Merlin, Puzzle, Riddle moved in the same instant, not in a play mood this time, but with urgency.
As Cammy reached the living room, Grady threw open the front door and stepped outside.
She caught up with him on the porch. Puzzle and Riddle sat on the steps in their prairie-dog mode. Merlin stood in the yard.
To the east, where Cracker’s Drive met the state road, a large helicopter descended.
At an altitude of less than a hundred feet, another chopper continued uphill, following the county road. As it approached, Cammy realized the aircraft was even bigger than she first thought, the largest helicopter she had ever seen close up.
The rotors were loud, but they also slammed concussion waves across the slope, and Cammy’s heart began to slam, too, harder and faster as the helicopter drew nearer.
Suddenly she decided that Puzzle and Riddle should not be out here, not in the open where they could be snatched up in an instant. They needed to be inside, behind closed doors, so the federal agents would need to go inside to get them.
To go inside, the feds needed a search warrant, didn’t they? They probably had one. They probably had a court order to blow up the house if they were in the mood for pyrotechnics.
Nevertheless, a closed door was at least some kind of barrier, a way to delay surrendering custody of the animals, however briefly.
Cammy moved onto the steps, between Puzzle and Riddle, pulled at them, tried to herd them onto the porch and inside, but they were transfixed by the incoming chopper.
Above the thunder of the immense rotors, she shouted, “Merlin!”
The wolfhound heard her, he looked back, he understood that she wanted him, and he loped across the lawn to the steps.
“Let’s go!” She shouted, “House!” which was one of his commands.
He bounded up the steps ahead of her. Although Puzzle and Riddle had not been interested in following her, they at once followed the dog, as she had hoped they would. The three scrambled into the house.
Cammy pulled the front door shut and returned to Grady’s side.
East of the house, the helicopter touched down in the meadow, just past the end of the deep front yard.
The rotor-slashed air shook the big paper birch at the northeast corner of the house. Cascades of golden leaves fluttered down upon the porch, the yard.
At the back of the enormous chopper’s main body, a bay door dropped, forming a ramp. Heavily armed, uniformed men hurried down the ramp, under the tail section. So many of them.
Standing on the front porch with Cammy, watching the crisis team arrive, Grady knew something must be wrong. The response seemed out of proportion to the threat, if indeed any threat existed.
The chopper looked like a new generation – or a modified version – of the Huey with which he was familiar. The dark-green fuselage did not bear any numbers or insignia, and there was no legend identifying the military service or federal agency to which it belonged. The craft sported only a two-by-three-foot painting of the United States flag aft of the pilot’s-cabin windows and before the side-entry sliding door.
The armed men who came down the tail ramp were dressed in black, like members of a SWAT team. Each had a sidearm in a swivel holster hung from his utility belt, and each carried what appeared from a distance to be a fully automatic carbine with an extended magazine. Some of them surely had been military at one time. None of them were military now; they were paramilitary agents of Homeland Security or of one bureau or another under its control.
Grady counted eleven. Ten of them tramped out of the meadow, heading down-slope and east on the county road, Cracker’s Drive, and the eleventh proceeded to the point where the road terminated and Grady’s driveway began.
If the chopper at the farther end of the road had been carrying as many, and if three were stationed at that intersection, eighteen were left to visit the other nine houses on Cracker’s Drive, coming in from both directions, to tell those residents what was happening and/or to confine them to their homes.
Immediately after the first eleven debarked, four more appeared, also dressed in black but without carbines. They worked in pairs, between them guiding large wheeled crates, about six feet by four by four, down the ramp and onto the meadow.
Rotor speed dropped precipitously on touchdown, and now the pilot cut the turbines. When the rotors stopped cycling, the quiet, though imperfect, seemed like a hush.
“I’m sick,” Cammy said.
He knew she didn’t mean physically ill. She meant heartsick.
If they had entertained any hope that, when all this had blown over, Puzzle and Riddle might remain in their care, that hope was swept away by the amount of manpower committed to this investigation.
“It’s not just about those two animals,” Grady said. “There’s something more we don’t know.”
“I had the same thought driving here earlier. Puzzle and Riddle are part of something bigger.”
The sound of powerful truck engines rose along the county road, and soon what appeared to be a customized Greyhound bus rolled into view. The unpainted, matte-finish stainless-steel exterior appeared satiny in the sun. It might have been a motor home, except that it lacked windows along its flank and its engine sounded far more powerful than that of the average private or commercial conveyance of similar size. The wraparound windshield was so heavily tinted that the driver could not be seen.
As the armed agent stationed at the end of the road began to direct the vehicle into Grady’s driveway, a second appeared behind it. As the first entered the driveway, which leveled out from the county route, and rolled past the house toward the garage and the workshop, a third appeared behind the second.
Eventually, the convoy consisted of four identical stainless-steel behemoths. They parked one behind the other, with a few feet between, nearly filling the driveway from end to end.
Referring to the vehicles as their engines were shut off one after the other, Cammy said, “Do they try to make them look ominous?”
“It’s probably just form following function,” Grady said.
“And what’s their function?”
“Damn if I know.”
The four men who had brought wheeled crates out of the transport helicopter were unrolling bales of flexible plastic gridwork across the yard. This material, when in place and locked, would form a solid base on soft ground.
Out of the east, fast and at a low altitude, shrieked a four-man helicopter. It banked to circle the property. Through the Plexiglas bubble, Grady saw the pilot and another man as they checked out the progress of the operation.
After two complete circuits, the chopper set down on the county road. One passenger, apparently the only one, got out of the craft. Pants billowing and suit coat flapping in the rotors’ downdraft, he hurried toward the house as the pilot at once took the helicopter up and arced toward the east, from which he had come.
The newcomer, his sandy hair in disarray, proceeded directly to the foot of the front-porch steps. His handsome but rubbery face was reminiscent of the face of any hero’s wisecracking best buddy in hundreds of movies, selling likability with every freckle, with ears slightly too large, with a minimal but endearing overbite, with blue eyes that were wide and clear and direct and twinkling more than a ballroom chandelier.
“Ah,