Nelson Demille: Wild fire

He hung up, took the wire cutters, sliced a gap in the chain-link, and squeezed through onto the property. He stood motionless, looked, listened, then put the wire cutters back in his pocket. He continued on, through the woods.

After about five minutes, he noticed a telephone pole rising between the pine trees, and he approached it. Mounted on the pole was a telephone call box, which was locked.

He looked up and saw that the pole was about thirty feet high. Approximately twenty feet up the pole were four floodlights, and above that were five strands of wire running along a crossbeam. One wire obviously powered the telephone and another powered the floodlights. The other three were actually thick cables that could carry lots of juice.

Harry noticed something unusual and focused his binoculars toward the top of the pole. What he’d thought were evergreen boughs from surrounding trees were actually boughs protruding from the telephone pole. But these boughs, he knew, were the plastic kind that cell-phone companies used to camouflage or beautify cell-phone towers in populated areas. Why, he wondered, were they here in the middle of the woods?

He lowered his binoculars, raised his Nikon, and snapped a few shots of the pole, recalling that Tom Walsh had said to him, “In addition to cars, faces, and plate numbers, photograph anything else that looks interesting.”

Harry thought this seemed interesting and good for the files, so he took his Handycam and shot ten seconds of tape, then moved on.

The terrain began to rise gradually, and the pines gave way to big oaks, elms, and maples whose remaining foliage were brilliant hues of red, orange, and yellow. A carpet of fallen leaves covered the ground, and they rustled when Harry passed over them.

Harry did a quick map-and-compass check and determined that the lodge was straight ahead, less than half a mile away.

He broke out a breakfast bar and continued on, eating, enjoying the fresh Adirondack mountain air while staying alert for trouble. Even though he was a Federal agent, trespassing was trespassing, and without a warrant, he had no more right to be on private, posted land than a poacher.

And yet, when he’d asked Walsh about a warrant, Walsh had said to him, “We have no probable cause for surveillance. Why ask a judge if the answer is no?” Or, as the NYPD liked to say about bending the law, “It’s better to ask for forgiveness later than to ask for permission now.”

Harry, like everyone else in anti-terrorism, knew that the rules had changed about two minutes after the second tower had been hit, and the rules that hadn’t changed could be broken. This usually made his job easier, but sometimes, like now, the job also got a little riskier.

The forest had thinned out, and Harry noticed a lot of stumps where the trees had been felled and carted away, maybe for firewood, maybe for security. Whatever the reason, there was a lot less cover and concealment than there had been a hundred yards back.

Up ahead, he could see an open field, and he approached it slowly through the widely spaced trees.

He stopped under the last standing maple and surveyed the open land with his binoculars.

A paved road ran through the field and downhill to the entrance gate, where he could see a log-cabin gatehouse through his binoculars. The road was lined with security lights mounted on metal poles, and he also noticed wooden telephone poles with five strands of wires coming out of the woods, crossing the field and road, and disappearing again in the woods on the far side of the road. This, he assumed, was a continuation of what he’d seen near the fence, and it appeared that these poles and wires circled the property, meaning the whole sixteen-mile perimeter was floodlit. He said to himself, This is not a hunting lodge.

He scanned the road as it traveled uphill to a huge two-story Adirondack-style mountain lodge that sat on the rising slope in front of him, about two hundred yards away. On the front lawn of the lodge was a tall flagpole from which flew the American flag and, beneath that, some sort of yellow pennant. Beyond the lodge were some utility structures, and at the top of the hill was what looked like a radio or cell-phone tower, and he took a telescopic photo of it with his Nikon.

The lodge was made of river stone, logs, and wood shingles, with a big columned portico out front. The green-shingled roof sprouted six stone chimneys, all of which billowed gray smoke into the air. He could see lights in the front windows and a black Jeep in the big gravel parking lot in front of the house. Obviously, someone was home, and hopefully they were expecting guests. That’s why he was here.

He used the Nikon to take a few telescopic photos of the parking lot and lodge, then he turned on his Handycam and took some establishing footage of the lodge and his surroundings.

He knew that he’d have to get a lot closer if he was going to photograph arriving cars, people, and license plates. Ed From Tech had shown him an aerial photo of the lodge and pointed out that the terrain was open, but that there were lots of large rock outcroppings for concealment.

Harry looked at the outcroppings rising up the hill, and he planned his route to sprint from one rock formation to another until he could reach a vantage point about a hundred feet from the lodge and the parking field. From there, he saw he could photograph and videotape parked cars, and people going into the lodge. He needed to stay there until late afternoon, according to Walsh, then get over to the local airport to check out arriving-passenger manifests and car rentals.

He recalled the time he was on the case of a bunch of Irish Republican Army guys who’d set up a training camp not far from here. The Adirondack Forest Preserve was as big as the state of New Hampshire, a mixture of public and private land with a very small population, making it a good place to hunt, hike, and try out illegal weapons.

This surveillance was a little different from the IRA bust, in that no crimes had apparently been committed and the people who lived in that big lodge probably had some pull someplace.

Harry was about to make his first rush toward an outcrop when suddenly three black Jeeps appeared from behind the lodge and started traveling cross-country at high speed. In fact, they were traveling straight toward him. “Shit.”

He turned and moved back into the tree line, then heard dogs barking in the forest. “Holy shit.”

The three Jeeps came right up to the trees, and two men exited from each vehicle. They carried hunting rifles.

Out of the trees around him came three men with German shepherds straining at their leashes and growling. The men, he noticed, had sidearms strapped to their hips. Harry now saw a fourth guy coming out of the trees who walked as if he were in charge.

Harry realized the only way his position could have been fixed so accurately was if there were motion or sound detectors planted in the area. These people really liked their privacy.

He felt an unaccustomed sense of anxiety, though not fear. This was going to be messy but not dangerous.

The security guards had formed a circle around him but kept a distance of about twenty feet. They were all dressed in military-type camouflage fatigues with an American flag patch on their right shoulders. Each man wore a peaked cap with an American eagle on it, and each had a wireworm sprouting from his left ear.

The man who was in charge-a tough-looking, middle-aged guy-stepped closer, and Harry saw he had a military-type name tag that said CARL.

Carl notified him, “Sir, you are on private property.”

Harry put on a dumb face. “Are you sure?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Oh, geez. Well, if you’ll point the way-”