Текст книги "Fangs Out"

Автор книги: David Freed

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Текущая страница: 12 (всего у книги 19 страниц)

Under normal circumstances, I would’ve disregarded him. It’s a free country, pal, snap all the pictures you want. But these weren’t normal circumstances. Chinese intelligence was supposedly spying on Castle Robotics. Janet Bollinger, who’d worked at Castle Robotics, was dead. And someone had intentionally trashed my airplane. Was the Chinese government behind it all? I flashed on the two Asians in the Lexus I’d seen taking photos outside Castle’s headquarters two days earlier. And now this guy with his camera across the street.

Call it coincidence – like when you read a word for the first time, and all of a sudden, you hear that word everywhere – but I was up and moving toward the door before I knew it.

By the time I burst outside, the guy with the camera was gone.

* * *

Dutch Holland’s Piper Cherokee hadn’t flown in more than two years, which coincided with how long it had been since the FAA yanked Holland’s medical certificate, effectively grounding him. That, however, hadn’t stopped him from putting the airplane through FAA-mandated annual inspections and running its engine at least once a week, if only to keep everything properly greased for its next owner.

By the time I got to Montgomery Field, he’d already penciled in a flight plan to the Owens Valley on a couple of aeronautical charts and telephoned Lockheed flight service for a weather briefing. Forecasts called for light winds out of the west along our proposed route, with clear skies and visibility unlimited – CAVU in pilot lingo.

“Good day to fly,” Holland said.

“Is there any other kind?” I said.

“I like your style, Logan.”

He took out a tow bar from the Cherokee’s aft luggage compartment and hooked it to the nose wheel strut. I offered to pull the airplane from the hangar and he let me. The last thing either of us needed was Dutch Holland having The Big One.

His preflight inspection was textbook meticulous. It was also glacial. Rockets have reached high orbit in less time than it took Holland to walk around his airplane, checking control surfaces, draining gas to make sure the fuel tanks had no water in them, fiddling with this and that.

“Any chance we can get going sometime before the end of the year, Dutch?”

“I’m surprised you’ve lived as long as you have with that kind of get-there-itis,” Holland said, peering at the oil dipstick through the lenses of his aviator frames. “You know what they say. There are old pilots, and bold pilots…”

“But no old, bold pilots.”

It was a truism in aviation, and I deserved the reprimand. Nothing will kill a pilot faster than impatience. I’d drilled the very same lesson into every one of my students – but not before convincing them that flying a small plane, if done correctly, is inherently safe. The last thing you want is to terrify somebody before they’ve paid you.

I sat down with my back against the wall of his hangar, and waited for Holland to finish his walk-around inspection. What, I wondered, had I gotten myself into? Trusting a moth-eaten, half-blind pilot to fly me into the meteorologically unpredictable Sierra Nevada Mountains, hoping to find a remote dirt strip and another moth-eaten airman who might or might not shed light on who sabotaged my Cessna? Finding a roulette wheel in Vegas and betting my entire life savings, all three figures of it, would’ve made about as much sense.

“OK, all set,” Holland hollered over to me.

Too late to back out now.

The old man grabbed the handhold bolted to the upper fuselage behind the Cherokee’s right rear window and, with no small effort, willed himself up onto the back of the wing. He unlatched the airplane’s only door, got down on all fours and crawled inside. The contortions it took for him just to reach a sitting position, then to slide over from the right seat into the left, were monumental. But any fear I may have had as to his piloting skills evaporated the moment I glimpsed the joy in his eyes. Holland was in his element.

I climbed in after him and latched the door. Even though he knew it by heart, Holland asked me to help him run through the engine start checklist. After we’d gone through the procedures, he asked if anyone was standing near the airplane. I double-checked and told him no. He reached down, toggled the electrical master switch to “on,” rotated the ignition key to the left-magneto setting, planted his soft-sole old guy shoes on the toe brakes atop the rudder pedals, then cracked open a small hinged window on the pilot’s side, and yelled, “Clear!”

A push of the starter button, a few pumps of the throttle, and the forty-five-year-old engine fired up as if it were factory new. Holland turned the ignition key to both magnetos, pulled the mixture control out an inch to avoid fouling the spark plugs, and retarded the throttle to idle. We donned headsets.

“Need to get the ATIS,” he said, his gnarled, palsied fingers fumbling with a communications stack that was even older than mine.

“How about I work the radios for you, Dutch?”

“Good deal.”

I dialed in the correct frequency for Montgomery’s Automated Terminal Information Service, the regularly updated recording that provides pilots with the current weather, altimeter setting and other pertinent information on airport conditions. I listened, then switched over to ground control, glancing as I did at the two inch-long placards affixed to the instrument panel in front of Holland that showed the airplane’s tail number, and pushed the mic button on the copilot’s yoke.

“Montgomery ground, Cherokee 5-4-8-7 Whiskey. Ready to taxi, east end hangars with ATIS Foxtrot. We’re a PA-28 slant Uniform. Requesting a right downwind departure.”

“Piper 5-4-8-7 Whiskey, taxi runway 28 right via taxiways Hotel, Alpha. Advise run-up complete.”

Holland repeated the directions back to the controller before I could, barely able to contain his enthusiasm.

“Your airplane,” I said.

“A-OK,” Holland said, smiling.

He couldn’t see for squat, but he didn’t need to. When you’ve wracked up more than 40,000 hours doing anything, as Dutch Holland had done piloting airplanes, skills become ingrained like they’re part of your DNA. He steered the Cherokee perfectly along the centerline of the taxiway. When we reached the engine run-up area, he stood on the left rudder pedal, turned the plane deftly into the wind, and set the parking brake. He tested the ailerons and elevator controls to make sure the inputs were working properly, moving the yoke in and out, left and right, then pushed the throttle up to 2,000 RPMs, checking the carburetor heat control, the two magnetos, leaning over to peer closely at the oil temperature, fuel pressure, and a half-dozen other engine gauges. All were in the green. Holland pulled the throttle back to 1,000 RPMs.

“Montgomery ground,” I radioed, “Cherokee 8–7 Whiskey, run-up complete.”

“Cherokee 8–7 Whiskey, taxi to 2–8 right and contact the tower.”

Holland released the parking brake and steered the plane toward the runway with his feet. “I love flying,” he said. “I’d have no complaints if that’s how I headed west.”

In aviation circles, to say somebody “headed west” is to say they died. Where the euphemism came from I have no idea. But, personally, I could think of any number of other, more desirable ways to head west than in some hurtling piece of machinery. Having The Big One, for example, while celebrating your 100th birthday with three showgirls in the presidential suite of the Ritz. Or maybe just gazing into Savannah’s eyes.

“Nobody’s heading west today,” I said. “We’re heading north.”

Holland laughed and seemed not to notice the approaching hold-short line for runway 28 right. I thought he would stop the plane but he didn’t. I stood on the brakes to prevent the Cherokee from rolling without authorization onto the runway, just as a six-seater Piper Dakota touched down in front of us.

“Sorry,” Holland said.

He felt bad enough without me saying anything, so I didn’t. I switched the number one radio to tower frequency and announced that we were ready to go.

“Cherokee 8–7 Whiskey, runway 28 right, cleared for takeoff, right downwind departure approved, wind 2-5-0 at 9.”

“Cleared for takeoff, 2–8 right, with a right downwind departure.” I turned to Holland. “Bit of a crosswind from the left. You do remember how to do this, right?”

A smile was his only response.

He steered the plane onto the runway centerline and advanced the throttle. We were rolling. In seconds, we were climbing. Dutch Holland may not have been able to make out anything much past the nose of his airplane, but he still knew how to fly like the old pro he was.

I looked left as we lifted off, hoping to glimpse the Ruptured Duck. But the hangar housing my airplane until the FAA completed its accident investigation was closed. I wasn’t sure which made me feel worse: seeing the Duck all banged up again or not seeing him at all.

A pocket of turbulence rocked me back to reality.

* * *

The 344-mile route Dutch Holland had laid out on his charts took us east of the restricted airspace surrounding the Marine Corps helicopter base at Miramar, then northwest, straight into the Owens Valley of eastern California. We’d first have to request permission to cut across Edwards Air Force Base, where Chuck Yeager in 1947 had broken the sound barrier, and where America’s original astronaut corps demonstrated the Right Stuff before conquering space. Unless Edwards was test-flying some new super secret aircraft, chances were good that air traffic control would give us permission to overfly the base. Holland had calculated our projected time en route accordingly at two hours and forty-five minutes. That allowed us a fuel reserve of about an hour.

What he hadn’t counted on was the Air Force saying no to flying over Edwards. Or to the winds picking up.

We were forced to turn northeast and cut across the high desert, halfway to Las Vegas, then north, then west again. By the time we penetrated the mouth of the Owens Valley and banked north once again, the gauges were showing less than a quarter-tank of fuel in either wing. Our ground speed had fallen to less than seventy miles-an-hour, while the unsettled air pushed the Cherokee around like a leaf on a millpond.

“We’ll need to make a fuel stop,” I said.

Holland leaned over to his right, our shoulders touching, raised his glasses and squinted at the gas gauges on the instrument panel in front of me.

“Damn wind,” he said. “That’s not what they forecast.”

“Weather forecasting is nothing more than fortune-telling with a few random numbers tossed in.”

“You got that right.”

Twin ridgelines towered on either side of the plane like fortress turrets, the Sierra Nevada on our left and the White-Inyo Mountains to our right. Many peaks were still topped with snow, even in June. The charts showed there was a small public airfield located on the valley floor about seven miles ahead of us with a single north – south runway. Holland wanted to keep going, but I persisted. Airplane fuel gauges can be notoriously inaccurate. Who’s to say we weren’t already flying on fumes?

“I know my plane,” the old man said.

“And I know you’re not legally allowed to fly without a certified flight instructor on board, Dutch, which, according to the FAA, I am. I’m sorry to pull rank, but that makes me pilot-in-command, and I say we put down before we have no choice.”

Holland looked over at the mountains to our left, then down toward the ground, a mile below us. The area was starting to look familiar to him. Al Demaerschalk’s cabin and dirt airstrip, he said, were just up the way, probably no more than ten or twelve miles.

I was starting to worry about committing aviation’s cardinal sin – running out of gas.

“Let’s say we do find the cabin and land on Al’s strip,” I said. “By the time we take off, we may not have enough gas to get to someplace where we can refuel. We’d be stuck, unless Al could drive us somewhere. And we don’t even know if he’s there.”

Holland rubbed his eyes. “Fuel’s gonna be cheaper up toward Bishop,” he said. “I say we land there, then go find Al’s cabin. But you’re the CFI. If you think we should put down, fine by me.”

He held up both hands like he was surrendering the airplane to me. I took the controls and started looking for a runway on which to land.

Looking back, maybe I should have listened to him.

Fourteen

There was no gas at the Fair Vista Airport. There was no nothing. Just a couple of boarded-up, weather-beaten, World War II-era hangars, and a crumbling tarmac with milkweeds growing out of the cracks. A mangy-looking pit bull with swollen teats barked at me as I stepped off the wing, before racing off toward an empty two-lane highway that paralleled the runway, about fifty meters to the west.

Holland climbed down stiffly out of the airplane behind me.

“Where’s the gas pumps?”

“There are none.”

“Then why did we land here, Mr. Certified Flight Instructor?”

Good question.

He shook his head and started walking toward the rear of the nearest hangar.

“Where’re you going, Dutch?”

“The little boy’s room.”

We both knew what he meant. There was no public washroom at the Fair Vista Airport. But when you’re male and you’re outdoors, well…

A parching wind whistled out of the north. The place reminded me of the mountainous region east of Kabul, only without the charm. I’d flown into Afghanistan frequently with the government, the last time to visit the Taliban’s leading manufacturer of quality suicide vests. We found him doing business behind a mud hut, hunched over an antique foot-powered sewing machine in a rusting steel Conex shipping container that doubled as his workshop. Eight vests laden with explosives were stacked neatly on the floor behind him. Our translator asked him his name. When he confirmed that he was the man we were looking for, we shot him. Two of his teenaged sons heard our muffled gunshots from their mud hut and came running, one armed with a Russian-made Makarov pistol, the other with a sword. We shot them, too. Then we shot a Taliban courier off his Honda trail bike as he rode in, presumably to fetch the new vests. We radioed for exfil, helicoptered back to Bagram, and got hammered on Wild Turkey, courtesy of a one-star from Joint Special Operations Command who said he couldn’t believe that a couple of go-to guys had done in a day what all of his operators had been unable to achieve in a year.

A drunk member of my team told me that night that Echevarria, who assigned our missions, had been bedding my wife while sending me overseas, sometimes for weeks at a time. Granted, I’d given her every reason to find comfort in the arms of another man; nobody would ever pin a merit badge on me for marital fidelity while I was away – and even when I was home, I admit I was a distant presence emotionally, my head still in the field. All I had left to share with her were jittery nerves and lingering, combat-induced anger. But still…

I stopped drinking after that.

The sound of an approaching car derricked me from Memory Lane. I turned to see a faded gold Oldsmobile Cutlass lurch off the highway and onto the tarmac, toward the plane, streaming a thin contrail of oily smoke. The driver was about twenty-five, shirtless and skinny.

“How goes it?” He waved pleasantly as the car pulled up beside me. A pair of dice showing snake eyes was tattooed on his left deltoid. He was wearing dark wraparound sunglasses.

“Just living the dream.”

“Saw you land,” he said, shoving his transmission into park and stepping out. “We don’t get too many planes coming in here. Usually they just keep right on flying up the valley, all the way to Mammoth. Why land here unless you got engine trouble or something, right?”

“We were running low on gas.”

“Well, there’s no gas here, that’s for sure.” He was missing two lower front teeth.

Tell me something I don’t know.

He gestured with his thumb to a young woman slouched in the front passenger seat of his car, smoking a Marlboro red.

“Yeah, me and her, we live down the road, ’bout a mile thatta way.”

She was as scrawny as he was. Her hair was long and unwashed and zigzagged down the middle. Nasty-looking skin blemishes ravaged what had once been a pretty face. If the Crystal Meth Manufacturing Association of California was looking for poster kids, these two were it.

“Nice airplane,” he said, gazing at the Cherokee. “How much you think something like this sells for?”

“Hard to say. A lot depends on the radios, how much time there is on the engine.”

He glided his hand along the wing. “Yeah, I was gonna be a pilot once. I don’t know, man. Life, ya know?”

“I do indeed.”

He snapped his fingers as though hit by a great idea. “Hey, you know what? There’s a gas pump at the Independence Airport, just up the valley. Tell ya what, we could drive you up there. Got a couple jerry cans in the trunk. Fill ’em up, drive you back, get you on your way.”

“We sure would certainly appreciate that, young man,” said Dutch Holland, done with his business behind the hangar and walking toward us. He dug into the front pocket of his trousers and pulled out a fat roll of cash. “Be happy to pay you for your trouble.”

The driver stared at the wad the way a hungry man stares at a ham sandwich as Holland peeled off a couple of twenties.

“Awful nice of you, Mister,” he said as he stuffed the bills in the back pocket of his jeans. “Isn’t that awful nice of the gentleman, Jodi?”

Jodi flicked the butt of her cigarette out the window and tried to smile.

“I’m… Mike, by the way,” her boyfriend said, hesitating for a split second, like he first had to come up with the name.

“Pleasure. I’m Dutch Holland. This is Mr. Logan.”

We shook hands. Mike’s palm was as slimy as a mackerel.

“Well,” Mike said, holding the left rear door open for Holland, “let’s get ’er done.”

Holland seemed to suspect nothing as he eased into the backseat of the Olds. I suspected plenty. “Mike” was way too eager to help us. Either he was an Eagle Scout, or he was up to no good. My money was on the latter.

There’s a given in escape and evasion tactics. The odds of surviving a kidnapping decline radically the second you set foot inside the kidnapper’s vehicle. Better to resist any abduction attempt, forced or coerced, on open ground, where you still have a fighting chance. I wasn’t too worried about whether I could incapacitate Mike and his stringy girlfriend. Even armed, neither struck me as much of a threat. But there’s that weevil that lodges at the base of your throat when you don’t know what’s waiting for you up ahead. It’s the same feeling you get just before you touch down in a hot landing zone, or when you kick a door, not knowing who’s waiting on the other side, and with what. The unknown. You never get used to it. You just learn to put it aside.

We needed fuel.

I climbed into the back of the Olds with Dutch Holland.

* * *

The highway was empty. Jodi sucked on her cigarette, staring straight ahead in heavy-lidded, narcotic-addled silence.

“So where’d you guys fly in from?” Mike looked up in the rearview mirror with his sunglasses on as the speedometer pushed past seventy-five.

“San Diego,” Holland said.

“Nice. They got those big whales down there,” Mike said. “Always wanted to see those whales.”

I rolled down the window to vent Marlboro smoke and asked Mike what he did for a living.

“Me? Uh, construction. Framing, mostly. Yeah, it was pretty slow around here for awhile but things are starting to pick up. I’ve been working pretty steady lately.”

He was lying. The local construction trade may well have been on the upswing, but Mike was no part of it, not with callous-free palms like his.

We passed Manzanar, where thousands of Japanese-American citizens were forced to relocate during World War II after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Long gone were the guard towers and barbed wire fences. Little beyond concrete foundations remained of the camp’s tar paper barracks. That and the lingering air of injustice. Dutch Holland appeared to notice none of it.

“We’re looking for my buddy Al’s cabin,” he said, squinting at the landscape whizzing by, trying to get his bearings. “It’s just up the road, to the west, into those hills a little, I think. He’s got his own airstrip.”

Mike was quiet. Then he said, “I know exactly where that is. Just up the road, into the hills. We can cruise over there right now if you want.”

Holland brightened. “You wouldn’t mind?”

“Not at all. It’s on the way.” Mike glanced over at his girlfriend. “Isn’t it, darlin’?”

Jodi stared straight ahead.

I knew one thing. Wherever Mike was taking us, it wasn’t to see Al Demaerschalk.

There was a turnoff just south of the town of Independence. Mike hooked a left and headed west. The terrain rose quickly from the valley floor as we pushed higher into what soon became pine-dappled foothills.

Holland peeled off his glasses, polished them on a trouser cuff, and slipped them back on, peering out the windows. “This doesn’t look very familiar to me at all. You sure Al’s cabin is up here?”

“Just a little further,” Mike said, his jaw set.

The pavement soon gave way to a rutted dirt road. Dust swirled behind us. We bounced over a cattle crossing guard doing fifty, suspension and tires chattering across the metal grate like machine-gun fire. Mike eased off the car’s accelerator as we approached a metal mailbox mounted to a weathered four-by-four leaning precariously into the road. To our right was another road that led perpendicularly up a short draw, so overhung by a thatch of tangled vines as to be all but unnoticeable. Mike made the turn.

“I’m sorry,” Holland said, “but this is definitely not the way to Al’s place.”

No kidding, Dutch.

The top of the draw gave way to a collection of junked vehicles, an unpainted Quonset hut, and a dilapidated, freestanding mobile home from which two long-haired men, both the approximate age of our driver, emerged on the run. The shorter and heavier of the two sported a scruffy beard and a pump-action, 12-gauge shotgun. The other man toted an AK-47.

Mike jammed on the brakes. He reached under his seat, then jumped out, waving a cheap .25-caliber pistol and yelling, “Get out of the car!” as the two men from the trailer converged on us with their weapons at the ready.

Holland looked left and right, confused. “Where are we?”

“In deep guano,” I said, stepping out with my hands up.

The odor of ammonia wafted in the dry, hot air from the direction of the Quonset hut. Somebody was cooking a batch of crystal meth.

“Who’re these jokers?” the guy with the shotgun demanded. He was wearing flip-flops, cargo shorts, and a John Deere baseball cap, backwards.

“Dude, they’re Fort fuckin’ Knox,” Mike said. He pulled open Dutch Holland’s door. “Get outta the car, Gramps. I mean it. Now!”

“You heard him,” Jodi said from the front seat, almost like she was bored. “Get out.”

Dutch got out.

“I don’t understand,” he said, confused.

“It’s gonna be OK, Dutch.”

“I saw ’em land, down in Fair Vista,” Mike was telling the others. “Check this out.” He jammed his hand into Holland’s front pocket, holding up the cash roll like it was a scalp. “Plus they got their own airplane. Is that chill or what?”

“They got their own plane?” said the man with the AK-47. He wore a “Jugs, Not Drugs” T-shirt.

“Real nice one, too,” Mike said.

“That means people must’ve seen ’em come in, you moron! They probably got tracked on radar or something. What the hell were you thinking, bringing ’em up here? Seriously, dude, I’d like to know.”

“I thought…” Mike stopped to ponder the question. “I thought, you know, we could, like, I dunno, jack ’em, or somethin’. Take their plane. Whatever.”

“Then what, shoot ’em?”

Mike looked down at the ground like he hadn’t really planned that far ahead, then shrugged. “I guess. I dunno.”

The guy wearing the backward John Deere cap smacked him on the side of the head.

“Just so you know,” I said, “I’m an employee of the United States government. I work for one of those alphabet agencies you’ve no doubt heard about, and I just happened to be on a mission with my distinguished colleague here when your friend ‘Mike’ offered us a lift. Now, you probably want to know what kind of a mission I’m on, and I could tell you, but then I’d have to, well, I think you know…”

Jodi turned to Mike and asked, “Have to what?”

“Kill us,” Mike said, rolling his eyes.

I went on. “One thing I can tell you, because most foreign intelligence services hostile to the United States already are aware of these things, is that I’ve been implanted with a microchip, which is standard procedure for operators in the field, by the way. My chip transmits a discrete transponder code. And that code,” I said, unfurling a finger skyward, “goes directly to an NROL-25 satellite in geostationary orbit, programmed to monitor my every movement. The National Reconnaissance Office is actually watching you right now. Everybody say cheese.”

They all craned their necks and gaped as if to see the aforementioned recon bird in orbit. Even Jodi looked up.

“So here’s the deal, kids: my colleague and I will borrow Mike’s car, and we will go about our mission here in the beautiful Owens Valley. After we’ve completed our mission, we’ll drop the car back at the Fair Vista Airport, where you can pick it up tomorrow at your convenience.”

The guy with the shotgun scratched his chin, pondering my offer. “What about the cops?” He gestured toward the hut.

“You mean am I going to tell them about your little chemistry project? Not as long as Mike here gives my colleague back all the money he stole from him and if you young gentlemen promise to consider contacting the Betty Ford Center.”

Shotgun man thought about it, then said, “OK.”

Mike returned Holland’s cash. “Sorry, mister.”

The old man struggled to come up with an appropriate response. “Just try to keep your nose clean,” he said finally. “The mind is a terrible thing to waste.”

I climbed in behind the wheel of the Olds. Dutch got in on the passenger side. The last thing I saw driving away was Jodi lighting another cigarette and the guy with the AK punching Mike in the face.

* * *

“What the heck was that awful smell back there?” Dutch Holland said, glancing back through the rear window.

“Drugs.”

“What kind of drugs?”

“Bad drugs.”

The old man was quiet for a minute as we drove along the dirt road.

“You really work for the government?”

“If I did, Dutch, do you really think I would’ve said I did?”

He mulled my answer.

“What about the computer chip, the satellite, all that. That made up, too?”

I looked over at him as if to say, of course it was.

“Well, you sure had me bamboozled – and those dope fiends, too,” Holland said, smiling. “Boy howdy, now there’s a story to tell the grandkids.”

It took two hours cruising up and down the valley floor before we turned up a canyon west of Lone Pine that Dutch Holland thought he recognized, and found Al Demaerschalk’s cabin.

It was located along a short, straight section of dirt road, which doubled as Demaerschalk’s runway. Hewn from rough barn wood, the cabin itself was little more than an oversized shed, probably 200 square feet tops, with a flat, corrugated metal roof set at a steep angle so the snow could melt off. There was a raised wooden porch with a pole railing around. Flanking the front door, chained to the floorboards, were two rusting metal milk cans bearing clutches of fake black-eyed Susans.

I pulled off the road, parked in front of the cabin, and got out of the Olds.

“Al drives a Kia,” Holland said.

The man shoots down North Korean MiGs and sixty years later drives a car made in South Korea. You’ve gotta love that kind of consistency.

There wasn’t a Kia in sight, unfortunately. Or any other motor vehicle except the commandeered Olds we were driving.

I tried the front door. Locked. There was a double-hung window on either side of the little porch. Both were lashed tight and covered over from the inside with butcher paper. The cabin appeared to have been unoccupied for a very long time.

Holland took off his baseball cap, rubbed his smooth, pink crown, and said, “I don’t know where else he could be.”

We headed back to the car and were almost there when a loud crash erupted from inside the cabin. Holland froze and looked over at me in alarm.

“Stay here, Dutch.”

I eased silently along a side wall and peeked around the corner, to the back of the cabin. No one was there. I stepped around an outhouse and past a decomposing wooden wagon wheel. A box spring stripped of fabric was leaning vertically against the cabin’s rear wall, partially obscuring a back door.

Which was cracked open by about two inches.

“Al? You in there?”

Another loud crash from inside the cabin. I retreated and pried a spoke off of the wagon wheel – a makeshift weapon in the event that whoever was inside wasn’t Al. I was heading toward the back door again when I sensed movement behind me, whirled with the club raised, and nearly took off Holland’s head.

“I told you to stay put,” I whispered, a little too loudly.

“I thought you could use some help.”

“It would help if you went back to the car.”

His shoulders sagged, his feelings hurt. He turned and started walking away.

“OK, hold up. Just stay there, Dutch. I’ll call you if I need you, OK?”

“OK.”

Whatever tactical element of surprise I once held was gone. I shoved the box spring aside, booted open the door to make what operators call a “dynamic entry,” and stormed into the cabin.

Waiting for me just inside the doorway, aimed and ready, was a skunk.

The sneaky little bastard let me have it with both barrels.