Page 57

CHAPTER 57

R ose texted:

DRONE LAUNCHING

How she managed to get the Ferrells to go along, I had no idea. Whether their resolve would hold this afternoon was also questionable. But for now, the plan was moving forward.

We loaded the treasure into the back of the G63 under the camera of the drone flying five hundred feet overhead. We couldn’t hear it and it was hard to spot the small black dot. But it was there.

I got in the minivan with Luke, and we took the lead in the convoy, heading deeper into the forest toward Pike’s cabin in the mountains. The G63 was behind us. Behind that was Tanke in the snowcat, the treads churning up the forest road, which at this point was a mixture of gravel, snow, and mud. And overhead, the drone was tracking and filming.

We arrived at the clearing in front of the cabin and off-loaded. We carried the treasure chest into Pike’s cabin. I noticed that Dmitri had put a new lock on the box; his own.

We grabbed some spare ghillie suits that Pike had—because of course Pike had spare camouflage Ghillie suits—and positioned ourselves behind a berm between Pike’s cabin and the forest road. From above, it would look like an ambush.

I checked my watch. It was a quarter to two. I pulled out my phone and called Rose. “Are we good?”

I heard her ask the Ferrells and then she relayed their answer. “Good to go.”

“All right. Let’s hope this works.”

“It should,” Rose said.

“We’re moving out. I’ll see you soon.”

“You better.”

I hung up and then called out, “Let’s do it.”

We gathered our weapons and piled into the vehicles. We retraced our steps until we came to the one-lane bridge across the creek in the forest where Norman had ambushed Poppy and Darius weeks earlier. We crossed to the side closest to town. There was no sign of the drone. It was back at the roof above the SCIF, the battery being recharged and the video downloaded.

We hid the vehicles out of sight under trees behind Rose’s cottage. Then Luke and Tanke dug into the forest road just before the bridge in several spots. I slid under the bridge and Pike passed me charges, which I placed on one of the supports. I was making a guess on how much to use to take out one side of the bridge, remembering that we’d have to fix all this once we succeeded.

If we didn’t succeed, we wouldn’t care.

Then we prepared the kill zone using more of the explosives in Luke’s minivan, putting shaped charges in each hole. We used the snowcat to chew up the snow-covered forest road to obscure where the holes were, then ran det cords back to a spot on one side where I could detonate them. Tanke drove the snowcat across the bridge and out of sight down the road and then hoofed it back.

I did a last walkthrough, checking everything and making sure the holes in the road were camouflaged. The lines for the explosives were wired to detonating clackers close at hand. We lay down in the brush to the side, where we were camouflaged with white sheets we’d taken from Betty.

Luke was to my right, Pike to my left. Dmitri and Tanke were farther down the line toward the bridge. Jackie was hidden behind us, safe behind a downed tree. We each had an automatic weapon; Jackie her black bag. Luke also had his big .50-caliber Barrett. We were as ready as we were going to be.