All three concentrated on lowering lifesign, sitting back to back in a little cross-legged circle. The horses would give off no more lifesign than a group of deer; there was enough wildlife in the woods to confuse it even if it passed close, as long as they were able to mask their minds properly. As he quieted his mind and centered his breathing, Valentine found he could feel the Reaper atop the hill to the west. Minutes passed, then an hour, and the Reaper moved off to the west as clammy sweat trickled down Valentine's back.
"That was a little too close," Valentine said to his fellow Wolves. "Anyone want to move camp, just in case it circles around the hill?"
"Fine idea," Harper agreed. "I could walk all night anyway after that."
They decided to move south, treating the Reaper as a tornado that you can best dodge by moving at right angles to its path. As Harper readied the horses and Gonzalez hid evidence of their camp, Valentine cautiously walked up Tower Hill, rifle at the ready. He read the trail left by heavy bootprints. The Reaper had paused for an hour on the overlook. Valentine wondered why. After a word to Harper, he found an unobstructed knoll above the stage and scanned what parts of the horizon he could.
Two or three miles to the southeast, flame lit the clouded night. A pair of buildings seemed to be ablaze behind a screen of trees; he could make out a small grain silo lit by the red-yellow glow. Perhaps the Hood had a better view from the western crown of Tower Hill, but it was unlike a Reaper to just stand and watch a fire for the drama of it. And the blaze seemed unnaturally bright. Valentine wished the winds were favorable enough for him to smell the smoke.
He rejoined Gonzalez and Harper.
"There's a good-size fire," Valentine explained. "I think a barn or a house is going up. You want to check it out? It's on this side of the river, so we can get to it easy."
"Do we want to be there?" Harper asked. "If it's someone's house, neighbors will be coming from all over. It would be just like a Hood to pick someone off in the confusion."
"I thought we were headed south," Gonzalez said.
"Yes, eventually. But I think this Reaper watched what was going on there for a while, for whatever reason. It's not like them to just look at something for the sake of the view. I think it's worth checking out."
Harper shrugged. "It's your party. I don't mind watching a building burn. But I don't like the idea of making a decision 'cause of a prediction about a Reaper's behavior. Sounds like a good way to end up drained."
"It'll be okay, as long as the lieutenant's radar is working," Gonzalez suggested.
"Hope so," Harper said. "Let's get there before the patrols wake up."
They moved through the night, leading their horses. Gonzalez walked out ahead, picking the path, followed by Valentine and Harper, each taking two horses.
As they drew close to the fire, Valentine decided the burning buildings were just another abandoned farm in a region where two out of three homesteads were empty. New forests stood in fields that had once belonged to cows.
The Wolves tied up the horses near a shallow seasonal streambed, and the horses drank from runoff puddles scattered among the rocks. They could see the flames flickering through the thin-skinned trunks of scrub beech and young oaks. They crept up to within fifty feet of the dying fire. What was left of four buildings, one obviously a barn, had already collapsed into burning debris. Without the daily rains of the past week, the conflagration would have turned into a forest fire.
Harper spat cotton. "Okay, Lieutenant, here's your fire. What now?"
"No family, no neighbors," Valentine observed. "Must have been empty. These fields sure don't look used. I haven't seen anything but a few old fence posts around with the wire stripped off. So why's it burning?"
"Maybe a patrol came through, livened up a quiet night with a little arson," Harper mused. "That east-west road we crossed yesterday by the river's got to be up there somewhere."
"Could be," Valentine agreed. "If so, they used a lot of starter. You can smell it from here, kind of like gasoline."
Gonzalez and Harper sniffed. "Reminds me a little of napalm," Harper said. "The Grogs used it at Cedar Creek. They had an old fire truck filled with it. Doused some of the buildings our guys were holed up in and then lit it."
"I'd like to take another look around in daylight," Valentine said. "We can wait a few more hours before moving on. Let's get the horses and find a safe spot to sleep."
Valentine could tell from Harper's expression that he thought getting some rest was the first sensible plan out of his superior's mouth all evening.
Daylight inspection of the ruins told the end of the story but not the beginning. While Gonzalez squatted in cover along the road, ready to run like a jackrabbit back to the fire scene at the first sign of a patrol, only a livestock-laden tractor-trailer passed along the old highway, crawling east at a safe fifteen miles an hour along the potholed road.
"This makes no sense," Valentine said to a disinterested Harper. "We've got four burning buildings, or three buildings and a shed, I guess. But what are those other three burned spots?"
Valentine indicated the blackened brush, circles of fire twelve to thirty feet in diameter, scattered around the buildings on what had once been lawn and garden.
"Weird thing number two. Look how the house is wrecked. The frame's been scattered all to hell, but only westward. Like a bunch of dynamite was set off on the east side of it."
Harper shrugged. "Maybe the Quislings were training with demolitions or something."
"Then where's the crater? And the foundation is in good shape; those cinder blocks would be gone if someone put a charge there. And look at those two saplings. They're both broken off three feet up, but the tops are lying toward the house. An explosion wouldn't do that. Weird thing number three. That hole dug in the ground by the barn."
The men walked over to the ruins of the old barn, next to the blackened column of the still-standing silo. A triangular furrow, three feet long and almost two feet deep, was gouged into the ground; a dug-up divot of earth and grass lay nine feet away, in the direction of the barn. "What did this?" asked Valentine. "The patrols brought out a backhoe? This was dug out in one clean scoop."