He had been back on the road, headed for his rented cabin, before the last of the sunlight was drained from the sky.

Now midnight had come and gone, and Kuhl could hear the engines of the false power company vehicles awakening as Ciras and Anton started them up and swung away into the darkness. At the door of the cabin, Lido greeted him, licking and sniffing his hand. Kuhl paused to scratch the dog under its muzzle, then strode forward through the foyer. He padded close behind him, treading softly for a creature of its immense size.

Kuhl’s bond with the Schutzhunds had been immediate and was strongest with the alpha.

He entered the living room, Lido at his heels. Four men sat waiting there in silence. On the carpeted floor, the two other shepherds peered up at him with their gleaming, attentive black eyes.

Kuhl looked around at his men.

“Let’s have one of you put up some coffee,” he said. “I want to review tomorrow’s action in detail before we rest.”

Startled awake by the sound of his own prolonged adenoidal snore, Rob Howell lifted his chin off his pillow and realized the baseball game he’d been watching on TV had been replaced by an infomercial.

Rob glanced at his alarm clock in the flickering glow of the set. It was almost two o’clock in the morning. Wonderful, he thought. The Seattle Mariners and Oakland A’s in a match that might very well decide which team won the hotly contested AL West playoff slot, and he’d slipped into dreamland with the score tied at the bottom of the seventh. If that wasn’t evidence of a man suffering from acute overwork, Rob didn’t know what was.

He groped blearily around on his nightstand for the remote, couldn’t locate it, felt for it on the bed, and found it wedged between himself and the vague shape under the quilt that was Cynthia snuggled into a sleeping ball.

“Later for you, Mr. Crap-o-matic Veggie Master,” he muttered to the tube, ready to thumb off the power. Then he reconsidered. There was always ESPN to give him the game highlights.

Rob raised the clicker to change channels, landed on the station just as it cut away from a repeat of some NASCAR tournament to a plug for Sports Illustrated magazine. Sure, why not, what gave him the right to catch a break? He snorted, thinking he could still look forward to the news crawl at the bottom of the screen when the race footage came back on.

Meanwhile, though, his bladder was sending him an urgent newsflash of its own.