Dreamcatcher

Owen wasn’t entirely surprised to find himself rather enjoying his new friend’s discomfort; God knew Henry had discomfited him. “What do you suggest? Bearing in mind that you yourself said that only your pal Jonesy matters.”

“Yes, but…” Floundering. Henry’s mental voice was a little surer, but only a little. I didn’t mean we’d walk away and let them die.

“We won’t be walking anywhere,” Owen said. “We’ll be ru

“Kill Kurtz,” Henry said. “That’s the answer. It’ll make it easier for us to get away with no one to give orders, and it’ll put the… the biological cleansing on hold. “Owen laughed dryly. “You make it sound so easy,” he said. “Double-oh-Underhill, license to kill.”

He lit a fourth cigarette, cupping his hands around the lighter and the end of the smoke. In spite of his gloves, his fingers were numb. We better come to some conclusions pretty quick, he thought. Before I freeze to death.

“What’s the big deal about it?” Henry asked, but he knew what the big deal was, all right; Owen could sense (and half-hear) him trying not to see it, not wanting things to be worse than they already were. “Just walk in there and pop him.”

“Wouldn’t work.” Owen sent Henry a brief image: Freddy Johnson (and other members of the so-called Imperial Valley cadre) keeping an eye on Kurtz’s Wi

“That’s something it might be prudent for me to keep to myself, for the time being.”

Owen nonetheless probed for it with such telepathy as he possessed. For a moment he caught a blurred and perplexing vision-a tall white building in the snow, cylindrical, like a barn silo and then it was gone, replaced by the image of a white horse that looked almost like a unicorn ru

He grunted in amusement and exasperation. “You’re jamming me.” “You can think of it that way. Or you can think of it as teaching you a technique you better learn if you’d like to keep our conversation a secret.”

“Uh-huh.” Owen wasn’t entirely displeased with what had just happened. For one thing, a jamming technique would be a very good thing to have. For another, Henry did know where his infected friend-call him Typhoid Jonesy-was going. Owen had seen a brief picture of it in Henry’s head.

“Henry, I want you to listen to me now.”

“All right.”

“Here’s the simplest, safest thing we can do, you and I. First, if time isn’t an utterly crucial factor, we both need to get some sleep.”

“I can buy that. I’m next door to dead.”

“Then, around three o'clock, I can start to move and shake. This installation is going to be on high alert till the time when there isn’t an installation here any longer, but if Big Brother’s eyeball ever glazes over a little, it’s apt to be between four and six A.M. I’ll make a diversion, and I can short out the fence-that’s the easiest part, actually. I can be here with a Sno-Cat five minutes after the shit hits the fan-”

Telepathy had certain shorthand advantages to verbal communication, Owen was discovering. He sent Henry the image of a burning MH-6 Little Bird helicopter and soldiers ru

“-and off we go.”

“Leaving Kurtz with a barnful of i

Owen, who had been full-time military since the age of nineteen and one of Kurtz’s eraserheads for the last eight years, sent two hard words along the mental conduit the two of them had established: Acceptable losses.

Behind the dirty glass, the vague shape that was Henry Devlin stirred, then stood.

No, he sent back.

No? What do you mean, no?

No. That’s what I mean.

Do you have a better idea?

And Owen realized, to his extreme horror, that Henry thought he did. Fragments of that idea-it would be far too generous to call it a plan-shot through Owen’s mind like the brightly fragmented tail of a comet. It took his breath away. The cigarette dropped u

You’re nuts.

No, I’m not. We need a diversion in order to get away, you already know that. This is a diversion.

They’ll be killed anyway!

Some will. Maybe even most of them. But it’s a chance. What chance will they have in a burning barn?

Out loud, Henry said: “And there’s Kurtz. If he’s got a couple of hundred escapees to worry about-most of whom who’d be happy to tell the first reporters they came across that the panic-stricken U.S. government had sanctioned a My Lai massacre right here on American soil-he’s going to be a lot less concerned about us. “You don’t know Abe Kurtz, Owen thought. You don’t know about the Kurtz Line. Of course, neither had he. Not really. Not until today.

Yet Henry’s proposal made a lunatic kind of sense. And it contained at least a measure of atonement. As this endless November fourteenth marched toward midnight and as odds of living until the end of the week grew longer, Owen was not surprised to find that the idea of atonement had its attractions.

“Henry.”

“Yes, Owen. I’m here.”

“I’ve always felt badly about what I did in the Rapeloews” house that day.”

“I know.”

“And yet I’ve done it again and again. How tucked up is that?” Henry, an excellent psychiatrist even after his thoughts had turned to suicide, said nothing. Fucked up was normal human behavior. Sad but true.

“All right,” Owen said at last. “You can buy the house, but I’m going to furnish it. Deal?”

“Deal,” Henry replied at once.

“Can you really teach me that jamming technique? Because I think I may need it.”

“I’m pretty sure I can.”

“All right. Listen.” Owen talked for the next three minutes, sometimes out loud, sometimes mind to mind. The two men had reached a point where they no longer differentiated between the modes of communication; thoughts and words had become one.