Dead Watch

by John Sandford

  “If they’re not here by then, we’ll have to pull out,” Jake said. “Danzig will be going public with the package.”

  From the parking area to the end of Billy’s driveway was a long loop of narrow blacktop. The driveway began with a nearly invisible indentation in the tree line. Fifty feet in, invisible from the road, was a locked gate and the beginning of a gravel track. “Billy’s is the only place back here,” Jake said. “We’re on his land now.”

  “Dark,” Madison said. Then: “What if they have those night-vision things? Darrell was military, he probably could get National Guard equipment.”

  “If they can’t see us in the daytime, they can’t see us at night. And if you keep yourself down, they won’t see us.” He got out and opened the gate with his key, drove the truck through, and locked the gate behind them.

  The cabin was built on a wide spot of a crooked valley nestled in a series of steep, heavily forested hillsides. Just below the cabin, on the creek that cut the valley, Billy had excavated a three-acre pond and filled it with bass. The shallow, six-foot-wide creek trickled down over a rocky bottom, past the cabin, into the pond, over a concrete lip, and then down and out of the valley.

  They came around the last turn in the gravel track, and the cabin glowed like a piece of amber in the headlights. A motion-sensing yard light flicked on. Jake parked, and feeling the hair rippling on the back of his neck, climbed the porch, unlocked the door, turned on the lights. Madison helped carry the gear bags inside.

  Were they out there? Up the hill, arguing what to do about Madison? Hurried calls going out of the ridgetop? He didn’t think so, but it was a possibility.

  The cabin was big enough to sleep eight, with two bedrooms, a bath, and storage on the upper level. The first floor had two more bedrooms, a bath, a kitchen and a great room, and a set of high windows that looked out over the pond. A large-scale geological-survey map of the property was framed and hung on the wall of the great room.

  Jake took Madison to the map. “This is probably the same map they’d be looking at, if they pull it off the Internet.” He tapped a tightly bunched strip of contour lines south of the cabin. “Up here, we’ve got this really steep hillside—it’s virtually a bluff. It’s unlikely they’d come in over the bluff, because it’s just too steep, and there are springs all along the side of it, it’s pretty slippery in there. I don’t think they’d come in from the west, because they have to cross too much of the open valley, and the creek, and it’d add a couple of miles to the approach. They could come north, up the drive, park far enough up the driveway that you couldn’t see their car from the road. The thing is, they can’t be sure from this map that there aren’t any more cabins up here, or that we might not have a gate with an alarm.”

  “We have an alarm on our gate at the farm . . .” She peered at the map. “So the best way is over the hill.”

  He nodded. “From the east. From the parking lot I showed you. That’s right here.” He tapped the map again. “They leave their car at the trailhead, cross the hill in the dark, taking it slow, watch the cabin for a while, then come in at dawn and take me out. They dump the body in a hole somewhere, then exfiltrate during the day, taking it slow again. One of the guys moves my car, dumps it in Lexington. Nobody would ever know.”

  “What if there are three or four of them?”

  “That would be another problem,” he said. “But this would be murder, so there won’t be. They’ll try to keep it as tight as they can. Could be only one guy. A pro that they bring in for the job.”

  “I’m worried that we’re overconfident,” Madison said.

  “You keep saying that. But with this kind of deal, you do the intelligence and you make your play,” Jake said.

  “I hope you’re not fantasizing that you’re back in Afghanistan.”

  “So do I. Fantasy could get us killed.”

  While Madison unpacked the gear bags, Jake figured out the game-spotter cameras. They were cheap digital cameras with flashes, in camouflaged plastic, meant to be posted along game trails to check for passing deer. They worked on infrared motion-sensing triggers, and had been around for twenty years, long enough to become reliable. He put batteries in them and left them on the table.

  “We’ve got walkie-talkies like these at the farm,” Madison said. Jake had two Motorola walkie-talkies in his hunting gear.

  “Put new batteries in and we’ll check to make sure the channels are synced,” Jake said.

  “What if somebody hears them from the outside? The range is pretty long . . .”

  “Not here. We’re too deep in the valley. When we’re turkey hunting, if we go over the top of the bluffs, we can’t pick up a call from the cabin. And you can’t call out from the cabin on your cell phone. You have to be up on top.”

  “Okay.” She glanced at her watch. “You better change.”

  He got into his cool-weather camo, got his sleeping bag, put three power snacks and two bottles of springwater in his hip pockets. He took a full box of shells, loading four into the rifle, the rest into the elastic loops of the cartridge holders on the camo jacket; he’d never used the loops before, and fumbled the shells getting them in.

  Nervous. And getting a little high on the coming combat.

  Madison had taken the shotgun out of the case and was looking it over. “It’s just about like mine,” she said.

  As Jake checked a flashlight, he watched her handling it. She knew what she was doing. “Snap it a few times, then load it up.”

  She dry-fired it, pointing it across the room at a framed photo of the hunting group, using a trapshooter’s stance. Satisfied, she shoved some shells into the magazine.

  “If one of them comes through the door, keep pulling the trigger until he goes down.” She nodded, and Jake said, “I’m going to run outside. I’ll be back in a minute.”

  He slung the rifle over his shoulder and picked up the game-trail spotters and the flashlight. If they were out there . . . but they wouldn’t have been able to move that fast. If they’d moved deliberately, but hadn’t done anything weird, like rent a helicopter, they’d arrive in perhaps four hours. He had time.

  Outside, the night was cool, damp. The leaves would be quiet; he would have preferred a crisper, drier night. He carried the game cameras around to the west side of the house, the side he wouldn’t be able to see, and began tying them into trees between the cabin and the pond. If they did come in from the west, they’d trip the infrared flashes, and he’d see the flashes . . .

  Unless, of course, a deer came in. Then he’d get a false alarm. But the grasses on the open slopes around the cabin didn’t pull many deer in. He’d have to hope for the best.

  Back in the cabin, they synced the radios. Jake switched his to “vibrate” and said, “When you get up in the morning, turn the TV on, first thing. Change channels every few minutes, but news channels. Leave the one window open just an inch, so they can hear it. Keep the blinds down, except the one over the kitchen sink. Leave that half up. When I give you four chirps, that means . . .”

  “Walk past the window,” she said.

  Jake nodded. “Not too fast, not too slow. You don’t want to give them time to fire a shot, but you want them to see your body. For Christ’s sake, don’t look outside—they might see your face and take off. If they just see the flannel shirt, your arm, all they’ll pick up is the movement.”

  She touched her lip with her tongue. She was nervous, too. “Okay.”

  “If they get me, then they’ll have to come after you,” Jake said. “That’ll only happen if there are several of them. If there are several, you know what to do.”

  “I call for you, at the open window, so they can hear my voice.”

  “That should scare them off,” Jake said. “If not, I’ll take them on. You call nine-one-one, you yell at me that the cops are coming, so they’ll know. Then you tip the tables as barricades, make them come through the doors to get you. If they think the cops are coming, if they don’t have
time to organize, I think they’ll run, even if I’m dead.”

  She shivered. “Jake . . .”

  “We’ll be okay.” He grinned at her. “Maybe.”

  When they were ready, Jake kissed her, said, “Keep shooting until you see them go down,” and stepped outside. The porch light was on, and he hurried away from it, into the dark. Probably three hours before they’d arrive, at the earliest, he thought. At this moment, they’d probably be somewhere in the Blue Ridge.

  If they’d monitored the bug at all. But, he thought, they would have: too much was happening all at once, and the bug would be invaluable.

  He walked away from the cabin in the narrow slash of light from his headlamp, the rifle slung over his shoulder, climbed the east hill on a trail he’d walked fifty times before, heading toward a crease in the hillside, hoping it wasn’t too wet.

  When he got there, he tested it with his bare hands. No more damp than the rest of the hillside, and not bad. He unrolled his quiet pad in the low vegetation, trying not to crush any more of the leafy plants than necessary, unrolled his sleeping bag on top of it, then slipped inside.

  Inside the bag, he could move with absolute silence; and he’d stay loose and warm. He’d jacked a shell into the rifle’s chamber in the cabin; he tested the safety, to make sure it was on, then snuggled up to the rifle, the muzzle just outside the top of his head.

  And went to sleep.

  He’d learned a long time before that sleep was protective; you were silent in your sleep, as long as you didn’t snore, and if you were in an ambush, you didn’t snore. You also woke up at any non-natural sound, and at fifteen- or twenty-minute intervals.

  He did that for an hour, then two hours, then three, the minute hand on his watch seeming to jump around the dial as he went in and out of sleep. At four, he was done with the sleep. He’d heard several small animals in the dark—skunks, maybe, possums, raccoons—but nothing larger. There’d been no flashes from behind the cabin.

  At five-thirty, he heard movement above him and to the south. Listening, hard. Turned his head that way, looking for a light. Moving in the dark was difficult in the Virginia woods; even a red LED lamp would help some, and shaded, pointed at the ground, normally wouldn’t be visible. But since he was below them, he might catch just a random flash . . .

  He saw nothing. The movement stopped, and he listened, breathing silently, his nostrils twitching, an atavistic effort to find a scent. Down below, the cabin porch lights, and the yard light near the shed, lit up the yard. There were two lights on inside the house, but no sound. Jake had told Madison not to turn the TV on until six o’clock, after turning on lights first in the upstairs bedroom, then in the bathroom, and finally in the kitchen.

  After twenty minutes of silence, he’d begun to wonder if he’d actually heard the movement, if it might not have been a departing deer. But he always thought that when he was hunting. You’d hear the sound, then you’d doubt it, and then you’d hear it again, and then you’d figure out where it was going, the angle, the speed, the shooting possibilities.

  Sunrise wouldn’t be for another half an hour. If it had been Jake, he’d have gotten into a shooting spot before there was any movement in the cabin. If they were up there, they’d be watching the cabin and making last-minute plans. In a few minutes, they’d start down the hillside, probably a few yards apart. They’d go in as a team, he thought, rather than breaking up and circling against each other.

  At a minute before six, he heard movement again, and at the same time got a single alert vibration from the walkie-talkie. Madison was up and moving. The light came on in the upper bedroom, and then in the bathroom. The movement stopped when the first light came on; it started again when the second light came up.

  So they were here. A deer wouldn’t have frozen. And whoever it was, was doing it right, moving with almost imperceptible slowness, placing every foot carefully—but it was impossible to move through the woods without making some noise. If there’d been wind, Jake wouldn’t have been able to pick out the footfalls; but there was no wind. They were pretty decent at it, he thought. He’d have to keep that in mind.

  By six-fifteen, daylight was coming on, enough to shoot, and he’d heard the movement pass him to the south, heading down the hill. A moment later, Madison turned on the kitchen light, and then the television. He gave her four beeps on the walkie-talkie, and she walked by the half-open blind of the kitchen window, fast enough that he caught just a flash of shirt.

  If the men below were watching the cabin, they should have seen it. And they should have focused on the idea that the quarry was inside . . .

  Fixing on any specific idea was a killer.

  Five minutes later, he saw them for the first time. For a moment, he thought there was only one, a man in military camo, complete with head cover, carrying a short black weapon. The gun had a fat snout, as big around as an old silver dollar: a special forces military silencer, a gun they’d bought from the Israelis.

  Then he saw more movement ten yards away, a second man. There’d been no flashes from the cameras on the backside of the cabin. He hadn’t expected any, because the approach was so much poorer on that side. There could be a backstop guy on the other side, but it didn’t feel that way. This felt like a hunter-killer team, well coordinated, moving in on a target.

  A scraping noise came from the cabin, the sound of a chair being moved. Madison was improvising. The TV channels, barely audible from Jake’s position, changed. When they did, one of the men flicked a hand at the other. The other man scurried across the opening to the cabin, ducked down next to the porch steps.

  They waited for a moment. Then the second man crossed the clearing, joining his partner. They both were wearing head and face covering, probably against the possibility of security cameras. Jake was tracking them both in the scope now, clicking the safety off, waiting for the shot. He wanted them on the porch. If he took the first one before they were on the porch, the second man might be able to roll under the cabin before he could get another shot off.

  One of the men gave a hand signal, and they moved up the steps, slowly, slowly, ready to crack the front door, or maybe a window.

  Window. One of the men slid toward the larger window looking into the cabin, while the other crouched next to the door. He was going to do a peek. Jake put the crosshairs on him, watching the other man with his off-scope eye.

  The man at the window did a slow peek, then moved his head back, gave the other some kind of hand signal; the man near the door may or may not have gotten it, but it didn’t make any difference.

  Because at that moment, Jake shot the window man in the back.

  21

  The window man went down and Jake tracked right to the second man as he worked the bolt, but the second man was already moving fast, up in the air, over the porch rail, onto the ground and rolling. Jake snapped a shot at him, had the feeling that the shot was a good one, but the man flipped under the cabin and disappeared.

  Jake said into the walkie-talkie, “One down, but we’ve got a loose one, he jumped the railing, he’s under you, watch the back.”

  Madison said, “Yes.”

  A moment later, a flash went off behind the cabin, one of the game-trail cameras. The loose man had continued under the cabin, putting it between himself and Jake, and was heading for the trees. Jake started moving as soon as he saw the flash, sideways across the hill, running. The walkie-talkie vibrated in his hand and Madison called, “He’s crossing the creek, he’s across the creek . . .”

  Jake jacked another shell into the chamber as he ran, saw the second man ten feet from the tree line, hobbling, straining for the trees. Jake pinned the rifle to a tree trunk to steady it, but had no time, no time, and wound up snapping another shot into the brush where the man disappeared.

  On the walkie-talkie, Jake said, “There’s one on the porch, I think he’s gone. Be careful, though. I’m tracking the other one.”

  “Be careful, be careful . . .”


  Now it was a game of cat and mouse. The man in the woods had big problems: he’d probably been hit, though it was impossible to tell how hard. But if he had been, he was bleeding and under pressure to get medical help. His car was three miles away, over tough country, and even if he was able to walk to it, he’d have to keep moving. If he stopped, he might bleed out; and he’d certainly stiffen up.

  Jake had problems, too: he couldn’t take a chance that the man might get away. He had to block him. If the other man realized that, he might simply hide, tend to the wound, and hope that Jake would stumble into him. If he killed Jake, he might not have to walk to his car: he might get Jake’s.

  Jake paused just long enough to press three more cartridges into the rifle, then began jogging across the hillside. He was making a lot of noise, but he had to get in position to block. Once he was there, he could slow down into a stalking mode.

  The walkie-talkie vibrated. He stopped, put the radio to his face, said, “Yes.”

  “He’s moving south. He’s going up the west side of the bluffs.”

  Jake started moving again, climbing higher on the valley wall. If the other guy was moving, he wouldn’t be able to hear Jake. In his mind’s eye, Jake could see a perfect ambush spot overlooking a deer-food plot with a shallow ravine running along its side.

  From there, he should be able to see anybody coming along the top of the bluffs. The spot was two hundred yards away. He windmilled toward it, refusing to let his bad leg slow him, his own breath harsh in his ears. Brush lashed his face, tore at his body and legs, scratching his face. He kept moving, gasping for air, up a last short slope and into the nest at the top.

  Billy had stacked tree branches in a two-foot-high triangle, an impromptu ground-blind looking down at the deer plot. Jake eased into it and settled down. Listening, listening . . .