by Dave Butler
The quiet of the mountain morning broke when Willson’s radio squawked to life. It was tucked into the pocket of her jacket and she jumped at the unexpected noise.
“Watchers Four, Five, and Six, this is Watcher One, do you copy?” It was Inspector Doyle at the junction of the Buhl and Skookumchuk Creek roads, calling his surveillance teams on the scrambled radio channel.
Willson clicked the microphone clipped to the collar of her jacket. “Go ahead, One, this is Four.” She heard the other two teams responding.
“Five here,” said one.
“Go for Six,” said the other.
“I have an update for you,” said Doyle. “Be advised that Big Bear was just seen returning to his residence, alone. We have no idea where he was for the last eighteen hours. But we’ll continue watching to see what he does next, where he goes.”
Willson could tell he was seriously pissed off — but no more so than she was.
“Roger that,” she said, and then made a quick decision. “I need teams Five and Six to move into Location Alpha and immediately arrest both parties there. I’m assuming their presence was a diversion. We’ll be right there and will then bring them to Cranbrook for interviews. I want to know what they know.”
In sequence, the surveillance teams responded in the affirmative.
Willson stared at MacDonald. “Son of a bitch!” she yelled. “I knew something wasn’t right.”
As she and MacDonald broke camp, Willson immediately thought of Jenkins. Like her, he’d put so much time and energy into this investigation that the idea they had been purposefully misled would be, she knew, devastating for him. But that was what it looked like. She was just as devastated. And pissed off. And then her mind shifted to Eastman and his client. Had the guy come into Canada like he was supposed to? They’d had no calls from any border crossings telling them that someone had come north claiming to be hunting with Eastman, but that meant nothing. If the client had come north and if he and Eastman hadn’t come to the Buhl Creek camp for a grizzly, then where the hell did they go? And what did they shoot, if anything? She saw her strategy unravelling, all the doubts she’d carried over the past few days coming alive. She now knew how unlikely it was that they’d catch the American heading back to the U.S. with a poached bear.
Sick with anger and doubt, Willson threw her duffle bag into the truck and poured the remaining coffee on the fire. It died with a hiss. “Just like our goddamn case,” she said. “Fuck.” She tossed the keys at MacDonald. “You drive, Peter. I’m so pissed off, I’ll end up driving us into a tree.”
By the time the two wardens reached Eastman’s camp, after bouncing up the last three kilometres of logging road, the two surveillance teams had moved in from the trees to arrest the cook and the assistant guide. The two men sat shoeless on the front porch of the main cabin, in handcuffs and in shock. With one look, Willson was certain they had no idea what was going on and had, like the circle of six officers now standing around them, expected Eastman and a client to arrive at the camp the night before.
“What the hell’s going on?” asked the camp cook when Willson pulled him to his feet.
“We’ll give you a chance to tell us all you know when we get back to Cranbrook,” she said, steering the man toward their idling crew cab.
With the two men seated in the truck, their hands cuffed behind them, Willson and MacDonald entered the main cabin, searching for evidence. Her gaze jumped to a trio of rifles leaning in one corner of the seating area. She brushed past MacDonald and picked them up one at a time. “Come on, .308. Come on, 308,” she said as though rolling dice in a casino. But after studying the last weapon, she turned back to MacDonald, crestfallen. No .308. “Why can’t we get a friggin’ break?” she asked.
Leaning against the dining table, MacDonald flipped the pages of a notebook. “I don’t know, Jenny,” he said. “The calendar here shows that Eastman and a client were supposed to arrive yesterday for a seven-day hunt starting today. These guys seemed to believe it. Either Eastman changed his mind at the last minute … or he’s trying to mess with our heads.”
Frustrated, Willson walked outside and stood alone on the front porch of the cabin. She looked at Eastman’s GPS-tagged truck parked near the corral, its windows opaque with frost. “You’re one tricky son of a bitch and you’ve outmanoeuvred us again,” Willson said, shaking her head, her accusation directed more at Eastman’s mysterious client than Eastman himself. “Where the hell are you?”
Three hours later, the entire enforcement team of conservation officers and wardens again sat in the boardroom at the B.C. Environment office in Cranbrook. Down the hall, the camp cook was in one interview room, the assistant guide in another.
Willson spoke first. “Gentlemen, before we interview our two guys, let’s take a moment. While I appreciate your efforts, you now know that my suspicions were, unfortunately, right. It appears that Eastman set this whole thing up. He wanted us to believe that he and his client were heading into camp. But now we know different. What we don’t know is where the hell he did go while we were freezing our asses near his camp.” She slammed her open hand on the table, startling everyone. “And I still don’t know who his American client is! We don’t even know if they were together. After all this, we’ve got squat.”
Willson looked around the table. She knew everyone felt as dismayed as she did. “I’m open to ideas.”
MacDonald’s grim smile was an attempt to offer hope. “We could push Eastman’s two guys hard,” he said, “but I don’t believe they knew what was going on. They appeared to be in shock when we showed up. And all the way here, they kept asking why they’d been arrested. I think they were pawns in Eastman’s chess game.”
“I agree,” said one of the COs from the Special Investigations Unit who’d been watching the Buhl Creek camp while lying on the forest floor a hundred metres away. “From what we could see, they appeared to be getting the camp ready for hunters. And I thought they’d shit themselves when they opened the cabin door to us this morning.”
“Jesus,” said Willson with a sigh, “what a friggin’ mess. I really should’ve listened to my gut on this.”
“She’s right,” said an older CO who was on the verge of retirement and overtly resentful of Inspector Doyle. “Why did we put all our eggs in this one basket? We could’ve —”
The inspector stared the man into silence. “Could’ve what, Dennis? If you had all the answers, why the hell didn’t you speak up earlier?”
“Hey,” Dennis said snidely, “you acted like you and the lady warden had all the answers. Now it looks like you maybe didn’t.”
“Shut the hell up,” said Doyle. “I’ll see you in my office as soon as we’re done here.” He turned his attention back to the group. “We can sit around here all afternoon and navel-gaze and lay blame, or we can deal with the steaming pile of shit we’ve been handed. Jenny and I will do the interviews in a few minutes, so why doesn’t everyone take a break and grab some coffee. We got lots of work ahead of us.” He rose quickly, glared again at the older CO, threw open the door to the boardroom, and stalked off down the hallway.
The room emptied, with Willson, Jenkins, and MacDonald staying behind.
“Sorry you had to witness the internal pissing match, Jenny,” said Jenkins, looking across the table at the two wardens while he leaned as far back as his chair would allow. They all appeared equally exhausted and deflated. “I really thought we were going to nail Eastman and his guy this time. Based on what we know, it’s possible they were somewhere else, doing God knows what, while we were waiting in Buhl Creek. But we don’t know. And if the American did come across the border into Canada, then the prick is probably home and out of our hands again. You were right to think it was a set-up. The fucker outwitted us. Whoever he is, he must be laughing his ass off at us right now.”
“I don’t know what to say, Brad,” said Willson. “Ba
sed on what Clark told us before he was killed, there was a good chance the hunt was going down from the camp. But there was that little voice in my head telling me things weren’t as they appeared. It seemed too easy. If what we now suspect is right, Eastman and his client must’ve used Clark to set this up … and then took him out of the picture so he wouldn’t talk. There’s no way in hell we could have known or suspected that.”
“I don’t know, Jenny,” said Jenkins. “Going from poaching to homicide is a hell of a big leap. What the hell were they doing to make this worthwhile?” he asked, not expecting an answer.
“Whatever it was,” said Willson, “this just became a lot more personal.”
“What’s next, Jenny?” asked MacDonald.
“What’s next? We’re going to arrest Eastman, and I’m going to get another search warrant for his place. I’m done playing games with that fucker. It’s time for us to meet again, face to face, with him in handcuffs and me asking the questions.”
Later that same day, Steve Barber backed his pickup into his barn in Yahk. The bed of the truck was capped with a fibreglass canopy, its windows blackened. He flipped up the door of the canopy, making the hinges squeak, and lowered the tailgate with a thump.
For the fifth time that day, he mentally reviewed, step-by-step, what he needed to accomplish that night. It was his military experience that made him plan and train, and plan and train again. After phoning his contact across the border the day before, he’d left a message on his uncle Bernie’s cellphone, confirming that tonight was the night.
Barber loaded the truck in reverse sequence so the items he needed first would be closest to the tailgate. First in went the bull caribou head, covered with a dark canvas tarp and wrapped securely with black electrical tape. Next, he slid in a small black two-man raft, not quite fully inflated. He’d bought it at a U.S. surplus store after he left the army, thinking it would be ideal for fishing in remote lakes. But he’d never imagined that it would be used for something like this, something that would make him money. Finally, he added a nylon duffle bag filled with gear.
When the sky was hours beyond sunset, filled with bands of stars from horizon to mountain-topped horizon, Barber drove out of his garage and turned right onto the highway. Ten minutes later, he shut off his headlights as he turned right onto the Shorty Creek Forest Service Road.
Driving slowly on the gravel so as not to awaken the residents of a house a few hundred metres to the west, he crossed the Moyie River on a log bridge. He turned left into a private driveway and immediately pulled into a small clearing between the driveway and the river. He shut off the truck, punched the button on his watch, and read the time on the illuminated dial. Thirty minutes past midnight. From thoroughly scouting the location previously, Barber knew that in a few moments, a southbound train would pass this spot, slowing as it approached the U.S. border, obliterating all other sound for three loud minutes.
Barber emerged from his truck, shutting the driver’s door carefully and quietly. Doing the same with the canopy door and tailgate, he unzipped the duffle bag and began to pull on a black neoprene wetsuit. He stuck his B.C. driver’s licence in a waterproof sleeve down the zippered front. He thought about his old dog tags hanging from his bathroom mirror. This was his first mission without them. He pulled the neoprene hood over his head, forced his feet into black booties with rubber soles, and as a last step, worked his hands into thick, black, neoprene gloves. He strapped a diver’s watch on his left arm and drew a mask, snorkel, and fins from the bottom of the duffle bag. Two warm beers sat on the seat in the truck, and although he knew that if he pounded them both back now they would add credibility to the story he’d no doubt have to tell later on, Barber left them. Drinking before a mission, a mission that involved swimming in an icy river, was a dumb idea.
Barber heard the rumble of the approaching train and felt an injection of adrenalin into his bloodstream. Moving to the opposite side of the truck from the tracks, he waited until the twin engines passed where he stood, a bright cyclops-like headlight illuminating the steel tracks ahead in twin bands of white.
In a first quick trip, he dragged the raft, his fins, snorkel, and mask to the edge of the Moyie River. In a second trip, he wrestled the wrapped caribou head to the waiting raft, lashing it securely against the middle inflated thwart using black garden twine. It was a difficult task wearing neoprene gloves, but he’d practised it many times in preparation for that moment. As the last train car rattled by, a small electronic conductor box blinking on the back, Barber slipped into the river, sliding the loaded raft in behind him. Time to rock and roll.
The shock of the cold water hitting his exposed cheeks, chin, and forehead made him gasp. Suck it up, he thought. Night patrols outside their Kandahar base had been worse than this. The current caught him and pulled him through a wide left-hand curve south and east toward the Kingsgate border crossing. As best he could, Barber stayed tight against the west bank where the current was deepest. Twice, he was forced to paddle aggressively to avoid log-jams.
When he saw the bright lights of the new Canadian border station with the U.S. crossing behind it, Barber submerged on the side of the raft away from the buildings, began breathing through the upright snorkel, and let the current carry him onward. He remained still, hanging on to a rope on the bottom of the raft, hoping the raft’s low profile would not trigger the infrared beams he assumed were pointing across the river.
He made it beyond the border and floated motionlessly down the Moyie River into northern Idaho. Scanning the banks, his mask just above the waterline, he saw no signs of movement and heard no wailing sirens or racing vehicles amidst the sounds of moving water gurgling in his neoprene-covered ears. He tried to smile, but his frozen face wouldn’t obey the commands from his brain. He knew that his destination, a bridge on Moyie River Road, was still another five kilometres downstream, yet he was confident of success. However, like the ex-soldier he was, he also knew that it wasn’t over until it was over.
Chapter 29
September 5
The Moyie River carved a series of sinuous curves as it flowed south through Idaho. At the last major bend before the bridge on Moyie River Road, Barber crawled out of the water on the west side, his arms and legs wobbly from cold and exhaustion. He pulled himself and the raft up the rocky shoreline and into the trees. As he was asked to do, he untied the caribou head from the raft and tucked the trophy against the north side of a large veteran cottonwood, its leaves on the ground crisp and dry. Because the head was wrapped in black, Barber knew it would be difficult to detect, even in daylight. It was a black shadow, one of many amongst the tall cottonwoods. The raft was no longer of value to him, so he punctured the main tubes with his knife, pushed as much air out of it as he could, and heaved the pieces into the main current of the river. He wrapped himself in an emergency blanket and sat down to wait.
Thirty minutes later, Barber heard the sound of a truck rolling down Moyie River Road from the west. When the vehicle squealed to a stop and the engine fell silent, he raised two fingers to his mouth and produced a high-pitched whistle. Once, twice. He watched a flashlight beam bouncing toward him through the shoreline trees and heard two men approaching, their footsteps crunching in the carpet of fallen leaves. Concerned that it might be the Border Patrol or a local sheriff, Barber stood motionless behind a second cottonwood.
One of the two men whispered the only words spoken between them that night. “Hey, it’s us. Have you got the package?” he asked, his voice thick with nerves.
Barber stepped out from behind the tree, startling the men. Without responding, he simply pointed to the wrapped head leaning against the tree. The men picked it up and moved away quickly.
When the truck was gone and all was again quiet, Barber took a deep breath, girding himself for the next stage. He was tired and cold. His energy reserves were nearly gone, but he had to finish the mission if he was to collect payme
nt from his uncle.
After cutting the blanket into pieces, Barber tossed them and the knife into the water. He then slipped back into the river and let the current again carry him downstream. When he reached the bridge, he escaped the river’s pull and scrambled up a gravel slope on the east bank, reaching the road moments later. The snorkel, mask, and fins joined the raft, knife, and shredded blanket in the water.
Leaving behind the sound of the river, Barber staggered toward the lights of a distant house. Out of the cold water and moving on dry land, his extremities came to life again. He swung his arms in circles as he walked, moving warm blood into his frozen hands. His legs began to work as they should, but it was painful to walk on the frozen ground, his feet covered only in the thin layer of neoprene. As he approached the house, he saw the first signs of sunrise in the eastern sky.
Here we go, he thought. These folks are going to come out to see why their dog is barking, and they’ll see a man dressed in black opening the gate to their yard. This is the most dangerous part of the mission. Because this was northern Idaho, Barber wasn’t surprised when he saw the homeowner open the door, shotgun in hand.
“Who the hell are you and why’re you on my property?” the man asked, while sighting down the barrel toward Barber.
Barber was ready for this, his hands already in the air. He stopped walking.
“I … I … need help and I don’t know where I am,” he said to the man, trying his best to sound tired and confused. After what he’d just done, the tired part was easy.
“What the hell are you doing here?” said the man, the shotgun still pointed at Barber’s chest.