The small tree arched like a pulled bow, but its roots held.
He struggled to regain his balance, chest thumping. He stared over the ledge at the rock-strewn creek bed fifty feet below. A long sigh escaped his cracked lips in a soft hiss of steam.
Thank God for small beeches, he thought.
In five years of roving every kind of trail imaginable and battling through wild, almost impassable mountain backcountry, he had never come this close to a calamity. In a previous chapter of his life, he had developed a reputation as a cool professional, always on alert for the unexpected. Had he let the previous day's success lull him into a complacency that became an invitation to disaster?
The twisting path was a primitive one, perhaps blazed by Indians. In more recent times, it had accommodated prowling black bears. He had spotted the occasional gash in the bark high on a tree, claw marks of a wanderer scavenging the woods for acorns and nuts and anything else that might satisfy a ravenous appetite before the onslaught of winter snow.
That was part of the fascination of the Great Smoky Mountains, a rugged wilderness area that had lured him out of a self-imposed exile among the oil fields of Alaska.
He squinted with watery blue eyes, gazing down the trail where it writhed into the morning mist like a trapped snake, squeezed at its sides by towering hemlocks. At this altitude, most of the trees had already shed their leaves in late October though the slopes still brightened with occasional flashes of amber, rust, and orange.
Burke Hill had left his perch well above the four-thousand-foot level at daybreak. Now he approached the hidden spot he had stumbled upon some months back, a narrow corridor that linked the old footpath with a seldom-used Jeep trail.
Bent like an old man beneath the bulky pack of equipment, he scraped the mud-crusted boots on a tangle of roots. At the moment, he could easily have passed for ten to twenty years beyond the fifty-five he admitted to. His muscles ached from tedious hours of endless squatting. Stationed near an icy stream bolstered by a melting early snowfall from high on the slopes of Mt. Guyot, he had clutched the Nikon with its front-heavy telephoto lens until his fingers resembled lead claws. Then he huddled for the second straight night beneath a rock ledge as the temperature dipped below the freezing point.
By now the hardships and solitude of the trail had become second nature. The discomforts he took as part of the price of life in the wild. As for the isolation, he had always been more of a loner than a joiner. He wasn't known as Mr. Congeniality during a hectic ten-plus years in the FBI, either. Not that he hadn't made several good friends, but he was usually too intensely preoccupied with his job to indulge in partying or sports.
The final pages of that chapter had nearly wrecked his life. The strain of supposedly breaking with the Bureau and joining the underworld had reached a cataclysmic climax when his idol, J. Edgar Hoover, had disowned him as though the entire charade had been the Gospel truth, to use his mother’s words. He had bought into Hoover’s charge that he was a miserable failure.
The nearest thing to subterfuge he engaged in these days was to stand as rigid as a tree trunk to catch a mother bird in her nest, or to hide in a clump of mountain laurel as a wild turkey strutted past. Trained in the use of sophisticated camera equipment, he had found the patience and stealth required for photographic surveillance uniquely suited to the demands of nature photography. The result had been a challenging new career that made use of old talents and abilities. He was, in essence, a wildlife spook, but one object had eluded him.
Early on, a park biologist had casually mentioned the mink, that small brown creature whose expensive fur made women melt. Only a few had been spotted in the Smokies over the years, and nobody had managed to photograph one. They spent much of their time in the water. The normal pattern was to travel on land at night. Mink passed their springs and summers deep in the forest and ventured down to the lower, more open areas only during the bleak days of winter.
Ever since he first heard about the mink, it had nagged at him. He had always responded to challenges, and this challenge soon became an obsession. He kept part of his brain alert for the distinctive footprint — four small toes, plus an inside fifth, that might show along the trail.
Earlier in the week, he had spotted fresh tracks beside a high stream. A two-day stakeout paid off shortly before dusk yesterday. He rigged makeshift reflectors, using aluminum foil, to focus the afternoon sunlight where the tracks led to a burrow beneath a pile of rotting logs. He also mounted flash units to cover the area. After hours of patient waiting, buffering the camera's electronics against the cold, he watched in fascination as the sleek brown animal made a cautious appearance. As it struck an obliging pose, chin up to reveal its characteristic patch of white, he snapped a series of available light shots, praying the fast film would be sufficient. Then, for insurance, he fired off as many quick strobe shots as the autowinder would allow before the startled mink squealed its objection and dived for the water, discharging a musky odor in its wake.
Chapter 4
Readers plowing through the bulky classified section of The Washington Post on the Sunday morning following Thanksgiving took the brief announcement item signed "Queen" as a teaser advertisement or some weirdo's joke. Less than a handful recognized it as a literary quotation. Other than the party who had authorized its placement, only one knew its true meaning. He promptly put in a call to the Aeroflot office at New York's John F. Kennedy Airport and left a cryptic message for relay to Moscow.
That same day in the Georgetown section of Washington, Judge Kingsley Marshall, a man who had used a curious mixture of jurisprudence and computer education as the launching pad for a career in the cloakless and daggerless side of the Central Intelligence Agency, received a birthday present mounted in an attractive frame from the man responsible for boosting him to the top of his field. It was a magnificent color photograph of a sleek brown mink beside a mountain stream, eyes alert, chin up, displaying the distinctive patch of white.
Marshall beamed, standing back to admire it. "Beautiful, Charlie. I'm gradually rebuilding my wildlife collection, you know. Damned little of it was left after that fire at our old house in the Poconos. Who's the photographer?"
"A man named Burke Hill. Lives out from Gatlinburg, Tennessee in the Smoky Mountains. I'd bought some of his mountain scenery through a gallery in Gatlinburg. They told me about this new one and it sounded just right for you."
"You guessed right, old friend," said the Director of Central Intelligence, still marveling at the picture. The mink seemed almost alive. "This one is going on the wall of my office at Langley."
That decision triggered one of those unintended consequences that would set Burke Hill off on the adventure of a lifetime.
Senator Charles Gravely grinned with satisfaction at the reception of his gift. He might have still been in the House, or worse yet back home in the district, if he hadn't talked Marshall into taking a sabbatical from the CIA to run his senatorial campaign. After that, the sharp-witted intelligence analyst who retained the title he’d earned in a brief stint as a district judge remained a valued advisor until the top slot at Langley had come open. As a key member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Gravely had prevailed upon the President to give Kingsley Marshall the appointment.
Chapter 5
"Boats For Hire" announced the large black and white sign at the entrance to Peyton's Boat Yard, a run-down nautical menagerie on the panhandle coast at Port St. Joe. "All kinds, all uses" said smaller lettering beneath. It was a Friday morning, the third week in May, and crusty old Scooter Peyton, as he was known along the coast, reflected on the state of the boat rental business. He had seen it worse, he guessed, though he couldn't remember exactly when. A few close friends would have been quick to point out that Scooter was at his best when his jaundiced eye saw things at their worst. He had the tawny color and the sharp bite of a jigger of very old Kentucky bourbon. And, as with that famed Southern elixir, most folks found Scooter Peyton could be stomached best in small doses.