Misled

by Anderson Harp

  A man came out of the trees with his pistol still extended. He walked up to Paul and looked him in the eyes.

  “I could have shot you in the head and made it less painful,” Caldwell said as he stood over his former employer, watching him gasp his last breaths. He turned to Will. “The Agency suspected he was a danger. I was told what to do if he left the United States.”

  Frank Caldwell worked for Langley.

  Will lowered his weapon.

  “For some time, the bank in the Caymans had money coming out. They thought it was going to the UAE and frankly they thought it was terrorist money.”

  “So, no one cared.”

  “Exactly.” Caldwell leaned against the helicopter, clearly in some amount of pain. “Then it became agency money.”

  “Are you hurt?” asked Moncrief.

  The man that Paul and everyone else had known as Caldwell opened his parka, revealing a bulletproof vest badly damaged in the back.

  “Nothing worse than a couple of broken ribs, I hope.”

  “What now?” Will asked.

  “Nothing. We’re done. A tragic mishap in the Yukon left Alexander Paul missing. Probably a downed aircraft near Snag. Not unusual, I understand.”

  Caldwell opened the hatch on the chopper and, with some effort, pulled the pilot into view. He reached into his pocket, pulled out a folding knife, and freed the pilot from the zip ties. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”

  * * * *

  It turned out that the helicopter pilot also worked for the Agency. Paul was never going to leave Snag, no matter what he did.

  “Can we make it?” Will asked the pilot.

  “Sure.”

  “I need you to drop me off at a lake on the other side of that ridgeline.” Will pointed in the direction of the lake where he and Karen had survived the nights. His Otter had made it back to the same lake. He’d been crossing the ridgeline when he heard the shots ring out in the valley.

  “Get him to the infirmary in Whitehorse.” Will pointed to Kevin Moncrief.

  “I’ve already called in.” The man they knew as Caldwell held up his radio. “They’re waiting for us. You know….” He paused. “It’s probably best that we forget about all of this. Doctor, you might want to leave Snag alone for a while.”

  Dr. Karen Stewart nodded.

  There was nothing left of Snag other than the bodies. The wolves and foxes would take care of much of the corpses before anyone returned to the scene. A false story would leak that Alexander Paul was lost somewhere in the Yukon in a small airplane crash. The hope would be that searchers returning in the spring would find the missing airplane.

  “What are you going to do?” Caldwell asked Will.

  “There’s a cabin on a lake way north.” He smiled. “I might go up there for a while.” He looked at Karen meaningfully.

  “Need a little company?” she said.

  “Yeah.” Will smiled. “I’ve been meaning to train a copilot for some time now.”

  The turbine of the helicopter started to whine. The blades began kicking up ice and snow.

  “How about you, Gunny?” he asked Moncrief, who was limping to the helicopter.

  The gunny turned and sighed. “Me? I’m going to get these little scrapes fixed up and then take a long nap.”

  Epilogue

  Six months later

  The long nights became long days again.

  Pontoons replaced the sleds on Will’s Otter. It lumbered over Snag, heading toward the familiar ridgeline, then swung down to the pothole lake on the other side. The forest was now green and dense with undergrowth. Even from altitude, Will could make out giant ostrich ferns crowding the forest floor.

  He made the turn to the lake, slowed the aircraft, and dropped on to the glass-like surface. He taxied the Otter to the same shoreline where they’d crashed and spent their frozen days and nights until the airplane’s pontoon nestled up against a rock.

  As he climbed onto the pontoon, Will extended his hand.

  “Here you go.”

  Karen Stewart slid out of her copilot seat and placed her foot on the float.

  Will stepped on to a rock on the shore. “Pass me the rifle.”

  The bears were out and the days were warm, the sun lighting the Yukon for nearly twenty hours a day, earning its moniker as the land of the midnight sun.

  After the lake settled down from the wave motion caused by the landing, Will didn’t need to moor it with a rope. It wasn’t going anywhere. They climbed up the hillside, following the path of fallen and broken trees that had served as an opening when they were seeking shelter last winter.

  “Are you gonna tell me now?” Karen jumped from the pontoon to the shore. “Why’d we come back here?”

  “I wanted to check on something.”

  He took a closer look at what had once looked like a giant rock, the same outcropping that had sheltered them from the killing cold during their fight to survive.

  “Is this it?” She held up the piece of tin that he had used to carve out the snow for them to shelter. The dish-shaped metal object still looked oddly out of place in the wilderness.

  “This wasn’t supposed to be here.” He held it up, scrutinizing it. It was the reason he’d returned. He scanned the area above them once more. Moss and ferns covered the big rock. Using the same piece of metal, he began scraping away the moss and weeds from the outcropping.

  They both stared at the rock overhang, which clearly wasn’t made of rock.

  “I thought so.”

  He pulled the weeds away, using his bare hands, revealing another piece of metal and, soon, a number.

  “Forty-two-seven-two-four-six-nine.” He read the number out loud. He pulled more of the moss away. Above the figure were four letters.

  “USAF,” said Karen, looking over his shoulder.

  Like seeing the solution to a puzzle for the first time, Will looked across the hillscape. Now it all made sense. The fallen trees had been cut down by the fuselage as it bored into the hillside. He pushed through the undergrowth and saw the glimmer of another third piece of metal buried just below the brush. This one was no larger than a dog tag. He held the newly discovered, small shape in his hand, walked to the shore, and used the cold water from the lake to wash off the dirt.

  “Sergeant John A. Jones, USMC.”

  The C-54 Skymaster had been missing for nearly seventy years, with its thirty-six passengers and a mother and her child.

  That night, the news story hit CNN, and a son, now well into his seventies, learned of the airplane’s grave.

  The news that night also reported on the FBI investigation into the Cayman Islands bank fiasco. It exposed a conspiracy that connected the Defense Intelligence Agency and banks in the United Arab Emirates and Great Britain, resulting in forty-six federal indictments.

  Also on the news, a smaller, human-interest story about a young Marine with an 0651 military occupational specialty who had been missing was promoted to corporal. His father, a retired Marine colonel, attended the ceremony and helped his son pin on his new stripes.

  Michael Ridges was indicted for his release of intelligence information and ultimately pleaded guilty to a lesser crime, serving one year in the federal prison in Montgomery, Alabama, under special protection. After his release, he was hired as a consultant to the ITD corporation.

  Kevin Moncrief returned to painting houses in the Atlanta area and keeping an eye on a certain seldom-visited farm, cabin, and airstrip well to the south.

  Acknowledgments

  I wish to thank the many who have followed the Will Parker series from its beginning. In addition, my thanks to Kevin Harcourt and Meed Geary for their advice and counsel on much of the aviation. Likewise, I appreciate the help and advice of Ed Stackler, Doug Grad, and my editor, Gary Goldstein, as well as my many fellow authors who
have provided so much over the years. Of course, the help of my brothers-in-arms, especially the Marines, will always be appreciated.

  —AH

  Don’t miss Northern Thunder, a Will Parker Thriller by Anderson Harp.

  INTO THE LION’S DEN

  North Korea. 2011.

  For Kim Jong-un, the time has come to position his country atop the world’s pecking order. To do so, he has invested his nation’s resources in one rogue scientist. Peter Nampo is a nanotech specialist who has developed a nuclear missile not only capable of reaching the heart of Los Angeles, but also capable of knocking out America’s eyes in the skies—the GPS satellites overseeing the Korean Peninsula. Kim Jong-un has funded Nampo’s secret laboratory somewhere in a valley of the Taebaek Mountains.

  Marine recon veteran and small-town prosecutor William Parker has a history with Peter Nampo—and is the only one who can identify him. Recruited into a joint CIA and Pentagon Dark Ops task force, Parker must infiltrate the Hermit Kingdom, find Nampo, and end the scientist’s threat. But there’s more to this mission than Parker knows, and what he discovers is a danger far greater than being trapped behind enemy lines…

  Look for Northern Thunder, on sale now in eBook and paperback.