Anishinaabe.”
The men shouted and whooped. LeDuc turned to Blessing. “Now we’re ready. Lead the way.”
Most of the men climbed into two vehicles: LeDuc’s Ranger and Neadeau’s Blazer. Kingbird got into the Bronco with Cork. Trailing behind Blessing, who returned the way he’d come, they drove east on miles of dirt and gravel, twisting among bogs and sliding between high ridges, eating dust and chewing silently on what lay ahead.
“Where exactly is the warehouse?” Kingbird finally asked.
“On Black Duck Lake. Not a place anyone goes anymore, if they ever did. Too shallow for good fishing, not particularly picturesque or accessible. Being on the rez helps keep it isolated.”
Kingbird squinted at the red sky. “You heard of Jeb Stuart?”
“Civil War general, right?”
“One of the best the South had. Know what he said when someone asked his secret for winning a battle? Said you had to get there the firstest with the mostest. If I was this Ortega, I’d be there hours ahead of when I said I would, and I’d come well armed.”
“That’s why we’re heading out before daybreak. And the Red Boyz have been out there since yesterday, watching for just such a possibility.”
“Ortega might also be thinking seriously of not coming that way at all.”
“We thought of that. The Red Boyz have someone posted at all the important road junctions on the rez. They spot the Latin Lords, they radio that info to Blessing.”
“You thought this thing through pretty carefully,” he said.
“This is Ojibwe land. The Ojibwe know how to defend it.”
Blessing finally pulled to a stop where the access to Black Duck Lake split off. One of the Red Boyz jumped from the truck bed and dragged the blind aside. After the three vehicles had passed, he put the blind in place and bounded back into the truck. The procession continued slowly along the narrow track to the old trapper’s cabin, where once again a blind was hauled aside, exposing a faint, rugged trail that followed the shoreline east.
The warehouse had been built on a small cove at the southeast end of the lake. It was a simple rectangle about the size of a two-car garage. There were no windows and only one wide door that ascended on rollers. Camouflage netting made it difficult to see from the lake and probably impossible to spot from the air. Cork figured it wouldn’t have taken the Red Boyz much more than a weekend to put up a structure like that. It sat a dozen yards back from the lake. On the shore, two portable ten-foot aluminum docks on wheels were beached and, like the warehouse, had been covered with camouflage netting. Blessing had told them that the Tahoe the Latin Lords used whenever they visited the rez was parked inside the warehouse.
The tops of the pines that edged the water were burning with yellow sunlight as morning broke over the lake. Bobby Oakgrove, one of the Red Boyz, stood sentry in front of the warehouse. The vehicles parked along the trail and the men piled out.
“Anything?” Blessing said to Oakgrove.
“A few loons arrived for breakfast, nothing else.”
LeDuc scanned the woods around the warehouse. “Let’s get those vehicles back up the trail and out of sight. Then find yourselves a place in the trees to settle in and we’ll wait.”
Kingbird said, “And what? When they arrive we just open up on them?”
“More or less,” LeDuc said. “Unless you want to greet ’em with a handshake.”
There were a couple of quiet laughs among the men.
“I figured we’d give them a chance to talk first,” LeDuc said seriously. “Maybe we can reach an agreement.”
“The only agreement men like this accept is that you die and they don’t. This is war,” Kingbird said. “If they come, and if they’re smart, they’ll make a couple of flyovers to reconnoiter. With the sun up, any reflection off the windshields or chrome on those vehicles will give us away. We shouldn’t just move them. We should cover them with netting, if possible.”
“Do you have more netting?” LeDuc asked Blessing.
“All you need.”
“Anything else?” LeDuc said to Kingbird.
“Yes. If they have any concern that the Red Boyz might give them trouble, and again, if they’re smart, they’ll come prepared. By that I mean with men and with good weapons. I expect these people can afford both. If it was me, I’d come in with assault rifles, AK-47s or maybe XM8s. We give them a chance, they’ll simply lay down a sweeping fire that’ll cut the woods and everything in it to shreds. We’ll probably take them down eventually, if we don’t lose our cool, but a lot of us will go out with them.”
“That doesn’t sound good,” LeDuc admitted.
“And there’s another problem. They all die. I don’t think you want them all dead.”
“No?”
“My guess is that the Latin Lords would just send someone else, more men, more weapons, and next time you won’t know when they’re coming. I think there’s a way you might get everything you want and that will keep the Latin Lords away for good.”
“I’d love to hear what it is,” LeDuc said.
“It’s going to take someone familiar to them, someone with the guts to pull it off.” He scanned the gathering and his eyes settled on Blessing, the young man who’d taken the name of the war chief Waubishash.
Without hesitation, Blessing said, “What do you want me to do?”
The plane came not long after, hours before Ortega had told Blessing they would arrive. Just as Kingbird had predicted, it made several passes over the lake, almost scraping the tops of the pines that enclosed the warehouse. Cork, with his field glasses, could make out the face of the pilot and the man sitting next to him. The floatplane completed a final loop and came at the water from the north. The lake was so calm that Cork could see the reflection of the plane racing along the surface as the floats touched down. The plane taxied toward the shore. As it neared land, the passenger door opened and a man clambered out and nimbly leaped to the pontoon and from there to solid ground. He had an assault rifle slung over his shoulder.
Cork and Kingbird lay behind a hastily constructed blind of branches and brush forty yards west of the warehouse. Prone between them lay Elgin Manypenny, barely seventeen and the youngest of the Red Boyz present that day. He held a walkie-talkie in his right hand. The fingers of his left loosely gripped a nice Ruger Mark II that rested on the ground beside him. Each of the groups positioned among the trees and hidden behind blinds consisted of a mix of Red Menz and Red Boyz. Each had a designated leader and instructions, generally speaking, concerning what to do in several possible scenarios that Kingbird had talked them through. LeDuc and Blessing together had made the decisions about the makeup of the groups and chosen a radioman for each. There’d been some grumbling, but in the end every man accepted and understood his assignment. Kingbird had deployed them in such a way that there wasn’t a square foot of ground anywhere around the warehouse that was not in their field of fire, but he was also careful to place them so that they didn’t risk shooting each other. There was nowhere for the enemy to hide. The skill and efficiency with which he’d organized the operation that morning had impressed Cork and the other men. Kingbird had been given the responsibility for instituting any firing action that might be necessary, and each group awaited his command.
Cork had begun the morning still hoping that bloodshed could somehow be averted. But if what Kingbird predicted proved true-that the Latin Lords had come with men and with firepower-he knew any hope for a peaceful resolution was almost dead. With so many guns and so much tension, there was only one way for this confrontation to go and only one question in the end: Who would be left standing?
“Walking point,” Kingbird whispered, as the lone gunman moved toward the warehouse.
The man circled the structure, then studied the trees and the trail that ran along the lake toward the trapper’s shelter. Finally he walked back to the plane and signaled. The pilot cut the engine and the props ceased spinning. Another man climbed out carrying a rope, which he attached to the nose of the plane. He tossed the line to his cohort onshore, who caught it and tugged until the pontoons touched solid ground. He tied the line to an aspen sapling a dozen feet inland. From the description Blessing had supplied, Cork recognized the second man as Estevez, the enforcer. He was compact, with a head like a block of polished maple and a scar that ran diagonally from just above his left eye to his right jaw. Blessing said he’d heard it had been made by a machete.
The pilot disembarked next. This was Ortega. Blessing said that Ortega always piloted and that he claimed
