Shadowfires

catch up with her, though minute by minute she was getting a
greater lead on him, rapidly decreasing his hope of closing the gap.
At the very least he had to find a telephone and get hold of Whitney
Gavis, his man in Vegas, so when Rachael got there and called Whitney
for the motel keys, he would be able to alert her to Eric's presence. Of course, Eric might break out of that trunk or be released from it long before Rachael arrived in Vegas, but that hideous possibility did not even bear contemplation.
    Rachael alone on the darkening desert highway… a
strange noise in the trunk… her cold dead husband suddenly kicking
his way out of confinement, knocking the back seat off its hinge
pins… clambering into the passenger compartment…
    That monstrous picture shook Ben so badly that he dared not dwell
on it. If he gave it too much thought, it would start to seem like an
inevitable scenario, and he would be unable to go on.
    So he resolutely refused to think the unthinkable, and he left the
dry wash for a deer trail that offered a relatively easy descent for
thirty yards before turning between two fir trees in a direction he
did not wish to pursue. Thereafter, progress became considerably more
difficult, the ground more treacherous: a wild blackberry patch,
wickedly thorned, forced him to detour fifty yards out of his way; a
long slope of rotten shale crumbled under his feet, obliging him to
descend at an angle to avoid pitching headfirst to the bottom as the
surface shifted beneath him; deadfalls of old trees and brush forced
him either to go around or to climb over at the risk of a sprained
ankle or broken leg. More than once, he wished that he were wearing a
pair of
woodsman's boots instead of Adidas running shoes, though his jeans and long-sleeve shirt provided some protection from burrs and scratchy branches. Regardless of the difficulty, he forged ahead because he knew that eventually he would reach the lower slopes where the houses below Eric Leben's
cabin stood on less wild property; there he would find the going
easier. Besides, he had no choice but to go on because he did not
know if Anson Sharp was still on his tail.
    Anson Sharp.
    It was hard to believe.
    During his second year in Nam, Ben had been a lieutenant in
command of his own recon squad-serving under his platoon captain,
Olin Ashborn-planning and executing a series of highly successful
forays into enemy-held territory. His sergeant, George Mendoza, had
been killed by machine-gun fire during a mission to free four U.S.
prisoners of war being held at a temporary camp before transfer to
Hanoi. Anson Sharp was the sergeant assigned to replace Mendoza.
    From the moment he had met Sharp, Ben had not cared for him. It
was just one of those instinctive reactions, for initially he had not
seen anything seriously wrong with Sharp. The man was not a great
sergeant, not Mendoza's equal, but he was competent, and he did not do either drugs or alcohol, which put him a notch above a lot of other soldiers in that miserable war. Perhaps he relished his authority a bit too much and came down too hard on the men under him. Perhaps his talk about women was colored by a disquieting disrespect for them, but at first it had seemed like the usual boring and only half-serious misogyny that you sometimes heard from a certain number of men in any large group; Ben had seen nothing evil about it-until later. And perhaps Sharp had been too quick to advise against contact when the enemy was sighted and too quick to encourage withdrawal once the enemy was engaged, but at first he could not have been accurately labeled a coward. Yet Ben had been wary of him and had felt somewhat guilty about it because he had no substantial reasons for distrusting his new sergeant.
    One of the things he had disliked was
Sharp's apparent lack of conviction in all things. Sharp seemed to have no opinions about politics, religion, capital punishment, abortion, or any of the other issues that interested his contemporaries. Sharp also had no strong feelings about the war, either pro or con. He didn't
care who won, and he regarded the quasidemocratic South and the
totalitarian North as moral equals-if he thought about it at all in
moral terms. He had joined the Marines to avoid being drafted into
the Army, and he felt none of that leatherneck pride or commitment
that made the corps a home to most of the other men in it. He
intended to have a military career, though