“Outside,” the man replied.
“Get him,” Captain Eddie ordered. “And go bring the bodies up here to me.”
“Lazzo,” the man shouted, as he exited the cabin. Lazzo came in a minute later.
“That dog was at this cabin?” Captain Eddie asked him.
“Yes,” Lazzo replied. “But there was no one here. They searched it already.”
Captain Eddie grunted and continued to look around, knocking on walls and occasionally stomping on the floor. As he approached the fireplace, he glanced up at the moose head hanging above it. With cameras in each eye it seemed as if he was staring right at us. Eddie picked a picture up off the mantel and looked it over, then let it drop to the floor. It shattered, and Eddie turned back towards the front door, just as several men carried in the dead soldiers. They set the bodies on the ground, and Eddie examined them. He knelt beside the two men with holes through their throats. “Lazzo, what did this?” he asked, touching the wounds in their necks.
“Bullet?” Lazzo replied.
“What?” Hayley whispered next to me, not completely following his accent.
“He thinks it was a bullet,” I whispered back as Danny hushed us.
“No,” Captain Eddie growled. “No bullet.” He stood up and addressed the other soldiers in the room. “These men were killed by experts. Is not a hunter. Search all the cabins. Then burn them to the ground. Start a fire outside too. Burn this whole place down.”
The men hurried off to carry out his orders. Captain Eddie walked back outside and took one more look at the camera above the door. He shook his head and walked away, back towards his high-tech tracking system. He had seen activity around this cabin on his screen when they’d first turned it on. He’d figured it was his men, but maybe it hadn’t been. Still, he’d found nothing in the cabin, and they’d found no signs of life anywhere else. Maybe the dog was just crazy.
Eddie stroked his scruffy chin as he stared at the tracking station monitor. That was unlikely. There were people hiding in this area somewhere. His screen showed red dots moving about in twos and fours. Some of the patrols had an extra dot, if they had a dog, but none of their visible movements suggested anything unusual. If none of these dots on his screen were their targets, then where were the Americans? Was it possible they had some form of defense against his thermal scanner? How? And exactly how many of them were hiding out here?
If Eddie burnt the whole place down he’d find out. There’d be nowhere for the Americans to hide, and his soldiers could simply sit outside the fire and wait.
We watched through the monitors as the soldiers doused the cabin above us, and the others down the road, with gasoline. As the flames leapt up and spread to the dry brush and trees around the buildings, a wall of fire spread across the hills and brought the world outside crashing down. We lost all of our visual aids. Wes manually flipped on each of the tree cameras, but the heat from the expanding flames rendered their sight lines useless. We were blind for now. And suddenly, we didn’t feel as safe.
Wes lamented not having put a camera out on a buoy in the lake. “If only I’d have known,” he said.
“If you would’ve known, you wouldn’t have been here,” I said with a smile.
“None of us would be.” I heard Kate say quietly behind me.
The smile faded quickly from my face. Those five words spoke volumes for all of us. True. Very true.
FIFTEEN: “Blowing Smoke”
The fire raged through the night. As ordered, the cabins and the entire nature preserve on this side of the lake were burnt to the ground. Captain Eddie and his troops remained outside the burn lines, monitoring with their tracking equipment. They did flush out a couple of hunters who had been holed up beneath the floor of one of the cabins, and several hibernating animals that had somehow also escaped the chemicals, but Eddie was convinced he had not yet solved the problem. Eddie caught and interrogated the two hunters, but they gave him nothing he didn’t already know. They had never been here before, didn’t know any of the neighbors, and clearly weren’t the ones who had killed his men. They knew nothing of a woman named Suzanne—as the caller ID had read—and hadn’t spoken to the fat American whose phone Eddie had traced here from Grand Forks. None of it was adding up. There had to be more.
Eddie knew the man with the cell phone had been their best bet. His knowledge would have been both abundant and useful, but the bullet through the throat had ruined that. He couldn’t fault his men for their eager trigger fingers. They wanted American blood as much as he did. They also wanted to avenge their families. He understood, but he didn’t like it. It was sloppy. It was juvenile. It was the equivalent of the rite-of-passage pig hunts back in Africa. Young men were always so eager to prove themselves, to get that first kill fast, that they’d kill the baby boar instead of waiting out the much more valuable parent. At age fifteen, Eddie had taken his inaugural hunt. He’d found the baby, but he’d gotten the boar. Eddie’s men had killed the baby here. Eddie wanted the boar.
But his patience was wearing thin. He was already down to seventy-three men, in just two days. He stomped his foot in anger and kicked a chair across the tent. The killers were still out here, and they had to be close. As the sun peeked over the hills of blowing smoke, he gazed at the aftermath. Nothing but ash and ember. If the people he was looking for hadn’t already fled, they had to be dead. Nothing could have survived the blaze. He rounded up his troops and ordered them to search the area one last time. He had finished packing up all the surveillance equipment when one of his men radioed in. “Sir, you need to come see this.”
He drove his jeep to the coordinates he was given and joined his men adjacent a small enclave on the lakeshore. There stood three mud-lathered trucks with Minnesota license plates. Their camouflaging was brilliant, clearly by a military mind, and had they not been the only things to withstand the scorching flames, his men probably would never have discovered them. So where had the occupants gone? Had the fire killed them all somehow? He looked around at the remains of the cabins. There was nowhere else to hide, and if they left their vehicles here, they had to still be somewhere nearby, dead or alive.
A sudden thought prompted a self-directed, verbal tongue-lashing. His men looked at him in confusion, and he shook his head. They had searched the bunker the two hunters had come from, but they hadn’t checked the ruins of the other cabins. It had never occurred to him to search below the other buildings as well. They didn’t have basements in Libya. He’d knocked here and there on the floors, but a proper bunker would have been built far more than a thin layer below the ground. If people were still here, that’s where they would be.
He wouldn’t be able to find the entry now, with all the cabins burnt to the ground, so he’d have to have his men dig up each of the floors. Deciding against waiting for heavy digging equipment, he ordered his men to divide up into groups of fifteen and begin digging up the foundation of each of the five cabins.
Below the demolished lodge, Wes was trying to activate as many cameras as he could. He managed to get some form of feed from five of them, but only one blurry camera allowed us to see the area near us. It was enough. It showed a dozen or so soldiers digging up the foundation of an adjacent cabin. That told us what was probably taking place above us, too. They were digging up the floors. They hadn’t left. If the fire hadn’t convinced them we were dead or gone, they had to have found the trucks. They had to know someone was still here. They just didn’t yet know where.