Hunting Season

by P. T. Deutermann

  He didn’t want to turn on a cuff light until he thought he was very close. When he was finally in position, he paused to look straight up. It was a dark, moonless night, but there was plenty of starlight streaming down through the clear mountain air. He adapted his eyes to use the starlight by looking first up the stars and then down and sideways at the top objects in the logjam. When he could make out individual branches and snags, he looked down along the logjam until he could make out the tops of individual trees on the other side of the creek. If there was anyone out here tonight, they’d be over there in those trees, where they could see down into the broad ravine cut by the creek.

  He began to scan the dark mass of tangled debris with his peripheral vision, searching for a lighter contrast among all the roots, limbs, packed leaves, and mangled grasses. When he finally thought he had it, he set a cuff light for the dimmest red setting and pointed it into the tangle. The hat was right there. Keeping the light on, he pushed the rod into the tangle, very slowly so as to make no noise, and snagged the hat. He turned off the light, retrieved the cap, and stuffed it quietly into the chest pack without looking at it. Then he subsided to the ground to listen to the night.

  The mass of the logjam rose up beside him. It felt like an avalanche, poised to drop on him. The hairs were up on the back of his neck again.

  Browne stood to one side of the dim path. He was just able to make out Jared’s silhouette as he stood ten feet behind him. Jared was sweeping binoculars down into the ravine. The wedge of night sky showing through a gap in the trees was clear; the air was cooling fast. He didn’t really expect anything to happen tonight; if Jared had seen someone, they were at best long gone and at worst huddled around a campfire out in the deep storage area somewhere. For a moment, he had a prickly thought that whoever it was might have already gotten behind them and was even now creeping through the streets of the industrial area. The girl, he thought. Is this about the girl?

  Jared was moving back in his direction. As always, Browne was amazed that such a heavy man as Jared could move so soundlessly through the woods. Not a twig snapped nor bush swished. He just seemed to get closer and closer, until Browne could smell the cigarette smell on him.

  But then jared reached for Browne’s left hand. He took it gently, turned it palm up, and jabbed one finger down: He’d seen someone or something, and as best he could tell, there was only one of them out there.

  Browne took jared’s hand. He drew the letter W on Jared’s palm with his fingernail, followed by the letter R, meaning, Where exactly is he?

  Jared took Browne’s palm. He drew a wiggly line all the way across it.

  The creek. Then he bisected that line with the flat of his thumb, twice.

  The logjam, just below where those kids had drowned. Then he did it again, and where the two lines met, he drew his finger lightly up the logjam line and then jabbed his fingertip right there: south of the creek, on the other side, near the logjam, one individual.

  Browne pulled the heavy pistol and pressed it into Jared’s hand. Then he tapped Jared once on the chest and squeezed Jared’s hand around the pistol grip, indicating he should take the gun. Then he took jared’s other hand, touched his own chest with it, and then his right ear, tapping Jared’s fingertips on his ear two or three times, and then he pointed Jared’s arm first to his own face and then off to the right, meaning, You take the gun.

  I’ll go to the right and make noise. Jared nodded in the darkness, turned around, and melted back toward the creek.

  Browne waited until he could no longer see the black shape of his grandson, and then he went off the path to the right, moving silently across the carpet of pine needles. When he judged he was about thirty feet away from the path, he felt around for a large stick, picked it up, took a deep breath, and then began yelling, “There he is! Get him!” at the top of his lungs while banging the stick against the trees around him and crashing noisily through the underbrush toward the creek.

  Kreiss had crawled almost back to the edge of the creek when the hullabaloo broke out in the opposite tree line. He felt a stab of panic before his hunting discipline reasserted itself. Instead of springing into a dead run across the field of high grass, toward the safety of his own tree line, he lunged toward the noise and the creek, even as a heavy bullet smacked the hole of the big downed tree and a booming pistol report assaulted his ears from up on the opposite tree line. He rolled into the creek bed in the direction of the gunshot and made a split-second decision. If the watchers had been there for a long time, they’d expect him to run back the way he’d come, down the creek and then out through the tall grass, right into the man traps Instead, he scrambled as close to the undercut north bank as he could get and then slipped to his left under the big tree trunk and

  into the tangle of the logjam. He ended up lying on his belly in wet sand, with one of the small waterfalls pouring ice-cold water onto his back.

  Using the rod in his left hand and his fingers on his right hand, he moved sand aside like a giant sea turtle about to lay its eggs on a beach. As he wiggled deeper into the sand, he was able to move farther up under the logjam. With any luck, he could get all the way under it to the stream on the back side and get away, but, either way, they couldn’t get a shot at him while he was under all this debris. He kept digging and inching his way forward.

  When Browne heard the shot, he stopped making noise and stood still by the edge of the tree line, keeping one tree between himself and the creek and waiting for jared. Obviously, Jared had been confident enough of seeing someone that he’d taken a shot. Then, to Browne’s left, a bright white flashlight snapped on, its beam traversing the creek bed from right to left quickly, and then much more slowly. He pulled his own light and began doing the same thing, putting his beam where Jared’s wasn’t. They searched back and forth along the area of the creek bed, and along the downstream edge of the logjam pile. Browne saw the occasional glint of steel as his beam hit one of the traps. He moved left to join Jared.

  “Well?” he said.

  “Saw him at the edge of the creek and the logjam,” Jared said, keeping his voice low.

  “Blind once the gun went off. Missed him, though; heard the bullet hit that big tree.”

  “Can you tell which way he went?”

  “Into the creek. After that…”

  Browne was silent for a long moment. He stopped his light when it illuminated Kreiss’s original path through the tall grass leading down to the creek.

  “Well, nothing wrong with your instincts. There was someone out here. Question is, Why?”

  “Way that grass is flattened down, he was crawling’,” Jared said.

  “Whoever it was, he wasn’t hunting’. He was creepin’ this place.”

  “This has to be about those kids, then,” Browne said.

  “No way anyone could know about the other. Right, Jared?”

  “Not from me anyways,” Jared said as he flicked the powerful beam up to the opposite tree line, hoping to flash some eyes. Nothing shone back at him.

  “So that’s bad, then.”

  “Yes, it is.”

  “You want to keep looking? Maybe go get the dogs?”

  Browne thought about it. Jared had three mixed-breed hounds he used for hunting wild pigs, but it would be hours before they could get back here with the dogs.

  “No,” he said.

  “I think we should get off the reservation for the night. Maybe leave it alone for a couple of days. In case this was just some guy wandering around. Tonight he’s scared. Tomorrow he might bring cops.”

  “He’d have to admit he broke in here,” Jared said, handing back the heavy Ruger.

  “If this wasn’t purposeful, then he’ll never come back.”

  “And if it was…”

  “Then I need to start patrollin’. You stay on the generator; I need to start hunting’.”

  Browne detected the sound of anticipation in his grandson’s voice.

  Above all else, Jared w
as a hunter. They made a few more sweeps of the ravine with their Maglites, and then Browne switched his off. He brought out a much smaller version of the big light and used it to guide them back up the path toward the industrial area.

  Behind them, down in the ravine, Edwin Kreiss broke through the last of the tangle, pulled himself out onto a dry sandbar, sniffed the night air, and listened. Then he smiled.

  On Monday morning, Janet Carter talked to Larry Talbot and Billy Smith about what she’d learned from Barry dark. Billy Smith was manfully trying to stay awake, but there was a steady parade of yawns.

  “Am I mistaken, or didn’t the boss have a word with you Friday?” Talbot said.

  “Yes, he did. Warned me off Edwin Kreiss and this whole case. But as I understand it, we get new info, we make sure it gets into the system. Billy, you finished the transmittal letter for the case file?”

  “Nope, but I’ll have it today,” Billy said, giving another yawn.

  “I need to know which one of you is the official case officer.”

  If Billy wasn’t such a nice man, all this yawning would have me yelling at him, she thought. Talbot, however, made a noise of exasperation.

  “Look, Jan,” he said. She frowned. She hated being called Jan.

  “I

  remember that kid dark. Redhead, right?

  “Fuck you’ sneer on his face all the time? He’s an asshole. He could be telling you anything, or the latest thing off the Dungeon Masters of Doom bulletin board. Leave the fucking thing alone. You want to put the campus cops’ report and this Site R stuff into that file, fine. But if Farnsworth finds out you’re still messing with this thing, he’ll have you doing background investigation interviews on Honduran gardeners until the end of time. Okay? Enough already.”

  Janet acquiesced and slunk back to her cubicle. Billy rose up over the divider.

  “What’s the difference between a southern zoo and a northern zoo?”

  he asked.

  She waited.

  “A southern zoo has a description of the animal on the front of a cage, along with a recipe.”

  He winked at her over the divider and then did a down periscope.

  Sweet dreams, Billy, she thought. She started going through her Email and remembered that the shrink up in Washington had promised to get back to her, but it was only Monday morning. Then she saw an announcement on internal mail that Farnsworth was going to a conference of eastern region SACs and RAs for three days and wanted any pending action-items brought to him before close of business today. She looked around for Talbot, but he had stepped away from his desk. She cut over to the Web and hit her favorite search engine. She typed in Site R and received the usual avalanche of Web site garbage. So much for that, she thought, and went to refill her coffee cup. To her surprise, Billy was working, not sleeping. She offered to fill his cup, and he accepted. When she returned, she asked him about Site R. “Only Site R I ever heard about was the alternate command center for the Pentagon; it’s up near Camp David, in Maryland. Probably five, six hours from here, up I-Eighty-one, then east.”

  “Not a place you’d go camping, then?”

  “Not unless you like sleeping with a lot of Secret Service agents. It’s like that NORAD thing inside Cheyenne Mountain. You know, the command center for the ICBMs. For what it’s worth, I took a look through that case file. I noticed something: They didn’t take a lot of clothes, like for some long trip. Larry even made a note that Kreiss had questioned that. I don’t know about this Site R business, but I’d be looking for something closer to home.”

  “Like what? Site R sounds military.”

  “Yeah, well, maybe go talk to some of the homesteaders here. Or local law maybe.”

  Janet nodded and went back to her desk. The homesteaders were FBI employees who had been in the Roanoke office for a long time, people who either had low-level technical jobs or were non-career-path special agents. Talbot returned to the office and looked over in her direction;

  Janet made a show of tackling her in box. She had half a mind to put a call into Edwin Kreiss, see what he knew about Site R. Yeah, right, she thought. Back to work, Carter.

  Edwin Kreiss finished cleaning his trekking gear and then re stowed his packs in the spare bedroom closet. He was waiting for a return call from Dagget Parsons up in northern Virginia. Kreiss had saved Parsons’s life during an Agency retrieval in Oregon, when Dagget had been a pilot for the U.S. Marshals Service. Dagget had retired after the incident, but not before telling Kreiss that if there was ever anything he needed, just call.

  Kreiss was hoping that Dag was still flying for that environmental sciences company. The phone rang.

  “Edwin Kreiss.”

  “Well, well, Edwin Kreiss himself. How the hell are you? Where the hell are you?”

  “Nowhere special anymore, Dag; just another Bureau retiree. I’m down in Blacksburg, near Virginia Tech. What are you up to these days?

  You still flying for that Geo-Information Services?”

  “Yeah. It’s boring, but boring is what I’m after these days. How can I help you?”

  Kreiss told him about Lynn. Then he got right down to it.

  “Dag, I need some aerial photography of a place called the Ramsey Army Arsenal.

  It’s outside of a town called Ramsey, here in southwest Virginia. The place is a mothballed Army ammunition-production complex. Got any contacts who could maybe get me copies of some black-and-white overheads, say from about five thousand feet?” He phrased it that way in case Parsons didn’t want to do it.

  “Contacts? No. But I can do it. The company I fly for is over in Suitland, Maryland. Like you said, we do GIS stuff all up and down the East Coast. You know, field condition analyses for farmers, spectrum analysis for crop diseases, pond health, insect infestations, plant pathologies.”

  “I’m not active anymore, Dag. This is strictly personal. I can cover costs, of course.”

  “Understood. And you’re working with local law, or in spite of local law?”

  “They’ve declared it a missing persons case. The Bureau, I mean. The locals will follow the feds’ lead on that.”

  “The locals know you’re working it? They know who you are?”

  “No. Not yet anyway. The local Bureau people do, of course, after my somewhat colorful departure, and I’ve been duly warned off. But I can’t just sit here, Dag.”

  “Understood, Ed. I’ll guarantee I’d be doing the same damn thing.

  Look, this stuff is all unclassified. We have a humongous database of aerial photography. We probably have coverage. Lemme work on it. How long’s she been missing?”

  Kreiss told him.

  “Shit. That’s rough.” He paused, not wanting to state the obvious.

  “I have to hope, Dag, but, like I said, the cops and the Bureau have given up looking. The feds say there’s no evidence of a crime, so it’s a straight missing persons beef now. But I got a tip about this installation, and I then found her hat there. It’s not a place where she should have been, and I think there’s something going on there.”

  “You tell your ex-employers all that?”

  “I’d have to tell them how I found it. That wouldn’t be helpful. For a variety of reasons.”

  Dagget was silent for a moment.

  “But maybe they’d start working it again,” he said.

  “I don’t think so. There’s still no crime, except mine. They’re working stiffs with a budget and a boss, Dag. Basically, I’m going solo on this.”

  “Roger that,” Parsons said.

  “I’m slated into southern Pennsylvania this afternoon, but we did some flights on some big apple orchards in the upper valley about six months ago. Let me look at the GPS maps for this Ramsey Arsenal, see if maybe we got coverage.”

  “I can pay for this, Dag.”

  “Not me you can’t. The only thing that might take some cash is getting your data out of the center. But we’re talking black-and-white photo recce here, so that ought not to
be a big deal. This place restricted airspace?”

  “Probably. There’s a big double chain-link fence around the whole thing.”

  There was a moment of silence on the phone. Then he said, “I’ll get it, Ed. Whatever it takes. I owe you big-time.”

  “No, you don’t, but I appreciate it, Dag.”

  There was another pause.

  “Ed,” Parsons said.

  “That incident at Millwood.

  I heard some bizarre stories about that. Next time we get together, I’d like to hear your side, you feel like it. The official version smelled like coverup.”

  Kreiss didn’t want to get into this.

  “The official story closed that book, Dag,” he said.

  “Probably best for all concerned.”

  “A coupla guys made it sound like Custer’s last stand, but with the Indians losing.”

  Kreiss stared out the window for a moment.

  “Ancient history, Dag.”

  “Yeah. All right. I’ve got your number. If we have coverage, I’ll have something to you by Wednesday. And Ed, anything else—you just screech. You hear me? I’ve got my own plane, and I can still fly, even if I can’t shoot.”

  “Appreciate it, Dag. More than you know.” He got Parsons’s beeper number, then hung up. He went out the front door to the porch. He looked into what seemed to be a golden green cloud of new leaves. The air was filled with the scent of pollen and fresh loam. The creek down below was just barely audible through the thickening vegetation.

  He had made a mistake going into the arsenal without any idea of the layout. It hadn’t occurred to him that there might be people in there, which showed just how much of an edge he’d lost over the past few years.

  It had taken him an hour to get out of the logjam tangle, and then another hour to traverse just the fifty yards from the creek back into the trees.

  That shooter had to have had a very good pair of optics or a night scope of some kind to get so close with the first shot. That meant they had been down there looking for an intruder. An intruder into what? What was going on in that place that there were men laying traps along that creek and coming after him with guns? A bunch of bikers running a meth lab, possibly? A hillbilly marijuana farm?