Running Dark (18 page)

25

THE GARDEN PENINSULA: FIRST RECON, FEBRUARY 15, 1976

He needed not just to out-rat the rats, but to temporarily become one.

The outside door of the fake pump house was jammed by snow and ice, but Service managed to wedge it open with a shoulder. He was glad to be free of the house, despite it being warm and comfortable. Miss Tillie had followed him around all day, growling and snarling and making various sounds, none of which sounded particularly amicable. He had said the word
gentle
to her so many times, it was stuck in his mind like what Germans called an earworm.

When he got up to have breakfast with Lasurm, he had reviewed the list of names she had provided at the last meeting, and sat with her and his plat books making pencil marks by the homes and hangouts of the Garden rats. Before coming to the Garden he had contacted Lansing and gotten the registration numbers for snowmobiles, boats, and wheeled vehicles for the people on the list. If he encountered them during his travels, he would have some notion of whom he might be dealing with.

The weather had improved, but not significantly. The temperature had gotten up to eight during the day, and snow continued to fall, but the sun had not come out to melt and form a thin surface crust on the snow.

Lasurm would not be home for an hour. They agreed last night that she should maintain her regular routine during his time with her. It was 5:30
p.m.
when he crawled out of the well house, cinched up the ruck he had carried in his equipment bag, and began his trek northward. He intended to skirt the edge of Burn't Bluff going north and veer inland toward the village of Garden, coming up on it from the south and inland. Lasurm said a lot of the troublemakers hung out at Roadie's Bar at night—the same place where he had been attacked by rock throwers.

The village was ten miles north of her place, and at his normal walking pace he could do ten-minute miles almost endlessly; but there was fifteen inches of fresh snow and deeper drifts, unfamiliar rolling terrain, fences and roads to cross. He would have to make numerous stops to make sure he was not seen. Because of all this, he decided to figure on a conservative rate of thirty minutes per mile. This meant he would need five hours to get to the village and five hours to get back. If he gave himself two hours in the village itself, he could still be comfortably back by zero five thirty, well before morning twilight. If something held him up in the village, there was high ground east of South River Bay, and no well-traveled roads for almost a square mile. Lasurm had shown him where an abandoned sawmill was located, and if he ran out of time and night, this would be his layover destination for the next day.

Knowing how far he had to walk and the pace he wanted to maintain, he wore long johns under his snowmobile suit and carried the rest of his layers in his ruck to put on when he stopped for breaks.

Once clear of Lasurm's tunnel, he crawled and walked northward through the slash for the first mile before aiming northeast to skirt Sand Bay, his mind lost in thought, and relying on his instincts to watch for any potential contact with others. Law enforcement was being used as an instrument in a state plan to eliminate commercial fishing in Lake Michigan in favor of sportfishermen and their wallets. Most of the conservation officers risking their asses in the Garden probably didn't have a clue about what was really going on, and this thought put him in a nasty mood. To counter his temper, he kept repeating the goals of his mission: identify the rat leaders and their followers; determine how and where they stage their operations; observe their landside tactics, where they meet, and how they behave. Overall: observe and learn. Most of all, do not act and do not enforce—observe only. He and Tree had gone on many missions in Vietnam that were similar to this. More often than not they went into the jungle to find and watch the enemy, not to kill them.
This is
not
Vietnam,
he reminded himself as he pushed through the deep snow.
Your Vietnam was eight years ago. Your Vietnam is history—finished
.

South of Fayette he angled through the woods east of the Port Bar and increased his walking speed, the wind hard out of the north. Initially his eyes had been filled with tears from the wind, but now that was finished. His balaclava seemed to protect his face as he walked on, not dwelling on the conditions. His job kept him outside year-round, making the weather largely irrelevant.

Why the hell did he keep thinking about Vietnam? He remembered meeting an air force master sergeant at the NCO club at Danang one night. The KC-135 boom operator had been in the Strategic Air Command during the Cuban missile crisis, and had told him how all of SAC's bomber and tanker crews had been briefed before being put on the highest alert level. They were told that President Kennedy was going to give the Soviets an ultimatum: Get your missiles out, or we'll take them out. Every airman understood that such an attack could lead to a nuclear exchange, but back then, every fighting man understood the stakes and his duty. The boomer couldn't understand how one president could trust fighting men with such a secret, while the troops being killed in Vietnam knew little or nothing about what the national intent was. They were losing the war through attrition and lack of national will.

The mess in the Garden felt too much like Vietnam, Service decided. Lansing was not leveling with the troops on the ground about what their actual objectives were, and as a result, conservation officers were left trying to enforce a toothless law for goals that might be specious at best. Lasurm had explained the economics of sportfishing versus commercial fishing, and Fahey had confirmed this in Lansing, which left him feeling somewhere between anxious and ambivalent.

The rats were waging a guerrilla war—an insurgency for personal economic reasons. Yes, insurgency was the right term, he thought as he walked north. The rats were insurgents, pure and simple, conducting what his old commander Major Teddy Gates called a low-intensity conflict. Gates had taught his marines how to think about—and, more importantly, how to think
like
—the enemy. As a result, they had enjoyed many more successes than failures compared to other American units fighting against NVA troops. Insurgents in Vietnam, he remembered, attacked police in small units, using speed, surprise, and terrain to shock the government and force them to concentrate their troops and expend more resources. The more the government did this, the more impotent it looked.

Nobody was getting killed in the Garden, he knew, but Lasurm made it clear that intimidation of residents surely was taking place. Evidence: In an area with almost one thousand people, you might expect more than one person to step forward and complain, but so far only Lasurm had shown the requisite gumption, which reinforced how effective intimidation was in keeping the locals in line for the rats. Lasurm's actual motivation remained in doubt. She had given him reasons, which sounded good but didn't bite. And how did her daughter fit into this? The woman was in jail, Odd Hegstrom was her lawyer, and Lasurm denied that her motives grew out of her daughter's situation. Replaying this information, he concluded that the less contact he had with Lasurm, the better for both of them.

The situation here was perplexing. The DNR and police authorities had so far reacted classically: COs no longer conducted solo patrols. Delta County deputies and the Troops made no routine patrols at all, and came into the Garden only when there was a reported emergency or a formal complaint. Even in these circumstances they tended to drag their feet in responding. In essence, the lawless had gained control of the peninsula, and Service had seen firsthand their harassment tactics.

The longer he considered all the angles, the more he was certain that this was a sort of domestic Vietnam; if someone didn't get the insurgents on their heels—and soon—they would continue to increase their confidence, and eventually somebody would get killed. This realization was a real-life Yogism of déjà vu all over again, and the more he thought about it, the angrier he got—not with the sort of white-hot anger that made him want to strike out immediately and blindly, but with the blue rage that Teddy Gates had taught them: To get the enemy off your back, put the bastards on their heels.

His old commanding officer used to say, “Don't get mad: Get even.” Gates was an adherent of Sun Tzu, the Chinese general who was the first to codify rules of warfare around 500
b.c.
, and whose work was unknown in Europe until just prior to the French Revolution. Sun Tzu's lessons were based on having professional soldiers, good leadership, and common sense. As he walked, Service began to think about the lessons Teddy Gates and Sun Tzu had taught.

The closer he got to the town, the more certain he was that while the DNR needed accurate, timely intelligence, it also needed to treat this as the kind of conflict it had become. Their primary target should be the mind of the enemy leader. Lasurm said Pete Peletier was the top rat. If true, who was he, and what was his hold over the others? You couldn't attack the mind of a leader unless you had some idea of who you were dealing with. Don't wallow in doubt, he told himself as he marched on.

Less than a mile from the village Service stopped walking, found cover in a small aspen stand, and lit a cigarette. He got out a small iron grate he carried in his pack, pried the lid off a Sterno can, placed it under the grill, and lit the wick. He poured tea from a thermos borrowed from Lasurm into a cup and set it on the grill over the tiny flame. His plan, he realized, had been no plan at all; it was Attalienti's wish list. The trick had been to get into the Garden undetected, which he had done. Now what? Fulfill the wish list and split? No, he told himself. Not enough. You have to rethink the deal, top to bottom. Initially, he was disgusted by his shortsightedness, but this mood quickly shifted to a certainty that his gut was right: He was here for two weeks, and when it came time to withdraw, he somehow needed to leave confusion and mistrust among the rats about their leader. At the moment he was not sure how to accomplish what he wanted, but he had the germ of some ideas to ruminate on during the hike back to Lasurm's. Reconnaissance of the village would have to wait.

En route he detoured to the Port Bar, which was just outside the south gate of Fayette State Park, and stopped long enough to write down the registration numbers of snowmobiles, and descriptions and license numbers of trucks and automobiles parked around the bar.

As he headed into the final two and a half miles to the house, two things were clear in his mind. First, if Pete Peletier was the actual rat leader, his followers needed to begin to doubt him and wonder if he was representing them, or using them for his own ends. Second, to do the things he needed to do, he needed not just to out-rat the rats, but to temporarily become one.

“You aren't there to act,” Attalienti had told him. But Attalienti wasn't here, and his views were based on his place in the DNR's shameful history here. No, Attalienti was wrong; he couldn't enforce the law here, but he could do more than just gather information. The bastards here needed to feel the isolation and uncertainty that the marines had felt in Vietnam.

When Cecilia Lasurm came down for breakfast, coffee was already brewing and Service was making eggs and toast. “Good morning,” she greeted him with a quizzical look.

“There's a list of things I need,” he said, placing a plate of scrambled eggs in front of her.

She studied the note he had left on the table and looked up at him. “Five vise grips, two screwdrivers, a funnel, eight rolls of duct tape, twenty pounds of sugar in two-pound bags, green spray paint, ten pounds of small potatoes . . . What in the world is going on?”

“You'd best shop in Escanaba,” he said, placing two hundred-dollar bills in front of her. “I'm trying to think like a Chinaman,” he whispered.

“At large or institutionalized?” she asked, making him laugh.

26

GARDEN PENINSULA, FEBRUARY 21, 1976

“All this turns you on—just like the rats.”

For three consecutive nights he had explored the edges of roads and reconnoitered the layout around the houses of the rats on his list. Along the way he found five road-killed deer, cut out their hearts, and impaled them on some sticks he cut. They were frozen so there was no blood trail to worry about. They were now stockpiled inside the door of the pump house.

Tonight he had watched the Port Bar and its cheesy lighthouse facade. Five snowmobiles and two trucks on his list were parked nearby. Through frosted glass he saw people moving around inside. Once a man came out a side door and pissed in the snow, laughing like he had just cinched an Olympic gold medal.

When it was quiet Service poured a pound of sugar into the gas tanks of the snowmobiles. Sugar would take an hour or more to work, but then the machines would die and be unstartable until the owners pulled the carburetors, gas tanks, and fuel lines, and flushed everything. He slithered underneath the truck, used a vise grip to pinch off the fuel line near the gas tank, where it went from metal to rubber, and used duct tape to fasten the vise grip to the chassis. No matter what the driver did, the engine would not start with the line crimped, and the cause could not be discovered until somebody got underneath with a light.

Each night he carefully varied his routes, and tonight when he returned to Lasurm's, they drank coffee in silence. He showered and went to bed, only to be awakened from deep sleep by a heavy weight flopping on the end of the bed. He pulled the pillow off his head and saw Miss Tillie at his feet. She curled her lips when she saw him, and he tried to go back to sleep, telling himself not to move.

“Stop terrorizing the poor man,” Cecilia Lasurm chided the dog, which immediately jumped off the bed. Service heard the animal's claws and feet on the wood floors and he rolled over.

“What time is it?” he asked sleepily.

“Noonish,” she said. “You've got everybody spooked,” she said. “And angry.”

When he didn't respond, she added, “I'm on my way to a home visit. I'll be back early.”

“Did they notice?” he asked.

“Notice what?”

“That Peletier's truck was left alone.”

She shot him a quizzical look and walked out, the rubber tip of her crutch squeaking against the stairs as she descended.

During a dinner of bowtie pasta and meatballs, Lasurm poured red wine for herself and looked at him. “You're addicted to risk,” she said. “If there was no risk, you wouldn't be a cop. All this turns you on—just like the rats.”

He loaded his fork with pasta and shrugged. She was probably right, but he doubted she truly understood the difference between calculated and spontaneous risk. What he was doing now was calculated, he told himself.

“Is work all you think about?” she asked, dropping her fork onto her plate.

It suddenly felt like he was talking to Bathsheba, and the thought jarred him. He rinsed his plate in the sink, left it, and went into the tunnel to get ready for the night. Jesus, what was
her
problem?