Prey sahl-1

by Ken Goddard

  "I am ready," Watanabe said, allowing himself a brief glance at the dangling rope ladder behind him.

  Gerd Maas used a wrist lock on Butch Chareaux's broken but unbandaged left wrist and an arm across his throat to drag the cursing and kicking Cajun up to his feet and over to the cage. There, Maas shoved his frantically struggling and screaming victim against the cage door several times, causing the male grizzly to lunge and tear at the restraining bars.

  In one quick movement, Maas pulled Chareaux ten feet back from the cage door, took a last confirming glance at Kimiko Osan, and then yelled out one word:

  "Now!"

  Moving with the speed and precision of a trained gymnast, Shoshin Watanabe tossed Butch Chareaux's rifle out on the ground in front of the cage, released the locking lever, threw the door open, and then turned and ran for the dangling rope ladder as the grizzly burst out of its prison.

  For a brief moment, it looked as though the bear might go for Watanabe, but then Maas yelled out something in guttural German over the high-pitched screams of Butch Chareaux, and the bear lunged toward the two men just as Maas shoved Chareaux forward.

  The bear's slashing right paw tore open the sleeve of Maas's jacket in the instant before the four-inch claws slashed deep into Butch Chareaux's shoulder and chest muscles. But Maas had thrown himself backward as he was reaching for the. 357 Ruger revolver tucked against the small of his back. And in the brief moment it took for the enraged grizzly to fling Butch Chareaux's now lifeless body aside and lunge toward its white-bearded nemesis, Kimiko Osan had thrown Paul McNulty forward onto the ground, smoothly drawn MeNulty's. 45 SIG-Sauer out of her waistband, and squeezed the trigger.

  The first two. 45-caliber jacketed slugs caught Butch Chareaux in the rib cage and the side of the head as he was going down. The shots were only for effect, since Chareaux was already dead.

  The next round ricocheted off the surface of the bear's skull, sending blood and small gouged chunks of furry tissue in all directions and causing the bear to turn away from its murderous charge toward Maas to focus on its new tormentor. Kimiko Osan unflinchingly stood her ground and continued to aim and fire at the oncoming bear.

  In that instant, from a distance of less than five feet, Gerd Maas sent two. 357 Magnum bullets ripping through the rib cage and heart of the huge beast. Both of these wounds would prove to be fatal, but not yet. The huge grizzly turned once again to lunge at its white-haired tormentor.

  From five feet away, Gerd Maas had less than a second to live when he coolly triggered off a. 357 round straight into the bear's wide-open mouth-partially severing its spinal column-and then swiftly cocked and fired the powerful handgun two more times, sending a pair of the high-velocity projectiles through the deep eye sockets of the suddenly paralyzed grizzly.

  Calmly turning his back to the huge falling beast, he felt one heavy lifeless paw strike against his shoulder, drawing five bloody streaks down the side of his jacket. Maas coolly aimed and fired the final. 357 round from Sonny Chareaux's single-action revolver into Paul MeNulty's throat at a point just above the agent's Kevlar vest.

  Over a mile away, and distracted by Marie Pascalaura's excited screams as he struggled to untangle the two jerking lines, Henry Lightstone never heard the first three shots fired through Paul MeNulty's. 45 SIG-Sauer.

  But all of them certainly heard the two booming explosions from Butch Chareaux's. 357 echo across the bright turquoise water.

  "Henry! Watch out, he's going under the boat again!" Marie Pascalaura warned as she tried to bring the tip of her rod around the cover of the outboard motor. But then she gasped in surprise as Lightstone quickly reached for his belt knife, snapped the sharply honed blade open one-handed, and severed both lines.

  "WHAT — " Marie Pascalaura started to yell, but Lightstone silenced her with a wave of his hand while he and Woeshack and Jackson listened as the steady gunfire continued to reverberate across the water and off the surrounding mountains.

  Nine more echoing shots later, the lake was silent once again. Henry Lightstone tossed his backpack into the bottom of Sam Jackson's patrol boat and crossed over to the smaller craft as the engines of both outboard motors were started up.

  "Soon as you get in the air, get on the radio," Lightstone said to Woeshack. "Try to raise Paul, let him know we've got a situation out here. After that, put yourself over the south side of the lake, see if you can spot a boat or a plane. Sam and I will work our way in from the shore."

  "Got it," Woeshack acknowledged.

  Working quickly, Lightstone secured his two-and-a-half- inch. 357 Magnum revolver into the hip holster and then transferred the three cylindrical, hollow-point-filled speed-loaders from the backpack into the deep front pocket of his jacket.

  "What about me?" Marie asked, looking anxious and concerned as she clutched the puppy to her chest.

  "Sam, have you got a portable with you?" Lightstone asked quickly, noting that the refuge officer was also armed with one of the standard Fish and Wildlife Service handguns.

  "Sure do."

  "Okay," Lightstone nodded as he reached into his backpack and handed Marie his packset radio and the pair of binoculars. "You're going with Thomas to the refuge dock. Once you get there, you lock yourself in the boat house, go upstairs, and watch for anyone in a boat or on foot heading toward the public launch ramp. You see anybody heading that way, especially anyone moving fast, you get on that radio, okay?"

  "Got it," Marie acknowledged as she secured the radio in her jacket. She hunched down as Woeshack cast off Sam Jackson's line and headed the patrol boat toward the distant northwestern shore.

  "You got anybody else in the area?" Lightstone asked Jackson as he braced himself in the seat next to the refuge officer.

  "Couple of biologists tracking some moose on the north side, and a trainee down at the dock working on one of the boats," Sam Jackson replied. "Nobody with law- enforcement authority."

  "Okay," Lightstone nodded, picking up the refuge officer's binoculars and beginning to scan the distant shoreline again as Jackson started the small patrol craft toward the southern shore, "let's just hope these people are halfway friendly."

  It was Shoshin Watanabe who first spotted the approaching craft.

  "It is the refuge officer with one of the other fishermen," Kimiko Osan confirmed, focusing the spotting scope on the rapidly moving outboard.

  "How are they armed?" Maas asked.

  "I can't tell." Osan shook her head, frustrated by the distance and the narrow focusing field of the scope. "The other boat is heading back toward the landing very fast," she added.

  Gerd Maas surveyed the bloody kill site one last time, noting that the now empty. 45 SIG-Sauer lay in the blood-splattered weeds a few feet away from Paul McNulty's outstretched hand. He was pleased to see that Shoshin Watanabe had already collected all of the cut tape and gauze and placed the materials in one of the backpacks.

  As far as Maas could tell, the scene looked perfect.

  Walking over to the sprawled body of Butch Chareaux, he placed the empty stainless-steel Ruger revolver in the Cajun poacher's bloody palm, and with gloved hands, wrapped Chareaux's lifeless fingers around the rubber grip and trigger guard of the gunpowder-and-blood-smeared weapon. Then, after tossing the still-warm pistol a few feet away from Chareaux's limp hand, Maas looked up at Shoshin Watanabe with his deadly cold-blue eyes.

  "Tell Parker and Bolin to be ready."

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Apart from the cries of distant eagles, there was no sound.

  And no movement.

  Nothing.

  "Why don't we hold it right here for a couple of minutes?" Henry Lightstone suggested quietly as he lowered the binoculars and stared out across the glistening turquoise water at the still, quiet, and seemingly unoccupied landscape. Set before a backdrop of snowcapped mountains, low cliffs stretched out across the long, rocky, tree-and- shrub-covered shore.

  "Sounds good to me," Refuge Officer Sam Jackson nodded a
s he throttled the powerful outboard motor down to a rumbling idle.

  "What's the name of this place again?" Lightstone asked as he readjusted the binoculars and continued his methodical search.

  "Lupus Island, though it's not actually an island. There's a narrow spit of shale-covered sand that connects it to the shore."

  To Special Agent Henry Lightstone, it looked like the point of land could easily conceal several hundred drunk, camouflaged, and potentially trigger-happy hunters. But if all of that shooting had been done by legitimate hunters, there should be at least an occasional flash of camouflage clothing. A hat, or a vest, or laughter, or loud voices.

  But there wasn't.

  The idea of being a sitting duck out on about twenty-four thousand acres of glassy-smooth, subarctic water didn't appeal to Lightstone.

  "Still nothing?" Jackson finally asked.

  "Nope. Nothing at all." Lightstone shook his head. "What do you say we try that little cover straight ahead, work our way west?"

  "Sounds good to me," the orange-suited refuge officer nodded as he throttled the thin-skinned aluminum boat on a new course roughly parallel to the shoreline. When they reached the shallow cove, Sam Jackson turned the small patrol craft perpendicular to shore and then gave it one last nudge with the powerful outboard engine.

  "How deep do you figure the water is?" Lightstone asked, setting aside the binoculars and getting ready to jump out and protect the boat from the sharp-edged rocks.

  "Well, out here we usually go by the rule of ten," Jackson said as he cut off the engine and brought the prop up out of the water. "About ten feet out from shore, you can figure that you're going to be standing in about ten feet of water that's just about ten degrees Celsius."

  "Christ," Lightstone muttered as he held his hand in the ice-cold water for a moment, then quickly brought it back out.

  "Personally, if I was you," Sam Jackson advised in his slow Georgia drawl, "I'd stay in the boat until we run up on shore. We can always get the government to spring for a new boat every now and then."

  Taking the bearded refuge officer at his word, Lightstone remained in the bow of the boat until the thin, insulated hull scraped loudly against the shale-covered shore. Jackson double-tied the bowline to a pair of tire-sized boulders.

  "No one in his right mind ever goes swimming after a loose boat in these waters," Jackson said as he pulled a packset radio out of his backpack and looked over at Lightstone. "Are we ready? "

  "I am, but you might want to get out of that Day-Glo suit first."

  Sam Jackson looked down at the bright orange Mustang suit that was supposedly guaranteed to keep him alive for at least an extra four or five minutes if he ever had the misfortune to get dunked into the frigid subarctic waters of Skilak Lake.

  "You really think we're going to get into some kind of confrontation with these folks?"

  Lightstone hesitated for a moment. "Let's put it this way," he finally said. "Given the choice, I'd rather swim halfway across this lake after your boat than try to sneak in on some trigger-happy idiots in a getup like that."

  Lightstone waited while Jackson worked himself out of the bright survival suit, then led the way as they climbed to the top of the fifteen-foot cliff. Once there, they slowly worked their way through a nearly impenetrable barrier of waist-high scrub brush, irregular moss-and-lichen-covered outcroppings, and ten-to-fifteen-foot spruce trees.

  "Christ, how the hell can anybody hunt in stuff like this?" Lightstone muttered as he noisily pulled himself through a tightly grouped clump of white spruce trees, only to find himself blocked by the sharp, poking branches of a dead and partially dropped cottonwood.

  "What they do is look for the bare spots, usually around the big patches of salmonberries," Jackson said. "Saves a lot of wear and tear."

  "Like those over there to the right?" Lightstone asked hopefully.

  Sam Jackson looked up, squinting against the glare of the low sun. "Yeah, I'd say that's a likely spot."

  Two minutes later, the two federal wildlife officers were kneeling down beneath a large clump of berries, examining the still-warm, carcass of the maliciously killed mother Kodiak. One of the first things that Lightstone observed was the radio collar around the bear's thick neck.

  "You know this one?"

  "Oh, yeah." Sam Jackson nodded sadly. "We named her Molly. Found her as an orphaned cub over on Kodiak Island. Poacher killed her mom. Decided to transfer her over to the Killey Valley as an experiment. It seemed to be working out just fine, but I guess some goddamn bastard just couldn't wait to get his bear."

  "Out of season?"

  "Huh? Oh, yeah, I guess that, too," Jackson confirmed. "Not that it really matters in a situation like this."

  "Why's that?" Lightstone asked, distracted by the curious details that his homicide-trained eyes were starting to pick up.

  "Number-one rule in bear hunting out here. Can't hunt a female with cubs, no matter what. Christ, look at those teats. It should have been obvious to anybody with eyes that she was still nursing. She had two, and they're probably not far away. They'd stay fairly close to their mother,"

  Sam Jackson muttered in frustration as he stood up and looked around. "Not that any of that will matter much, even if we find the guy. He'll just claim it was self-defense, like they always do."

  As Jackson started to poke around in the nearby brush, Henry Lightstone pulled a sharp folding knife out of his pocket and began to cut and probe the massive left front shoulder of the huge bear.

  "The cubs were late-born," Jackson said half to himself as he slowly extended his search out into the surrounding brush and trees. "Probably running around here, scared half out of- Oh, for Christ's sake!"

  "What's the matter?" Lightstone brought his head up from where he had been examining the bear's massive front paws, instinctively reaching for his pistol as he looked around quickly.

  "Well, at least the bastard didn't leave the poor damn thing out here to starve," Sam Jackson muttered as he reached into the brush with gloved hands. Using the length of berry juice-soaked rope that was still looped around its neck, he pulled out the carcass of the young male cub.

  "Must be a hell of a sport, tying up baby bears and taking potshots at them." Lightstone shook his head, checking the surrounding hillside one more time before he resecured the. 357 in his hip holster and went back to examining the huge mother Kodiak.

  "Potshots, my ass. Take a closer look," the furious refuge officer said.

  "They cut its throat?" Lightstone blinked in surprise. Using his bare hands to move the rope and the blood-soaked fur aside, he exposed the deep, cleanly cut wound. "Why the hell would somebody do that?"

  "I don't know why, but I can sure as hell tell you they did it after they killed her," Sam Jackson replied, nodding down at the mother Kodiak. "No way in the world a bear like that would ever let a human get in that close to one of her cubs."

  Henry Lightstone spent a few more moments looking back over the scene from his kneeling position before he spoke.

  "Actually, I think maybe she did let somebody get that close and was trying as hard as she could to correct her mistake," Lightstone said quietly. He felt around the stiffening body of the small cub to confirm the absence of any other wounds.

  "What do you mean by that?"

  "Take a look at her front shoulders, at the main joints. And then at the back legs, around the knees."

  "Yeah, what about-" Jackson started to ask as he knelt down by the sprawled carcass of the huge female. Then he muttered a series of heartfelt curses as he examined each of the four massive wounds.

  "Remember how evenly paced the shooting was?"

  Sam Jackson nodded.

  "Well, the way it looks to me, whoever did this probably broke her down progressively as she was coming uphill," Lightstone explained, pointing to the trail of dislodged rocks, broken trees, and wide splatters of blood. "First shot was probably right down there by that rock, maybe twenty yards away at the most. You can
see where she went down each time, and then kept on coming back up. If I had to make a guess, I'd say he was standing right about there," Lightstone added, motioning to a spot about three feet away from the bear's massive head where a partial boot print was just barely visible in the rocky soil.

  "How can you tell all that?"

  "Used to work a lot of homicides down south," Lightstone replied. "Basically the same thing. If you look close, right around there, you can see the powder burns on the forehead and some of the effects of the muzzle blast." He pointed in the general area of the partially blown-out wound. "Coup de grace. Just stood there waiting for her to get close enough."

  "The guy used the cub as bait," Jackson whispered, shaking his head slowly in disbelief.

  "Oh, yeah? Why's that?"

  "Bears are afraid of people. She would have done anything she could to avoid a human, unless her cub was involved."

  Lightstone nodded after looking around the scene again. "You can see some smaller claw marks in that tree right there next to where the guy was standing. Cub was probably trying to get away. Get back to Mom."

  "I'll tell you what," Sam Jackson said. "If you're reading this whole thing right, and this guy deliberately drew this bear onto himself, using that cub as bait, then I don't care what kind of rifle he's carrying, the man's got to be crazy."

  "What would you say if I told you he used a pistol?" Lightstone asked as he dropped two chunks of bloody metal in the refuge officer's hand.

  "I'd say he was out of his goddamn mind," Sam Jackson said as he stared down at the badly mangled bullets.

  "I dug them out of the knee and shoulder joints, left side, front and back legs. The way they're torn up, it looks like they were probably from a. 357 Magnum. I'll send them down to our forensics lab in Ashland for confirmation, see what they can tell us about the make and model from the land and groove ratios."