“Let me get the other one started before you go, Jim,” he said. “That way we won’t get separated in the woods.”

He ran back to the shed. As soon as he was out of sight of Verhoven, he pulled out the radio Gideon had given him. “It’s me,” Tillman said. “Do you copy?”

“Are you okay?” Tillman could hear the concern in Gideon’s voice.

“Yeah. Verhoven’s bailing on his men, getting out of here with his wife on some ATVs. I’m going with him.”

“What are you talking about? You need to get as far away from Verhoven as you can.”

“Verhoven knows something. But he’s definitely not the ringleader, claims he doesn’t even know the target. If I stick with him, I can follow this operation back to whoever’s running it.”

“Tillman—”

“You want to kill the snake, you got to chop off the head, right?”

Gideon sighed. “I didn’t mean for you to get in this deep.”

Gideon's War and Hard Target

“Too late for that.”

“You sure you’re up for this?”

“It’s not like I’m giving up any big plans I had. Plus, I didn’t like owing you, but I think I’m gonna like you owing me.”

Gideon laughed. Although their previous estrangement had been resolved, Gideon felt their bond being burnished by Tillman’s solidarity. They ght niswere now not only brothers, but also brothers in arms. But whatever gratitude Gideon felt was tempered by the fear that his brother was putting his life on the line because of him.

“Fine, you stay with Verhoven but you need me to shadow you. Especially to get through the FBI perimeter,” said Gideon. “I’m monitoring their comm frequency, so I can clear your escape route. Remember that game we used to play in the woods? Tracker?”

A voice called out from the house. “Tillman? What are you doing?”

“I gotta go,” Tillman said.

“Head down to the logging road at the rear of the compound. I’ll direct you from there.”

“Copy that,” Tillman said, pulling the radio from his ear and shoving it deep in his pocket. Ten seconds later he pulled up to the house with the ATV. Verhoven and Lorene were sitting on the other ATV, Verhoven’s fatigues sticky with her blood.

“Sir!” someone shouted from the building. “Where are you going? What are we supposed to do?”

“I’m getting Lorene to a safe place. Whatever you do, don’t let the FBI follow us.”

“We need you to—”

Before the man could finish his sentence, Verhoven’s ATV leapt forward, throwing up a spray of dirt. Verhoven cranked the ATV’s throttle to the peg and headed toward the logging road at the perimeter of the property.

20

ANDERSON, WEST VIRGINIA

Ervin Mixon had been in the chair for a long time. Long enough that the open seam of flesh where his eyelids had been had finally stopped bleeding.

Gideon's War and Hard Target

The sclera of his eyes were dry and caked with blood, and...

And she was right.

He began to cry. Slowly, the tears spread across the dry surface of his eyes, stinging like a thousand tiny needles.

And as they did so, they slowly washed away the crusted blood. And just as slowly, the blurry surroundings began to resolve into focus around him.

Same concrete walls, same chemistry equipment, same barrels of ether and bags of chemicals.

The air was heavy and thick. After leaving him there, Verhoven and his monster of a wife had turned off the air system. It was a completely sealed space, Mixon knew, kept livable only by a quarter million dollars’ worth of filtration and air circulation equipment. The minute you turned the air off, you started consuming all the oxygen in the air. Once the CO2 concentration reached 3 or 4 percent, you began suffocating.

He sensed it was now getting close.

Wherever Verhoven was going, whatever this crazy missio rrrrrrg cloon he was on, he was leaving and he was never coming back. What a mistake it had been, trying to make a buck off of Verhoven, and now he would pay for that mistake with his life.

Verhoven’s sick bitch wife had cut off his left thumb, his ears, and skinned his right hand so that he appeared to be wearing an oozing brown glove. After she was done, she had tossed the skin onto the floor. He could see it now, a shriveled wadded thing, like an old-fashioned kid glove.

She hadn’t done the sick shit to get information. No, she had done it because she liked it.

The result was that he kept fainting from the horror of what she was doing to him. Skinning his fucking hand, especially. It wasn’t the pain. It was just the invasiveness, the wrongness of it, slowly slicing away all his skin like that with the small, precise strokes of her tiny little knife.

At first he had lied and told them that he had only given up the meth operation. But after she took off his thumb, he’d given up on lying and started telling them that he knew about the terrorist operation. After that, they’d focused on exactly what he’d said and to whom. But he hadn’t given up Gideon Davis’s name. Not because he cared, or had any sense of honor, but because he hadn’t stayed conscious long enough to tell her. And in preserving that secret, keeping that one piece of information to himself, he had accidentally preserved some small shred of dignity. It was his last comfort as the room darkened through his lidless eyes, and he fell into a permanent sleep.

21

ANDERSON, WEST VIRGINIA

Gideon was situated behind the shooting ranges, looking down on Verhoven’s entire spread, trying to find a clear path for Tillman through the FBI’s cordon. They had called in reinforcements, and he could see the ATVs carrying Tillman, Verhoven, and Lorene moving up the hill. He sprinted through the woods toward the road where the FBI was approaching, a chopper flying toward them, just over the treeline.

He reached the road just in time to see a black SUV barreling toward him on the rutted dirt, kicking up a cloud of dust as it pulled to a halt. He didn’t have much time. He’d been monitoring the FBI’s comms on the radio. One team had been assigned to the logging trail at the rear of the property. He didn’t know how big a team was, though. Was it a single car? Four cars? Ten? No way to know. But he had heard a radio call for assistance to the state troopers and to the Milner County sheriff’s department. They would be closing off the county road to the east. Which meant he’d need to steer Tillman to the west. There were no paved roads for several miles in that direction, and the smaller logging trails were not shown on any maps.

He ducked back into the woods, plunging through a thicket of briars that tore at his clothes. When he came to the other side, he searched until he found a trail that had clearly been formed by the wheels of ATVs. He then picked out a large oak tree and cut a double chevron into the bark with his pocketknife. He piled three rocks immediately to its left. With that he slowly worked his way back down the hill toward the logging trail.

Gideon's War and Hard Target

When they were boys, he and Tillman had lived in a fairly...

Once they had realized that they were never going to match Natty Bumppo’s magical skills at reading smudges and broken twigs, Tillman and Gideon had developed a language of twisted vines, stacked rocks, and blazes on trees that they used to direct each other. It wasn’t magical . . . but it worked.

The chevron that Gideon cut into the tree indicated danger ahead. The piled rocks indicated that safety lay to the west of the tree. He could hear the muted sound of a V8 engine chugging up the logging road. As long as he could identify exactly where the FBI was, he could steer Tillman and the Verhovens around them. To do that, though, he needed to get closer to the road. Doing so exposed him to possibly being caught by the FBI. But it was a risk he would have to take. He had to get Tillman out of there, and then follow him to whatever the Verhovens had planned.