ride.
John climbed over a split-rail section of the fence at the southwest corner of his property. Once on his own land, he hiked through a small wood of loblolly pine where the slope of a hill led down into a tiny valley where a shallow creek wound from north to south near the fence line.
He looked down at his watch and saw it was four-fifteen. He didn’t have any cell phone coverage out here, so for the three hours that he’d been out for his impromptu fishing trip he’d been “off the grid.” He wondered how many messages he’d have back on the landline at the house, and he thought back again to his past, fondly remembering a time before mobile phones, when he didn’t feel guilty for a walk in the damn woods.
Being alone here in the wilds of Maryland made him think of being alone in the bush in Southeast Asia. Yeah, it was a long time ago, but not so long if you’d been there, and Clark had damn well been there. The plants were different in the jungle, obviously, but the feel was the same. He’d always liked being out in nature; he’d sure gotten away from that in the last several years. Maybe once the OPTEMPO at The Campus died down to a reasonable level, then he could spend a little more time out here in his woods.
He’d love to take his grandson fishing someday — kids still liked stuff like that, didn’t they?
He stepped into his creek, felt his way forward through the knee-deep water, and found himself especially thankful that he’d worn his waders this afternoon. The water was ice-cold, spring-fed, and deeper than usual. The current wasn’t as fast-moving as it often was, which is why he crossed here as opposed to a hundred yards or so upstream, where large flat stones protruded just an inch or so out of the water across the width of the creek to make a natural, if slippery, bridge. But today Clark had no problem crossing right through the center of the stream, and even wading through a deeper pool created by a limestone depression, he found the water not more than waist deep.
John moved through the deepest part of the creek, stepped through a weed bed that sprang out of the limestone, and then he stopped.
He noticed something shining in the water, reflecting the setting sun’s rays like steel.
There, surrounding a clump of grass poking out of the knee-deep water, was a shiny pinkish film. As the water flowed downstream, the pink film trailed in the direction of the current, individual globules broke away from the rest of the form and floated on.
Unlike many Vietnam veterans, Clark did not have flashbacks, per se. He’d done so much in the intervening forty years since ’Nam that his years in country weren’t any more traumatic than many of his later experiences. But right now, while looking at this viscous substance clinging to the grass, he thought back to Laos in 1970. There, with a team of Montagnard guerrillas, he had been crossing a stream not much deeper than this one, under a primeval rainforest. He’d noticed black film trailing downstream by their crossing point, and upon inspection he and the others determined it to be two-stroke engine oil. They then turned upstream, and found a spur of the Ho Chi Minh Trail that led them behind a group of North Vietnamese Army regulars who’d lost a scooter in the heavy current while trying to cross the stream. They’d fished out the bike, but not before its oil leaked out into the water, ultimately giving them away.
Clark and his team of Montagnard guerrillas had wiped out the enemy from behind.
Looking at the oil in the creek in front of him, he couldn’t help but think back to Laos. He reached out and put his fingers into the thin film of pink, then brought them to his nose.
The unmistakable smell of gun oil filled his nostrils. He even thought he could determine the make. Yes, it was Break-Free CLP, his own favorite brand.
Immediately Clark turned his head to look upstream.
Hunters. He couldn’t see them, but he had little doubt they had passed on the natural footbridge a hundred yards north sometime in the past half-hour or so.
There were whitetailed deer and turkey all over his property, and at this time of the even?e of theing the deer would be in abundance. But it wasn’t deer season, and Clark’s fence line was damn well posted. Whoever was on his property was breaking a multitude of laws.
Clark walked on, crossed the rest of the stream, and then picked up the trail that led through the woods to the open fields around his house. His walk through the forest seemed even more like Southeast Asia, now that he knew he was not alone out here in the bush.
It occurred to Clark that he’d have to break out of the woods right in front of open pastureland in order to get to his house. If there were hunters there, especially the kind of hunters who trespassed and killed game out of season, then, John recognized, it was not beyond the realm of possibilities that he could get shot a second time this month.
And this time it wouldn’t be from a 9-millimeter pistol. It would be from a shotgun or a deer rifle.
But he stopped himself before pressing the trigger.
He headed off the trail he’d been traveling on, so that he could get behind where he thought they would have traveled through the woods. It took him a while to find their tracks. He blamed the low, dappled light here under the trees. Finally he saw evidence of two men where they crossed a smaller trail.
After a few dozen yards he detected the pattern of their travel, and he found it odd. Whether they were turkey hunters or deer hunters, moving off the trail here didn’t make much sense. Their quarry would be out in the open rolling fields closer to the farmhouse. Why were they moving covertly here, still fifty yards from the edge of the tree line?
He lost their tracks a few yards on when the dusk and the canopy of evergreen above blocked out all but the faintest traces of usable light.
Clark put his fishing tackle down, climbed out of his waders, lowered to his knees, and moved slowly up to the edge of the wood line. He was careful to keep himself low to the ground and shielded by a large hemlock spruce.
When he reached the edge of the pasture, he looked out over the low grasses, fully expecting to see bright orange — clad figures to the east.
But there was nothing.
He scanned over by his farmhouse, a good hundred yards to the north, but he didn’t see anyone there, either.
But he did see a group of whitetail, eight in number, nibbling on grasses in the field between his position and the farmhouse. They were small females and young fawns, nothing a hunter would be interested in.
Quickly Clark’s brain began computing all the data he’d taken in. The amount of time for the Break-Free oil to drift down from the natural crossing in the creek to where he found it passing his fording point. The amount of time the deer would stay clear of the field, had the hunters crossed here.
It didn’t take l?dn’t tong for him to realize that the hunters were here, in the woods with him.
John Clark was not a hunter, not of animals, anyway, so he defaulted again to his Vietnam experience. A knoll rose out of the southern portion of the pasture ahead on his right. This is where a sniper would logically set his hide to get optimal coverage of the area. Maybe a hunter would do the same—
Then he saw the men. They were not hunters, this he could tell from here. They wore ghillie suits, head-to- toe camouflage of tied strands of green and brown fabric to simulate leaves and dry grasses. The two men looked like a pair of leaf piles behind a partially camoed rifle and a spotting scope.
And their lenses were trained on the farmhouse.
“What the fuck?” Clark whispered to himself.
One of the men was wet, this Clark could plainly see. It didn’t take a brilliant investigator to put together
