lakes.”
“And you come in right before dusk?”
“With no lights, once I’m on the road.”
“Anybody asks you,” said Load, “you’re going up to Hager Lake and Jennings Falls.”
“With a truck full of furniture and dishes?” asked Cole.
“Tell them your friends have the fishing tackle and cameras.”
“My plan is not to get challenged,” said Cole.
“Go with that one,” said Load. “Better plan.”
Cole’s timing went well enough. The sun sank below the ridgeline fairly early, but there was still light in the sky when he found the entrance to road 48 and pulled off. Other cars were using headlights, but it wasn’t particularly odd that he wasn’t yet.
He was a little bothered by the sign warning about a dangerous, narrow, unpaved switchback road. But with any luck, he wouldn’t have to negotiate any of the tight turns.
He was half right. The truck ground along in low gear to the first switchback, and there was Load, greeting him like an old fishing buddy. But there
They used the last shreds of daylight to load the furniture and boxes off the truck, take out the weaponry, and conceal it in the trees. Then, with only one lantern inside the truck, and with a bit of cursing, they loaded all the furniture and boxes back onto the truck so it wouldn’t be
Then, in the dark, they changed into their camo and put their civilian clothes in big Ziploc bags. They put on their vests and packs, loaded and hefted their weapons, and then started up the road, picking different spots to conceal their civvies and then memorizing the spots.
“Just in case we return alive,” said Arty cheerfully.
“Sometimes your sense of humor is actually funny,” said Benny. “I hope I’m there next time it happens.”
After that they were quiet, except for the occasional low click of the tongue to draw their attention to something—a turn, an impediment in the route. They stayed close to the trees. There was light enough from a sliver of moon to see where they were going, but that meant enough light for them to be seen. But they stayed with the road, since in the dark all they could do among the trees was crash around. Flashlights were out of the question. If there were sentries anywhere, flashlights would alert them like the blinking lights on airplane wings.
At the third switchback, a track led off to the southwest—road 4820. They followed it around the mountain for a little over a mile. In the stillness of the evening, they could hear a waterfall below them, though the trees were too thick for them to see down to the surface of the lake they knew must lie below them. Then there were a couple of switchbacks. When they came to a third one, they finally left the road and proceeded only a few dozen yards into the trees between the legs of the hairpin turn.
The ground sloped; they found the most level spot. Cole, whose alarm watch was already on vibrate, assigned Mingo and Benny to the first watch, Mingo upslope, Benny down.
Three hours later, Cole’s alarm woke him. In turn, he woke Drew, and they went together to relieve Mingo. Leaving Drew where Mingo had been, Cole and Mingo went to relieve Benny. Cole remained on watch while Mingo and Benny went back to the main camp to sleep.
Another three hours. There was only a faint breeze now and then, but it was a chilly one—this far up in the mountains, July didn’t meant what it meant down in the lowlands. But they had dressed for it.
There were things to be seen and even smelled, but mostly Cole listened. He had to learn the natural sounds in order to be able to distinguish unnatural ones. Animals aren’t as quiet as most people think. Humans don’t hear them because the din they make themselves masks all smaller sounds. But squirrels are not silent as they move through brush or leaves. The stooping of an owl; the screech of small prey; the padding of an animal’s footsteps through the night.
Something larger. Probably a porcupine, thought Cole. Whatever it was, it got close enough to catch Cole’s scent; then it hustled away in another direction.
His alarm went off again. Summer nights were short at this latitude—about nine hours—but it was still dark. It hadn’t taken them all that long to walk up the road.
Cole returned to the camp and wakened Cat and Babe. Tonight Arty and Load got the full night, though Cole knew by now that for Arty, sleep was never all that deep. Babe once told him that Arty spent most of his nights reliving dark passages through Al Qaeda tunnels in Afghanistan. He never woke screaming, but he slept with a constant alertness, as if in his sleep he still knew he could find an enemy lurking in crevices anywhere.
“First light,” he reminded Cat and Babe. They went up and relieved Drew first; Cat stayed and Drew went with Babe to the downhill post before he returned to camp.
Their watch was less than an hour long. First light meant the first glimmer of lightening in the eastern sky. But Cole had used the time to catch more sleep. Soldiers learned how to sleep whenever the opportunity presented itself. Like any other people, they needed eight hours or more to be at peak. But in the presence of the enemy— which, for all they knew, they were right now—adrenalin made up for the lack of sleep. Besides, even at half of their peak alertness, Cole knew these soldiers were sharper than most people. Sharp enough to still be alive despite all their enemies had thrown at them in the past.
They created a weapons cache a hundred feet from the road, leaving the heavier weapons there. Cole assigned Drew and Babe to stay with the cache. Each of the others carried sniper rifles and sidearms, rations, ammunition, and other supplies.
They also wore the infrasound transceivers Torrent had obtained for them. They used a digital signal, but it was carried on sound waves too low in pitch to be heard by human ears. It was like the shout of a giant. Elephants used sounds that low to communicate with each other from miles away. The receivers were on; they didn’t turn on the transmitters until the carrier signal was actually needed. No need to be blasting low-pitched tones all over the mountains except at need. Besides, the captured mechs had a variant on this technology. The best guess was that their equipment operated at such a different pitch from the Army’s new system that they wouldn’t be able to pick up the jeesh’s transmission tone. But there was no certainty of that.
They spread out, never so far that they couldn’t keep track of where the man in front of them was, but never so close that a trap could be sprung on all of them at once. There was a ranger tower atop the ridge between the lakes, but it seemed to be unoccupied. It might hold cameras, however. Cole and the others knew enough not to let themselves be seen from that angle—but not to assume that it was the only observation point, either.
The slope and the trees were such that from their side of Lake Chinnereth, they could observe the opposite shore but not their own. Certainly the other side of the lake offered nothing interesting. If the trees had been cut right to the maximum waterline, then the lake level was about three feet below full—about normal for summer here. Once the turbines started running to generate electricity, though, the lake would drain steadily but slowly all summer, and it didn’t seem to Cole as though the watershed here would be large enough to replenish the lake waters if there was a constant drain.
This reservoir didn’t make sense. The slope of the canyon was so steep that the dam had to be very high in order to hold enough water to make a lake of any size. Yet the lake was only about four miles long on one branch, three and a half on the other. He knew from the map that Lake Genesseret was even smaller—two miles long.
It was a boondoggle. The federal government had paid for this project, and it would never pay for itself. Nor would it generate that much electricity if it was also supplying some town somewhere with water. This was exactly the kind of project that environmentalists loved to kill. It should have been easy to do, because the dam was indefensible.
Yet there was no sign of any kind of development here beyond the lake itself. The original route of road 21 was under water, and if a new road had been cut it must be on this side of the lake, since it could not be seen on the other.
Their travel today would go much faster if they climbed down to the clear-cut slope between the waterline and the trees, but there they would be completely visible to any observers. The idea was not to be detected. So
