Like the Eskimos say, unless you’re the lead dog, the view never changes. Drenched in sweat beneath the bulky Kevlar vest, with more sweat dripping down his face from under the too-small helmet, Pender followed the camouflaged back of the deputy in front of him through a sun-dappled second-growth forest, pickin’ ’em up and layin’ ’em down to a medley of unlikely march-time oldies playing on his internal jukebox: “Ballad of the Green Berets,” “The Battle of New Orleans,” and “Fifty Ways to Leave Your Lover.”
The column halted at the edge of a wooded ridge looking out over a wedge-shaped valley that fanned west to east, with a range of grassy hills, greenish gold in the spring, forming the opposite rise. Below and to the squad’s right, on the broad side of the wedge, lay a flat patchwork of abandoned fields, subsumed now by scrub brush and man-high weeds, with only a few discontinuous stretches of three-rail wooden fencing still standing to demarcate the borders.
Below to the left, at the narrow end of the valley, the front end of a weathered gray barn protruded from a steep scree of dirt and rocks. At first it appeared to Pender as if the barn had been constructed half underground, but a closer look through borrowed binoculars spoke instead of a monumental landslide that had buried the rear half of the barn but left the front half miraculously standing.
The lieutenant showed Pender the readout on his handheld GPS device-the first one Pender had ever seen. “The cell phone was picked up in or near that structure,” Sperry whispered, pointing to the barn. “We’re going to circle around the back, then split into two teams to flank the barn. I need you to stay up here and watch our backs-I’ll leave you the glasses along with a walkie-talkie and a cricket. If it looks like we’re heading into any shit, key Talk and click the cricket twice, but do not, repeat not, speak into it for any reason until I give you the go-ahead. Otherwise you might accidentally give our position away. Got all that?”
“Got it.”
“Good.” Sperry turned to the squad. “Okay, let’s move out. I’ll take the point. And maintain mission silence, everybody-we want the element of surprise on our side.”
Although he’d never have admitted it, not even to himself, Pender was more than a little relieved at no longer having to keep up with the younger, fitter tac squadders. After taking a slug of water from a plastic bottle one of them had loaned him, he removed his helmet and sluiced the rest of the water over his steaming dome. Then he dropped to a prone position at the edge of the tree line and began scanning the barn, left to right, top to bottom, with the binoculars.
The sliding front door was wide open, askew on its hinges. No signs of life inside or out-but of course Sweet could be hiding almost anywhere in there. Or he could be lying in wait behind the building, or around the side, or somewhere out there in the weeds, or in the hills directly across the way, Pender realized. Expanding the parameters of his scan accordingly, he began sweeping the binoculars the length and breadth of the valley.
But the only thing moving on this hot, windless spring afternoon was a pair of turkey vultures circling the grassy hill to the north, directly across the valley from Pender’s position. Pender watched them soar, following them through the glasses as they swooped and glided, then resumed his visual sweep of the valley. But the cop part of his brain, the area where law enforcement professionals store information like the mug shots of the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted criminals and the license plate numbers of stolen cars, had already begun flashing the red lights and sounding the awooga horn to remind Pender that turkey vultures were an integral part of Luke Sweet’s m.o. lately.
So he turned the glasses back to the vultures, and when one of them suddenly peeled away from the other and swooped downward, Pender followed its flight all the way to the ground. It touched down with a skidding hop and darted up to a struggling, heaving mass that Pender first took to be a dying calf. But when he adjusted the focus and zeroed in again, he realized that there were in fact two bodies lying there, roped back-to-back. One of them looked like a corpse in an advanced state of decay; the other appeared to be…yes, it was Epstein-no mistaking that built-up shoe.
Pender swung the glasses back around to the west, past the barn, just as the squad’s point man emerged from the woods. Urgently he thumbed the Talk key on the walkie-talkie and clicked the cricket twice.