Ken Goddard - Double blind

"Not a chance." The Special Ops chief dismissed that option immediately. "I want him there, too, just in case we do run into some problems with Charlie Team or Boggs. Lightstone may be a little difficult to control at times, but he's also pretty damned useful when things turn to shit."

"So…?"

"So, while Charlie Team scopes out the militants and everyone else on Bravo Team tries to work out accommodations for seven hundred giant tarantulas, twelve baby crocodiles, and two or three dozen poisonous snakes" — Halahan smiled pleasantly — "I think somebody should take a serious look at our friend the Sage and his Bigfoot souvenir scam, don't you?"

"You know" — Moore paused a moment to savor the Bravo Team's wild-card agent's most likely reaction to his new assignment — "this just might teach those jokers to play fair."

"I doubt it."

"Yeah, me too." Moore nodded in agreement. "But in any case, I think we'd better get them on a plane to Oregon by tomorrow afternoon at the latest. I have a feeling Jennifer's going to have those tarantulas packed up, out the door, and on their way to a certain Loggerhead City warehouse before we have a chance to change our minds."

"Exactly. Which means you'd better get busy putting together a briefing document."

"It will be a pleasure." Freddy Moore smiled in cheerful anticipation.

"Yeah, I'll bet. And in the meantime," Halahan said as he put the stack of exercise evaluations aside, "I'm going to give my old buddy Wilbur Boggs a call. Tell him to break out his big grill and ice chest and stand by, because Special Ops is about to make his life a whole lot more miserable, too."

It took federal wildlife agent Wilbur Boggs a good five minutes to regain his senses after the accident.

Two or three minutes after that, he discovered that the force of the impact had broken the leather restraining strap on his shoulder holster, thereby sending his old and reliable government-issued Model 66. 357 revolver (he simply couldn't get used to the new 10mm Smith amp; Wesson semiautomatic pistols that most of the agents in the Fish and Wildlife Service now carried) into at least twenty feet of cold muddy water… along with his binoculars, thermos bottle, lunch box, tackle box, fishing rod, ticket book, portable radio, and his badge case.

He would have discovered all of this earlier if he hadn't spent so much time staring in dismay at the bent and twisted mounts of his outboard motor that had nearly been torn loose from the transom, thereby severely damaging the back of his own boat — which he'd opted to use for his rendezvous with Lou Eliot because he knew Rustman's crew would spot his government-owned boat the moment he dropped it into the water.

Then, and in spite of Lt. Colonel John Rustman's optimistic predictions, it had taken Boggs almost four more hours to free his prop from the yards of tightly wrapped nylon netting and twisted ropes for several reasons.

One, the tightened ropes, twisted mounts, and his severely broken right hand prevented him from raising the outboard out of the water or disconnecting it from the ripped transom.

Two, the impact tore open his supposedly sink-proof tackle box, sending his wrenches and pliers and other potentially useful tools — not to mention his wallet — to the bottom of the lake, leaving him with only a pocketknife and the pair of nail clippers on his key chain.

And three, he had to do everything with his merely throbbing and trembling left hand, and he didn't dare drop the pocketknife overboard because he didn't even want to think about how long it might take him to cut all that rope and netting loose with nail clippers.

Boggs spent the first few minutes leaning over the side of the boat in an ultimately futile effort to cut through the tightened ropes that secured the netting and the boat to whatever anchors Rustman and his cohorts had placed in the bottom of the lake. Finally, he gave that up because he couldn't reach all of the ropes, and holding his head upside down made him feel dizzier than ever. So he cursed John Rustman, Lou Eliot, and especially Regis J. Smallsreed for the fifteen minutes it took him to pull off all of his clothes, put the life vest back on, and then awkwardly lower himself into the icy cold water with his forearms, and his one more or less good hand to try to work the ropes and netting loose from there.

Once in the water, he momentarily considered diving to the murky bottom to search for some of his tools, but some still-rational fragment of his mind warned him that if he did, he'd probably get caught in the netting and drown.

A second distinctively sharp, high-velocity gunshot — that didn't sound at all like a shotgun blast, but did sound exactly like the first one that had catapulted him into action at the end of what he assumed was Smallsreed's first round of shooting — caught his attention. He would have tried to pinpoint the location of that second shot if nothing else, but his head and his hand hurt like hell, and his feet and legs ached already in the icy water, so he decided not to worry about it until later.

After he got the boat loose.

It took seven trips into the frigid water before Wilbur Boggs finally managed to free his boat. During each trip, he wrapped his useless right arm around the motor housing, then carefully cut a few nylon strands at a time until his lower body grew numb. When that happened, he carefully slipped the knife into the Velcro-secured pouch on his life vest, heaved himself back into the boat, dried himself off as much as possible with his soggy underwear, socks, and shirt, pulled on his pants and jacket, and sat shivering in the chilly morning air until some feeling returned to his limbs and he could rationalize going back into the water at least one more time.

Several times during this physically and mentally exhausting process, Boggs sensed that someone was watching him. But he forced himself to block that out because he knew if he saw so much as a glimpse of Lou Eliot, or Lt. Colonel John Rustman, or — in a moment of wishful thinking — the Honorable Regis J. Smallsreed himself, he'd forget all about getting tangled in the net and drowning, and dive straight down into that murky, freezing water for his gun and proceed to kill the bastards.

For the first time in his life, Special Agent Wilbur Boggs felt that close to losing control completely.

But the worst was yet to come: Once he finally did manage to free his boat, he discovered what he should have expected, had he not been so disoriented and distracted by the combined effects of an almost certain concussion, a broken hand, a smashed nose, missing teeth, the icy cold water, and other assorted aches and pains far too numerous to name.

The motor wouldn't start.

Forcing himself to remain calm, Boggs awkwardly unlatched and removed the engine cover with one hand, checked the fuel lines, switch valve, plug wires, distributor cap, battery connections, and air filter, replaced and latched the cover, and then tried again.

Nothing.

That was when Wilbur Boggs began to laugh.

It wasn't a pleasant laugh. In fact, had any member of Lt. Colonel John Rustman's crew — except maybe Wintersole — heard that laugh, they almost certainly would have given the emotionally and physically drained federal wildlife agent a wide berth… because nothing in that laughter indicated the presence of a man with a tight grip on his sanity.

It took Boggs a good three or four minutes to stop laughing and wipe the tears out of his eyes… at which point the Fates mercifully gave him a glimpse of the small wooden paddle floating in the distance.

Under anything even remotely resembling normal circumstances, Wilbur Boggs could have retrieved the paddle in, at most, a couple of minutes. But after almost three hours of intermittent exposure to the icy lake water, he now doubted he could swim that far in one stretch, and he knew the life vest wouldn't keep him warm enough if he couldn't. So he used his good hand to paddle to the real paddle instead, stopping only twice to untangle the prop from pieces of rope and netting. Whereupon it all became, in a relative sense, much easier.