Chapter 20

The dockside security came running, full of concern. "We heard shots," they explained.

"Nice of you guys to show up," Mac said dryly.

They explained that they were getting Alex and his father to a safer location and calling for backup.

Mac told them about Frank, but when they looked, he was no longer in the next aisle. They did locate his gun, over on the roof of the next row of containers.

"It's a good thing you didn't have to confront him on the rows stacked double high," said the captain, and Mac had to agree.

"What in the world are you wearing?" asked another of the security officers. Mac explained the silk, but his explanation was met with only dubious silence.

"Let's see what he was guarding, shall we?" Mac said, to change the subject.

The captain crossed to the end of the blue container and opened the lock with his master key. Entering the dark interior of the container, Mac's fingers encountered the familiar wooden crates that he had helped carry up the mountain to the helicopter in the Selway-Bitterroot wilderness. He shook his head in amazement.

At that moment, the backup security detail rushed up, and the Captain began barking orders, telling some of the officers to search for Frank, and others to begin cataloguing the smuggled weapons. He then ordered his second-in-command to go put a phone call through to the FBI.

With all the official bustle going on around him, Mac led Puck back out of the container, and began tracing the metal walls to walk back down the row to the silk shipment. He unwrapped the cloth from himself and Puck, and mentally thanked the merchant for shipping silk that day. As well as he could, he rolled the bolts back up, and made a mental note to have Pete's secretary track down the merchant and reimburse any damages.

Then, he went back to ask one of the security officers to guide him to Alex and his father. And to find a telephone.

A half-hour passed before he managed to get Pete on the phone, at his home number rather than the office.

"You do go home occasionally," he teased in greeting, when Pete picked up the phone.

"You don't, I notice," Pete retorted. "How did it go?"

"Jackpot on the shipment," Mac reported, trying not to be too specific on an unsecured line. "Same crates, same contents. We lost the underling, and nobody else was around."

"He's gone to ground," Pete said, his tone frustrated.

"Who?" Mac asked.

"Green," Pete said, apparently less concerned about phone security. "He's gone completely off the grid. Our people can't locate him anywhere."

Mac balled his fist against his forehead in exasperation. Where could the man go?

Pete's words niggled at the back of his mind. Off the grid. The memory of the wooden crates under his hands was still as fresh and sharp as the wooden sliver that had lodged itself painfully under one fingernail. He worried it with his other fingers as he thought.

"Mac?" Pete asked. "You still there?"

"Oh, yeah, Pete. I got an idea. I gotta go."

Twenty hours later, Mac stood on a quiet trail next to the Shearer cabin in the remote interior of the Selway-Bitterroot wilderness. Sun-warmed pine balsam filled the air around him as the late-afternoon sun began its descent toward the Selway Crags in the west, behind him.

Puck sat beside him on the trail, harness on, waiting for Mac to give the word.

"Do you think I'm right about this? Or do you think I'm just crazy?" Mac asked the dog sitting beside him. "Yeah, you're probably right. Crazy."

Pete certainly thought his idea was crazy. Too crazy to send a team in here, but Mac wanted to come anyway. Pete tolerantly gave him permission, but only on the condition that Mac didn't do "anything stupid," a phrase which brought an ironic smile to Mac's lips.

"How could I do anything stupid if no one is out there?" he asked Pete.

Now, remembering, Mac shook his head.

He bent and picked up Puck's handle. "Puck, right," he said, sweeping his right hand across his body in a wide gesture and turning his feet onto the path. "Forward."

When the path narrowed so much that walking next to the dog became cumbersome, Mac switched to leash guiding, letting Puck walk directly in front of him and following the tug of the leather leash.

The river on his left widened into the shallow, wide crossing, and Mac pushed through the underbrush toward it. With Puck half wading, half swimming beside him, he struggled to step along the slippery tilting round rocks that made up the riverbed.

Once across, he took a few minutes to change his shoes, while Puck cheerfully shook himself dry.

The sun sank behind the mountains and twilight filled the river valley.

Mac shouldered his pack and together, he and Puck searched the base of Elevator Mountain for the trail that led upward toward the cave. By the time they found it and had climbed the steep set of switchbacks, the air around them was dark and held the chill of night. Mac ignored the cold and hurried onward.

They neared the cave and Mac paused, listening intently. Along with two voices, and the crackle of a campfire, he could just see a vague glow of light in the inky darkness.

He was right! There was someone up there, camping, hiding out in the old cave.

He crouched on the steep slope, thinking, his right hand steadying himself on the rough, warm bark of a tree trunk.

The first thing he decided to do was to hide Puck to keep him safe. In the dark, a black dog should be easy to hide, and the most reasonable place was to the side of the cave and higher up the slope. For this reason, he began quietly working his way up the hill to his right, avoiding the open meadows, staying near bushes and trees. Not only did he need to hide the dog, but he needed to be able to find him again later, so he did his best to notice landmarks as he went. A large, open slope of broken, tumbled rocks appeared ahead of him and he used its left edge as a guide up the hill until he came to a clump of bracken near two trees that grew close together.

He debated with himself whether to tie the dog. While he certainly didn't want Puck joining him at the cave, he worried that a tied dog would be easy bait for a cougar or bear. In the end, he decided not to tie Puck.

"Puck, down," he ordered. "Stay."

Please, please stay, he added silently.

He set his pack near the dog, and with his fingers, explored its contents, carefully organized so that he knew where each item was located. He withdrew his folded cane, a coil of heavy cord, a lighter, a handful of firecrackers, some smoke bombs, a bandanna and a roll of duct tape. He stuffed the small items into his pockets, and slowly unfolded his cane, careful not to let the joints make a loud snapping sound as the elastic cord drew them tight into a straight staff.

He made his way back toward the cave, concentrating on the slope of the hill under his feet, the sound of the river far below him and the thickness of the trees and brush to give him his bearings and tell him which way to go. He neared it from the side; the sound of voices coming from his right told him that he was close.

He was lucky the two men had spoken; they obviously had begun to settle for the night and their conversation dwindled. Mac crouched on his heels, waiting and listening. Even the crackling of the fire dwindled, losing itself in the huge stillness of the night.

A bat flapped unexpectedly near MacGyver's head, and he startled. Each nerve felt tense as he waited. He took a long, slow breath to calm himself.

Just as he decided to move, one of the men rose, shuffled across the gravelly floor of the cave, retrieved a few sticks of wood and tossed them onto the fire.

He sat back down with a grunt, and Mac heard the metallic sound of a gun being set on his lap.

Mac bit his lip with frustration. One of them must be watching, he thought. He'd hoped to surprise them in their sleep, but apparently this wasn't going to be so easy.

As carefully and quietly as a stalking cat, he moved toward the cave mouth, crouching out of sight. He pulled the lighter and a couple of the firecrackers and smoke bombs from his pocket. Gingerly, he twisted their fuses together. Then, holding the fuses in his left hand, he struck the lighter with his right. It took a couple of tries before he could make out a glow of flame in the darkness, and as soon as he saw it, he held the ends of the fuses to its heat.

He felt and heard their fizzing, and tossed them gently up into the cave entrance.

A heart-stopping four seconds passed in utter silence. Then, the night erupted with noise and smoke as the fireworks all detonated at once.

Mac stuffed the lighter into his pocket, tugged the bandanna from around his neck, up over his chin and nose, and vaulted up over the edge of the floor into the cave.

On his right, he could hear Frank yelling a steady stream of curses, and so he aimed for him first. Finding Frank's shoulder with his left hand, he delivered a right hook to the shorter man's jaw that sent a shot of pain through his knuckles and up his arm. I was worth it, however, since it sent Frank spinning to the ground where he lay still.

He turned toward the side of the cave where Fist had been sitting. Not Fist, he amended to himself. Robert Foster Green.

For a tense moment, there was absolute silence in the cave as MacGyver listened for the location of the man who had also frozen.

"The smoke was a good idea," the man said in a low voice, hit tones echoing around the cave as though he threw his voice as a ventriloquist does. Mac held his breath, concentrating.

"But it was a waste of your time," Robert Foster Green continued.

Mac waited, tense, a cobra poised to strike.

"Do you want to know why?" the man asked.

Mac stayed silent, wanting to stay hidden within the swirls of smoke so the man couldn't see him and they had an equal disadvantage.

"Of course you do; you just don't want to speak and give yourself away," said Green. "You see, though, I know where you are already."

Mac frowned at this, still waiting.

"I've known your world longer than you realize," Green explained.

My world? Mac wondered.

"Like you, I hunt by sound," said Green, his voice almost triumphant. "And I know right where you are."

There was a click. Mac reacted on pure instinct. He dropped to the ground and rolled to his right, toward the back of the cave. The cave wall just behind where he had been standing exploded into shards of gravel as the bullet ripped into it.

"Nice move," complimented Green, and Mac heard him take a crunching footstep forward. "But it won't take me long to find you. You see, that's one advantage I had over you. I never underestimated you. Poor blind guy can't do anything? Pah! That's a load of…"

Mac slid backward as quietly as he could, but Green heard it and shot again. The cave reverberated with the noise, and the bullet whistled just over Mac's left shoulder to bury itself in the gravel floor.

"You know why I started smuggling guns?" Green asked. "Not the money. Not the fun…it's not fun. No, I did it because I was sick of being treated like a two-year-old by everyone. By everyone! 'We don't have a job opening.' 'You'll be a safety hazard.' Oh yeah? I'll show you a safety hazard. Don't think a blind guy can do anything? There's a hell of a lot a blind guy can do!" Green's voice was laced with bitterness. "And the next thing I'm going to do, Mr. MacGyver, is make sure you never get in my way again!"