“I’m not going to ask again…” Nate said, leveling his weapon at the driver’s head.
But before Nate could say another word there was the rapid crack-crack-crack of gunshots and the inside of the Tahoe was suddenly filled with swirling debris from the exploded cushioning from the bench seats. The driver was trying to put bullets into Nate by firing through the two sets of seats, and Nate dropped to the gravel. But he wasn’t hit. The steel framework and springs inside had stopped or diverted the rounds.
He rolled away back to his Jeep and clambered inside. He could hear the two men shouting inside the Tahoe. The passenger was screaming at the driver to stop firing, saying he’d seen the big blond man go down.
Behind the wheel of his Jeep, Nate cranked the front wheels and drove quickly out onto the road. Then he shoved the gearshift into reverse again and goosed it and T-boned the SUV. The spare tire mounted on the back of his Jeep hit the Tahoe squarely between the front and back doors on the exposed side. Nate’s head snapped back from the force of the collision, but the last thing he saw before the impact and pure blue sky was the muzzle of the driver’s weapon being raised toward the glass of the passenger window.
The Tahoe made an unholy racket as it rolled down the mountainside, snapping trees and breaking up in showers of glass and plastic and pine boughs until it settled upside down eight hundred feet below in a small rocky ravine.
In Nate’s mind, the faces of the two men-one of his brethren raising his weapon to try and take him out before the impact-hung suspended in the air. But something about them didn’t jibe. Unlike Nate’s fellow operators in The Five, these guys looked less like cool and efficient warriors than well-conditioned thugs. Either The Five were recruiting a different class of special operators, or he was so far away from his days in the unit that he remembered his brothers with murky nostalgia. He shook his head sharply, trying to make their faces and his thoughts go away.
He parked in the trees so his Jeep couldn’t be seen from the highway or from his father’s home. He kept in the timber as he skirted the clearing, getting just close enough to confirm there were fresh tracks in the drive from when the Tahoe had come and gone earlier. He suspected there was a third operator of The Five inside, possibly two, and prayed that Dalisay and the girls had been returned unharmed. The operators were no doubt waiting for the two men in the Tahoe to come back and pick them up after dispatching Nate.
He approached the house from the side, running from tree to tree, keeping low. He had to close a distance of eighty yards from the timber to the siding of the structure. The three windows on the side of the house went to the back bedrooms and the bathroom. All had curtains drawn, but as he made his last desperate sprint to the house over open lawn, he looked up and saw the curtains part on the bathroom window. Nate dropped to a squat and raised his weapon and cocked the hammer in a single move.
The crosshairs through his scope settled on the bridge of his father’s nose as the old man looked out. He was using the toilet and happened to part the curtains while he stood. Nate saw his Dad’s eyes widen in shock and surprise when he saw him.
Nate lowered the gun and raised a single finger to his lips to indicate “Sssshhh.”
His father nodded slightly before looking over his shoulder. Then, apparently satisfied no one was watching, he turned back.
Nate mouthed, “How many?”
His father mouthed, “One.”
“Front or back?”
“Front.”
“I’m going to ring the doorbell,” Nate mouthed, and illustrated by jabbing his pointer finger. He turned his finger on his Dad. “You answer the door.”
Gordo looked back at him blankly for a moment, then nodded that he understood.
Nate kept below the windows as he turned the corner from the side of the house. He approached the porch, then reached through the railing to press the doorbell. When the chime rang inside, he heard a series of sudden footfalls. Light and heavy steps. Meaning there were more inside than his father and the bad guy. Dalisay and the girls? He hoped so.
“Who the hell is that?” an unfamiliar man asked.
“I’ll get it,” he heard Gordon say.
“Stay where you are,” the other man said.
“Who’s here, Mom?” A small girl’s voice. Nate smiled to himself.
Nate heard and felt the sucking sound of the front door opening out. He pressed himself against the siding of the house with his weapon cocked and pointed up at a forty-five-degree angle.
A man’s head poked outside, squinting toward the circular drive. The operator was older than the two men in the Tahoe, but his features were just as hard and rough. Heavy brow, close-cropped hair, zipperlike scar on his cheek, and serious set to his mouth. Another thug. At Nate’s eye level, he recognized the blunt round snout of a flash suppressor mounted on the barrel of a semiautomatic long gun.
The operator sensed something wrong and his head rotated toward the big revolver.
Nate blew it off.
As he holstered his weapon and the shot rang in his ears along with shrieks from inside, he thought: Yarak.
15
The next morning, Wednesday, outside Saddlestring, Wyoming, Joe Pickett backed his pickup toward the tongue of his stock trailer in the muted dawn light. The glow of his taillights painted the front of the trailer light pink as he tried to inch into position so he could lower the trailer hitch onto the ball jutting out from beneath his rear bumper.
It was a cool fall day, with enough of a wind that the last clinging leaves on the cottonwoods were releasing their grip in yellow/gold waves. It had dropped below freezing during the night and he’d had to break through an inch of ice on the horse trough. Southbound high-altitude V ’s of Canada geese punctuated the rosy day sky, making a racket.
He’d left a message on Luke Brueggemann’s cell phone that it was time to ride the circuit in the mountains and check on those elk camps they hadn’t gotten to earlier. While he bridled Toby to lead him over to the open trailer, he heard a vehicle rumbling up Bighorn Road from town. Hunters, he guessed, headed up into the mountains.
Gravel crunched in front of his house and a door slammed, and he leaned around the corner of the trailer to see who it was. It wouldn’t be unusual for a hunter to stop by to verify hunting area boundaries or make a complaint. But it wasn’t a hunter, it was a sheriff’s department vehicle. Joe caught his groan before it came out.
He stuffed his gloves into his back pocket and walked around the house to the front. Deputy Mike Reed was on his porch, fist raised, about to knock.
“Hey, Mike,” Joe said.
“Joe.”
“You’re out and about early.”
Reed sighed and crammed his hands into the pockets of his too-tight department jacket. “It seems late to me. I’ve been up most of the night.”
Joe frowned. “What’s up?”
“Hell is breaking loose. I was hoping you might offer me a cup of coffee.”
“Sure,” Joe said. “Just let me go inside and check around first. I’ve got one bathroom and three females in there getting ready for work and school in various stages of undress.”
Reed nodded. “I’ve got daughters. I remember what that’s like. I used the lilac bushes on the side of my house for eight years, I think. Maybe you could bring the coffee out here.”
“That would be a better idea,” Joe said, shouldering past the deputy.
