The Native American agreed. “Myall must use something to plan his patrols. I guess the best thing is to ask him.”
“Let me,” Jak said, rising to his feet.
The albino walked out into the sun, screwing up his eyes as the harsh and brilliant light hit him. He walked over to the paddock, where he could see McVie coaching some of the sec riders.
“Hey, Whitey, how’s things?” McVie greeted Jak as he approached. “Hear you and Crow had some trouble last night.”
“Stupe fighting,” Jak said offhandedly. “Myall around?”
“Sleeping. He was on late patrol out at the well,” McVie replied. “Unless it’s real necessary I wouldn’t like to disturb him, so is there anything I can do?”
“Mebbe. Got paper for this?” Jak asked, indicating the immediate area with a sweep of his arm.
“What, the sec camp or the workers’ camp?”
“Both. And well and refinery,” Jak added.
McVie scratched at his chin, screwing up his eyes as he thought. “Guess there must be, ’cause we must have planned the patrols somehow. But it’s been such a while that I can’t…just used to doing it from memory,” he added.
Jak said nothing, but it crossed his mind that the sec patrols had been taking the same routes for so long that they had grown stale, maybe not so attentive to change. That would make them soft, and easy prey for the saboteurs.
“Tell you what,” McVie said finally, “come with me.”
Jak followed the sec man across the camp, past the area where the radio shack was erected, and to the back of the blockhouse where the food for the camp was prepared and served.
“In here,” McVie said, beckoning Jak to follow him through a door that led past the kitchens and into a small office area. It was a room barely big enough for the table and chair that stood in it, and the table was bare on top, with two drawers beneath. “Myall keeps our patrol schedules and routes in here,” he said as he opened one of the drawers. “I don’t know what’s what, seeing as how I don’t read, but I guess there must be a map of some kind here as we had to know where we were going in the first place, right?”
The stocky sec man took a bundle of papers from the table drawer and placed them on the top. He spread some of them out, looking for something that was a drawing rather than covered in—to him—incomprehensible writing. There were several drawn maps, and although all of them were labeled, he was unable to work out which ones mapped out which areas.
“Hell, I sure hope you can make something out of all this.” He shrugged, stepping back to let Jak come near. The albino had limited reading skills, but he knew enough and had enough intelligence to work out which of the maps were of the camp area, and which of the well and refinery. He picked out two maps that folded out to nearly the area of the table, and put the rest of the papers back in the drawer, closing it.
“Tell Myall have these,” he remarked to McVie.
“Yeah, sure,” the stocky sec man replied. “Wanna tell me why you got them, just so I can tell him?”
Jak studied the sec man’s face, his red eyes piercing over his thin, hawklike nose. McVie felt a shiver of fear pass over him at the cold way Jak regarded him, like an eagle about to stoop on its prey. For his part, Jak was trying to decide whether McVie was asking the question from anything other than an idle curiosity.
Finally, he replied, “Just say Ryan need.” He walked past McVie and out of the office, leaving the stocky sec man with the feeling that he had come close to buying the farm, without being able to explain why he had that feeling.
When Jak arrived back at the companions’ quarters with the maps, Ryan and J.B. spread them out across the long dining table. The two maps joined together to form a long diagram of the work camp, the refinery, the well and the area in between.