A Time of Predators

Curt braked suddenly, seeing the padlocked wooden gate on the right-hand side, but then went on by. Two hundred yards beyond, the road swung right to the edge of the fall and a dusty view-area, well out of sight of the gate. Curt got out, went back afoot along the inside edge of the highway, where it was flanked by an immediate rise of bluff. On the ocean, the gate side of the road, was a steep fall covered with evergreens which effectively screened any glimpse of the ravine, cabin, or cove below. In the fog, this stretch of highway would be dangerous.

The gate bore a sign Private Road — No Trespassing. Curt went over quickly, ducked into the heavy cover beyond it. Deep ditches beside the steeply slanting drive would carry off water during the rains; on either side rose the wooded, brush-tangled sides of the ravine. A good place for a sniper with a rifle.

Curt descended in short rushes, even though he doubted if anyone would be at the cabin today. At the bottom, under cover of a large spruce tree, he waited for his heart to quit pounding. It didn’t. He grinned to himself; he had the wind up for sure. Well, he always had gone into combat scared green; it gave an edge to the reactions. He hoped.

He studied the cup which held the apparently deserted cabin. On Curt’s left, the Douglas fir and tideland spruce of the ravine thinned into a strip of heavy tangled shrubs and small trees, mainly wax myrtles, judging by their smooth gray bark and dark green glossy leaves. They fringed the base of the cliff nearly to the edge of the dunes, where they phased into coarse reeds. To his right, the conifer forest extended around beside the cabin.

Under cover of the myrtles, Curt worked his way left along the cliff base to the plant-topped dunes which shielded the narrow V of beach. Deserted. Beyond the mouth of the cove, Curt could see the foaming swells of the Pacific and the jumbled smoothness which marked the presence of a large kelp bed.

As a trap, the cup was a damned good one. The cliffs probably could be scaled — it even looked like a ledge about forty feet up which might allow one to get back to the ravine — and a good swimmer might be able to enter the cove from the next beach south, depending on the width of the headland. But the normal, unsuspecting man’s approach would be down the ravine, where a man in good cover with a rifle...

Curt dropped down on the beach, under cover of the dimes’ three-foot lip, worked his way up to the cabin. Yes, deserted. He prowled about for another ten minutes, looking in uncurtained windows, checking the position of the electric fuse box. Then he went back up the drive, over the gate, and walked to his car. Leaning against the fender of the VW, he checked the width of the spine of rock which formed the left-hand side of the cove he just had left, and the right-hand side of the beach below the view-area. A man could probably scramble down to the water here; equipped with wet suit, snorkle, fins and face mask, he then could swim around to the cove. Curt, after all, had done some amphib operational training in S.A.S., rubber rafts and all that lot.

But it would be down the gravel for him tomorrow night, he supposed. Risky, but...

Unless he had a second man to cover him.

Curt suddenly felt better. He probably could hire Archie Matthews to — but wait a minute. Matthews, with a license to protect and knowing Curt planned a direct assault on the gang if the predators were there, probably would refuse. But what about Floyd Preston? Preston, as an old clandestine operation teacher, would do it for a lark.

Driving back past the gate, he didn’t see the fresh tire tracks of Rick’s Triumph, overlaid on his own footprints in the dust beside the road. Rick and Debbie had missed him by a bare five minutes.

“I think it’s a setup,” said Preston.

Curt had just spent half an hour detailing the physical layout by the cabin. “I can’t be sure, Floyd, that’s the hell of it. If I go down there tomorrow night, I might find Debbie waiting there alone—”

“—or you might find a bullet in your spine when you get halfway down the road. A guy in the woods, with a good rifle—”

“Not if I’m covered by a second man,” said Curt.

Preston ignored the suggestion. In tightly pegged gray slacks and form-fitting T-shirt clinging to his lithe, tremendously muscular torso, he looked like every boy’s dream of Tarzan.

“Don’t go, Curt,” he said. “Or if you do, take that Sergeant Worden with you.”

“Hell, Floyd,” Curt burst out, “he’s already told me where the law stands on this: since there’s nothing they can do, I’d better not do anything on my own or I’ll be in trouble. No, all we need is you and me. You can act as my cover, to see I’m not shot in the back, and—” He faltered, for Preston’s Indian-featured face wore an oddly startled expression, as if realizing what he was about to say was a shock to himself.

“Well, you see, Curt, I couldn’t go down there with you.”