Prey

Chapter Thirty-Two

"Do you see anyone?" Gerd Maas asked over the loud, angry roar of the bear.

Up in the hills surrounding the southern shore of Skilak Lake, and about half a mile from the thick berry patch where the Kodiak sow had fought and died, the male grizzly bear had started to growl and slash at the cage again. But Maas was ignoring it, because he was still on a high from his more recent encounter with the enraged mother bear, and because he was much more concerned about getting the setting exactly right.

"Just some fishermen. Four of them, in two boats," Kimiko Osan replied as she continued to scan the distant northern shore with the powerful spotting scope.

"How far out are they?"

"About a mile," she estimated. "Due north, just outside Doroshin Bay. One of them is wearing an orange survival suit. I think he's the refuge officer we've been monitoring. The one with the small dog. They are very busy. Three of them have fish on their lines, and at least two of the lines seem to be tangled."

"Good. They shouldn't be too interested in what we are doing here," Maas nodded as he pulled on a pair of thin leather gloves over his muscular hands. Then he turned to Shoshin Watanabe.

"What about the plane?"

Watanabe spoke into his radio, listened for a reply, and then looked back up at Maas. "He is flying in a circle pattern approximately thirty kilometers to the south."

"And the diversion team?"

"Parker and Bolin are in position, approximately five hundred meters to the east. They are also ready."

"Excellent."

Twenty feet away and partially concealed in a clump of spruce and alder, the male grizzly roared out his anger as he continued to tear and bite at the aluminum crossbars of the portable cage. Several of the bars had already been bent by his furious mauling.

Ignoring the bear for the moment, Gerd Maas walked over to where the two men had been secured to individual trees with lengths of wide medical gauze and hospital tape to eliminate the possibility of telltale bruising.

Kneeling down before the younger of the two, Maas placed the long serrated edge of his belt knife against the man's neck-causing his eyes to bulge wide open-and then, with a savage twist of his wrist, he cut the gauze and tape wrappings away from Butch Chareaux's mouth.

It took the younger Chareaux only a few moments to recover his composure, whereupon he began to curse wildly in his fluent Cajun dialect until Maas dealt him a savage backhanded blow to the side of his bearded face.

"You will remain silent," Maas ordered in a raspy whisper as he cut the bindings away from Chareaux's legs. Then he looked up at Kimiko Osan, who was standing a few feet away with Paul McNulty's. 45 SIG-Sauer automatic and Sonny Chareaux's stainless-steel. 357 Magnum revolver in her small hands.

"Are you ready?" he asked.

"Yes. Are you comfortable with his boots?" Kimiko Osan responded. She was hesitant to question Maas, but she knew that timing would be crucial and that Chareaux's boots were two sizes too big.

"They are fine," Maas nodded with icy-cold indifference.

"Then I am ready also," she said calmly.

"And you?" Maas turned to look at Shoshin Watanabe, who was standing next to the tree where McNulty was tightly secured with gauze and tape.

"Hai!" Watanabe acknowledged with a sharp forward nod of his closely shorn head.

"Good, then we begin," Maas said as he cut the last of Butch Chareaux's ties. Maas held him on the ground with a knee pressed into his lower spine and his unbroken wrist twisted tightly against his upper back.

After dragging the Cajun about ten feet in front of the rocking cage, Maas took the. 357 Ruger revolver from Kimiko Osan and slipped it into the back waistband of his jeans. Then he looked up at his young, attractive, and absolutely lethal assistant and gave her the nod to proceed.

Moving with a smooth, almost feline stride, Kimiko Osan returned to the tree where Paul McNulty was secured and slid the heavy SIG-Sauer into the front waistband of her jeans. As she did so, Shoshin Watanabe-a small man with exceptionally strong arms and hands for his size-cut away the gauze and tape restraints from McNulty's mouth, wrists, and legs.

"Goddamn it, what the hell are you- Aaggghh!"

Watanabe immediately caught McNulty in an extremely painful reversed wrist lock and then allowed Kimiko Osan to step in and take over the control hold.

"Listen to me, goddamn you!" McNulty raged, but to no avail.

Pausing only to be certain that Osan had McNulty fully in her control, Shoshin Watanabe walked over to the cage and placed his hand on the release lever, ignoring the fearsome thrashing and roaring and clattering of the cage sections as the infuriated grizzly tried to get at its tormentors.

"I am ready," Watanabe said, allowing himself a brief glance at the dangling rope ladder behind him.

Gerd Maas used a wrist lock on Butch Chareaux's broken but unbandaged left wrist and an arm across his throat to drag the cursing and kicking Cajun up to his feet and over to the cage. There, Maas shoved his frantically struggling and screaming victim against the cage door several times, causing the male grizzly to lunge and tear at the restraining bars.

In one quick movement, Maas pulled Chareaux ten feet back from the cage door, took a last confirming glance at Kimiko Osan, and then yelled out one word:

"Now!"

Moving with the speed and precision of a trained gymnast, Shoshin Watanabe tossed Butch Chareaux's rifle out on the ground in front of the cage, released the locking lever, threw the door open, and then turned and ran for the dangling rope ladder as the grizzly burst out of its prison.

For a brief moment, it looked as though the bear might go for Watanabe, but then Maas yelled out something in guttural German over the high-pitched screams of Butch Chareaux, and the bear lunged toward the two men just as Maas shoved Chareaux forward.

The bear's slashing right paw tore open the sleeve of Maas's jacket in the instant before the four-inch claws slashed deep into Butch Chareaux's shoulder and chest muscles. But Maas had thrown himself backward as he was reaching for the. 357 Ruger revolver tucked against the small of his back. And in the brief moment it took for the enraged grizzly to fling Butch Chareaux's now lifeless body aside and lunge toward its white-bearded nemesis, Kimiko Osan had thrown Paul McNulty forward onto the ground, smoothly drawn MeNulty's. 45 SIG-Sauer out of her waistband, and squeezed the trigger.

The first two. 45-caliber jacketed slugs caught Butch Chareaux in the rib cage and the side of the head as he was going down. The shots were only for effect, since Chareaux was already dead.

The next round ricocheted off the surface of the bear's skull, sending blood and small gouged chunks of furry tissue in all directions and causing the bear to turn away from its murderous charge toward Maas to focus on its new tormentor. Kimiko Osan unflinchingly stood her ground and continued to aim and fire at the oncoming bear.

In that instant, from a distance of less than five feet, Gerd Maas sent two. 357 Magnum bullets ripping through the rib cage and heart of the huge beast. Both of these wounds would prove to be fatal, but not yet. The huge grizzly turned once again to lunge at its white-haired tormentor.

From five feet away, Gerd Maas had less than a second to live when he coolly triggered off a. 357 round straight into the bear's wide-open mouth-partially severing its spinal column-and then swiftly cocked and fired the powerful handgun two more times, sending a pair of the high-velocity projectiles through the deep eye sockets of the suddenly paralyzed grizzly.

Calmly turning his back to the huge falling beast, he felt one heavy lifeless paw strike against his shoulder, drawing five bloody streaks down the side of his jacket. Maas coolly aimed and fired the final. 357 round from Sonny Chareaux's single-action revolver into Paul MeNulty's throat at a point just above the agent's Kevlar vest.

Over a mile away, and distracted by Marie Pascalaura's excited screams as he struggled to untangle the two jerking lines, Henry Lightstone never heard the first three shots fired through Paul MeNulty's. 45 SIG-Sauer.

But all of them certainly heard the two booming explosions from Butch Chareaux's. 357 echo across the bright turquoise water.

"Henry! Watch out, he's going under the boat again!" Marie Pascalaura warned as she tried to bring the tip of her rod around the cover of the outboard motor. But then she gasped in surprise as Lightstone quickly reached for his belt knife, snapped the sharply honed blade open one-handed, and severed both lines.

"WHAT — " Marie Pascalaura started to yell, but Lightstone silenced her with a wave of his hand while he and Woeshack and Jackson listened as the steady gunfire continued to reverberate across the water and off the surrounding mountains.

Nine more echoing shots later, the lake was silent once again. Henry Lightstone tossed his backpack into the bottom of Sam Jackson's patrol boat and crossed over to the smaller craft as the engines of both outboard motors were started up.

"Soon as you get in the air, get on the radio," Lightstone said to Woeshack. "Try to raise Paul, let him know we've got a situation out here. After that, put yourself over the south side of the lake, see if you can spot a boat or a plane. Sam and I will work our way in from the shore."

"Got it," Woeshack acknowledged.

Working quickly, Lightstone secured his two-and-a-half- inch. 357 Magnum revolver into the hip holster and 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."