Chapter 35

35

To the northwest above the town, the Beckford Reservoir was a nine-billion-gallon, two-mile square basin with a hundred-thirty-foot-high spillway dam that emptied out into the Farmington River.

Ten minutes after we left The Forge, we pulled up on the driveway of the reservoir's access road and stopped twenty feet before its rolling fence gate.

Its padlocked rolling fence gate.

I got out of the truck. To the right of the fence where the edge of a forest started was a small rise that I scrambled up, and I squatted down in the pine needles and looked around. A towering pine stood close to the edge where the fence ended but the gap between was just about enough to get the truck through.

I thought I could get the truck up the rise without flipping it. At least maybe.

But what would happen then? I thought, tapping my chin as I looked at the lakeside access road beyond the chain link.

The water company had to have security cameras especially by the spillway bridge. I remembered there was a small building there that may have housed equipment. Then there was another bit of access road and a second fence that I wasn't sure we'd be able to drive around.

"Screw it," I mumbled as I came back for the truck. "Have to take the chance."

Colleen hopped out of the cab as I took out the Leatherman tool on my key chain and knelt to unscrew the license plates on my truck.

"We're doing this?"

"Yep," I said as I got off the first screw.

"Mike, I can't begin to thank you for all this. Throwing you in the middle of this out of the blue," she said as she knelt, shining the flashlight of her phone onto the license plate to help.

"Nothing to thank me for yet," I said as I got the tag off and stood and pushed in the side mirrors.

"We're not out of the woods—or even in them—yet," I said.

"Are you sure about this?" Jodi said as Colleen and I got back in.

I swung the headlights and us off the asphalt and onto the piney slope in a skidding lurch.

Not even a little , I thought.

But I was right. I just cleared the fence by a hair and then came down the incline and bumped hard back onto the blacktop on the fence's other side.

"One down, one to go," I said as I gave it some gas.

I switched off the headlights as I gunned it. On our left the beautiful vast reservoir was as still as a pane of smoked glass. The access road arced in a long reverse C around the edge of it with the middle part of it being the spillway bridge itself.

As we came past the little bridge house, I immediately spotted the security camera on it.

We got onto the other side of the spillway and another couple of hundred feet up, I slowed as I saw we had a problem.

"Dammit," I said.

"No," Colleen said as we arrived at the closed gate.

It wasn't just the locked gate. With the stone wall of the ridge on the right and the water on the left, there was no way to drive around this one.

"What if we left the truck and walked out? The road's right there," Colleen said.

"No," I said. "That wouldn't work. We'd get picked up as soon as they found the truck. And they may have already seen it. We passed a camera on the spillway bridge back there."

"C'mon, Mike. We need to do something. Let's leave the truck. We'll hide in the woods or something," Colleen tried again.

I thought about that. If I were on my own, I'd already be on foot, completely in the wind. But with the SEALs, I'd had the privilege of being personally trained by an old man who had founded the notorious LRRP Recondo school in Vietnam. Put to the test, no one would find me with all the bush tricks I'd been taught. Not in this kind of forest cover. Not even Rambo himself.

Well, maybe Rambo. Or Colonel Trautman. But they were about it.

But I wasn't alone, was I?

I looked at Jodi behind me, then back at Colleen.

Call me crazy, but my lady friends didn't look like they'd take to sleeping in the mud and brunching on bark moss and swamp water too well.

"So, what are we going to do now?" Colleen said as I did a backward K-turn.

"We go back to town," I said. "There's still a heck of a lot of haystack for these clowns to find the needle in. The ball's still in our court. Time to go back and be patient and see what they do next."

"What they're going to do next won't be good," Jodi said quietly from the back seat as we passed over the top of the spillway.

I looked at her in the rearview. Then out over the expanse of moonlit water.

"I guess we'll just have to see about that, now won't we," I said.