“Who wouldn’t jump?”
“That New York cop you’re chasing,” Walke said. “I thought we could bail and shake you, but he didn’t get my gist, I guess.”
“That cop is down there in the truck?”
Walke nodded.
“Poor fella,” he said.
Devine stood over the old coot, while Haber sent Irvine and Leighton down in the chopper to check out the truck.
“There’s nobody in there,” Irvine radioed up after another three minutes. “The old fart’s lying.”
“What?” the old man said, looking down at the truck again. “No? That’s funny. I could have sworn I seen him right there next to me. He must have jumped after all.”
Haber looked out down the ridge, the thin silver filament of the river in the shadowed land in the distance. It was past sunset now, getting dark.
“I wanted to wrap this up before dark, but now that won’t happen, will it?” Haber said, and hit the old man square in his face with the rifle butt.
The old man turned with the blow. Then he turned back and spat out a tooth.
“You think you’re tough, hitting an old man? You ain’t shit.”
“And you’re what?” Haber said as he leaned down over him. “Mr. Shit, I presume?”
The old man rolled up his sleeve and showed him a tattoo on his bicep, green and smeary with age. Devine recognized it. It was the skull and wings of force recon. USMC ’68, it said beneath it.
“That’s who I am. Right there. Semper fi, you asshole.”
Chapter 26
Three hours later, we came upon the sign between two stone posts. It was metal, in the shape of an arrow, lying rusted on the ground beneath a cracked wood beam.
Big Country Secret Cavern, it read, in Jet Age 1950s script.
It was Joe Walke’s idea. If he wasn’t convinced by my story, he knew we were in danger when he spotted the man with the gun riding on the outside of the helicopter.
There was no way to drive out of the area without being spotted from the air, so Joe insisted we bail while he drew Haber and his men off in another direction. A former coal miner and also the son of a coal miner, he’d spent his whole life in the area and could navigate the woods blindfolded. Rosalind, too, knew a special way out on foot.
“This place was big a long time ago, but it’s been closed for years. Even the road is
gone,” Rosalind said as we stepped past the sign, Roxie at our heels.
In the low moonlight, I saw that there was an indentation in the hill we’d been skirting. It was just rock face along this side, ten stories of it going straight up.
Twenty feet later, we saw the cave opening. It was triangular, like a church roof, and it was on the other side of a huge black pond.
“How are we going to get through? Swim? It’s filled with water.”
“No, this way,” Rosalind said, going left around the oblong pond. “They used to send you through in paddle boats, Tunnel of Love–style, Grandpa said, but there’s a walkway. C’mon.”
As we stepped in under the cathedral-like ceiling, Roxie started barking.
“Stop your fidgeting, Roxie. I like it as much as you do.”
I turned on one of the flashlights Joe Walke had given us. We also had some water bottles, and the shotguns—they held about twenty rounds, most of them number 7 birdshot, but there were a few shells of double-ought buck.
What wasn’t in our favor was that the shotguns were over-and-under break-open style, so they could only hold two rounds at a time. If we got into a firefight with these professional military folks, it was going to be over very quickly.