After Haugen finished swearing at his rifle and prying out the jammed cartridge case, he turned and shouted to Graham to hurry. When the panting Graham caught up, Haugen snatched the man's rifle and snapped off a short burst. Then it jammed, too, when the action didn't slide far enough and a cartridge case failed to fully eject. Haugen cursed some more.
Again he drew his knife, and pried out the case. That's what comes from having people running things who don't know what the hell they're doing, he told himself. Gracco hadn't known enough to get the oil wiped off the actions before sending guys out where the mercury was going way below zero. Now it had gotten cold enough that the oil had turned sticky, and he found himself with a steel and plastic club instead of a gun.
"Here!" he said, shoving Graham's rifle back at him. "The oil's got gummy. Carry it inside your parka and warm it up so it'll work."
"How can I carry it inside my parka?"
"Just do it, for chrissake!" Haugen barked, then took off his own parka and slung his weapon butt upward from his right shoulder. Graham copied his action. His parka back on, Haugen peered ahead across the ice. The sonofabitch they were chasing was way to hell and gone ahead now; he could hardly see him. The guy was angling off across the lake.
And then it hit him—out on the ice away from cover, the guy would be a sitting duck for the chopper. Quickly Haugen took his radio from a parka pocket and switched it on, noticing the tiny red light come on to indicate power. The batteries were surviving the cold, anyway.
"Vulture One, this is Haugen. Come in, Vulture One.... Vulture One, this is Haugen. Come in, Vulture One."
There was no response, and Haugen glared at Graham as if he were to blame. "Gimme your radio!" he demanded. Graham dug it out and handed it over; again there was no reply. Haugen handed it back, his anger suddenly broken to mere resentment. Either the radios were junk that wouldn't reach the chopper, or someone was asleep on the job.
"Let's go," he growled, and set off, departing Diacono's tracks, cutting the angle to gain ground on the man. They'd have to bag the guy themselves. Or probably himself; that finky Graham wasn't likely to last much longer.
Frank could feel the tiredness again, and wished briefly that he could ditch his pack. But once he lost his pursuers, out on Lake Superior, he'd need his radio and his sleeping bag and ground pad while he waited for Lampi to come get him, and his flashlight for a beacon when Lampi was looking for him.
There were some small rocky islets at this end of the lake, near the shore. Diacono paused, and from behind one of them looked back, trying to spot the gunman or gunmen. He couldn't see anyone, and it occurred to him that they might have given up.
"No," a voice whispered in his mind. He'd forgotten the voice in the minutes since it had spoken to him earlier. "They're still coming—two of them. They're hard to see because they're quite a long way behind you and they've got white uniforms on."
"Thanks. Who are you?"
"My name is Miki. Miki Ludi."
Ludi; that was Carol's last name. "Are you a ghost?" This time he didn't take the breath to ask out loud. He thought the question to her.
"No. I'm a sort of—a psychic would be closest, I suppose; I wouldn't qualify as a witch."
"Do you have straight black hair, bobbed?"
"Yes. How did you know?"
"I dreamed about you. Maybe you visited me in my sleep."
She didn't answer, just continued with him as he strode along. He was maintaining a good pace, but not trying to go really fast. If they gained a little on him, Diacono told himself, well, he'd soon be off the lake, on a regular forest trail this time. And his pursuers must be tiring, too.
"How about it?" he asked. "Can you tell if they're tiring badly?"
There was a moment without answer, then: "One of them is. He's falling way behind the other one. The leader seems to be doing all right, but he doesn't look any fresher than you do. What do you have in your pack?"
"More bulk than weight. A short-wave radio that weighs a few pounds, a flashlight I'm going to need, my sleeping bag and Vic's, a couple of rolled-up ground pads to put them on, and enough trail rations for a couple of meals."
"Is Vic the older one with the beard? Not very large?"
"That's him."
"Then—he's dead."
There it was. He'd known it, accepted it, but to have someone say it jolted him for a moment.
"You could throw his bag away," she suggested.
"It's not worth stopping to do it. It probably weighs ten pounds; maybe twelve with the ground pad. And I may want it as a quilt when I bed down on the lake. I will for sure if a breeze comes up."
He kept striding, the only sounds his breathing and the slight sound of snowshoes in dry snow. "Can you check Lake Superior," he asked silently, "and tell me if it's frozen for a few miles out? Check it from down by the surface; new ice won't have snow on it, so from up a ways it'll look black, like the water."
He felt her withdraw. In a minute or two she was back. "It's frozen out quite a way. Maybe two miles—I'm not good at estimating that kind of thing. And it seems fairly thick; I can see cracks in it that look like wide gauze ribbons from the top of the ice to the water, and it looks like it might be ten inches or a foot."
The information gave him new optimism, and close ahead now he could see a little bay. The trail would be at the end of the bay, if he remembered correctly. If not, he'd simply take off cross-country.
Hell, he had this as good as whipped. All he had to do was keep going.
The once-Lefty Nagel didn't have brush and branches to work with now, and found that either he could not affect Graham's body directly, or could not bring himself to. But Vic and Tory had given him some heavy counseling in enabling him to escape the holding bottle; he could probably create some visible effects, he decided.
Positioning himself in front of Graham, he groaned into the man's mind. Graham looked up from the snow in front of his snowshoes and saw something resembling cheesecloth, roughly in the shape of a person, a decayed cheesecloth body with its head a semi-transparent caved-in skull. The gunman stopped in his tracks as a coldness gripped him that had nothing to do with the minus twenty-eight-degree temperature of the air.
"Pete!" he husked, staring. Haugen was a hundred yards ahead of him. The ghost hung between them, one arm pointing back the way he had come. "Pete!" This time it was a croak. A thought came to him—that if he went on, he would surely die.
"Yes, sir!" whispered Graham, his head bobbing rapidly. "Yes, sir! " Turning, he started on the back trail across the ice and didn't look back for a quarter mile. When he did look back, he couldn't see Pete anymore. He couldn't see the ghost, either. It occurred to him that he was in trouble now for sure. He couldn't tell Gracco he'd run—that a ghost had chased him off. He didn't know what the hell to do.
He started hiking again, still headed down the back trail for Greenstone Ridge. When he got back, he'd just have to lie, and hope for the best. That had worked for him before, more than once. Maybe Pete wouldn't come back. No ghost would scare Pete away, but maybe it would kill him. Maybe Haugen would die out here in the snow.
Lefty joined Leo in accompanying Pete Haugen, and let the other ghost know what he'd done. They should do the same to this man, he suggested. Leo thought back at him that Haugen was a tough and forceful man, a man who ordered himself, even when the impetus came from some boss. He wasn't someone easily shoved around.
These communications weren't in words. The two of them were advanced enough that, unconnected as they were to bodies, they communicated easily and efficiently with one another by concepts. And despite Haugen's toughness, they decided to work on him. Lefty created a wind gust, sending a thin cloud of snow swirling up from the surface in front of Haugen, while Leo groaned into the man's ear. Haugen scowled but did not slow. A breeze had risen, he told himself; and the ice was freezing thicker, groaning in contraction. As if in agreement, the ice gave forth a long snapping, cracking sound under the stress of increasing cold.
Lefty sent the snow swirling more thickly, so that Haugen walked through it squinting, half blinded, and this time Leo groaned Haugen's name. "Peter Haugen! Peter Haugen!"
Haugen stopped in consternation, cold chills rushing over him. "Who the hell is that? What's going on?"
They created ghostly shapes in front of him, pointing. "Go back," they moaned in chorus. "Go back or you'll die."
"Eat shit!" he swore at them, and unzipped his parka, his mittened hand going to his rifle. "Get your asses out of here! Now!"
He couldn't have said anything more effective to a ghost than a firm and fearless order to leave. They found themselves instantly a considerable distance overhead, seeing Siskiwit Lake as a seven-mile, fish-shaped white oblong surrounded by dark forest. Mentally they shrugged at each other: there still were definite limitations to this ghost business. Perhaps, though, they could harass the man covertly again, as before, when he reentered the forest—as long as he didn't realize his power and once more order them off.
Soberly, they relocated themselves where they could watch his wolflike half-lope along Diacono's snow-shoe trail. He seemed to be going faster now.
At the lower end of the little bay, Frank found not a trail to Lake Superior, but a narrow channel that took him to a much smaller lake. He'd remembered the map wrong. Not surprising, he told himself. There'd been a lot of map, and he hadn't put much attention on this part of it. So he kept hiking, though not as fest as before. He could bypass the feeling of tiredness temporarily, by intention, but then it would hit him again.
"Miki," he thought, "how am I doing? Is he gaining on me, or am I getting farther ahead?"
She withdrew for a moment, then was there again. "One of them has turned back," she said. "You can forget about him. The other one is gaining on you. He seems to be very tough, and he has no pack."
"How close?"
"I would say—perhaps a half mile."
He nodded and picked up his pace again. Quickly he was approaching the far corner of the little lake, and a post on the shore. As he came up to it, he saw its small sign just above the snow: "Whittlesey Lake Portage/0.5 mile."
It puzzled him. "Doesn't this trail take me to Lake Superior?" he asked.
Again Miki flicked away, and he stood there, stopping for the first time since they'd shot him back on the ridge. Half a minute later she was back.
"It goes to another lake—a very narrow lake with steep ridges on both sides. The lake must be two or three miles long, and at the other end there is forest again. Beyond that is another long, thin lake. Lake Superior is off to your right."
She thought to him a picture of the scene as she'd seen it from high above narrow Whittlesey Lake. "But partway up this trail you cross a hill." She let him see that too, as she had, from a point near the ground. "The hill leads toward Lake Superior."
He nodded, and started off again.
The trail was free of brush and blowdowns, but it led uphill, and he realized he was tireder than he'd thought. At its top he left the trail, turning right along the crest.
The forest here was of fir and spruce, with dense sapling thickets that he had to find his way around. Here too he had to go uphill for a while; when he topped out, it was gratefully. On a hunch, he angled left a bit, and was soon in a heavily wooded draw. Before long it ended at a tiny cove, across which he saw Lake Superior with a narrow white shelf of ice. Beyond that was blackness which stretched to a horizon lost against the sky.
He barely paused, striding out on the snow-covered cove with a feeling of grim satisfaction. Though no longer free-swinging, his pace still was quick, and the safety of snow-free ice was in sight. It took a minute or two to clear the mouth of the cove and reach the open sweep of the great Lake, then he continued straight ahead, as if he thought he could walk all the way to Michigan.
He'd gone scarcely a quarter mile when he heard a burst of gunfire behind him. Instantly he broke into a clumsy gallop, not trying to dodge, seeking the relative safety of the black new ice just ahead. The shooting stopped while the gunman dug another clip from his pocket and seated it, and as soon as Frank was on new ice, he cut left. Surely his pursuer couldn't see him now.
Another burst of gunfire blasted from the direction of the shore. He fell heavily, not from bullets but because he had slipped; his snowshoes gave poor traction on bare ice. Pain stabbed the wound in his shoulder when he fell, but he got up immediately and continued with a crouched and shambling, half-skating gait.
For a couple of hundred yards he hurried parallel to the edge of the older, snow-covered ice, then veered outward again away from it. In his dark pants and mackinaw he was hidden by blackness now, well away from the snow that had framed him for so many miles and had shown the clear marks of his passing.
When he'd come out of the forest onto the shore of the cove, Haugen had realized at once what his target had in mind. He could barely see the man, in line with the straight trail he left in his wake. Again Haugen unzipped his parka, throwing it at his feet, to take the rifle from his shoulder.
At that moment both Lefty and Leo sent snow swirling up in front of Haugen, screening his target. The gunman fired anyway, emptying his clip, then seated another as the snow continued to swirl around him. He stood there in angry chagrin for a moment, not realizing that he need but repeat his earlier order to leave. Then once again he fired blindly, emptying a full clip in one long burst, heating the chamber and barrel so that he could smell the now-hot oil.
When the swirl of snow had died, Haugen reslung his rifle, shook the snow from his parka and put it back on. Then he started down his quarry's trail once more. As he strode, his eyes scanned ahead, right to left and back again. At the edge of the black new ice he stopped and stood a long minute, searching, finding nothing, tasting bitterness.
Then he turned slowly and headed back the way he'd come.
Diacono kept hiking, still quickly at first, then more slowly. When the edge of the snow was a half mile behind him, he stopped. Miki told him that the ice went on only another mile or so, and he didn't want to hazard Lampi breaking through it when he landed.
Miki checked on Haugen and reported that the gunman had started back up the hill toward the portage trail.
Frank set the pack down on the ice, took off his mittens and dug out the radio, intending to call Lampi. There was a bullet hole in the side of the pack, as he knew there would be, but even so he was not prepared for what he found. The slug had ripped through the radio, ruining it; there would be no call to Lampi.
He had snowshoed at least a dozen miles that night, maybe fifteen, some of it through brush, and broken trail the whole way through virgin powder snow, carrying a pack. He hadn't eaten since a mid-afternoon meal in Duluth. On top of that, he'd been shot, although the wound was minor.
And now this!
In utter chagrin he stood there, then shook it off and tried to think what to do. "Miki," he said, "there should be a park headquarters eastward along the shore somewhere. I'm sure I saw it that way on the map. Can you check it out for me? Give me an idea of now far, and help me find it?"
Again she flicked away, skimming along the shore, seeking, and he stood waiting in the minus-thirty-degree cold. His eyes traveled up the sky to scan the silent panoply of stars, then panned the horizon all around. There might not be another human being for thirty or forty miles, he thought, except for a few who wanted to kill him. This is the wilderness, all right, he told himself. A man could die here and never be found. He slapped his left thigh with the mittened hand of his unwounded arm. But some of us are damned hard to kill.
Then Miki was back. "I found it," she told him. "It's east, all right, on a long island just off the shore. And there's a light in one of the buildings, and a plane parked on the ice by them."
"How far?"
She didn't answer at once, and he could sense that she hated to tell him. "I think it must be ten miles, at least," she said.
Unexpectedly, he laughed. "Hell, kiddo," he said aloud, "I can do that walking on my hands. Let's go."
But his right shoulder hurt so sharply when he swung the heavy pack onto his back that he almost passed out, and as he began to walk, he could feel blood running down his arm again.