Tattered blue tarps hung on a weathered plywood shack, heavy with snow in the windless gray dawn. Three bare wooden frames, cobbled together from old two-by-fours and sun-bleached spruce poles, stood in front of the main shack on the wide gravel bar. It made her colder just looking at it. “That’s a fish camp?” she said. “I don’t know why, but I was expecting some kind of lodge, or at least a real cabin.”
“Not out here,” Quinn said. “Plywood is sixty bucks a sheet if they can get it. This is actually a pretty nice setup.”
Quinn squatted at the base of the alder, slowly turning his head to scan up and down the far bank. “No smoke,” he said. “There’s a boat pulled up by the shack. It’s covered with snow, but it still bothers me a little.”
“You think it could be Volodin?”
“Could be,” Quinn said, panting in the cold air. He unzipped his pack to retrieve the binoculars.
Beaudine took off her glove and dabbed at the wound on her forehead with the tip of her finger while she caught her breath and gazed across the river. The fish camp, such as it was, was no more than a hundred meters away. A layer of fog hugged the river, and everything above it was covered in frost or snow, making it difficult to pick out much detail in the flat morning light.
“You ever play Kim’s Game?” Quinn’s voice was muffled against his hands as he peered through the binoculars.
“Can’t say as I have,” Beaudine said. This guy was even more of an enigma than she’d been told. He’d hardly said a word of conversation through their entire walk and now he wanted to talk about some game.
Quinn passed her the binoculars, then leaned away slightly to give her a clear view. “Look it over like you would a crime scene for a minute or two.”
Beaudine wiped the moisture away from her eyes and looked through the binoculars, careful not to touch them to her wound. She swept back and forth a couple of times before attempting to hand them back to Quinn. “That was a fun game,” she said. “We’ll have to play it again sometime.”
“Okay.” Quinn gave her a quiet smile, the kind of smile you give a child when you have the upper hand. “Tell me what you saw.”
Beaudine sighed, exasperated. “I don’t know. A ratty old shack with a bunch of ripped tarps for a roof. It looks vacant though. Like you said, no tracks.”
“Did you see the sheet of plastic they’re using for a window?”
“I saw it,” Beaudine said. “It looked exactly like a sheet of plastic.”
“Did you see the frost on it?”
Beaudine raised the binoculars again, taking a better look this time. There it was, a layer of frost—inside the plastic sheeting. She glanced sideways at Quinn, suddenly glad that they were still hidden in the willows. “Frozen vapor from somebody’s breath?”
“Breath and maybe a propane heater,” Quinn said. “There’s definitely someone in there.”
Chapter 38
Quinn squatted in the shadows, going over the various routes of approach in his head while Beaudine continued to scan with the binoculars.
“Why did you bring up that… what did you call it? Kim’s Game?” she asked.
“It’s from my favorite Kipling book,” Quinn said. “Kim, the boy, is training to be a spy in British India. He plays a game where he looks at a tray full of stones of different size and color for a given amount of time. His teacher covers the tray, and Kim has to recite what he saw. Snipers use the same kind of game for observation training. Makes you pay attention to detail.”
“I’ve played that before,” Beaudine said. “You mean to tell me we played sniper games at my friend’s bridal shower?”
“Pretty much,” Quinn said. “My daughter and I play it all the time — when I’m around anyway.”
“The things you learn sitting in the woods spying on a fish camp,” Beaudine said, still looking through the binoculars. “Someone… or a few someones are in that camp. What’s your plan?”
Quinn gazed to the east. Morning light filtered through the trees, casting long shadows across the windblown snow. “First, we hurry and get across before who ever it is wakes up and shoots us.”
“I’m with you there,” Beaudine said. “I don’t think my face could take another hit.”
Quinn led the way back a hundred meters upstream from the camp, keeping to the alders and willow scrub until he found a spot where the water spread out to a width of about thirty meters. Crossing here would put them in the open for much longer, leaving them naked and vulnerable to any would-be attackers, but wide water had a chance to slow down, often making it relatively shallow. Even at this wide spot, the swollen stream reached their knees. Quinn pushed his way through the current, dragging his feet and slowing just enough so that he didn’t loose his footing on the slick melon-sized rocks that rolled along the streambed with a periodic audible clatter. He walked upstream from Beaudine, shuffling his numb feet in the freezing water and doing his best to block the current so she wouldn’t fall.
The main shack sat in a clearing on a low bluff overlooking an open gravel bar as long as a football field and half as wide. Scoured clean every spring by great slabs of river ice during breakup, the gravel was barren of all but a few tiny scrub willows that had to start over again every year.
Quinn sloshed out of the freezing water, moving up the bluff where a dark pocket of stunted spruce trees offered some semblance of concealment if not actual cover. Water squished from his boots with every step. Dry socks would eventually become a necessity, no matter the rush. He’d suffered from the agony of trench foot once before on a hunting trip with his brother, Bo, and once was plenty for a lifetime. Ever immortal in their own minds, the brothers had tried to tough out cold and wet boots for two full days on Kodiak Island. The week of red and swollen feet that followed was enough to make them both firm believers in the value of dry socks. As his old man said, “It did zero good to hurry if you were worthless when you got there.”
Snow dampened their approach on the gravel, but Quinn and Beaudine moved quickly once they left the trees, going straight to the hollow-core door without stopping. Rifle over his shoulder, Quinn held the Kimber at high ready as he booted the flimsy thing and button hooked to his left around the threshold, just inside the twelve-by-twelve-foot room. Beaudine followed him inside immediately, hooking right as per their prearranged plan. She held the AR-10 high, moving in a slight crouch, elbows tucked like a professional shooter.
An Inupiaq boy in his mid-teens lay in his sleeping bag on a rough wooden frame across the room. He sat straight up and faced the door at the thud of boots on plywood. His sleepy eyes went wide and both hands flew up to shield his face.
Quinn lowered his pistol once he saw the other two bunk frames were vacant.
“Who are you guys?” the boy said, his voice remarkably calm for being woken up at gunpoint.
“FBI,” Beaudine said, lowering the AR-10.
A smile spread over the boy’s face. “No crap? You guys are really FBI?”
“We’re after a fugitive,” Beaudine said. “Thought he might be here.”
“That was friggin’ awesome,” the boy said. “You busted in here like a friggin’ HALO game.” He suddenly noticed Beaudine’s wounds and gave her a somber nod. “Your fugitive do that to you?”
“Plane crash,” Quinn said, wanting to speed things along. He started to tell the boy about Lovita but decided it better to wait. “My name’s Jericho. Do you happen to have a cell phone?”
“Only works when I’m in sight of the village.” His face brightened into a smile. “They just built a new tower out here last year.” He swung his feet onto the floor. He wore dingy gray cotton socks that had once been white, green nylon basketball shorts, and a stained T-shirt of the same color. At least a dozen dark purple hickeys encircled his neck, just above the collar of his T-shirt. He rubbed his eyes, then extended a hand toward Quinn. “I’m Brian. Brian Ticket.”