The Dark Root

28

It was pitch-black, drizzling, and a thick ground fog had settled into the low spots. Gene Blood’s farm lay like a dark, misty blanket across the high undulations east of Lake Memphremagog, the rough edges of its streams and shallow ravines-even of the boulders lining its fields-smoothed and contoured by years of northern ice and snow and bone-cracking wind, making it all at once beautiful, soothing, and utterly hostile.

It was as quiet as a graveyard.

I was crouched in the lee of a small outcropping of rocks, high on a field that fell away to a row of trees marking the boundary with Canada. The fog had piled up against the base of the woods, so even with the pair of night-vision binoculars I’d been issued, all I could see at the bottom of the field was a slowly shifting, impenetrable haze, which in the artificial green glow of the binoculars, looked like a slow-motion surf, rubbing up against a dark and mysterious forest, full of promise and threat.

I ran a finger between my neck and the tight throat-mike fitted just to the side of my vocal cords. It was about as comfortable as those cheap, elastic bow ties waiters are forced to wear, but it enabled me to talk on the radio in a barely audible murmur and still be clearly understood at the other end. Strapped to my right ear, also with constricting bands that ran around my head, was a single large, padded headphone. A receiver on my belt allowed me to change frequencies between the small group of people hidden along Gene Blood’s farm, the Border Patrol dispatcher in Swanton, and Lester Spinney, who was standing by the helicopter we’d been lent by the New York State National Guard.

I made sure I was on the local channel. “This is Alpha One with a wake-up call. How’s everyone doin’?”

One by one, the six people I had assigned to me checked in, all with nothing to report. The last was Richard Boucher, the Border Patrolman who’d put me onto Gene Blood in the first place. We’d met shortly after that first phone conversation. I’d liked him instantly, and had gone to some pains to make sure he was made my on-ground liaison to his superiors.

“I had a doe trigger one of the infrareds about half an hour ago, but that’s it so far.”

“10-4.” I took my finger off the send button and sighed. We’d been out here for four nights running. The concert in Highgate had come and gone, along with the almost fever-pitch tension that had accompanied it. Forty-eight hours earlier, a wandering doe would have triggered an instant recon patrol and brought everyone on the team to the edge of their seats. This time, I was sure, Boucher had merely waited for the animal to clear the woods and had checked it out with his binoculars. We were, after all, only some five hours shy of dawn-and of bringing this entire operation to a close.

There had been some bright spots, especially far west of us, above Highgate, where quite a few people had been rounded up crossing the border to see the concert. Those “hits” had apparently justified our putting the majority of our manpower there, despite my personal opinion that Truong would opt for a place of calm over chaos. That’s why he’d chosen to undermine Da Wang from Vermont in the first place, instead of fighting him directly on his own Montreal turf-and why he’d taken so long to reach this point in his plans, after years of tracking down and eliminating the lesser players, slowly nibbling away at a nemesis who’d been watching him get closer for years.

I couldn’t complain, though. The committee running this coordinated operation-nominally under Frazier’s guidance-had listened to all viewpoints, and mine had been catered to with my squad of six now very bored people. They’d even gone beyond that. Boucher had found a couple of others like Blood-people living on the border with no past smuggling histories, but who were on the financial ropes and vulnerable to persuasion-and the committee had placed small squads on their properties, too.

So now I was trying to come to grips with the fact that despite my instincts-and my further belief that, of all the candidates, Blood was the best-I’d still been wrong. Either Truong did have enough money elsewhere to keep himself going, or he had other means to restock his coffers. It was possible he’d undermined more than one of Da Wang’s pipelines, that despite Nguyen’s denials and all the other intelligence we’d gathered on him, he’d still managed to keep some part of his business from all of us. But I still didn’t believe it, even when confronted by the obvious.

A small tone went off in my ear, indicating someone wanted me on channel two-the frequency of the Swanton headquarters dispatcher.

“Alpha One from 6-40,” came the flat, disinterested voice, “We got a hit on Whiskey-Three. 2-53 investigating.”

I switched my radio over and murmured an acknowledgment. I wasn’t as attuned as the Border Patrol was to the names and locations of all their dozens of monitors-I relied on Richard for that. I switched back to channel one in time to hear his low, calm voice say, “Memphremagog, eastern bank.”

“10-4.” I shifted my weight to get more circulation to my left leg. Normally, sensor hits were recorded by the dispatcher, and either checked remotely by camera or by a notified patrol unit. Given this particular detail, however, and the fact that none of us knew for sure where Truong might try to cross, all of us were being told of every “hit,” regardless of where it was located. Only the small mobile sensors, like the several Richard was monitoring, bypassed this system, since their broadcast strength wasn’t enough to reach the Swanton receiver.

Of the three types of sensors, the infrareds gave off the most alerts, since they were designed to capture anything that broke their invisible beams, including animals, falling branches, and even occasional tricks of light. The seismic units, triggered by the vibrations of passing vehicles, and the magnetics, which could pick up the metal shoelace holes on a single pair of boots, were custom-made for this kind of surveillance. But the infrareds were the cheapest, the lightest, and the easiest units to install, and as such accounted for the majority out here. I therefore assumed the sensor by the lake was one of them, and that its object of interest was either a floating log or two lovers in a canoe with a fetish for frostbite.

The tone went off again in my ear. This time, the dispatcher sounded a little more interested. “6-40 to all units. Whiskey-Eighteen just went dead. 6-40 to 2-53.”

2-53 was the Derby-based car that had gone out to investigate the first hit. “6-40. This is 2-53. I’m on City Farm Road now, heading north. I’ll take a look from Allen Hill.”

I stayed on the main frequency, eavesdropping. I remembered Allen Hill from the guided tour of the landscape Boucher had given me five days earlier. From the top of it, the lake had spread out below like a vast black oil slick, curving around the tree-spiked humps of the islands and peninsulas with a menacing invasiveness. It was easy to imagine the lone patroller now, sitting in the warmth of his vehicle, adjusting his night-vision goggles to fit against high-power binoculars, steadying his elbows on the steering wheel.

“6-40, this is 2-53. We have multiple craft on the water, northeast of Black Island. Looks like they’re heading toward the Holbrook Bay area, moving fast.”

The Swanton dispatcher slipped into his Chuck Yeager, calm-in-any-storm voice. “10-4, 2-53. Advise you stay put for further incursions while we tend to mop-up.” He followed with an alphabet soup of call letters, directing multiple units-both vehicles and boats-to converge on the scene.

He was interrupted by 2-53 again: “6-40, you better step up the response. Now I’ve got more Charlies heading south, maybe to Indian Point. They’re spreading out to hit the shore on a broad base. We’re going to need everybody we can get.”

Swanton Dispatch reacted accordingly. Unit by unit, he read off numbers, including Spinney’s helicopter crew. Like heavy footfalls coming along a corridor, I could hear him getting closer to me and my small, suddenly alert band. “Alpha One,” he finally said. “2-57 is to follow the Johns River SOP. Your command has been terminated.”

2-57 was Richard Boucher, and he was being ordered to take over from me and abandon the Blood farm. In the pause that should have been filled with my own curt and acquiescent “10-4, Alpha One command terminated,” I heard the double tone of our own frequency go off in my ear-Boucher wondering why I was hesitating and impatient to get going.

I switched channels. “Go ahead.”

“Joe,” he said, without all the formalities, “you hear that last request?”

“Yeah. I’m thinking. Anything going off on your monitors?”

“Negative. The action’s on the lake.”

“It is right now-out in the open where everyone can see it.”

Swanton signaled to me to answer. I went back to their frequency and told them to wait. When I returned, Richard asked, “What’re you saying? You still think he’ll hit here?” His voice was incredulous, and a touch irritated.

“This could be his last shot. He laid the ground, did his homework, took his time. I have a hard time believing it all boils down to a bunch of boats flying across open water in clear weather, especially since he must know we’re on high alert.”

This time it was Boucher who hesitated. “They’re still going to need troops along the eastern shore.”

“Fine. How many will it take?”

“I’m running the sensors,” he said.

“How ’bout you, me, and Steve stay put, and I cut the other three loose?”

I knew what that decision was costing him. The northern border was normally quiet enough to be considered by some a retirement post. To be on duty and miss an event like this cut deep. “Thanks, Richard. I appreciate it.”

I let him do the honors of breaking the news to 6-40. In true military style, they took it without comment, saving their wrath for when it could be dished out face to face, by the man with the most brass on his shoulders.

I stayed on the general frequency, as I knew Boucher and Steve were doing from their hiding spots. Tucked away among my little pile of rocks, I could hear all hell breaking loose, as VSP, Newport Police, and sheriff ’s units were called in for backup, visualizing from experience what was taking place. Five minutes later, adding to the unreality, I heard the distant thudding of Spinney’s helicopter through the ear that wasn’t covered by the headphone, some six miles to the west.

As the minutes dragged on, I began wondering if the anticipated dressing down I’d be getting later wouldn’t be richly deserved.

The small double tone went off. I switched over.

“Joe, I got a hit, about halfway between us,” Boucher reported.

“Okay. Hang on.”

The trick to mobile sensors was to place them strategically, far enough apart to give the listener not only a sense of which direction the object was moving in, but also at what speed. Richard and I were waiting for the second hit.

“Got it,” he said moments later. “He’s heading toward you, and he’s on wheels, moving fast.” Then he added quickly, “I got another one on the first sensor-something big.”

I aimed my binoculars to the left and then made a calculated gamble. “Drop everything and head back to your pickup, Richard. If he is mobile and I miss him, we’ll be shit out of luck without a vehicle. Steve, you find out what triggered that second hit, and call for reinforcements. I think this is it.”

“What if this is another diversion? Or a midnight joyrider?”

“Just do it. We don’t have much left to lose.”

I heard something in the distance and tore the headphone off my ear to listen. It was the high-pitched whine of a small engine. I disconnected the radio from all its covert paraphernalia, the need for silence over, and told Richard, “I hear it coming. Sounds like an ATV.”

Boucher was breathing hard, running for his pickup. “10-4. I’ll be headin’ your way in a sec.”

The fog bank by the trees told me nothing. As before, it lay there, trapped, opaque as green phosphorescence through the low-light binoculars, disguising the source of the approaching engine’s growing howl. I was frustrated by the binoculars. Richard and a few of the others had been issued sophisticated night-vision goggles from the Border Patrol’s limited supply, which not only could be conveniently strapped onto one’s head, but could also be left in place while shooting a gun. If it came to that, I knew I wouldn’t do much with a pair of binoculars in one hand and a pistol in the other.

At last, much closer than I expected, the fog gave up its malevolent gift. The dark, squatty form of a four-wheel all-terrain vehicle, towing a small trailer, burst from the bank like a shark clearing water, and came charging right at me, its lights extinguished.

I exchanged the binoculars for a powerful flashlight, stood clear of the rocks, steadied my gun hand on top of the hand holding the light, and switched it on. “Police-stop.”

But we were too close. It had happened too fast. There was no room left for either one of us to choose a peaceful option. The driver was also wearing night goggles, and the glare from my light totally blinded him for an instant, making him instinctively tear them off and throw them aside. He swerved at me, only barely in control of his machine. Just before diving out of the way, I saw the dazed face of Truong Van Loc.

I ended up against one of the rocks, momentarily stunned, the stench of the ATV’s exhaust in my nostrils. He hadn’t missed me by much. I dug my radio from the holster on my belt. “Richard-it’s him. He got by me. He’s heading for the road.”

I scrambled to my feet and began running, my flashlight now lost but my gun still in my hand. The road was a couple of hundred feet away, and Truong, now minus his goggles, had switched on his headlights. But I knew we were too late. Richard hadn’t been able to get to his pickup quickly enough. Even now, almost reaching the road and seeing Truong picking up speed in the opposite direction, I could barely see Richard’s lights coming over the rise far to my right.

Breathing hard, I staggered into the road and waved at the pickup to stop. He slowed down enough for me to pile into the passenger seat, and then poured the speed back on.

“He’s right ahead of us-four-wheel ATV with a trailer-using lights.”

Over the radio, we heard Steve reporting that he’d secured a large truck, minus the driver, and that he’d contained its human cargo by locking the back door.

Driving with one hand, the countryside ripping by in a frightening blur, Boucher unhooked his radio mike and relayed our situation to Dispatch in a calm, measured tone. “There is one thing going for us,” he said after he’d signed off. “Unless he really knows this part of the woods, he’s going to have to double back to keep on any kind of decent road. They all crap out about three to four miles east of here.”

I remembered that from studying the map earlier. Somewhere near where Orleans County ended and Essex began, the dozen or so marked roads all either dead-ended or looped back around to the west. But there were a lot of them, mostly interconnected, and unless we could seal them off quickly, Truong still stood a good chance of escaping, especially if he put his cross-country vehicle to its intended use.

“There he is,” Boucher murmured, almost to himself.

Ahead of us, around a curve in the road, a quick, jittery glow flickered briefly across the treetops. I hung on as Richard approached the bend without letting up on the accelerator.

Tires squealing, odds and ends shifting noisily around inside the cab, we took the corner almost on two wheels. Straightening out, we found the road ahead-straight, broad, and flat-totally empty.

Richard slammed his hand against the steering wheel, coming to a stop. “Damn. The son of a bitch. I should’ve known it.”

He threw the truck into reverse, turned us around, and sped back to a small gap in the woods I hadn’t noticed on the inside of the curve. Again, he grabbed the radio and gave a short update. Then he positioned us so our lights shined directly into the trees.

I looked dubiously at the narrow gap, which in the shadows looked about big enough for a bicycle. “You sure?”

“I know every deer path in this county. He’s down there, all right, playing hide and seek.”

“So we wait?” I asked.

A slow smile spread across his face as he shook his head. “Too many options in there. He could come out at a half-dozen places, cross another road, and keep on going. We’re going to have to force his hand.” He put the truck into four-wheel drive.

“In this?” I asked incredulously.

He laughed. “You never been Jeepin’ before?”

The truck leaped from the road into the brush with a tremendous crash. Branches flew by the windshield as if caught in a tornado, and I could hear the truck’s undercarriage squealing and groaning with the strain. I held onto the dash with both hands, wondering how I could have been so wrong in gauging Boucher’s character.

After the initial onslaught, the branches faded back a bit, allowing us some vision, and up ahead, exactly on cue, another pair of headlights suddenly came to life.

“I got you, you bastard,” Richard shouted gleefully, and put on more speed.

As he did so, two sharp muzzle flashes punctured the darkness. Our windshield cracked like a snapped bone, and we were sprinkled with tiny shards of glass. Boucher’s face, glowing green in the dash lights, merely hardened in silence.

The chase became a slow-motion cataclysm of violent sound, motion, and half-perceived disasters. Adrenaline-pumping images of grazed boulders, hip-checked trees, branches further smashing the windshield, and an occasional view of the vehicle just ahead, its driver hunched over the handlebars, crowded in on me in chaotic order. The maelstrom of jumbled impressions was so confusing, so immediate, and so life threatening, I actually found myself wondering if any of it was real.

And then abruptly it stopped. Boucher screamed, “Shit,” and slammed on the brakes. Ahead of us-almost under us-was Truong’s trailer, twisted, broken, completely blocking our way. Beyond it, receding rapidly, we could clearly see the fading lights of the ATV.

Once again, Richard grabbed the radio. This time, however, I reached out and took it from him.

“4-60 from Alpha One. Where’s the chopper now?”

“Near the intersections of Holland, Morgan, and Selby Roads.”

I glanced at Boucher.

“That’s just ahead. If we can move that trailer, I can get you there in five minutes. We almost had him,” he added as an angry afterthought.

“Can you land there?” I asked the helicopter.

“10-4. What about the ATV?”

“Have you inventoried the truck yet?” I asked instead, knowing the noise of our cross-country pursuit had drowned out anything that might have come in over the radio.

“10-4. One hundred and twenty illegals.”

“Then I recommend you track the ATV, but do not apprehend. Watch for it to go back the way it came-over into Canada.”

Boucher and I swung out of the truck. “Boy-they aren’t going to like that,” he said. “What’re you up to?”

We both grabbed a corner of the trailer, noticing the tow bar had been destroyed, and pushed it farther into the brush. “Open it for a quick look,” I said instead of answering him.

He slipped the catch from the top of the trailer and threw back the door. Inside, lit by our headlights, was a trashed jumble of suitcases, cloth bags, and bundled clothing.

“The truck was the mother lode,” I explained with relief. “The armada on the lake was just to draw our attention.”

We returned to the truck, and Richard drove us rapidly to the road a few hundred yards farther on. He took a hard right and accelerated to where we could already see the helicopter landing lights searching out a good place to settle down. The truck didn’t sound too healthy, despite the smooth road.

We reached the crossroads simultaneously. I ran, doubled over, just as the helicopter touched down, opened its waist door, and jumped inside, surprised as I did so to see not just Spinney, but Lucas and Frazier as well.

“Have you located him?” I shouted as the rotors revved up and we pulled away from the earth. Spinney handed me a pair of headphones similar to the ones Al Hammond had used in his airplane.

Frazier answered my question. “Yes. We have him on a loose tail, and he is heading back for the border, but I’m not sure I’m real happy with this. What the hell’re you doing? I thought we wanted to nail this guy.”

“Without the truck, he’s probably out a half-million dollars or more. I think he took his last gamble-like we thought he would-and he blew it. His only option now is to go after Da Wang directly, except that with the protection Da Wang’s got, Truong’s going to need Diep and anyone else he can round up to pull it off. If we really want to put an end to this, we need him to lead us to the others.”

Lucas put his hand on my shoulder. “You will have a stronger case if you stop him in this country. With all due respect, your laws are tougher than ours when it comes to people like this.”

“But the evidence against him is still here. Can’t we extradite him?” I asked Frazier.

“I don’t have a problem with that, but we’ve got him now. Why risk losing him just because he may or may not lead us to Diep? And what if it goes wrong? This could lead to a bloodbath.”

“Because we’re always grabbing what we can and letting the rest get away,” I shouted back, since even with our headphones on, the helicopter put out a terrific noise. “They expect that-they count on it. Why do you think he threw us all those poor bastards on the lake? Were any of them carrying contraband?”

“We’re still rounding them up, but, so far, none of them are even illegals-they’re all Canadian landed immigrants. The ones we’ve caught are claiming they had full intentions of declaring entry at the port.

I shook my head in amazement at the depth of Truong’s planning. “Let’s take the gamble and do it right. We’ve done pretty well so far. We already shut him down. Taking him now and letting the others walk would be a total waste. He’s the best chance we’ve got to round up the rest of them-maybe even Da Wang.” And Amy Lee, I thought privately.

I looked at them all in the dim red glow from the bulkhead light. All of us were trained as rookies to do as Frazier had suggested-to be content with a clean bust as soon as you can get it. Conversely, we were by now all veteran officers, and we knew that carefully considered gambles were also a part of the business; that without undercover operations, stings, snitches, prolonged surveillance tactics, and the taking of risks, none of us could have made some of our bigger cases stick. It also didn’t hurt that my credibility was pretty good at the moment.

Frazier finally turned to Lucas. “Jacques, this is as much your call as ours. We’re going into your jurisdiction.”

Lucas nodded and moved toward the cockpit. He had the co-pilot key-in a special radio frequency and then plugged his headset directly into the dash, taking him out of our communications loop.

I turned to Spinney. “Assuming he says yes, think we could fake a good pursuit, just so Truong doesn’t catch on?”

Spinney grinned and switched over to the VSP radio.

Five long, tense minutes later, when any decision was getting close to being too late, Lucas returned to us. “Okay.”

Spinney immediately set his plan in motion, orders were given to the pilot, and the four of us moved to the windows to see what would happen.

Far below, isolated by the blackness of the empty land all around them, we could clearly see two sets of lights-one small and jerky, the ATV charging cross-country-the other, farther off but closing rapidly, sparkling like some runaway Christmas ornament-the unit Spinney had set after Truong. I watched with growing concern as the two drew ever closer, wondering if the trooper understood that the ATV was supposed to escape.

Suddenly, and with some relief, I saw the cruiser’s lights swerve violently and then come to an abrupt stop. Spinney burst out laughing: “Attaboy-right into the ditch.” He hit the send button on his radio. “You all right down there?”

“You sure my butt’s covered on this?” was the reply.

Spinney laughed again as we all watched the smaller light flicker down the field where I’d first met it and work its way back into the woods.

The smiles slowly died on all our faces. I looked over to Lucas, the memory still painfully sharp of how I’d set Vince Sharkey against Michael Vu. “Guess I stuck it to us now.”

He kept his eyes glued to the window, as if trying to memorize the details below. “I am hoping not,” he finally muttered, and turned away toward the cockpit.