MacAvity's Burning. Dan H. McLachlan
scab lands, and sitting on a large valley of sand and sage between a wall of basalt rock and a sweeping horizon was a circle of single-wide manufactured homes made up of nearly forty units. And in the center was a fifty foot perfectly square building that was obviously made of prefabbed units the same size as the homes, and all buttoned together. It was a typical military or North Slope instant compound. An instant village. Cheap and portable.
We were silent.
Finally Billy said, “That, my friends, is home to over 150 members of the rogue Sons of Tuanetar, the 666th Lightfoot Militia, and that compound you’re seeing is fifteen miles north of nowhere, an abandoned railroad track and a tiny ranching town called Saddle Rock, Washington.”
He let that sink in.
“And guess what, Butte?” he added. “They’re probitionists to boot.”
“And,” Bruun added, “remember, they’re neo-Nazi and very dangerous. I know that because we suspect they employ arson and evangelistic cleansing.”
“Any proof of that?” Butte asked.
“Only my suspicions. My hunch is based on the three unsolved cases of missing persons in the area. One was a long haired college kid hitching home to Seattle for Christmas. Another was a young botanist out by himself doing studies for his PhD on the flora of the Columbia Basin Eco System. And a third was an elderly woman who had pulled over to fix a flat on her classic VW bus.”
He paused.
“What strikes me is that these three all had one thing in common...”
“They were Liberals?” I said.
“Exactly.”
Chapter Six
Bruun drove Butte and Hammersmith back to Ryback an hour later, after we had gone over the same material one more time. But the results remained the same. Basically, all we could determine was that there was a religious sort of compound set up in temporary single wides in the Columbia River Basin, and that they were a militant rogue group from the Saulite Lutheran faith with Finnish ties. Period.
But establishing a connection between them and our own Lutheran minister’s murder or the destruction and attempted murders of MacAvity and Shiela was pure conjecture based on coincidence. There wasn’t even any proof that these so-called Sons of Tuonetar had killed three people that got too close to their compound. Much less establishing that the motive was that the victims all had Liberal leanings. For all we knew, all three of the victims might have been conservative Lutherans and were killed because they lacked a sense of humor...which I pointed out might have been reason enough.
It was that last comment of mine that convinced Hammersmith it was time to be getting back. Apparently he may have thought the Irish whiskey was getting the better of me.
After they left, Billy took out his Droid Razr and called his pilot and told him to get the Cessna ready for a 6am departure. He slid the phone back into its hip case and poured us another round, our third, and settled back into the upholstery like a happy Buddha.
“Is this a smoking room, “Smoke asked.
“This is a suite,” Billy pointed out. “It goes for over a grand a night...which means it’s any kind of room we want it to be.”
“Roger that.”
Smoke took out one of his thin cigarillos and held it over his Zippo lighter which had a Harrier jet etched into its side. Flying Harriers had been his specialty.
We watched him perform his ritual of striking the flint and keeping the tobacco just above but not touching the flame. Unlike most foul inexpensive cigars, Smoke’s were black market Cubans and smelled sweet and rich. I had always enjoyed my doses of his second-hand carcinogens.
“You two ever hear of the Beagle Boys?” Billy said out of nowhere.
I nodded. “Yeah. As a kid I had all the Uncle Scrooge comics. Those Beagle Boys were a real torment.”
“I don’t think that’s the same guys Billy’s talking about,” Smoke said. He blew a stream of smoke at the ceiling.
“Right,” Billy said. “They are the Finnish equivalent of our SWAT teams. There are less than a hundred of them in all of Finland, and they form a ‘Bear Team’ that’s called a Karhu Team, or colloquially, the ‘Beagle Boys.’ They are extremely efficient. Kinda like the Israeli Massad in the Middle East.”
“My, you have been doing your homework,” Smoke said.
Billy ignored him.
“So they are part of and yet independent from the Minister of Interior’s Finnish Security Intelligence Service or what they call SUPO, Suojelupoliisi Skyddspolisen. Which, like most Finnish words, is seriously impossible to spell. Thus SUPO, thankfully.”
He leaned forward and said softly, “The reason this seems important to me--now that I have stumbled onto these Tuonetars--is that a sometimes associate of mine, a guy called Skye Zipperer, is a retired Beagle Boy who, after retirement, followed his American wife to settle in the US. They landed just west of Boise and bought a brick bungalow on the outskirts of Caldwell overlooking the Snake River.”
Billy winked.
“And when it comes to clandestine work, he’s a skilled craftsman.”
“So,” he concluded, “Do we gentlemen feel it would be worthy of me to venture forth tomorrow and pay the good man a visit?”
Smoke got to his feet and walked over to the windows, pushed aside the patio door and stepped out onto the suite’s veranda. He stood at the railing, looked down at the Clearwater, then turned back to face us with a grin.”
“You’d be a fool not to,” he said.”
Billy nodded, “Sounds perfect,” adding, “but I haven’t slept since three this morning. If you gentlemen will excuse me, I’m going to take a nap before Robbie gets back from his geriatric deliveries.”
Smoke and I let ourselves out , boarded his GMC land jet, and started back up the grade.
“Well,” Smoke finally said. “That was a mildly interesting gathering, but did you learn anything of value? I sure didn’t.”
“Sure you did. You learned what Redbreast Irish Whiskey can do to the frontal lobes, and that a person can smoke in a thousand dollar suite of rooms. What more do you want?”
“There is that,” Smoke conceded. He dropped into third and screamed past an empty grain truck pulling the grade. “And, I guess, we know that there exists some Lutheran Finns that are up to something, and it may involve Ryback.”
“Exactly. And if there is anything to it, Billy will find out what it is.”
“And,” Smoke added, “his Beagle Boy will torch their compound and enslave their women.”
I laughed.
“So”, I said, “let’s see what’s happening at the fire scene. See if there’s anything we can do to help.”
Smoke nodded and kicked the speed up a notch. We were now flying over the rolling harvest land at a pleasant ninety miles an hour--the modified V-8 humming along and grinning like a dog with it’s head out the side window.
Chapter Seven
It was one o’clock by the time Smoke and I pulled into Ryback. Pickups, farm trucks, ATVs and cars lined the streets under the shade trees. It looked like the entire Bench had come in--and it had.
We pulled up to my barn and parked in the shade of the lilac trees. Parking there risked getting bird droppings on the truck’s hood, but, of course, I didn’t say anything.
Smoke was silent. He sat without getting out and looked back at the town in the rear view mirror.
I waited.
“Okay,”