Prey

Chapter Thirty-Three

Apart from the cries of distant eagles, there was no sound.

And no movement.

Nothing.

"Why don't we hold it right here for a couple of minutes?" Henry Lightstone suggested quietly as he lowered the binoculars and stared out across the glistening turquoise water at the still, quiet, and seemingly unoccupied landscape. Set before a backdrop of snowcapped mountains, low cliffs stretched out across the long, rocky, tree-and- shrub-covered shore.

"Sounds good to me," Refuge Officer Sam Jackson nodded as he throttled the powerful outboard motor down to a rumbling idle.

"What's the name of this place again?" Lightstone asked as he readjusted the binoculars and continued his methodical search.

"Lupus Island, though it's not actually an island. There's a narrow spit of shale-covered sand that connects it to the shore."

To Special Agent Henry Lightstone, it looked like the point of land could easily conceal several hundred drunk, camouflaged, and potentially trigger-happy hunters. But if all of that shooting had been done by legitimate hunters, there should be at least an occasional flash of camouflage clothing. A hat, or a vest, or laughter, or loud voices.

But there wasn't.

The idea of being a sitting duck out on about twenty-four thousand acres of glassy-smooth, subarctic water didn't appeal to Lightstone.

"Still nothing?" Jackson finally asked.

"Nope. Nothing at all." Lightstone shook his head. "What do you say we try that little cover straight ahead, work our way west?"

"Sounds good to me," the orange-suited refuge officer nodded as he throttled the thin-skinned aluminum boat on a new course roughly parallel to the shoreline. When they reached the shallow cove, Sam Jackson turned the small patrol craft perpendicular to shore and then gave it one last nudge with the powerful outboard engine.

"How deep do you figure the water is?" Lightstone asked, setting aside the binoculars and getting ready to jump out and protect the boat from the sharp-edged rocks.

"Well, out here we usually go by the rule of ten," Jackson said as he cut off the engine and brought the prop up out of the water. "About ten feet out from shore, you can figure that you're going to be standing in about ten feet of water that's just about ten degrees Celsius."

"Christ," Lightstone muttered as he held his hand in the ice-cold water for a moment, then quickly brought it back out.

"Personally, if I was you," Sam Jackson advised in his slow Georgia drawl, "I'd stay in the boat until we run up on shore. We can always get the government to spring for a new boat every now and then."

Taking the bearded refuge officer at his word, Lightstone remained in the bow of the boat until the thin, insulated hull scraped loudly against the shale-covered shore. Jackson double-tied the bowline to a pair of tire-sized boulders.

"No one in his right mind ever goes swimming after a loose boat in these waters," Jackson said as he pulled a packset radio out of his backpack and looked over at Lightstone. "Are we ready? "

"I am, but you might want to get out of that Day-Glo suit first."

Sam Jackson looked down at the bright orange Mustang suit that was supposedly guaranteed to keep him alive for at least an extra four or five minutes if he ever had the misfortune to get dunked into the frigid subarctic waters of Skilak Lake.

"You really think we're going to get into some kind of confrontation with these folks?"

Lightstone hesitated for a moment. "Let's put it this way," he finally said. "Given the choice, I'd rather swim halfway across this lake after your boat than try to sneak in on some trigger-happy idiots in a getup like that."

Lightstone waited while Jackson worked himself out of the bright survival suit, then led the way as they climbed to the top of the fifteen-foot cliff. Once there, they slowly worked their way through a nearly impenetrable barrier of waist-high scrub brush, irregular moss-and-lichen-covered outcroppings, and ten-to-fifteen-foot spruce trees.

"Christ, how the hell can anybody hunt in stuff like this?" Lightstone muttered as he noisily pulled himself through a tightly grouped clump of white spruce trees, only to find himself blocked by the sharp, poking branches of a dead and partially dropped cottonwood.

"What they do is look for the bare spots, usually around the big patches of salmonberries," Jackson said. "Saves a lot of wear and tear."

"Like those over there to the right?" Lightstone asked hopefully.

Sam Jackson looked up, squinting against the glare of the low sun. "Yeah, I'd say that's a likely spot."

Two minutes later, the two federal wildlife officers were kneeling down beneath a large clump of berries, examining the still-warm, carcass of the maliciously killed mother Kodiak. One of the first things that Lightstone observed was the radio collar around the bear's thick neck.

"You know this one?"

"Oh, yeah." Sam Jackson nodded sadly. "We named her Molly. Found her as an orphaned cub over on Kodiak Island. Poacher killed her mom. Decided to transfer her over to the Killey Valley as an experiment. It seemed to be working out just fine, but I guess some goddamn bastard just couldn't wait to get his bear."

"Out of season?"

"Huh? Oh, yeah, I guess that, too," Jackson confirmed. "Not that it really matters in a situation like this."

"Why's that?" Lightstone asked, distracted by the curious details that his homicide-trained eyes were starting to pick up.

"Number-one rule in bear hunting out here. Can't hunt a female with cubs, no matter what. Christ, look at those teats. It should have been obvious to anybody with eyes that she was still nursing. She had two, and they're probably not far away. They'd stay fairly close to their mother,"

Sam Jackson muttered in frustration as he stood up and looked around. "Not that any of that will matter much, even if we find the guy. He'll just claim it was self-defense, like they always do."

As Jackson started to poke around in the nearby brush, Henry Lightstone pulled a sharp folding knife out of his pocket and began to cut and probe the massive left front shoulder of the huge bear.

"The cubs were late-born," Jackson said half to himself as he slowly extended his search out into the surrounding brush and trees. "Probably running around here, scared half out of- Oh, for Christ's sake!"

"What's the matter?" Lightstone brought his head up from where he had been examining the bear's massive front paws, instinctively reaching for his pistol as he looked around quickly.

"Well, at least the bastard didn't leave the poor damn thing out here to starve," Sam Jackson muttered as he reached into the brush with gloved hands. Using the length of berry juice-soaked rope that was still looped around its neck, he pulled out the carcass of the young male cub.

"Must be a hell of a sport, tying up baby bears and taking potshots at them." Lightstone shook his head, checking the surrounding hillside one more time before he resecured the. 357 in his hip holster and went back to examining the huge mother Kodiak.

"Potshots, my ass. Take a closer look," the furious refuge officer said.

"They cut its throat?" Lightstone blinked in surprise. Using his bare hands to move the rope and the blood-soaked fur aside, he exposed the deep, cleanly cut wound. "Why the hell would somebody do that?"

"I don't know why, but I can sure as hell tell you they did it after they killed her," Sam Jackson replied, nodding down at the mother Kodiak. "No way in the world a bear like that would ever let a human get in that close to one of her cubs."

Henry Lightstone spent a few more moments looking back over the scene from his kneeling position before he spoke.

"Actually, I think maybe she did let somebody get that close and was trying as hard as she could to correct her mistake," Lightstone said quietly. He felt around the stiffening body of the small cub to confirm the absence of any other wounds.

"What do you mean by that?"

"Take a look at her front shoulders, at the main joints. And then at the back legs, around the knees."

"Yeah, what about-" Jackson started to ask as he knelt down by the sprawled carcass of the huge female. Then he muttered a series of heartfelt curses as he examined each of the four massive wounds.

"Remember how evenly paced the shooting was?"

Sam Jackson nodded.

"Well, the way it looks to me, whoever did this probably broke her down progressively as she was coming uphill," Lightstone explained, pointing to the trail of dislodged rocks, broken trees, and wide splatters of blood. "First shot was probably right down there by that rock, maybe twenty yards away at the most. You can see where she went down each time, and then kept on coming back up. If I had to make a guess, I'd say he was standing right about there," Lightstone added, motioning to a spot about three feet away from the bear's massive head where a partial boot print was just barely visible in the rocky soil.

"How can you tell all that?"

"Used to work a lot of homicides down south," Lightstone replied. "Basically the same thing. If you look close, right around there, you can see the powder burns on the forehead and some of the effects of the muzzle blast." He pointed in the general area of the partially blown-out wound. "Coup de grace. Just stood there waiting for her to get close enough."

"The guy used the cub as bait," Jackson whispered, shaking his head slowly in disbelief.

"Oh, yeah? Why's that?"

"Bears are afraid of people. She would have done anything she could to avoid a human, unless her cub was involved."

Lightstone nodded after looking around the scene again. "You can see some smaller claw marks in that tree right there next to where the guy was standing. Cub was probably trying to get away. Get back to Mom."

"I'll tell you what," Sam Jackson said. "If you're reading this whole thing right, and this guy deliberately drew this bear onto himself, using that cub as bait, then I don't care what kind of rifle he's carrying, the man's got to be crazy."

"What would you say if I told you he used a pistol?" Lightstone asked as he dropped two chunks of bloody metal in the refuge officer's hand.

"I'd say he was out of his goddamn mind," Sam Jackson said as he stared down at the badly mangled bullets.

"I dug them out of the knee and shoulder joints, left side, front and back legs. The way they're torn up, it looks like they were probably from a. 357 Magnum. I'll send them down to our forensics lab in Ashland for confirmation, see what they can tell us about the make and model from the land and groove ratios."

"A three-fifty-seven pistol?" Jackson still didn't want to believe it.

"Three-fifty-seven's one hell of a weapon if you want to take out a human being," Lightstone shrugged. "But it sure wouldn't be my choice for hunting a grizzly bear."

"Yeah, no shit."

"And as long as I'm sending things down to the lab, I'll probably include this." Lightstone showed the refuge officer a tiny strip of hide about an inch long and less than a sixteenth of an inch wide.

"What's that?"

"Not sure. I found it stuck in one of her front claws." Lightstone shrugged as he pulled three small Zip-loc bags out of his flotation vest. He discarded the fishing flies and carefully transferred the mangled bullets and the strip of hide to separate bags, then put them back in his vest pocket.

"So now what do we do?" the enraged and frustrated refuge officer asked.

"You said these bears were killed out of season?"

Sam Jackson looked at his watch for confirmation. "Yeah, sure. Today's the fourteenth of September. Season doesn't start until the fifteenth, even if these bastards had a tag, which they probably didn't."

"So let me run this by you," Lightstone said. "The guy could always claim that the bear charged him, and that he just didn't have a chance to see the cub. And the fact that he used a pistol to put her down would probably back up the self-defense angle. I'm assuming that it's legal to shoot a bear out of season to protect yourself."

"As long as he didn't provoke the attack," Jackson nodded. "But you don't think this guy-"

"No, of course not." Lightstone shook his head. "But the point is, it doesn't matter what I think. It's what a jury's going to think that counts. On the other hand," he added with a smile, "you'd think the person who did this would have one hell of a time trying to explain to a jury why he had to rope a little sixty-pound cub by the neck and then cut its throat to protect himself."

"I sure as hell wouldn't believe it," Sam Jackson growled.

"Well, in that case, seeing as how there's a set of boot prints moving up over in that direction," Lightstone said, motioning with a blood-smeared hand, "what do you say we take ourselves a little hike, find this certifiably crazy bastard, and see what he has to say for himself?"

"Can you see them?" Gerd Maas demanded, speaking quickly into his scrambled radio as he crouched down in the concealing brush.

"Affirmative. Two subjects, approaching cautiously from the south." Roy Parker, one of Paul Saltmann's ICER protection-team members, watched the approaching law- enforcement officers as he spoke into his headset microphone.

"How far away?"

"A couple hundred yards."

"Do you have a clear shot?"

"Doubt it. These guys are staying in pretty tight with the rocks. Let me check with Arturo."

"Why can't he answer for himself?" Maas demanded.

"Antenna link on his com-set's malfunctioning," Parker replied calmly. "Hold on."

Turning his head carefully so as not to lose the limited cover of the small spruce, or to allow the stabilizer on his 5.56mm Colt Commando automatic carbine to disturb the surrounding brush, Parker looked over at a position about twenty yards away, where his headset radio-equipped and camouflage-covered partner, Arturo Bolin, was lying in a prone position with a U.S. Marine Corps 7.62mm bolt- action, bipod and Redfield telescopic-sight-mounted M40 sniper rifle extended out and ready.

The camouflage patterns on the fiberglass stock and the clothing had been specifically selected for the Kenai Peninsula area. And when combined with the brown and dark green greasepaint, the wiglike hat made out of shredded brown and dark green rags, the rag netting, and the clumps of rubber-band-attached local foliage, the overall silhouette-concealing effects were so successful that Parker had to look carefully to see his partner's hand signals.

But in doing so, the professionally trained mercenary failed to notice the movement of the small, terrified female grizzly-the mother Kodiak's surviving cub-who, alerted by the sound of the human voice, had quickly crouched down in the surrounding brush.

"Negative on the clear shot." Parker spoke into his own headset radio mike. "Maybe another thirty seconds."

Maas cursed. He knew they had to hurry, because the dark orange floatplane had already made one low run across the west end of the island and was starting to come back around for another pass.

"You want to call it now, or wait?" Parker's electronically scrambled voice asked with calm, professional patience.

"Can you identify them?"

"The tall one with the beard is Sam Jackson, one of the senior refuge officers out here. No make on the second guy."

"Are they armed?"

"From what we can see, it looks like both of them are carrying stainless-steel handguns, short barrels. Probably standard-issue Model Sixty-sixes. No long guns."

"Then the second man is either another refuge officer or a special agent," Maas said as he watched the orange floatplane sweep back around over the eastern end of Skilak Lake.

"That's the way we read it," Parker agreed. "Thing is, we figure you'd better make a call one way or the other pretty damn quick. That guy up there in the Cessna makes another pass, he's bound to spot either us, you guys, or the plane."

"You deal with the two on the ground, we will deal with the plane," Gerd Maas said, the chill in his voice still evident despite the electronic scrambling.

"That mean we have clearance?"

"Yes," Maas said. "Put them down."