Mitch Kearns Combat Tracker Series Boxed Set, Volumes 1-3: Dead in Their Tracks, Counter-Strike, The Kill List

by JT Sawyer

  “Thanks, doc. You’re a helluva lady and a surgeon for what it’s worth.”

  She sloshed her soiled hands through a puddle of water. “That means a lot,” she said, looking down at her furrowed fingers. “And it’s horses, by the way. They’re my one true passion in life that makes me forget about the rest of the world.”

  Mitch nodded at her. “I know the feeling. Nothing like being under open skies on your favorite steed.”

  They began to walk back to the shelter. Mitch stopped halfway. “Return to the others. I’ll be back in a little bit. There’s something I have to take care of first. If anybody asks, just say you haven’t seen me.”

  He left and trotted into the forest then deposited the GPS tracker under a fallen spruce tree that had a large burl deformity growing off its side. This would make it easy for him to identify the hiding spot on his return trip. For twenty minutes, he walked in an expanding concentric circle around the area, looking for the tracks of anyone outside of their small group and for any indication of Nicholas. The rain had done a thorough job of erasing everything—animal, insect, or human. He felt even further stripped of his abilities in not being able to read the ground, something he so took for granted and had always relied on to analyze his surroundings. Now, he was operating blind.

  As he pushed out further in an arc away from the log shelter, he came across something shiny glinting from behind a bush. Moving cautiously, he skirted near the edge of a precipice and found a crumpled space blanket jammed into the base of an elderberry bush. He looked to his right and saw some signs of transference on the rocks—the sign a tracker looks for when mud or debris from one surface transfers from the heels of the fugitive onto the rocks or logs. It’s the next best thing to locating an actual boot print and points to recent movement.

  Mitch crept towards the edge of the drop-off, following the mud transference, then saw some droplets of blood on the leaves of a mountain mahogany shrub. Another foot away was a large swath of bright red blood sprayed onto the boulders, like a water balloon full of it had dropped from above. He inched over to the last rock jutting out over the precipice and saw Nicholas’ shattered body on the rocks below. Mitch glanced back over his shoulder and then to either side to make sure no one was in the area then he scrutinized the dead prosecutor’s corpse, noting the knife wounds on the throat and chest. Mitch still didn’t see any signs of foot traffic which meant the attacker must have killed Nicholas before the rain ended shortly before sunrise.

  He suddenly turned at the sound of movement behind him but slipped on the still-damp blood coating the rocks. He started to drop over the edge but grabbed the thin branches of mountain mahogany. Desperately clinging to the rim, Mitch felt the diminutive branches cracking as he began sliding along the slick face of wet granite. There was nothing left to grab and he feverishly clawed at the rounded lip along the rocky edge. He thought about the irony of having the rope around his shoulders that he had released Nicholas from yesterday.

  “Shit, this can’t be happening.” He clutched a small fingerhold in the rocky surface but it wasn’t enough to sustain his weight. In another second his grip weakened and his finger started to give way. Then he felt something yank on his wrist and looked up to see Julie holding on to him. He was shocked to see the petite woman as she held on with one hand while grasping a large juniper branch jutting over the edge.

  “Hold on, I got ya.”

  Mitch was able to swing his other arm up to a contoured section of the rim which afforded more fingerholds then he hoisted himself up until his shoulders crested the edge. Julie grabbed his coat sleeve and yanked him up until he was secure. Mitch collapsed back onto the ground, sucking in the cool morning air while realizing how little sand he had left in his hourglass.

  “Shit, this trek just keeps getting better,” he said, propping himself up on his elbows and staring at Julie. “Sure glad you appeared when you did.”

  “Yeah, me too,” she said, flinging her damp hair back over her shoulder and then realizing she had blood on her arms. “What the hell.”

  “It’s from Nicholas—he’s lying down below. Somebody hacked him up with a blade before shoving him over.”

  Julie frantically tried to rub it off while scooching away from Mitch. “Are you fucking kidding me?” She reached down for a rock then got up on one knee like a linebacker waiting to sprint forward.

  “Relax, he was my least favorite person in this group—maybe even the world actually—but I sure as hell didn’t kill him.”

  “Then how did he end up there?”

  “His knife wounds were on the front of his body from what I could tell so he must have been facing his attacker then fallen backwards.”

  Julie began swiveling her head to the right and left, her eyes frantic. “Brian is the only person with a knife. He’s one of them. We have to get out of here. I knew we shouldn’t have stayed here this long.”

  Mitch stood up and shook out his sore arms. He still wasn’t convinced someone else was out here but Brian had emerged with even greater certainty as the prime candidate. “You’re right, we should get moving. Let’s go back and get the others.”

  “You walk in front of me,” Julie said.

  “If you thought I was the killer, then why save me?”

  “Look, I don’t know what to fucking think anymore. I just heard something scrambling around on the rocks and then saw you dangling there.” She rubbed a handful of wet leaves along her blood-stained sleeves. “I didn’t know it was a goddamned crime scene.”

  Mitch proceeded ahead. When they arrived at the shelter Brian was filling his water bottle in a nearby puddle while Lisa was scrunched inside by the dwindling campfire.

  “You seen Nicholas at all?” said Julie, palming the rock as she stood a ways back from Brian.

  “No, you?”

  Julie shot a sideways glance at Mitch as if hoping he’d do the rest of the interrogation. He moved up a few feet, pointing back to the distant ledge. “We just found Nicholas at the bottom of a cliff. He was stabbed to death then shoved over is my guess.” Mitch looked over Brian’s hands and shirt sleeves for blood but only saw streaks of dirt.

  Brian stood up, his mouth agape. “Hey, look, what I said last night to him was just talk. He got on my nerves after the way he treated everybody here.”

  “And where were you right after sunrise?” said Julie. “I mean, you’re the only one who has a knife, Brian.”

  “Taking a piss—you my parole officer now, needing to know my whereabouts twenty-four seven?” He opened his coat and removed the blade from its sheath, letting the clean silver edge glint in the sun. “Here, you want to inspect the weapon? Go ahead.” He took a step forward, motioning with the blade down for her to take it. “Shit, you can have it if you want. I didn’t kill Nicholas.”

  The large figure returned the blade to his beltline and knelt back down to continue filling his water bottle.

  Mitch looked him over. He still couldn’t read the granite-faced man but he didn’t see any blood stains on the knife to indicate that he’d hacked up Nicholas—although he could’ve already washed them off. Then again, Julie had blood all over her after she’d helped him up. The ground has been impossible to read so I can’t rule her out. Does she have a knife hidden on her? He started to dismiss the notion while glancing at her diminutive frame and seemingly frail disposition but then recalled the arm strength she demonstrated in pulling him up from the cliff. Or maybe there are others out here. He shook his head, his mind reeling from all the possibilities.

  “Look, all of these little bitch-and-moan sessions are bogging us down,” Mitch said. “That’s probably to slow our progress forward. We need to just haul ass out of here and get to the cabin before this canyon is underwater.”

  “Agreed,” said Lisa, stepping out from the shelter.

  “I’m gonna fill up my water bottle and then we can head out. I’d suggest you all do the same. It’s going to be a helluva push.” While everyone gathered th
eir few items and rehydrated, he snuck off a short distance to retrieve his GPS tracker, tucking it into his pocket and rejoining the group as they trekked north.

  Chapter 19

  San Juan National Forest, Animas Dam Headquarters, Seventy Miles North of Durango

  Declan White arrived at the United States Bureau of Reclamation field station an hour before his shift began. It was his twentieth year working for the USBR and the new Animas Dam was the third waterworks project he was in charge of overseeing in the Upper Colorado Division. Compared to the others, the Animas was small and had been reduced in size from the original proposal due to lawsuits by environmentalists during the planning phase. In the end, the USBR had compromised and scaled back the project to include the present location which comprised a total of twelve miles of the canyon. A four-hundred-foot cement retaining wall was in place at the lower end with the USBR gauging station and water spillway occupying the upper end where Declan was standing. The past five months of labor were finally coming to fruition with tomorrow’s release of water from the Animas River, which flowed perpendicular to the canyon. He still had to send his work crews to the lower end above the concrete embankment next week to extract the heavy winches that were used for lowering supplies to the engineers during the past few months of construction.

  Declan remembered exploring the canyon in his youth and coming across prehistoric ruins and evidence of early settlers. Later, during fall elk hunts in the region, he had taken refuge in an old forest service cabin that had been abandoned in the ’80s. The dilapidated cabin, four miles south of his present location, would be underwater soon along with miles of rugged wilderness. Earlier research by federal archeologists and botanists had failed to turned up anything of significance in the canyon so it was deemed the least likely to suffer catastrophic impact once the dam was constructed.

  A small tributary of the nearby Animas River was going to be diverted temporarily to fill the canyon, which Declan estimated would take approximately seventeen days to completely reach capacity. Anything occupying the bottom of the gorge would be permanently submerged or obliterated from the scouring action of the boulders, debris, and trees.

  Declan grabbed a pair of binoculars and scanned the forest below the northern portion of the dam. Ah, such lovely country to go to waste but it’s not like we don’t have a hundred more canyons around here just like it. He thought about the myriad benefits of having this manmade reservoir in place: helicopters would be able to fill up their tethered water buckets to put out wildfires; nearby towns would have a backup drinking source during drought years; and eventually the state would stock the depths with farm-raised trout for fishing. He even planned on taking his grandkids canoeing on the waters in late summer once the county hydrologist had given the green light.

  Declan scanned the treetops many miles away and thought he saw a wisp of smoke rising up from the canopy near a small bend in the canyon a few miles south of the old cabin. But it disappeared as quickly as it arrived. Sure as shit hope there ain’t some dumb hiker that snuck past all the barbed wire along the trailheads to see the canyon one more time.

  Declan ground his teeth and let out a muffled sigh. He wasn’t about to delay months of preparation and postpone opening the floodgates tomorrow. He went back inside and checked the police log on his desk to see if there had been any reports of protesters attempting to gain access to the canyon but nothing showed up. He thought about calling the sheriff’s office in Durango about the possibility that he had seen smoke in the canyon but then he questioned if it wasn’t a vestige of early morning fog burning off in the first rays of sunlight. Yeah, that’s what it was—fog.

  He glanced out the large bay windows overlooking the dam and caressed his thick beard. No point in pulling the sheriff and his boys out here and sending them down into the canyon. Hell, that’d take nearly half a day right there just to get them out to that old horse trail above the cabin and then the better part of the afternoon walking down to where I thought I saw smoke. He stroked his beard with more force and then abruptly turned away, heading back to his office to look over his notes for tomorrow. Yep, fog—had to be.

  Chapter 20

  With sunrise nearing, Dev finally got word from Petra about the location of the GPS signals. He texted her the coordinates along with satellite imagery of a remote stretch of canyon, seventy miles north of Durango. He mentioned how it had been a source of contention for environmental protesters. She examined the map and compared it to the one sheathed in a clear plastic bag on the evidence table.

  Brenner and Roth walked in, discussing the next step in unraveling the mysterious events at the house.

  Dev tucked away her phone as the men approached, still deciding how to surreptitiously reveal the information she had without drawing attention to her clandestine intel-gathering methods. “This canyon on the map, is it Animas Canyon, the region that’s about to be flooded?” said Dev.

  Brenner leaned forward, eyeballing the map and then looking back at her. “Could be—what makes you think that?”

  “I overheard one of the locals in town saying something about a place north of town that was going to be underwater soon once the new dam was opened. I thought I saw a map similar to this the other day when I was reading the newspaper.”

  “Animas—yeah, that sure does look like the layout of the place,” said Roth, who moved in between the two, snatching the covered map off the table. “I helped provide security protocols for the Bureau of Reclamation guys when they were deciding how to close off the roads and hiking trails. Guess I didn’t notice the place from this piss-poor map.” He shot a glance over at Dev. “Strange that you did.”

  “The geologists never got back to me about this map,” said Brenner. “They must be out in the field so it might be a good bet to look into Animas.” Brenner removed his hat and rubbed his bristly scalp. “That’s gonna be a bit of a drive down rutted roads to get there—over an hour then a few more to walk down into the canyon.”

  “Good thing you’re with me then,” said Roth. “We can be at the airstrip in Bayfield in an hour and I can have my agency helicopter meet us there.”

  Dev was surprised at Roth’s generosity. She hadn’t had time to review the information Petra just sent about Roth but was sure there was more to his motives than what was dictated by his authoritarian role.

  “I’ve gotta grab some of my things. I’ll meet you in Bayfield in an hour,” said Brenner. “Maybe Ms. Leitner can drive down with you,” he said to Roth as he brushed past them.

  As Dev walked with the husky marshal down to the driveway, she scrolled through her texts from Petra. One stood out, causing her to hesitate in mid-step. Internal video footage from a salvage yard across from the federal impoundment lot shows Roth inspecting Kruger’s vehicle and removing something from the side quarter panel days after Kruger’s accident.

  “Something wrong?”

  “Ah, no, my family just keeps sending me these crazy messages about getting back home. Like I’d leave here without Mitch.”

  “So they don’t approve of him either, eh?” Roth said, shaking his head as he opened the door to his SUV. “Maybe you should listen to those with good common sense.”

  Dev just raised her eyebrows and wanted to break the man’s jaw with a right hook. Instead she got in the SUV, changing the subject to the weather while trying to plan her next move, wondering how far Roth’s deception went.

  Chapter 21

  Mitch studied the topographic map he had removed from Daryl’s pants pocket back at the log shelter, tying in the contour lines on paper with the landscape features around him. A jagged protrusion of rock to his right matched up with the map. He determined that they had less than two miles to go before reaching the cabin. Mitch still wasn’t sure it would be there but it had provided a focal point for everyone and he was determined to at least see if there was a trail out of this hellacious gorge.

  Brian caught up and stood next to him, catching his breath from the s
light incline he’d trudged up. The two women were fifty yards behind, with Julie coaxing the melancholy Lisa to continue moving forward.

  Mitch stowed away the map in his jacket and glanced at the game trail ahead, which was devoid of any tracks, human or otherwise. He looked at Brian and moved closer to him.

  “Say, you started talking yesterday when we first met about some feds arriving at your prison in regards to Kruger’s death.”

  “Yeah, that’s right. There was inquiry into how he died.”

  “That’s kind of unusual don’t you think? That’s something that could be read about in the cause-of-demise report via email. What were they asking about in particular?”

  “Well, that’s the thing—it was just one guy. He was with the U.S. Marshals office. Kept asking about whether Kruger had said anything before he died—he was very specific and kept asking if Kruger had kept a journal of any kind in his cell. He didn’t seem too interested in the actual attack or the perps that shivved the man.”

  Mitch’s eyes darted around the canopy of trees, trying to piece together what Brian told him. He could hear the two women approaching and took a step back then switched his attention to the trail ahead while hiding his interest in what he’d just learned.

  “Not much farther to the cabin now. Should be there within the hour,” Mitch said.

  The two women stopped and sat down on rock slabs, wiping the sweat off their faces.

  “And then what?” said Brian. “What if we’re just walking into another trap or dead end?”

  Before Mitch could answer, he swiveled his head in either direction, staring up at the slivers of open sky above the trees. “A plane—I hear a low-flying plane.” He ran forward twenty feet to get a better glimpse through a large open area in the canopy then waved the others over. “This is a long shot but gather up any dry bark or kindling you can find. We’ll see if we can get a smoky fire going. That plane may be circling the region for a while if they think we could be down here.”