Absolute Zero Page 9

  Miller hangs up and looks at his reflection staring back at him from the black window.

  A trophy?

  CHAPTER 49

  THERE’S A STORM coming – a bigger one.

  Miller can see it in the sky and feel it in his gut. A kind of steel creeps into the already freezing air. The fog lifts slowly to reveal ugly slabs of black cloud crawling across the ridge from the west, like a sheet being drawn over a body in the morgue.

  He gets his main guys together in the kitchen at the main house – the Axe, Donno, Carver and Tannhauser – and brings them up to speed on Delamenko’s clusterfuck in East Talbot.

  ‘Fuckin’ Russians,’ says the Axe. ‘We shouldn’ta brung them in, Nate.’

  ‘Noted, genius,’ says Miller. He holds his hands up. ‘I admit it, I fucked up. Should’ve kept this in-house, like. So we won’t say no more about it, OK? Here’s what’s going to happen. If this guy comes near this place I want him killed. Nothing fancy, just shoot the motherfucker. I underestimated him. That’s not going to happen again. Donno, roust a few of your crew up outta their La-Z-Boys, OK? Get ’em out here now. Same with you, Carver, Tann. All hands on deck. We—’

  The kitchen door opens and one of Tannhauser’s crew comes in. Seeing Miller’s face, he holds up his hands in apology. ‘Sorry, Mr Miller, but, but …’

  Tannhauser slams a palm on the table. ‘Spit it out, Stevie, fer Chrissakes!’

  Stevie points to the door. ‘You got to see this.’

  CHAPTER 50

  ‘WHAT ARE WE looking at?’ says Miller.

  He is standing in the middle of a group of men gathered round a pine tree which has a tarpaulin wrapped around its base.

  One of his crew unties a couple of ropes and pulls the tarp free.

  Miller coughs and takes a step back. He spits into the snow. ‘Holy fuck.’

  Viktor Delamenko has been crucified. There’s no other word for it. His back lies against the trunk of the giant pine, each hand nailed to a branch on either side. He is naked and a trail of red spots can be clearly seen arcing across his chest. Here and there the light glints on a nail head standing clear of his flesh. He’s been shot once in the head through his eye.

  ‘Jesus Christ,’ whispers someone behind Miller, and he whips round to see if it’s a joke but the guy realises what he’s said and holds up a hand.

  ‘How long’s he been here?’ says Miller.

  They are at the junction off the highway that leads to the compound.

  Tannhauser’s guy, the one who brought the news, steps forward. ‘Micky saw him about thirty minutes ago on his way in.’ Tannhauser’s guy breaks off to point to a guy in his crew. ‘Micky figured he’d best cover him up – case anyone spotted him, like.’

  ‘Yeah, good,’ says Miller. He turns away from Delamenko. ‘Get him down. Get rid of him somewhere far away. He’s never been here.’

  Tannhauser nods. Micky steps forward with a claw hammer and starts digging the nails out of Delamenko’s hands. Miller watches for a few seconds then walks towards his truck. He’s at the door when he hears a shout. He turns to see Tannhauser looking closely at something on the trunk of the pine.

  ‘Hey, Nate,’ says Tannhauser. ‘Check this out.’

  Miller steps over Delamenko’s body and sees the word ‘CHENOO’ has been carved into the wood. Blood from Delamenko’s wounds has seeped into the grooves.

  ‘Chenoo. What the fuck does that mean?’

  Tannhauser shrugs. He turns to the group. ‘Anyone?’

  One of Carver’s boys gets out his phone.

  ‘You fuckin’ googling this?’ says Miller.

  The guy looks at Miller and hesitates. ‘Uh, yeah.’

  ‘Good idea,’ growls Miller. ‘How come none of the rest of you dumb shits thoughta that?’

  He’s not expecting an answer and none comes.

  ‘It’s, uh, Indian,’ says the guy looking at his phone. ‘Like Red Indian. Native American.’

  ‘What’s it mean?’ says Miller.

  The guy looks up. ‘Says here the Chenoo is a human whose heart’s been turned into ice. Chenoos are cannibals from the north. Once someone’s become, uh, a Chenoo, the only escape is death.’

  ‘Fuckin’ crock,’ says Miller. He points into the forest. ‘Carver, get our four best hunters ready and bazookered up. Huntin’ season is officially open. First man to bag this fuckin’ “Chenoo” gets a fifty-grand finder’s fee. I want this bastard gutted and hung up to rot out here.’

  Miller walks back to his truck with Anders. They get in and spin round towards the compound. As soon as he’s out of sight of the men, Miller punches the dash hard six times. When he’s done he stops, breathing heavily. He glances in his rear-view and slams on the brakes. He turns in his seat to look over his shoulder at a single word traced into the ice on the rear window of the truck.

  Chenoo.

  CHAPTER 51

  SLITHERING BACK INTO his position in the snow-covered trees across the highway, Thurston picks up his binoculars to see the guy in front of the dead man looking at his phone. Thurston knows the dude is looking up the word ‘Chenoo’, exactly like Thurston did earlier.

  Thurston knows exactly zip about Native American myths but wanted something spooky-sounding to unsettle Miller’s crew. Writing the word on Miller’s truck was showy – and risky – but Thurston doesn’t care. It was worth it just to think about Miller’s face.

  Thurston could have taken Nate Miller out with the Remington he picked up in the motel – shit, at this distance he’d fancy his chances of hitting him with the crossbow. But after seeing Terri lying dead in the corridor Thurston’s coming at this thing with a new intensity. He’s already in the frame for the murders of Sofi and Barb back in London so he’s pretty sure he’s going to be targeted for the deaths at the Top o’ the Lake Motel last night. Which means Cody Thurston is no longer content to kill Nate Miller.

  Thurston’s going to bring it all down.

  CHAPTER 52

  IN THE AFTERNOON, Thurston contents himself with observing. He establishes three vantage points dotted around a sloping ridge. Each of these vantage points is placed high in the branches of a tree and he lays a trail to bring the hunters to him. Nothing too obvious – a broken branch here, some footprints in soft snow there.

  It works.

  To a point.

  After an hour the first of the hunters comes into view. He’s moving cautiously on a diagonal across the ridge. If Thurston wasn’t being extremely vigilant he’d never have spotted him.

  Thurston slides the crossbow into position and tracks the hunter’s cautious path, waiting for the moment. He sees a patch of open ground between two trees. There.

  He waits.

  As the hunter gets to the open ground he stops, just as Thurston expects. The guy must know this section might leave him temporarily exposed. What he should do is work his way back down the ridge and then edge back up through the tree cover some eighty yards away.

  He doesn’t.

  Thurston’s finger tightens on the crossbow trigger and he gets ready to put a bolt in the guy’s head the second he appears in the open.

  Any second now …

  Thurston stops.

  From everything he’s seen, this guy is good. So why is he exposing his position? Why is he taking the risk?

  Suddenly Thurston realises what’s happening. This guy is bait. They are waiting for Thurston to reveal his position. The hunter becomes the hunted.

  Smart move, thinks Thurston.

  He leans back against the trunk of the tree and waits.

  Snow is falling heavily now, drifting down from the steel sky in fat flakes. Inside the forest, the snow-padded silence becomes tangible, the forest a white cathedral. Any noise here will sound like a thunderclap.

  So Thurston waits some more.

  The temperature keeps falling and he’s glad of the extra precautions he’s taken with his clothing. He’s guessing the hunters, though well equipped, won�
��t have prepared as thoroughly as he has. They are local. They know there are warm beds and food no more than an hour from here on foot. They won’t be willing to wait it out as long.

  Thurston’s betting his life on it.

  CHAPTER 53

  IT TAKES ALMOST forty minutes.

  And then Thurston hears the soft crack of a twig underfoot coming from his left, and much closer than he imagined. He swivels his eyes and catches a trace of white vapour rising from a low snow bank about thirty yards behind his position.

  These guys have been closing in. He was right to wait. A shot when he saw the first hunter would have resulted in him being trapped. All they’d have to have done was wait it out or shoot him straight out of the tree.

  Carefully Thurston takes his cell phone from his pocket and presses a single digit he keyed earlier.

  Some hundred metres to his south comes the incongruous muffled sound of a ringtone: a cell placed in the crook of a tree and wrapped inside a woolly hat.

  Immediately the hunters move towards the sound. They move more quickly than is advisable, keen to track the ringtone before it gives out. As they edge away from his position, Thurston silently drops to the forest floor.

  CHAPTER 54

  ‘SON OF A BITCH.’

  Kane, the first of the hunters to get to the phone, holds it up as Palmer and Schmidt arrive.

  Palmer grabs Kane’s sleeve and pulls him low to the ground. ‘Jesus, man!’ he hisses. ‘Why the fuck you think the phone’s there? You want to get us killed?’

  Kane’s experienced enough to know he’s fucked up. A pro, he doesn’t get into a slanging match with Palmer. The guy’s right. Thurston’s drawn them out. They’re exposed. The three of them crawl to the bole of a big pine with two protruding protective branches. From here there is only one firing line. Unless Thurston’s dead ahead, this will work as protection.

  ‘Where’s O’Hara?’ says Palmer.

  CHAPTER 55

  DANNY O’HARA’S AN Arizona boy.

  He cops plenty of flack on that, mainly about how he can’t handle the cold up here. Guys handing him sun lotion, that kind of shit.

  But O’Hara was raised in northern Arizona, up in Williams where it gets plenty cold in winter. And he’s more cautious than the locals. You don’t get to survive six tours of duty in some of the most fucked-up places on the planet without learning a thing or two. The others on this hunt are pros but they’ve let themselves get caught up in the chase. As soon as the phone rang they were off like dogs catching the scent. O’Hara too, at first, before he stopped and thought some.

  This was a trap. This Thurston guy? From what O’Hara has seen, he’s solid. Dangerous.

  When the phone stops ringing, O’Hara wonders if the others are already dead. He listens intently, straining, but Danny O’Hara hears nothing, not even the sound of Cody Thurston reaching round and cutting his throat in one swift, silent movement.

  CHAPTER 56

  PALMER SWITCHES TO night vision goggles as darkness closes in. It turns the snow-covered forest a ghostly, milky green. Fifty yards to Palmer’s left, Kane does likewise. Fifty back, Schmidt is bringing up point, the three hunters making an open-faced triangle. They move slowly, deliberately. The phone thing has rattled them, exposed them, but that’s forgotten now.

  The key for the hunters is to use their local knowledge against Thurston. With the storm worsening there are only so many places he can go. A steep ravine lies to the east. In these conditions it is impassable. To the west is a scrabble of mud and weeds: a flatland area which runs about two miles from the fire trail to Lake Carlson. Even in winter it is not possible to cross.

  The phone may have been a plan to draw out the hunters but – from the information they have – Thurston has made an error, trapping himself in a relatively narrow corridor leading back towards White Nation and Lake Carlson. This formation is a net in which to catch Thurston.

  After ten minutes, Palmer passes a fallen pine that could make a likely spot for Thurston to mount an attack. He approaches cautiously and sees O’Hara sprawled face down in the snow, the blood spray from his cut throat showing almost black in the night vision goggles. Too late, he realises his mistake.

  CHAPTER 57

  IN THE SECOND or two it takes for the man to register his dead comrade, Thurston pulls back the white waterproof under which he’s been waiting and puts a crossbow bolt into the back of his head. The hunter slumps forward and lands arched across the fallen pine.

  Thurston doesn’t wait. Sliding his night vision goggles onto his forehead he turns and, moving quickly, crosses a stand of trees to emerge on the other side of the hunters’ ‘triangle’. The hunter sees Thurston and raises his rifle.

  Thurston flicks on his Maglite torch, blinding the man as he gets off a round. Thurston hears the bullet smack into the tree less than six inches to his left.

  The blinded hunter fires wildly as Thurston sprints forward and stabs him in the chest. He shouts something and Thurston hits the ground while the fourth man sets up a hail of shots that cut the blinded hunter almost in two. Blood spurts across the snow as Thurston burrows deep into a drift banked against the base of a big pine. Although not hit, he screams convincingly and pulls on his night vision goggles.

  Thurston knows this last guy won’t be able to tell if either of the bodies sprawled in the snow are his fellow hunters. Hidden in the drift, Thurston bides his time and then, as number four moves forward fractionally, blows his face off with one round from the Remington.

  Thurston emerges from the snowdrift and gets to work.

  CHAPTER 58

  MORNING CRAWLS ROUND in the shape of a flat blue-grey light seeping into Isle de Rousse.

  At the Talbot Chemical Feed gatehouse, the double-duty security detail has been on full alert all night. The four men have heard the gunfire coming from the forest but Miller’s given them instructions to stay put unless advised otherwise.

  At five to seven there’s enough light for Bridges, the oldest man on duty, to peer through the gatehouse window and see a Jeep parked at the edge of the road where it comes out of the forest.

  ‘Call Miller,’ he says. ‘Tell him we got sump’n down at the gate.’ He picks up his assault rifle and puts on his hat. He motions to another guard, Foley. ‘Come with me.’

  The wind has picked up and as Bridges and Foley exit the gatehouse a blast of icy air threatens to rip the door off its hinges.

  ‘Let’s go,’ says Bridges. Foley’s moving but doesn’t look exactly enthusiastic about the prospect of leaving the gatehouse.

  Battling the wind, Bridges and Foley approach the Jeep, their boots squeaking on the new snow. There’s something on the hood of the Jeep but with all the snow and wind it’s hard to see until they are ten feet away.

  ‘Jesus Christ!’ says Foley and pukes.

  The windscreen of the Jeep has ‘Chenoo’ scrawled across it in blood. Lashed to the hood like four hunting trophies are the naked bodies of Kane, Schmidt, Palmer and O’Hara. All of them have had their hearts cut out.

  CHAPTER 59

  THURSTON’S NO MACHINE.

  Exhausted, freezing and hungry, he crawls inside the refuge he prepared yesterday inside the dry ‘cave’ formed by three fallen trees. A thick layer of smaller branches forms a roof fixed in place now by a carpet of snow. Thurston has sealed every draught with more packed snow and put a double-layered thermal mat on the floor.

  He takes off his blood-spattered outer layers and puts on a clean and dry woolly hat. He takes off his boots and carefully wraps them in a protective plastic sheet. He crawls inside a military-grade cold-weather sleeping bag. Sitting up with his back against one of the walls of his refuge, he cracks the foil seal on a self-heating pack of stew and opens a Thermos of hot tea.

  Thurston works his way through both before lying down, closing his eyes and falling almost instantly into a bottomless sleep filled with demons.

  CHAPTER 60

  ANY ICE STORM is bad news. Th
e one whipping down from Canada and slamming into northern Vermont this morning is a flat-out stone-cold bitch.

  The gently drifting snow turns to super-cooled rain and freezes on impact. Within minutes every available surface is covered with a rapidly thickening layer of hard glaze ice as the wind picks up. Power lines bow under the weight, roads become impassable, water pipes freeze solid, vehicles not under cover become glued fast to the ground, their locking systems iced and fuel lines as brittle as an old man’s arteries.

  By midday, East Talbot is effectively cut off from the rest of the world.

  At Isle de Rousse, news about the four dead hunters with the missing hearts spreads through the compound like a virus. With the road now an ice rink, eight men take off on foot within an hour of the news breaking and Miller suspects a few more of the weaker-minded ones are thinking about it. The girls at the compound also hear the rumours but Miller doesn’t give a shit if they run. Let the dumb sluts freeze out there. Not one of them would last ten minutes. He’s already had to punish Mercy for talking back to him.

  No, what’s done is done. The hunters on the hood of the Jeep and all that ‘Chenoo’ bullshit tell Miller one thing: the Australian’s declared war. Spooking the men at the compound is smart and a tiny part of Miller grudgingly congratulates his enemy. First create fear. Isn’t that what some Chink warlord said? But Miller doesn’t want any more defections, so he gets the Jeep and the bodies towed out to the old quarry and burned to ash. He has no thoughts on the dead men: just like Viktor and his boys, they fucked up and paid the price.

  With the Jeep and the hunters out of the way, Miller concentrates on making the compound an impenetrable fortress. He divides the crews up between Donno and Carver, and lets them sort out rotational patrols, lines of fire and the like. If Thurston’s going to come to him then let’s see what he’s got. Even with the defections, Miller’s got better than thirty hard-core guys left with an arsenal that’d make a general’s mouth water. They have abundant generator power, a ton of supplies, more drugs than a Colombian cartel, plenty of women … all while that Australian bastard’s out there freezing his nuts off.