The Falconer's Tale (18 page)

“Yeah, but we're still all here. And I understand they
aren't—they went away after Bush's first term?”

“You know the suicide note that George Eastman left
behind—‘My work is done, why wait?' And my hat is off to
them—a government office that puts itself out of business
gets a gold star!”

Craik grunted. Or the STU hiccupped. Craik said, “I'm not
ready to do that yet. Fax me the roster and I'll take it from
there.”

When the roster came some hours later, he saved it to his
computer and printed out a single hard copy, which he sent
by snail mail to Abe Peretz at home.

Piat's interest in the crannog was more than academic now.
He had plans for it, and he brought them toward fruition
with the same thoroughness that he ran an operation—
indeed, in his mind, it was an operation, even if an operation
subordinate to the one he was running for Partlow.

It certainly ran on Partlow's money.

On a Saturday, Piat rented a cottage in Dervaig. It had
two beds and could hold a third on a fold-out sofa. He paid
cash and called himself Jack. Risky, but allowable. He caught
the midday ferry to the mainland and drove around Oban,
claiming various packages—a generator, an air pump, a
surprising number of air tanks. He rented a second vehicle
and put it on Partlow's credit card, the riskiest part of the
whole game, but he had no other source of funds.

At two in the afternoon, he walked into the bar of the
Saint Columba Hotel. Any splendor the Saint Columba
might have had—and it had had plenty in its day—was long
gone. The same might have been said of the three men
waiting for him in the gloomy bar. They had a certain sameness
about them—short hair, tired polo shirts, khaki trousers,
heavy sunglasses, muscles, tattoos. Like dangerous, superannuated
beach boys. Two of them were dirty blonds with
identical moustaches. The third was black.

“Sweet Jesus fuck, Jack,” one hailed Piat as he walked
in. Lots of back-slapping. Then handshakes all around.

“You all know each other already?”

The black man leaned forward over his beer. “We're
already fuckin' blood brothers, man. Leastways, that guy
bought me a beer.” He indicated the thinner white man.

The thinner of the blonds nodded. “Didn't take a fockin'
rocket scientist to guess we was all here for you, Jack.”

Piat nodded. “Introductions all complete?”

“Never fockin' came up,” said the thinner man. “Ken
Howse.” He shook hands all around, again. His accent was
peculiar—Irish, then cockney, then Irish again. Howse had
been born in Belfast and spent twenty years in the SBS.

The black man smiled. “Leamon Dykes. Just call me
Dawg.” His hands were so big they covered the beer. By
contrast to Howse, Dykes barely had a trace of an accent—
the result of spending twenty years as one of the few black
NCOs in one of the most elite—and white—units in Joint
Special Operations Command.

“Tony Dalepo,” the third man said. “Glad to meet you
gents. Now, Jack. There was some mention of money.”
Dalepo had put in his time on SEAL Team Two. Piat had
worked with him twice.

“Just fer showing up,” Howse put in.

Piat handed out envelopes. He gave them a cursory brief
on what he had in mind.

“Shares?” Dalepo asked. His Alabama accent was so thick
that “shares” had an uncountable number of syllables and
two diphthongs.

“No. Straight cash, payments weekly. Bonus if we find something
worthwhile. Otherwise, payment for services rendered.”

All three men nodded. They nursed their beers. Howse
and Dalepo smoked. Piat waited. The money was good, and
the idea was fine. Men like these—mercenaries, for want
of a better word—had superstitions and beliefs that went
beyond the simple realities of money and danger.

Finally, Dykes drained his beer. “I'm in. Sounds like fun.
Anyway, my daughter's going to college—this's a safer bet
than robbing banks. Or playing rent-a-gun in Iraq.”

Dalepo crushed out his second cigarette, picked up his
envelope, and pushed it into the back pocket of his chinos.
“Fuck, Jack. Ya' know I hate divin' in cold water. Long trip
ta' tell you that. Ya'all pissed at me?”

Piat shook his head. “Catch you next time, Tony.”

Dalepo picked up an old Navy flight jacket and walked
out.

Howse was terse. “Too fockin' close to home, mate,” he
said with a shrug. “I don't do nothin' UK. Okay?”

“If you say so,” Piat answered. He was disappointed. He
knew the job required two men. He preferred to use men
he knew.

Dykes watched Howse through the door and then turned
back to Piat. “You don't want no part of that one,” he said.

Piat raised his eyebrows.

“Just something I heard.” Whatever he had heard had
thoroughly convinced him, though; Piat could read it on
his face.

Piat shrugged. “Either way, I don't think you can do this
on your own.”

Dykes put his hand up. “Hey, man—I know a couple of
guys over here. Good guys. I did a cross-training thing. Let
me a make a call. Okay?”

Dykes's friend proved to be a retired rescue diver from Royal
Navy Fleet Air Arm. He lived in Manchester, drove himself
up and arrived in time to make the ferry. He looked more
like a pirate than a retired British officer, with a bone-
crushing grip, a heavy beard, and a striped shirt. Piat thought
that all he needed was a parrot and an eyepatch. His name
was Tancred McLean, aka Tank. He and Dykes seemed to
get on like a house afire, and he needed the money.

They caught the last ferry for Mull, Piat in his own car
and Tank driving Dawg in the new rental with the equipment.
By nightfall he had them settled in the cottage in
Dervaig. He drove them over to the windswept road where
the hillside rose to the slope of the caldera above the
crannog. In the moonlight, it looked even steeper than it
was.

Dykes shook his head. “We're going to carry a
compressor
and a
generator
up that shit?”

McLean was filling his pipe. “Looks tough.”

Piat said, “It
is
tough. I've been up and down three times
carrying nothing but a pack.”

The three men sat and watched the hillside.

“What's the plan, then?” asked McLean.

“Later tonight, we come up here and unload the whole
kit. See that shingle at the base of the glen? No, right here.
Solid rock, screened from the road. Everything goes there.
We make two trips a day until we get it up. Either of you
guys know how to strip and reassemble a compressor?”

Both men looked at him as if he was an idiot.

“So we strip it and take it up in pieces.”

“Fair enough,” said McLean.

Dykes rolled his eyes. “You better be payin' on time,
Jack.”

Piat put a colored square of pasteboard in the windshield.
“Cover. We're fishing. For the next three weeks.”

Dykes brightened. “Hey, I like fishing.”

Piat smiled. “Good.”

They spent two hours unloading the rental van into the
ravine. Every part of Piat's body from the abdomen down
ached after the first climb, and the repeated trips up and
down the wet rock of the ravine sides turned the ache into
a raging fire. Nonetheless, the three men worked well
together. Jokes were made. War stories told.

In the end, it was done.

Dykes looked pointedly at Piat when Piat was ready to
leave. “You better be around for some of this, boss-man.”

Piat waved. “Until it's done,” he said.

He dropped in on them on a Sunday at the self-catering
place he'd found for them. Dykes and McLean were eating
breakfast together in their shared kitchen. After a round of
greetings, Dykes set to work making a stack of American
pancakes for Piat. Piat watched the big man cook. Dykes
laid everything he needed out on the counter with military
precision and cleaned his dishes as they were made,
every movement planned and executed with precision. It
was not Piat's method of cooking by a long shot, and Piat
wondered what the man was like as a husband or a father.
Rigid? Authoritarian?

McLean drank coffee and read the Oban paper.

“I thought we'd have a go today,” Piat said.

Dykes's back indicated a shrug. He flipped a pancake.
“Thought we were doing the moving at night.”

Piat glanced at McLean. “No one drives down that road.
No one much, anyway. I thought we'd take turns watching
and climbing.”

McLean turned a page in the paper. “Mind if I smoke?”
he asked.

Piat shook his head. McLean began stuffing his pipe.
Dykes whirled and delivered a plate of pancakes with a
flourish. “Better than sittin' here all day,” he said as the
first pancake disappeared into Piat. He glared at McLean.
“Smoking an' food don't go together.”

The first trip was the worst. Piat climbed with McLean,
wearing two tanks as a pack, while McLean carried the
frame of the generator and Dykes watched the road. The
rain, though light, had soaked the turf under the grass, and
every step was like walking in a marsh. The higher they
got on the slope of the caldera, the heavier the tanks were
on Piat's back, the straps cutting into his shoulders, the tops
of his thighs reliving every effort of the last seventy-two
hours.

McLean didn't like it any better, but his response was
humor, some of it dark, a lot of it funny. McLean had no
notion of a race to the top, however. He stopped twice to
smoke, and once, just at the rim, to admire the view. The
weight of the generator didn't seem to trouble him, nonetheless,
and Piat realized that the pauses had been for him.
McLean surprised him by being Canadian, not British, with
a wealth of outdoor experience in places whose names were
familiar but whose terrain was unknown—Northern Quebec,
various ice stations north of the Arctic Circle, the Middle
East and East Africa. He spoke easily of his career and past
postings—probably the result of having been a rescue diver
and not a special operations guy, Piat thought. He didn't
have to be cagey. By the time they built a hide on the loch,
Piat liked him. They stowed their loads and started back.

“You don't strike me as one of Dawg's hard men,” McLean
said.

Piat smiled. “No,” he said.

McLean turned and looked at him, then smiled. “Oh—
got it.” He was chuckling as he climbed down. “You're a
spook.”

“Mmm,” Piat said, noncommittally.

McLean raised an eyebrow. “What's the angle?” he asked.

Piat shrugged. “Angle?”

McLean pointed at the hide. “Dawg doesn't seem to care.
I do. I know people who dive crannogs. The stuff inside
them isn't worth a shit on the market.”

Piat shook his head. “Wrong. Northern Bronze Age is the
hottest stuff on the market. One piece—one decent piece—
will pay for this whole thing and some bonus money.”

McLean gave him a long, steady stare. Then he shrugged
and started down the hill.

Dykes and McLean took the next load, and Piat lay on the
grass and watched the road and the mountains, aware that
the landowner might just as easily come across the moorland
from the west on an ATV. He wanted to smoke. McLean's
pipe smoke was scratching at the door of his old addiction.

The two men got up the hill in a little more than half
the time Piat had taken with McLean, and they were back
sooner, too, but by the time they came back, Piat felt better.
He took the last two air tanks; Dykes took a pack full of
machine parts. McLean was to follow them with the last
load as soon as they were out of sight.

Piat's back still hurt, but his legs were surrendering to
the exercise. He was still trying to find a way to make small
talk with Dykes when he found that they were over the
top of the caldera and on their way to the hide.

“So pretty here, I'm 'mazed you're paying me to come,”
Dykes said with a big smile. His head was swiveling in all
directions, as if he was trying to get everything in a single
sweep. Then he pointed at the loch. “Got fish?”

Piat was sitting in a heap on the shingle, just breathing.
But he had carried his rod up snapped to the harness that
held the bottles, and he pushed himself to his feet.

“I'll show you,” he said. Still trying to control his
breathing.

He stayed on the shingle and cast a heavy red fly into
the mouth of the underwater vent. The second cast got a
swirl of movement and the third cast hooked a good brown
trout—possibly the same one he'd caught the last time,
possibly not. Piat landed the fish with care.

Dykes whistled. “I seen guys out west—Marine Mountain
Warfare School, you know it? Anyway, I watched 'em fly-
fish, and I thought, shit, I gotta learn to do that, it's slick.
But the stuff's all so frickin' expensive, and—”

Piat got the hook clear of the fish. “Shall I kill it? You
want to eat it?”

Dykes said, “Shit, yes!”

Piat whacked it in the head and moved along the shingle
to clean it. “It's not rocket science, Dawg. People are always
adding mysticism to it. Nothing to it. Hand-eye coordination
you got—the rest is just practice. And fishing is your
cover here, starting today.”

Dykes smiled from ear to ear. “You
sure
this ain't a vacation?”
Then he put the smile away. “Hey, Jack. About that
Howse guy. He's gonna talk.”

Piat smiled. “I expect he will.”

Dykes nodded, having confirmed something. “So you got
that covered.”

“Unless he talks to the cops. I don't have
that
covered.”
Piat tossed another cast into the vent. “Your friend McLean
wanted to know the angle. I don't know him. I know you.
So here's the angle.”

“I'm all ears,” Dykes said.

“Conditions are pretty much ideal for a lesson, Dawg.
Nothing to hit on the back cast, fish to catch in front. Take
the rod.”

Dykes hesitated, an odd look on his face. Embarrassment.
Fear. “My spin rig'll come up with Tank,” he said defensively.

Piat forced the cork grip into his hand. “Dawg. It won't
bite. The line's on the water. When you want to re-cast,
just pick it up and flick it again. Never mind—you've got
a fish on.” Without changing his tone, he said, “I doubt
you'll find anything in the water here, Dawg. But that's
not a problem. I'm going to supply a few artifacts.”