He spent two hot days and two cold nights alternately watching from and dozing in a smooth, body-sized divot in a rocky hill seven hundred yards from the village. His teeth chattered but the blanket seemed to help. As a boy, Gale liked hunting by himself for birds and rabbits and deer, but now, hunting alone for men made him feel edgy and exposed.
No one came or went from the dead village, or from the granary where the old man had gone. Through his rifle scope Gale saw the shooting slots chiseled through the thick mud walls. Three of them, all on the second story, all with different views of the trail. They were small rectangles, just big enough for a sniper to get his gun and the top half of his face through. They made for a tough shot, though he had once made one like it.
Gale got his look when the old man emerged from the granary just after first light on morning three, his rifle slung over one shoulder, his white, black, green, and red high-top Cheetahs happily bright in the advancing desert light.
The old man collapsed in a puff of dust and didn’t move.
Lew Gale’s heart was thumping hard and he felt the adrenaline coursing through him but his hands were sound and his fingers steady.
Five minutes later, in the growing light, Gale looked down at Cheetah Man’s craggy but somehow benign face, his flat black eyes, the blood that had jumped from his chest into his snow-white beard.
The gun slung from his shoulder had fallen loose beside him and Gale was astonished to see that it was an old shotgun, not a sniper’s rifle, not a rifle of any kind. Seeing the old man emerge from the farmhouse in the half-light with a gun, Gale had observed and presumed and assumed and failed to identify.
He took pictures on his phone.
Inside the granary he smelled the opium, noted the black-tarred hookah pipe, the plastic bottles of water, the scraps of food and paper wrappers already attracting mice. There was a mattress on the floor, heaped with dirty blankets and oddly festive pillows with purple and white piping, certainly handmade in Sangin.
Upstairs, Gale sat on a wooden chair and put his face to the sniper’s slots, one at a time, following the trail on which Private Chilcote died until it disappeared down toward the river. Up here the smell of opium smoke was stronger.
What we have here, thought Gale, is an old man with a bird gun stopping off for a few days of R & R.
Later, back in Sangin, Gale showed one of his pictures to a boy — a helpful occasional translator and village busybody. The boy told Gale that the dead man was Amardad, which meant “one who is immortal.”
“Why kill him?” asked the boy. “Amardad hunted birds, not men.”
Gale looked away.
Felt like time had stopped. The boy was young and slender and had straight black hair that fell almost to his eyebrows like a pageboy’s.
“It was a mistake,” Gale said. “In the dark I didn’t see he had a shotgun that shoots only a few yards. Not a rifle for killing men.”
“The man you wanted was Amardad’s brother, Ali,” said the boy. “He was the best sniper in Sangin. They look very alike, their wives got confused. He killed many Russians and British, then the British killed him. With a drone. Three months before you Americans got here.”
“Then who shot Private Chilcote on the trail by the abandoned village last week?” asked Gale.
The boy looked at Gale with a puzzled expression. “Anyone. Everyone. Not me! So can I come with you to America when you go?”
“We don’t do that.”
We don’t bring back the people who helped us.
Gale’s heart seemed to cough up some shameful, insipid stone, which caught in his throat and hurt violently.
4
In the early-morning light, Knight yips his lion alert on a narrow game trail that leads into the mountains. The big German shepherd snorts and shuffles, nose in the air, tail and hips low.
Gale, his stomach sloshing with an energy drink and protein bars, clomps along behind the dog, rifle in his hands and pack snug to his back.
They cover some ground now, Knight’s thick coat lifting and shifting, Gale falling into an easy rhythm behind the dog.
Knight veers suddenly off trail and zigzags through a swale with spring-fed cottonwoods and damp, calf-high grass. A quarter mile of this, and he stops and looks to Gale as if for advice. Then sneezes and drives his snout deep into the grass and sets a straight course down the middle of the little meadow, which leads him back to higher ground and the game trail.
He stops again and looks at Gale, snorts and yipes in frustration, then puts his wet nose to the air and continues along more slowly now, body relaxed and urgency gone.
“He was hot on a cat until the grass,” says Carpenter.
“You’d think the dew would hold the scent,” says Gale. He remembers with his dad and their springer spaniel, Ernie, working the little springs and creeks not far from here for quail.
But less than half a mile farther uphill, snorting his way through the mountain boulders, Knight alerts again and his body changes: muzzle up, hocks bent, hips low.
This is cat country, Gale thinks: the precarious piles of boulders, the dense growths of rabbit brush and manzanita growing between them. In the ten years he hunted these Santa Anas as an adolescent and young man, he saw only two mountain lions. Both of them tawny and still as the rocks, observing him from above in landscapes like this.
Knight leads his men up the base of the mountain in long switchbacks, ascending higher and higher.
Gale and Carpenter traipse along behind him, Gale feeling the elevation in his legs, and the weight of his heavy Barrett in his arms. The late-morning sun is warm. He lifts his SWAT cap and wipes his forehead on the sleeve of his flannel. Forty-three is the new sixty, he thinks. Just add an IED and bourbon.
Onward and upward.
Even as a boy, Gale disliked heights.
He tries to keep his eyes up and at the same time navigate the rocks and the spaces between them. His foot slips into a small crevasse and his ankle turns. He feels incompetent, mutters a curse, and looks back at Carpenter, climbing steadily toward him. Sees Knight out in front, scrambling up a boulder, front nails scratching, hind legs straining, Gale wondering at the animal’s fearlessness.
Elke Meyer on his phone, her voice clear. He remembers when there was no reception out here.
“How’s our mountain lion of interest?” she asks.
He tells her they haven’t seen the cat, but are getting close.
“We identified the victim as Bennet Tarlow yesterday,” says the undersheriff. “Sheriff himself did the press conference. The Coast Highway video went viral, of course. They’re calling him the Killer Cat.”
Gale feels a blip of anger.
“We can’t kill the wrong cat,” he says.
Or man.
“Lew, get it through your head that the old mountain lion on Coast Highway is probably our Killer Cat. The chances are overwhelmingly good. The corridors line up between Laguna and where you are right now. That’s what the Fish and Wildlife scientists say.”
A pause.
“Maria Brown from the Times wants to talk to you when this is over and the Killer Cat is no longer eating people. I told her I’d inquire.”
“Have Carpenter talk to her.”
“She wants you, Lew. Got herself a Pulitzer for that, as you know.”
“I’ll do my job, Elke, but I’m not talking to her again.”
“I know, I know, and I don’t blame you. But Lew, you could put us in a good light. Sheriff Kersey wants good light. Up for reelection soon. He asked me to make sure that you’re clear on that.”
“Let someone else take the shot, Elke.”
And clicks off.