John Sandford - Heat Lightning

Knox’s house was a sprawling log cabin, built from two-foot-thick pine logs and fieldstone; the logs were maple-syrup brown in the headlights. The house sat fifty yards back from the water on a low rise, or swell, above the rest of the land. A pinkish sodium-vapor yard light, and another one down by a dock, provided the only ambient light. Across the water, Virgil could see another light reflecting off a roof on the Canadian side.

“How far you think that is to the other side?” he asked Bunch as they parked. He was thinking about Warren, and how he’d been shot across the lake.

“Two hundred and fifty yards?”

“Further than that,” Jarlait said.

Virgil fished his range finder out of the backpack and, when they stepped out of the truck, put them on the distant roof. “Huh.”

“What is it?” Bunch asked.

“Three-eighty from here to the house over there.”

“Told you,” Jarlait said.

“I meant that the water was two hundred yards.”

“Yeah, bullshit…”

Virgil said, “The main thing is, I think it’s too long to risk a shot. They’ll have to come in on this side-they can’t shoot from over there.”

“I shot an elk at three-fifty,” Bunch said.

“Guy’s a lot smaller than an elk… and there’re enough trees in the way that they can’t be sure they’d even get a shot. If they’re coming in, it’ll be on this side.”

A MAN SPOKE in the dark: “Who are you guys?”

He was so close, and so loud, that Virgil flinched-but he was still alive, so he said, “Virgil Flowers.”

He saw movement, and the man stepped out of a line of trees. He was carrying an assault-style rifle and was wearing a head net and gloves. “I’m Sean Raines, I work for Carl. Better come in, we can work out what we’re gonna do.”

Inside, the place was simply a luxury home, finished in maple and birch, with a sunken living room looking out across the river through a glass wall, and a television the size of Virgil’s living-room carpet. Raines was a compact man wearing jeans and a camouflage jacket. He peeled off the head net to reveal pale blue eyes and a knobby, rough-complected face; like a tough Kentucky hillbilly, Virgil thought.

Virgil asked, “What about the windows?”

“Can’t see in,” Raines said. “You can’t see it from this side, but they’re mirrored. How many guys you think are coming?”

“Probably three,” Virgil said. “Two guys and a woman. They’ve got a rifle-hell, they probably got anything they want.”

“They any good in the woods?”

“Don’t know,” Virgil said.

“It’s gonna be just us four?” Raines asked.

“We got three more guys coming from Bemidji, oughta be here pretty quick.” As he said it, Virgil pulled his phone from his pocket and punched up the number he’d been given.

He got an answer: “Paul Queenen.”

“Paul, this is Virgil Flowers. Where are you guys?”

“Fifteen, twenty minutes south of town on 71,” Queenen said.

“Stay on 71 until you get to Country Club Road.”

VIRGIL GAVE THEM instructions on getting in and then Raines took the three of them to an electronics room to look at the security system. “We got some deer around, so we keep the audio alarms off most the time, but I’ve got them set to beep us tonight…”

Knox had a dozen video cameras set out in the woods, feeding views into three small black-and-white monitors, all of which were a blank gray. “When you hear an alarm, you get a beep and an LED flashes on the area panel,” Raines said. He touched a ten-inch-long metal strip with a series of dark-red LEDs in numbered boxes. Above the LED strip was a map of Knox’s property, divided into numbered zones that corresponded to the LEDs. “When you get a flash, you can punch up the monitor and get a view of the area… you almost always see a deer, though we’ve had bears going through. Sometimes you don’t see anything because they’re out of range of the camera.”

“But in the dark like this…”

“The cameras see into the infrared, and there are infrared lights mounted with the cameras,” Raines said. He reached over to another numbered panel, full of keyboard-style numbered buttons, and tapped On. One of the monitors flickered and a black-and-white image came up: trees, in harsh outline.

“You’ll notice that there isn’t as much brush as you’d expect-Carl keeps it trimmed out pretty good. The trees are bigger than you’d expect, because he has them thinned. He wants it to look sorta normal, but when you get into it, you can see a lot further than if it was just untouched woods.”

“How does it pick up movement?” Bunch asked. “Radar?”

“They’re dual-mode-microwave and infrared to pick up body heat.”

Raines had worked through a defensive setup. “Whoever’s covering the system has to know where our guys are at. You don’t want to be turning on the lights if you don’t have to, because you’ve got your own guys moving around. If somebody’s coming in with high-end night-vision goggles, some of those can see into the infrared. It’d be like turning on a floodlight for them.”

Virgil looked at his watch. “I don’t think they’ll get here until daylight anyway,” he said. “Not unless they flew, and then they’d still have to drive.”

They got a beep then, and Raines switched one of the monitor views, and they saw a fuzzy heat-blob moving across the screen. “It’s small-probably a doe,” he said. He flicked on the infrared lights and they saw the doe, wandering undisturbed through the trees.

“Hell of a system,” Virgil said.

TWO OR THREE minutes later, as they were headed back to the living room, the security system beeped again and they went back to look at the monitors. “Car coming in,” Raines said. He touched one of the monitors and they saw a truck coming toward them, down the driveway.

“Bemidji,” Bunch said.

“We oughta put the trucks in the garage-too many of them, they’ll get worried. If they spot them,” Jarlait said.

THE THREE AGENTS from Bemidji-Paul Queenen, Chuck Whiting, Larry McDonald-brought assault rifles, armor, and radios. With the handsets that Virgil already had, there’d be enough for everyone. They gathered in Knox’s den, where he had a Macintosh computer with a thirty-inch video display, and Virgil called up Google Earth and put a satellite view of Knox’s property on the screen.

“Overall, I see two possibilities,” Virgil said, touching the screen. “First, they come in by water, which wouldn’t surprise me if they’ve looked at this picture, and they probably have. They could grab a boat, or bring one-a canoe or a jon boat-throw it in the water, and drift right along the shore. They’d probably come in from the south, but they could come in from either direction, so we have to watch both. The second possibility is that all they’ve got is a car, or a truck, and they come in from the highway… but they won’t want to park in the open, so they’ll have to ditch the truck here or here.”

When he finished, one of the Bemidji agents said, “You know, there’re only two highways in here.” He tapped the screen. “If you put roadblocks here and here… they gotta hit them. If you had some guys hiding off-road, south of the roadblocks, and if somebody turned and ran, they could block them south. Trap them.”

“I thought of that,” Virgil said. “One problem: we’d have some dead cops. These people have no reason not to fight. They’ve already killed seven or eight people, they’re here illegally, and they could be considered spies. Probably would be. If we catch them, they’ll go away forever. So if they’re suddenly jumped by a roadblock, my feeling is that they’d go for it-they’d try to shoot their way through. And they might have any kind of weapons.