Code name, p.15
Code Name, page 15
****
He lay panting, trying to catch his breath, listening intently, hoping not to hear the sound of rotors hovering overhead. He heard nothing except the raspy whisper of his own breathing.
Moments later, in the distance, a dog howled, then another. They were behind him now. He wondered how they got on his trail so fast. Maybe the soldier whose boots he had stolen had convinced his CO that somebody else was responsible for the theft. When the old boots couldn’t be found anywhere in camp, the incident must have been reported to NIA. He understood how the whole thing could seem like a new lead worth following, and it advanced the search to the area around the camp.
With dogs in the hunt, it was only a matter of time before they trailed his scent to the dump. Then, whether he lived or died depended on how well he had succeeded at erasing his scent and breaking the trail.
His eyes finally adapted to the darkness, and he looked around the culvert to see what was there. Ordinarily, a culvert was open on both ends, and fresh air and daylight moved freely through. But this one was clogged with something. No light came from the other end, and there was very little air movement. Inside the tunnel was rank and stale, making breathing difficult. The only light and fresh air came from the end of the culvert he had entered.
He looked at his watch. Nearly eighteen hours had passed since his last meal, and he was hungry. Hunger was only part of the problem. The larger concern was that he felt himself running out of energy. And he was thirsty almost beyond belief. His arms and legs were heavy, his whole body was weary. He had been running on adrenaline, and needed food and water.
Then the thought came: I need to clear my tracks. Mark crawled back to the entrance and scanned the approach to the culvert. He had run across rocky ground, built up to prevent erosion along the bank of the drainage leading to the culvert. At the mouth of the opening, his belly flop was clearly visible in the soil.
****
“I pulled a stick from the log jam in the culvert and used it to erase the imprint, then sprinkled loose soil over the repair,” Mark said. “Then I crawled back into the culvert until I was hidden by darkness. With the tip of the stick, I made patterns in the soil all the way to the culvert entrance – tracks that looked as if they had been made by a squirrel.
“Anyone looking into the culvert would see the tracks and assume that nobody could be in there, because small animals will not occupy such a tight space with humans.”
****
Mark tugged at the snag of limbs and debris, loosened several pieces and crawled deeper into the tunnel. Then he pulled the loose debris in behind him, enclosing himself in a camouflaged nest that would conceal him even with a flashlight pointed into the culvert.
As if he were a burrowing animal, he had made an underground den where he felt safe from predators. Curled on the sand-covered floor of the culvert, with debris pulled tightly around him, he was enclosed in stillness. All night he had been awake, sneaking into camp, stealing food and equipment, then hiking many miles through the forest. From the time of his escape, he had rested only in brief spurts. He was more than merely tired – he was drained. Now, in the darkness and quiet, exhaustion won out over hunger, and he slept like a dead man.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
The day warmed under a clear blue sky, but the temperature in the culvert remained comfortably cool. Afternoon passed, and still Mark slept. His body needed to renew itself, replenish the energy spent, and prepare for the coming physical challenges.
Already, his body was adapting to its new role as prey in a deadly game of survival. Normal sleep cycles would shift. Patterns of life would change to meet the demands, adjusting to the reduced availability of food, water and comfort.
Ten hours later, Mark opened his eyes into utter blackness. He felt rested, but was still weak from lack of water and food. From his vantage point, he could barely see through the tangle of limbs to the culvert opening.
“Gotta get moving,” he muttered. “Can’t stay here long or they’ll find me. I need water, then food. Need to get to Xulakan and Laura.”
Mark reached into a pocket and pulled out a tall can of fruit.
“Can’t eat much,” he reminded himself, knowing that without water to drink a man had to limit food intake.
Inside one of the ration packets was a P38 – a small fold-up can opener. Mark flipped it open and started working the hook jaw around the edge of the can. When he could finally bend the lid back enough to drink the thick sweet syrup, he let the juice ooze down his throat slowly, prolonging the pleasure. Even though the fruit juice would not satisfy his need for water, it felt good going down his throat. And it boosted his energy.
He closed his eyes and rested again, but did not sleep. His mind was busy trying to calculate exactly where he was, what lay ahead, and what course of action he should take.
“Oh, Laura,” he moaned, “what have I gotten us into?”
His mind painted an image of Xulakan. He wondered if they would really live long enough to rendezvous there.
Hours later, when only dim light remained in the sky and all was quiet outside, he crept to the mouth of the culvert. There on the ground just outside the small tunnel he saw boot prints. Other depressions in the sand indicated that someone had stopped and knelt down, undoubtedly to peer inside the culvert, perhaps using a flashlight to probe the darkness. There were also tracks of a large dog.
“So, they’ve been here,” he whispered. Someone had stopped to inspect the culvert – dog and handler. It had been while he slept. They had evidently tracked him to the dump, then lost the trail and decided to begin a systematic search of the area.
He had no doubt that other dog-handlers had been called to this area as well. The search was probably spreading through the forest all around him.
****
“Once again, I found myself in the epicenter of the hunt,” Mark said. “I inspected the tracks closely and thought they were at least a few hours old. Blake had showed me how to read tracks.”
“Sometimes you can tell the age of a track by looking at the smallest details,” the soldier had said.
****
On these tracks, the tiny grains of sand along the ridges were dry, while the underlying sand was moist.
“The way the weather’s been,” Mark thought to himself, “these tracks aren’t real fresh. A couple hours, I’d guess.”
A low layer of stratus clouds hung in the sky, blanketing the moon and stars, making the night deeply black. In the distance to the southeast, he could see the glow of city lights from Washington D.C. reflected beneath the cloud cover.
“There’s my beacon,” he whispered. He would walk toward the light, but he chose to take the most difficult route of travel.
Blake’s doctrine on enemy avoidance, was: “It’s human nature for people to choose the easiest trail. If you choose the difficult route, you’ll probably have it all to yourself.”
Hiding within a few feet of a bloodhound was the toughest test, and he had succeeded. He didn’t think the dogs could locate him now. He smelled like garbage and smoke, exactly like the dump where the hounds had lost his trail. The odor of the smoldering dump permeated the entire area, and he just blended into the ambient aroma.
He looked at the sky. It would be fully dark soon. In the distance, he heard dogs barking. “That’s okay,” he said. The commotion caused by handlers and dogs thrashing through the darkening woods, leaving footprints and breaking brush, would actually make it easier for him to travel undetected.
If the dogs couldn’t smell him, all he had to do was keep from stumbling onto one of the searchers.
Choppers with infrared weren’t useful here. In addition to the dogs and handlers, there were other men on the ground, searching without dogs. Their body heat would be detected by the scanners, creating lots of false targets, throwing the whole process into confusion.
Mark didn’t know for certain, but he figured the sky directly over this search zone was free of Hueys this night. The helicopters had moved ahead to see if they could spot anything where the dogs and other search team members were not yet on the ground. But if he did find himself beneath a chopper, he had to be careful not to do anything that looked suspicious to those manning the scopes. Act cool. An image of a man suddenly running and ducking under cover is a dead giveaway.
The land sloped off to his right, draining toward the Potomac River.
****
“It was too obvious a route for an escaping man,” Mark said. “I knew there would be surveillance. If I moved carefully, I could only make about one mile of progress in an hour. The last thing I wanted was to overrun the handlers and their dogs if they were ahead of me.
“As the perimeter broadened, gaps naturally formed as the searchers were forced to spread out to cover more ground. My best shot was to slip through one of those gaps, when the opportunity looked right.”
****
After an hour, Mark came to a small stream that bounded down a rocky crease in the hillside. He heard it before he saw it in the darkness. It was not much more than a tumbling trickle, but the sweet music of bubbling water was unmistakable. He knelt and drank deeply. The water came from someplace up the hill, a source of unknown purity. But it was a risk he had to take; his body was severely depleted and in need of rehydration.
He lay in the cool grass beside the creek and drank deeply. With water in his body, he could now safely eat more food. From his cargo pocket, he pulled a C-ration can and opened it: Lima beans and ham, with a little skim of congealed fat floating on the liquid. He ate it all, slowly, then used the empty can to scoop up water, and drank again.
Quietly, he got back on his feet, tucked the empty can in his pocket, careful to leave no litter behind. He looked toward the distant light and started to walk. On through the night he moved, always keeping the illuminated clouds before him.
A little past midnight, the forest ahead of him suddenly lit up like a night-time baseball game, and the sound of a loudspeaker pierced the silence.
Flat on the forest floor, concealed by a low bush, he lay in the dark shadows and watched and listened. It took a moment, but then he understood what it was: this was where Highway 189 cut through the forest.
Well back in the trees, he studied the situation. From his vantage point, he could see one police car in each direction. Blue, white and red lights flashed and engines were running to keep the batteries from going dead while supplying power to the lights. He estimated the patrol cars were parked about two hundred yards apart, but within view of each other so they could watch the road between.
Mark figured it was that way all up and down the highway – a daisy chain of police cars all within view of each other. Somewhere down the line in each direction was a roadblock that was checking every vehicle.
Downtown D.C. was still fifteen miles away, and that was where he wanted to go. He could hide in D.C. Blend in.
But first, he needed to get past Highway 189, which ran like the Iron Curtain between him and freedom. And like the Iron Curtain, if he were caught trying to cross it, a hail of bullets would cut him down.
Each police car sat in a bright circle of light, created by the headlights and ditch lights. But Mark noticed that the circle of light extended for only about seventy-five yards before the darkness took over. For a short distance, the space exactly halfway between the cars was shrouded in semi-darkness.
At 3:30 in the morning, Mark made his move, knowing the officers were fighting to stay awake by that hour.
****
“I ghosted through the forest shadows to a point exactly between two of the police cars, where the roadway was darkest,” Mark said. “Moving slowly on all fours, I crept from the cover of the trees to the edge of the pavement. There, to keep the lowest possible profile, I stretched out flat on the ground with my head pointing toward one car and my feet toward the other. Then I began to roll across the highway. Slowly, I rolled, half a turn at a time. The ration cans in my cargo pockets shifted with each half rotation, and I clamped my hands across them to keep them quiet.”
****
Just as Mark reached the double yellow lines in the center of the highway, the loudspeaker on the car nearest his head shattered the silence and he froze.
“Hey, Rick, you have anything?” The sharp blaze of a spotlight flashed the length of the pavement, slicing close beside him, then rose and came to rest on the distant car.
“Not a thing,” came the reply.
The spotlight from the first car went dead. The second car switched on the light and duplicated the process, flashing the light down the stretch of road to the next car.
“Don, anything?” It was a way to keep themselves and each other awake through the long, tedious night.
Mark exhaled slowly. That was close.
He rolled half a turn, adjusted the cargo pockets and then rolled again. It took nearly fifteen minutes to cross the highway. When he reached the far side, he rolled into the borrow pit and rested, panting and sweating.
Suddenly a set of bright headlights rolled along the highway, lighting up the edge of the forest beyond where he lay. In the depth of the borrow pit, he remained in shadow. An 18-wheeler drove slowly by, heading south toward 396, picking his way past the police car obstacle course. It was the first truck, or for that matter the first vehicle of any kind, that had passed since Mark had been watching the road. The night was dead.
In the distant sky, Mark heard the sound of choppers circling the region ahead of the dogs. That was the area he had left just hours ago. Off to the northwest, he saw flashes of huge airborne spotlights being played on the forest, looking for any sign of movement among the trees.
“Gates,” Mark breathed, “bless your black heart. You may think that before this night is over you’ll have me – one way or another, dead or alive. But I don’t think so.”
Crossing Highway 189 was a significant victory. Still, Mark had no delusions about this minor success. He had a long way to go before he could finally rest on Xulakan. At this point, he knew there were only two choices – succeed or die. His dying would automatically kill Laura as well.
****
“My hope now,” Mark said, “was that Laura had been able to talk her way out of being a suspect in any wrong-doing, had been released, and had initiated her planned disappearance. There was only one reason I could think of that Gates might decide to hold Laura, and that would be to attract me back in.
“But the ugly truth circulated through my mind again. Gates was unpredictable, and capable of doing just about anything to save his own hide. The man was a murderer with a secret to keep. If he didn’t work for the government, Gates would be an excellent candidate for a maximum-security prison – or a gas chamber.
“What troubled me the most was that now options were on the table; and a sick mind like Gates’ could come up with some horrible options. Trying to second-guess him was a fool’s game.”
****
With that grim thought on his mind, Mark crawled from the borrow pit into the edge of the forest. He moved deliberately, so as not to scar the ground and leave a trail. Then he stood, looked to the sky and followed the reflection on the clouds toward the city.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Pages 36-50, notebook #2 (Spence, Knight’s handwriting starts to get sloppy. Maybe he’s exhausted at this point, trying to rush. I’m transcribing the best I can. RJ)
March 27
My time on Xulakan was running short. The story of what happened to the Bentons had become a consuming priority, and I pressed Mark to spend more time each day and into the night, so I could write as much as possible. Perhaps, I reasoned, if he realized that I was highly motivated to help him get his story told, he might let me live.
We spent more time together. He talked, and I wrote as fast as I could.
“The night was warm and humid,” Mark said, “black and deeply overcast with low clouds that indicated rain. The ceiling hovered only a few thousand feet off the ground, reflecting the distant lights of D.C. Even though it was still the middle of the night, the horizon glowed as if dawn were about to break.
“I moved quickly now, racing through the forest, needing to put some distance between me and the search teams, dogs and choppers that were combing the forest on the other side of Highway 189.”
****
Mark had broken through the perimeter, and could move more swiftly now. But still he stuck to the forest to conceal his movement from the view of anyone who might happen to be around. To cover a lot of ground fast, he ran through the trees, ducking limbs, jumping deadfall. By the time the search reached this area, he intended to be in D.C. If he could lose himself in the city, it would present a whole new set of problems for the searchers.
The first hint of dawn replaced the reflected light of the city with a vermilion ceiling of sunrise shining through a slit below the cloud cover. The brilliant red sky lifted Mark’s spirits, but lasted only a few minutes before the sun rose above cloud level and the sky turned ominously gray.
“By sunrise, I had covered nearly four miles since crossing 189. Roads, residential area and business districts began to swallow up the forest,” Mark said. “I needed a change of strategy, something to keep me from being caught in the full light of day.”
****
A yellow sign a quarter mile ahead flashed, ‘TRUCK STOP’. It took only a few minutes for Mark to close the distance and duck in among the parked trucks, their engines still running at idle while the drivers caught an early breakfast after an all-nighter on the road. A flatbed trailer covered with a black tarp strapped down over an odd-shaped load caught his eye.
Wasting no time, he grabbed a strap and pulled himself up, then settled into the deepest crevasse in the tarp where it formed a valley between the load’s high points. Concealed from the view of anyone standing at ground level, he laid back and melted into the folds of the tarp. The drone of the idling diesel engine sent a vibration through the whole truck and trailer, gently massaging his weary muscles.
