P Deutermann - Spider mountain

“Something like that, yes,” she said. “Look: We’ve got all the aerial photography, topo maps, suspected smuggling routes, IR plume shots of supposedly abandoned shacks and trailers that go hot at night, arrest trends with links back to Robbins County, in other words, tons of data. What we don’t have is any HUMINT-human source ground truth.”

“But why not? The feds have certainly been looking.”

“Basically, none of the alphabets has ever been able to get probable cause to do search and seizure because M. C. Mingo undoes their every attempt, one way or another. That’s why the feds came to us in the first place. Plus, they’ve been totally unable to get anyone undercover because the bad guys, one, are all related and, two, have known each other since the Blue Ridge first turned blue.”

“The feds want to break up a drug ring, and the SBI wants to clean out a dirty sheriff’s office,” I said. “Seems like a match made in cop heaven. Why not declare them all suspected terrorists and take them down to Guantanamo for a year or so? Hit ’em so hard they can’t recover for a few generations.”

“Because,” she said patiently, “the government is already under siege by lawyers and civil rights activists over the detention of real live car-bombing, throat-slitting, Koran-thumping Muslim fanatics. These people are, for better or for worse, Americans.”

“So are the Crips and the Bloods, but the feds walk all over those guys from time to time, if only to thin ’em out.”

“The feds have people inside those operations. Real-time intelligence. Major deals they can rumble and then seize. Up here, these people are making the shit in caves and the tunnels of old mines. Everyone’s kin. You piss off the boss and you get eaten by dogs, right?”

“And why me, again?” I asked.

“A couple of reasons,” she said, finishing her coffee. “One, you’ve been up there and made it back. Two, you’ve seen some of the players up close and personal. And, three-well, I can’t tell you that one. Yet.”

I stood up and walked around the cabin’s main room. “And, three, as a consultant, if things go really wrong, the SBI can deny me three times before sunrise and keep its bureaucratic skirts clean.”

“Such a cynic,” she said. “We’re not that clever.”

“Oh, right. Okay, try this: Three, I’m officially a fugitive from a warrant in Robbins County. So if things really go wrong, you can say that you were in pursuit of a fugitive, and that’s why you were up there in the first place.”

“Now you’re talking,” she said, again with a grin. “Consider yourself a target of opportunity. If you can get us what we need, great. If not, we’re no worse off than when we started.”

“Which doesn’t necessarily describe where I’d be.”

“That’s one of the perks of going private,” she said.

I smiled. “Damn, Carrie, you really know how to make a guy feel wanted.”

“Oh, you’re wanted, all right,” she said. “Just call M. C. Mingo.”

I had no reply for that, so I tried to change the subject. “You physically qualified to walk the high country?” I asked. “And run, if necessary?”

“Absolutely,” she said. “And I can climb, too. Straight up rock walls, if I have to. Can you climb?”

“Only if the bear is big enough,” I said. Or the pig, I thought, remembering our little scamper up the pine trees.

“Well, there you go, operational consultant. And if I choose to run, you know the bear rule, right?”

“Yeah, yeah, you don’t have to outrun the bear, you only have to outrun me. Who’s going to handle logistics? You’re not proposing we tote a bunch of supplies, are you?”

“That’s where Mr. Greenberg and his crew come in,” she replied. “They’re going to go ‘camping’ in the national park. We’ll get up with them once a day to resupply and to report what we’ve seen.”

“Can they act as cavalry if the need arises?”

“Not legally,” she said. “Which isn’t to say they won’t come. But the whole idea is to put a small team on the ground, not a federal horde.”

I sat back down in one of the chairs. “A whole grunch of questions come to mind here,” I said.

“What can I tell you,” she said, flicking her hair away from her eyes. “You said you liked to go camping.”

We set out late that afternoon. Greenberg and his team had hired Mose Walsh to bring in their camping gear at noon by truck, and then they’d staged everything up to a fire-lane road in the park at the upper end of Crown Lake. From there we could walk down through a pass to a gentle valley that was two ridges over from the Creighs’ home base. The plan was for the pair of us to set up a camp just below the ridge at the head of the valley that evening, and then begin our photo “hike” down the first valley and up the adjacent one, returning to the park boundaries by nightfall. Greenberg and his crew would maintain the base while keeping at least one agent in a position from which he could maintain line-of-sight communications with Carrie and me using DEA tactical radios. Mose would handle resupply on a daily basis.

Carrie and I wore civilian backpacks and field belts, and we each carried a shelter half and a sleeping bag rolled on packs supplied, once again, by Mose Walsh. I had a sport-fisherman’s vest, under which I wore my SIG. 45. Carrie carried a weapon I hadn’t seen before, a nasty little number that she called a mamba stick. It looked like and served as a pool-cue-shaped walking stick but could fire up to six. 223-caliber bullets with a flick of the wrist. It was part six-shooter, part rifle. To fire it, all she had to do was pick off the tip of the walking stick, ratchet the base end to the left to cock it, point it, and then press a small button to fire each round-basically a single-action bang stick.

I relaxed a little when I saw her decked out in well-worn outdoors clothes and boots. My gear was similarly well broken in; I spent at least two weekends out of each month somewhere in North Carolina either fishing, hunting, or just taking the mutts out for a spin. Once every two hours one of us would open the radio and ask Can you hear me now, aping those ubiquitous Verizon commercials and probably annoying the shit out of the duty DEA comms agent. We set up our first camp alongside a pretty stream in a high meadow. This put us on the eastern boundary of the national park. The entire valley spread out below us, and we hoped to see some lights below us when darkness fell.

It turned out that Carrie did not cook at all. “My father was an excellent cook and wouldn’t tolerate women in the kitchen,” she said. “At least not until dinner was over and there were pots to be washed.”

“How do you survive?” I asked, as we unpacked our stuff.

“I’m a charter member of the nuclear age,” she said. “I buy it, I nuke it, I eat it. Unless I can con some guy to do better.”

“You could con me,” I said. “But then I’m easy.”

She smiled. “Good-you do the honors around the campfire, and I’ll handle what has to happen in the creek.”

“Deal,” I said. I boiled up a cup of rice over the fire and then added a package of dehydrated chili and the required water. In the coals I made some biscuits in a collapsible Dutch oven and then set up a coffeepot on one side of the coals. The shepherds each got a cup of dry kibble, although they made it perfectly clear that chili would have been a much better deal. We ate in contented silence as we watched the sun go down behind the western mountains, throwing the valley below into deeper and deeper shadows.

“This going to be worth the effort?” I asked.

“I think it will, especially if you come to the same conclusions that we have. Then things might get interesting.”