Page 22

Chapter Twenty

In the morning, Joe groaned aloud as he shinnied out of the one-man tent onto the frost-covered grass. Although he’d been physically exhausted from the day before, it had been a tough night and he’d slept soundly only in stretches. His sleeping pad was too thin and he felt the impressions in his back of every small rock and pine cone beneath the floor of the tent.

He grumbled, “Getting too old for this” as he rose to his feet and stretched painfully.

The mule eyed him coolly while munching a mouthful of meadow grass.

“Good morning, Henry,” he said. “Looks like you had a better night than I did.”

Using torn pages from his notebook, he started a fire and fed sticks into it, then foot-long lengths of dry, broken branches. He squatted and held his palms out to the fire to warm his hands. Then he placed a small soot-blackened pot of water on the grate to boil. That always took so long at elevation.

Susan Kany had not called during the night and he was concerned to see that there was only a twenty percent charge left on the sat phone. Nevertheless, he punched in her number.

“Good morning,” she answered. “You’re up early.”

He glanced at his watch. It was six-fifteen. “So are you,” he said.

“That’s because someone called me. Did you make any progress finding those guys after I left?”

“Nope.” Then: “Maybe. I found something interesting last night.”

He described the two-track he’d stumbled upon and the location of it.

“Somebody cleared it with chain saws recently,” he said. “And there are a bunch of tire tracks on it. I want to see it in the daylight, and I hope I can tell you more.”

“It’s open ?” she said, clearly surprised. “That doesn’t make sense to me. The Forest Service isn’t exactly known for clearing old roads in the mountains.”

“What if it wasn’t the Forest Service who cleared it?” Joe asked.

“Then who would it be?”

“That’s what I’m asking myself. Who would open an old road to a ghost town in the mountains?”

“Hunters, maybe?” she said.

“Maybe. Maybe it was our missing hunters.”

“Then where are they?” she asked rhetorically.

“How’s it going on your end?” he asked.

“Joe, it’s barely six in the morning. Last night, I called the dispatcher and asked her to have Sheriff Haswell call me back, and I left a message on his cell phone. I haven’t heard back from him yet.”

“Ah.”

“If I haven’t talked to him in a couple of hours, I’ll drive down to the Warm Springs resort and look for him there. He always has breakfast there. Every morning, like clockwork.”

“Good. Let’s get this thing moving.”

She said, “Haswell needs to call up the search and rescue team, and they’ll need to gear up. They’re all volunteers, so they’ll have to get off work and so on. I wouldn’t count on us getting up there until the afternoon at the earliest.”

“That’s what I figured,” Joe said.

“I left a message for the Civil Air Patrol for when their office opens at eight, and I did the same at headquarters to see if we can get a search plane into the air today.”

“Let me know when you know something,” Joe said.

Then: “I briefed the governor’s chief of staff last night where we’re at. I’m guessing I’m not the most popular guy at the governor’s residence this morning.”

She laughed at that.

“In the meantime,” Joe said, “I’m going to make some breakfast and then saddle up Henry. My plan is to ride him up that road until I get to Summit. How long do you think that’ll take me?”

“It’s fifteen or so miles from where you’re camped, I’d guess,” she said. “It’ll take most of the day. Henry isn’t exactly a sprinter.”

“As I’ve learned,” Joe said. “So that’s my plan. If nothing else, I’ll find that old mining town and scratch it off the list.”

“Keep your phone on,” Kany said. “I’ll let you know how things are going down here.”

“I will,” Joe said, “although I don’t know if you’ll be able to call me on this phone. It’s losing its charge really fast. I don’t know how much longer it’ll last.”

“Crap. There must be something wrong with it. Maybe the battery is shot. In any case, if it goes completely dead, I’ll communicate with you by radio when we get close.”

“I wish I could plug it into a tree or something,” Joe mused. Then: “I’ll try and keep you posted if I can find anything of interest in Summit or along the road. If nothing pans out, I’ll head back and meet you wherever. By the way, thanks for talking to Marybeth.”

“She didn’t sound very happy,” Kany said.

“It wasn’t aimed at you; it was aimed at me. But we talked it out.”

Kany chuckled and punched off.

—

A half hour later, outside Saddlestring at the state-owned home and game warden station on the banks of the Twelve Sleep River, Sheridan escorted Kestrel out into the garage and buckled the little girl in her car seat in Marybeth’s blue Ford Bronco.

“You have a good day, sweetie,” Sheridan said.

“Bye-bye,” Kestrel said while blowing Sheridan an exaggerated lip-smacking kiss. Sheridan returned the gesture.

As Marybeth entered the garage, Sheridan said, “You look nice today.”

Marybeth wore a dark suit with a white blouse and her string of pearls.

“I’ve got an all-staff meeting this morning,” Marybeth said. “I’ve got to get them prepared for budget cuts from the county commissioners, and that’s never fun.”

Sheridan told her mother that she was also headed to town right behind her to run errands and that she’d try to meet her for lunch. “I’ve got to get a roll of chicken wire at the feedstore so I can repair our Yarak pigeon coop. A fox tried to break in a couple of nights ago to get at the birds.

“I’ve also got a meeting with our CPA. It took me a while to get up to speed on Yarak’s recordkeeping after Liv—”

Marybeth quickly placed her index finger up to her lips as a signal to Sheridan, who caught herself and didn’t finish her sentence in front of Kestrel.

“Let me know if you hear from you-know-who,” Sheridan said after a beat.

“I’d better hear from him,” Marybeth said with a concerned look on her face.

—

Road dust from Marybeth’s Bronco still hung in the air on the gravel road when Sheridan departed for Saddlestring in her SUV. She had a full day ahead of her: chicken wire, post office, grocery store, the meeting with the CPA, then out to Nate’s compound, where the office for Yarak, Inc . was located. She had bills, paperwork, and emails to catch up on, along with the repair of the pigeon coop. There was also a colony of gophers encroaching toward the mews from the sagebrush pasture, making holes in the ground a horse or cow could step into and snap their legs. That’s why Nate’s ancient 12-gauge pump shotgun was leaned muzzle-down on the passenger floorboard.

She was wary about the meeting with the CPA because Sheridan had questions she hoped he would have answers for. Should she scale back the bird abatement business since Nate was still gone, or ramp it up and hire additional falconers? Demand hadn’t decreased in the past year with Nate away, and she’d been turning down some lucrative jobs because she couldn’t handle them all herself.

If she did hire additional falconers, should they be given a salary or be paid by the job? What would the tax ramifications be for scaling up or down? What regulations would kick in for doing either?

Sheridan wished she’d taken more business classes in college and that she had paid more attention to Liv’s side of the business before Liv was killed. Running a small business was much more challenging than she realized. There were days where she felt that she was flying blind and the business part of Yarak was overwhelming her time and knowledge. Sheridan wished she could return to the days where she was simply a master falconer sent on assignments.

As she turned onto the state highway from the access road, Sheridan saw her mother’s Bronco a half mile ahead on the straightaway. There were no other cars in either lane.

And then, there was. Up ahead, behind her mother’s vehicle, a sheriff’s department pickup nosed out of the trees on the left and turned to follow the Bronco.

Since when, Sheridan asked herself, did the sheriff set up a speed trap on the state highway? And had her mother been speeding? Since the road was clear and there was no traffic at all on it, Sheridan thought it likely she had been.

Her guess appeared to be confirmed when the lights flashed on and rotated on the top of the sheriff’s unit, followed by the whoop of a siren.

Sheridan punched the Bluetooth button on her steering wheel and called Marybeth.

“What’s going on up there?” she asked.

“I’m being pulled over by the sheriff.”

“Why?”

“I’m not sure.”

—

Marybeth cringed when she saw the flashing lights in her rearview mirror, then quickly looked down at her speedometer. She was going seventy-three in a seventy zone. Without disconnecting the call from Sheridan, she lowered her cell phone into her lap. She didn’t want the sheriff to see her using it while driving.

The siren continued to wail behind her.

“Oh, come on,” Marybeth said out loud. “Is that necessary? I’m pulling over.”

From her car seat, Kestrel said, “Who is it, Grandma?”

“Oh, just an annoying sheriff,” Marybeth responded. Her anger was muted by the fact that Kestrel had started calling her “Grandma” instead of her given name. It warmed her heart.

As she pulled over, several thoughts came into Marybeth’s head. If she was being pulled over for speeding, it better be a warning and not a citation. Three miles per hour over the limit was nothing , especially in Wyoming. Was it something else? A burned-out taillamp?

Maybe the sheriff just wanted to talk to her about something and chose to pull her over instead of call? Or, she thought with sudden horror, had something happened to Joe?

She stopped on the side of the road and the pickup pulled in twenty yards behind her. The wigwag lights doused, and she looked into her side mirror to see Sheriff Jackson Bishop climbing down from his cab. She could read nothing on his face as he approached her on the driver’s side.

Marybeth powered the window down. “What is it, Sheriff? I don’t want to be late for work.”

Bishop looked at her coldly. He was unsmiling and appeared nervous. She’d never seen him like that before.

“I need you to get out of the car.”

“Why?”

She found it strange that he didn’t ask for her license or registration. Then she saw him glance into the back of her Bronco toward Kestrel’s car seat.

“Let’s not make this difficult, Marybeth,” he said as he placed his right hand on the grip of his holstered Glock.

“Make what difficult?” she asked.

“There’s something I need to do here. I don’t like it, either. But I’m the sheriff and you need to comply.”

Marybeth felt a red-hot rush of blood to her face. “I do not need to comply,” she said. “I don’t believe in that nonsense. I’m also married to a law enforcement officer and I know you need to state a probable cause for why you pulled me over and asked me to get out of my car.”

“He’s not a LEO,” Bishop said with contempt. “He’s a game warden.”

Then it hit her. He wanted Kestrel.

Marybeth gritted her teeth and said, “ You want her, but you can’t have her .”

Before she could floor the accelerator and leave him standing there, Sheridan’s SUV pulled up and stopped on the highway next to her Bronco. Bishop wheeled around, surprised by it.

Sheridan’s passenger window was down and the muzzle of a shotgun extended out of it. Marybeth heard her daughter say, “Drop the weapon and get on the ground or I’ll blow your head off.” To her mother, Sheridan called out, “I heard everything.”

Bishop looked over his shoulder at Marybeth. He was obviously frightened.

“I never wanted to do this,” he said bitterly as he tossed his weapon to the pavement. “Can we just forget this ever happened?”

“Down on the ground,” Sheridan warned. “ Comply! ” Bishop slowly shook his head from side to side as he lowered himself to his knees.

“Take off, Mom,” Sheridan said. “I’ve got this.”

“Are you sure?”

“Go,” Sheridan commanded.

—

In a small dark motel room on First Street in Warm Springs, Nate and Geronimo assembled their weapons and gear on top of Nate’s rumpled bed. It was at Geronimo’s initiative.

“Our squad used to do this prior to any mission in Iraq and Somalia,” Geronimo said. “It was kind of a ritual, but a useful one. We wanted every guy on the team to have a complete understanding of our overall firepower and capabilities. That way, we could position each operator on the strike team in the best possible location, and adjust them depending on the mission.”

Nate said, “But there are just two of us.”

“Which makes this even more important, if you think about it.”

On the bed were firearms, boxes of ammunition, a pair of armored vests, and combat knives in sheaths. Piled on Geronimo’s bed were optics, and field equipment including a first-aid kit, camouflage paint, and handheld radios.

Geronimo gestured to Nate’s holstered .454 Casull and his accompanying Ruger Ranch Rifle chambered for 6.8mm SPC rounds. Three full fifteen-round magazines lay next to the rifle.

“Obviously, you’ve got long-range capability with your flat-shooting rifle. That weapon, even with open sights, is lethal up to three hundred yards. We already know what you can do with your hand cannon,” Geronimo said. “You’ll be our distance wing warrior.”

“Gotcha.”

Geronimo pointed at his weapons on the bed. “My Benelli is loaded with buckshot rounds. It’s devastating up to forty yards, and I can hit my targets at one shot per second. It holds eight rounds.

“I’ll have both of these on me,” he said, picking up two identical 1911 Colt .45 semiautomatic handguns from the bed. “One under each arm. As you know, these old babies are bruisers close-in. I’ll be our close-combat ninja.

“So,” Geronimo said to Nate, “how do you propose we do this? We can’t just blast our way in, and I insist that we spare the guards manning the checkpoints.”

“I’m with you on that,” Nate said. “We want Axel, not service members.”

“How do we isolate him and take him out?”

“The hunter must become the thing he hunts,” Nate said.

When Geronimo looked at him quizzically, Nate said, “It’s from The Peregrine by J. A. Baker. Baker wrote that after studying falcons in England. We need to get inside of Axel’s head and imagine what he’d do, given the target and the terrain. Then we use that knowledge to go after him.”

Using the scarred top of a small desk in the motel room, Nate used his fingertip in a thin layer of dust to plot out their approach. “The road into the ranch is heavily guarded, as we know. Even if we took on the guards or blasted our way in, the guys at the other checkpoints would know we’re coming. The road goes along the North Platte River, so conceivably we could drop down to the water and hike upriver, where we couldn’t be seen by the guards up on the road. But that’s too risky. All it would take is for one of those guys to wander over from the checkpoint on the road to take a piss and see us.

“So what would Axel do?” Nate asked while moving his finger to the other side of the desk. “Axel would avoid the checkpoints, too. He’s a special operator like us, so he’d study the situation and search for soft entry points into the ranch and exploit them. He’d move in from behind the ranch, where there aren’t any roads and where heavy timber on the mountainside would conceal his approach. He’d come straight down Battle Mountain on the east side.”

Geronimo nodded his head in agreement.

“This is all really rough country,” Nate said. “It’s filled with deep gorges and black timber. But if he comes directly down the mountain and not from the side or along the river upstream, it’s easier terrain, even though it’s a longer march. So what we need to do is intercept him before he gets to the ranch.”

“How do we do that?”

Nate moved his finger to the center of the table. “There’s a steep trail over here called Purgatory Gulch. I’ve gone down it and it’s a bitch, but it takes you down to a river canyon, where it flattens out along the banks. We could go down there and cut across the side of the mountain to the south. We’ll have to use the terrain and cover to our advantage, and it’ll be tough going. But Axel won’t expect to be flanked by anyone.”

“I like it, except for the hike,” Geronimo said. “How many bad guys do you suppose we’ll be up against?”

“It’s hard to say for sure from what little we know,” Nate said. “I’m guessing his force is fifteen to twenty. It might be a few less because we’ve taken out a half dozen, but he might have picked up some new recruits along the way we don’t know about. I’m not really worried about the hippies. I’m worried about the number of vets he has in his group.”

Geronimo looked up at the ceiling. “The last thing I want to do is kill brother soldiers.”

“Let’s do our best to avoid that,” Nate said. “I don’t know how, but we can try. It shouldn’t be that tough telling the vets from the hippies when we pull the trigger.” Then: “If we take out Axel, we’re done. We need to cut off the head of the snake and we can go home. I don’t care about the hippies or the Centurions, to be honest. I just want Axel.”

Geronimo lowered his eyes and took in the sketched map on the desktop, then he leaned forward and cleaned it of the dust and erased it so no one could ever see it.

“Then let’s get going,” Geronimo said. As he said it, his cell phone burred in his pocket. He took it out and held the screen up to Nate. It read: Sheridan Pickett .

Geronimo punched her up on speaker. “Hello, Sheridan.”

“Geronimo, are you with Nate?” Her voice sounded tinny and there was static on the line.

“He’s right in front of me,” Geronimo said.

“Good. I thought that might be the case. Please let me talk to him.”

Instead of handing over the phone, Geronimo held the device out between them.

“I’m here,” Nate said.

“Listen, I just cuffed Sheriff Bishop with his own handcuffs and he’s rolling around in the back of my car. He tried to kidnap Kestrel from my mom.”

“He did what ?” Nate hissed.

“He pulled over my mom on her way to work and he was going to take Kestrel from us. I stopped him.”

“How did you do that?” Nate asked, astounded.

“I stuck a shotgun in his face. It felt like something you would do.”

“Is Kestrel okay? Is your mom okay?”

“They’re fine. Bishop is really remorseful, and he keeps begging me to let him loose. Honestly, I’m not sure what I’m going to do with him.”

Over the speaker, they could hear Bishop’s muffled pleas.

“I had to gag him,” Sheridan explained. “He was driving me insane. But I needed to let you know what he told me, which is that Axel Soledad ordered him to take Kestrel.”

“He wanted to take us off the board,” Nate said to Geronimo. “He knows we’re close to him, and he wanted us to hightail it to Saddlestring.”

“This guy is always a step ahead of us,” Geronimo said. “I’m really starting to hate that.”

He jabbed a finger at Nate and said, “See what happens when good people spend too much time around you? They kidnap their local sheriff .”

“Sheridan, you’re amazing,” Nate said, ignoring him. “Thank you.”

“I wasn’t going to hurt her!” Bishop yelled from the back seat. Apparently, he’d worked free of the gag.

“Smack him,” Nate said to Sheridan. “And if he doesn’t pipe down, twist his ear off.”

“No,” Sheridan said. “I’m not doing that.”

Nate asked, “Where is Joe in all of this?”

“He’s been out of town the last couple of days. The governor sent him on an assignment to try and locate a couple of missing elk-hunting guides.”

“Where?” Nate asked.

“Down south, almost to Colorado. He’s somewhere around Battle Mountain.”

Nate and Geronimo looked at each other without speaking. Nate shook his head and said, “Sheridan, can you or your mom get in touch with him?”

“Mom can,” she said. “I don’t know his satellite phone number.”

“Then please ask her to call him. We’re in the same vicinity. Have Joe call Geronimo’s cell phone so we can coordinate.”

“I can do that. Is he in any danger?”

Nate hesitated a moment, then said, “He might be, but we won’t know until we know where he is.”

“Don’t let him get hurt, Nate,” Sheridan pleaded.

“I’ll do my best, but now we have to go. Good work today. I owe you everything for what you did.”

“Just come back soon with my dad,” Sheridan said. “I’m serious.”

“I hope to,” Nate said. “But there’s something we need to do first.”

—

Geronimo disconnected the call and both quickly geared up. Geronimo carried his combat shotgun and Nate slung the rifle over his shoulder. Geronimo shouldered the motel room door open and Nate followed. They weren’t worried about being seen because it wasn’t unusual for people to openly display firearms on the streets of Warm Springs, especially on the cusp of elk-hunting season.

Leaning against Geronimo’s Suburban was an older, silver-headed man wearing rimless glasses and a beige trench coat. To Nate, he looked like a college professor.

“I’m Special Agent Rick Orr of the FBI,” the man said. “And you two must be Nate Romanowski and Geronimo Jones.”

Both men froze.

“I’ve been looking for you for a long time,” Orr said.