Vic didn’t appreciate the Brit’s smug, probing eyes and broke the man’s view with his body. He moved between the asset and his desk to pick up his glass and down the dribble of whisky that remained.
The asset unzipped his jacket as he took a few steps across the room toward Vic, his boots making no sound on the wet and cracked linoleum floor. He shifted his weight to his left foot and his jacket opened just the amount he would need to quickly reach his silenced pistol. He fixed Vic with a broad, chilling smile and said, “I assume we do still have your full support, Mr. LeClerc, Entendu?”
Chapter 42
“Do it, or you’ll not be getting any lunch,” Hamish called up to Vuur, who was hesitating at the end of a horizontal ladder mounted ten meters in the air. Snow and ice from the ladder fell, hitting the rope safety net below him before clattering on the concrete floor.
“Shush,” Christa said without taking her eyes of the dog, “He’ll get it. He’s just a little afraid of heights.”
Vuur was half crouched with his paws spread eagle on each side rail of an aluminum ladder. The cold metal was covered in patches of ice. His toes were spread wide and his toenails were scratching to get purchase.
One end of the ladder was bolted to the landing of a third floor concrete stairwell. The far end of the ladder, where the dog now teetered, was bolted to a wooden beam that was attached to an opposite concrete landing. The span between landings was about six meters, and at the center the weight of the dog made the whole rig bounce and sway.
Ben was watching from between his fingers. A small icicle spun away from the drooping ladder and splintered on the cement next to him. They were standing on the ground floor of a huge abandoned saw mill complex. It was a kilometer downriver from the ranch at the head of another large valley that swooped down from the west. A smaller river met the larger one where the valleys met. It snaked away up the bowl of the valley, disappearing over the opposite ridgeline, not far from Greer and Ellena Nellis’ sporting lodge.
Before Christa’s family leased their logging forests out to other companies this mill site had been the main processing plant for the rough timber. It had been brought down from the slopes of connected valleys covering almost three thousand square kilometers. A saw mill had been in continuous operation for more than two hundred years on the site, from a time when the logs were driven down the river in rafts. Remnants of the original cast iron pike pole tips that would maneuver the logs and the two-man hand saws that would cut them were still stacked up at the river’s edge. Nimble footed River Pigs were dancing on these log rafts until the late forties when a surplus of cheap trucks left over from the war made it more effective to haul the logs down the mountain by road. Christa’s grandfather had been a Jam Crew boss, and he lost his life between the ice covered crush of a log pile-up on the river just upstream from the mill.
The mill works had been operational right up to the time Christa’s parents retired. The main building and the offices were modern and still weather tight, but the concrete walled outbuildings and older stone mill house had fallen into decay. The equipment had been removed, leaving a three story shell with steel stairs and catwalks over a concrete floor. There were cement pads of various heights with rusty metal bolts and mounting plates set in the floor. Some of the outbuildings had been purposely knocked over leaving a city-block size area of twisted rebar and jutting concrete walls at the far end of the complex.
The mill site was their urban training ground, and home for Vuur and Rook when they weren’t at the ranch house. They had stayed in the mill offices for weeks at a time and had learned to find food and water, both edible and not, that Hamish had hidden in places where they’d have to work to get at it. The dogs were trained to twist door knobs with their mouths, pull off ventilation ducts, walk safely over glass, and find ways to navigate in the dark and find alternate routes around locked doors.
Most of the outbuilding area had been turned into an immense course of obstacles that increased in difficulty. It started with low ramps and tubes for puppies to gain confidence and learn the basic commands, and progressed to high thin beams and balance ropes. The agility course had ramps and teeter boards and a mix of different ladders. There were timbers of varying size and height, some cut off and stuck into the ground and some mounted in grids and high catwalks. The end of the course was a hundred-meter long, two-story high maze of collapsed buildings that had been carefully rearranged with tight spaces and dead ends. To successfully navigate the maze the dogs had to demonstrate patience and tenacity. To do it while finding hidden scents they had to be world-class.
Spot and Smudge had been through all of the courses a few times over the past few days, and they loved it. It was like a big, serious playground. They’d watched Christa working with Vuur and Rook as well, and the police dogs also enjoyed showing the pups around when there were breaks in the training. The boerboels had initially showed the pups how to navigate the course, and then the pups gave Vuur and Rook tips on how to do it faster. Spot and Smudge had promised Ben they would take it easy, which they took to mean just being careful to wait until Christa wasn’t watching too closely. Hamish and Ben were usually in the snow fields with the Elkies, which meant the pups often had the police dogs to themselves.
They couldn’t help Vuur cross the ladder, however. He was three stories up and his hind legs had started to shake a little. Spot and Smudge were standing next to Rook, who was helplessly looking up at his brother.
Smudge was getting nervous and Ben could see it. She was shifting from side to side and would look up at Vuur and then to Ben, and back again. Ben kept giving her the don’t do it head shake, but he was afraid it wasn’t going to work for long. Even Spot was now giving his sister a sympathetic look.
Smudge sneezed.
And then she sneezed again even louder.
“Bless you,” Christa said, not taking her eyes off Vuur.
Spot looked slowly back at Ben and shrugged slightly.
From his shaky perch high above them Vuur looked down at Smudge.
Smudge looked up at Vuur.
Smudge sneezed again but Ben noticed she also moved her body when she did it, communicating with the dog teetering high up on the ladder.
Vuur closed his eyes and a moment later he reached out a paw. He slid it along the wooden beam, knocking snow from it. He continued until his whole body was stretched out along the thin beam. He opened his eyes and slowly took one tentative step after another.
Christa grabbed the shoulder of Ben’s jacket and tugged it back and forth with each of Vuur’s steps.
After a few steps the dog straightened up and walked the rest of the beam without stopping. As he cleared the last few feet he deliberately kicked snow down at the waiting spectators.
Smudge hip-bumped Spot as Christa called out, “Yes! That’s my boy! Onstagwekkende!”
The huge brown dog with the black face and wagging tail bound down the stairwell and shot across the floor. He knocked Christa down when he jumped up on her.
They worked on agility for the rest of the afternoon and finished up with the collapsed building maze course. Ben helped Christa rearrange some of the plywood sheets used to blockade paths and create dead ends. The route through the maze was never the same for the dogs.
There were several ladders sticking up along the course so the humans could watch the dogs’ progress from above.
Christa had chosen the run to be a speed test so they weren’t hunting for a scent but just navigating the maze as quickly as they could manage. Ben could tell the dogs knew what was expected of them. They were dancing and stomping impatiently for Christa to give them the command to start.
Both dogs were sent into the maze and Ben ran to climb the ladder at the halfway point. He only got a quick look at a head or a tail as the dogs made their way towards him. Mostly they were deep in the cracks and crevices, twisting around tight corners and shooting down paths only to get stuck and have to retrace their steps and try again. He c
ould hear a bark or yap echoing up from deep in the maze from time to time.
As the dogs shot past an opening just below Ben he raised his hand to mark the dogs passing before he climbed down to race to the next ladder.
Crista was waiting with Hamish on a platform above the exit. She looked down at her stopwatch and smiled, and showed it to Hamish.
A few minutes later Ben raised his hand at the next ladder and ran down the side of the course to join Hamish and Christa on the platform above the exit. “They’re flying,” he said, panting with his hands on his knees.
The yaps were getting closer and they could see flashes of the dogs running side by side through the course.
Christa clicked down the stopwatch as the boerboels flew from the last doorway.
“Eighteen five,” she said with a smile, showing Hamish her watch, “A new record. Even Sholto the wonder dog couldn’t have beaten that.”
“I suspect not,” Hamish said. He wasn’t smiling.
He watched as Ben and Christa played with all of the dogs in the snow. Eventually he said, “Right then, that’s enough for today I think.”
Chapter 43
The rogue’s first bite wasn’t well placed and it gave Alpha the chance to spin and catch the attacking wolf just behind the shoulder. His teeth had a good hold, and pulling hard allowed him to slip his neck from the deranged rogue’s mouth and get onto its back. Alpha released and with lightning speed clamped down again, hard, just behind the rogue’s head. He tried to sink his fangs in deep but felt a sickening knot of bulbous, fetid muscle squish in his mouth.
The rogue howled in pain and it came out as a gargled slur.
The wolves were vile. They smelled far worse up close than their trail had suggested and their bodies were lumpy and twisted. They were huge, and the chunky clusters of sinew under their matted fur was strong and almost impenetrable. Bites weren’t slowing them down any, and Alpha was getting worried. The only bright spot was the rogue’s weren’t very accurate which Alpha felt was as much due to their deranged behavior as it was their bodies. They fought crazily, snapping at nothing and clawing at the ground with odd, clubbed black paws.
Glasgow was on her back, pinned beneath the second rogue. She was having trouble breathing as it had her throat in a vise grip.
He wasn’t cutting off her windpipe completely, and that horrified her.
This lunatic wolf, with its disgusting slobber running over her snout, was saving her for some reason. Glasgow didn’t like thinking about what that might be.
Her head was buried in the snow and it was hard to see. She twisted enough to watch one of her juveniles join the fight. He was her most confident son, and the one she was pretty sure would lead his own pack someday. He leapt over Alpha and pounced just behind him, clamping down on the rogue’s hind quarters. Together they dropped the rogue onto its side as Glasgow’s brother, the pack’s other mating male, shot from the protection of the pines and went for its throat.
Bolstered by this renewed attack Glasgow kicked wildly at her attacker, eventually finding a tender spot in his groin and lifting him off her. She spun and bolted, narrowly missing a snap to the face. Once back on her feet she turned to attack and another yearling slid to a stop in the deep snow next to her. It was Glasgow’s daughter, the fastest one in the pack and the most nurturing of the pups. She lacked the aggression needed to rise to a position of leadership but Glasgow wasn’t disappointed. Her daughter would make a great subordinate pack mother. Glasgow felt it was the most important job in the pack, and the hardest.
The pack’s nine-month old pups were being protected by the other breeding female under a nearby umbrella of pines. They were almost full height but still lacked the weight and skills to be effective in this fight. They were as loyal as they were well-trained, and it was hard for them to see a pack-mate being attacked. The female was struggling to keep them in check and quiet. They had been on hunts and had seen family squabbles, but the noise and ferocity of this fight was at once scary for them to watch, and difficult for them to stay out of.
Glasgow’s brother had missed his attempt at the first rogue’s throat and paid dearly. The crazed wolf had pulled back at the last instant and shot forward, tearing a large piece out her brother’s chin and neck. He stumbled away a few steps, spraying blood over the snow before he collapsed.
Alpha’s teeth had slipped off the back of the wolf’s thick neck, taking a patch of oily fur with him as the monster rogue turned. The rogue snapped crazily as Alpha backpedaled into his son.
Glasgow and her daughter pounced together at the second rogue, driving it backwards. She waited for the wolf to strike, dodged his bite, and used her weight to shoulder the lager animal into a snow bank. The rogue screamed in frustration. Kicking his back feet only caused him to sink deeper into the snow. The rogue howled, head butting Glasgow hard and sending her tumbling. She had never heard an animal make that sound before. It was a painful, insane, tortured sound and it caused her young daughter to freeze. The small wolf just stood there, staring at the rogue wolf’s large contorted head. Glasgow could see what was coming and tried to make it to her daughter but it was too late. The rogue darted up from the snow bank and took the young wolf’s entire face into its jaws. With one quick snap it crushed her skull. Glasgow watched as her daughter’s ruined face looked at her for the last time. Her eyes closed, and she fell forward into the snow.
Chapter 44
“Thank you Ben, that was very informative,” Mr. P said as the class clapped softly and a few of the kids shouted goodbye to Ben. He waved and disconnected the video chat.
“That was frightfully more boring than the last one,” Christa said as she got up to open the slider. The pups padded into the kitchen from the back deck with Sholto and Rook.
“Yeah,” Ben said, “well I wanted to do this one from the shooting range, with a grand finale of cutting off a target’s head with a fifty cal shot and some Tannerite, but Mr. P said no. After that last one he said I had to run my presentation ideas past him first.”
“He’s a poop,” Christa said as Ben tapped a few buttons on his tablet and Mimi and Kelcy came on the screen.
“So,” Mimi said, “How’d it go?”
“Boring, boring, and oh oh wait!, no, sorry, just more boring,” Ben said, “It was a painful hour of Mr. P asking me every geography and sociology question about Quebec he could come up with. He added ten more minutes of who cares stuff of his own to the end of each answer. Even the dogs were yawning.”
“And how are my wee ones?” Mimi asked. Spot and Smudge came over to the table and put their cold front paws in Ben’s lap. The grandmother cooed, “Oh, there’s my good boy and girl. I miss you lot. Not so much the eating me out of house and home part, and the barking, and the mess, and the dog hair all over, but everything else I miss.”
The family chatted for a while. Kelcy told Ben about her job at the clinic, and that she’d been hanging out with Harriet and her buds, and everyone was cool. Harriet was their code for One Ear.
Mimi asked if he was staying out of trouble and helping with the chores which Christa assured her he was. They talked about the Elkies’ and the boerboels’ training.
As they chatted about another round of snow hitting Pembury, Hamish came down the stairs with Vuur trotting behind him.
“Hello sis,” Hamish said, “hope your lum’s reekin.”
Ben knew he was wishing her well, which literally translated as hoping her chimney was always smoking.
“Hamish, tell me you’re keeping a limit on the cursing and not taking the boy around taverns and loose women, and nae’ shooting up the town,” Mimi asked with a smile.
Ben leaned in front of the screen and said, “Of course not, Meem. Perish the thought.”
Hamish didn’t look to be in a joking mood, and after the call Christa suggested they take the night off. There was a pizza place in the next town. It was almost an hour drive but she thought they should celebrate as Vuur and Rook were doing
so well.
Ben didn’t need to be asked twice. He packed up his tablet and raced upstairs with the pups to wash up.
When they came back down Hamish was sitting at the head of the kitchen table with Christa seated next to him. They didn’t look like they were ready to go get pizza.
“Who died?” Ben said as he slipped into a chair with the pups at his side.
On the table in front of Hamish were their borrowed snow boots and their USB stick.
Chapter 45
Glasgow dragged her beaten body into the river. She dropped into the cold water and let the chill numb her burning muscles. She lay there with her bleeding snout just barely sticking out from the freezing water and watched as the rogues toyed with her last surviving pup. They taunted the runt, the smallest girl from her last litter, taking turns nipping her rump as she spun in circles and tried to bite them.
Glasgow raised a paw from the water and the pup tried to run to her mother but one of the obscene rogues pawed her hard across the face with his knotted black paw. The girl fell backwards and sat down in a heap, fresh blood coming from her nose.
Where do you think you’re going? One of the rogues slurred, his body language and yapping almost unintelligible. It came out manic and frenzied, and too loud, We aren’t done with you yet little one, and she can’t help you.
As the second rogue male leaned in for another nip the little wolf feigned right and snapped up hard and to the left, catching his lumpy face along the ridge of his forehead. Her bottom canines sunk in just above his eyes and her fangs dug into his ear.
The wolf howled and raised his head, taking the pup off the ground with him as the other rogue laughed ghoulishly. Glasgow’s daughter was attached to the rogue’s face and wasn’t letting go.
The Glasgow Gray: Spot and Smudge - Book 2 Page 22
