by Rhona Weaver
Shepherd quickly stepped down to the trail and grabbed Chandler’s arm. “Brother King, we have many steps to take toward victory today, let’s finish this first task now.” Chandler clearly wanted to get in another lick or two, but Shepherd tugged at his arm and they moved a couple of steps back up the slope. Win shook his head to clear the bright spangles that were still flashing in front of his eyes from the blow. Shepherd turned his attention from Win and addressed his troops.
“Brothers! This man claims to be a believer! Only God knows his heart and in Glory, God can correct his mistaken thoughts.” Shepherd spoke to the group along those lines for a minute or two, quoting Scripture and raising that Bible . . . trying to ramp himself back up for the ugly task at hand.
But Win wasn’t really there. He was in that floating state again. He’s staging this show for his men, Win thought, as his mind drifted. He knew in his heart he couldn’t reason with them. Individually, maybe he could have, but when men form a pack, and their leader chooses the wrong path, it’s nearly impossible to turn the group—the pack—back to the right. He knew that. The pack mentality allows mobs to form, riots to occur—rational thinking rarely prevails and truth is generally trampled. Win held no illusions that his arguments would free him. He’d said what he needed to say. The peace was settling back in.
When Shepherd’s short speech ended, Win focused back on the present. Some of the militiamen were easing back toward the trees, and Win sensed one of the men behind him moving. A hand squeezed his right shoulder and he caught a glimpse of Two sliding away from him. The surroundings were becoming lighter, and he could make out individual faces and expressions better. He scanned them again for anyone who would step out and be an ally. He found none. It must be time.
Win didn’t want anyone to be able to tell his daddy he hadn’t died like a man. He raised his chin and squared his shoulders as he watched Ron Chandler unzip his heavy camouflage coat. He watched the man’s right hand go to the checkered grip of a holstered .357 revolver in slow motion. His left hand pulled an eight-inch silver cylinder from a pocket, a Liberty suppressor or silencer. Chandler had come prepared. The man’s eyes under the camo field cap were flat and icy. Win’s world collapsed into the six feet between them. He drew in a breath. He had control of his emotions. He was ready.
But Win was wrong about those emotions. As soon as he heard the voice behind him, a cold chill ran down his spine, his knees went weak, he closed his eyes tight in disbelief.
“I’ll handle this fer you, Prophet. This man was too familiar toward my wife. . . . This Fed dies by my hand and we both have our revenge.” The voice was direct and firm.
The horrible realization of the betrayal hit Win full force. How could he have been so wrong? Before he opened his eyes, Win heard Matt Smith’s warning to him as clearly as if the man were standing there: Think about the lives that could be lost if Luke Bordeaux is one of the bad guys! He’d gone with his instincts and made a terrible error. Ron Chandler smiled a devilish smile, put the big silver .357 Magnum back in the holster, and shrugged.
Prophet Shepherd nodded slowly, as if trying to decide whether Luke’s statement was a request or a command. “As you want, Brother Luke. I just need to see him die—I need to do it for my Dennie, you understand?”
“Alright, I’m moving him off the trail. We don’t need blood there. We’ll need the elk to confuse our tracks when they move through here today. They won’t walk through blood. Step down below the trail and we’ll finish this.”
Win wasn’t sure he could even will his legs to move, but Luke’s strong hands had him by the back of his jacket and his shoulder. Luke pulled him along as he stumbled backward to a more open, grassy area on a slight slope. The break in the execution had given several more of the militiamen an excuse to move back toward their small camp stoves in the cave. Most of them would rather have another cup of coffee than see the Prophet’s revenge play out with a man killed in cold blood.
When they stopped moving backward, Win’s fear mixed with anger and he twisted to look into Luke’s face. Everything had been said, but he wasn’t about to let the man kill him without seeing his eyes. Luke’s tan face was within inches of his—the eyes looked nearly black. Win hoped the man saw his anger when they locked eyes, but he knew at that moment Luke could also see his fear—he just hadn’t expected to see that same emotion in Bordeaux’s eyes. But those black eyes showed no sign of regret or guilt, and the fear, if it had been there at all, was quickly replaced by the hard, steely stare Win had seen in the chapel the night before last. Luke was in the zone, as he’d once put it. Luke was fixing to tend to business.
“Damn you, Luke!” Win spat the words at him and hoped God would understand. Luke responded by knocking Win’s feet out from under him with one move of his leg. He caught the back of Win’s jacket and took him to his knees. Then he kicked him facedown into the grassy slope.
Win’s first reaction was to close his eyes tightly, but he didn’t want his last memories of this world to be darkness, and he opened them to focus on the new spring grass taking hold on the mountainside. He could hear the sounds of a stream a few yards to the south. It was a nice sound. A bird was singing a welcome to the dawn somewhere nearby in the forest. Despite the fury he’d felt a moment before, a calm was returning to his soul. Time was suspended. For a few more seconds he was a spectator floating above the small clearing as the world awoke from the night.
Then a heavy knee was on his back, forcing him harder into the ground. He heard Luke’s voice tell the others he was wrapping the gun to stifle the sound, he heard the metal slide move backward then forward on Luke’s Beretta as he chambered a round, then he felt the cold steel of the gun’s muzzle against the side of his head. Win gritted his teeth, closed his eyes, and silently asked God to take him home.
“Take care of Ellie and my babies. Don’t move!” Whispered words from above his left ear, then much louder and harsher, “La Porte Battante!”
And then the deafening roar and sharp pain from the pistol’s concussion—the shattering blow to the side of his head. Intense pain in his left ear, warm liquid on his head and neck. He kept his eyes closed. He didn’t breathe. He’d expected to see light, but there was no light. Did Luke somehow miss? The whispered words confused him. Why ask me to care for his family if I’m gonna die here? He took a shallow breath and held his breath again. He willed his body to lie still in the damp grass. He smelled the metallic smoke from the handgun’s discharge. He could taste blood as it reached his lips. He fought the strong urge to be physically sick. He heard them above him, but the roar in his ears was too loud to understand words. What are they saying? He could only catch pieces of it at first.
“Just a Cajun war cry. . . . Never killed a man like that . . . blood all over my hands. . . . Need to wash this off . . .” That was Luke speaking.
Another voice above him: “You’ve done a good service for me, Brother Luke. An eye for an eye.” The man’s voice changed, got softer and sad. “Somehow I thought watching him die might ease my feelings for Dennie more. He looked so much like my boy.” A long pause. “Ah, maybe in time . . .” The Prophet’s voice trailed off. “Yes, maybe in time.” No one else spoke, and the voice rose a notch as the Prophet shifted back to their mission. “Brother Luke, it’s good you’ve come back to us today—we’re a few men short. Will you go with Brother King’s team? He can use your skills.”
“Yes, Prophet, wherever you want me to serve,” Luke answered.
“What about the body? Want some of the men to move it down the ridge?” Chandler’s voice, a little shaky. He’d lost some of the swagger with a dead FBI agent four feet away.
All three of them must be standing nearly on top of him, Win realized, just above him near the trail. He continued to hold his breath; his heart was beating wildly and the intense ringing in his ears hadn’t let up. As the pain at the side of his head grew, it was starting to sink in t
hat he was still very much alive.
Luke’s voice again. “No need to move the body. It’s gettin’ full light now, and the wolves and bears will be drawn to the blood. They’ll drag it off—won’t be much to find by mid-morning.” Luke’s voice shifted to the clipped, military inflection Win had heard him use before. “This is done. We’ve got ground to cover before three.”
They were walking away, up the slope toward the militiamen. He sensed activity somewhere above the trail; they were moving out. His head was pounding and his mouth was filling with blood. He kept fighting the urge to gag on it.
He didn’t move for what seemed like forever. He knew Luke had placed him in the open intentionally. The drones or helicopters could spot him if they were flying in this area. He couldn’t see it, but he felt the sun break over the mountains. It warmed his back and lit up the little clearing where he lay. He was guessing fifteen minutes had passed since the men had left, but he really had no idea. He was normally exceptionally good at estimating time—that came from his quarterback days, years of practice at internally counting down the time between plays. Now, for some reason, he had no feel for the seconds as they passed. He supposed he was slipping into shock, and he made a mental note to figure out how to deal with that condition if it ever happened again. He hoped like hell it never happened again.
He finally rolled to his right side and spit out some of the blood. He tried to get to his knees but threw up before he made it. His left eye was caked shut with dried blood, but from his right eye he could see that Luke had left a phone and a bloody knife beneath him. Win rocked back on his heels when it hit him—the blood wasn’t his—it was Luke Bordeaux’s. “Oh, dear God,” he whispered when it dawned on him how Luke had pulled it off.
He’d seen enough old Westerns to know how to stab the knife blade into the ground and use the exposed blade to saw off hand restraints. Win found that in reality it was much harder to do than it appeared in the movies. The knife was sticky with Luke’s drying blood and it was sharp as a razor. His hands were still numb from straining against the cuffs and he couldn’t move several fingers. He nicked himself with the knife several times before he even got it firmly planted in the ground. The plastic flex cuffs were more difficult to cut than rope or thinner zip ties, so he had to force himself to work at it very slowly. He could easily slice his own wrist and bleed to death. It was tedious and scary.
Then it got worse. Out of the corner of his open eye he caught movement near the tree line and heard the sounds of limbs breaking. He saw a dark form in the woods fifty yards away. He immediately remembered Luke’s words about wolves and bears finding the fresh blood. It sounded like something big was coming through the woods, looking for breakfast.
Chapter Thirty-Six
Trey Hechtner was beginning to see this as a classic case of too many chiefs and not enough Indians. It was nearly 6:00 a.m., and the early-morning sun was peeking through the low clouds and fog and streaming through the open blinds in the Park Service’s conference room. Trey leaned back in his chair and ran a hand over his face while he thought back on the night’s events.
The FBI’s SWAT convoy with fifteen agents, along with four Park Service Special Response Team members, had finally rolled into Mammoth from the monument dedication site about the time the heavy fog began to roll out at 2:45 a.m. By that time he had a reasonable facsimile of an incident command center up and running out of the park’s Administration Building. He’d issued a general alarm to all park law enforcement personnel and support staff; folks had trickled into the command center in reasonable numbers. The crime scene at Win’s house had been secured, and the backcountry campers had been brought down from the vicinity of Sepulcher Mountain. One of the rangers had stumbled onto the kidnappers’ utility van abandoned in a parking lot near the hotel. It was secured for processing by the FBI Evidence Response Team, but those folks wouldn’t arrive until mid-morning at the earliest. Based on an initial inspection, there was no indication Win had been in the van, but much more analysis was required to nail that down.
Trey had rangers physically blocking the highway to West Yellowstone and all hiking trails leading out of Mammoth to the north and west. He wasn’t taking the chance visitors would actually obey the Do Not Enter or Trail Closed signage. Vehicles coming into and out of the park were being checked by rangers and local deputies at all park entrances—not a huge job since a third of the park’s roads weren’t even open yet, but as traffic increased this morning, it would become more of a problem. He needed more bodies. He’d called the Livingston and Cooke City police departments for additional help and Gus had requested additional law enforcement rangers from several of the surrounding national parks and national forests. It would be hours before most of them arrived, but at least reinforcements were on the way.
His one attempt to get the helicopter up last night hadn’t been successful. They’d lifted off around 2:30 a.m. and tried their thermal-imaging equipment on the south slopes of Sepulcher Mountain and down the valley from Swan Lake. The dense ground fog and large numbers of elk and bison in those areas had made the imaging device nearly useless. They’d grounded the ship after less than an hour, when more fog rolled in. As much as he hated to suspend the search, there was a guiding principle he wouldn’t violate: He wouldn’t risk the lives of the four-man helo crew for one lost soul.
Trey knew Gus and Chief Randall had been waging war through the early-morning hours in West Yellowstone’s tactical operations center, with elements of the State Department, Secret Service, Department of Justice, and FBI. Based on his last conversation with Gus an hour ago, no one could agree on anything. The State Department was adamant that the monument dedication go forward. The Secret Service and DOJ were equally adamant that the FBI and the Park Service focus most of their manpower on securing the site for that upcoming event, while the FBI brass were furious they weren’t being allowed to shift more resources into the search for Win.
Trey shook his head to try to clear the headache forming behind his eyes—lack of sleep always did that to him. It would sure be nice to have a shower, but that wasn’t an option; he was still wearing the grungy tactical garb he’d worn last night on the trail. He stared back up at the big white board he was using to detail the various facets of the incident. He’d set up a flowchart on what was known . . . and unknown. He breathed a deep sigh. Way, way too much still unknown. The ubiquitous government clock on the wall hit six o’clock as one of the clerks brought him more coffee. He walked down the hall to stretch and clear his mind. Agent Johnson was on the landline when Trey walked back into the room.
Johnson jumped right in. “Can you get that helicopter up? You’ve got some thermal-imaging capacity, right? Been light half an hour and they still can’t get anything off the ground in West Yellowstone. We’ve got two teams of SWAT agents flying into Bozeman, that airport opened at 5:30. But their ETA is three hours out—that will put them here after nine. What are you hearing?”
Trey ventured a question before he began answering Johnson’s. “Who’s in charge now?”
Always the diplomat, Johnson thundered back, “Who in hell do you think’s in charge! We’re in charge, and from the looks of it, we’re doing a damn poor job!” The big man snorted into the phone. “Apparently the State Department and DOJ are yanking everyone’s chain and insisting that our primary resources stay in the Cohn Monument area until after the dedication—like it’s some big national crisis if a damn piece of granite doesn’t get some dead guy’s name on it this afternoon! All the while we’ve got a real crisis—one of our men kidnapped by a bunch of raving loons!”
Trey pulled the phone away from his ear and listened as Johnson blew off more steam. He closed his aching eyes for a few seconds, then realized if he left them closed, he might fall asleep sitting at the conference table.
When Johnson momentarily calmed, Trey began talking. “The ceiling’s lifting again. Are you authorizing me to get the he
licopter in the air? I haven’t been able to get authorization from anyone else.”
“Me authorize something? I don’t have any real authority. I’ve got fifteen SWAT agents milling around downstairs, wondering what to do, but I think getting the copter up would . . .” Johnson paused. Trey could tell he had turned away from the phone. “Oh, hell, got to take this. . . . Call you right back.” The line went dead.
Helpless. That was Trey’s overriding feeling. In his career, he’d worked horrible vehicle wrecks, rappelled down cliff faces to recover bodies, and kayaked through raging rivers to search for drowning victims. He knew what helplessness felt like, but he’d always been able to channel that emotion into action. It was much more than going through the motions—it was trying to make a difference, a positive difference. The primary aspect of his job, as he saw it, was helping people. Trying to save lives. And in those sad times when that wasn’t possible, trying his best to provide closure to anguished family and friends. This time, for the first time, he knew the victim. He knew the man who might not come back—that added a sharp edge to the emotions in his heart. He knew he might be finding out sooner rather than later if the concept of closure was just an illusion.
His thoughts were interrupted by the ringing of the secure landline. “All right, finally got something!” Johnson sounded almost excited. “One of our ground surveillance teams lucked out just before daylight and spotted nine men coming down a ravine onto the church’s land from the south. Fog was still so bad they couldn’t get clear definition with night vision, but the thermal imaging showed eight men armed with long guns and one guy, about Win’s size, with cuffs or ties on his hands.” He took a deep breath. “Our guys were under orders not to intercept them. . . . They’re probably walking into the church buildings about now.”