by Ken Goddard
"But you would inspect occasionally if you thought there was something illegal in one of the shipments?"
"Oh, yes, certainly, especially if we got some kind of tip."
"Such as a single passenger trying to bring three untagged trophy grizzlies in from British Columbia, listing Anchorage as his final destination?"
"We would definitely search on something like that," Jennifer Alik said emphatically. "Of course it would help if that tip came from a reliable source."
"Then I guess the next question is, do you think I'm reliable enough?"
"Yes sir, of course," the young wildlife inspector laughed. "Do you have any idea of when this passenger might be coming in?"
Lightstone looked at his watch. "Far as I know, in about an hour and twenty minutes."
"Tonight?"
"I'm afraid so."
"Okay," Jennifer Alik sighed. "I'll be there, but it'll take me a couple of minutes to get dressed."
"Ah, listen," Lightstone said, "I'm staying here at the Captain Cook. Do you think you could pick me up on the way?"
Making full use of her connections with the operations staff at the Anchorage airport, it took Jennifer Alik less than twenty minutes to get Lightstone's bag checked onto Flight 394 and then return to her small, shared office at Alaska Air Cargo, where Henry Lightstone was waiting.
"Any problems?" he asked as she handed him the ticket packet with the red "Checked Firearms" tag stapled to the front.
"I had to verify that the gun in the locked case was unloaded," the cheerfully smiling wildlife inspector nodded. "McNulty's been saying some nice things about you the last couple of weeks, so I assumed it was."
"Yep, all safe and sound," Lightstone nodded, wishing that he had the heart to tell her about MeNulty, and wishing also that he could have carried the new 10mm Smith amp; Wesson semiautomatic pistol-the one he'd checked out of the Anchorage property room-with him on the plane. But he knew that it wasn't beyond A1 Grynad to have his agents monitoring the issuance of weapons passes by the airlines. And there was no way to avoid having to show his real credentials if he tried to go through the checkpoint armed.
Something about that whole weapons check-through procedure was tugging at the back of Lightstone's brain, but he didn't know why, and then Jennifer Alik interrupted his thoughts before he could figure it out.
"Anything else I can help you with?" the young Eskimo woman asked.
"Well, for the next twenty minutes or so," Lightstone said, "why don't you show me how you really would have inspected a shipment from Flight Ninety-nine had that tip come from a more reliable source."
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Thursday September 15th
At exactly one o'clock that Thursday morning, Special Agent Henry Lightstone went through the motions of suddenly remembering that he had a flight to catch. The assistant manager at the Alaska Cargo office-who was apparently willing to do just about anything for Jennifer Alik-stepped in and offered to drive him out on his baggage cart to the loading ramp for Alaska Flight 394.
Entering the plane via the emergency access stairway, Lightstone managed to bypass the surveillance teams that FBI Agent A1 Grynard had placed at the security checkpoints.
Eight hours and twenty minutes later, at precisely 10:20 a.m., after passing through one time zone, and two more security checks without incident, Lightstone approached the Budget rental-car counter at San Diego International Airport. He signed for a small sedan in the name of Henry Allen Lightner, using one of his undercover credit cards that he hadn't gotten around to canceling.
Forty-five minutes later, Lightstone entered the Federal Building on "C" street, took the elevator up to the seventh floor, and walked into Dwight Stoner's office… completely unaware that he had been followed all the way from the Budget parking lot.
"Henry Lightstone. I'm here to see Dwight Stoner," he said, holding out his badge and credentials for inspection by the young blond receptionist.
"I'm sorry, sir," the young woman smiled apologetically, "but Agent Stoner left the office a little while ago. Was he expecting you?"
"Uh, no, not really. Do you know when he'll be back?"
"No, I don't. He received a call from an informant, and then he left right away."
"An informant?" Lightstone blinked. "Are you sure?"
"Well, uh, yes, I guess so. I mean-"
"When exactly did he get the call?"
"Oh, uh, earlier this morning," the receptionist said, looking flustered.
"I mean, what time?" Lightstone said impatiently.
"Oh, sure, let's see here," she said as she turned back the top page in her telephone memo book. "Yes, here it is. The call came in at exactly nine forty-six, a little over an hour ago."
"Did you happen to get the name of the informant?" Lightstone asked as he tried to read the barely legible script upside down.
"No, I didn't. She wouldn't give me her name. I asked her twice, but she said that-"
"She?" Lightstone's head came up. "Are you sure it was a woman?"
"Oh, yes, it was definitely a woman's voice," the young woman nodded. "She had a real strong accent. Sort of Germanic, I think."
Lightstone forced himself to remain calm. "Do you remember what was it, exactly, that she said to you?" he asked, feeling his blood pressure starting to rise as he remembered A1 Grynard's words: And Scoby hasn't checked back in from a routine contact with a female informant somewhere in southern Arizona.
"Well, let me think. Humm, first of all, when I asked who she was, she said that she didn't want to give me her name because it was not a big deal and she didn't think-"
"Listen, uh, Tracy," Lightstone interrupted as he quickly read the nameplate on the front of the desk, "this is very important. Do you have any idea of where Agent Stoner was to meet this informant?"
"No, he didn't say, but he might have written it down in the notebook on his desk. He usually-" she started to add, but Lightstone was already sprinting to Stoner's small office, where he rummaged around the top of the cluttered desk and then in the lower file drawer.
"Uh, sir, I'm really not supposed to let you do that," the young woman said as she came in through the doorway with a determined look on her face. But Lightstone already had the spiral-bound notebook opened to the last entry. A moment later he was out the door and running down the wide corridor to the elevator.
At six-foot-nine, and three hundred and ten pounds, Special Agent Dwight Stoner had long since become accustomed to the fact that his presence tended to intimidate people.
And while that sort of thing was perfectly okay when facing down defensive linebackers like Lawrence Taylor and Carl Banks, or malicious biker punks like Brendon Kleinfelter, it was often a disadvantage when the formidable special agent tried to interact with the general public.
Thus, when Dwight Stoner saw the momentary look of fear in the very attractive young woman's eyes, he immediately tried to compensate by relaxing his guard.
"I didn't mean to frighten you, ma'am," Stoner said with what he hoped was a reassuring smile as he held out his badge and credentials. "I'm Special Agent Dwight Stoner with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. I believe you called me this morning about an illegal rack?"
"Oh yes, Officer. Please come in." Carine Mueller said in a shaky voice, genuinely startled by the immense size of the federal agent. She decided immediately that she wouldn't let Sonny Chareaux draw the game out with this man the way he wanted to. "I was afraid that you might have changed your mind."
"Had to stop for gas, and then I made a wrong turn back at the junction." Stoner shrugged his massive shoulders apologetically. "Took me a while to find somebody who knew this part of the country well enough to give me directions."
"It was very kind of you to drive all the way out here," Mueller said as she led him in through the kitchen and out the back door, then started walking toward a large, decrepit barn at the far corner of her acre-sized lot. "My neighbor was so frightened."
"Is that
Mr. Nakamura?" Stoner asked, observing the slender, nervous-looking Oriental man who stood next to the partially opened side door of the barn.
"Yes," Carine Mueller nodded. "He's such a nice man, and he and his wife are wonderful neighbors. But they haven't been in this country very long, and he was afraid that he'd be arrested if he kept it at his house. And he didn't know what to do, so I told him that he could keep it in our barn until you got here."
"Mr. Nakamura, I'm Special Agent Stoner, from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service," Stoner said as he walked up and slowly extended his large hand.
"Yes, I thank you very much that you come to help me," Kiro Nakamura-a Shotokan fourth-degree black belt-said in broken English, taking professional note of Dwight Stoner's limp as he returned the agent's handshake with his deliberately relaxed right hand.
"I understand you had a run-in with a poacher out here?"
"Yes," Nakamura nodded with wide-eyed enthusiasm. "He say that for very little money, I can have big animal trophy and family name in record book. I say yes, but now he want more money, and I not want," Nakamura stuttered, forcing his lethal hands to tremble visibly. "I am visitor in your country. Not want to go to jail."
"It's okay, Mr. Nakamura," Dwight Stoner said soothingly. "I'm here to help you, not to arrest you, okay?"
"Yes, okay, I like that." The Oriental man smiled happily as Stoner turned back to Carine Mueller.
"You said the rack is in the barn?"
"Yes, let me show you," Mueller said as she led the way into the dark, cobwebby barn that was filled with stacked boxes, trunks, gasoline cans, and a vast array of farm equipment that looked like it hadn't been touched in years.
"Ugghh, this place gives me the willies," she shuddered as she fumbled around in the semidarkness. "I almost never come out here. I hate spiders, and I can never remember where the light switch is."
"Is this it?" Stoner asked as he stepped between two head-high stacks of old cardboard boxes and looked down at the huge, eight-point elk rack that had been propped up against a pair of wooden ammo crates.
"Yes, that is what he want to sell to me," Kiro Nakamura said in an excited voice as he moved up past Stoner. "But then he say I no have papers, so I must pay more."
"What did you say the man's name was?" Stoner asked as he bent down to examine the record-sized rack more closely.
"Chareaux," said a familiar voice to Stoner's right.
"What-?"
Dwight Stoner started to come up and around just as Sonny Chareaux lunged forward and swung the baseball bat square across Stoner's right knee, causing the surprised special agent to roar in agony as he collapsed on the concrete floor.
As Stoner went down, Kiro Nakamura immediately moved in to grab for his shoulder-holstered. 45 SIG-Sauer automatic. Pulling Stoner's jacket aside with his right hand and reaching in his left, Nakamura unsnapped the restraining strap and had the heavy weapon halfway out of its holster when Dwight Stoner brought his head up with a savage look in his pain-filled eyes and closed his huge right hand around Nakamura's left wrist.
Reacting with blinding speed, Nakamura yelled out a guttural "Ki-ai!" as he drove the heel of his right palm into Stoner's nose, slamming the agent's head backward in a spray of blood. Yelling out again, Nakamura brought his tightly closed right hand around in a vicious back-fisted strike that caught Stoner square across the right eye and snapped his head around to the left. He then delivered a knife-hand thrust to the agent's exposed throat.
Stunned and nearly unconscious, Stoner dropped hard onto his knees with an agonized gasp, but somehow he managed to find the strength to snap Nakamura's wrist, causing the Oriental to release the SIG-Sauer pistol, which clattered to the floor.
Then, using the broken wrist for leverage, Stoner sent the injured karate master stumbling into Carine Mueller just as she was reaching into one of the boxes for her. 357 revolver.
"Get him… agghhhl" Mueller cried out in pain as her head struck the metal edge of a table saw, splitting the skin over her left eye. She cursed in her native-German as she fumbled around under the boxes, searching desperately for her weapon.
Dwight Stoner was still trying to recover from the savage blows to his nose and throat, and the agonizing pain in his shattered knee, when he saw movement out of the corner of his rapidly swelling eye. He barely managed to turn away in time to absorb the impact of the bat against his upper arm and shoulder rather than against his head. But the blow jarred him backward, and all he could do was to try to twist around and bring his massive forearms up to ward off Sonny Chareaux's next swing when…
Ka-booom!
… the sudden concussive detonation of a high-velocity pistol round going off in the contained area seemed to send ice picks through his eardrums. The 180-grain jacketed hollow-point bullet tore through the back of Sonny Chareaux's right hand and sent pieces of the bat flying in all directions.
Stunned by the impact of the expanding 10mm projectile, and groaning from the terrible pain of shattered bones and torn nerves, Chareaux stumbled forward. Then, turning around in a daze, one bloody hand clutched tight against his stomach, the Cajun poacher found himself staring into a very familiar face.
"I'd kill you right now," Henry Lightstone whispered as he centered the sights of the stainless-steel automatic between Chareaux's blinking eyes, "but I'd rather see you rot in jail."
"You!" Chareaux rasped, his eyes widening in disbelief. Then, in an incredible display of rage, the Cajun poacher lunged forward, his lips bared back, looking for all the world like the wounded Kodiak whose only thought had been to move forward and destroy.
Lightstone had already dropped the sights of the S amp;W automatic and was starting to squeeze off the first point-blank shot into the center of Sonny Chareaux's chest when Carine Mueller suddenly sprinted off across the debris-covered floor.
Reacting instinctively, because Chareaux was already crippled and thus presumably a lesser threat, Lightstone spun around in a crouch and triggered three concussive shots in the direction of the disappearing figure just as Dwight Stoner threw himself forward at Chareaux's legs and Kiro Nakamura came in fast with a spinning kick that sent the fifth 180-grain bullet streaking over Sonny Chareaux's head and through the main door of the barn as the stainless-steel automatic was knocked out of Lightstone's hands.
For a brief moment, the two bare-handed fighters paused to stare at each other in the dust-and debris-strewn semidarkness while Dwight Stoner and Sonny Chareaux continued to twist and grunt and roll across the cement floor, sending boxes and tools flying as they hit and elbowed and bit and tore at each other's throat.
Then, sensing an advantage, Nakamura suddenly stepped forward, missed with a lunging, high jump kick, absorbed and then spun away from Lightstone's combination block and punishing side elbow strike to his upper rib cage, came back all the way around with a roundhouse heel kick to the side of Lightstone's head… and then went down hard when the Okinawan-trained agent recovered, shifted his feet and twisted his hips sharply as he drove a punishing left-handed punch into his assailant's floating ribs and then immediately followed with a reverse-direction right-elbow strike that caught the Skotokan black belt square in the mouth and nose.
Behind his back, Henry Lightstone heard a horrible crunch of breaking bones-and then an agonized scream- but he didn't have time to look around because his seemingly indestructible opponent was already back on his feet and smiling in apparent amusement through bleeding lips and nose as his flickering eyes searched for yet another advantage in the dust-filled semidarkness.
Lightstone had instinctively brought his feet back into a balanced defensive stance, ready to counter Nakamura's next move, when the far side door of the barn burst open and a curly haired body-builder type appeared, holding a short-barreled H amp;K 9mm submachine gun.
"Come on, let's blow this place!" the body-builder yelled, putting a stream of 9mm bullets ripping through the rotten wooden walls of the barn-sending Lightstone and Nakamura diving for the
floor… before he and Carine Mueller disappeared through the far side door.
Looking around frantically, Lightstone finally spotted the reflective stainless-steel finish of his 10mm Smith amp; Wesson on the floor about ten feet away and was starting toward it when he heard, and then saw, Kiro Nakamura coming in fast.
The full-powered front kick would have caught Lightstone square in the face-and either knocked him unconscious or broken his neck-had it not been for Dwight Stoner, who pulled himself up out of the semidarkness on one leg, caught Kiro Nakamura by the shirt in midair, and then slammed the Shotokan master back into the rough six-by-six support beam, with his feet dangling a good sixteen inches above the floor.
Reacting out of pure instinct, Nakamura drove his left fist into the huge agent's exposed neck and then shrieked in pain as the broken bones of his wrist grated against torn nerves.
"Shithead!" Dwight Stoner screamed, glaring into Nakamura's agonized eyes. Then, holding the struggling Shotokan black belt up and out with his left hand, the infuriated agent drove his huge fist into Nakamura's chest, sending him crashing into the wall in a shower of loose boards and flying tools. He landed facedown on the hard concrete.
But then, to the astonishment of both Stoner and Lightstone, the crippled Shotokan black belt slowly pushed and pulled himself back up to a sitting position against the wall and smiled once again through his now profusely bleeding mouth as he brought Henry Lightstone's stainless- steel automatic up in both trembling hands.
The splintered end of Sonny Chareaux's bat was lying on the cement floor about six feet away, and Lightstone was already going for it- knowing that he'd be too late, but trying anyway-when the roar of new gunfire reverberated through the barn.
In quick succession, three. 45-caliber jacketed hollow- point bullets caught Kiro Nakamura in the chest, neck, and forehead, slamming him backward into the broken and splintered wall boards like a rag doll.
As both Lightstone and Stoner spun around, they saw Larry Paxton standing on one crutch and braced against the doorway, a smoking SIG-Sauer pistol in his outstretched right hand.
