‘Chase’ Chapters 21-24

James Patterson,

AARP Bulletin

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Published February 12, 2024

Illustration of an over-shoulder silhouette of a man heading into a forest; in front of him are two people in bright orange hunting vests who are coming toward him and pointing shotguns at him

Illustration by MAIYASHU

CHAPTER 21

DEVINE WAITED IN the outer office of the comm trailer at Black Hills compound, listening to the boss, Paul Haber, scream bloody murder into his phone on the other side of the closed door.

He had reason to be pissed. They’d been only half an hour away, coming back from New York, when they got the call from Therkelson that the cop, Bennett, had arrived at the base alone.

Toporski and Therkelson, going ahead of the rest of the team, were supposed to neutralize the cop.

But that hadn’t happened. As they came up the hill, they saw the wreckage in the ravine—Toporski squashed dead like a bug and his buddy Therkelson busted up and in critical condition. The cop was gone.

The only good news was that the cop seemed to have headed off in the direction of the state forest, hundreds of thousands of acres of uninhabited woods. He had a good forty-minute head start on them, but there was no one on this side of the mountain. They might be able to catch him still.

Haber had already gotten the hunting party started. Before making the necessary calls, he told Monroe to get the MH-6 Little Bird ready, then took down and doled out what he called his M&M packs—M4A1s with attached M203 grenade launchers—to all the men.

Haber, who had been a platoon sergeant in the 2nd Battalion, 6th Infantry, before joining Delta, wasn’t stingy with the ammo. He’d given everyone five full clips apiece, as well as grenade packs with star clusters and smoke and high-explosive rounds. He wanted this cop good and dead.

Devine sat on a plastic lawn chair staring up at the trailer’s dull metal ceiling as Haber screamed some more.

Ever since he was a little boy, he’d loved guns and hunting and the woods. His father was an avid deer hunter, as his father had been before him. Devine loved the cold, empty wilderness and the smell of gun oil and cordite, sweat, and leather.

But for the first time, he felt something was wrong about all this, something off.

There were only seven of them now. Haber, Irvine, Leighton, Willard, Monroe, and De Souza. And himself.

One little, two little, three little Indians, Devine thought as the boss’s door flew open.

CHAPTER 22

HABER STOOD IN the doorway, a slender, sharp-featured thirty-five-year-old man with a shaved head, gray trimmed goatee, and cold, dark-brown eyes. He was dressed in Sitka Optifade camo bibs and jacket, with Crispi Italian hunting boots. The mission was bankrolled by some deep pockets, and Haber had insisted that he and the men be outfitted properly with the best that money could buy.

Even at rest, Haber had a stately presence. There was something old-fashioned about him. A hunter, an alpha. A born leader.

“Get in here,” Haber said, going back into the office, taking his own M&M pack out of the locker behind him and clunking it on his desk.

Devine watched Haber expertly load, check, and sight his automatic weapon. He did it with a skilled workman’s quick yet reverent efficiency. There was something pretty about it. Like watching a musician tuning his instrument, or a master chef honing his knife.

The inside of his office was as spare and rugged as the man. A cot and camp chair, coffeepot on a plywood shelf, a whiteboard tacked with aerial and topographical maps.

“Where’s Leighton? Here?” Haber said, tapping at the map.

“Yes. I have him on this perimeter,” Devine said, stepping over and drawing a line with his finger.

“So you definitely think he went south here?” Haber said, pointing.

“Yes. His track through the mud puts him on this downslope to the southwest right toward the state land. That’s our advantage. That’s some of the most uninhabited timberland in the state. In the northeast, probably.”

“Okay, good,” Haber said. “Why aren’t you on the bird yet?”

Devine winced.

“I wanted to talk to you in private, sir. I think we should medevac out Therkelson. We could have Monroe fly him over the hill and down to Chapman and call 911 anonymously.”

“C’mon, he has a broken arm,” Haber said. “Last thing we need is more heat.”

“I think his back is broke, too, sir.”

Haber glanced at him angrily.

“He’s stabilized, right?”

“But there could be internal bleeding.”

“Don’t give me ‘could be,’ Devine. Don’t be an old biddy. Therk is old-school tough. Just give him some morphine until we get this thing settled. Then we’ll get him completely patched up.”

“You sure, boss?”

Haber glared at him. Not a comfortable feeling. Yet he went on.

“I mean, maybe we should retreat, sir. Get out of here. Reassess. We’re starting to take some serious casualties now. We’re down to seven guys.”

“Not that I need to explain this to you, Devine, but I just got off the phone with our southern friends who are bankrolling the operation, and we’ve agreed to ramp up the schedule. We leave tomorrow. They’ll have good men at the airfield to replace the ones we lost. It’s all set up.”

“Tomorrow we go?”

“Yes, buddy, and we’re leaving here right away. After we bag the cop, we’re scrubbing this entire hill. Gone without a trace. Is that good enough for you, you worrywart?”

Haber smiled then as he pounded Devine in the arm.

Devine smiled back.

O Captain, my Captain, he thought.

“Sir, yes, sir,” he said.

CHAPTER 23

BUMPING AND TRIPPING, sweating and bleeding, with my arms still handcuffed behind my back, I ran down the endless slope of the middle-of-nowhere Pennsylvania forest.

Crossing a narrow creek, I slipped and did another long roll that ended in a full somersault before I came to a painful, skidding stop in the wet forest leaves.

As I lay there spitting dirt out of my mouth, a memory surfaced from when I was a kid—when we’d play army in the woods of Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx, using sticks that looked like rifles as we patrolled. I fought back a desperate urge to start weeping.

Instead, I stood and continued southwest. I would have headed back toward the road I’d taken there, except I had no idea where I was in this damned woodland maze. I knew west by the hastily setting sun, but what the hell did that gain me? Which way was help?

The one thing I could do was pick a direction—southwest—and keep steadily moving to distance myself from the wrecked truck. Because whoever was on the other end of that big dude’s phone would be coming after me, and they were going to be pissed. I still didn’t know a damn thing except that these guys were killers, of the professional CIA-military variety; and I now, like a complete idiot, was in their home court.

After another quarter-mile, I came to a small cliff—three or four stories of angled gray rock. I could have run down it if my arms were at my sides, but I couldn’t risk tripping, so I had to inch down like an infant.

At the bottom, I looked to the left and saw something sparkle through the brush. It was a creek, I saw. I walked over to it. A stream heading the same way I was, southwest. It was wider than the one I’d tripped over; and running water would lead to more, bigger running water, wouldn’t it? That might mean fishermen, a boat, perhaps a bridge.

But as I followed the stream down, it began to slow. When I came to the foot of the wooded hill, I saw that it became a trickle that fed an enormous wetland swamp. “There goes my merit badge,” I mumbled. I went to the left, following the curve of the wide hill.

I was at the edge of the swamp, where it seemed to become dry land again, when I began to hear it. To the left beside the swamp was a stand of tall, very skinny white trees with yellow leaves, and a lot of brush; and from the brush came the faint sound of chirping.

At first I thought it was a bunch of birds, but it was too consistent. It sounded mechanical. A weird kind of electronic beeping, like a smoke alarm or a truck backing up, which made zero sense.

I thought I was cracking up when I heard a dog bark from the same direction. Initially it sounded like the beast I’d heard from the trailer—but it was a friendlier bark.

“Help! Help me, please! Hello?” I yelled, running for the brush and the white trees.

I was about twenty feet into the stand, crashing through the brush, when through the tangle of vines and twigs I saw Day-Glo orange.

A moment later I recognized the bright orange color as two hunting vests—and hope leapt in my heart in a way I had never felt.

CHAPTER 24

THEY WERE GROUSE hunters. Joe Walke, a tall, heavyset, bearded man with glasses, and his granddaughter Rosalind, who looked no older than fourteen.

The beeping came from the pointing collar of their English setter, Roxie, a floppy pooch with brown, black, and white fur. Roxie would be let off the leash into the woods to find the grouse and, when she did, would assume a pointing position—triggering the electronic beeping of the collar.

But I learned that later. When I first saw the older man and his granddaughter, they were pointing shotguns at me as I burst out of the bush, handcuffed and covered in filth and blood.

“Please help me! A bunch of men are trying to kill me!” I yelled.

While I panted in terror, trying to speak, Mr. Walke lowered the gun and came over. He calmly sat me down and washed out my head cut with a bottle of water from his pack.

“It’s okay, son. Slowly now. What’s really going on? Are you a fugitive of some sort? Why are you wearing handcuffs?”

I shook my head at him violently.

“There’s no time. A phone. Do you have a phone?”

“She has one, but I make her leave it back at the vehicle. Breaks her concentration,” Walke said, smiling.

He had a good and gentle whiskered face.

“Wouldn’t work, anyway. Not out here. No bars,” said Rosalind, a scrawny tomboyish girl with short, sandy hair and freckles.

“I’m a police officer,” I finally managed to get out. “From New York City. I was just attacked by two men up at that shooting range on top of the mountain who I was trying to question. I managed to escape, but they have friends who are right this very second trying to find me. If they do, they will kill me and you. These guys are soldiers, professional killers. We need to leave this place now.”

“Don’t believe him, Grandpa. He’s lying,” Rosalind said, shaking her head. “Leave him. He’s a bad man. Let’s just get out of here and call the cops.”

“At that shooting range, huh?” Walke said, nodding as he looked back up the hill. “I knew those fellas seemed fishy.”

“You don’t believe him, Grandpa, do you?” Rosalind said.

“Yes, I do,” Walke said, helping me up. “Let’s get back to the ATVs.”

I sat in front of Walke on his Honda ATV, cradled in his arms like a baby in a basket, as we skirted the swampland back to the pickup he had parked four miles away.

As the woods flew away behind us, I couldn’t stop thinking about how lucky I was. About God answering my prayers. When we arrived at the blue truck and Mr. Walke cut the chain of the cuffs with a pair of side cutters he took from the toolbox, I was seriously thinking about hugging him.

We’d gotten both ATVs back into the bed of the truck and had just started the engine when we heard it. It was a distant sound, almost pleasant at first like a lawn mower, but then we could hear its trilling. It was a helicopter, flying low and fast over the swamp.

“That them?” Mr. Walke said.

I nodded.

“Let’s get the hell out of here.”

“Grandpa, what have you gotten us into now? Grandma is gonna kill you,” Rosalind said, sitting beside me with Roxie in her lap.

Joe Walke dropped the truck into drive and dropped the hammer.

“What else is new, child?” he said, as we bumped and skidded off down the old dirt logging road.

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