Page 24

Chapter Twenty-Two

It was almost three-thirty in the afternoon when Joe and Mark Eisele reached the edge of Summit. Eisele was mounted on Henry with Joe leading the mule on foot. Joe wasn’t sure Eisele could have continued to walk back based on his condition.

The ghost town consisted of fewer than a dozen intact structures: aging log cabin homes, the remains of a livery stable and large ramshackle barn, a blacksmith’s shop, a storefront adorned with a faint Gen’l Merch sign above the portico, and a large sprawling two-story hotel that looked like it was about to fall in on itself. Among the buildings were eight dented modern travel trailers that had been parked and mounted on cinder blocks to keep them steady.

The mining town appeared to be completely abandoned at first sight, but Joe was wary. He guided Henry off the two-track into a thick stand of twelve-foot-high mountain juniper brush, where they couldn’t be seen from Summit. He helped Eisele dismount.

“I really don’t want to come back here,” Eisele said. “In fact, I never want to see this place again for the rest of my life.”

Over the past two hours, Eisele had told Joe everything he’d seen, heard, and experienced from when he and Spike Rankin stumbled upon the armed team on the ridge while scouting for elk. Eisele said he thought they’d find Rankin’s body in a meat cellar.

“I didn’t go looking for him when I got loose of those restraints,” Eisele said. “I just got out of that old hotel and didn’t stop walking until I ran into you.”

Eisele had pleaded not to go back, but Joe had explained the situation they were in with no way to liaise with the outside world and a dead satellite phone. And he told Eisele that it would take them much longer to go back down the mountain to the trailhead than it would to continue to Summit.

“They have to be able to communicate from there,” Joe said. “Do you know how they do it?”

Eisele said he didn’t, but he thought he’d heard what sounded like one-sided cell phone conversations on the other side of the door in the hotel lobby. Which meant there was either a cell signal available or they were using satellite phones.

“We’ve got to let your father-in-law know you’re alive as soon as we can,” Joe said. “And I’ve got to contact the game warden from this district so she can call off the search and rescue operation.

“So tell me about the layout of Summit and where I might find radios or sat phones.”

“I don’t have a clue,” Eisele said. “All I know about that place is a dark little room off the lobby and what I could hear from outside. I know they have a kitchen somewhere, but that’s about it.”

Joe didn’t press him further. Instead, he reached up and parted two juniper branches so he could get a better view of the ghost town. He saw no one about, and no signs of life.

“Do you think they’re all gone now?” he whispered.

“I think they all left this morning after that meeting I told you about,” Eisele said. “Whether or not they left anyone behind in Soledad City—I don’t know. But I doubt it.”

Joe turned and grimaced at Eisele in surprise. “Did you just say ‘Soledad City’?”

“That’s what they called it.”

“As in Axel Soledad ?”

Eisele was emphatic. “Yes. I met him, so to speak, and I heard the name ‘Axel’ time and time again. I heard Double-A call him that. She was the only one who was kind to me. I think if Double-A wasn’t there that Axel would have done to me what he did to Rankin.”

Joe felt his stomach clench and his heart race.

“Tell me about the people who were here,” he said to Eisele.

—

Fifteen miles away, on the southern slope of Battle Mountain, Nate and Geronimo filled day packs with ammunition, water bottles, and other gear. They’d found a trailhead off the Forest Service road and parked the Suburban. Rick Orr had followed them from Warm Springs in his rental SUV and now stood with his back to them at the edge of the clearing, talking on his cell phone. As he spoke, he waved his free hand wildly and with emphasis.

“Who’s he talking to?” Geronimo asked Nate.

“Probably D.C.,” Nate said. “He’s probably calling in an air strike on us.”

“Very funny,” Geronimo said.

“Let’s release the birds.”

Geronimo’s expression turned suddenly serious. He no doubt knew what Nate was thinking. If the two of them didn’t make it back, they didn’t want the falcons to slowly starve to death inside the Suburban. It was better to release them and hope, if all went well, that they’d return to their falconers. Or just fly away forever.

Nate donned a heavy leather glove and lifted the peregrine and prairie falcon out of the vehicle and removed their hoods. Geronimo did the same with the gyrfalcon. All three birds were magnificently still, but Nate could feel the peregrine grip his hand with coiled-up anticipation. Then Nate held up each bird and released the leather jesses attached to their ankles.

The peregrine launched and dropped a foot until its wings caught air. Then it shot across the meadow, gaining elevation until it topped the pine trees and didn’t look back. The prairie falcon did the same. The gyrfalcon needed more runway because it was larger, but it also climbed until it did a banked turn before a wall of trees, and it soared to the west.

“I kind of wish I could go with them,” Geronimo said.

“I always do,” Nate responded.

Orr watched the falcons fly away as he walked back to the vehicles, but he didn’t comment on them. He looked very agitated, Nate thought.

“Cell service really sucks out here,” he groused. “I could barely get one bar.”

“Consider yourself lucky,” Geronimo said. Then: “Did you call in the Marines?”

Orr stopped in front of them, briefly closed his eyes, and sighed. “Not even close,” he said. “It’s a typical bureaucratic clusterfuck. I told HQ what you told me, and I got put up the chain all the way to the assistant director. He said he couldn’t take action without the approval of the big guy, who just happens to be out of town today and can’t be reached.”

“That’s fine,” Nate said. “We’ll do this without them, like we planned to do in the first place.”

“It isn’t just that,” Orr said, his eyes widening. “Do you want to know where the director is right now?”

“Where is he?” Geronimo asked.

Orr lifted his arm and pointed south. Nate noticed that his hand and pointer finger were trembling.

“He’s at the B-Lazy-U?” Nate said.

Orr said, “Apparently, he arrived in Warm Springs on his jet a couple of days ago.”

Nate grinned wryly. “The director of the FBI has his own private jet? And he’s hanging out with the Centurions? Well, my, my.”

Orr then told Nate and Geronimo that he wouldn’t be accompanying them any farther. He pointed at his lace-up dress shoes and said, “I’m not equipped for where you’re going, and I’d only hold you back. I’ll stay here and get back in touch with the assistant director. I’ll do everything I can to help you guys take down Soledad, even if that includes reaching out to other agencies who might have people on the ground near here to respond.” Then: “How confident are you that they’ll try to hit the ranch tonight?”

Nate shrugged. “We’re flying blind at this point. All we know is Soledad is in the area, and the Centurions plan to break up and go home tomorrow or the next day after their big shindig. So if Soledad is going to hit them, it would need to be now.”

Orr’s face blanched once again. He said, “Why does this all have to happen in the middle of nowhere? Why can’t it happen someplace where we have agents, local law enforcement, and firepower available?”

“You just answered your own question,” Nate said while turning on his heel toward the forest wall to the north of the clearing.

A few minutes later, Geronimo looked up while they walked and said, “ Damn .”

“What?”

“Your peregrine is tracking us. It came back.”

Nate continued trudging down the game trail without looking up.

“You knew it would stay with us, didn’t you?” Geronimo asked with astonishment.

Nate grunted, “Yes.”

“How did you know that?”

Nate took a deep breath as he trudged forward. After a long moment of silence, he said, “There are things that were revealed to me during my months in the Hole in the Wall Canyon living with my falcons twenty-four seven.”

“Are you going to tell me what they are?” Geronimo asked with exasperation.

“Not now,” Nate said.

—

Eisele stayed back in the brush with Henry while Joe worked his way to Summit along the side of the road. He advanced from tree to tree, and he was terrified the entire time that someone would emerge from one of the buildings and spot him coming. Judging by what Eisele had told him, the people who had occupied “Soledad City” were heavily armed. If they saw a game warden in a red uniform shirt approaching the location on foot, they would likely shoot first and ask questions later.

Joe began to breathe easier as he cleared each building and structure. He worked around the edges first, leaving the old hotel for last.

He found a log lean-to where they had obviously parked ATVs, evidenced by the wide knobby tire tracks in the dirt and the spots of oil and gasoline within the shelter. Joe opened the doors of the camper trailers one by one with his shotgun ready. Most were cluttered and unkempt, filled with sleeping bags, clothing, wrappers, half-filled mugs of coffee, and a few books. In one, he reached in and came out with a long scarf-like item he recognized as a Palestinian kaffiyeh. He tossed it back in.

It was obvious to him that the trailers had been used very recently and that whoever had used them planned to return.

Joe approached the old hotel from the back while watching for any movement from behind the windows. Thirty yards from the building, he ducked behind a three-foot-high elevated mound of dirt that would shield him if someone inside took a shot at him. But there was no movement from the hotel.

As he moved around the dirt mound and looked back, Joe realized the feature was the top half of an underground bunker of some sort. Several steps down a stairwell, thick yellow electrical cords came out along the ground from under the closed door. Joe followed the cords with his eyes and saw that they snaked through the grass and led to the hotel.

He descended the partially rotted set of stairs to the bunker and opened the door, which revealed a surprisingly large diesel electrical generator, which was turned off. Joe assumed that Soledad had put the generator in the bunker—which Joe now realized was an ancient meat cellar—to keep the sound of it muted when it was running. He placed his palm on the side of the unit. It was warmer than the air outside, meaning it had been recently used.

Joe backed out of the cellar and neared the hotel, walking as silently as he could. Then he entered it through an unlocked back door. There was a dark hallway that led to a larger room, presumably the hotel lobby. He stopped and simply listened for a moment.

Hearing no sounds inside, Joe proceeded with his shotgun at the ready. The lobby was filled with empty chairs and tables, as well as a laptop computer and a projector on a tall stool. The projector was aimed toward a bedsheet that had been tacked on the wall to serve as a screen.

The stairs going to the second floor were damaged, with several treads missing. The handrail was also snapped off in several places. He assumed they had not used the rooms on the second floor.

Joe walked behind the front counter and opened a door directly behind it. Inside were two cots that could barely be seen because the window was boarded up from the outside with a sheet of plywood. The cot on the right had rumpled bedding, and loose nylon straps were coiled on the floor on the side of it. The bed on the left had been stripped clean. It was exactly as Eisele had described where he’d been held. Next to the door, on a shelf at shoulder height, was a medicine bottle of clear liquid and a syringe. Joe assumed it was the morphine Eisele had been sedated with.

As he backed out of the room, Joe heard heavy footfalls on the wooden porch outside. Someone was coming. He quickly sidestepped so he was behind a pillar, and he shouldered his shotgun and aimed at the front door.

Joe saw the doorknob turn and he eased the safety off his weapon. Then Eisele pushed his way through and stood stock-still for a moment, blinking into the gloom of the room.

Joe lowered his shotgun and stepped out from behind the pillar. “You were right,” he said. “They’re all gone.”

“I’m glad you didn’t shoot me,” Eisele said with a grimace. “That would have been a hell of an ending.”

“We’ve got to search this whole compound before anyone comes back,” Joe said. “There has to be a comms room around here. Do you have any idea where it might be?”

“I don’t,” Eisele said. “My familiarity with this town consists of that room behind you.”

“I found a generator in the back,” Joe said. “I’ll go see if I can get it going. It would be helpful if we had light to see. Plus, I’m curious what’s on that computer.”

“I’ll go take a look around myself,” Eisele offered.

Joe approached the man and handed him his service .40 Glock. “Take this,” Joe said. “I assume you know how it works.”

“No safety, right?” Eisele said. “Just point and shoot.”

“That’s right. Maybe you can hit something with it, because I sure can’t.”

“I hope I don’t need to find out,” Eisele said as he slipped it into the back pocket of his scrubs.

Joe used the flashlight feature on his phone to illuminate the generator in the cellar. As he reached down for a silver toggle switch on the side of the unit, he caught a glimpse of a large bundle of some kind on the floor in the back of the cellar. He shinnied around the machine and got closer to it.

He recognized the bundle as a military-grade body bag. Joe didn’t have to guess what he’d find inside, but he squatted down and reluctantly unzipped the top. Inside was Spike Rankin’s pale white face and half-open eyes. There was a perfectly round puncture wound in his ear.

Shaken, Joe closed the body bag and returned to the generator. He quickly flipped the switch, and it rumbled to life, filling the cellar with sickeningly sweet diesel fumes. Then he got out of there as fast as he could and returned to the lobby.

Bare bulbs in fixtures suspended from the ceiling had blazed on. He hadn’t even noticed where the lights were when he was first there.

Joe opened the laptop and the screen instantly illuminated. He was both surprised and pleased that it wasn’t password protected. The desktop display was a photo of three ragged-looking soldiers in a tropical setting. Joe had seen Axel Soledad when he, Nate, and Geronimo had confronted him in Portland years before. In the photo on the laptop, Soledad was younger, slimmer, and obviously on active duty.

Then he studied the graphics on the screen. It was an Apple MacBook Air, so he was somewhat familiar with it. Marybeth had the same model.

He located a folder on the desktop that read Operation October Surprise . Inside the folder were Word files. He clicked on one called Roster .

It was a list of twenty-two names divided into two columns. The column on the left was headed “Fodder” and the column on the right was headed “Vets.”

Of the sixteen names under “Fodder,” six had been crossed out. Joe read through the column twice. There were names like Bree, Hadid, Emi, Stephen, Gumoor, Tashia—people with decidedly younger names. None of the individuals were familiar to him, and he wondered why they were labeled as “Fodder.”

The six names under “Vets” were intact, and they consisted of what Joe assumed were nicknames, such as Sergeant, Marshall, Gunny, Double-A, RPG, and MRAP.

Then he clicked on a PowerPoint folder and turned on the projector. The white sheet was suddenly filled with an aerial photo of mountain terrain. Joe studied it for a moment before recognizing it as Battle Mountain. Summit was located on the top right corner. On the bottom left was a property that looked like an oasis created within the sea of timber: manicured grass lawns, a uniform series of small structures, and a larger facility squarely in the middle.

Joe advanced to the second slide. It was the same aerial photo, but this one had graphics overlaid on it. Two arrows, one red and one blue, stretched from Summit through the forest and over the top of the mountain. Halfway down the other side, the blue arrow stopped at what looked like a long north-to-south granite ridge that poked up through the trees. The red arrow continued through a break in the ridge and was aimed directly at the property, which was now labeled B-Lazy-U .

“Oh no,” Joe said aloud. “This is their battle plan.”

As he said it, Eisele came back into the lobby from outside. He said, “Thank you for turning on the lights.”

“Look at what they’re planning,” Joe said, pointing toward the sheet screen. “They’re going after the Centurions.”

Eisele studied the image. “It makes more sense to me now. This is what Soledad was talking about this morning. See that ridge where the blue arrow goes? That’s where Rankin and I got jumped by the bad guys, including Double-A.”

“Speaking of Rankin,” Joe said, “I found his body outside in the cellar. I’m really sorry to tell you that.”

“I can’t say I’m surprised,” Eisele said, looking down at the tops of his boots. “It really makes me sad, though. He was a really good guy.”

Joe nodded in agreement.

Then Eisele looked up and grinned.

“What?” Joe asked.

“You were right. They have a communications room. I found it inside the old cabin right next to this place. And look what I found.” Eisele handed a fully charged satellite phone to Joe.

“They took all the rest of their radios or whatever,” Eisele said. “All they left was a bunch of empty charging stations. But they did leave this.”

—

Eight miles away and over the summit of Battle Mountain, Axel Soledad navigated his three-wheeled ATV through tightly packed trees. He’d deliberately stayed in the rear of his strike force since they’d left Soledad City.

The vets led, followed by the activists. Soledad stayed behind all of them for several reasons.

The first reason was because he didn’t like the optics of him riding the ATV while the others were on foot. He wanted them to lead, knowing that because of his injured legs he had no choice but to use the vehicle.

The second reason was that he was worried that some of the activists might decide to bolt before they were in place on the ridge. He wasn’t worried about the vets in front. They were on a mission.

But already several of the activists had complained to him about the long march and the blisters that were growing on their feet from their boots. Plus, they didn’t like having to pack their heavy rifles and day packs. If one or two of them decided to turn back, others might join them. But since he’d be directly in their path on the way back, he was confident he could dissuade them. And if that didn’t work, he’d threaten them with their lives.

Soledad had ridden abreast of his team several times since they’d left that morning, and he’d offered bottles of water from the cooler strapped to his ATV. He’d also given encouraging words to them. “This will turn out to be the most important thing you do in your lifetime,” and “This will be such a blow to the patriarchy that they may never recover from it,” and “What you’re doing this afternoon will be remembered forever,” and whatever else he thought would bolster their morale.

The third and very unstated reason he hung back was that if the operation went pear-shaped on the ranch grounds, he could get the hell out of there in a hurry and save himself to fight another day.

—

An hour later, as the sun slipped behind the mountains to their left and muted the pale orange light that had fused through the forest, Nate and Geronimo scrambled their way through a tangled timber blowdown. They found themselves crawling over, under, and through a broken maelstrom of trunks, branches, and exposed pine tree root pans that looked like the outstretched palms of hands ordering, “Stop!” It was the isolated apex of a mountain microburst.

It was hard going, literally cutting southerly across the grain of the mountain terrain that sloped west to east. And they did so as quickly as they could, because they knew that once darkness enveloped the mountain in less than an hour they’d be blind.

After they’d traversed the blowdown and entered the standing forest on the other side, they entered a small mountain meadow that afforded a panoramic view of the mountainside ahead of them and the valley floor below. Nate paused for the first time since they’d left Orr back at the trailhead, and he stood there breathing hard to regain his calm. Geronimo very willingly took a break as well, and when he did, he leaned forward at the waist and placed his hands on his knees. His wide shoulders heaved with exertion.

From that vantage point, Nate could see the distant B-Lazy-U Ranch spread over an opening on the valley floor far below. Geronimo saw it, too, and nodded.

When he was once again breathing normally, Nate sat down and leaned his back against a thick tree trunk. He placed his hands in his lap and let the back of his head rest against the trunk. Then he closed his eyes.

Five long minutes passed. Geronimo spent the time glaring at Nate, then pacing near him. Finally, Geronimo said, “Nate, you need to wake the fuck up. We’re burning our daylight. Are you okay?”

Nate didn’t respond. His face was calm and his eyes remained shut.

Only when Geronimo squatted down and lightly cuffed Nate’s jaw did Nate open his eyes. For a few seconds, his eyes were strange and unfocused. Then they sharpened.

“We’re too low on the mountain,” Nate said. “At this altitude, we won’t intercept them until it’s too late. We’ve got to start climbing and stay on a bead to the southeast until we see a granite ridge. The way we’re going now would lead us beneath that ridge. We need to be above it.

“There are fourteen of them approaching the ridge. Four have broken off and are heading to a group of boulders closer to the ranch and below the ridge. Axel is behind all of them on an ATV.”

Geronimo was speechless. Then his eyes widened, and he stood and looked straight up into the air. The peregrine was a tiny dot in the darkening sky.

“My God,” Geronimo whispered. “You’re seeing the battlefield through the eyes of your falcon.”

Nate didn’t deny it. He rubbed his eyes, as if emerging from a trance, then rose again to his feet. He gestured to the southeast through the trees. “That way,” he said. “We need to keep up the pace. We’ve got to be above them by the time it gets dark.”

Geronimo said to Nate, “You’ve got to explain to me what just happened. That is an entire level beyond yarak .”

“What do you think I was doing all those months by myself in the canyon?” Nate asked.