Free Gideon's War/Hard Target by Howard Gordon Page B

was from bullies at school or opposing linemen on the football field. Thanks to Tillman, nobody messed with Gideon Davis. People came to understand that if you put a late hit on Gideon Davis, when the next play rolled around, Tillman Davis was going to cut you off at the knees.
    It was only as he grew older—and increasingly estranged from his brother—that he began to understand what that protection had cost Tillman, how much pain he had absorbed on Gideon’s behalf. The realization came only slowly and grudgingly. But eventually Gideon realized that only through Tillman’s self-sacrifice had Gideon been given the space to grow into the man he had become.
    It was a debt that Gideon knew he had never adequately repaid.
    There had been a time when Gideon’s forebears owned half of Yancey County, Virginia, a rural county to the west of Washington. But a succession of poor business decisions had stripped the family of their land, until Gideon’s father had been left with nothing but their house and the small plot of land around it that he hadn’t sold off. In the early 1970s, Gideon’s father sold what was left and invested the proceeds in a final speculative venture, which quickly failed.
    The week before Gideon’s fourteenth birthday, the entire thing had caved in.
    The day the bank seized Father’s office, Father came home, parked his Cadillac outside the house, unlocked the gun room, took out the old Remington 10, walked into the bedroom, and shot Gideon’s mother in the chest. She was a beautiful woman, and being a vain man who prized her face as one might prize a good setter or a matched pair of Purdeys, he had not wanted her spoiled. Then he went into the gun room and ended his own life.
    Gideon came running after he heard the first shot and found his mother lying in a blooming pool of blood. His desperate attempt to keep her alive was interrupted by the familiar sound of the door slamming shut on his father’s secret room. Then Gideon heard another shot.
    When Sheriff Wright came, he found the gunroom unlocked. He just turned the knob and walked in. Gideon’s father lay dead on the floor, the back half of his head gone. There had been no investigation, no securing the crime scene, no bits of evidence collected and stuck in numbered plastic bags. After all, it was obvious what had happened. So the sheriff had simply called the funeral home and had the bodies carted away.
    A few weeks later, when he and Tillman finally returned to the house to gather their personal possessions, Gideon found himself piling his father’s guns on a blanket, dragging them down to the pond behind the house, and throwing them into the water, one by one. The Holland & Holland, the matched pair of Purdeys, the Weatherby double rifle, the Kimber 1911, the Luger, the K-frame Smith, the Model 70—the only things his father had ever really loved. And now all Gideon cared about was knowing that none of those guns could ever be fired again.
    After he was finished, he walked to the front porch steps and sat down next to Tillman and said, “Why do you think he did it?”
    Tillman snorted but said nothing.
    That was it. Since that day, neither of them had ever said another, ±€r word about what happened. And since that day, Gideon Davis had never touched a firearm.
    The AK-47 is not an especially precise rifle. But in the right hands it can cut a man in half, and Gideon could tell that the man shooting at him knew how to handle his weapon. The next burst would take his head off. So he did the only thing he could, bounding from his hiding place and sprinting for the river, hoping that his movement would throw off the shooter’s aim.
    In front of him were three turbaned young men on the quay. One held his gun by the barrel, the butt hanging over his shoulder. The other two had leaned their guns against creosote-smeared mooring posts.
    Gideon had no choice except to keep going.
    Hearing the gunfire, the men whipped around and saw him, before