Off the Grid

by C. J. Box

  • • •

  CROUCHING NOW BEHIND THE JEEP as rounds shredded its ragtop and thudded into the body, Nate loaded both weapons and glanced up the hill toward Joe’s position. It was getting shredded by rifle fire.

  And he couldn’t see Joe.

  Nate had been hit twice, once through the muscle of his left thigh and the other in his right buttock cheek. His thigh wound was a through-and-through and it bled freely down his leg into his boot. If he hadn’t seen it, he wouldn’t have known it happened, because the butt wound was much worse: it just sat back there, burning like a hot coal that would not cool down.

  Rather than appear over the top of the hood of the Jeep like the gunmen had expected, Nate crouched and wheeled around the back. As he did, he glimpsed inside his vehicle and saw that the dowel rods he’d fashioned for his falcons had been blown to bits.

  At least, he thought, his birds would live through the day.

  He’d expected the gunmen who had not been hit, which was the majority of them, to be huddled behind their own smoking vehicles, taking aim. That’s what rational soldiers, well-trained soldiers, would have done, he thought.

  But these guys were crazy.

  Instead, five of them were advancing on foot toward his position. They were screaming, “Allahu Akbar!”

  Saeed wasn’t with them, which didn’t surprise Nate one bit.

  He waited until three of the five were lined up front to back and he fired one shot center-mass on the first gunman. All three went down.

  It was his first triple.

  The act seemed to stun the other two, who stopped and stared. He took them out with two head shots.

  They were crazy, all right, he thought. But there were still too many of them.

  He wasn’t sure he could hold out against them all before he bled out.

  The gunmen from the third truck continued to keep up heavy fire on the hilltop where Joe had been. Nate had heard no return fire.

  His ears began to roar. He couldn’t trace the source. Had he been hit in the head? The neck?

  Was this rising cacophony the last thing he would ever hear?

  • • •

  JOE WAS FLAT on his back and bleeding. AK-47 rounds snapped through the air inches from his eyes.

  Although he didn’t think he’d been hit by a bullet, he wasn’t sure. So many rounds had struck the rocks around him and fragmented that he’d taken splinters of rock and hot lead in his arms, chest, legs, and face. His entire body was numb.

  When there was a momentary pause, he used it to roll to his belly again so he could shoot back. As he did, his left shoulder must have been just high enough on the horizon that they saw him and fired. A round hit the top of his shoulder and it felt like the blow of a baseball bat.

  The animal sound that he heard was his own.

  When the orange spangles of pain finally faded from his eyes, he turned his head and looked at the wound. He had trouble focusing.

  The round had torn back a flap of his red uniform fabric and dark blood was pulsing out of a scorched hole in his flesh. His entire arm was numb, and he doubted he could shoulder the carbine and aim again.

  Joe closed his eyes, said a prayer, and painfully pulled the butt of the stock to his injured shoulder and found the peep sight. He wasn’t sure he could endure the pain the kick of the weapon would have on his wound when he pulled the trigger again.

  As he inched back into the notch in the rocks and stuck the barrel out over his daypack, he seemed to swoon.

  There was a roar above him in the sky. Dirt began to lift up from the rocks around him and float through the air.

  Suddenly, there was a maelstrom of dust swirling around him and he closed his eyes tight so they wouldn’t fill with grit.

  Then, .30mm cannon fire.

  • • •

  THE OBLITERATION of the gunmen in and around the three pickups by the lone returning Apache helicopter gunship was awesome to behold, Nate thought.

  Bad guys were cut into pieces and the three white vehicles were reduced to smoking wrecks of torn sheet metal and twisted frames.

  He briefly saw Saeed run out from behind his pickup and raise his hands in the air toward the low helicopter to surrender.

  Nate thought about how Saeed had urged his own men to sacrifice themselves but he’d hung back himself, both at Nate’s camp several nights before and now when the Apache arrived. Saeed was at his best when others were doing the hard work, or when his victim—like Ibby—was bound and unarmed.

  Nate hated him at that second like he’d never hated anyone before, and he quickly raised his weapon and put the front sight on Saeed’s jaw and squeezed the trigger.

  Saeed’s now headless body stood for a moment, slightly swaying, before a cannon round turned him into a smoking grease spot on the desert floor.

  Damn, Nate thought. We killed him twice. Too bad we can’t make it three times.

  • • •

  NATE PLACED both of his empty weapons on the hood of his Jeep so that they were in plain sight and raised his hands, palms out, toward the Apache as it descended. He was weak with loss of blood and he had to lean against the front of his vehicle to stay upright.

  His long blond hair whipped behind him from the backwash as the Apache landed. He kept his eyes closed until he could feel it begin to dissipate as the blades slowed and whined.

  When he opened them, he saw two airmen in pilot helmets and green jumpsuits approach from the helicopter. They were carrying automatic rifles. They walked cautiously through the battleground, heads on swivels, making sure none of the bodies scattered around them came back to life.

  One of the airmen approached Nate and slid his face mask up. He was young and pale and he had freckles across his nose. His gray eyes were cool and steady.

  “Good thing we decided to take a shortcut home or we would have never stumbled on your situation here,” he said.

  Nate expressed his thanks, then chinned toward the top of the ridge. “I’ve got a friend up there,” he said. “I don’t know if he made it.”

  The second pilot nodded and broke off from the first, headed toward the ridge.

  “I’m out of fuel and out of ammo,” the first pilot said, looking Nate over and unable to keep the concern off his face. “I’ll help you to the aircraft so we can get our kit out and get that bleeding stopped.”

  Nate looked down. His left leg was black with blood and it beaded on the dry desert floor.

  “My buddy . . .” Nate said, barely able to stay conscious.

  “Put your arm around my shoulder,” the pilot said. “We’ve got to get you over there.”

  Nate resisted. He’d put Joe into this situation and he didn’t want to leave him up there. Suddenly, he felt an overwhelming sense of loss.

  “I found a man up here,” the other pilot shouted from the top of the hill. “Not sure if he’s alive or dead . . .”

  32

  A week later, Joe Pickett and Nate Romanowski sat in a large windowless room in the basement of the Wyoming Homeland Security building on Bishop Boulevard in Cheyenne. They had been asked to wait for the governor to arrive. The governor and a “special guest,” as Rulon had put it to Joe in a voicemail.

  The table was long and coffin-shaped with twenty empty rolling chairs spaced neatly around it. Brass-framed placards were placed in front of each chair and Joe recognized the names of local, state, and federal officials. There were monitors mounted end to end on the walls and ports in the table itself where communications equipment could be plugged in.

  This was the room, he guessed, where all of the big shots would meet in the event of a civil or natural catastrophe. At the head of the table was the placard for Governor Spencer Rulon. A sign above the threshold to the room read SITUATION ROOM.

  Rulon’s administrative assistant, Lisa Casper, was the onl
y other person there, and she sat to the right of the empty governor’s chair. She was reading over a sheaf of papers with a nervous intensity that was designed, Joe thought, to discourage questions.

  The situation room hummed very softly with recirculated air and the banks of harsh white fluorescent light tubes that lined the ceiling. The walls were constructed of cinder block painted pale green. The floor was covered with dark gray carpet with as much give as asphalt.

  Everything about the room and the building itself was bloodless, institutional, and bureaucratic.

  This, Joe thought, was why he could never work nine to five in an office.

  “So who is the special guest?” Joe asked Casper.

  She didn’t look up from her very important papers, but her cheeks flushed slightly.

  “Can’t say, or won’t?”

  “Please, Joe.”

  “Got it.”

  He looked at Nate across the table. Nate had the ability to go as still as one of his hooded falcons when he wanted to. Joe couldn’t even tell if he was breathing.

  “You know, this building used to be the headquarters for the Wyoming Game and Fish,” Joe said. “I used to come here every now and then in the old days.”

  Nate didn’t even acknowledge that Joe had spoken to him.

  “Every state has one of these buildings now,” Joe said. “Since 9/11.”

  Nate’s crutches were leaned into a corner of the room and his left leg was extended straight out under the table so that he sat with a list to the side. When he came out of his self-induced coma every minute or so, he’d adjust himself in the chair to relieve the pressure on his buttocks. While he did it, he grimaced.

  Joe himself still suffered from various wounds and abrasions all over his body. At the hospital in Cheyenne, where they’d been airlifted, the surgeon had removed more than a dozen small shards of rock and bullet fragments, including one from his throat that had missed his carotid artery by half an inch. At the time, he didn’t even know he’d been hit there.

  He was covered with stitches and bandage strips and he walked like he was seventy years old. After seeing him when he was released from the hospital, Sheridan suggested they cover him in bubble wrap for a week or two. Marybeth endorsed the idea. Joe took it in stride.

  His hat was crown-down on the table in front of him. It had been vented by shrapnel. He had awakened the first night in the hospital to find two nurses sticking their fingers through the holes and giggling.

  “So what happens now?” Joe asked Casper.

  “Please, Joe . . .”

  “When does the governor get here?”

  “Soon, I would guess. I can’t call him because I had to surrender my cell phone before I came down here to the secure room.”

  “Why are we meeting here?” Joe asked. “Who would be spying on us?”

  • • •

  JOE AND NATE HAD GOTTEN together in a dark corner of the family lounge area on the third floor of the hospital the second night they were both there. Joe had painfully walked down the quiet hall and Nate had wheeled there in his chair. They took two hours to catch each other up on what had led them both to the Red Desert.

  Nate’s story about the dream, the Wolverines, Ibby and Saeed, and shooting his way into the third shed was so outlandish that Joe of course believed it.

  “I’m going back to prison,” Nate had told him. “The entire deal was based on their lies. They had an agenda, all right, but it had nothing to do with what they told me.”

  When Joe tried to argue, Nate hushed him and said, “Sheridan can have my birds if she can catch them. It’s time she stepped up. Better that than hanging around with trust-fund anarchists.”

  Joe had agreed.

  • • •

  THERE WERE FOOTFALLS on the stairwell outside the room and Lisa Casper looked up. Joe followed her eyes to the door.

  He heard Rulon say to someone, “You stay out here until we’re ready for you. I’ll call you in in a minute.”

  The governor entered the room in full bluster, carrying a medium-sized box wrapped with ribbon. He kicked the door shut behind him with his cowboy boot heel and it locked with an audible clunk.

  “Greetings, heroes,” he said with a grin. “You’ve looked better, but it could have been worse! Thank God the cavalry showed up in the nick of time.”

  He blew through the room toward the head of the table. Joe thought it remarkable how one man could fill a room that moments before had seemed empty.

  He stopped behind Joe. “I was never in a firefight in the military,” he said. “What’s it like, Joe?”

  “Horrible.”

  Rulon nodded. “That’s what I thought. What about you, Mr. Romanowski?”

  Nate’s silence said he’d been in more battles than he cared to talk about.

  “That’s what I thought, too.”

  He continued around the room, pulled out his chair, sat down in it heavily, and slid the box the length of the table, where it stopped next to Joe.

  “Open it,” Rulon said.

  Joe untied the ribbon and removed a brand-new black Resistol Cattle Baron.

  “That’s a nine-hundred-dollar hat,” Rulon beamed. “One hundred percent beaver, size seven and a quarter. It repels the rain and it sits on your bean like a pillow. If it ever gets beat up, you just send it back and they’ll recondition it to look like new. Look inside.”

  Joe turned the hat over. The sweat brim was inscribed:

  To My Range Rider Joe Pickett

  From Wyoming Governor Spencer Rulon

  “If it doesn’t fit, let me know and I’ll get it resized,” Rulon said. “Your lovely wife gave me your size. Not that she was eager to do so, because she’s still mad at me. Maybe she’ll forgive me one day, I hope and pray.”

  “I can’t wear it,” Joe said. “It’s too . . .”

  “Wear the damned thing,” Rulon said. “Just try not to get it shot up like the last one. I don’t think they can fix bullet holes.”

  Then he threw back his head and laughed.

  Joe smiled in return. He carefully placed the new hat near his old one. The battered one he would still wear every time he went out in the field.

  “You need to wear it,” Rulon said emphatically, “because I’m afraid that’s the only thing you’re going to get out of what happened in the Red Desert. No medals, no bonuses, no press conference where I can go on and on about your loyalty, patriotism, or devotion to duty.”

  Before Joe could say that was fine by him and that it had all really been about finding Nate and saving Sheridan, Rulon said, “None of it ever happened. Do you understand me?”

  Joe shook his head.

  “Pretend the last week and a half was a fever dream, Joe. Nothing happened in the Red Desert. You went down there to find your buddy and you finally located him flying his birds around. You lost another truck when it broke down—no surprise there, given your track record—and the two of you had to hike out, a little worse for wear. But there were no terrorists, no goofball team of anarchists, no EMP devices built into semitrailers. And no rescue by the cavalry.”

  Joe was dumbfounded. But when he looked over to Nate, he found his friend nodding wryly.

  “You get it, don’t you?” Rulon said to Nate.

  “I’m afraid I do,” Nate said. “So that’s Tyrell and Volk outside, then?”

  “Just Tyrell,” Rulon said, sitting back in his chair. “Mr. Volk is apparently in federal custody. They had to draw straws on which one got thrown under the bus, and Mr. Volk—not his real name, as I’m sure I don’t need to tell you—drew the short straw.”

  Joe looked from Rulon to Nate. He was confused. When he turned to Lisa Casper, she avoided his eyes.

  “Crazy thing about that bear,” Rulon said to Joe. “That grizzly made a beeline straight south for hundreds
of miles. What was it thinking?”

  Joe shrugged, puzzled that the governor suddenly brought up GB-53.

  “That’s a difference between us and them, when you think about it,” Rulon said. “We do everything in our power to save a bear—we throw money and manpower at keeping that creature alive. And they show up and kill it the first chance they get for no good reason at all except to cut off its damned head.”

  He paused. “Maybe when I can somehow figure that out, those people will make some kind of sense to me. But I don’t know if I really want to know.”

  He let the last sentence hang there.

  Then Rulon stood up and said, “Enough of that. Let’s bring in our special guest.”

  • • •

  BRIAN TYRELL, wearing a gray suit and a green tie, sat down in one of the chairs directly across from Nate and on the same side of the table as Joe. He leaned forward and clasped his hands and said to Nate, “You’re a hell of an operator. Better than I even expected.”

  Nate glared at him.

  Tyrell said, “I won’t go on and on. What is, is. What happened, happened. I’m glad you got out alive and that casualties were minimal—considering. I’m sure you haven’t heard that the Utah Data Center was knocked out by the EMP that got away. There is a complete press blackout on that one. There was some collateral damage, but less than we thought there would be.”

  He gave a What you gonna do shrug. “Nothing ever works as perfectly as planned.”

  “Which is lucky for us,” Nate said, “since your plan included obliterating all of the people at that sheep ranch in one fell swoop.”

  “Nothing personal,” Tyrell said. “Loose ends.”

  Nate narrowed his eyes.

  Tyrell continued. “We took out the truck as soon as they finished their work. Two dead, two in federal custody—including Bill Henn, who has agreed to cooperate. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised to find out he’s back working for us in the near future. He figured out some technical issues on a mobile EMP device our own people have been struggling with for years.”

  “Hold it,” Joe interrupted. “They destroyed the Utah Data Center?”