Field of Fire

by Marc Cameron

  The throbbing rattle of a speed bag brought Petyr back to reality. Maxim, one of the two Ortega brothers who owned the gym, stood at the front counter. He tried to fix a broken credit-card machine by prying off the back with a screwdriver. Maxim, also known as Maxim the Minimum, was the smaller of the two Ortegas at just under five and a half feet tall. He had a neck like an ox with shoulders to match. It was common knowledge that he was not the smarter of the two brothers. The screwdriver had him baffled so there was not much hope for the credit-card machine.

  It didn’t take long for Maxim to lose patience and drive the screwdriver through the card reader, as if trying to stab it through the heart. He threw the whole broken mess under the counter and scrawled a sign on the back of a cardboard protein supplement box that said “CASH ONLY.”

  Cash. That was exactly what Petyr needed. He had to get his hands on some money one way or another. Unfortunately, his talent for making money was no better than Maxim Ortega’s handyman skills. The bastards at Cheekie’s had kept him from getting to the emergency stash he kept hidden at Nikka’s place.

  All he really knew how to do was fight.

  Good fights took time to set up, the ones with decent purses anyway, and Petyr found himself in a bad spot professionally. He’d lost too many bouts to get a shot at moving out of the mid-level ranks without beating one of the big names. And he’d won too many for a big name to want to meet him in the ring. If a ranked fighter beat Petyr, he would not move up in the rankings, but if he lost, he could certainly move down.

  That left few options—at least any that let him retain his dignity. Petyr quit skipping with a flourish of rope swings on either side of his body, just in case another fighter happened to be watching. He grabbed a towel off a peg along the wall and replaced it with the jump rope. Wiping the sweat off his face, he caught Maxim’s eye. The brothers ran a little side business that could make him some money if The Wolf didn’t mind sacrificing a little bit of his integrity. He shot a glance at his yellow duffle on the floor below the rope pegs. Integrity. That was a joke. His girlfriend was a junkie stripper, and he juiced regularly on Russian ’roids his chemist father sent him. He didn’t have much integrity to lose—and anyway, integrity was a hell of a lot easier to sell when you needed some cash. He picked up the duffle and carried it with him when he went up front to work out the specifics with Maxim. The stuff his father sent was hard to come by. He had to stretch it out. Make it last.

  Where he was going, he’d need all the help he could get.

  Chapter 37

  Alaska

  It was still dark when Quinn shoved the last of the gear into his drybag and zipped it closed. Beaudine was already packed and had borrowed the toilet paper to head into the brush one last time before they hit the trail.

  Quinn’s pack wasn’t particularly large, and he had to tie the sleeping bag on the outside, horseshoe style over the top. Quinn’s old man was known to venture into the woods with nothing more than a hatchet and an attitude.

  Garcia had a tendency to surf the web at night to wind down after a stressful day. Such browsing only made Quinn angry so he usually read or studied Chinese or Arabic flashcards. Still, if Ronnie stayed away from political rants, she sometimes found the odd kernel of interest and shared it with him. She’d once shown him a site with the laughable array of what people put in a go-bag, popularly called the SHTF bag because it was supposed to contain the gear vital to survival when the proverbial “Shit Hit The Fan.” Many such bags looked as if they were kits prepared for all-out war—but included few of the necessities for the inevitable lull between battles. Some had a couple of axes, a folding saw, three or four handguns, multiple pocket knives, push daggers, machetes, road flares—all of it useful gear in the right situation. Quinn could hardly judge. He was rarely without two guns and two blades—but a good go-bag had to contain some beans and Band-Aids to go with the bullets. Quinn found himself amazed at how few bags contained toilet paper.

  He started any kit with his EDC, his everyday carry. Unless he happened to be swimming, it was a rare moment that found Quinn without at least three things: a knife, a light source, and something to make fire. In this case, he had his Zero Tolerance folding knife, an orange zippo lighter—less tacticool but harder to misplace, the Leatherman Squirt, and a SureFire Titan flashlight. Smaller than his little finger, the light ran on a single AAA battery. The satellite phone was somewhere underwater inside the airplane. Quinn and Beaudine both had cellphones, but they would do them no good until they reached a village, almost all of which had a cellular tower. His custom Kimber 10mm rested in a leather Askins Avenger holster on his strong side, balanced by a spare magazine and the thick piggish blade of his Riot sheath knife. The hot 10mm round gave him similar ballistics to a .41 Magnum, but he was still happy to have his Aunt Abbey’s AR-10. Quinn was certainly not against handguns—having used them to great effect, but if things devolved into chaos in the woods as in an urban environment, a handgun of any kind was merely the weapon used to fight his way to a rifle.

  The most basic kit for any bush venture added a headlamp and at least fifty feet of parachute cord. Quinn wore his headlamp now to make sure he didn’t inadvertently leave behind anything important but planned to turn it off once they started to move, preferring to navigate by natural light. Wearing a beacon on your skull was a good way to get turned into a bullet sponge.

  Inside his pack, Quinn carried a second flashlight because, as he’d learned from hard experience, Two is one and one is none when it came to critical pieces of gear. The second light was larger and used two of the ubiquitous 123 lithium batteries. A small plastic case contained spares as well as an extra photo battery for the Aimpoint Patrol sight mounted on Aunt Abbey’s rifle.

  The cold weather had both Quinn and Beaudine layering in virtually every piece of clothing they had, including Lovita’s pink fleece that he’d dried by the fire and given to Beaudine. Freedom of movement made large parkas impractical, but Quinn felt relatively comfortable with his waterproof Sitka shell layered over a fleece jacket, the wool shirt, and wool long johns. Aunt Abbey had provided Beaudine with much the same system. As with the woolies, everything was a little large, making the FBI agent look as though she was dressed in her big sister’s clothes. She didn’t seem to mind. Warmth beat style every time in the bush.

  Both Quinn and his brother had worn Mechanix gloves for years, first when working on their bikes—long before they had fallen into favor with the tactical community. He kept two pair of the lightly insulated gloves in his pack year round.

  Quinn carried his personal trauma kit, but augmented it with bandages and some extra QuiKclot gauze from the plane. He gave the high-calorie energy bars from the aircraft to Beaudine, preferring the taste of Lovita’s salmon strips and fatty akutaq to the cookies that tasted like coconut and sawdust.

  Gorilla Tape, a hundred feet of 550 cord, Quinn’s Vortex binoculars, and the Russian’s .338 Lapua sniper rifle rounded out their gear. Quinn figured they each carried around twenty-five pounds, not including the long guns—sickeningly light since it was everything they had.

  Beaudine came in from the shadowed timberline and crunched across the gravel as Quinn pulled the last tab tight to secure the sleeping bag. She must have gone down the stream and washed away the blood and grime from the crash. Her face was now clean and pinked from the cold water.

  She handed him the toilet paper.

  “Keep it,” Quinn said, waving away the baggie. “I found another roll in the survival kit.

  Beaudine thanked him and shoved the new treasure in her pocket before looking up at him. He flipped up the lens on his headlamp so he didn’t blind her.

  “Sorry about getting all weepy before,” she said.

  Quinn shrugged. “It happens.”

  “Not with me,” Beaudine said. “I was raised under the iron notion that only my pillows should see my tears.”

  Quinn kicked snow into the fire, throwing the camp into darkness and s
ending up a hissing cloud of steam. “You’re like your cousin in at least one respect,” he said, chuckling.

  Beaudine’s brow furrowed, lopsided because of her wound. “How’s that?”

  “You both get philosophical when you take toilet paper into the woods.” Quinn shouldered his pack and then picked up the rifle.

  “I spilled some pretty gnarly details about my family,” she said, falling in to crunch along beside him in the dark. “It doesn’t make you worry about working with me?”

  “Makes me worry for the other guys,” Quinn said. “I don’t know, maybe we really do heal stronger in the broken places.”

  “Math and Hemingway,” she said. “You must have done well in school. Anyhow, that’s a nice platitude. My grandma used to say stuff like that—‘The good Lord won’t give us a trial we can’t handle.’ Well, the good Lord must think I’m a badass.”

  “I know what you mean,” Quinn said, eager to move past the philosophizing. It was easy to see that Beaudine and Thibodaux shared the same blood.

  Beaudine stopped when they slid down the gravel to the edge of the swollen stream. She peered into the darkness down the rough animal trail. It was little more than a depression in the snow that ran next to the stream.

  “I get a definite vibe that you really like this stuff,” she said. Vapor clouded her face in the chilly blue reflection from the snow.

  “Guess I’m just used to it,” Quinn said.

  “Well,” Beaudine continued, “remember how I told you that the FBI had the lead on this so I’m the one in charge?”

  “I do.” Quinn raised both hands. “Loud and clear.”

  “Turns out this wilderness stuff scares the shit outta me,” Beaudine said. “I am officially putting you back in charge.”

  “We’re after the same thing,” Quinn said. “Who’s in charge matters a lot less than who’s still alive when it’s over.”

  “And that is exactly why you’re in charge,” Beaudine said. She nodded toward the gun slung over his shoulder as they wove their way around snow-covered willows. “Now, tell me about the gun you took from the Russian. I know a sniper rifle when I see it. Can you shoot it well enough to protect us from this Worst of the Moon?”

  “I hope so,” Quinn said. “It’s a chambered in .338 Lapua Magnum. Awesome round. My ex-wife was shot with one just like it.”

  Beaudine gave a low whistle. “We all got stories, I guess.”

  “Yes, we do,” Quinn said. “Anyway, it’ll shoot further than I’m capable of.”

  Beaudine stopped in her tracks and looked at him. The stitches he’d given her crawled diagonally from her eyebrow nearly to her hairline like a dozen tiny black spiders. “But you can shoot long range, right? I mean, you have experience with that kind of thing?”

  “I can and I do.” Quinn gave her what he hoped was his best calming smile. “But it’s going to involve some math—weaponized math . . . but it’s still math.”

  “Of course there would have to be math,” Beaudine said. She took her frustration out on a scrub willow, knocking off the snow with her fist as she turned to continue down the silver ribbon of trail. “Yet one more reason you should be in charge.”

  * * *

  The sun was just a pink line over the eastern horizon fifty-five minutes later when they broke out of the willows onto a wide gravel flat at the confluence of the creek and the Kobuk River.

  Each step had seen them slogging through loose gravel, powering through mucky, boot-sucking tundra, or leaping between the sometimes knee-high hills of grass and relatively dry ground Quinn called tussocks. Beaudine had to concentrate to keep from wheezing.

  In the lead, Quinn paused while still in the cover of thick willow and alder scrub, holding up his fist to signal that he wanted to stop. He’d warned her that there would likely be a fish camp at the confluence of the two waterways and that they should stay quiet on approach. He needn’t have worried. Just when she’d found a guy that was worth talking to, she didn’t have the energy to say a word.

  Snow sifted down through frozen leaves as Quinn drew back an alder branch so Beaudine had a better view in the direction he was looking. He pointed across the creek with the blade of his hand.

  Tattered blue tarps hung on a weathered plywood shack, heavy with snow in the windless gray dawn. Three bare wooden frames, cobbled together from old two-by-fours and sun-bleached spruce poles, stood in front of the main shack on the wide gravel bar. It made her colder just looking at it. “That’s a fish camp?” she said. “I don’t know why, but I was expecting some kind of lodge, or at least a real cabin.”

  “Not out here,” Quinn said. “Plywood is sixty bucks a sheet if they can get it. This is actually a pretty nice setup.”

  Quinn squatted at the base of the alder, slowly turning his head to scan up and down the far bank. “No smoke,” he said. “There’s a boat pulled up by the shack. It’s covered with snow, but it still bothers me a little.”

  “You think it could be Volodin?”

  “Could be,” Quinn said, panting in the cold air. He unzipped his pack to retrieve the binoculars.

  Beaudine took off her glove and dabbed at the wound on her forehead with the tip of her finger while she caught her breath and gazed across the river. The fish camp, such as it was, was no more than a hundred meters away. A layer of fog hugged the river, and everything above it was covered in frost or snow, making it difficult to pick out much detail in the flat morning light.

  “You ever play Kim’s Game?” Quinn’s voice was muffled against his hands as he peered through the binoculars.

  “Can’t say as I have,” Beaudine said. This guy was even more of an enigma than she’d been told. He’d hardly said a word of conversation through their entire walk and now he wanted to talk about some game.

  Quinn passed her the binoculars, then leaned away slightly to give her a clear view. “Look it over like you would a crime scene for a minute or two.”

  Beaudine wiped the moisture away from her eyes and looked through the binoculars, careful not to touch them to her wound. She swept back and forth a couple of times before attempting to hand them back to Quinn. “That was a fun game,” she said. “We’ll have to play it again sometime.”

  “Okay.” Quinn gave her a quiet smile, the kind of smile you give a child when you have the upper hand. “Tell me what you saw.”

  Beaudine sighed, exasperated. “I don’t know. A ratty old shack with a bunch of ripped tarps for a roof. It looks vacant though. Like you said, no tracks.”

  “Did you see the sheet of plastic they’re using for a window?”

  “I saw it,” Beaudine said. “It looked exactly like a sheet of plastic.”

  “Did you see the frost on it?”

  Beaudine raised the binoculars again, taking a better look this time. There it was, a layer of frost—inside the plastic sheeting. She glanced sideways at Quinn, suddenly glad that they were still hidden in the willows. “Frozen vapor from somebody’s breath?”

  “Breath and maybe a propane heater,” Quinn said. “There’s definitely someone in there.”

  Chapter 38

  Quinn squatted in the shadows, going over the various routes of approach in his head while Beaudine continued to scan with the binoculars.

  “Why did you bring up that . . . what did you call it? Kim’s Game?” she asked.

  “It’s from my favorite Kipling book,” Quinn said. “Kim, the boy, is training to be a spy in British India. He plays a game where he looks at a tray full of stones of different size and color for a given amount of time. His teacher covers the tray, and Kim has to recite what he saw. Snipers use the same kind of game for observation training. Makes you pay attention to detail.”

  “I’ve played that before,” Beaudine said. “You mean to tell me we played sniper games at my friend’s bridal shower?”

  “Pretty much,” Quinn said. “My daughter and I play it all the time—when I’m around anyway.”

  “The things you learn sit
ting in the woods spying on a fish camp,” Beaudine said, still looking through the binoculars. “Someone . . . or a few someones are in that camp. What’s your plan?”

  Quinn gazed to the east. Morning light filtered through the trees, casting long shadows across the windblown snow. “First, we hurry and get across before who ever it is wakes up and shoots us.”

  “I’m with you there,” Beaudine said. “I don’t think my face could take another hit.”

  Quinn led the way back a hundred meters upstream from the camp, keeping to the alders and willow scrub until he found a spot where the water spread out to a width of about thirty meters. Crossing here would put them in the open for much longer, leaving them naked and vulnerable to any would-be attackers, but wide water had a chance to slow down, often making it relatively shallow. Even at this wide spot, the swollen stream reached their knees. Quinn pushed his way through the current, dragging his feet and slowing just enough so that he didn’t loose his footing on the slick melon-sized rocks that rolled along the streambed with a periodic audible clatter. He walked upstream from Beaudine, shuffling his numb feet in the freezing water and doing his best to block the current so she wouldn’t fall.

  The main shack sat in a clearing on a low bluff overlooking an open gravel bar as long as a football field and half as wide. Scoured clean every spring by great slabs of river ice during breakup, the gravel was barren of all but a few tiny scrub willows that had to start over again every year.

  Quinn sloshed out of the freezing water, moving up the bluff where a dark pocket of stunted spruce trees offered some semblance of concealment if not actual cover. Water squished from his boots with every step. Dry socks would eventually become a necessity, no matter the rush. He’d suffered from the agony of trench foot once before on a hunting trip with his brother, Bo, and once was plenty for a lifetime. Ever immortal in their own minds, the brothers had tried to tough out cold and wet boots for two full days on Kodiak Island. The week of red and swollen feet that followed was enough to make them both firm believers in the value of dry socks. As his old man said, “It did zero good to hurry if you were worthless when you got there.”