Heat Lightning

26

THE PILOT’S name was Doug Wayne. He was a small, mustachioed highway patrolman who looked like he should be flying biplanes for Brits over France; he was waiting in his olive-drab Nomex flight suit in the general aviation pilots’ lounge at St. Paul ’s Holman Field.

Virgil came through carrying a backpack with a change of clothes, the ammo and the nightscopes and a range finder and two radios, a plastic sack with two doughnuts and two sixteen-ounce Diet Pepsis, and the M16 in a rifle case.

Wayne said, “Just step through the security scanner over there…”

“Place would blow up,” Virgil said. “We ready?”

“How big a hurry are we in?”

“Big hurry,” Virgil said. “Big as you got.”

WAYNE WAS flying the highway patrol’s Cessna Skylane, taken away from a Canadian drug dealer the year before. International Falls was a little more than two hundred and fifty miles from St. Paul by air, and the Skylane cruised at one hundred forty-five miles per hour. “If you got two bottles of soda in that sack… I mean, I hope you got the bladder for it. We’re gonna bounce around a little,” Wayne said as they walked out to the flight line.

“I’ll pee on the floor,” Virgil said.

“That’d make my day,” Wayne said.

“Just kiddin’. How bad are we going to bounce?”

Wayne said, “There’s a line of thunderstorms from about St. Cloud northeast to Duluth, headed east. We can go around the back end, no problem, but there’ll still be some rough air.”

They climbed in and stashed Virgil’s gear in the back of the plane and locked down and took off. St. Paul was gorgeous at night, the downtown lights on the bluffs reflecting off the Mississippi, the bridges close underneath, but they made the turn and were out of town in ten minutes. Looking down, the nightscape was a checkerboard of small towns, clumps of light along I-35, the lights growing sparser as they diverged from the interstate route, heading slightly northwest.

“Gonna take a nap if I can,” Virgil said.

“Good luck,” Wayne said.

Virgil liked flying; might look into a pilot’s license someday, when he could afford it. He asked, “How much does a plane like this cost?”

“New? Maybe… four hundred thousand.”

He closed his eyes and thought about how a cop would get four hundred thousand dollars-write a book, maybe, but it’d have to sell big. Other than that…

The drone of the plane and darkness started to carry him off. He thought about God, and after a while he went to sleep. He was aware, at some point, that the plane was shuddering, and he got the elevator feeling, but not too bad; and when he woke up, his mouth tasting sour, he peered out at what looked like the ocean: an expanse of blackness broken only occasionally by pinpoints of light.

He cracked one of the Pepsis and asked, “Where are we?”

“You missed all the good stuff,” Wayne said. “Had a light show for a while, off to the east. We’re about a half hour out of International Falls. You were sleeping like a rock.”

“I’ve been hard-pushed lately,” Virgil said. He looked at his watch: nearly one in the morning. Took out his cell phone: no service.

“You won’t get service until we’re ten minutes out,” Wayne said. “We’re talking vast wasteland.”

VIRGIL TRIED AGAIN when they could see the lights of International Falls and Louis Jarlait came up. “We’re just out of town,” Jarlait said. “Where do you want to hook up?”

“Pick me up at the airport. We got some BCA guys coming up from Bemidji.”

“I talked to them. They’re probably a half hour behind us, they had to get their shit together.”

“Okay. I’ll get them on the phone, bring them into Knox’s place,” Virgil said. “We need to check at the airport and see if they had any small-plane flights in the last hour or so with some Vietnamese on board.”

“I’ll ask while we’re waiting for you.”

“Careful. You might walk in right on top of them.”

Virgil couldn’t reach the BCA agents from Bemidji: they were still too far out in the bogs.

WAYNE WAS going to turn the plane around and head back to the Cities. Virgil thanked him for the flight, and he said, “No problem. I love getting out in the night.”

Louis Jarlait and Rudy Bunch were waiting when Virgil came off the flight line: “No small planes, no Vietnamese,” Bunch said.

“So they’re traveling by car. That was the most likely thing anyway,” Virgil said. “They won’t be here for at least a couple of hours.”

They loaded into Bunch’s truck, Virgil in the backseat, and Virgil asked, “What kind of weapons you got? You got armor?”

“We got armor, we got helmets, we got rifles. We’re good,” Jarlait said. “Goddamn, I been waiting for this. I can’t believe this is happening.”

“You’ve been waiting for it?”

“I was in Vietnam when I was nineteen-coming up on forty years ago,” Jarlait said. “We’d send these patrols out, you could never find shit. I mean, it was their country. Those Vietcongs, man, they were country people, they knew their way around out there.” Jarlait turned with his arm over the seat so he could look at Virgil. “But up here, man-this is our jungle. I walk around in these woods every day of my life. Gettin’ some of those Vietcongs in here, it’s like a gift from God.”

“I don’t think they’re Vietcong,” Bunch said.

“Close enough,” Jarlait said.

“Yeah, about the time you’re thinking you’re creeping around like a shadow, one of them is gonna jump up with a huntin’ knife and open up your old neck like a can of fruit juice,” Bunch said.

Virgil was looking at a map. “Take a right. We need to get over to the country club.”

“Nobody gonna creep up on me,” Jarlait said. “I’m doing the creeping.”

THE DRIVEWAY into Knox’s place branched off Golf Course Road, running around humps and bogs for a half mile through a tunnel of tall overhanging pines down to the Rainy River. The night was dark as a coal sack, their headlights barely picking out the contours of the graveled driveway. Not a place to get into, or out of, quickly, not in the dark.

“Weird place to build a cabin,” Bunch said. “You’re on the wrong side of the falls-if you were on the other side, you’d be two minutes out of Rainy Lake.”

“He didn’t build it for the fishing,” Virgil said. “I think he built it so he and his pals can get in and out of Canada without disturbing anyone. The rumor is, he deals stolen Caterpillar equipment all over western Canada.”

Knox’s house was a sprawling log cabin, built from two-foot-thick pine logs and fieldstone; the logs were maple-syrup brown in the headlights. The house sat fifty yards back from the water on a low rise, or swell, above the rest of the land. A pinkish sodium-vapor yard light, and another one down by a dock, provided the only ambient light. Across the water, Virgil could see another light reflecting off a roof on the Canadian side.

“How far you think that is to the other side?” he asked Bunch as they parked. He was thinking about Warren, and how he’d been shot across the lake.

“Two hundred and fifty yards?”

“Further than that,” Jarlait said.

Virgil fished his range finder out of the backpack and, when they stepped out of the truck, put them on the distant roof. “Huh.”

“What is it?” Bunch asked.

“Three-eighty from here to the house over there.”

“Told you,” Jarlait said.

“I meant that the water was two hundred yards.”

“Yeah, bullshit…”

Virgil said, “The main thing is, I think it’s too long to risk a shot. They’ll have to come in on this side-they can’t shoot from over there.”

“I shot an elk at three-fifty,” Bunch said.

“Guy’s a lot smaller than an elk… and there’re enough trees in the way that they can’t be sure they’d even get a shot. If they’re coming in, it’ll be on this side.”

A MAN SPOKE in the dark: “Who are you guys?”

He was so close, and so loud, that Virgil flinched-but he was still alive, so he said, “Virgil Flowers.”

He saw movement, and the man stepped out of a line of trees. He was carrying an assault-style rifle and was wearing a head net and gloves. “I’m Sean Raines, I work for Carl. Better come in, we can work out what we’re gonna do.”

Inside, the place was simply a luxury home, finished in maple and birch, with a sunken living room looking out across the river through a glass wall, and a television the size of Virgil’s living-room carpet. Raines was a compact man wearing jeans and a camouflage jacket. He peeled off the head net to reveal pale blue eyes and a knobby, rough-complected face; like a tough Kentucky hillbilly, Virgil thought.

Virgil asked, “What about the windows?”

“Can’t see in,” Raines said. “You can’t see it from this side, but they’re mirrored. How many guys you think are coming?”

“Probably three,” Virgil said. “Two guys and a woman. They’ve got a rifle-hell, they probably got anything they want.”

“They any good in the woods?”

“Don’t know,” Virgil said.

“It’s gonna be just us four?” Raines asked.

“We got three more guys coming from Bemidji, oughta be here pretty quick.” As he said it, Virgil pulled his phone from his pocket and punched up the number he’d been given.

He got an answer: “Paul Queenen.”

“Paul, this is Virgil Flowers. Where are you guys?”

“Fifteen, twenty minutes south of town on 71,” Queenen said.

“Stay on 71 until you get to Country Club Road.”

VIRGIL GAVE THEM instructions on getting in and then Raines took the three of them to an electronics room to look at the security system. “We got some deer around, so we keep the audio alarms off most the time, but I’ve got them set to beep us tonight…”

Knox had a dozen video cameras set out in the woods, feeding views into three small black-and-white monitors, all of which were a blank gray. “When you hear an alarm, you get a beep and an LED flashes on the area panel,” Raines said. He touched a ten-inch-long metal strip with a series of dark-red LEDs in numbered boxes. Above the LED strip was a map of Knox’s property, divided into numbered zones that corresponded to the LEDs. “When you get a flash, you can punch up the monitor and get a view of the area… you almost always see a deer, though we’ve had bears going through. Sometimes you don’t see anything because they’re out of range of the camera.”

“But in the dark like this…”

“The cameras see into the infrared, and there are infrared lights mounted with the cameras,” Raines said. He reached over to another numbered panel, full of keyboard-style numbered buttons, and tapped On. One of the monitors flickered and a black-and-white image came up: trees, in harsh outline.

“You’ll notice that there isn’t as much brush as you’d expect-Carl keeps it trimmed out pretty good. The trees are bigger than you’d expect, because he has them thinned. He wants it to look sorta normal, but when you get into it, you can see a lot further than if it was just untouched woods.”

“How does it pick up movement?” Bunch asked. “Radar?”

“They’re dual-mode-microwave and infrared to pick up body heat.”

Raines had worked through a defensive setup. “Whoever’s covering the system has to know where our guys are at. You don’t want to be turning on the lights if you don’t have to, because you’ve got your own guys moving around. If somebody’s coming in with high-end night-vision goggles, some of those can see into the infrared. It’d be like turning on a floodlight for them.”

Virgil looked at his watch. “I don’t think they’ll get here until daylight anyway,” he said. “Not unless they flew, and then they’d still have to drive.”

They got a beep then, and Raines switched one of the monitor views, and they saw a fuzzy heat-blob moving across the screen. “It’s small-probably a doe,” he said. He flicked on the infrared lights and they saw the doe, wandering undisturbed through the trees.

“Hell of a system,” Virgil said.

TWO OR THREE minutes later, as they were headed back to the living room, the security system beeped again and they went back to look at the monitors. “Car coming in,” Raines said. He touched one of the monitors and they saw a truck coming toward them, down the driveway.

“Bemidji,” Bunch said.

“We oughta put the trucks in the garage-too many of them, they’ll get worried. If they spot them,” Jarlait said.

THE THREE AGENTS from Bemidji-Paul Queenen, Chuck Whiting, Larry McDonald-brought assault rifles, armor, and radios. With the handsets that Virgil already had, there’d be enough for everyone. They gathered in Knox’s den, where he had a Macintosh computer with a thirty-inch video display, and Virgil called up Google Earth and put a satellite view of Knox’s property on the screen.

“Overall, I see two possibilities,” Virgil said, touching the screen. “First, they come in by water, which wouldn’t surprise me if they’ve looked at this picture, and they probably have. They could grab a boat, or bring one-a canoe or a jon boat-throw it in the water, and drift right along the shore. They’d probably come in from the south, but they could come in from either direction, so we have to watch both. The second possibility is that all they’ve got is a car, or a truck, and they come in from the highway… but they won’t want to park in the open, so they’ll have to ditch the truck here or here.”

When he finished, one of the Bemidji agents said, “You know, there’re only two highways in here.” He tapped the screen. “If you put roadblocks here and here… they gotta hit them. If you had some guys hiding off-road, south of the roadblocks, and if somebody turned and ran, they could block them south. Trap them.”

“I thought of that,” Virgil said. “One problem: we’d have some dead cops. These people have no reason not to fight. They’ve already killed seven or eight people, they’re here illegally, and they could be considered spies. Probably would be. If we catch them, they’ll go away forever. So if they’re suddenly jumped by a roadblock, my feeling is that they’d go for it-they’d try to shoot their way through. And they might have any kind of weapons.

“The other problem is, we’ve got Canada here.” Virgil traced the border on the satellite view. “They could literally swim to a country where we have no authority, if they could shoot their way to the river. If they get to Canada, I have a feeling we lose them.”

“Probably would,” another of the agents said. “Their crimes are federal capital crimes. Canada wouldn’t extradite. We’d have to make some weird kind of deal. I don’t think the politicians would go for it-let Canada tell us what we could do.”

“One more thing,” Virgil said. “They’ve been working this operation for a year. They’re not stupid; they’ll have alternative plans. I thought about things like, what if they ditched all their weapons down in the Cities and flew into Fort Frances? They walk through Canadian customs, pick up a prepositioned weapons cache and a boat over there, cross the river, hit Knox, cross back, and head out.”

They all looked at the map, then Jarlait chuckled and said, “Wish you’d mentioned that sooner. If they did that, they could be here right now.”

“No. Not on the alarm system,” Raines said. “We’ll see them coming-might only have a minute or two, but we’ll see them.”

“Maybe they’ve got invisibility cloaks,” Bunch said.

Raines said, “Well, then we’re fucked.”

VIRGIL SAT staring at the map until Bunch prodded him and asked, “What do we do, boss?”

Virgil said, “Our biggest problem is that we don’t know the territory, and we don’t have time to learn it. Can’t see in the woods, but we can’t help it, because if they’re coming at all, they’re coming tonight. By tomorrow, they’ve got to figure they’ll be all over the media. That Knox will know that they’re coming and will get out. And I’ve set them up to think that I don’t know where this house is… if they’re still monitoring my truck. So: I think they’ll come in fast, but there aren’t many of them.”

He looked at Jarlait and Bunch. “I want you two guys at the corners of the property, on the river, looking for boats.” He touched the two corners on the video map. “I want you deep under cover, I want you to literally find a hole, and then, not move. Nothing sticking up but your head. They’ve got starlight scopes and night-vision glasses. If they come in, I just want a warning so we can reposition everybody else.”

To the Bemidji guys: “I want you three on the land side.” He pointed at the video display: “Here, here, and here.”

“I want everybody on the ground, hidden. Your main job will be to spot these guys so we can build a trap as they come in.”

“You mean, ambush them,” Whiting said.

Virgil nodded. “That’s what it comes to. I’m going to ask Sean to monitor the security system. If anybody sees or hears anything, you call on the radio. Bunch of clicks and your name. That’s all. When they come in, you let them past and then get ready to close from the back. Sean will vector you in behind them. If they come in spread out, that means they’ll be hooked up by radio. If they’re operating as a sniper team, I expect at least two will come together, a spotter and a shooter. Gotta watch out for the third one.

“If they come in from the river, I want the land-side guys to rally down here on the house; if they come in from the land-side, I want Jarlait and Bunch to rally up to the house,” Virgil said. “I’ll be here with Sean until something pops up, and then I’ll go out to face them. By staying here, I can go in any direction.”

“And stay out of the mosquitoes,” Bunch said.

“And drink beer and watch TV,” Virgil said. He looked at his watch. “I want to get us out and get spotted right now. So get armored up, get warm, get your head nets on, get plugged into the radios. Find a comfortable place to lie down and then check in with us.”

Raines said, “Best if it’s in a ditch or low spot, someplace that will minimize your heat signature, in case they have infrared imaging capability. Get low.”

“If everything works perfectly, if they come in and we drop the net around them, I’ll try to talk to them,” Virgil said. “If they make a run for it, well, stay down and make sure you know what you’re shooting at. Anybody running has got to be them. Got that? Nobody runs. We don’t want any of us shot by any of us.”

He looked around. “If anybody gets hurt, call it in if you can, and we’ll make you the first priority. First priority is ‘Don’t get hurt.’ Catching these people is the second priority, okay? Don’t get your ass shot.”

He turned to Raines. “You know where the hospital is?”

Raines nodded.

“Then you’re in charge of making the hospital run if anybody gets knocked down. Them or us,” Virgil said. “One thing to remember is, they’re coming in here expecting to be on the offensive. They’ve got to come to us. We don’t have to maneuver; we just have to snap the trap. Okay? So let’s put your armor on and get out there.”

To Raines: “One more thing: if there’s shooting, and I can’t do it, I want you to call the sheriff’s office and tell them what’s up. Tell them that it’s a BCA operation. We don’t want any locals to come crashing through and get mixed up with us, or with the Vietnamese.”

VIRGIL AND Paul Queenen moved the BCA truck into the garage, and on the way back in, Queenen looked up at the overcast sky and asked, “What if they don’t come in?”

“Then they don’t. But if they’re monitoring my truck, and they should be, it’s been like the ace in their hand… then they know we’ve tumbled to them. They know when people start watching TV, everybody in the state will be looking for them. If they don’t move tonight, they’ll have to give it up.” Virgil looked at his watch again. “They’ve got to be getting close.”

“If they come.”

“They will,” Virgil said. “I talked to the woman a couple days ago. Mai-Hoa. Told her I didn’t know where Knox is hiding. I said it again tonight, in the truck. So-this is their last chance.”

“Why did you tell her that? Did you already know she was in it?”

“No.” Virgil thought about it for a minute, then said, “I don’t know why I told her that.”

FIFTEEN MINUTES LATER, all five men were at their stands. All five were deer hunters, they were all camouflaged and armored and netted and settled in, earbuds operating.

Virgil piled his armor in the hallway leading to the electronics room. He slipped into a soft camo turkey-hunter’s jacket, put a magazine in each of four separate pockets so they wouldn’t rattle, another one seated in the rifle, a shell jacked into the chamber. He jumped up and down a few times to make sure that nothing rattled, then piled the jacket and rifle next to the armor and walked around the house turning off lights.

When the place was dark, he pulled a couple of cushions off the couch in the living room, got a towel from the kitchen, and carried them to the electronics room, where Raines was sitting in a dimmed-down light, watching the monitors.

Virgil tossed the cushions on the floor, lay down on them, put the towel across his eyes, got out the second bottle of Pepsi, took a sip. “Everybody spotted?”

“Yes. I can barely see them, even on the infrared. They got themselves some holes.”

A moment of silence, then Virgil asked, “How’d you get this job?”

Raines said, “Got out of the Crotch, couldn’t get a job, so a guy got me a shot as a doorman at a club. You know. I met some guys doing security for rock stars, thought I could do that, and that’s what I did.”

“What rock stars do you know?”

He shrugged again. “Ah, you know. I don’t know any of them, but I’ve ridden around with most of them one time or another. I’m the guy who gets out of the limo first.”

“What’d you do in the Crotch?”

“Rifleman, mostly-though the last year I spent mostly on shore patrol.”

“Yeah? I was an MP,” Virgil said.

“Tell you what,” Raines said. “I was in Iraq One. I did a lot more fighting as an SP than I ever did in Iraq. Especially those fuckin’ squids, man. When the fleet is in, Jesus Christ, you just don’t want to be there.”

“I was in Fort Lauderdale once when a British ship came in,” Virgil said, relaxing into the time-killing chatter. “The people that came off that boat were the pinkest people I ever saw. Absolutely pink, like babies’ butts. You could see them six blocks away, they glowed in the dark. I went down to a place on the beach that night, you could hear the screaming a block away, and then the sirens started up, and when I got there, here was twenty buck-naked pink British sailors in the goddamnedest brawl… Man. They were throwing cops out of the club.”

So they bullshitted through an hour, and once every fifteen minutes or so Raines would start calling names, getting a click from each.

Raines said, “We looked you up on the Internet. Me ’n’ Knox.”

“Yeah?”

“Saw that thing about the shoot-out, that small-town deal, with the preacher and the dope. Sounded like a war,” Raines said.

“It was like a war,” Virgil said. The towel on his eyes was comfortable, but not being able to see Raines was annoying. “Close as I ever want to come.”

Raines said, “But here you are again, automatic weapons, body armor…”

“Just… coincidence,” Virgil said. “I hope.”

THE VIETNAMESE came in.

Fifteen clicks, a solid, fast rhythm, and one muttered word, “Bunch,” carrying nothing but urgency.

“It’s Bunch,” Raines said. “I don’t see shit on the monitor.” He picked up a radio and said, “That’s Bunch clicking, folks. Bunch: one click if by land, two if they’re on the water.”

Pause: two clicks.

Raines: “Bunch. One click if it’s likely some fishermen. Several clicks if it’s likely the Viets.”

Pause: several clicks.

Raines: “Click how many there are.”

Pause, then: five slow clicks.

Virgil had crawled into the hallway and closed the door against the light, pulled the armor over his head, patted the Velcro closures, pulled on the jacket, pulled on the head net and the shooting gloves. His eyes were good, already accustomed to the dark. He could hear Raines talking to Bunch.

Raines: “We got five clicks. Give us several clicks if that’s correct.”

Pause: several clicks.

Raines: “One click if they’re still outside of your position. Several clicks if they’re past your position.”

Pause: several clicks.

Raines said through the door, “Bunch says they’re inside his position, but I’ve got nothing yet. We got a bad angle to the south…”

Virgil plugged in the earbud, said, “I’m going.”

Raines said, “It could be a fake-out. A diversion.”

“I don’t think they’ve got enough people for a diversion. Tell the other guys to hold their positions until you’re sure. I’m going out to face them.”

Raines said, “Wait-wait. I got heat. I got heat, right along the bank, they’re two hundred yards out, they’re all together, they’re running right along the bank.”

“I’m going,” Virgil said. “I’ll lock the door going out. Keep your piece handy.”

HE WENT OUT the back door, moved as slowly as he could across the parking area, onto the grass, through a carpet of pine needles, along to the edge of the woods, almost to the river. When he sensed the water, he turned left, into the woods, where he ran into a tree. He couldn’t use the night-vision glasses because they’d ruin his night sight. Just have to take it slower. He moved, inches at a time, taking baby steps, one hand out in front, through the edge of the trees.

Raines spoke in his ear. “They’re landing. They’re seventy-five yards south of you-or west, or whatever it is. I’m going to pull the guys on the land side, bring them down to the cabin. If you’ve got a problem with that, click-otherwise, go on.”

Virgil moved deeper into the woods, felt the land going out from under him. A gully of some kind, a swale, running down toward the water. He moved down into it, felt the ground get soggy, then he was up the far side: couldn’t see anything.

At the top of the swale, he found another tree, a big one. The position felt good, so he stopped.

Raines: “Virgil, I’ve got you stopped. If you’re okay, give me a click.”

Virgil found the radio talk-button and clicked it.

Raines’s voice was calm, collected, steady: “I got a heat mass moving out of the boat, one still in it. Now I got two, okay, they spread out a little, I’ve got four heat masses moving up on the bank. They’re grouping again. They’re stopped. Bunch, you’re behind them. You’ll be shooting toward Virgil if you shoot past them-see if you can move further away from the river and toward the house. Looks like they’re gonna stay along the bank. One guy is still in the boat.”

Raines: “Bemidji guys, you’re right on top of each other, do you see each other? Give me a click if you do.” Click. “Okay, spread out, we want a line between the west edge of the house running down to the river… that’s good… now moving forward… Careful, you got Jarlait closing in along the bank. Jarlait, you might be moving too fast, take it easy.”

Raines kept talking them through it, the Bemidji cops and Jarlait closing on Virgil, the heat signatures by the river hardly moving at all. Raines finally said, “Okay, everybody stop. I think these guys are waiting for a little light. Bemidji guys, Virgil’s about fifty yards straight ahead of you. Virgil, the four who got out of the boat are still in a group, they’re maybe fifty yards straight ahead of you. Bunch, you’re good. Wait there, or someplace close. Looks a little lighter out there… sun’ll be up in an hour.”

THEY WAITED, nobody moving, soothed by Raines. “Everybody stay loose, stay loose…”

Virgil first imagined that the sky was growing brighter, then admitted to himself that it wasn’t: a common deer-hunting phenomenon. Then it did get brighter, slowly, and Virgil could see the tips of trees, and then the tips of branches, and then a squirrel got pissed somewhere and started chattering, and the woods began to wake up.

“They’re moving,” Raines said. “They’re coming in two plus two. Two are going further up the bank, two are coming right at you, Virgil. They’re closing, you’ll see them, if you can see them, in about a minute… Rest of you guys, don’t shoot Virgil. Bunch, the second two are as high on the bank as you are, you’re behind them, they’re moving toward the cabin… Virgil, you should see them anytime.”

Virgil sensed movement in front of him, thumbed the radio button, said as quietly as he could, “Rudy, I’m gonna yell. Your guys may move.”

“I think they heard you-they stopped,” Raines said in Virgil’s ear. “Christ, they’re not more than twenty-five yards away.”

From out in front of him, a woman’s voice said quietly, “Virgil?”

Virgil eased a little lower down the slope of the gully, thumbed the radio button so everybody could hear him, and said, “Mai-we’re looking at you on thermal imaging equipment, and on visual cameras up in the trees. We can see all of you. We’ve got you boxed, and there are a lot more of us than there are of you. Give it up or we’ll kill you.”

There was a heavy thud as something hit the far side of Virgil’s tree, and Virgil realized in an instant what it was, and flopped down the bank and covered his eyes and the grenade went with a flash and a deafening blast, and a machine gun started up the hill and Virgil thought, Rudy, and he rolled up and a burst of automatic-weapon fire seemed to explode over his head, coming from where Jarlait should have been, and he heard somebody scream and then there was a sudden silence and he could hear Raines talking: “Rudy, he’s up above you, circling around you, back up if you can, back up, you see him, you see him?”

More gunfire, and then Bunch shouted, “I got him, but I’m hit, I’m hit, ah, Jesus, I’m hit…”

Raines said, “Virgil, you’ve got one not moving in front of you, one moving away.”

Jarlait: “I got the one in front of Virgil, I had him dead in my sights.”

Raines: “We got one moving down to the water, Jarlait, if you move sideways down to the water you might be able to see them, you might have to move forward… Virgil, you can move forward… Paul, can you and your guys get to Rudy? Can you get to Rudy?”

Queenen said, “I can hear him, but where’s the other guy, is he still there?”

“He’s not moving, he may be down, I’m going to illuminate with the IR… okay, I can see him, he looks like he’s down, he’s on his back, if you go straight ahead you should get to Rudy… Rudy, I can see Rudy waving… Rudy, the guy above you is moving, but not much. He’s crawling, I think, can you see him?”

And Queenen said, “Is Rudy moving? Is Rudy crawling, I can see a guy crawling-” Rudy shouted, “No,” in the open, and Queenen opened up, ten fast shots, and Raines, his voice still cool, said, “I think you rolled him.”

JARLAIT SHOUTED, in the open, “I can’t see them.”

Virgil moved. The light was coming up fast, and he went forward, and Raines said in his ear, “Virgil, I can’t tell if the guy in front of you is down, but he’s not moving at all. The other one is down at the water.”

Virgil moved again, fast dodging moves from tree to tree. Raines called, “You’re right on top of him, he’s just downhill.”

Virgil saw the body: Phem, with a rifle. He was lying on his back, looking sightlessly at the brightening sky, the last he would ever have seen; his chest had been torn to pieces.

Virgil could hear Mai’s voice, calling out to somebody, the tone urgent, well ahead, but couldn’t make out what she was saying. Vietnamese?

Queenen: “Okay, the first guy’s dead… Larry, watch me, I’m moving over to the left, you see me? Watch right up the hill there… I’m gonna make a move here.”

A few seconds, then Queenen: “Okay, the second guy is dead. Rudy, where are you?”

Raines called: “They’re moving, they’re on the water… they’re moving fast…”

Virgil heard somebody crashing along the riverbank, assumed it was Jarlait, and then a long burst of automatic-weapon fire, interspersed with tracers, chewed up the riverbank and cut back into the woods and he went down.

Raines: “Louis, are you okay?”

“I’m okay. Jesus, they almost shot me.” His breath was hoarse through the walkie-talkie; another old guy.

Another long burst, then another, and Virgil realized that somebody-Mai? -was loading magazines and hosing down the woods as thoroughly as possible, keeping them stepping and jiving until they could get down the river, in the boat, to wherever their vehicle was.

He left Phem and hurried forward through the trees, crashing around, knowing he was noisy, and another burst slashed and ricocheted around him, and he went down again, and somebody shouted, “Man,” and then, on the radio, “That last one… I’m bleeding, but I don’t think it’s too bad.”

Virgil thought, Shit, turned back to help out, then heard Jarlait yell to the wounded man, “I see you. I’m coming your way, don’t shoot me, I’m coming your way.”

Virgil turned and jogged through the woods, fifty yards, a hundred yards, Raines calling into his ear, “I’m gonna lose you in a minute, Virgil, they’re already off my screens… I’m losing you…”

Virgil ran another fifty yards, to a muddy little point, risked a move to the water. The morning fog hung two or three feet deep over the water, wisps here and there, and Virgil saw only a flash of them, three or four hundred yards away, heading into the Canadian side, around another bend in the river; they disappeared in a quarter second, behind a screen of willows. No sound-they were using a trolling motor. He put his aim point a foot high, where he thought they’d gone, and dumped the whole magazine at them. When he ran dry, he kicked the empty mag out, jammed in another, and dumped thirty more rounds into the trees about where the boat should have been.

He thumbed the radio and shouted, “I’m coming back, watch me, I’m running back.”

When he got back to the house, Jarlait was there, standing over McDonald, as one of the trucks backed across the yard toward them. Jarlait looked at Virgil and said, “Rudy’s hit in the back. He’s hurt. This guy’s got a bad cut on his scalp, but not too bad. Needs some stitches.”

VIRGIL SAID, “So what are you up to?”

“What?”

He nodded down to a canoe, rolled up on the bank. “There’s a chance I hit them, or one of them. I’m going after them.”

“Let’s go,” Jarlait said. “Fuckin’ Vietcong.”