He raised the binoculars to his eyes. There were two sedans and a four-wheel drive vehicle parked close to the lodge. That could mean as many as ten people or more in total, plus Strickland. It hadn't seemed that many, from whatever vantage he had observed the lodge during the last hours of daylight. Two men outside, Strickland posed at the one window, the blinds down or the lights not on in other rooms. Could there be as many as another eight he hadn't seen? The stars gleamed like silver. He studied the lodge, after glancing at his watch dial. A little after seven. He had to wait, maybe for most of the night, just wait… And count.
The room he had decided was the kitchen registered a tiny spillage of light a little after eight. To the infrared binoculars, there was a shadowy shape in the room, a human heat source… By nine-thirty, he was certain there were two more men in an upstairs room, its window jutting like a wedge from the steep slope of the roof.
Presumably, they were sleeping. In the trees, the two on patrol continued their routine. An occasional engine fired from the lakeside settlement, even laughter, raucous and abrupt, once. Then it was cut off as if a door had closed on it. The binoculars showed smoke in the starlit sky from a couple of tourist cabins. Faint noises from a small boat that had put out from the jetty on which Strickland had been photographed years before.
Ten-fifteen… There were six of them beside Strickland. Just before ten, an anonymous hand had passed him sandwiches and beer, the body to which it belonged kept carefully from view. Mclntyre would be in the room with him… just had to be.
Strickland had become increasingly restless as the evening had progressed. The lit window, the proximity of whoever was in the room with him, eroded him, made him begin yawning. His head had turned occasionally, at other times he appeared to be responding to someone, even challenging the man Gant couldn't see but who had to be Mclntyre.
The two men upstairs were still resting heat sources. There was, from time to time, another figure in the dark of the kitchen.
His surveillance gave him power, control rather than weariness. They were the ones really waiting, growing uncertain and edgy with heightened nerves. He glanced at his watch. Ten-twenty. They would believe he was outside. They had waited long enough to begin to imagine he must have some strategy, that he was waiting out of confidence in the darkness of the trees… They could wait some more.
He had all night. He was ready. Time was on his side, not theirs Eleven-thirty. The three minutes since Mclntyre had last looked at the big dial of his watch had dragged inordinately. The enforced silence of the lodge, the brightness of the lights in the room, the flicker of the monochrome TV screens, the wash of the arm of the radar screen unnerved. Fraser and Strickland had begun to irritate, like a rash on his arms and chest, then slowly, deeply anger him, as if they were three prisoners unwillingly flung together and confined, he the only innocent man.
The thought of Gant, who must be out there in the darkness, able to see Strickland, spotlit as he was, was a goad, prodding him out of confidence with sapping electric jolts to his calm and assurance.
Mclntyre chewed at the last uneaten sandwich on the plate that had been placed between himself and Fraser. The bottles of beer were empty.
Their chairs were squeezed into the angle of one of the room's corners, out of sight line from both windows. It was, this late in the evening, as if he was tied into his, unable to break out of biting restraints.
Eleven-thirty-one.
He heard soft footsteps from the bedroom above the den and shuffled restlessly in his chair. A few moments later, Chris opened the door.
The young man hovered, bleary-eyed, in the doorway.
"We Sam and me'll relieve the others now… sir." The respectful politeness was added like a tag from a dead language, strange-sounding.
Chris' tired blue eyes seemed troubled, uncertain. Scared of the dark, Mclntyre thought dismissively, and of who's out there.
"OK, keep alert, Chris. Keep moving, keep quiet, keep alive!" Fraser snorted derisively. Chris' cheeks reddened.
The young man glanced once at Strickland, as em pathetically as at a fellow prisoner then nodded.
"Sir."
Chris closed the door behind him on Fraser's brief laughter, the sound of nails scraping down a blackboard. He shivered, then reluctantly opened the lodge's main door and stepped furtively on to the verandah.
The stoop seemed betrayingly silvered with the first moonlight. Sam's breathing was laboured behind him. Chris fitted the earphone and checked his mike's throat strap to greater comfort. He adjusted the harness of the transceiver that hugged his left side like a poultice.
Then he murmured:
"OK, you guys, come on in. We'll cover you from the verandah—" Thank sweet Jesus," he heard in response.
The night was chilly or was it just the change of temperature from the warm tension of the lodge? Chris couldn't be sure, but his skin shivered at the touch of the cold. Sam remained to his left, an infrared monocular pocket scope clenched in his hand. It was as if he were giving some freedom-fighter's salute. He scanned the clearing in front of the lodge methodically, nervously. Chris knew he should be doing the same. Gant — everyone said was out there for certain, just waiting to get to Strickland. And he could only get to him through a half-dozen FBI agents.
So he was desperate. He wouldn't be stopped from even taking on the Federal authorities… The first of the two-man patrol emerged from the trees with exaggerated, comic caution, then began hurrying across the open ground, hunched as if against taunts rather than a bullet. But why was all this happening? It had no real shape. What was Strickland to Gant?
The second man came out of the trees. A night bird shocked him into rigidity, then he hurried for the lodge. The two men passed them with laboured breathing, their fear palpable. The door closed behind them with a dull, carrying noise and Chris whirled on his heel to remonstrate'Well?" Sam asked.
"OK here goes nothing…"
He walked off the stoop into the moonlight, senses alert, nerves stretched. They crossed the clearing with moonlight between them. On the hole of a tree, a low light camera swivelled like the nose of a scenting dog. Chris felt observed rather than reassured. His feet hurried him into the trees. Sam disappeared fifty yards to his left.
Moonlight filtered weakly, like some powder dusting his shoulders and hands. He gripped the Springfield carbine more tightly, pressing it across his stomach as he began his patrol.
Gant… The murmurings and asides of conversation between Mclntyre and the Englishman, Fraser, flitted through his thoughts, as alarming as the rustle of investigating wings above his head. Fraser was relying on Mclntyre using him?
There was a mutual, fierce determination to kill Gant rather than arrest him… and Strickland, too, was destined to be shown the end of the pier and invited to dive off… Gant?
He shook his head, making the infrared pocket scope image of the ghostly trees joggle like something in a child's toy. He almost expected snow. The trees massed again, white-grey, the darkness between them empty. He began circling the perimeter of the clearing, a hundred yards into the trees. A brief gap showed him the flanks of South Sister, gleaming with moonlit ice and snow. A glacier like an old man's beard. From a rise, another gap revealed the sheen of Bonner Lake below. Gant… was sitting out here somewhere, maybe even aware of him right now.