The cabin was built on a wide spot of a crooked valley nestled in a series of steep, heavily forested hillsides. Just below the cabin, on the creek that cut the valley, Billy had excavated a three-acre pond and filled it with bass. The shallow, six-foot-wide creek trickled down over a rocky bottom, past the cabin, into the pond, over a concrete lip, and then down and out of the valley.
They came around the last turn in the gravel track, and the cabin glowed like a piece of amber in the headlights. A motion-sensing yard light flicked on. Jake parked, and feeling the hair rippling on the back of his neck, climbed the porch, unlocked the door, turned on the lights. Madison helped carry the gear bags inside.
Were they out there? Up the hill, arguing what to do about Madison? Hurried calls going out of the ridgetop? He didn’t think so, but it was a possibility.
The cabin was big enough to sleep eight, with two bedrooms, a bath, and storage on the upper level. The first floor had two more bedrooms, a bath, a kitchen and a great room, and a set of high windows that looked out over the pond. A large-scale geological-survey map of the property was framed and hung on the wall of the great room.
Jake took Madison to the map. “This is probably the same map they’d be looking at, if they pull it off the Internet.” He tapped a tightly bunched strip of contour lines south of the cabin. “Up here, we’ve got this really steep hillside—it’s virtually a bluff. It’s unlikely they’d come in over the bluff, because it’s just too steep, and there are springs all along the side of it, it’s pretty slippery in there. I don’t think they’d come in from the west, because they have to cross too much of the open valley, and the creek, and it’d add a couple of miles to the approach. They could come north, up the drive, park far enough up the driveway that you couldn’t see their car from the road. The thing is, they can’t be sure from this map that there aren’t any more cabins up here, or that we might not have a gate with an alarm.”
“We have an alarm on our gate at the farm . . .” She peered at the map. “So the best way is over the hill.”
He nodded. “From the east. From the parking lot I showed you. That’s right here.” He tapped the map again. “They leave their car at the trailhead, cross the hill in the dark, taking it slow, watch the cabin for a while, then come in at dawn and take me out. They dump the body in a hole somewhere, then exfiltrate during the day, taking it slow again. One of the guys moves my car, dumps it in Lexington. Nobody would ever know.”
“What if there are three or four of them?”
“That would be another problem,” he said. “But this would be murder, so there won’t be. They’ll try to keep it as tight as they can. Could be only one guy. A pro that they bring in for the job.”
“I’m worried that we’re overconfident,” Madison said.
“You keep saying that. But with this kind of deal, you do the intelligence and you make your play,” Jake said.
“I hope you’re not fantasizing that you’re back in Afghanistan.”
“So do I. Fantasy could get us killed.”
While Madison unpacked the gear bags, Jake figured out the game-spotter cameras. They were cheap digital cameras with flashes, in camouflaged plastic, meant to be posted along game trails to check for passing deer. They worked on infrared motion-sensing triggers, and had been around for twenty years, long enough to become reliable. He put batteries in them and left them on the table.
“We’ve got walkie-talkies like these at the farm,” Madison said. Jake had two Motorola walkie-talkies in his hunting gear.
“Put new batteries in and we’ll check to make sure the channels are synced,” Jake said.
“What if somebody hears them from the outside? The range is pretty long . . .”
“Not here. We’re too deep in the valley. When we’re turkey hunting, if we go over the top of the bluffs, we can’t pick up a call from the cabin. And you can’t call out from the cabin on your cell phone. You have to be up on top.”
“Okay.” She glanced at her watch. “You better change.”
He got into his cool-weather camo, got his sleeping bag, put three power snacks and two bottles of springwater in his hip pockets. He took a full box of shells, loading four into the rifle, the rest into the elastic loops of the cartridge holders on the camo jacket; he’d never used the loops before, and fumbled the shells getting them in.
Nervous. And getting a little high on the coming combat.
Madison had taken the shotgun out of the case and was looking it over. “It’s just about like mine,” she said.
As Jake checked a flashlight, he watched her handling it. She knew what she was doing. “Snap it a few times, then load it up.”
She dry-fired it, pointing it across the room at a framed photo of the hunting group, using a trapshooter’s stance. Satisfied, she shoved some shells into the magazine.
“If one of them comes through the door, keep pulling the trigger until he goes down.” She nodded, and Jake said, “I’m going to run outside. I’ll be back in a minute.”
He slung the rifle over his shoulder and picked up the game-trail spotters and the flashlight. If they were out there . . . but they wouldn’t have been able to move that fast. If they’d moved deliberately, but hadn’t done anything weird, like rent a helicopter, they’d arrive in perhaps four hours. He had time.
Outside, the night was cool, damp. The leaves would be quiet; he would have preferred a crisper, drier night. He carried the game cameras around to the west side of the house, the side he wouldn’t be able to see, and began tying them into trees between the cabin and the pond. If they did come in from the west, they’d trip the infrared flashes, and he’d see the flashes . . .
Unless, of course, a deer came in. Then he’d get a false alarm. But the grasses on the open slopes around the cabin didn’t pull many deer in. He’d have to hope for the best.
