by Scott Blade
I picked it up and twisted off the cap and sucked down a long swig from it like it was a canteen out in the field after a long day of humping my gear. Which was one reason why I didn’t was grateful to not have packed anything for this trip. I literally was pulled out of my assignment, told about my mother being shot, and I left straight away. No packing anything. No planning on what to wear. I’d have to think about that later.
Without anything to carry, I had to admit, felt good. It felt liberating.
LeBleu motioned for me to follow him over to the cafeteria, which was closed, but the lights to the dining room were still on. And I heard shuffling from back in the kitchen. The early morning workers were preparing breakfast.
We sat at a table near the window. I sat with my back to the wall, an old habit that I formed long ago.
The lights in the dining room were still on, but the area with the checkout windows were completely dark. Way back in the kitchen I heard sounds of clinking silverware and clattering of plates and banging of pots and pans like the kitchen crew were here prepping for the morning breakfast crowd.
LeBleu drank coffee. And for a while there was no sounds between us, except for the slurping sounds he made when he drank his coffee.
Finally, he broke the silence and said, “My name is Wayne LeBleu. I’m your ma’s number two. There used to be another guy but he retired last year and actually picked up and moved to Florida. No one has heard from him since.”
I nodded. I remembered the other guy. I said, “Tell me about what happened to my mom.”
He sat back in the chair and stared out of the window. It was still dark, but the sunrise was only around the corner.
He said, “Ya ever heard of a place called Jarvis Lake?”
I shook my head.
“Well actually, the town is called Black Rock, but the lake is Jarvis. The whole town’s built up on it. But the lake is what people know best. It’s like a tourism thing. Sport fishing once a year. That sorta thing.”
“Yeah.”
“Well, yer ma is friends with the sheriff there. And one of our girls, who went off to college, drove that way last winter. She never made it to the school and she never came home.”
He drank from his coffee, then he said, “And the girl’s mother got all up in arms about it and hounded yer ma for weeks. Yer ma had gone through all of the proper channels for this sorta thing, but no one was helping us. She decided to look more into it. On her own. She called the sheriff there. You know to check up. He said to call the FBI. So she did. They gave her the run around. Turns out girls have gone missing passing through that county for years. It’s the weirdest thing. They just vanish without a trace. Yer ma, hounded the FBI about it, but they said their investigation went to a dead end and that all of the girls who’ve been missing over the last five years are all of age. The FBI swears that they are just runaways. Nothing they can do about grown women, who leave Mississippi and never return. Nothing they can do without evidence.”
“How many girls?”
“The FBI knows for sure how many have been reported, but yer ma thinks it’s something like a dozen or so.”
A long pause fell between us. He drank the last of his coffee out of the paper cup, and half-crumbled it, set it down on the tabletop.
I asked, “So she was digging around about the missing girl and Black Rock is at the center of the whole thing?”
He nodded.
I asked, “And then someone lured her out to a dirt road and shot her?”
He nodded again, looked down.
I followed suit, and stared down at the table. I was angry at the guy who shot her, at myself for not picking up the phone to call her, not once in the last sixteen years.
“Any idea who she was meeting with?”
“Of course not. If I knew. I’d be the first banging down his door!”
I nodded. I believed him. He may not have been top of his class at the academy or in the National Guard, but he was loyal, a good soldier, and that was equally important. Small town cops are like that. He had been with my mom for years and she didn’t keep him around for his southern charm. She kept him around because he was loyal and dependable and a good cop.
I said, “This road.”
“Yeah?”
“Take me to it.”
WINTER TERRITORY
A JACK WIDOW THRILLER
BONUS
CHAPTER 1
THE MAN WAS ABOUT TWENTY-FIVE YEARS OLD AND FREEZING.
The cold pierced through his skin and shot straight to his bones. The temperatures outside dipped into the low twenties, and the winter hadn’t even come on yet. Not fully. It was still the middle of November, but the mountaintops were snowcapped, and the sky was wet with the cold, dewy feeling that came with high altitudes and frigid skies. Which exactly described his location—high up in a stark, cold winter. He was in the Absaroka Mountain Range, a part of the Rockies. The elevation was somewhere around thirteen thousand feet, but he wasn’t sure of the exact number.
The man was hiding out in a familiar place. A place he used to hide when he was young. He felt safe there.
Outside, the night wind blew and battered the ruggedly built wooden structure. It was primitive but had endured the cold winters for many, many years. For the moment, nothing and no one would find him. He was safe, but it wouldn’t be for long. He had nowhere else to go. He had run out of options and time.
They were coming for him. They were coming, and they would come in hot with guns blazing. They would kill him for sure. No doubt about it. He had been running for days, and he knew he would come face-to-face with them soon enough. His cover had been blown all to hell and back.
No changing that now. No changing the past.
But that wasn’t the thing that worried him at the moment. The thing that was the immediate danger wasn’t the guys coming to kill him for betraying them. It wasn’t the fact that they had trusted him, and he had turned on them. It wasn’t the dangerous enemies who had once terrified him. The immediate danger wasn’t the contents of the stolen bulletproof briefcase that was covered in dirt and grime and still damp from being dragged through the snowy terrain.
The immediate danger that ate away at him was that he was starving. He hadn’t eaten in days, so many days that he had no idea when the last time was.
Two weeks ago, he had been on a military stealth helicopter on his way into Mexico, or maybe back from Mexico, across the Mexican-United States border. He couldn’t remember for sure. The details were fuzzy because his thinking was muddled. Five or six or seven days without food will do that to a man. He tried to remember his training, his tradecraft, but for some reason all he could focus on was the stealth helicopter.
He had thought it was such a cool thing. It was a Comanche RAH-70, the most terrifying machine he had ever seen. Reports from around the world had claimed that highly modified Black Hawk UH-60s were the stealth helicopters used in the raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound in 2011. He hadn’t been there in 2011—he had been far too young at the time to have been involved in that operation—but he did have top secret clearance and was privy to knowledge that the helicopters used were in fact Comanche’s RAH-70s, cousins of the RAH-66.
Public knowledge said that the Comanche helicopters had been canceled way back in 2004. The programs were too expensive for the US military, but not for his employer. His employer had found use for them and had financed dozens of them to be created for stealth missions. They were housed in strategic military installations all around the world. Military service personnel were restricted from accessing them. Authorized persons had been told never to reveal any details about them to anyone.
The helicopter was a remarkable machine with deadly and accurate machine guns attached. It was equipped with special side turret-style machine guns based on the Vulcan-style gun and could fire M50 ammunition at 1,500 rounds per minute. The ammunition housed five hundred rounds and could be reloaded in fifteen minutes.
The man kn
ew this information not because of his military training, but because of his tradecraft. Although now he did question the statistics and details in his mind because he knew one thing for certain—he was starving, and the lack of substance in his body was causing him to lose focus and reasoning. He tried desperately to concentrate on the details of the stealth helicopter. And it helped. But he was still starving.
He was in one of the richest states in the country, and at that moment he was a rich man. He was richer than he had been five or six or seven days ago because of the value of the contents of the security briefcase in his possession.
Next to the man was a Beretta 9mm, a service weapon given to him just before his secret mission. It rested on top of a closed shoebox next to him, in close grabbing distance. The safety was on, but that could change quickly. The shoebox was stacked on top of a large appliance box that held old items from a childhood long past.
The room the man was in was dark and dank and not well-insulated. Spiders indigenous to the region crawled in the far corner of the ceiling. They crawled in the shadows of a swinging bulb that hung down on a long cord and swayed back and forth in a curved arc from west to north. A wind that chilled the room blew the bulb from side to side. The man could hear a faint whistle that sounded with the gusts of wind from the outside terrain.
The man was sitting on the floor with his back to the wall. He craned his neck to look out of a snow-covered, shuttered window above his head. He had to press his body up against the wall and use his arms to hoist himself up just to see. Billions of stars shimmered across the stretch of sky. The ground was covered in snow, but the night sky was clear and dark blue and picturesque like the wallpaper on a desktop computer. Perhaps on a computer back in Langley, Virginia, which was where he had lived for the last year of his life.
The man leaned forward some more and looked straight down at the front of the house. He couldn’t see the front door from his position, but he was more than two stories up, and he could see more than a hundred yards down the steep land in front of him. Behind him were dense trees and then the edge of a rugged mountain. He wasn’t much worried about men coming for him from that direction. He figured these guys would just come straight up the long, wide driveway. If they could find it. The snow had covered it over, leaving no signs of where it used to be. More than likely, his enemies would be coming in by snowmobile, and he would hear their engines in the dead silence around him. The noise would echo and bounce off the far-off trees or the sides of the mountains. No way could anyone surprise him on a snowmobile. The only alternative means of transportation would’ve been horses. The snow on the ground wasn’t deep enough to prevent them from riding on horseback up the track.
Either way, it wouldn’t matter. He was ready. His main problem wasn’t how they would come for him but when.
The owner of the house didn’t know he was there. He was hiding out. He prayed he wouldn’t be discovered. The last thing he wanted to do was involve innocent people.
Just then he heard a noise, a creaking on the staircase below him. He stretched back up and craned his head to look out the window. He couldn’t see the front door because of the huge porch, a fact he had forgotten. Then he remembered he had just looked down only moments ago.
The man heard more noises from below him. He heard footsteps growing louder and louder. A moment later, someone was on the floor beneath him, and then he heard a chair moving across the floor and light footsteps as if someone had climbed the chair and reached up for the rope to the attic door. He heard the creaks of his frozen bones as he twisted to look at the trapdoor and then the squeaking of springs from the door itself as someone pulled it down. The sound was deafening in the silence of the house.
He grabbed his Beretta and quickly pointed it in the direction of the attic door as it was pulled downward. Light flashed in through the crack and up onto the ceiling above him. Soon it filled half of the attic. He wanted to slide over to hide behind some of the larger boxes, but he couldn’t really move his legs. He had lost feeling in them some time ago but couldn’t remember when. Truth was, he had forgotten they were paralyzed.
The trapdoor went down all the way, and the folding staircase attached plopped down below. The man heard the creak of the wooden ladder as someone climbed it. A head stuck up into the attic, and a body followed. The small figure in front of him scanned across the attic and the boxes until their eyes connected.
The man lowered his Beretta when he saw a small boy, approximately six years of age. The boy glowered at him in a peculiar way. Most likely a combination of fright because of the gun and then recognition.
The man had been in and out of sleep for days and had expended so much energy in guarding himself, holding the Beretta up, that before he knew it, his eyes closed under the heavy weight of his eyelids.
WITHOUT MEASURE
Coming in March 2017
(Look for a preorder option)
After a long night trying to sleep in the cab of a big truck, hauling bullets, of all things, Jack Widow gives up trying to catch some sleep. He gets out at the next stop, a medium-sized town in the northeast corner of California with two industries—a small arms manufacturer and a Marine base on the verge of being forgotten.
Widow stops in a diner to eat breakfast and drink coffee in peace, but a man seated at another table gives off signs that bother him. The guy is in US Marine uniform and holds an officer rank. The officer is carrying a gun in public and wearing his camos, two things that are a major no-no in the Marine Corp.
Widow tries to talk to the man, but he doesn’t want to talk. At least, he doesn’t say much. Just small talk.
Afterwards, Widow finishes his coffee and leaves the diner and finds a motel, to finally sleep. But by the time his head hits the pillow, the local and military police show up, banging on his. They’ve got questions and handcuffs.
They want to know why he was seen with the Marine officer. They want to know what was said. They want to know why after Jack Widow sat with him, the officer went back to his base, shot and killed five fellow officers, before shooting himself dead.
In a year, with tensions high regarding Muslim extremists, gun control, and police culture; the cops think that it’s obvious that Marine Officer James Mohammed Turik, was an ISIS cell and that’s why he shot and killed his fellow officers. Some local townspeople want to blame Muslims. Outside media wants to blame guns. Jack Widow wants to find the truth.
In his seventh explosive thriller, Jack Widow digs deep under the surface to uncover a truth that will turn over rocks with dark secrets crawling underneath.