Greenberg smiled. He was starting to bounce around again. “I run ten miles every day,” he said quietly. “I won’t slow you down. You are gonna leave most of this shit here, right?”
I nodded. “I’ve got a small backpack, a camo shelter half, canteen, knife, the spotting scope, two MREs. Going up tonight, gonna watch all day tomorrow, come out tomorrow night, late.”
Greenberg pointed at the black rifle with his chin. “Whatcha got there, sport?”
“Remington 700P TWS model,. 308 Win rounds.”
“We going to war?”
“We might,” I said. “Although, from what I hear, the black hats see a couple of strangers, they usually fire a warning shot to shoo them away.”
“Usually? Is that like ‘assume’?”
“Well, life’s a risky business, Special Agent. I get a warning shot, I propose to scope the hillside and blow an arm off. You have official top cover to come along on this little hike?”
Greenberg sniffed and shook his head. “Officially, I was concerned that a crusading civilian might get himself hurt going up into Grinny Creigh’s cave and irritating the demons. I can follow you at fifty yards if you like.”
I laughed. “That might not be a bad idea, you know, in case that ‘usually’ shit doesn’t work out. But mostly I want to watch for an entire day. I’ve been there once, at night, and besides Grinny, what I remember most is Rue Creigh making headlights against the screen door.”
“Tell me your impression of Grinny Creigh-you’re probably the first LE guy to lay eyes on her for a long time.”
“Carrie said that her whole deal was about power and controclass="underline" She radiates that. Big woman, fat, but probably strong as an ox. Cunning, pig eyes. Accustomed to command and obedience. Didn’t move out of her chair or raise her voice particularly, but when I pissed her off, the guys hanging back in the trees started sliding toward cover, like she might have been about to pull a gun and start blasting away. Her son, Nathan, looks like he ought to have bolts in his neck. Tall, skinny, one of those ball-bearing-eyes types. I think he gives the detailed orders to the black hats once Grinny sets the general objective.”
“Modern weapons?”
“None that I saw. Lots of shotguns, but all double-barreled, nontactical. A pack of dogs that’s pretty scary. Outbuildings, but I don’t know if there’s electricity. Really primitive look and feel to the place, but bigger than most of the cabins in these parts.”
“Primitive makes for pretty good electronic security,” Greenberg said. “Nothing for us to listen to when they’re whispering messages down the mountain trails in some eighteenth-century dialect, as we have found out. How many soldiers were there the night you went up there?”
“A dozen? It was dark. And that’s not counting the two who took me there.”
Greenberg nodded. “The population outside of Rocky Falls is estimated to be something between one and two thousand people,” he said. “That’s all in. But the state demographers really don’t know shit, and the federal census bureau has zero credible data. The Creigh clan isn’t that big, but they all tend to react negatively to strangers. The decent folk just try to keep out of their way.”
“So anyone who spots us is likely to at least raise the alarm.”
“And the usual warning shots. Don’t forget them.”
I looked at my watch and roused the dogs. “Why don’t we go find out?”
“How about these canoes-hate to have them stolen while we’re up that hill there.”
“We’ll sink them, pile some rocks in them. They’re aluminum. Easy.”
“How do we get the water out, we come back?” he asked.
“Now that’s hard.”
It took most of the night to get across the aptly named Rockslide Mountain to a position about a thousand feet above the cabin on the east flank of Book Mountain. The firebreaks, which had looked smooth and open from a distance, had turned out to be overgrown and very difficult to walk through without a machete. A bulldozer would have been a great help. We’d ended up traversing the slopes by staying just inside the tree line and using the firebreaks more as a navigation aid. We’d seen some cabins down in the hollows, but few lights. There’d also been some barking dogs, but no reaction from inside the houses.
I had put my dogs’ bark collars on and then deployed them fifty yards ahead of us, where they scouted, making regular returns to touch base with their struggling humans. Greenberg had been true to his word, though, keeping up with me all the way. Our biggest problems had been night insects and not enough water. Fortunately, our perch on the side of Book Mountain included a substantial weep of spring water flowing practically under our feet, so the dogs had water and we could fill our canteens, albeit with a hefty dose of Hal-zone purifier to kill off the ubiquitous giardia bugs.
We set up our hide between two massive boulders, which looked like they were ready to unlimber from the hillside any minute now and roll directly down on the cabin complex below. I had put the dogs on a long down above the boulders to give warning of anyone approaching from behind our position. Our own view into the cabin’s yard was partially obscured by a spotty line of pines, which also screened us, but the scope gave us a pretty good look. We counted twenty-five dogs of uncertain but uniformly large breeding in the dog lot, three even larger pigs in a pen next door, and a pair of goats wandering around eating invisible delicacies throughout the dirt yard.
Three men had come up the front meadow just after sunrise, leading a mule with bulging saddlebags. Nathan had come out of the building to the right of the main cabin. They’d talked for a few minutes, and then the men departed, leaving the loaded mule behind. Nathan took it into the barn, then came back outside. He slopped the pigs and threw chunks of something red to the dogs, causing an immediate dogfight, clearly audible from our hide. Greenberg wondered aloud if the red things were local babies while I sketched details of the cabin layout on a notepad.
The spotting telescope was a sixty-power Swarovski number shielded against making a lens flash. Greenberg pointed out that there were firing ports cut in the logs of the cabin, and that the ground behind the cabin was higher than the visible grade on either side.
“That’s been built up,” he said. “They’ve either got a basement that goes back into the hill, or maybe even a cave.”
I shivered mentally. The last cave I’d been into had been occupied by two starving mountain lions.
Greenberg said he saw a pipe running down from the springhouse to the cabin. “We ever do any kind of siege down there, we’d need to cut that pipe.”
“They have electricity that you can see?”
He said no, nor had I seen any power poles.
Grinny herself appeared midmorning on the back porch of the cabin, sweeping some dust and debris out into the yard. She was wearing a tent-sized housecoat, and from our hilltop vantage point her head looked too small for her body. I was watching her through the telescope and was startled when she stopped sweeping for a moment, cocked her head to one side, and then looked up the hillside and appeared to stare right back into the lens. I didn’t move, and neither did she, for almost ten seconds. Then she went back into the house.
“Shit!” Greenberg exclaimed. “She see you?” He’d been watching through his own small binocs.
“There’s no way,” I said. “But she might have sensed us. Some of these mountain women have what the locals call ‘the sight.’ Wouldn’t surprise me if she’s detected someone or something watching the cabin.”
“She looked right up here, and that’s, what, a thousand feet of elevation difference? We should move.”
“No,” I said. “Movement is a dead giveaway. She couldn’t have seen the lens; it’s recessed at least three inches into the tube.”