Then the wind had blown some damned bit of plywood, making a noise near him, and the Dodger had been forced to freeze, bending low, not even breathing. By the time he was ready to move again, so were they, climbing the hill toward his train tracks.
He'd cut over the hilltop, hurrying ahead to the big oak near the edge of the forest. The bulk of it bid him and when they followed the tracks out into the open, he'd have a clear shot of no more than fifteen meters. As his anger faded, he considered a head shot for the man, saving the multiple slugs for the woman. Not because she was a woman or beautifulthe Dodger was indifferent to thatbut because he sensed that the man was the more dangerous of the two. Always eliminate the primary danger first, the Boss had taught him. Always. Don't hesitate.
But he'd hesitated, and now it was too late.
The goddamned helicopter. That same, goddamned old Huey the Major had used for more than thirty years.
The Dodger watched the four Vietnamese men flexcuff Kurtz and the woman and load them into the helicopter. Then he faded back into the woods as the Huey lifted off and
flew north, its passing flattening the grass for sixty feet around.
He was glad that he'd hidden the bug truck in the thicket where it couldn't be seen from the air. Removing the silencer, the Dodger slipped the Beretta back in its holster, paused only briefly at the hut, and then walked quickly back to the truck.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
The train tracks came to within a hundred yards of the mansion and then looped in a turnaround. The Cloud Nine kid-sized locomotive and cars were just visible in a long storage shed that straddled the tracks. Evidently the Major had kept the train and tracks maintained all these years.
The Huey landed and the four men half-pushed, half-dragged Rigby and Kurtz out of the open doors. All four were dressed in jeans and field jackets. Two of them carried M-16s that Kurtz was certain were illegally rigged for full auto; the other two carried even more formidable military firepowerM-60 machine guns.
Where are the Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms pukes in their windbreakers when you need them ? thought Kurtz. The man behind him shoved him through doors that a fifth Vietnamese man, this one from inside the house and dressed in a blue blazer, opened for them.
This butler or whatever he was led them through a foyer, down a hallway, through a library, and out onto the rear terrace on the cliff's edge. Kurtz had noted every side room and everything else he could see during their short transit through the house, and he knew that Rigby was doing the same. The fact that they hadn't been blindfolded bothered him a bit, since the simplest explanation for that was that they planned to kill both him and Rigby.
The house was largethree stories tall, comprising at least five thousand square feet insideand it looked as if it had been built in the 1970s, around the time of the Major's retirement to Neola. It was built to fight off Indians. The first story and a half were stonenot only faced with stone, but built of stone. The windows to the rear of the house, nearest the helipad, were all leaded glass, but the leaded parts were actually bars. Thinner, taller windows to either side of the main ones were too narrow to scramble through but would offer perfect firing positions. A five-car garage ran to the north of the house along the same circular driveway, but all five of the wooden doors were down. The house doors they'd come throughthe house was situated so that its fancier front was facing the bluff rather than the heliport and drivewaywere a thick hardwood reinforced by steel. Enough to stop a Kiowa war lance, that was for sure.
This side of the house facing the cliff was less defensible. The library opened onto the terrace through wide French doors that let in the view and afternoon light to the west. Off the library had been an adjoining bedroomKurtz only caught a glimpse but thought it was probably the Major's bedroom, adapted from a huge parlor on the first floor, because of pill bottles and military photos on the burgundy wallpapered wallsand that bedroom also had wide doors opening onto the terrace. Kurtz guessed from oversized drape boxes above the doors that there were steel shutters that could drop down if necessary.
The Major, Colonel Vin Trinh, and three other men were waiting on the terrace. One man wore sheriff's gray, a Colt.45 in a western holster, and a name tag that said "Gerey" the name of the sheriff that Rigby had talked to little more man an hour earlier; the other two men were younger, white, muscled, and also armed.
That's seven bodyguards so far, counting the servant in the blazer and not counting the chopper pilot and the sheriff , thought Kurtz as he and Rigby were shoved into the sunlight in front of the man in the wheelchair, which was in the shade of a striped canvas awning. And Truth, the Major, and this other old guy .
"Mr. Kurtz, Miss King," said the Major. "How nice of you to drop in."