Ken Goddard - Double blind

"Which is?" Lightstone asked warily.

The woman glanced fondly down at her pet snapping the deer femur like a toothpick with her powerful jaws, "you really shouldn't go wandering around with Sasha at night all by yourself anymore. Unless, of course, you take along a nice big picnic basket full of deer meat and turkey sandwiches."

"A picnic basket?"

"Like I said," she added with an ambiguous smile as she picked up her glass of cold milk, "we can be distracted."

First Sergeant Aran Wintersole met with his team at an all-night coffee shop some ten miles distant from the Gopher's Hole, where Wildlife Special Agents Mark LiBrandi and Gus Donato of Charlie Team had finished their Thursday evening shift of bar-hopping.

"Did you send the photos?" he asked the team's communications specialist after the waitress had departed.

The young female soldier nodded her head solemnly. In a public restaurant, surrounded by civilians who might easily overhear any scrap of conversation, they automatically dropped the use of military demeanor and team-member designations.

"I had the negs processed and printed in Ashland, four-by-five color, and dropped them off at the post office at" — she hesitated briefly as she translated the military time — "a little after seven this evening. I included the primary subjects and the secondary’s. Figured the Colonel might want to see who these people have been contacting. The package should go out in the…" she paused only briefly this time, "… 8:00 A.M. pickup."

"Did you include the ones of the subjects at the drop point, including that character with the truck?"

"Yes."

"Good. We need verification, and I'm tired of waiting for those profiles." Wintersole nodded approvingly, then looked at the other team members. "How did it go this evening?"

"One thing for sure, those two at the Gopher's Hole were definitely trolling," one-five reported.

"For what?" Wintersole leaned forward expectantly.

"That I don't know," the civvies-dressed soldier admitted, "but the one time I talked with them, it was pretty obvious they wanted the conversation to work its way around to the local militant groups."

"They ever ask anything directly?"

"Never." One-five shrugged. "Just my impression."

"I agree with John," one-six added. "They brought up — or responded to — just about every related topic: right-wing politics, fundamentalist religion, guns, the federal government, you name it."

"So what do they want?" Wintersole addressed the entire group.

"Wilbur Boggs, for one thing," the communications specialist volunteered softly.

That brought Wintersole's head up in surprise.

"Are you sure?"

The communications specialist nodded. "David and I" — she nodded toward the injured member of the team — "managed to get close enough to dangle one of the pickup mikes over the back of their booth."

"And?" Wintersole pressed her for details.

"Putting a bunch of things they said together, I got the impression that everybody on their team — except for the three we keep seeing," she emphasized, "go out looking for Boggs every day."

"That doesn't make any sense." Wintersole lowered his voice as he looked around at the members of his hunter-killer team. "Why would an undercover team of federal wildlife agents try to make contact with the local resident wildlife agent — a man so well known throughout the county he could easily blow their cover — when they're supposed to be covertly working their way in on the Chosen Brigade of the Seventh Seal?"

"Maybe they think he could help them pinpoint specific members of the group — the ones who might be more approachable?" one-seven suggested.

"If that's the case, then why can't they find him?" Wintersole asked reasonably. "He lives only a few miles from his office, and we know he was out at the lake last Sunday."

"And we also know his vehicles are still at his house, both government and personal," one-three added.

"And so do they," one-five reported. "They were out there this evening and sure acted like they knew the place. One of them just jumped out of the car, ran up to the front door, knocked, tried the knob, and then took a quick look through the garage window. Didn't even bother going around to the back."

"You think they checked his office?" one-three asked.

"First thing," one-four responded confidently. "If he was there, all they would've had to do was make a simple call-in asking for a meet at a remote location. Which means Boggs probably isn't out on assignment or on leave," he added.

"Maybe he just took off without telling anyone," one-three suggested. "You think he'd be allowed to do that?"

"Pretty damned loose outfit if he could," one-two commented.

"According to Rustman, the man doesn't take real vacations," Wintersole reported thoughtfully. "Spends his days off out on the lake fishing. But that brings up an interesting point," the first sergeant added. "If those agents have checked his office and his house — probably more than once from the sound of it — and they're still looking for him instead of doing what they were sent out here to do, they must have a real good reason for wanting to talk with him. Which could help us, because we need some way to bring them all together at one location at a specified time."

"So if we find Boggs first, we can use him as bait," one-three came to the obvious conclusion.

"Exactly." Wintersole nodded grimly. "The question is, how do we do that before they do?"

"Man likes to fish, but he probably won't want to do much of that for a while," one-two suggested with a smile. "Last time we saw him at Rustman's place, he was bleeding from the nose real bad, and it looked like at least one of his hands was broken. He must have spent at least four hours in the water cutting all that rope and netting loose."

"He did look pretty wiped out by the time he got that boat back to shore," one-seven confirmed. "Gotta hand it to him. He's a tough old bird. If I'd been hurt that bad, I'd have called for a medic straightaway."

Wintersole turned to the team's communications specialist/medic and smiled thinly.

"The hospital," she whispered softly, when the realization hit her suddenly. "I'll bet that's exactly where he is right now."

At 8:05 that Friday morning, with his heart pounding in his chest, Congressional Aide Keith Bennington stumbled into the Dogsfire Inn Post Office, fumbled with the key, and then blinked in surprise when he saw the inch-thick manila envelope lying sideways in box fifteen with another much thinner envelope.

"Christ, it's about time somebody finally put something in the damned thing," he muttered, heartsick because the presence of the envelope would make it even more difficult to convince his boss that there wasn't much point making two trips a day out to the rural post office — at 8:00 A.M. and 6:00 P.M. — to check on an empty mailbox.

This was Bennington's third trip to the Dogsfire Inn since that fateful night when his attempt to deliver the federal-agent profiles resulted in his horrifying confrontation with the nightmarish creature whose hovering — and glowing — yellow eyes still haunted his dreams. And it hadn't gotten any better. In fact, it took every ounce of resolve that the young congressional aide could muster just to get out of his car and enter the post office.

He had hoped to talk Maria Cordovian into taking over — or at the very least sharing — the drop-off and pickup runs, but the strikingly attractive young intern hadn't spoken three words to him since the weekend hunting trip at Rustman's, and office rumor hinted that Smallsreed wanted her to fill an open slot at his DC office.

Bennington tried not to think about the other — more lurid — aspects of that rumor.