“Actually, I’m thinking we should head back. Clearly the weatherman was stoned when he called this one.”
“If you can find somewhere to turn around.”
He steered them slightly toward the right then hard left and came to a stop.
“Did you hear that?” Delorme said.
He paused with his hand on the shift. Delorme rolled down her window a couple of inches. Snow swirled in. The cry came again, a man’s voice. Distant enough to be faint, close enough for them to hear the distortion of panic.
“That way,” Cardinal said, indicating west, the forest.
“I hope you have snowshoes in the trunk.”
“I don’t.”
37
Opp Sergeant Tyler Adams used his right-hand tactical glove to pull back his sleeve and check his field watch. He was on the ground in a specialized assault vehicle along with five members of a Tactics and Rescue Unit, three guys and two females. They were as fit as a SWAT team could be, as highly trained. All of them were expert in special weaponry, explosives and marksmanship.
They were crammed into the Forced Entry and Rescue truck, parked in a field behind a barn off Highway 124, waiting for the chopper that would carry the other half of the team. The FEAR truck is a highly modified Hummer that can drive through pretty much anything. It features a hydraulic lift system that is useful for surprising an enemy by ignoring the ground floor and inserting personnel directly into an upstairs bedroom.
The team were double-checking their weapons and supplies, the flashbang and Stinger grenades, the nine- and ten-millimetre Heckler amp; Koch submachine guns along with the sniper rifles, and a bulky infrared motion sensor that filled up most of the interior. Adams checked his watch again. The chopper was due in three minutes.
Information was thin. A man in his fifties, armed to the teeth, had taken over the Magnet-One Ranch three miles up the road, one of the bigger mink-farming outfits in the province. Husband away at the auction in Algonquin Bay, wife and kids possible hostages. According to the 911 call from a terrified ranch hand, the guy was claiming credit for chopping heads in Algonquin Bay.
Adams was new to the position as commander of the TRU team. The last commander, Glenn Freitag, had successfully taken down many highly defended grow ops and defused his share of nasty hostage situations, but his last deployment was to take back a park that had been commandeered by militant Mohawks, and it had gone terribly wrong. A couple of Indians were shot dead and Freitag was reassigned and off the force long before the SIU and all the public inquiries had finished digesting it.
A SWAT team is not for show, Adams thought. It’s a loaded weapon and you don’t draw it out of the holster unless you’re serious.
He heard the whup-whup-whup of rotors and stepped out of the truck. He had to squint, his eyes dazzled by sunlight on snow. The Eurocopter TwinStar came over the trees, scarlet against an indigo sky, low enough for its twin engines to kick ground snow into Adams’s face. His number two’s voice came over the radio, crystal clear on the new FleetNet frequency. “So what happened to the blizzard?”
“We shipped it to Algonquin Bay. They responded by sending us a total wacko.”
“Nice. We’re ready to rock ‘n’ roll in here, just tell us where you want us.”
–
Cardinal and Delorme were only a couple of hundred yards into the bush, but already you would never have known there was a highway nearby. The snow was mid-shin level, just high enough to get into their boots. Cardinal pointed to the west where a line of hydro poles stretched over a slight rise in the terrain. “Keep those as a landmark. Even if we get totally disoriented, we can follow them home.”
“I plan to stay oriented, thanks.”
They walked on, enveloped in the deep hush of snowfall, the only sounds the nylon of their parkas rubbing against itself, the occasional muffled snap of a twig, and the huff of their breathing.
They passed a dilapidated shack on their left, all but hidden among the trees. In summer it would have been invisible.
“Trapper’s cabin,” Cardinal said. “Totally illegal, no doubt.”
For a while the wind was somewhat baffled by the woods, the odd breeze causing a sudden vortex of snow. But soon it came in earnest and drove the snow into their faces. Cardinal could no longer hear their steps, or Delorme’s breathing, only his own.
They stopped and listened. Cardinal called out-once, twice-and they waited for an answering cry, but none came.
“This is so not good,” Delorme said.
Cardinal pointed to the hydro wires, still faintly visible. A single heavy wire branched off. “That’ll be for Lloyd Kreeger’s place. Black Lake’s the only thing on the map around here.”
“Well, if those hunters are here, presumably they’ll figure that out too.” The fur trim of Delorme’s hood was entirely white, as were her eyebrows and eyelashes.
“I’m still not seeing any tracks. Not that they’ll last long in this. Let’s follow the wire. They could be further up ahead. If they’re not, we’ll stop at Kreeger’s and get warm and alert search and rescue. They’ll come out the minute this is over.”
Cardinal angled off to follow the direction of the new hydro line. The snow flew thick and wild. The hydro line was getting harder to make out.
Cardinal stopped and called out again. Even though the temperature was now well into the sub-zero zone, he was sweating. “Voice isn’t going to carry far in this. Are you up to keep moving? We could go back to the trapper’s shack, wait till visibility improves.”
“We must be pretty close to Kreeger’s, no?” Delorme’s white eyebrows looked like stage makeup. “I say keep going.”
She pressed on ahead of him.
Every few yards they had to pause and wait until the wind dropped or changed direction enough to allow a glimpse of the hydro wire. It too was covered with clinging snow. There was a broken birch up ahead, one large branch angling down to the ground. Cardinal made note of it, happy for anything that might be a landmark. He called out again. They waited. Heard nothing. Moved on.
The shriek when it came was so loud, so inhuman, that Cardinal did not immediately associate it with Delorme. She staggered and fell in front of him, but he thought that was in response to the scream. He scanned the forest, but the world around them was a grey-white nothing.
Delorme was writhing on the ground. She was screaming again, but suppressing it so that it came out as a desperate growling.
Cardinal went to her. The iron clamps of a bear trap were closed on her shin.
“Try to hold still,” he said.
Cardinal was no hunter. He had never even seen a bear trap up close. He brushed snow away. The thing looked ancient, a malevolent jaw of black iron.
Delorme was hyperventilating, growling through her teeth.
Cardinal searched for a release mechanism amid the springs and levers. He found a loop of metal and pulled on it. It was rusty, but finally the long pin came free. He pulled the clamps apart and Delorme fainted, her head lolling to one side. Cardinal gently felt her shin. The break was palpable through her jeans.
Her face had gone white. That would be shock, the blood retreating from the extremities. The unconsciousness was merciful, but she was more vulnerable in this condition to hypothermia and frostbite.
Cardinal sat on his heels and pulled Delorme into a seated position so that her head hung down over her outstretched legs. He rubbed at her wrists and slapped her face lightly to bring the blood back.
She came to and vomited, choking. Cardinal turned her on her side and she cried out and vomited again,
