and talk to her and plan to kill her all at once.

But she had difficulty concentrating these days. She wasn't sure what the drug was: she guessed it to be something in the Amobarbital-B range, a powerful barbiturate that had the additional effect of eroding the will. They'd been gradually increasing the dosages, too, until on some days she couldn't remember who she was or why this was happening. Always so tired, all she longed for was to go back to sleep and wake up back in Arizona. Very occasionally, she wished she had something to fight them with. But they had taken her only weapons.

They sat her in the seat behind them and drove the van up high mountain ridges, down dusty roads, passing hordes of other four-wheel-drive vehicles, watching as men clambered out in the glare of the headlamps, snorting plumes of hot breath in the night air, their rifles glinting and jingling as they headed out for their stands.

And after a while, the hunters thinned, and then ceased altogether. They drove on endlessly. She looked up dreamily, her head resting on the cool pane of the window: the stars above were bright like pinwheels of fire, the air brisk and magical. She could lose herself in them totally; she felt herself drifting through them and only the sudden sharp bounce of the tire on a rut in the road jerked her back to the present.

With effort, she fought her way toward a consideration of her circumstances. She wanted to kill them; she wanted to see them die, smashed into the earth. But it hurt to hold that thought in the front of her mind for very long; she felt the idea break loose from her brain and begin to drift away until it could no longer be grasped or recognized.

But just as it seemed to disappear forever, she had one last instant of clarity: I hope you're there, Bob, she thought. I hope you make them pay.

"We're here," said Payne. "This is as close as we can get by vehicle to the first checkpoint. It's about two miles and we've got a few hours yet. No sweat."

"No sweat," said Shreck. "Now let's suit up."

The two men got out of the van and Payne slid the cargo door open. Inside the woman sat passively while Payne bent to the floor, where two Kevlar Second-Chance ballistic vests lay. He retrieved one and handed it to the colonel.

"Thanks," said Shreck.

They slipped their coats off and pulled the heavy vests on, securing the snaps.

"Heavy as shit," said Payne.

"But it'll stop goddamn near anything, including a .308 rifle bullet," said Shreck. He fastened the last snap and said, "Get the woman."

Payne stepped back inside. Julie sat there limply, a vacant look on that beautiful face.

"Come on, sweetie. Time to play with the big boys."