The snow squall shook his truck and smeared streaky white across his windshield. Dennis muttered under his breath, damning the Weather Service’s forecast of clear skies for a couple of days. Bunch of Portland egghead assholes, safely away from the fog and giant swirling tides of Fundy. Sunrise County sat in Nova Scotia’s hip pocket and lived under the fist of a whole different weather god. The Maritimes always had served as a magnet for any stray storms that wanted to come out and play.
Curses out of the way, he concentrated on the faint trace of the road ahead, the faint greasy road slithering under his tires with rocks and ditches and tree trunks waiting hidden in the gray blur to either side. He thought about stopping and switching into four-wheel drive, but that would just encourage him to drive faster. Wouldn’t help his brakes a bit.
Besides, 4WD just meant you were further into the snowbank when you got stuck. Prudence said to keep it in reserve, for backing out again. No, winter said to just slow down. Tough tactic for the average red-blooded American hot-rodder to swallow, but it remained the best way to drive on snow and ice.
Hard tactics and average red-blooded Americans. He didn’t have a clue how to deal with Ms. Tranh. Doctor Tranh to you, no kind of average American. Maine was a little weak on ethnic diversity, ninety-nine and forty-four one-hundredths white, like Ivory soap.
Until he went into the army, about the only brown faces Dennis ever saw were Naskeags and the Mexican migrant workers raking blueberries each August. Naskeags were as Yankee as he was, maybe more so, and he never even spoke with the Mexicans. Or Guatemalans, or whatever. Any second language in school was French for the Acadians and Quebecois, not Spanish.
Oh, there’d been some blacks in college, mostly jocks imported for the football and basketball teams. They’d lived beyond a kind of invisible wall maintained from both sides, not overt segregation but a lack of cultural connection. He’d maybe spoken two words with one of them. No preparation for the modern all-color army and a whole land of brown-skinned maybe-enemies.
Couldn’t trust any of them, even the so-called “allies.” Us versus Them. Viets were Gooks in Army lingo, with a shitload of baggage manufactured in the jungles and paddies of Southeast Asia. And her face came straight out of a firefight. He twitched, just remembering that glance at Shirly’s.
So he was a racist. Fuck it. Fuck her, if she thought he couldn’t tell a bald eagle from an osprey.
He shook his head and concentrated on driving, testing the brakes with a gentle tap. The rear end of the truck wanted to swap places with the front, and he slowed down some more.
The wind shook his truck again and swirling snow blanked the road into a whiteout. He couldn’t tell if this was fresh stuff coming down or just a ground blizzard kicked up from the drifts and down from the shadowy hints of spruce trees to each side. Not that it mattered. He down-shifted to a crawl, aiming at the center of the brighter white in front of him.
Maine winter—some people hated it, feared it, fled south with the geese each fall. He loved winter, the snow and ice and skies so blue you could drown in them, brilliant light against deep mysterious shadows, deeper night silences in the calms when even Jake didn’t stir up on his generator tower, silences so pure you could hear the Northern Lights humming in the sky. Life stripped down to the essentials. Winter held sharp clear dazzling beauty like fine crystal. Like diamonds.
Deadly diamonds, if you got careless. But Carlssons came from the northland, the Viking land, and knew how to live with snow and ice and cold that would freeze your spit before it reached the ground. A great-uncle of his had sailed north of Greenland on the Bowdoin with MacMillan, another had crewed Cook’s expedition. Dennis still had a caribou parka and sealskin pants and boots from that one, locked up in a cedar chest and waiting for another chance at ninety north.
The gatehouse showed as a ghostly darkness on his left. He eased the truck to a stop, climbed down to open the garage, and then up again to back in and park. Four inches of fresh snow covered the pavement since he’d pulled out this morning. Still clear and sunny in Portland, most likely, off in the other Maine. The snow would have wiped out those bear tracks, no evidence to show to “Aunt” Jean if Rick went and carried out his threat.
Silver dancing spirit bears. Naskeag “aunts.” Dennis winced at the thought. He wasn’t afraid of natural bears or winter. He knew enough to fear Bear as a Naskeag spirit, to fear Aunt Jean as a Spirit Hunter.
And he knew enough to fear whatever came from the sea to kill two security guards over at the Navy base. Spetsnaz playing tag, or something else. He pulled Dad’s old M-1 down from its hiding place above the garage door, field-stripped it on the workbench, and cleaned off the grease that guarded it inside and out against salt air. Checked the bore, checked the sights, lubed and then clicked the familiar parts back together. Loaded up three clips with fresh cartridges and shoved one down into the action. Round in the chamber, safety on. Then, more precaution, he strapped on the Webley and tucked spare ammo clips into parka pockets, the mottled white over-parka of winter camouflage from Uncle Ray’s service in the Aleutians.
Methodical, double-checking, triple-checking, working down the mental list step by step as if he was getting ready to move out on patrol again. Habits. Habits could save your ass, but they sure looked funny when they resurfaced half a world away from where they mattered. He laughed at himself, shook his head, and slapped a strip of tape over the rifle’s muzzle, over the “National Match” star, to keep snow out of the bore. He didn’t really need that—the old Garand would take snow and rain and sand and mud and keep on kicking, not like those damned M-16s that would foul and jam if you looked at them crosswise.
‘Course, family legend said that the ancient trapdoor Springfield would jam if you fired twenty or thirty of the old black powder cartridges the army issued. Each one left a serious mess behind, not to mention the cloud of smoke that marked your position for the enemy. Hell of a note when you have to field-strip and clean your weapon in the middle of a firefight. Same legend said that was part of why Custer and the Seventh Cav bought the farm.
Bad equipment and stupid, arrogant command. Like the Prophet said, there is nothing new under the sun. Dennis shook his head and snugged his parka hood around his face. And tested the straps on his GI foot before lacing on his snowshoes. Details.
M-1 slung across his back, frozen deer carcass on the battered old wood toboggan, long enough tote strap to keep it clear of his snowshoe heels, Dennis felt ready for Ghost Point. Rick had gutted and quartered the doe before it froze, so Cassidy and Pete lost out on the good stuff, the liver and rest of the paunch.
He locked up and tested the doors, then headed out into the wind-whipped snow, still damn near whiteout and stinging crystals on his cheeks and eyelids. Dennis grinned to himself. Primordial man against the storm, dragging his prey back to the cave. Primordial man should have brought snow goggles, but he’d forgotten. Or trusted the Weather Service, just as serious an error in judgment. Winter survival could ride on such minor things.
His safety line began right at the gate post, blue nylon pot-warp strung from tree to tree through the most sheltered heart of the Point, a guide he could follow blind if he had to. He let it slide through his left hand as he slogged along, freeing the slack from crusted snow and underbrush as he went, raising the wrapped coils on tree trunks where snow built up in drifts in the lee of brush or glacier-piled stones. Gusts and lulls tugged him from side to side, almost as if he sailed over the slow waves of the snow, and the steady pace warmed him just short of sweating.
That was one of those old Carlsson rules—never sweat in winter. Wet clothing will kill you. Slow, methodical, saving energy, attention to each step and the next and the next because tangling and breaking a snowshoe could mean death, spraining an ankle could mean death, breaking through crust into one of the small frog-ponds dotting the point could mean death. Take your time and you’ll get there faster than if you rush. Dennis grinned again, under the rime of snow and ice building on his beard—facing the chance of death brought life into clear focus. Only good thing ’Nam had taught him.
‘Nam. How would Ms. “That’s Doctor Tranh, thank you” survive out here? A tempting image crossed his mind, her orange Bauer parka almost visible in the gusting snow. Invite her out to check on those nests, nests too big for osprey, and give her a short survival test.
Serve the bitch right.
Dennis shook off the image. He had his own survival test to pass, one he’d lived through dozens of times before but each one still could be his last. It was simple pass/fail scoring, and you couldn’t appeal your grade to the department head.
Price of living alone. Never hike alone, never climb alone, never sail alone, never dive alone, never ski alone. Advice of caution, ’specially if you’re a cripple gimping along on one foot. Screw ’em. Life is dangerous. Terminal disease, no exceptions proved to science. I’d rather freeze to death than rot for fifteen years bedridden in a nursing home.
Ghost trees turned solid around him as the snow thinned, gusts still shaking mini-avalanches loose from the spruce and pine but less new snow falling. The squall seemed to be blowing out to sea. Another half-hour, hour, and he could be walking through dead calm under clear skies. Or through the heart of a blizzard. You could flip a coin to make your forecast—odds would be just as good as believing the radio.
The toboggan snagged on a spruce seedling poking through the snow, the hundredth time. He turned and cleared it. He shuffled on, snow squeaking under his feet now that the wind had quit howling in his ears. A red squirrel chattered defiance from the spruce thicket to his left, warning the wind to stay away.
The first pens loomed ahead, most empty for the winter. Bimbo should be tucked behind her windbreak, might be buried under drifted snow with just a tunnel melted through where her breath warmed the air. Cassidy and Pete would be denned up away from the wind as well. Welcome home, the mighty hunter. He should stay away from Bimbo, pass downwind so he wouldn’t spook her with any lingering stink of her dead cousin.
But the gate to her pen stood open. Open and rattling in the gusts, torn loose from the top hinge and sagging into snow scraped into a heaped arc by its swinging.
She’s blind. She’s scared of the world outside her pen, scared of Cassidy and Pete, scared of me even when I smell of cedar tips. She wouldn’t break out.
Spetsnaz, or whatever. He shifted into Warrior again, pulse speeding, as if the jungle had crept into Maine’s winter woods. Dennis dropped the toboggan’s tote line and crouched next to an ancient spruce. He unslung his M-1, dusting snow off the sights while his eyes searched the shadows and light around him. Unbroken snow, fresh snow, tracks an hour old would be hidden, no more than dimples in the whiteness.
A furrow led out of the pen. Holding low, awkward on the snowshoes, he shuffled nearer by one step and another while listening for any sound out of place. Pete whined from his pen, the coyote picking up Den’s scent on the breeze but too nervous to come out and play. No sign of Cassidy, gates to both pens still closed, no fresh marks in the snow, bobcat probably sleeping through the day in his straw nest.
Dennis wasn’t a tracker, not like Rick. The furrow looked like something had been dragged through the snow, before this latest squall. Something deer-sized, something doe-sized. He knelt and dug at the snow with his left hand, right hand holding the M-1 against his hip with the safety off ready for a snap shot.
He came up with blood, crimson snow frozen in lumps. Deer hair. A lot of blood and hair. Poacher. Fucking murder, killing a deer in a pen. Killing a blind deer in a pen. He felt a moment of red rage, then swallowed it and fed it to his senses as adrenaline.
Stay to one side of the trail, leave evidence untouched, get to the boathouse and call Rick on the CB radio. This will piss him off.
Eyes ahead, eyes behind, eyes to each side and overhead, searching for any trace of danger, anything out of place, listening, sniffing the air, crystal clarity of senses, Dennis dropped back into full stalking mode and crept across the snow. The furrow led toward the sea, toward the landing. Step by slow stalking step, he came in sight of the boathouse. The furrow swung wide of it, as if avoiding. But tracks, fresh tracks, came up from the sea on a separate line, turned to the side door, ended.
Vanished inside. Snowshoes stood by the door, aluminum frames and neoprene pads, fancy high-tech strangers. Dennis crouched next to the trunk of a pine, a hundred feet from his door, slid flat behind the trunk and the mound of a boulder under the snow. Someone, someone probably not the poacher, had entered his house minutes ago, after the snow ended. Dennis didn’t know anyone who owned snowshoes like those.
His finger toyed with the safety. Part of him wanted to stomp across the snow and roar through his own door, rifle at the ready, and execute a little berserker rage. Part of him remembered how he’d cleared brush for an open field of fire around the place, just part of feeling comfortable in the world. No way anyone could sneak up on that boathouse without being seen. He felt eyes peering out his own windows, alert and armed. He’d learned to pay attention to that Warrior sense.
Spetsnaz? Russian commandos, same ruthless training and black-ops missions as Bouchard?
He settled into the snow, the iron blade of his rifle sight steady on the door with the snowshoes next to it. His enemy would come back out the way he went in. Besides, the other doors were still blocked by snowdrifts—he hadn’t shoveled them out yet. And if Dennis slogged back to the gatehouse telephone and called the cops, he’d be waiting for at least an hour before a deputy showed up. The burglar, the whatever, would be long gone.
He could wait. He was dressed for the cold, and hadn’t sweated.
He waited. Chickadees chattered from the trees, waves humped and boomed on the shore, wind shook snow loose from the branches overhead. He waited. His toes complained of the cold, both the flesh and plastic feet. He wiggled the flesh toes inside the boot inside the snowshoe binding, waking the pins-and-needles of circulation, but he couldn’t do a damn thing about his plastic foot, the phantom pain.
He waited. His rage cooled and became calculation. He probably would not shoot that bastard the instant he stuck his nose out the door—wait and ask some questions first. The tracks came from the water . . . .
He waited. He wiggled his toes.
Sounds focused on the door—scuffling feet, the grunt of tugging the door open from its frame winter-warped by cold and dryness and frost-heaved foundation stones. He settled his finger against the trigger and relaxed his breathing.
A man showed in the darkness of the door frame, a man dressed in winter camouflage of blotched white and gray and black, a man carrying an assault rifle. Military weapon, military clothing, military stance. Weapon looked like a sawed-off M-16, not AK-47, stock just the bare gray metal of the buffer tube with a butt-plate attached. A careless man, total stranger, didn’t look around and study the woods over the sights of his weapon, not acting like Bouchard would. That man turned his back on the woods to tug the main door shut and then close the storm door, made sure they were tight just as if he cared. He squatted on the porch steps, next to his snowshoes, leaned the weapon against the cedar shingles of the boathouse wall, started the fiddling-dance of strapping snowshoes to his boots.
Spetsnaz? The picture read strange to Den’s eye, warrior sense just wound up to the edge and not over it. He shifted his sights to the rifle leaning against the wall, against his wall, centered on the receiver just behind and below the ejection port. Damnfool cowboy-movie trick, shooting the weapon rather than the man. Hundred feet, match rifle and target ammo, piece of cake. He squeezed the trigger.
The crack of the M-1 echoed and re-echoed, turned hollow from the stone cliffs across the bay, and his sights recoiled and then settled back on the man. That assault rifle cartwheeled into a puff of fresh snow fifteen feet down the boathouse wall, well out of the man’s reach, and he’d have to wade through snowdrifts four feet deep to get to it. Dennis lay still, sheltered by the pine trunk and the boulder, hidden behind snow.
He waited.
The man had jerked to his feet, hand clawing at his parka over his right hip but not diving inside. Now he stood still, hands in the open, scanning the forest around him. Body language said he hadn’t spotted Dennis. Body language said he had a sidearm belted under that parka.
Long range for a pistol. “Hands on top of your head!”
The man obeyed.
Good first step. He understood English and seemed willing to behave. The scene still read strange.
“You’ve got a sidearm. I can put three rounds through your heart before you reach it. Unzip your parka and show it to me, move slow, I’ll let you. Move an inch too far or too fast, I’ll shoot. You want to take that weapon out slowly and lay it on the steps. Understand?”
The stranger had zeroed in on Den’s voice, staring toward his tree now. He nodded, licking his lips from fear. Dennis kept the sights hard on the man’s sternum.
“These are hollow-points, match bullets. No small neat holes, and it’s a long way to the nearest hospital. Move like you want to live a while longer.”
The man nodded again. His hand lowered to his zipper, an inch at a time, tugged it down, spread the parka wide to show a khaki web belt and holster underneath. He lifted a black automatic out of it, looked like an army .45, thumb and two fingers holding the butt, nowhere near the trigger or the grip safety. He crouched, slow and careful, and laid the pistol down on the porch landing. He stood up again. He’d finally spotted Dennis, identified the lump beside a tree with a barrel sticking out of the snow and looking like a branch stub.
“Naval Security.”
That clicked with the rest of the picture. Dennis nodded to himself but didn’t relax. “Take out your ID card and drop it next to the pistol. Walk away from the building. Walk over to that crooked spruce and stand in the middle of the snowdrift.”
The man moved slowly again, pulling out a wallet and then a card from the wallet and dropping the card. He stepped down from the porch and waded through snow, no snowshoes, slower and slower as it rose above his knees and then his waist.
Time for the acid test. Did he carry a holdout? Cops usually did, soldiers might not.
Dennis struggled to his feet, leaning on the tree, awkward with the snowshoes and the plastic foot and the long waiting, and the man stayed still in his snowdrift even when Den’s rifle strayed off-target.
The stranger studied Dennis for a minute, took in his stance and cover and the way he held a weapon, then lifted an eyebrow. “Nam?”
“Army. Iron Triangle.”
“Khe Sanh.”
Den nodded at the lodge recognition, sign and countersign. He stopped short of giving his unit and dates in-country, though. “Semper Fi, Marine.” He didn’t lower the Garand, kept the iron sights centered on the intruder’s chest. The man had no business here, wherever he might have served. “What the fuck you think you’re doing?”
“Naval Security, like I said. We’ve got a . . . situation . . . over at the base. Commander ordered a coast check.”
Dennis shook his head. “Land’s posted, signs every twenty feet along the shore. What gave you the brilliant notion you could poke into private houses?”
“Naval Security.”
Okay, one of those. Certain jobs bred certain kinds of assholes. “That won’t even buy you a cup of coffee off the base. You got any kind of badge from a civil authority? State, county, local? You got a search warrant?”
Dennis didn’t expect an answer. He didn’t get one, either. He shuffled across snow to the boathouse, picked up the ID card, and studied it. One Edward O. Johnson, USMC, card gave his rank as second lieutenant, if he’d been at Khe Sanh and was still a butter-bars he must have come up through the ranks and OCS. And lost all sense in the process. Lieutenants shouldn’t be let out without a keeper, a senior NCO by choice.
Dennis dropped the card, squatted on the porch, and pulled out his Webley for backup before leaning the M-1 against the wall. He picked up the .45 auto and cleared its action, field-stripped it, and tossed the barrel forty feet off into the snow. Then he retrieved that sawed-off M-16, a model he’d never seen before, and tried the action. It was jammed—the .30 cal slug had taken it exactly where he’d aimed.
He stared over at the waiting Marine. “Round in the chamber?”
The man hesitated. “No.”
“You don’t lie very well. Work on it. You’ll need practice, the way you’re going.”
Dennis snow-shoed closer to the man where he stood mired in the drift, centered the M-16’s sights between the man’s eyes, fiddled with the safety and trigger guard, and shook his head at the wince. No blood on the cammies, no deer hair. There’d been a lot of blood and hair.
He pointed the muzzle at the sky and pulled the trigger. A flat crack echoed off the sea cliffs again, thinner and lighter than the boom of the M-1. No ejected cartridge—action truly jammed. He dumped the crippled M-16 in the snow and retrieved his old Garand.
“Take your Mattel toy and .45 back to the armory and explain just what happened to them. I ought to keep your ID card and hand it over to your CO in person, but I won’t. I don’t like officers and I don’t like shitheads. Get the fuck off my land and don’t come back. Don’t slow down, don’t look around. I might be following you. And next time, I aim at the man rather than the weapon.”
But he wouldn’t follow the Marine. He needed to call Rick on the CB. Call him about whatever took Bimbo.
That was the real enemy.