Fielding sat at the wheel of his rental car, driving to Bentonville on a calculated hunch. His BlackBerry showed live feed of three Apache helicopters preparing for takeoff from York River Gardens, a half-completed vacation condominium development in mid-Virginia that was purportedly in Chapter Eleven. As Fielding knew, its gray brick exterior, intentionally left unpainted, really housed a sort of Special Forces la carte. York River Gardens was one of several such outposts around the country maintained by the Office of Security.
To Fielding, the Apaches’ bloated engines, floppy rotors, Bigfoot skids, fins, guns, and launchers all looked to have been attached during a game of pin the tail on the donkey; it was hard to imagine the ships getting off the ground. But as he could attest, having flown in several, they could reach twenty thousand feet and two hundred miles per hour. Also they were ideal for searching the Blue Ridge. The dense canopy of trees there could hide a house painted Day-Glo yellow from the drones-and most helicopters-but the Apaches had extraordinary turret-mounted sights with three fields of forward-looking infrared. Unless the night warmed to 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit, the old man and the punk would be seen. The helicopters’ sensors relayed to Fielding’s BlackBerry that the current ground temperature was 28.41 degrees.
The Clarks could dig in or seek the cover of a cave, but either would leave them vulnerable to trackers. More likely, Fielding thought, they would attempt to flee the ridge. Once they showed as little as a nose, the thirty-millimeter chain gun located under each Apache’s fuselage could pick them off at 625 rounds per minute. And if they were out of range of the guns, an Apache Hellfire missile could obliterate their entire ridge.
“Actually, one Apache’s plenty,” Fielding said over the phone to Bull, who was at Hickory Road, liaising with York River Gardens in order to augment the five-man team he already had combing the ridge.
“But, sir, we’ll need to cover as much as forty square miles,” Bull said.
“More, by my math. The problem is a resident woken up in the middle of the night by one of those behemoths can imagine a reason for it being there. Three of those behemoths and we’re all but writing the lead for the Associated Press manhunt story that Abdullah bin Zayed al Saqr will read at breakfast.”
“Got it. What about trackers?”
“It depends.”
“York River has a unit that can pick up a trail on a dry cement floor. No one will ever see them-”
“Trackers are a good idea.” Fielding didn’t want to waste time discussing how, time and again, manhunts had proven the futility of deploying trackers unfamiliar with a specific area. “Let me just see if I can scare up anyone around here first.”
When instructors at the Farm say a student has “a good nose,” they mean an analytical ability seemingly independent of the five ordinary senses, the intangible “it” quality vital to being a good operations officer. In 1994, lacking such a nose, one of Fielding’s fellow first-year “Perriman Appliances sales associates” walked up to the wrong Jordanian roadblock and was halved by a fifty-caliber round. On the same desert road, Fielding held back, for reasons he couldn’t articulate, even with the luxury of hindsight. The best he could summon for his incident report was, “It didn’t smell right.”
Tonight, on pitch-black Virginia country roads about which his GPS offered only the most cursory information, he followed his nose through Bentonville-a hamlet comprised of a metal-roofed church, a couple of tiny stores, and a post office that shared space with a construction company. At the live bait shack at the end of town, he turned up an unlit dirt road leading into the mountains. It brought him to a solitary, shabby, corrugated steel Quonset hut with neon Bud signs in the windows and ten-point antlers above the door. This was Miss Tabby’s, according to the metallic letter decals running down one side of the doorframe. A jukebox had the place throbbing to a rockabilly beat.
Fielding parked among the forty or fifty vehicles, mostly pickups. He popped open his collar button and loosened the knot of his tie an inch or two, to where it would be hanging after a shitty day at the office and a couple of grueling hours in traffic. As someone who’d just endured such a drive would, he hauled himself out of his car with a groan and rolled the kinks out of his neck. Despite the fresh snowfall and towering, aromatic pines all around, the muddy lot reeked of stale beer and urine.
The door beneath the antlers opened onto a bar faced with split logs and gaps where other logs had fallen off. Every barstool was occupied, as were all the chairs at fifteen or twenty tables. In the orange-plum glow of illuminated brewery promotions, another three dozen men and women stood elbow to elbow. More still played pinball, darts, or pool. Through a mass of cigarette smoke at the far end of the room, Fielding saw mere forms around a pool table. Among them, he sensed, were the men he wanted: meth men. The Blue Ridge was littered with methamphetamine labs. Many of the cooks were descendants of the notorious Blue Ridge moonshiners. Like their ancestors, they were expert hunters and trackers who were vicious in defense of their turf. They thought nothing of unloading rifles on sheriffs. And most were expert shots.
Wandering their way, Fielding practically felt a breeze from all of the heads turning. It wasn’t that anyone recognized him. It was because he was wearing a suit.
Once upon a time, when entering rough-and-tumble places, he was tempted to dress down or affect a tough guy’s swagger. Experience had taught him to shun artifice whenever he could. The closer to his base of experience he could play it, the less he needed to fabricate; the less he needed to fabricate, the more convincing he could be. Here he would try to pass himself off as a Capitol Hill lawyer, a breed he knew well-too well, he lamented. Should anyone ask, he would say he dealt “Tina”-a fashionable name for meth in crystalline solid form-to subsidize his own fun. Probably they wouldn’t ask; they would just assume he was ATF or DEA.
Seventy-five cents got him into a game of eight ball, but only because that was the house rule-he may as well have set a shiny badge down on the pool table along with his three quarters, given the players’ standoffishness. He was pleased to see several of them were missing teeth, a hallmark of meth usage.
While playing, he didn’t participate in their conversation about the bowl games. He kept looking to the door. Twice he asked his partner, “Sorry, man, are we stripes or solids?” A few times he stepped away and grumbled to himself. Picking up a bottle of Heineken and a double shot of rum from the bar, he forgot to collect his fourteen dollars in change. This was obviously a man preoccupied.
When he felt the others’ curiosity peak, he tossed back the rum and stormed out of the bar.
Halfway to his car, he sensed a man approaching from behind. He whirled around, the way someone who was scared would. As he’d hoped, it was one of the pool players, the gaunt kid who’d been his partner. Twenty-five or so, he wore a Lynchburg Hillcats baseball cap with the bill low, shading his bland features and drawing attention to sideburns so chunky Fielding suspected they’d never come in contact with scissors.
“Oh, hey,” Fielding said, with fake relief.
“Hey, I was just wondering if everything’s okay with you, man?”
So he was the meth men’s scout.
Fielding kicked at the ground. “Sure, fine, whatever. Thanks.”
“You staying around here?”
“I’ve gotta get all the way back up to Georgetown tonight. Fucking breakfast meeting first thing maana.”
“Mind me asking what brung you all this way?”
Fielding looked him in the eyes. “I’m guessing you’re not a cop, right?” Sideburns would have to be in world-record deep cover: He was missing most of his upper teeth.
The kid chuckled softly. “I work construction, mostly.”
“There’s a guy, I don’t know his name,” Fielding said, his relaxed stance and tone befitting the release of catharsis. “Thin, like twenty-five or thirty, buzz cut, lot of tattoos. He works out of a trailer on the ridge north of here, sometimes he does a little business here. Know who I mean?”
“Dude, that’s, like, half the guys here,” Sideburns said with a grin.
Fielding regarded his new friend with gratitude for the bit of levity. “I started out tonight driving to his place, but, like a mile before the turnoff, around Hickory Road, I saw a government-looking car pull over and park. Two suits got out and headed into the woods. So I figured it probably wasn’t the best idea to stick around. I hoped I’d see my guy here. And, mostly, a friend of his.” He lowered his voice. “Tina.”
This elicited a knowing look. “Her, I think I’ve heard of,” Sideburns said.
“Yeah?”
“I might be able to find her for you.”
“Dude, that would be huge!”
“I just wanna know one thing. Those suits. You get a look at them?”
Fielding wasn’t fooled by Sideburn’s casual manner. The meth man’s underlying alarm was as obvious as sirens and strobe lights.
“Just a couple assholes in gray suits is all I can tell you,” Fielding said.
With a little prodding, he provided physical descriptions of Drummond and Charlie that would have been good enough for a blind man.
Sideburns hurried back in to the other pool players. Fielding followed as far as the bar, then made a call using his BlackBerry.
“Ginger, you there?” he demanded into the mouthpiece.
“You got the wrong number, amigo,” came a young man’s voice.
Fielding hung up and happily ordered another beer. His use of “Ginger” signified all had gone according to plan here. “Amigo” meant that Dewart and Pitman, who’d answered, would now start monitoring all analog and digital traffic to and from Miss Tabby’s.
In the next three minutes, Dewart and Pitman captured nine telephone calls and relayed the gist of them to Fielding’s BlackBerry. The callers included the bartender, checking that her grandson had done his Bible study, and a plumber leaving with a prostitute-he told his wife he was having car trouble. Sideburns and another pool player also made calls. Both left messages urging local familiars to call back ASAP. A third player texted someone located on the ridge a hundredth of a latitudinal degree north of Hickory Road:
DEA fux on prowl 2nite!!! get ready to play D bro!!!