Force of Nature

by C. J. Box

  He squeezed between the pumps to confront the driver, when a flashlight beam blinded him.

  “Hey,” he said, raising his left forearm to block the light.

  “Bad Bob, right?” came a male voice. It was somewhat familiar. A white voice.

  “Get that light outta my face. I can’t see. Buddy,” Bob said, “do you know what fucking time it is?”

  Although the light clicked off, all Bob could see was a round green orb burned into his eyes. He heard the car door open, though, and just as quickly the rifle was wrenched out of his right hand.

  “Fuckin …” Bob started to say, but he heard the shuffle of someone behind him and something icy and sharp bit into his throat and squeezed off any further words as well as his breath.

  “I don’t want to hurt you,” the voice said calmly in his right ear. “But you’ll need to stop struggling. Do you understand?”

  Bob tried to draw air in through his nose, but the cord—or wire—around his throat restricted that, too. He reached up involuntarily with both hands to feel what was choking him, but the man slapped his hands down.

  “Relax. I’m not going to hurt you. I just need some information.”

  Bob could feel his heart whumping, and a voice inside his head told him to stay still. He lowered his hands and rocked back slightly, which lessened the pressure of the thin wire noose—or whatever it was. His eyes had readjusted to the dark, and he glanced toward his store, hoping Rhonda would see what was happening at the front door. She wasn’t there.

  “Do you remember me?” the man asked, his lips inches from Bob’s ear. “Do you recognize my car?”

  Despite the biting pain it caused, Bob managed to shake his head. Even though he remembered the Audi Q7.

  The man behind him chuckled. “Oh, we both wish it were so. Now, listen to me carefully, Bob. I’m going to ease up on you so you can talk. Like I said, all I need is information. Then, if you help me out and you don’t turn around and you walk straight back into your little store, everything will be fine. You’ll have an abrasion on your neck, but that’s all. Do you hear me?”

  Although spangles were replacing the stars in the night sky, Bob managed to nod.

  “Okay,” the man said, and the pressure eased, but the wire was still cutting into the soft flesh of Bob’s throat. “I’m looking for a house. Seven seventeen Farm Station Street. The street numbers here on the reservation—I can’t make heads or tails of them.”

  Bob knew that to be true, and it was something he was used to. No one ever used street or house numbers, anyway. They just said, “I’ll meet you at Mary’s house” or “turn west by where Jimmy Nosleep used to live.”

  “I don’t know the numbers,” Bob croaked. “Tell me who you’re looking for.”

  “Alice Thunder,” the man said. “She works at the school.”

  Bob felt a stab of pain in his heart. If this man would do this to him, what would he do to Alice? Everyone loved Alice. …

  As if the man could read his thoughts, the wire cinched tighter, and Bob groaned.

  “Where does she live?” the man asked.

  Bob thought, I’ll tell him. Then I’ll call Alice and tell her to run like hell and I’ll call the tribal police right after that. Then he’d call his buddies and tell them to grab their hunting rifles and meet him at Alice’s place, where they’d teach this son-of-a-bitch a lesson before the cops got there. He still couldn’t quite believe how quickly the man in the dark crossover—the man Nate Romanowski had asked him about—had taken his rifle and slipped the garrote over his head. He looked again at his store and wordlessly begged Rhonda to look out.

  Then, when the noose eased, Bob said, “Go down this street in front of us about a mile and a half and turn right on a dirt road just past a big stack of hay. Her house is half a mile from that, on your left.”

  “Ah,” the man said. “I was right by it earlier and didn’t see it. You people need to come up with a numbering system that makes sense.”

  Because of the wire around his neck and the man’s hands on the wire, Bob felt intimately connected to this person, and he could feel it when the man shifted his weight, as if he were digging something out of a pocket.

  His keys. There was a dull thunk of an electronic lock releasing. In his peripheral vision, Bob saw the trunk of the vehicle lift on its own and an interior light come on inside. Until that moment, he’d thought he had a chance. No longer.

  “We’re going for a ride now,” the man behind him said, and steered him toward the open trunk. Bob saw that thick clear plastic sheeting had been laid down inside.

  “I thought you said …”

  Bob never finished his question before the wire was cinched tight and his world went black and the last thing he saw was the after-image of the hawk flying across the surface of the moon and he wished he’d understood earlier what it foretold.

  13

  NATE ROMANOWSKI reached the outskirts of Colorado Springs as the morning sun lit up the fresh snowfall on the western slope of the mountains in a brilliant green and white palette. There had been a light snowfall during the night that was melting away in the high-altitude sun, and wisps of steam wafted up from the asphalt. His tires hissed on the wet surface. It was Tuesday, October 23.

  For the last seven and a half hours, he’d driven straight through the state of Wyoming from north to south on Interstate 25 and squeezed through Denver before the morning traffic approached its apex. Because he had no cell or satellite phone and he paid cash for food and fuel and therefore created no credit card receipts, his route and movements were untraceable.

  The U.S. Air Force Academy glinted like a glass-and-steel castle fortress in the foothills to the west as the highway expanded to three, then four lanes. Cars and pickups streamed onto the highway from entrance ramps, drivers sipping coffee and dressed for work. An SUV shot by him, driven by an attractive fortyish woman applying lipstick in her rearview mirror and singing along with a song on the radio. Nate smiled to himself because he’d been away so long he’d almost forgotten what it was like to experience the morning rush of normal Americans going to work at normal jobs for normal hours. The pure dynamism and hurly-burly of the scene made him wistful.

  SEEING THE ACADEMY brought back a flood of memories, several so powerful they made him wince. He recalled arriving there as a freshman just appointed by Montana senators, a tall and raw-boned middle linebacker with a buzz cut, still stinging from his goodbyes and from releasing his falcons to the wind. The upperclassman cadets jeered and confronted him, and he was paired with an older cadet named Vince Vincent who informed him that as of that moment he was his “dooley”—all freshmen were dooleys—and he had no past, no reputation, no rights, and no value as a human being. It was Nate’s responsibility, Vincent said, to start his life over at zero. And he could start by shining Vince Vincent’s boots. Nate gritted his teeth, said, “Yes, sir,” and dropped to his knees with a brush and jar of polish. Vincent stood there in the gleaming hallway with his hands on his hips and his chin in the air while other cadets walked by and laughed.

  The humiliation continued. Between classes, orientation, and football practice, Nate fetched Vincent’s lunch and dinner, ironed and hung his uniform, and cleaned up after him. Nate was asked to stand at attention outside the bathroom stall while Vincent had his morning bowel movement, and to note on a pad the shape and number of excrement bits Vincent called out to him.

  He spent days shadowing Vincent through the grounds so he was available do his bidding at any moment. The campus was numbered with similar relationships, and dooleys rolled their eyes at one another in shared humiliation as they passed in the hallways. But after a month, Nate observed that most of his classmates, although still designated dooleys, as they would be throughout the first year, spoke comfortably and freely with their assigned cadets. The pairs could be seen walking side by side on the campus, and the cadets became more like mentors and advisers. They even sat together in the cafeteria, where Nate wa
s required to stand at attention beside his cadet in case Vincent dropped a napkin or fork and needed it retrieved immediately.

  And Vince Vincent didn’t let up.

  That lasted for forty-eight days, until Nate slipped into Vincent’s dorm room at three in the morning and crouched down next to the bed and hissed into the cadet’s ear: “I know how the game is played and I’ve played it without bitching. Your role is to break me down and build me back up. But you don’t know me, and you’ve let your power go to your head. My father is an Air Force technical sergeant who spent his life breaking me down. He’s a professional. Compared to him, you’re a bad joke and a fucking embarrassment to the uniform. You’ve had your fun, and I’ve taken it until now for your sake, not mine. I’ve been your dooley.”

  As Vincent started to sit up, Nate reached over and placed his fingers around Vincent’s windpipe and pushed him back down. The cadet’s eyes pleaded to him to stop. Nate said, “I’m a falconer. I’ve spent more time outside than inside. I’m a student of violent death in nature. I could rip your throat out right now and it wouldn’t make me blink. You’d bleed out before you got to the door, and I’d step over your body on the way out to brush my teeth for the night.”

  Nate tightened his grip. “We don’t have to be friends, and I don’t like you, anyway. But from this minute on, you’ll respect me and I’ll pretend to honor your rank. No one will have to know we’ve had this discussion. Do you understand?”

  Vincent blinked his eyes to indicate he did. Nate’s life improved after that, and Vince Vincent went on living.

  _______

  DISCIPLINE AND ROUTINE at the Academy was nothing new to Nate; he’d grown up that way. His father was an Air Force lifer, and they’d lived all over the country and the world on military bases: Goodfellow in San Angelo, Texas; Edwards in Rosamond, California; McChord in Tacoma, Washington; Ellsworth in Rapid City, South Dakota; Incirlik in Adana, Turkey; Mountain Home, in Idaho; and Malmstrom in Great Falls, Montana.

  He’d been a dooley all his life. Friendships with kids his age were fleeting and incomplete. Schools and teachers were temporary. Nate sought some kind of permanence and an anchor outside his family and found it outside. No matter where they were located there was hunting, fishing, camping, and wildlife. Sure, the weather and terrain varied. But outside the base housing and civilization, there was a whole world out there that was harsh, beautiful, tough—and didn’t judge him.

  While they were still stationed in Montana, Nate’s mother died from lupus and his father doubled down on Nate because he didn’t know what else to do. He instilled in his son, through thought and deed, an ethos of loyalty, duty, and love of country. In his father’s mind, warriors held an exalted place in society and should be honored even if they weren’t in the modern world. According to Nate’s father, it was more important to serve than it was to be recognized or appreciated for it by those soft and ignorant ninnies who benefited from the warrior’s service. Every right the ninnies and sissies enjoyed had been protected over the years by the blood shed by American warriors, despite the contempt shown them as a result.

  The message was pure and tough and noble, but Nate’s father was absent for long periods of time. And when he was gone, the worldview he described fascinated Nate, who wondered how much of it was true and how much of it was self-justification for a nomadic life and a dysfunctional family. To confirm or deny his father’s rationale, Nate sought out and found another ordered universe in the amoral world of nature. He found a place where the strong killed and ate the weak and the small. Nate came to realize the only difference between a warrior culture and the tooth-and-claw natural world were the values and compassion humans had but wild creatures didn’t. So to better understand the former, he became a student of the latter.

  That’s when he got his first falcon.

  When Nate was a junior in high school in Great Falls, his father was thrilled when his son was nominated by the Montana senators and accepted by the Air Force Academy, but it came with well-known caveats. As a lifer, he had very mixed feelings about college-bred officers, and he wasn’t shy about expressing them. When his father found himself in a situation that was chaotic, disorganized, or wholly screwed up, he described it as “worse than following a second lieutenant with a map.”

  AS NATE melded into the flow of traffic toward the center of town, he recalled standing in the end zone of the football stadium in uniform during a home game. He’d been in the Academy for a year and had been assigned a dooley of his own, whom he’d released the day before without humiliating him. The Air Force Academy Falcons were playing the Colorado State Rams. Because of a knee injury the year before, Nate was no longer on the team, but he’d been chosen for a role he relished even more: falconer for the school’s live mascots. It was an Academy tradition. The birds were released at the start of the game and at halftime, and they’d circle the stadium and return to fist.

  It was two minutes until the half, and the Falcons were up 21–14, when an officer he’d never seen before approached him and stood a few feet away, studying him up and down with a flat, superior expression, as if he were about to bid on him in an auction. The officer looked hard, and there was a palpable sense of purpose, dark menace, and explosive action about him. Although he had the single silver bar that designated the officer as a lieutenant, he had a black patch sewn onto his uniform sleeve Nate didn’t recognize. The patch was in the shape of a badge and it had no words or numerals. Just a white embroidered profile of a falcon slashing through the air with both talons outstretched. And above the lieutenant’s breast pocket was a black metal pin with the roman numeral V, or five.

  “This isn’t your first time handling falcons, is it cadet?” the lieutenant said.

  “No, sir. I’ve flown birds all my life.”

  “Name them.”

  “Started with a prairie falcon, sir. I’ve worked with three prairies. But I’ve flown redtails and kestrels, and a gyr.”

  The lieutenant cocked an eyebrow, but his mouth didn’t change. “A gyr? Isn’t that like flying a B-52 bomber?”

  “A little. It was a challenge.”

  “Ever hunt a peregrine?”

  “No, sir. But that’s something I want to do someday.”

  The lieutenant nodded knowingly. “Pound for pound, it’s the greatest hunter alive. Fastest, too.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “How did you get all those birds?” the officer asked.

  “Trapped them myself, sir.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The officer extended his hand and Nate shook it. The man’s grip was dry and hard.

  “I’m in command of a small Special Forces unit, and I’ve been looking for a couple of fellow falconers to round it out. The reason, I can’t disclose. Is that something you might be interested in?”

  Nate shrugged. “I’m not sure, sir. But I’d be eager to learn more about it.”

  “Our official team name is Mark V,” the officer said. “Informally, we’re known as The Five. But within the team, we call ourselves the Peregrines.”

  Nate grinned.

  That was the first time he met Lieutenant John Nemecek.

  NATE SLID into the right-hand lane and took the exit for Cimarron Street onto State Highway 24 west toward Cascade. It wasn’t long before the buzz of morning traffic was behind him. As he climbed into the foothills, he noted that the inch of snow from the night before still clung to the pine boughs of the trees and sparkled in the grass.

  The gravel road he took to the right wasn’t marked with a sign. Within a few minutes, the canopy of trees closed above him, and for half a mile it was like driving through a tunnel.

  The place he was looking for was a squat brick home nestled into a shaded alcove with a view of a sloping mountain meadow in front and the massive jagged horizon of Pikes Peak behind. A single stringy white cloud seemed to have snagged on the top of the peak like a plastic bag caught on a tree branch.


  He pulled into the circular driveway and drove around it until his Jeep was adjacent to the porch and front door. There were no signs of life, but a rolled-up Colorado Springs Gazette on the top stair of the porch and an American flag flapping on a pole indicated someone was there.

  Nate killed the motor and swung his legs out of the Jeep. He looked at the house through squinted eyes, trying to remember the last time he’d been there. And wondering why it seemed so lifeless. He slipped off his shoulder harness and holster, and bundled it under the front seat.

  Before he reached the front steps, the interior door opened and Nate’s father stood behind the storm door with a scowl on his face.

  All he said was, “You.”

  “Hey, Tech Sarge,” Nate said, hesitating on the porch. “Are you going to let me in?”

  Although his father was still tall and wide-shouldered, his body looked ravaged and sunken-in. His thin, pale hair was wispy, and his eyes looked out of deep sockets like dull chunks of basalt.

  “I’m thinking,” his father said.

  “WHERE’S DALISAY and the girls?” Nate asked, when his father finally stepped aside and let him enter.

  “Around,” Technical Sergeant Gordon “Gordo” Romanowski growled.

  “Is there coffee? I’ve been driving all night.”

  “In the kitchen.”

  Nate paused for a moment, then said, “It’s okay, I’ll get it myself.”

  “You know where the cups are.”

  The interior of the house hadn’t changed much, Nate noted. Despite the mountain location and the three-hundred-plus days of sunshine in Colorado, it was designed to be dark inside. The shaded windows were small, and the corners were lit with dim lamps. The wall of framed photographs of Gordo Romanowski in exotic locales was as it had always been, but there had been a few changes. As Nate poured a cup of coffee, he studied the photos.

  Gordo, Nate’s mother, and five-year-old Nate in Turkey. Gordo with a forty-pound tuna off the coast of Baja, Mexico. Gordo in full dress in his tech sergeant’s uniform.