“What is it, General?” pressed Choir as Prince, on high alert, cocked his head inquiringly, Gomez glancing anxiously at his watch, figuring that at the speed they were going they were less than six miles from the campground. Eddie Mervyn and Johnny Lee were watching the road intently through a shower of ice-cold rain.
“China!” said the general. “Saucers. They put six damn saucers upside down across the road!”
“Probably got ’em from the cabin they busted into,” Eddie Murphy suggested.
Choir wasn’t interested. All right, so they were cunning. But right now, hunched tight over the wheel, eyes straining, the SpecFor veteran was preoccupied, watching the rain-slicked road, the calf of his right leg a tense bundle of nerves and muscle, ready to stab the brake at the first sign of another wire, the terrible, dull thud and thwack of Ruth’s decapitation burned into his memory forever.
The general guesstimated that they were about five miles — around seven minutes — from Melson Campground, and he knew that the terrorist he was after, this “Ram,” if that was what he was called, was infuriatingly smart, almost, the general allowed, as smart as he was. Well, hell, the general told himself, one thing that he and the team weren’t going to do was drive pell-mell into the campground. It was early fall, and though he doubted there would be many campers, if any, after the Labor Day weekend, he’d have to be careful not to get any more civilians involved. They’d stop the Explorer a quarter mile before the objective and go in for the kill on foot.
Approaching the campground on the run, Prince, on point, was panting so loudly, Freeman thought, that he could be heard a hundred feet away on the narrow, potholed road that led through a tunnel of trees to the campground. It was hoped that Prince still had the scent and that the eager spaniel could lead the general and his four-man team to exactly where the terrorists were, or to what hiking trail they’d selected to take them northward to the Canadian border fourteen miles due north.
Freeman’s SpecFors halted fifty yards from the campground. They could see bodies strewn by the entrance where a bullet-ridden Winnebago stood facing them. Its driver, a woman, her door open, was slumped over the wheel. Two children, seven, possibly eight years old, were lying very still on the ground, the nearby grass so green it contrasted vividly with the pools of blood. The children’s faces were horribly disfigured, abdomens disemboweled. Prince became rigid and pointed. Several gray wolves, tails down, were slinking away on the off side of the camper, one of them baring its blood-smeared canines at the intrusion on what obviously, from the gruesome state of one of the children’s bodies, had been the predators’ meal.
Freeman signaled Choir to put Prince back to work to find the enemy’s scent, which Prince did quickly despite the rain, leading them to a trailhead a hundred yards beyond the campground by one of the creeks. They followed Prince along the Dodge Colt’s tracks, which could be easily seen where the gravel ended and the grass began. Eddie Mervyn was mouthing obscenities. The car, Canadian plates RCV 625, had been nosed into heavy brush. There were a lot of pine needles around it; the needles had probably showered down when the doors, now shut, had been opened. None of the team thought there was an ambush set up; that would be an unwarranted loss of time for the terrorists. But none of the team expected to walk past the Dodge scot-free. The car was probably “rigged for red”—ready to blow via trip wire.
Ten minutes later they knew there were no trip wires, and that they had wasted ten minutes. And they no longer had the “beep.” It wasn’t their modern infantry radios that had been jammed. Rather, the thunderous collision of two big storm fronts, whose electric-blue strikes were dancing neurotically amid the Selkirk Mountains that bordered Idaho and the Canadian province of British Columbia, had temporarily scrambled all radio communication. Prince, having led them to the Dodge, was now sneezing so hard and frequently that the team wondered if the terrorists had used black pepper or some other equally confusing compound to throw the dog off.
Don’t panic, Freeman told himself, as if addressing the other members of his team. Stay calm. Go back to the campground’s entrance, look for boot marks, get
But it was no use. The heavy rain had obliterated any footprints or enemy smell for Prince to work with. The spaniel looked up and the general could have sworn the dog’s eyes were saying “Sorry.”
“It’s all right, Bud,” said Freeman, kneeling, catching his breath. “You’ve worked hard.” As the general patted Prince, he glanced back at the murdered woman in the Winnebago and the bodies of her children, which neither Johnny Lee nor Choir wanted to deal with.
Freeman called in on the sheriff’s Sandpoint police frequency. A message machine answered. He gave the team’s location and told them, “We’re in trouble. Send in whoever you can. We’ll try to pick up the scumbags’ trail and we’ll secure the campground perimeter just in case.”
It was a mark of his leadership — to know that he was beaten and not let pride prevent him from calling in the bigger, albeit slower moving, search and rescue elements. With no scent, no beep, and heavy rain, tracking the bad guys was virtually hopeless. But just because he’d failed on his quick dash by helo to Priest Lake, there was no reason now to prevent the bigger battalions from coming in. Until it occurred to him — the most unexpected scenario of all — that because each tent and trailer-home site was so secluded in this heavily forested area, the terrorists could be hiding
Freeman, Choir, Gomez, Lee, and Eddie Mervyn began doing a search, moving swiftly yet cautiously from one site to another. It was bad enough to have lost a man already, and Freeman didn’t want any more casualties in this — so far, at least — futile mission. Prince was doing his all, between bouts of sneezing that jangled their nerves. It took all of Choir’s concentration not to say, “Bless you,” to the dog each time, so close was his bond with Prince. He could see that Prince was becoming increasingly uncomfortable under the weight of the protective vest. Now and then the spaniel would stop and paw at it, to no avail.
Johnny Lee saw the strand and screamed, “Down!” Everyone did so, including Prince, but he’d already tripped the wire that had been strung a few inches above the apron of soggy ground. The bang of the claymore mine and the whistling of its seven hundred steel balls temporarily blocked out the sound of the rain. They were all hit with ricochets coming off the surrounding trees, but their hagvar helmets, vests, and high-collared battle dress uniforms had saved them from any incapacitating injury, though Choir’s right thigh would be badly bruised from one ricochet. Prince, however, had not been so lucky. Having caught part of the blast on the part of his hindquarters not covered by his hagvar coat, he now lay yelping in a tangle of wire dangling from the exploded mine’s carcass. Choir limped to his spaniel’s side, Freeman already calling in search and rescue in Coeur d’Alene via Sandpoint for an evac helo. Eddie Mervyn, Gomez, and Johnny Lee went into T.D.P. — triangular defensive position — to cover the general. The delay, they all knew, meant more gained ground for the terrorists, who the team now believed must be escaping on one of the many trails that wove their way farther from the campground into the wilderness of the Idaho — British Columbia border.
“Hang on, old boy,” Choir whispered to Prince, unbuckling the bloodied rear strap of Prince’s armored vest. “Hang on.”
A half an hour later, as they waited for the SAR helo that they could hear beating the air somewhere above them in the torrential downpour, their fatigue, the loss of Tony, and now, possibly, of Prince, sat upon them like a heavy, gray sheet of metal. Freeman knew that they had lost too much time to catch the terrorists before they crossed the border into Canada. By now, the regular army forces had had time to assemble and, under presidential orders, were taking over the search. The general, Gomez, Mervyn, Choir, and Johnny Lee all tried to hide their bitter disappointment as they regrouped, waiting for a lift back to Sandpoint, but the plain fact was that the terrorists, despite having lost half their number in the fiercely fought rearguard action at the lake, had soundly defeated Freeman’s team.
In the next twenty-four hours, as a few grim locals put it, “the hills were alive with the sound of curses,” as battalions of army reservists and army rangers, guided by forest rangers, scoured the high wilderness areas west, north, and east of Priest Lake, pressing ever farther into the mountainous fastness of Idaho’s panhandle. Only one thing of any relevance was found, and that by a ranger corporal. It was a manila envelope with “General D. Freeman—
