“Pick me up at the airport. We got some BCA guys coming up from Bemidji.”
“I talked to them. They’re probably a half hour behind us, they had to get their shit together.”
“Okay. I’ll get them on the phone, bring them into Knox’s place,” Virgil said. “We need to check at the airport and see if they had any small-plane flights in the last hour or so with some Vietnamese on board.”
“I’ll ask while we’re waiting for you.”
“Careful. You might walk in right on top of them.”
Virgil couldn’t reach the BCA agents from Bemidji: they were still too far out in the bogs.
WAYNE WAS going to turn the plane around and head back to the Cities. Virgil thanked him for the flight, and he said, “No problem. I love getting out in the night.”
Louis Jarlait and Rudy Bunch were waiting when Virgil came off the flight line: “No small planes, no Vietnamese,” Bunch said.
“So they’re traveling by car. That was the most likely thing anyway,” Virgil said. “They won’t be here for at least a couple of hours.”
They loaded into Bunch’s truck, Virgil in the backseat, and Virgil asked, “What kind of weapons you got? You got armor?”
“We got armor, we got helmets, we got rifles. We’re good,” Jarlait said. “Goddamn, I been waiting for this. I can’t believe this is happening.”
“You’ve been waiting for it?”
“I was in Vietnam when I was nineteen-coming up on forty years ago,” Jarlait said. “We’d send these patrols out, you could never find shit. I mean, it was their country. Those Vietcongs, man, they were country people, they knew their way around out there.” Jarlait turned with his arm over the seat so he could look at Virgil. “But up here, man-this is our jungle. I walk around in these woods every day of my life. Gettin’ some of those Vietcongs in here, it’s like a gift from God.”
“I don’t think they’re Vietcong,” Bunch said.
“Close enough,” Jarlait said.
“Yeah, about the time you’re thinking you’re creeping around like a shadow, one of them is gonna jump up with a huntin’ knife and open up your old neck like a can of fruit juice,” Bunch said.
Virgil was looking at a map. “Take a right. We need to get over to the country club.”
“Nobody gonna creep up on me,” Jarlait said. “I’m doing the creeping.”
THE DRIVEWAY into Knox’s place branched off Golf Course Road, running around humps and bogs for a half mile through a tunnel of tall overhanging pines down to the Rainy River. The night was dark as a coal sack, their headlights barely picking out the contours of the graveled driveway. Not a place to get into, or out of, quickly, not in the dark.
“Weird place to build a cabin,” Bunch said. “You’re on the wrong side of the falls-if you were on the other side, you’d be two minutes out of Rainy Lake.”
“He didn’t build it for the fishing,” Virgil said. “I think he built it so he and his pals can get in and out of Canada without disturbing anyone. The rumor is, he deals stolen Caterpillar equipment all over western Canada.”
Knox’s house was a sprawling log cabin, built from two-foot-thick pine logs and fieldstone; the logs were maple-syrup brown in the headlights. The house sat fifty yards back from the water on a low rise, or swell, above the rest of the land. A pinkish sodium-vapor yard light, and another one down by a dock, provided the only ambient light. Across the water, Virgil could see another light reflecting off a roof on the Canadian side.
“How far you think that is to the other side?” he asked Bunch as they parked. He was thinking about Warren, and how he’d been shot across the lake.
“Two hundred and fifty yards?”
“Further than that,” Jarlait said.
Virgil fished his range finder out of the backpack and, when they stepped out of the truck, put them on the distant roof. “Huh.”
“What is it?” Bunch asked.
“Three-eighty from here to the house over there.”
“Told you,” Jarlait said.
“I meant that the water was two hundred yards.”
“Yeah, bullshit…”
Virgil said, “The main thing is, I think it’s too long to risk a shot. They’ll have to come in on this side-they can’t shoot from over there.”
“I shot an elk at three-fifty,” Bunch said.
“Guy’s a lot smaller than an elk… and there’re enough trees in the way that they can’t be sure they’d even get a shot. If they’re coming in, it’ll be on this side.”
A MAN SPOKE in the dark: “Who are you guys?”
He was so close, and so loud, that Virgil flinched-but he was still alive, so he said, “Virgil Flowers.”
He saw movement, and the man stepped out of a line of trees. He was carrying an assault-style rifle and was wearing a head net and gloves. “I’m Sean Raines, I work for Carl. Better come in, we can work out what we’re gonna do.”
Inside, the place was simply a luxury home, finished in maple and birch, with a sunken living room looking out across the river through a glass wall, and a television the size of Virgil’s living-room carpet. Raines was a compact man wearing jeans and a camouflage jacket. He peeled off the head net to reveal pale blue eyes and a knobby, rough-complected face; like a tough Kentucky hillbilly, Virgil thought.
Virgil asked, “What about the windows?”
“Can’t see in,” Raines said. “You can’t see it from this side, but they’re mirrored. How many guys you think are coming?”
“Probably three,” Virgil said. “Two guys and a woman. They’ve got a rifle-hell, they probably got anything they want.”
“They any good in the woods?”
“Don’t know,” Virgil said.
“It’s gonna be just us four?” Raines asked.
“We got three more guys coming from Bemidji, oughta be here pretty quick.” As he said it, Virgil pulled his phone from his pocket and punched up the number he’d been given.
He got an answer: “Paul Queenen.”
“Paul, this is Virgil Flowers. Where are you guys?”
“Fifteen, twenty minutes south of town on 71,” Queenen said.
“Stay on 71 until you get to Country Club Road.”
VIRGIL GAVE THEM instructions on getting in and then Raines took the three of them to an electronics room to look at the security system. “We got some deer around, so we keep the audio alarms off most the time, but I’ve got them set to beep us tonight…”
Knox had a dozen video cameras set out in the woods, feeding views into three small black-and-white monitors, all of which were a blank gray. “When you hear an alarm, you get a beep and an LED flashes on the area panel,” Raines said. He touched a ten-inch-long metal strip with a series of dark-red LEDs in numbered boxes. Above the LED strip was a map of Knox’s property, divided into numbered zones that corresponded to the LEDs. “When you get a flash, you can punch up the monitor and get a view of the area… you almost always see a deer, though we’ve had bears going through. Sometimes you don’t see anything because they’re out of range of the camera.”
“But in the dark like this…”
“The cameras see into the infrared, and there are infrared lights mounted with the cameras,” Raines said. He reached over to another numbered panel, full of keyboard-style numbered buttons, and tapped On. One of the monitors flickered and a black-and-white image came up: trees, in harsh outline.
“You’ll notice that there isn’t as much brush as you’d expect-Carl keeps it trimmed out pretty good. The trees are bigger than you’d expect, because he has them thinned. He wants it to look sorta normal, but when you get into it, you can see a lot further than if it was just untouched woods.”
“How does it pick up movement?” Bunch asked. “Radar?”
“They’re dual-mode-microwave and infrared to pick up body heat.”
Raines had worked through a defensive setup. “Whoever’s covering the system has to know where our guys are at. You don’t want to be turning on the lights if you don’t have to, because you’ve got your own guys moving around. If somebody’s coming in with high-end night-vision goggles, some of those can see into the infrared. It’d be like turning on a floodlight for them.”