Storm Crow

by Jeff Gulvin

  ‘Maybe not.’ Brady’s eyes were shining, his breath coming in bursts of steam. ‘We can do it, Jack. Nanga Parbat. You and me.’

  Swann looked to his left and saw the cloud lowering steadily. They were close to 8000 metres and the air was very thin. He could hear the slow roar of breath trying to escape his lungs. ‘Steve, we need to go back.’

  He woke up and saw Brady beaten and bloodied, standing at the end of the bed. He screamed, high pitched like a woman. Somebody started to cry. And then he realized it was Joanna, his daughter. He recovered himself and sat up, reaching out both his arms for her. She pushed against him, sobbing. ‘I’m sorry, darling. I was dreaming,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t know it was you. I didn’t hear you come in.’

  He held her close to him then, near to tears himself while her own sobbing subsided.

  ‘I couldn’t sleep,’ she said. ‘I woke up and I was frightened.’

  He took her into bed with him and held her till she was asleep, then he carried her back to her own bed.

  Back on the couch in the living room he lay down and closed his eyes, trying to ignore the cramps round his gut. He saw the mountain, felt again the sudden, terrible weight as Brady lost his grip. He threw off the bedclothes and stood naked in the middle of the floor. The same point, the same point every time he dreamed. The clarity of it, as if a film were replaying again and again in his head. Everything was still all right, then. But the breath choked in his throat and the air in the room seemed suddenly rancid and still. Pulling on a pair of shorts, he climbed the steps to the roof. The windows of the old MI5 building were cold and dark and empty, like so many sightless eyes.

  11

  GUFFY WAS WORKING ALL weekend in the diner and Harrison had told everyone he was going fishing at his favourite spot a few miles along the East Fork of the Salmon, south of Willow Creek. Friday night he had a beer with Junior and Big John, the Italian, in the Silver Dollar. They sat at the far end of the bar, bullshitting while the band set up in the corner. ‘You want company this weekend?’ Junior asked him.

  ‘Nope.’ Harrison glanced at him. ‘No offence, Junior, but I always fish on my own. I’m around folks all week long and I like to get off on my own.’

  The doors flapped and Jesse walked in with Slusher and Wingo. He eyed Harrison darkly, but did not speak. Outside, the harsh crackle of engines split the air, and Harrison slid off his stool. Dark now, past ten and the evening cool, with a breeze blowing in from the mountains. From the stoop, he could see Fathead and Randy Miller parking their Harleys.

  ‘Hey, Harrison. What’s up?’ Fathead slapped him on the shoulder, almost spilling his beer, as he walked into the bar.

  Harrison left at eleven and watched Tyler Oldfield, one of the Passover marshals, cruise the length of Main Street. Rodriguez and a couple of his friends were sharing an illicit bottle of Cuervo on the steps of the Mexican Import Shop.

  ‘Hey, Harrison. You wanna drink?’

  Harrison held up his hand. ‘Not tonight, Rodriguez.’ He glanced at the others and spotted Pedro looking sorry for himself. He had just been stopped by the sheriff for driving without privileges, the sixth time it had happened and he was looking at three years in the pen. ‘Don’t let the cops see you drinking on the street, Pedro,’ he said, ‘or your three will be five to ten.’

  At midnight he packed his fishing gear into the truck and left the trailer park. He rolled north through Westlake, the streets quiet. He knew the police patrolled every half-hour along Main Street, not that it mattered much at the weekend. He’d told enough people in town where he would be till Sunday. Next to him on the seat, he had a small canvas bag containing rations and water for the weekend, together with a selection of polythene bags and toilet tissue.

  He smoked one cigarette after the other, Merit, then Marlboro, never pulling out the packs, just feeling for one in his shirt pockets, sticking it against his lip and lighting it with his ancient brass Zippo. He needed his fill of nicotine for two reasons: number one, an undercover agent never got over his fear—every time he went covert, he was nervous; number two, these would be the last smokes until Sunday. In downtown Westlake he turned left off Main Street, out of town and then on past the scattered ranches until he came to the dirt road that led to Dugger’s Canyon.

  The track took him a mile or so into the hills before sweeping round in a circle and down into the canyon itself. Colorado Gulch was its real name, but everyone in town knew it as Dugger’s Canyon, being as how the Dugger family had mined it for years. The trail dipped down to the river and the bridge that Danny and his father had built. He pulled off before then and drove the truck into the clearing where Chief had built his hogan. There was good fishing just north of here and, if anybody asked, Harrison would tell them he changed his mind at Galena Summit. This weekend Chief was working on his pictures for the buyer in Boise, and Harrison knew that Danny would not come up here. The old Magdalena mine was closed down, although the entrance still gaped where the roof had partially collapsed. One night when he was drunk in the Westlake Hotel, Danny had mapped the tunnels for Harrison. The hogan was Navajo or Hopi, Harrison could never remember which. Chief had spent a year down in Arizona on the reservation during his wanderlust days and had a spell living in one. Wood-pole construction with a mud roof, cool in summer and well insulated in winter. It was better than hauling a tent for hunting.

  He left the truck, hid his fishing gear in the brush and shouldered the canvas bag. In the depth of the cotton-woods, he stripped the top sod of earth from his keep hide and dug down through the loose dirt to the sealed cooler inside. He took out his spare cam’ suit and gilly and dressed quickly; first, the two-piece summer cam’ suit, not quite desert-style but close. The gilly he put on last and it fell to the ground at his feet, the hood down over his face and flaps over his hands. If he stood still, he was part of the hillside.

  From the hide he also took his Glock 17 automatic pistol, garrotte and his two knuckle knives. These he stashed under the gilly and then lifted out his camera with the macrozoom lens. He had a cover sheet made and ready at each of his lay-up points, so that wherever he watched from the hillside the sun would not catch the lens. Down in the bottom of the box, he had an MP5 with retractable stock, ten clips of ammunition along with three rolls of fishing line, and head-fixed, night-vision glasses which he avoided wearing whenever he could. He also kept an NVG telescope, extra rations and his distraction box, just in case things got really nasty. At the very bottom of the cooler was an infrared suppressive suit. Everything was wrapped in plastic to keep the moisture out, though the cooler had a pretty good seal. When he was ready he stowed what he needed in the canvas bag, slipping in two extra rolls of film and finally a motion sensor, which he would set in place while he was watching and remove when he was gone. The last thing he did was smear his face and hands with cam’ cream.

  Once his eyes were as accustomed to the darkness as they were going to get, he set off. The country was rugged, the trails pitted and full of loose rock and shale. His eyes were good. Six months of crawling tunnels in Vietnam had set him up for life. Yes, you could use a flashlight down there and most of the time you did; but there were those occasions when Charlie was so close you could almost hear the breath break from his body, then you crawled in darkness.

  Compared to the blackness underground, open country under a flat and full sky was daylight. The world was grey/brown rather than black and Harrison had hiked this trail many times before. The going was steep at first. He pressed a path between the hills, cutting through groves of aspen and Douglas fir trees. He almost stepped on a chukar, and in the trees, crows called as he passed. He startled a group of elk and had to watch for the bull as he skittered away from the trail. Birds lifted from the branches of trees, with the sudden flurry of movement. That was bad, moving too fast. Birds flying like that could alert somebody looking. He recalled the night back in June when Drake’s kid had been so vigilant.

  A mile into the canyon, he ca
me to the outcrop of reddy brown rock that lifted in a small bluff to the northeast of the trail. He could spot it from some distance as the sky greyed above his head, a slim fissure of a cave edging fifteen feet into the rock. Sometimes he would use this as a sleeping hole if Jesse had troops on the hill. In the roof, bats hung in clusters. Harrison hated bats. They were OK scuttling about in the open, but when you disturbed their sleep they were frantic, screeching and crying and fluttering into your face with wings of moist leather. He moved more slowly now, too visible on open ground: he could never be completely sure that they did not patrol at night. In the daytime, they used three-man teams on the perimeter of the compound itself. Whatever Salvesen was planning, he was paranoid about people close to his land. Harrison checked his watch, almost three o’clock. He was careful, eyes peeled, ears pricked for sounds which shouldn’t be there. He wished it would rain or the wind would blow instead of this dead calm.

  He had lay-up points at height and distance intervals mainly on the hillside to the back of the compound. He moved from one to the other at a snail’s pace, spending a good few hours in each. In summer, Salvesen entertained guests on a specially seeded lawn with trees growing up against the inner fence. The compound was accessed by the dirt track that ran for a mile between the foothills all the way from the highway. You had to cross a small wooden bridge over the river, and there Harrison had hidden passive infrared sensors to count vehicles crossing. When he couldn’t use his eyes to see what kind of traffic was moving up and down the highway, he checked his car counter. Mucho activity meant mucho surveillance, which, given the size of the town and the general interest in other people’s business, was not that easy. There are only so many weekends in which a man can be invisible.

  It was three-thirty when he moved to the top of the gulch and settled in his first observation point. High on the hilltop, which overlooked the grassy canyon where Salvesen had his compound, the gulch saddled between two outcrops of rock. Underneath the one on the right flank, an overhang jutted about three feet and Harrison used it to lie under. A dried-up gopher hole pitted into the rock, and it was here he stowed the first of his camera hides.

  He took the camera and binoculars from his bag and pulled the chicken-wire shade from the hole. He unravelled it, pulling the wire out on to the prongs which he set deep in the earth. The covering was the same colour strips of cloth that he used on the gilly suit. When it was set up, not only did it protect his lens from reflection but it kept the sun from his face. The cam’ cream had dried now and when it got light the sun would mush it into a sticky coating on his skin. He lay on his side, under the lip of rock, and set his camera on to the mini tripod. The lens was extendable, but had been adapted by FBI scientists for ease of transportation. When everything was ready, he rolled himself in the gilly suit and slept the rest of the night.

  He woke with the sun warming his face. Three men with dogs were walking the outer perimeter fence, five hundred yards below him. The fence was twelve feet high with razor wire on the top. He recognized Jesse’s mottled green baseball hat. He adjusted his position; below him, in the foothills, cattle grazed. A couple of men on horseback were rounding them up, hats turned to the sun. If he listened hard, he could hear their whistles. He watched as they gathered the stray steers, then drove them ahead, down the slopes towards the outer rim of the compound. Harrison lay there until the foot patrol was gone and the horsemen had driven the stock far beyond the front of the compound. Then he moved, crabbing his way down the hill a few feet at a time. Far in the distance, clouds gathered and he knew he would get wet tonight.

  It took him over an hour to make his second lay-up point, about a hundred yards further down the hill. There, he had the benefit of a rising bank of grass with some scrub sage tightly curled in clumps. Wrapped around one was his second chicken-wire shade. Again he unwound it, no sudden movements, everything slow and easy. Now and then he would peer back up the hillside to make sure he was not observed from above. He could see a gathering of tiny figures in the backyard of the compound. The house stood tall and white against the sun. The huge marquee, where Salvesen held church services by special invitation only, took up half the spare ground at the back. Beyond it, to the right as Harrison looked, was the stretch of seed grass where the barbecue area was. He could see a tendril of smoke rising towards the sky. Now he set up his camera for the second time, adjusted the zoom lens and watched. It wasn’t as close as he would like and he knew that he would have to make the final observation point if he was to get any decent shots. The compound was busy, people thronging here and there. Harrison imagined pitchers of lemonade, and the chicken and racks of ribs hissing in their own fat.

  It was almost ten and he knew that a half-hour from now another patrol would check the outer perimeter. From his forwardmost lay-up point, they would still be fifty yards in front of him. There was no wind, so the chances of one of the dogs sniffing him out was remote. It remained a chance, however, and he had to decide whether to move now or wait till they had passed. He decided that time was on his side, so he settled down to wait. At exactly ten-thirty the second patrol came by, different men this time and the pit bull was running free. It gambolled away from them, running back and forth, up and down the hill, no more than twenty-five feet from where he would have been lying. His mouth dried at the thought.

  At the forwardmost lay-up point he settled in for a long stint, propped up on his elbow under the protective cover of the gilly. His camera was set up, the chicken-wire cover over it as part of the hillside. He could see clearly and he snapped away at the faces eating chicken and ribs and platters of green salad. He recognized a couple of people; businessmen from upstate with whom Salvesen was acquainted. Then he saw Congressman Redruth from Boise. Twice now he had photographed him in this compound. He looked for other out-of-towners, but could not spot anyone he recognized. One man stood apart, looking a little awkward. Harrison focused his camera, closing in on the man’s face. The subject was young, younger than most of the other guests, his face tanned dark by the sun, with long blond hair. There was something vaguely familiar about him, but Harrison could not say what. One man he did recognize was Gil Davidson out of Missouri. He had been here at least three times before, a preacher in the mould of Salvesen, only not as bright. He was part of the leadership of the Missouri Breakmen, one of the best-attended militia groups in the country. He had brought forty men and women out for a weekend’s training with Jesse Tate.

  Harrison lay back and slept for a while and when he woke it was afternoon. The gathering was less busy now, the smoke from the barbecue had gone and the trestles were being cleared. He saw Salvesen walking beyond the marquee with the blond-haired man who had stood on his own. Harrison got behind the camera and followed them. God, he wished he could hear what they were saying. Salvesen was a big man, taller and much broader than the blond guy. They walked close, strolling almost, heads together as though deep in conversation. The younger man was showing Salvesen something, but Harrison could not tell what it was. He trained the camera on Salvesen’s reddened features, bull-nosed, with that great walrus-like moustache spreading across his lips. He was fifty-five years old, but you’d have to look hard to find a grey hair on his head.

  That night Harrison did get wet. Early evening and a stillness descended on the country, holding the air against the ground. Then all at once the wind started to blow, slow at first, then harder and harder until the trees were bent all but double. Clouds gathered darker and darker and then lightning lit up the sky in pink and orange, before it forked at the ground like the devil spearing for fish. The rain fell in vertical lines, iron rods hammering the dust into mush. Harrison used its cover to move as close to the outer perimeter fence as he dared. He had no NVGs with him, but they would have been useless anyway with lightning strikes all around him. The thunder rolled, the rain hissed against rock and dirt and he was able to move much more swiftly than he normally would. He had been this close before, again using the cover of a summer s
torm to shield his path and allow him up to the fence. He had noted that when the weather was this bad the perimeter patrols were non-existent. He knew where the light and motion sensors were, and they were fewer than at the front. Everybody bars and chains their front door. Human nature, he called it. Salvesen was no different, his back gate was locked but it wasn’t bolted. He had goon towers twenty feet high on each corner of the compound, but they were not manned twenty-four hours a day. They were manned tonight, however; a show of strength for his guests, no doubt. One man in each, armed with an M16 automatic rifle. Salvesen allowed no Chinese or Russian guns in his compound. Harrison knew the movement of the guards, and right now they would be tucked up under cover having a quiet chew or a smoke.

  He was able to get right up to the fence and check it from one end to the other. The trip wires were visible to the naked eye, if you knew where to look. Fifty yards to the back of the fence was a rising hillock with a grove of aspen behind it. Harrison moved there and lay up against the edge, the best cover near to the compound. It was too close for any feeding animal to crop at the grass and the regular movement of men kept most of them away. Harrison lay flat now, with the rain beating off his gilly and soaking right into his bones. He was cold, wet through, but this was his best chance in years. If ever he was to find a weak spot in the wire, it was now. So he picked his way at a crawl, the entire length of the fence and found what he was looking for. The wire had been dug down into the ground, rather than just being tied off, but underneath the northern goon tower it was solid rock. They had had no option but to fasten it down and leave it. As Harrison tested it with his fingers, he knew he could cut effectively and tie back again afterwards. If Kovalski could get him a warrant—he had his point of covert entry.

  Exhilarated, he watched the inner wall. Lights were mounted, facing out at twenty-foot intervals. They were activated by motion and cast a beam over the outer pasture that ran up to the fence. Twin security cameras were set up at each corner, facing across one another so they could pick up any movement. He had filmed them recently with the SearchCam Recon IR, a tactical surveillance camera that the Bureau had furnished him with. It was made of anodized aluminium and allowed him to survey activity covertly and behind the line of fire. The information ended up in the Domestic Terrorism Unit in D.C. After Oklahoma, ‘potential terrorists’ was how the FBI viewed some of the active militia groups. Salvesen had as yet committed no crime against any person or person’s property in the United States, but he frequented the company of known militia leaders and was undoubtedly training their members, perhaps even arming them. Harrison saw his role as terror prevention. According to the Bureau, terrorism prevention was: ‘A documented instance in which a violent act by a known or suspected terrorist group or individual with the means and a proven propensity for violence is successfully interdicted through investigative activity.’ Investigative activity, that was what this was, sitting out here with rain falling like lead pellets from an ashen sky and lightning bolts tearing up great chunks of the hillside. Salvesen could not be deemed to have a proven propensity for violence, but some of the men he spoke to did—BobCat Reece of Montana for one.