by Ken Goddard
"Are they going to take them in?"
"Yeah, looks like it," Scoby said. "Apparently no one in the group was sober enough to have driven here legally, so they're all gonna get put on ice for about twenty-four hours. Drunk driving, disturbing the peace, littering the parking lot. Couple down below got a little shook up when they looked out their window and saw the guy land on his car, but outside of that, everything seems to be settling down."
MeNulty was silent for a few moments.
"Listen," he finally said, "are you absolutely certain that this thing wasn't a probe?"
"Paul, to tell you the honest-to-God truth, I think the whole thing's too fucking absurd to be anything but the truth," Scoby said. "We're going to check out their hotel just to make sure. You think we ought to move the command post?"
MeNulty hesitated. "Yes, I do, but that means shutting down the communications system, right?"
"Afraid so, unless we wait for Mike. He should be back pretty soon, though. Anyway, if we left right now, Mike wouldn't know how to find us unless we contacted the airport."
"You guys have been made, and we don't know if Alex Chareaux has connected with the locals," MeNulty said. "What about the radios?"
"Mike's got a packset with him for emergency use, but it's a one-way deal. It's not likely he's going to be in any position to leave it on."
"Which means that if he does find something in that plane, we're not going to know about it until he tries to call in-or goes back to the motel, and finds out you've moved."
"That's about it," Scoby acknowledged. "I'll try to get us checked in over at the Prime Rate. That's the place right across the freeway, so we shouldn't have any problem picking up a radio call when he tries to find us. Trouble is, where does that leave Henry?"
"He's still got the lifeline," MeNulty said. "I had Mike reroute the link to Terry's house before he went out to the airport. I'll give Terry a call before I leave, make sure he knows that you're relocating."
"Yeah, that's fine, but maybe you ought to work it out so that Martha's the one who answers the phone. Far as I know, I don't think that Henry and Terry have ever met."
There was a short pause on the other end of the line.
"Shit," MeNulty muttered.
"What's the matter?"
"Martha left about a half hour ago. She was going to drop off the dogs at the kennel, run some errands and do some shopping. Last I heard, she wasn't planning on getting up to Terry's until nine or ten this evening."
"Can you get ahold of her?"
"Not unless I put out an APB on her car."
"Christ, if Henry hears a strange voice on the other end of that lifeline, he's just going to hang up."
Carl Scoby could almost hear McNulty's mind churning.
"I'm getting too goddamned old for this kind of shit," the team leader finally muttered.
"You and me both," Scoby said in heartfelt agreement.
"Okay," McNulty sighed, "here's what we'll do. We've still got a fair amount of time before Henry should be coming back from that hunt, so let's make good use of it. You turn Dwight and Larry loose, see if they can get a lead on Ruebottom. I'll make sure Terry knows where to contact us in case somebody calls him and then hangs up. In the meantime, it shouldn't take Mike long to find out what's going on with that Lear jet, so if we're even halfway lucky, he'll find you guys and get back in time to reconnect the communications system before Henry tries to report in."
"You do realize that this is beginning to sound like New York all over again," Carl Scoby commented dryly.
"Yeah, tell me about it. That's why I'm heading down there. I'll be damned if I'm going to spend another night sitting around on my ass by a phone, waiting to find out if I still have a team."
"Sounds good to me," Scoby said gratefully, more than willing to hand the supervision of this detail over to McNulty. "Anything else you want done before you get here?"
"Just make sure everybody down there stays alert," McNulty emphasized. "We don't need any more goddamned incidents drawing attention to what we're doing. And keep in mind that until Henry gets back from the hunt and starts calling around trying to find his pilot, there's no reason why somebody should be looking real hard for a guy named Len Ruebottom."
"Maybe we're trying to hook him up for another charter?"
"No, I think we'd be pushing our luck trying something like that. Henry's got Chareaux convinced that he's a big enough player to have a plane of his own on stand-by twenty-four hours a day. But even so, we took a hell of a chance using the Lear. A plane like that is way out of Henry Lightner's league."
"So now Chareaux has to figure that Henry's got himself some kind of Sugar Daddy hanging around in the background, which is bound to make him a little uneasy, because we set up Lightner as an independent operator," Scoby said.
"That's right. But to a guy like Chareaux, the smell of serious money is like blood in the water for a shark. So he starts sniffing around…"
"… and comes across a rookie agent named Len Ruebottom thrashing about on the surface like a goddamned cripple," Scoby finished dourly.
"Exactly."
"You really think they made him?" Scoby asked. Stoner and Paxton had come back into the room and were now sitting on the bed, staring at him.
"Yeah, I'm starting to think it's a strong possibility."
"So where does that leave Henry?"
"I don't know. That's the problem."
"There's always the chance that they made Ruebottom as an agent, but then came to the conclusion that he's working on Henry instead of on them," Scoby suggested. "Be a hell of a cover, when you stop to think about it."
"That's a possibility, too," McNulty acknowledged. "Henry told Alex that he's been hunting illegally since he was a kid and that he's got one hell of a trophy collection hidden away somewhere."
"Christ, with clients like that, the Chareauxs ought to expect the feds to be snooping around," Scoby said.
"Sure, hazards of the game. But would they be crazy enough to take Lightner out on a hunt if they knew he had a federal wildlife agent right on his ass?"
"Any halfway sane crook would have been long gone by now," Scoby agreed, "but I wouldn't put the Chareaux brothers in that category."
"No, I wouldn't either," McNulty agreed. "Especially not Alex. And that's exactly what's bothering me right now. I'd like to believe that everything's on track and that Len Ruebottom's just sitting around in a bar somewhere in Bozeman wondering if he's going to get his butt chewed for not doing as he was told. And I'd also like to believe that Henry's going to show up sometime in the next three or four hours with all the evidence we need to put these coon-ass bastards away for good."
"But you don't think so, do you?"
"No, I don't."
"So how long do you figure we've got?"
"We'll let it run until ten o'clock. That's about," McNulty checked his watch, "five and a half hours from now."
"Ten p.m., check," Scoby said as he marked the time down in his case notebook, "and after that?"
"If we don't hear from Len or Henry by ten o'clock," McNulty said, his voice taking on a cold chill, "the five of us are going to drive down to Gardiner and have a nice heart-to-heart talk with Alex Chareaux. And in the meantime, let's just hope that Mike's gotten something useful out of that goddamn plane."
Chapter Seventeen
"It's almost twenty to eight. We're going to be late," Butch Chareaux whispered to his brother, who nodded his head solemnly.
"Yes, I know," Alex Chareaux said as he continued to watch the bizarre ritual being carried out before his disbelieving eyes with a mixture of disgust and helpless frustration. "But they are the clients. There is nothing that we can do."
"But Lightner-" Butch Chareaux started to protest, but his brother waved him off.
"Lightner is no longer a problem," Alex Chareaux said firmly. "It is simply a matter of timing now. Before this night is gone, one way or the other, it will all be resolved."
&n
bsp; Timing.
From the moment that Reston Wolfe had called to demand a change in their scheduled hunt, time had been a key factor in Alex Chareaux's planning, and a crucial element in providing a suitable demonstration for Wolfe and his incredibly wealthy new clients.
But now time had become the enemy because it had taken them much longer than Chareaux had anticipated to "find" the smaller female grizzly and set the scene so that Dr. Morito Asai could have his kill. Mostly because he and his brothers had overestimated the bear's weight when they had switched over from the maintenance doses of phenobar- bital to the controlling dose of the far more powerful but shorter-acting secobarbital.
As a result, it had been necessary for Butch Chareaux to spend almost half an hour poking and prodding the nearly unconscious bear-first with the barrel of his Model 70 Winchester and finally with an electric cattle prod-before he was able to get her out of the hidden cage. And even then it had taken another five minutes of increasingly powerful jolts from the prod before Butch Chareaux was finally able to force the terrified young bear up onto her weak and trembling legs, and then drive her through the forest into the fatal path of Dr. Morito Asai's one-hundred-and-twenty- five-thousand-dollar double-barreled rifle.
But having learned their lesson from the previous shooting incident involving their supposed new partner, Butch Chareaux was careful to stay behind the frantically stumbling bear and to duck down at the proper moment. And Alex Chareaux had been equally careful to place his trigger-happy clients in positions that gave them a clear field of fire with their expensive, high-powered weapons.
So as a result, the second grizzly kill had been quick and easy and relatively uneventful.
Which meant that they still should have had plenty of time to load the bull elk, the eagles, the two bears, Lightner, and their hunters into the two camouflaged pickup trucks, drive out onto the paved road, and get to the small town of Fishtail and the previously designated phone booth by eight o'clock that evening. Exactly as the three brothers had planned it all out in their Bozeman motel room after having received the unexpected call from Dr. Reston Wolfe less than ten hours ago.
But it wasn't working out that way.
And it could all be traced back to Reston Wolfe's damnable arrogance, Alex Chareaux decided.
Chareaux was irritated because Wolfe, in his predictably insolent and patronizing manner, had offered him and his brothers the possibility of riches beyond their wildest dreams. But in doing so, he had placed them in a position of having to face the necessity-and the inherent dangers-of taking on a partner like Henry Allen Lightner.
So in what little time that remained before Henry Allen Lightner would be landing at Bozeman Airport, Chareaux and his brothers had been forced to come up with a makeshift plan that just might enable them, within the space of eight short hours, to determine the true nature of their proposed new partner. But in setting up the quick demonstration hunt for Wolfe, and in laying out their carefully orchestrated timetable to reveal any flaws in the supposed background of Lightner, Alex Chareaux had failed to anticipate yet another critical factor that would bring his entire operation to a stumbling halt.
In this case, it was the ancient cultural traditions of Dr. Morito Asai.
"No, must take the gallbladders first. Very important," Asai had argued insistently when Butch Chareaux started to back the winch-mounted pickup truck up against the huge carcass of the male grizzly.
And then, before Alex or Butch Chareaux could do anything to stop him, Dr. Morito Asai had proceeded to sit himself down in front of the slain bear and cut into its belly with an incredibly sharp knife that looked like a miniature version of the samurai's traditional katana sword.
"What is he doing?" Butch Chareaux had demanded in a choked and disbelieving voice, but his brother had simply pulled him aside and told him to shut up, because their new clients had agreed to spend fifty thousand dollars a week on their illegal hunts, with a minimum guarantee of fifty weeks. And if earning two and a half million dollars meant that they would be forced to stand by while their insane clients cut open the stomachs of their bears and removed their gallbladders, then that was the way it would have to be.
"But the smell," Butch Chareaux had groaned, watching in dismay as the diminutive hunter reached into the grizzly's abdominal cavity with his bare arms and removed a bloody organ about the size of an Idaho potato. With the tip of the sharp blade, Asai cut a small slit in the gallbladder.
Working slowly and carefully so as not to spill the precious fluid, Asai poured a bit of the dark bile over a small, cup-sized bowl of rice. Then, after quickly placing the gallbladder in a self-sealing plastic bag, he proceeded to eat the soaked rice with a pair of chopsticks that he produced from the inner pocket of his hunting jacket.
Polite as always, Asai had offered to share this delicacy with his companions, but Reston Wolfe and Lisa Abercombie hurriedly declined, and the two Chareaux brothers simply pretended that they didn't understand.
Instead, they had continued to load their clients' expensive hunting gear back into the short-bed pickup with the camper shell. They used the sleeping bags and Henry Lightstone's limp body to cushion the two incredibly expensive Holland and Holland rifles until the weapons could be broken down, cleaned, and returned to the twenty-two-hundred-dollar mahogany cases that had been left in the helicopter.
Then, muttering to himself in words that he had first learned at the knee of his Cajun grandfather, Butch Chareaux helped his brother winch the larger bear into the back of the larger pickup truck. Dragging the half-ton animal up next to the carcass of the bull elk, he grunted as the smell of blood and severed intestines began to fill air.
They stood then in the twilight next to the camper shell, waiting for Dr. Asai to complete his ritual with the second bear.
"If we miss Sonny's call, what will we do with Henry?" Butch Chareaux asked as they watched Asai set the fresh bowl of rice down next to the smaller bear.
"If we miss the eight-o'clock call, Sonny knows to call again at ten. We will know then." Alex Chareaux shrugged with feigned indifference, not wanting Butch to know how badly he wanted to hear from their brother. How badly he wanted to know, one way or the other, before it was too late.
"But we have to be at Jacall's by ten. Do we take him there with us?"
"If necessary, we will take him to Jacall's and dispose of him there," Alex Chareaux told him, relieved to see that Dr. Asai was finally finished with the second bear.
"But the risk?"
"There are always risks, my brother." Alex Chareaux shrugged once more as he began walking toward the already overloaded pickup. "Come. If we hurry, perhaps we can still get to Fishtail by ten."
Chapter Eighteen
Command Sergeant Major Clarence MacDonald had spent the better part of his thirty-two years in the United States Army helping to train Green Beret teams to reconnoiter, stalk, and kill their enemies with weapons that ranged from bare hands, rocks, wire, knives, and silenced firearms to far more sophisticated laser-guided rockets and miniaturized nuclear ordnance.
The men who graduated from his courses were considered to be some of the most skillful, creative, and deadly soldiers that the world had ever known, and they had been demonstrating the effectiveness of their training in remote battlefields throughout the world for the past two decades.
But aside from the British Army's Special Air Service Squadrons in general, and perhaps three or four Special Forces teams that he could remember specifically, MacDonald was convinced that he had never addressed a group of individuals whose expertise in weaponry, tactics, communications, reconnaissance, intelligence gathering, logistics, demolitions, guerrilla warfare, and hand-to-hand combat had come even close to that of the ICER assault group that sat before him in this underground conference room.
And for perhaps the first time in as far back as he could remember, MacDonald was standing before a man whose lethal skills in one-on-one combat situations were rumored to match, or possibly
to even exceed, his own. As MacDonald gazed calmly into the pale eyes of Assault Group Leader Gerd Maas, however, he felt only professional curiosity, and even pleasant anticipation. In truth, he was looking forward to finding out for himself if the eye-opening reports and evaluations on Gerd Maas had any basis in reality.
At precisely 1930 hours, MacDonald stepped up to the raised podium that faced twenty-four padded theater chairs arranged on an upwardly sloping six-by-four grid. He stared out across the brightly lit room at the members of the assault group, all of whom were dressed in mountain-camouflaged military fatigues.
MacDonald noted immediately that one member of the Japanese contingent, Dr. Morito Asai, was missing.
"Gentlemen, and ladies," he added in deference to the three woman who comprised one quarter of the ICER assault group, "it is my pleasure to welcome you to the Whitehorse Cabin Training Center. Allow me to introduce myself. My name is Clarence MacDonald, and as some of you are aware, I am privileged to hold the rank of command sergeant major in the United States Army."
MacDonald scanned the eleven alert faces.
"Some of you I know from previous training sessions. The rest of you are familiar to me only by the information in your personnel files. But I want to begin this session by making certain that one thing is absolutely clear. I am not here as your training sergeant, but rather, as your host."
MacDonald paused for effect.
"It is clear that the United States Government has gone to a great deal of effort to recruit and equip a top-notch counterterrorist team. Why this team has been established, and who your targets will be, has not been revealed to me. And I would emphasize the fact that such information is not of any concern or interest to the Whitehorse Cabin training staff.
"According to your records," MacDonald went on, "each one of you possesses an incredible amount of training and practical experience, both as a field operative and as an instructor. It is also apparent that you are well versed in general field operations, and that you each make the effort to maintain a high level of proficiency in your own area of expertise. Therefore, in my view," MacDonald said in his quiet but firm voice, "it would be a waste of time to provide a training course for you in the classical sense. Instead, we intend to make ourselves available to do three specific things.
