Chapter 9
"Headlights," Burner said. "You're sure."
"Two. Coming up the two track from the south. I could see them washing on the trees before I could see anything else."
"How far?"
"Past the second switchback."
That put it four miles out and climbing, and the two track ended three miles from the bowl, which meant Burner had somewhere between forty and ninety minutes depending on how much of a hurry they were in.
He ran.
He hit the yard shouting and it was the first time since he had come here that he had raised his voice at all, and the effect of it was immediate and total.
"Bars," he said to Priest. "Now. Hit them till your arm falls off."
The iron went off across the bowl, three notes, over and over.
The camp came out of the buildings.
It was a strange thing to see, and he would remember it later.
Two days of stripping had left the Kettle looking like a place people had already abandoned, empty racks and bare walls and pale rectangles where things had hung for two years, and out of that came fifty-one people in wool and canvas and they did not mill around and they did not ask questions.
Fourteen drills. Ninety-one seconds.
Halloran came out of the second building at a dead run.
"How long?"
"Forty minutes if they push. Longer if they don't."
"It's the twenty-fourth."
"It's the twenty-fourth," Burner agreed. "He lied twice. Once to us and once to his own man."
Halloran's face went hard.
"Or Sparrow lied."
"Or Sparrow lied. It doesn't matter for the next forty minutes."
Weathers had already gone into the third building. Delacroix was moving along the row of adults with a slate in her hand, reading off names and canyon loads without being told to, which meant she had been rehearsing it privately for two days.
"Give me the order," Halloran said.
"Everybody out."
"Everybody?"
"Everybody. Right now, the long way, up the east draw and over the shoulder. Not the northeast trail, that's the one they'd guess and it's the one with tracks all over it from two days of hauling."
"That adds four miles."
"It adds four miles in the dark with children and it is the only way you don't get caught strung out on open ground with headlights behind you," Burner said. "Go. Now."
"And you?"
Burner looked south at the black rim of the bowl.
"I'm going to make them stop," he said.
Halloran stared at him.
"With what?"
"With a hundred yards of nothing and four minutes of shooting and the fact that they don't know how many of us are left."
He grabbed Priest's good shoulder.
"Find Delacroix. Tell her I want her and nobody else, and tell her I want her on the south granite spur in four minutes. Then you go with the camp."
"I can shoot."
"You've got a hole in you."
"I shot last night with the hole in me."
"And you got the hole because you were in a slot in a wall I told you to be in," Burner said, "and if I let you stand up tonight and it goes wrong, your mother will spend the rest of her life knowing I said yes. Go with the camp."
Priest's jaw worked.
Then he went.
Sable came across the yard with the twenty gauge and her canvas bag and stood in front of him.
"Don't," she said.
"Don't what?"
"Don't tell me to walk northeast. I've watched these men for sixteen days and I'm the only person in this camp who has, and if you're going to stand on that rock and count them I'd like you to count them right."
Burner looked at her for one second.
"South spur," he said. "Behind the granite, not on it."
Fifty-one people went out of the Kettle in eleven minutes.
That was the number Halloran counted on the hand-wound watch and said out loud twice, and there was no time to be proud of it, so Burner filed it and forgot it and remembered it a week later at a bad moment.
They went in three groups, spaced, up the east draw. Weathers and four others carried the boy with the hip on a plank litter. Marin's mother had one child on her back and one by the hand.
Shyla went past Burner at the mouth of the draw and did not stop.
She looked at him once, and she had Yak's collar in her fist because Burner had told her to take the dog and she had not argued, and her face did the thing it did, which was nothing at all.
Then she was gone up into the dark with the rest.
Burner stood there three seconds longer than he had meant to.
He got on the south spur at twenty past eight.
The granite ran out from the west side of the gap in a long shoulder, and there was a natural slot in it about a foot wide at head height where he had chipped two edges away with a hammer the week before,
and from that slot a man could see two hundred and forty yards of open grass and the whole mouth of the south gap.
Delacroix was already there with the .270.
She had picked her own position, forty feet further east and lower, behind a boulder with a shelf of rock in front of it, and it was a better spot than the one he would have given her.
"You moved," he said.
"Your one's obvious. Somebody looks at that rock and sees the slot."
"That's the idea."
She looked at him, and something went across her face.
"You want them to shoot at the slot."
"I want them to know there's a shooter in it and I want them to spend a long time deciding what to do about it."
"How long do we hold?"
"Ten minutes."
"That's all?"
"That's all I want. Ten minutes of a place looking defended."
Burner laid the AK through the slot. "The camp needs an hour and a half to clear the shoulder. If we make them stop and think for ten minutes and then we break clean, we've bought all of it, because after we break they'll spend another forty minutes coming through here carefully."
Sable dropped in behind the granite between them.
"And if they don't stop?"
"Then we find out fast."
They heard the engine at twenty-nine minutes past eight.
It came up out of the timber south of the bowl, and then the lights swung across the grass and the whole south gap lit up white, and Burner had to turn his face away because he had been sitting in the dark for twenty minutes building his night vision and it went in one second.
"Close your eyes," he said. "Both of you. Right eye only, keep the left shut."
"What?"
"Keep one eye closed the whole time they've got lights on us. When they go off you'll have one eye that still works."
He heard Sable let out a small noise that was almost a laugh.
"Where do you learn that?"
"A book about submarines," Burner said.
The truck came into the mouth of the gap and stopped a hundred and eighty yards out, broadside, with its headlights sweeping the buildings.
Not the flatbed.
It was the pickup, the second vehicle, and there was a second set of lights behind it in the timber that had not come out yet.
"Two," Sable said.
"Count men, not trucks."
She was quiet a moment, watching with one eye.
"Four out of the bed," she said. "Two in the cab. There's more behind."
The lights played over the long hall, the third building, the empty racks, the greenhouse frames stripped down to their ribs.
Burner watched the lights and understood, with a drop in his stomach, exactly what they were seeing.
Empty buildings. Stripped greenhouses. No container.
"They know," he said.
"Know what?"
"That we've gone. Look what the lights are doing. They're not sweeping for shooters, they're looking at the buildings, and the buildings are empty and anyone can see it in four seconds."
"Is that bad?"
"It's bad because a man who thinks he's walking into a camp is careful," Burner said, "and a man who knows he's walking into an empty camp is in a hurry."
A voice came across the grass, amplified by nothing but lungs.
"That's far enough from me. I know there's someone on that rock."
Burner went very still.
It was not a shout. The man had pitched it to carry and had not strained, and the voice arrived flat and unhurried and perfectly clear across a hundred and eighty yards of frozen grass.
Sable's hand closed on Burner's sleeve.
"That's him," she said.
"Halstead."
"That's him."
"I've got no interest in your rock," the voice said. "You can stay on it. I'd like to point out that I haven't put a light on it, and I could, and I'm not going to, because in about ninety seconds you and I are going to be finished with each other and I'd rather nobody wasted a round."
Burner laid his cheek on the stock and found nothing in the sights but headlight glare.
"Talk to him," Sable breathed.
"No."
"Why not?"
"Because talking is how he finds out how many of us there are."
The voice came again.
"I'll take the silence as agreement. Here's what I came to say and then I'm going to leave, which I imagine is not what you expected."
A pause.
"There were three men killed here on Tuesday night. I don't imagine that means anything to you and I'm not going to pretend it should. That's the business. I've killed men in this valley and I've had men killed and it has never once been personal,
because personal is expensive and I've never been able to afford it."
Delacroix, forty feet east, had not moved at all. Burner could not even hear her breathing.
"So I want to be precise about what I'm about to say, because I've watched men say this kind of thing in anger and I am not angry."
The headlights did not move.
"Four days ago I asked for four adults and a harvest," Halstead said. "That offer is withdrawn. There's no version of this where you give me something and I go away. I want everyone in that camp understanding that clearly, because it changes what you'll do, and I'd rather you did it with the facts."
Burner's hands had gone cold on the rifle.
"That's not a threat," the voice said. "That's a schedule. You've emptied the buildings, which was sensible, and it means you're within about two days' walk of here carrying everything you own, which is not a thing you can hide. I'll find it. Probably Thursday."
Sable had stopped breathing.
"So go," Halstead said. "Go tonight. Walk as far as you can. I'm not going to chase you across a mountain in the dark and lose men in the blowdown for it, because that's the mistake I made on Tuesday and I only make a thing like that once."
A long pause.