Home of the Brave (Raine Stockton Dog Mysteries Book 9) (13 page)

Every time I came near enough to see him, Cisco had his nose to the ground, so he clearly was on Pepper’s trail, which was a good thing.  Of course, the moment he noticed me, he would be off at a gallop again, which was, in his mind, precisely what he was supposed to do.  Now and then I caught a glimpse of two waving golden tails instead of just one, and I knew the game of chase was still on ... only now the only one doing any chasing was me.  The two of them persisted upon maintaining just enough of a lead to stay out of reach, which only proves their innate intelligence.  If I could have caught either of them just then I doubt I’d be able to remember much about positive reinforcement dog training.

We seemed to be on a deer trail, and those usually led to water.  Since I could hear the gurgling of the stream that fed the lake, I knew we weren’t far away from trail’s end.  I also knew that the dogs’ romp would be over the minute they stopped to play in the stream.  I was right on both counts, but I hadn’t entirely expected what I found when I followed Cisco through a pine copse and into a narrow clearing.

We had stumbled onto the site of a small camp.  There was a one-man tent, a fire pit encircled by stones, a green bear bag suspended from a tree that was devised to keep woodland creatures away from good-smelling things like soap and food.  It occurred to me that this was probably the source of the sock Cisco kept wanting to play with; the camper was probably used to walking down to the lake to bathe or do laundry.  Pepper sniffed around the fire pit, clearly worn out with the game and ready to call it quits.  But as I watched in horror, my agility dog, who had been known to sail across a six-foot broad jump without batting a lash, took a running leap into the air and snagged the bottom of the bag with his teeth.  He looked as surprised as I was when the contents of the bag came pouring down on his head. 

His surprise lasted only a moment, though.  He dove into the bounty like a kid at a Christmas piñata, followed quickly by Pepper, and by the time I stumbled forward to grab their collars and heave them away, Cisco had consumed half the contents of the bag.

“Cisco!” I cried, gasping.  “Wrong!”  I pried open his mouth just to make sure there was nothing dangerous inside—no remnants of plastic, no half-chewed deodorant bottles—then gave his collar a little shake.  “Shame on you!”

If there is one phrase my dogs know without translation, it’s
Shame on you
.  Pepper didn’t even need to know what it meant to understand my tone, and she stood contritely while I snapped on her leash.  Cisco’s ears dropped repentantly, but at the same time he licked the remainder of something delicious off his lips.  It was an unconvincing apology.

I leashed Cisco and pulled both dogs close as I looked around in dismay at the remnants on the ground.  The camper, whoever he was, had made an effort to preserve his provisions with waxed paper, but it had proven no deterrent to a determined golden retriever.  And little wonder.  The little packets of waxed paper, as far as I could tell, had contained strips of meat jerky, dried and smoked and absolutely irresistible to any dog. The average person might not believe that Cisco had tracked the scent of meat jerky all the way from the lake to the woods; the average person did not know my dog.

I spun at the sound of crashing through the woods, expecting the worst, but it was only Melanie.  She had Mischief and Magic with her.  On second thought, perhaps that was the worst.

“I told you to stay put!” I said, scolding.

“Pepper!” she cried, rushing forward with Mischief and Magic in tow and her face alight with relief.  Pepper jumped up to greet her and I took the Aussie’s leashes so she could hug her dog.  “Pepper, you bad, bad, dog.  I was so worried!  Don’t ever run away again!”  She said it with such delighted adoration that Pepper had no idea she was being reprimanded and wriggled with pleasure as Melanie ruffled her ears and kissed her muzzle.  Then she turned and grinned at me.  “I told you Cisco could find her!”

Oh, to live in the world of a ten-year-old, where everything always, always turned out okay.  I hardly knew where to begin with the lectures about how important it is to do as you’re told, about how many things could have gone wrong, about how dangerous it was to go tramping through the woods after a runaway dog—so I did not begin at all.  I suspected she had already been scared enough when she saw Pepper disappear into the woods.  Besides, I had more immediate problems.

“Here, take the dogs out of the way.”  Mischief and Magic were already starting to sniff the goodies on the ground, so I transferred their leashes back to Melanie.  I did not trust her strength, however, to hold onto Cisco once he became focused on jerky, so I kept him by my side. 

“I couldn’t find Pepper’s ball,” she said, winding the leashes of all three dogs around her hand.  “But Cisco dropped this.”  She thrust a dirty sock at me and then looked around the campsite.  “Man, what a mess.”

I stuffed the sock into my fanny pack, muttering, “You can say that again.”  I blew out a breath.  “Well, the least I can do is try to clean up before the owner gets back.”

“We should probably leave a note,” Melanie agreed, “like when you have a fender-bender in the parking lot.”

I wondered exactly how many fender-benders in parking lots she had had as I bent to start picking up scraps.  Mischief and Magic resumed their curious sniffing and Pepper wasn’t far behind.  Cisco’s leash was wearing a groove in my hand as he tried to stretch out his neck long enough that his tongue would reach the ground.  “Dogs, sit!” I said sharply.  The Aussies, looking not in the least put out, obeyed.  Cisco followed more reluctantly.  Pepper just stared at me.

Melanie said, “Pepper, sit,” and Pepper obeyed.

I made a face that she couldn’t see, but before I could comment, Cisco gave a short, staccato bark and lunged to his feet.  Of course, that’s all it took for the Aussies to break their sits, and Melanie wrestled with the three dogs.  I reached to help her, but was stopped cold by an angry voice behind me.

“What the hell is going on here?”

I spun around, and found myself staring into the barrel of a shotgun.

Chapter
Thirteen

S
pecial Agent L.J. Manahan was a tall, square man with silver hair and a firm handshake.  He introduced his two colleagues, Lydia Armstrong and Jack Donaldson, as members of the Joint Terrorism Task Force.  Nothing in any of their faces suggested they might be here to enjoy the Smoky Mountain scenery.  Meeting them, Buck felt that bad feeling start to expand again.

The Hanover County Sheriff’s Department had hosted an FBI task force before, less than a year ago.  That time, they had been after one man—a hometown boy who’d made it to the Most Wanted list.  A man Buck once had called friend.  It had not ended well.  Sometimes, late at night, Buck would lie awake staring at the ceiling, listening to the sound of those gunshots over and over again in his head. 

Buck had not been in charge then.  Now he was.

He said, “I think you’d better fill me in.”  He turned to lead the way to his office.

Manahan stopped him.  “That’s what we’re here for, Sheriff.  But first we need to set up a headquarters.  We need a secure building with power and plumbing.  We’ll rewire what we have to.  We have a van about twenty minutes behind us with more agents and equipment.”

Buck cursed silently to himself, over and over again.  No doubt about it now.  This was bad.  And it was on him.  He said, “What about the old armory building on the edge of town?  We’ve been using it as a kind of community center, but it’s empty now.”

Manahan nodded his head toward Jack Donaldson.  “Check it out.”

They were in the main bullpen, with everyone staring and trying to pretend they weren’t, so it wasn’t hard for Buck to get the attention of one of his men.  He waved Lyle Reston over and said, “You and Mike take Agent Donaldson over to the armory and give him whatever assistance he needs.” To Manahan, he said, “This way.” 

Once in his office, the female agent began unpacking her briefcase.  An electronic tablet was hooked up to what appeared to be a miniature projector.  In another moment a map of the southeastern United States appeared on the wall opposite.  “You might recall that water treatment plant bombing in Alabama last year.”

Buck nodded.  “A little town called Bitter Branch, not much bigger than this.  Crazy.  You caught those guys, didn’t you?”

“We caught two of them,” said Manahan.  “This”—a new overlay appeared on the map on the wall, with half a dozen red balloon-like symbols in 3-D appearing over the names of towns in Georgia, South Carolina, Louisiana, Tennessee and Mississippi that Buck had never heard of—“represents similar attempts in other small towns that we’ve been able to stop.”

“Similar attempts,” Buck repeated, staring at the map.

“They weren’t all plots against municipal utilities,” clarified Agent Armstrong.  “The modus operandi vary.  Sometimes facilities are targeted, sometimes individuals.  On occasion multiple targets have been planned in the same location.”  She touched the screen of her tablet and a yellow arrow moved between a location in South Carolina and a location in southern Mississippi.  “Here,” she said, “a church was targeted.  And here, a school.”

The silence that descended upon the room was palpable for a brief moment, rich with both the horror of what might have happened and quiet pride that, in fact, it had not.  Then Manahan said, “The goal appears to be to spread chaos.  That’s what terrorists do.  And when they are successful, it doesn’t matter how many of them we catch.  They’re like that snake with a thousand heads.  You cut off one head and two grow in its place.”

He nodded toward Armstrong, and another overlay appeared on the wall.  It was blurred with red balloons, many of them so close together the geography itself was obscured.  “These are the cells we suspect to exist, or to be in the process of forming, now.  As you can see, the proliferation is primarily in the Bible Belt, although we’re seeing some significant activity in the Midwest as well. “

No one, looking at that map, could avoid feeling a little sick.  Buck said softly, “My God.  How do you fight them all?”

“One at a time,” replied Manahan somberly.

Buck nodded slowly, beginning to understand.  “And with explosives detection dogs from Homeland Security.”

“Ideally, every law enforcement agency in the US would have at least one team like yours,” said Manahan, “and eventually they will.  For now, we’re prioritizing according to strategic location and presumed threat.  Your county met both those criteria.  I’m not sure that’s a good thing.”

Buck muttered, “Me either.”  He looked sharply at Manahan.  “I should have been briefed on what was going on.  I can’t be expected to do my job if I’m kept in the dark.”

Manahan said, “We try not to involve local law enforcement until it becomes necessary. Most of the time, it’s not necessary.”

Agent Armstrong added, in a slightly less defensive tone, “We’re making great strides in interagency cooperation, Sheriff.  This task force is one example of that.  Your Officer Smith is another.  We’re aware we have a way to go, but when we need to, we can still all work together to get the job done.”

Buck couldn’t think of a pithy reply to that, so he decided to go the route of cooperation.  “Why small towns?”  he asked.  “Because they’re easy targets?”

“Partially,” agreed Agent Armstrong.  “Partially because we think sentiment is already in their favor, and recruiting is easy.”

Buck frowned.  “I don’t mean to tell you your business, but if there’s one thing I can promise you it’s that foreigners don’t go unnoticed in a place like this.  If a boy marries a girl from the next county it might take two generations before the neighbors stop looking at her sideways.  I can tell you for sure that there is no way sentiment is in favor of terrorists around here.”

Manahan returned mildly, “That would no doubt be true if we were talking about foreign nationals.  These guys are as American as you and me.  They call themselves Patriots, and they’re building an army.”

Chapter
Fourteen 

I
nstinctively my arm shot out to shield Melanie, which might have been effective if we had been traveling sixty miles an hour in a car that came to a sudden stop.  It was, needless to say, no barrier whatsoever against a twenty-gauge shotgun.  Nonetheless, Melanie drew close to me.

“Raine,” she whispered, big-eyed, “that’s him.  That’s the man I saw yesterday at the lake.”

He was thin and bearded, wearing jungle camo pants, worn hiking boots and a perspiration-stained gray tee shirt. His arms were covered with tattoos.  He had the kind of droopy dark eyes that always remind me of Abraham Lincoln, except that Abraham Lincoln’s eyes were kind.  This man’s eyes were hard and angry.

And then, when Melanie spoke, his eyes changed.  It was as though he noticed her for the first time, and then the dogs, and he lowered the gun.  My heart slowed to an almost normal rhythm, although his scowl was still far from reassuring.  “What are you doing here?” he demanded fiercely.  “Who are you?”

I stepped in front of Melanie, keeping Cisco close and slightly behind me.  “I—I’m sorry,” I said.  “My dog got away from me.  We were swimming down at the lake.”  My gesture was choppy and uncertain.  “I’m really sorry …”