then transferred the three cylindrical, hollow-point-filled speed-loaders from the backpack into the deep front pocket of his jacket.
'What about me?' Marie asked, looking anxious and concerned as she clutched the puppy to her chest.
'Sam, have you got a portable with you?' Lightstone asked quickly, noting that the refuge officer was also armed with one of the standard Fish and Wildlife Service handguns.
'Sure do.'
'Okay,' Lightstone nodded as he reached into his backpack and handed Marie his packset radio and the pair of binoculars. 'You're going with Thomas to the refuge dock. Once you get there, you lock yourself in the boat house, go upstairs, and watch for anyone in a boat or on foot heading toward the public launch ramp. You see anybody heading that way, especially anyone moving fast, you get on that radio, okay?'
'Got it,' Marie acknowledged as she secured the radio in her jacket. She hunched down as Woeshack cast off Sam Jackson's line and headed the patrol boat toward the distant northwestern shore.
'You got anybody else in the area?' Lightstone asked Jackson as he braced himself in the seat next to the refuge officer.
'Couple of biologists tracking some moose on the north side, and a trainee down at the dock working on one of the boats,' Sam Jackson replied. 'Nobody with law- enforcement authority.'
'Okay,' Lightstone nodded, picking up the refuge officer's binoculars and beginning to scan the distant shoreline again as Jackson started the small patrol craft toward the southern shore, 'let's just hope these people are halfway friendly.'
It was Shoshin Watanabe who first spotted the approaching craft.
'It is the refuge officer with one of the other fishermen,' Kimiko Osan confirmed, focusing the spotting scope on the rapidly moving outboard.
'How are they armed?' Maas asked.
'I can't tell.' Osan shook her head, frustrated by the distance and the narrow focusing field of the scope. 'The other boat is heading back toward the landing very fast,' she added.
Gerd Maas surveyed the bloody kill site one last time, noting that the now empty. 45 SIG-Sauer lay in the blood-splattered weeds a few feet away from Paul McNulty's outstretched hand. He was pleased to see that Shoshin Watanabe had already collected all of the cut tape and gauze and placed the materials in one of the backpacks.
As far as Maas could tell, the scene looked perfect.
Walking over to the sprawled body of Butch Chareaux, he placed the empty stainless-steel Ruger revolver in the Cajun poacher's bloody palm, and with gloved hands, wrapped Chareaux's lifeless fingers around the rubber grip and trigger guard of the gunpowder-and-blood-smeared weapon. Then, after tossing the still-warm pistol a few feet away from Chareaux's limp hand, Maas looked up at Shoshin Watanabe with his deadly cold-blue eyes.
'Tell Parker and Bolin to be ready.'
Chapter Thirty-Three
Apart from the cries of distant eagles, there was no sound.
And no movement.
Nothing.
'Why don't we hold it right here for a couple of minutes?' Henry Lightstone suggested quietly as he lowered the binoculars and stared out across the glistening turquoise water at the still, quiet, and seemingly unoccupied landscape. Set before a backdrop of snowcapped mountains, low cliffs stretched out across the long, rocky, tree- and- shrub-covered shore.
'Sounds good to me,' Refuge Officer Sam Jackson nodded as he throttled the powerful outboard motor down to a rumbling idle.
'What's the name of this place again?' Lightstone asked as he readjusted the binoculars and continued his methodical search.
'Lupus Island, though it's not actually an island. There's a narrow spit of shale-covered sand that connects it to the shore.'
To Special Agent Henry Lightstone, it looked like the point of land could easily conceal several hundred drunk, camouflaged, and potentially trigger-happy hunters. But if all of that shooting had been done by legitimate hunters, there should be at least an occasional flash of camouflage clothing. A hat, or a vest, or laughter, or loud voices.
But there wasn't.
The idea of being a sitting duck out on about twenty-four thousand acres of glassy-smooth, subarctic water didn't appeal to Lightstone.
'Still nothing?' Jackson finally asked.
'Nope. Nothing at all.' Lightstone shook his head. 'What do you say we try that little cover straight ahead, work our way west?'
'Sounds good to me,' the orange-suited refuge officer nodded as he throttled the thin-skinned aluminum boat on a new course roughly parallel to the shoreline. When they reached the shallow cove, Sam Jackson turned the small patrol craft perpendicular to shore and then gave it one last nudge with the powerful outboard engine.
'How deep do you figure the water is?' Lightstone asked, setting aside the binoculars and getting ready to jump out and protect the boat from the sharp-edged rocks.
'Well, out here we usually go by the rule of ten,' Jackson said as he cut off the engine and brought the prop up out of the water. 'About ten feet out from shore, you can figure that you're going to be standing in about ten feet of water that's just about ten degrees Celsius.'
'Christ,' Lightstone muttered as he held his hand in the ice-cold water for a moment, then quickly brought it back out.
'Personally, if I was you,' Sam Jackson advised in his slow Georgia drawl, 'I'd stay in the boat until we run up on shore. We can always get the government to spring for a new boat every now and then.'
Taking the bearded refuge officer at his word, Lightstone remained in the bow of the boat until the thin, insulated hull scraped loudly against the shale-covered shore. Jackson double-tied the bowline to a pair of tire-sized boulders.
'No one in his right mind ever goes swimming after a loose boat in these waters,' Jackson said as he pulled a packset radio out of his backpack and looked over at Lightstone. 'Are we ready? '
'I am, but you might want to get out of that Day-Glo suit first.'
Sam Jackson looked down at the bright orange Mustang suit that was supposedly guaranteed to keep him alive for at least an extra four or five minutes if he ever had the misfortune to get dunked into the frigid subarctic waters of Skilak Lake.
'You really think we're going to get into some kind of confrontation with these folks?'
Lightstone hesitated for a moment. 'Let's put it this way,' he finally said. 'Given the choice, I'd rather swim halfway across this lake after your boat than try to sneak in on some trigger-happy idiots in a getup like that.'
Lightstone waited while Jackson worked himself out of the bright survival suit, then led the way as they climbed to the top of the fifteen-foot cliff. Once there, they slowly worked their way through a nearly impenetrable barrier of waist-high scrub brush, irregular moss-and-lichen-covered outcroppings, and ten-to-fifteen-foot spruce trees.
'Christ, how the hell can anybody hunt in stuff like this?' Lightstone muttered as he noisily pulled himself through a tightly grouped clump of white spruce trees, only to find himself blocked by the sharp, poking branches of a dead and partially dropped cottonwood.
'What they do is look for the bare spots, usually around the big patches of salmonberries,' Jackson said. 'Saves a lot of wear and tear.'
'Like those over there to the right?' Lightstone asked hopefully.
Sam Jackson looked up, squinting against the glare of the low sun. 'Yeah, I'd say that's a likely spot.'
Two minutes later, the two federal wildlife officers were kneeling down beneath a large clump of berries,
