“You’re asking for a volunteer.”

“That’s right,” Watchman said evenly, and watched his face.

Vickers said, “Tell me what you’ve got in mind.”

“Get behind that sycamore and get ready to roll him over. If there’s a grenade under him you’ll hear the handle click—drop flat behind the tree and cover your head. Now either he’s booby-trapped or he’s not. Either way I want you to make a little run after you’ve flipped him over. Run out into the open three or four paces as if you’re going out to have a closer look at the corpse. Give them enough time to see you but not enough time to snug down their aim. Three or four steps, and then break right and dive into those trees on your belly. Then run back through the trees and hope they take a few shots at you.”

“I see. And you’ll be where?”

“Down there.” Watchman pointed toward the lower end of the pine-forest horseshoe. “We’ll be on horseback and if you can draw their fire I’ll be able to spot their muzzle flashes. We can get close pretty fast on horseback, before they’ve had time to fade back into the timber, and we’ll have a crack at them. How about it?”

Vickers thought about it, visibly. Watchman looked at the sky through the bare treetops. Dusk; a handful of stars already showing on a field of navy velvet. Moonrise in maybe half an hour. “All right, we’ll try it,” Vickers said.

“One other thing. I’ll need to know if that’s Hanratty. You’ll get a look at him when you flip him over. If you’re pretty sure it’s Hanratty fire three quick shots as soon as you have time.”

“Then what?”

“You’d better stay right here so I’ll know where you are. I know you don’t like that but if you come chasing along after us you’re likely to get yourself shot at by both sides.”

“It’s not appetizing. What makes you so sure they’ve waited around all this time?”

“I couldn’t put words to it. Maybe a feeling they need to get us off their backs—they don’t want to waste any more time than they have to. They want to get it over with.” It was a lame explanation but he didn’t add to it. The subconscious sorts and files according to experienced intuitions; what came to the surface was mostly hunch. He was beginning to develop a feeling about the way Hargit did his thinking.

“We may as well try it,” Vickers conceded. “How much lead time do you want?”

“What time do you have?”

“Eight minutes past six.”

Watchman took off his glove to set his watch back from six-eleven. “Roll him over at six-forty.”

“That long?”

“We’ll have the moon by then.”

“All right,” Vickers said, and when Watchman turned away Vickers said in a softer voice, “Good luck, Trooper.”

“Sure.” Watchman waved a hand and kept moving.

CHAPTER

10

1

The last ribbon of twilight faded out of the sky behind Baraclough’s right shoulder and Eddie Burt said in a distressed whisper, “What the fuck are the bastards doing?”

They had seen them—shadowy movements in the aspens down below. Once one of them had come tantalizingly close to Hanratty’s body. But they had never offered a clear shot, they had never come out of the trees.

The Major said, “The sensible thing is to stay put. Stay here. Let them come to us—we’ll hear their movements. I want this finished tonight.”

Baraclough turned his head and looked down through the pines. The tracks they had deliberately left there were easy to see for a distance of at least two hundred feet, even in the dusk, but it was evident now that the pursuers weren’t going to fall for that.

Burt said, “Christ, the damned finish line keeps moving, don’t it? These ain’t no regular hick cops, not the way they keep one think ahead of us.”

The Major’s jaw muscles stood out like cables. “I underestimated them. I accept the responsibility for that. But remember who we are, Sergeant. We’re graduates of the finest guerrilla training academy in the world. They’ve given us a little trouble because we didn’t anticipate their intelligence—I take the blame fully for that—but just remember they don’t have a chance. Now let’s get ourselves spread out and wait for them. No more talking.”

“Yes, sir,” Burt said, and moved away, fifty feet downhill through the pines, slithering on his belly like an eel.

Baraclough remained a moment before he moved away. “We’re using up a lot of time here. Maybe they’re not coming in after us at all. Maybe they know we’re in here and they just figure to bottle us up until they get reinforcements.”

“If that’s the case we’ll move out by dawn. But we’ll have a try at them first. We can’t move freely with them this close to us, you see that.”

“I do. But I wouldn’t mind moving out right now, Major.”

“No,” the Major said. “We’ll wait. Get to your post now.”

2

Baraclough burrowed into a snowdrift like a child digging himself into beach sand; he left nothing showing except his head and arms. Wrapped in waterproof boots and an oilskin rain slicker he had no worry about getting frostbitten; the cold was uncomfortable but he had always enjoyed discomfort.

He could see the Major and, just barely, Burt down below; they had always made it a practice to set up in such a way as to afford one another protective fire. The mechanics of it were cut and dried, old hat to them all, but what troubled him was a sense that something was out of place. They had consistently misjudged the quality of the men who pursued them: no matter what they did, the pursuers always seemed to have got there just ahead of them—Burt had been right about that and it was hard to explain it to himself. But when he thought about it he saw the Major was right about waiting it out. Whoever the pursuers were, breaking out of here now wouldn’t get rid of them. Other cops, maybe, but not these three. It was a hell of a handicap not knowing who they were, not knowing anything about them; but of course that wasn’t altogether true. Baraclough did know several things about them, the main item of which was the fact that these three cops were good. Very good.

A searchlight caught him right in the face and he blinked in momentary panic before he realized it was the moon, rising past the peaks to the east. The temperature had dropped fast since the sun had gone and he saw the breath steam down from his face, white and hazy in the sudden moonlight.

3

Watchman had crossed the stream before the moon came up and posted himself on horseback in the lower fringe of pines about forty feet downstream from Buck Stevens. If Hargit’s bunch was here at all it was most likely dug in somewhere along this flank of the horseshoe perimeter because only on this side would they have an easy back door to escape through. If they were here they were somewhere in the two-hundred-yard stretch of woods above him.

His first thought had been to pick a position with a good field of fire and wait for Hargit to open up. The sound and spark-flash of gunfire would give away Hargit’s position and give Watchman a target to shoot at. But then he had vetoed the idea. It would have been playing the game by Hargit’s rules. To Hargit this was a military exercise and in military exercises the objective was to annihilate the enemy: keep shooting at one another until only the winners survived. But that was warfare, not police work, and it wasn’t Watchman’s job to indulge in pocket battles. The highway patrolman’s oath said “apprehend and arrest”; it didn’t say “kill.”

He had discussed it with Stevens: “They’ll be spread out a little and one of them’s bound to be closer to us than the others. I want you to keep the other two pinned down while I take out the first one.”