Miller said to Taylor, “That’s right. You’re closer to death than most anyone, but also more alive than anyone. Well, here we’re dead men. Dead in spirit and soul and without purpose. We’re meat targets. And everything that makes us human, that makes us more than them, also makes us weaker than them. We die and then we die again. Except now men are dying for real, and I’m in this fucking cell, and our CO is under house arrest, and the MPs have got the goddamn armory under lock.” He ran his right hand through his close-cropped brown hair, and the sleeve of his undershirt rode up and revealed a tattoo on his biceps—a skull wearing a Ranger beret with a dagger held in its teeth. Miller looked again at the cracked wall where SPC Kemp had been murdered. The small stain of blood that wouldn’t wash out. “It’s been a long time since I’ve fought for anything real.”
Brodie thought of a panther in a zoo, looking dully through the bars of its cage. An apex predator, stripped of prey and purpose.
Why don’t you resist?
There it was again. It was maddening that Bucky had allowed itself to be destroyed. It took away the satisfaction. The retribution of it all. And maybe that was the point. Even when you kill them, you don’t really win.
The upshot of all this was that PFC Greer might have withheld even more information from them than his platoon sergeant had. He might hold the key to what was really going on here.
And maybe Tom Greer was up on that mesa right now, watching the sun slash shadows across the desert, doing whatever he could to reclaim a small part of himself. Looking for peace. That was the best-case scenario. But there were others.
If you want peace, prepare for war.
Greer had shared in Ames’s mushroom stash, and maybe he knew about the major’s weapons stash as well. They had to find this guy—and tread carefully.
CHAPTER 33
THE CAMP’S NORTHEAST GUARD TOWERwas unoccupied, and no one saw the agents approach the section of fencing near three black oil drums. Two of the drums had been dragged away from the fence, revealing a crawl space about three feet wide and three feet deep.
Brodie looked at Taylor, who was holding a plastic water bottle and had two more shoved in the pockets of her suit jacket. Brodie also had three bottles, all sourced from the refrigerator in the brig. So they had a hundred ounces of water and thirty-four bullets between them. Should be enough for a short desert manhunt.
Brodie got on his stomach and crawled beneath the fence, and Taylor followed. They brushed themselves off and headed east, the hills to their left, and the sun slipping low in the sky behind them. They were in a flat area dotted with brush and a few desert willows in bloom. A jackrabbit darted between the scrub.
Up ahead Brodie saw where the hills dipped down to the flatlands, and beyond that was the mesa—an isolated, flat-topped mountain. It was farther away than he’d realized. This would have been a lot more fun in an ATV.
Taylor took a drink of water. “How long do you figure?”
“Thirty minutes at a steady clip.”
“Think he’s really there?”
He looked at the mesa. “Maybe. Miller made it sound like the guy needed peace, but I think what he really needed was as much distance as possible between himself and Camp Hayden. If I were him, I’d makefor the outer perimeter fence. He’s got gear and the skills of an Army Ranger. And maybe a weapon, if he knew about the buried cache in Ames’s backyard. He’d be fine in the open desert for a while.”
Taylor looked at the distant mesa. “If he is up there, and he’s worried he might be found, there is no better spot to surveil us.”
“Or shoot us.”
Taylor did not respond.
They walked in silence for a few minutes. Brodie looked back at Camp Hayden as it receded in the distance—the high steel fence topped with razor wire, the empty guard towers, the stretching shadows. And deep beneath it all, the underground sanctum for a fleet of lethal autonomous weapons, maybe the worst invention since the car alarm.
What the hell were they thinking?
Incompetence and recklessness lead to tragedy, but so does evil. Men are plenty capable of evil. He thought about Major Klasky and what Sergeant Miller had said about the guy—that he’d rather Tom Greer self-destruct than leave this place and possibly reveal its secrets.
That was grim. But was it true? Or had the terrors at Camp Hayden darkened Sergeant Miller’s vision of the world so much that he, like Tom Greer, could no longer see what was real?
As they got closer to the mesa, they had a clearer sense of its scale. It was about three hundred feet high, and the late-day sun created a diagonal cut of dark shadow along its western side—a climbing path that someone had dug into it, likely an artifact from before this federal land had been fenced off for the creation of Camp Hayden.
In another fifteen minutes they reached the path and began the climb, with Brodie in the lead. The temperature was dipping down to something pleasant, and the sun sat low in the west. The path curved as it wound up the side of the mesa at a steady incline.
In a few minutes they were near the top. Before they reached it, Brodie unholstered his pistol, and Taylor followed.
They crested the top. The flat plain on the mesa was similar in appearance to the land below—a great stretch of sand and rocky earth dotted with low greenery. It was about half a mile across.
“There,” said Taylor.
About five hundred feet away was a small green nylon tent. Sitting in front of it was a man, looking out over the desert.
