Just past the bay, they flew over a neat little farmhouse and a good-sized red barn with a black tar-shingle roof. Gray shingles spelled out the word Ballantine in five-foot letters. Colding saw cows milling about a snow-dusted pasture outside the barn, then a running flash of something small and black. Probably a dog.
A road led away from the barn. The C-5 seemed to fly down the road’s slightly curving length. To the left of the road, he saw fields long since grown fallow, spotted here and there with young poplars and pines. To the right, the island’s center ridge angled up a good five hundred feet. In the dead center of the island, a square wooden tower rose up from that ridge like a small cabin on tall stilts. Next to it stood a thin, metal-frame communications tower painted in red and white, two boxy devices mounted high on its sides. At the top, a compact radar array spun in a steady circle.
Alonzo pointed at the wooden tower. “What’s with the Smokey the Bear action?”
Colding flipped through the folder. “It’s an old fire watchtower. Has an air-raid siren and everything. The metal tower has the secure satellite uplink to Genada. And a jammer that blocks all communications in or out.”
“A jammer?” Sara said. “Then how do you talk to someone on the other end of the island?”
“Regular old telephone poles,” Colding said. “Totally self-contained, not connected to any outside system. Look on the right side of the road—landlines running to all the buildings. All the occupied buildings, anyway, which looks like… a total of five, including the hangar.”
“Five houses,” Alonzo said. “Yeah, this place is jumping all right.”
They passed the island’s center, leaving the two towers behind. To the left, Colding saw an idyllic little harbor on the southeastern coast. Blocks of jagged granite surrounded the island, peeking up just past the water’s surface. Only the approach into the harbor looked clear. Massive piles of broken concrete and big rocks made up the harbor wall, turning the endless Lake Superior waves into minor chop. A large white fishing boat, maybe a thirty-footer, sat moored to a long black dock.
Along the road, overgrown trees crowded in among scattered houses. Most of the places looked abandoned. He saw just three buildings that seemed well maintained: a single house, then another barn and house combo. Large swatches of churned-up mud inside fences indicated the barn was a working one.
Not far past that farm, they flew over an open space surrounded by a cluster of small buildings. Colding couldn’t make out much, except for a solid-looking gray stone church with a tall bell tower.
Near the island’s southwestern tip, the forest gave way to a snow-covered lawn edged with orderly rows of landscaping trees. At the back of the lawn perched a three-story brick mansion that overlooked the estate like some lord’s castle from old England. The mansion’s high position gave it a commanding view of Black Manitou’s southern tip: a sandy beach lined with rocks, then nothing but water as far as the horizon.
A half mile due south of the mansion, a wide, flat clearing snaked through the woods like an oversized golf course fairway. Colding had to look at the paper map to see the logic—if you drew a visual line from end to end, the fairway had a mile-long space down the middle. Just wide enough to land a C-5. Danté Paglione had built a landing strip so that it didn’t look like a landing strip, at least to any probing satellite.
And that satellite camouflage philosophy bled over to the hangar. Colding actually didn’t see it at first, and had to spot-check the map before the visual clicked. The hangar was as big as the one back on Baffin Island, but with wire mesh over the roof that sloped down to the closely surrounding trees. A dense pack of fake pine-tree tips stuck up from the mesh. From the ground it probably looked like the worst camouflage one could imagine, but any satellite or even a plane flying at normal altitude would see nothing other than a wooded hill.
“Sightseeing is over,” Sara said. “Let’s get her on the ground.”
Alonzo nodded. “Roger that.”
Sara banked to the left, taking the C-5 back out over the water as she circled around. Surprisingly, the landing was as soft as any commercial flight Colding had ever flown.
The C-5 slowed to a crawl as Sara taxied it into the fake-hilltop hangar.
NOVEMBER 9: HOW’S IT GOIN’, EH?
AS THE C-5’S turbines idled down, the Twins lowered the rear ramp and P. J. Colding walked out of the plane. The place looked and felt oddly familiar: another big-ass hangar, cattle stalls on one end, big-ass open doors looking out into a snowy landscape. And, of course, a fuel truck—he made a mental note to find someplace else to park it.
Just as his feet hit the hangar’s concrete floor, a black Humvee and a beat-up old red Ford F150 pulled into the cavernous opening. A painted logo on the Hummer’s hood read OTTO LODGE. Two men stepped out, both wearing black parkas with the lodge logo embroidered on the left breast. Colding recognized the men from the personnel pictures in the folder Magnus had given him: Clayton Detweiler and his thirtysomething son, Gary. Clayton maintained the mansion and most of the island. Gary was the driver of the boat the C-5 had flown over on the way in, and was also the island’s only regular connection to the mainland.
The Ford truck produced three more people: a taller man almost Clayton’s age, and a man and a woman in their early thirties. Colding recognized them from the personnel pages as welclass="underline" Sven Ballantine, James Harvey and Stephanie Harvey, respectively.
Clayton walked up and extended his hand. He moved with the hitch of an overweight, older man plagued by a bum hip. His every other step brought the clinking of metal from the plus-sized key ring hanging from his belt. The way he carried himself the sound seemed more like the clinking of a gunfighter’s spurs than the jangle of a janitor’s keys. Colding shook the offered hand, feeling the man’s rough skin and thick calluses.
“Welcome to Black Manitou, eh?” Clayton said. “Clayton Detweiler. You must be Colding.”
Colding couldn’t place the man’s accent. He’d never heard anything quite like it. Clayton wore a scowl so deeply entrenched with permanent wrinkles it might have been the only expression the man had ever shown. A three-day growth of bristly gray beard made the wrinkles look deeper, more defined. His thick gray hair was combed straight back, looked oily-wet, and smelled of Brylcreem. Spots of dirt, grease and what appeared to be several mustard stains dotted his black down jacket.
“Nice to meet you,” Colding said. He turned to the younger Detweiler. “And you must be Gary, our link to the mainland?”
Gary nodded and shook. The guy looked like a living Abercrombie & Fitch ad. His parka was fresh and clean. Oakley sunglasses hung from a cord around his neck. A deep tan covered skin that was already turning leathery. He wore a hemp necklace and a small gold loop in his right ear. Gary had a little bit of an odd, rich smell about him, something that Colding knew but couldn’t place.
Colding shook hands with Sven and James. Each managed a fifty-cow backup herd. Sven was a heavyset older man, perhaps sixty, his old-fashioned mustache and sandy blond hair liberally peppered with gray. The mustache mostly hid a rather disturbing crop of nose hairs. Mostly. Sven looked like he should be riding shotgun with Sam Elliott in some old western.
James had the big-necked look of a former football player—a lineman, not a quarterback—and could have been a poster boy for the phrase “cornfed.” Stephanie had a wide-eyed smile and, of all things, curlers in her red hair.
Colding reached out to shake Stephanie’s hand, but couldn’t because she thrust a Saran Wrap–covered plate at him.