Heat Lightning

been given.
    He got an answer: “Paul Queenen.”
    “Paul, this is Virgil Flowers. Where are you guys?”
    “Fifteen, twenty minutes south of town on 71,” Queenen said.
    “Stay on 71 until you get to Country Club Road.”
     
 
VIRGIL GAVE THEM instructions on getting in and then Raines took the three of them to an electronics room to look at the security system. “We got some deer around, so we keep the audio alarms off most the time, but I’ve got them set to beep us tonight. . . .”
    Knox had a dozen video cameras set out in the woods, feeding views into three small black-and-white monitors, all of which were a blank gray. “When you hear an alarm, you get a beep and an LED flashes on the area panel,” Raines said. He touched a ten-inch-long metal strip with a series of dark-red LEDs in numbered boxes. Above the LED strip was a map of Knox’s property, divided into numbered zones that corresponded to the LEDs. “When you get a flash, you can punch up the monitor and get a view of the area . . . you almost always see a deer, though we’ve had bears going through. Sometimes you don’t see anything because they’re out of range of the camera.”
    “But in the dark like this . . .”
    “The cameras see into the infrared, and there are infrared lights mounted with the cameras,” Raines said. He reached over to another numbered panel, full of keyboard-style numbered buttons, and tapped On. One of the monitors flickered and a black-and-white image came up: trees, in harsh outline.
    “You’ll notice that there isn’t as much brush as you’d expect—Carl keeps it trimmed out pretty good. The trees are bigger than you’d expect, because he has them thinned. He wants it to look sorta normal, but when you get into it, you can see a lot further than if it was just untouched woods.”
    “How does it pick up movement?” Bunch asked. “Radar?”
    “They’re dual-mode—microwave and infrared to pick up body heat.”
    Raines had worked through a defensive setup. “Whoever’s covering the system has to know where our guys are at. You don’t want to be turning on the lights if you don’t have to, because you’ve got your own guys moving around. If somebody’s coming in with high-end night-vision goggles, some of those can see into the infrared. It’d be like turning on a floodlight for them.”
    Virgil looked at his watch. “I don’t think they’ll get here until daylight anyway,” he said. “Not unless they flew, and then they’d still have to drive.”
    They got a beep then, and Raines switched one of the monitor views, and they saw a fuzzy heat-blob moving across the screen. “It’s small—probably a doe,” he said. He flicked on the infrared lights and they saw the doe, wandering undisturbed through the trees.
    “Hell of a system,” Virgil said.
     
 
TWO OR THREE minutes later, as they were headed back to the living room, the security system beeped again and they went back to look at the monitors. “Car coming in,” Raines said. He touched one of the monitors and they saw a truck coming toward them, down the driveway.
    “Bemidji,” Bunch said.
    “We oughta put the trucks in the garage—too many of them, they’ll get worried. If they spot them,” Jarlait said.
     
 
THE THREE AGENTS from Bemidji—Paul Queenen, Chuck Whiting, Larry McDonald—brought assault rifles, armor, and radios. With the handsets that Virgil already had, there’d be enough for everyone. They gathered in Knox’s den, where he had a Macintosh computer with a thirty-inch video display, and Virgil called up Google Earth and put a satellite view of Knox’s property on the screen.
    “Overall, I see two possibilities,” Virgil said, touching the screen. “First, they come in by water, which wouldn’t surprise me if they’ve looked at this picture, and they probably have. They could grab a boat, or bring one—a canoe or a jon boat—throw it in the water, and drift right along the shore. They’d probably come in from the south, but they could come in from either direction, so we have to watch both. The second possibility is that all they’ve got is a car, or a truck, and they come in from the highway . . . but they won’t want to park in the open, so they’ll have to ditch the truck here or here.”
    When he finished, one of the Bemidji agents said, “You know, there’re only two highways in here.” He tapped the screen. “If you put roadblocks here and here . . . they gotta hit them. If