Where am I? she thought. What is this?
Then she remembered.
The sniper round had blown open a half-dollar-sized bloody exit wound hole just above her collarbone. She would have died from blood loss right there and then if her Quantico training hadn’t kicked in.
The very first thing she did as she lay there in shock with her adrenaline still pumping was take off her fleece and fold it and pack it down into the hole as hard as she could. Then she’d cinched it painfully tight to her torso with the raid jacket and her belt.
She looked down at the makeshift dressing now, scanning it carefully. It was almost completely soaked through with water, but she couldn’t see any blood blotting through it. At least not yet.
She looked up. It had still been somewhat dark when she’d slid down the almost sheer rock slope into the water, but now the Wyoming sky was a bright cloudless blue.
How long had she been in the water? Five minutes? An hour?
She had no clue.
The current took her out into the center of the stream as she came around a bend. When she looked left at the shore again, she could see the Wyoming mountains in the distance above her now, bright in the morning sun.
A sense of bone-deep sadness hit her as she suddenly thought of her partner, Dennis, up there somewhere facedown in the rocks, shot dead, all alone.
No! Stop it, she thought as she began to cry. Stop it. Stop thinking about death. Not now. Just hold on. Just—
She jerked her head up at a sudden louder sound in the river ahead. It was a low scary freight-training rumble, and she gripped the slimy branch harder as she felt herself moving faster.
The branch went sideways on her as she tracked out into the center of the stream again. When she looked to her left, she saw where the riverbank had suddenly become high slabs of gray stone. They were terracing down like descending stairs, and when she looked forward again, there was white water ahead shooting up in geyser-like spurts.
Shit, she thought as she dipped down and rose up and then plunged down even lower. Her stomach dropped as she lurched down in a rush through the center chute of it. When she rose up again, she was in the white-water geysers and then she was turning. She went under with the spinning log branch and then popped back up, coughing water.
She saw the fisherman as she drifted into an eddy beside the bottom of the rapids. He was on one of the lower rock slabs to her right, an old man in dark green rubber waders and a dark cowboy hat. The way he hovered above her, backlit against the sky, she thought she was hallucinating him. She didn’t think he was real.
Was it God?
“Ma’am, are you okay?” the old cowboy fisherman said calmly as she floated in a slow spin. “Do you need help, ma’am?”
“Yes!” Kit Hagen screamed.
10
On Tuesdays, they did Mexican, so as Declan took the first shower, Gannon put on the eggs and set out the tortillas and salsa and hot sauce on the table. After he clacked down the plates, he made a fresh pot of coffee and poured himself a cup and took it with him into the living room.
Of their bus.
It actually wasn’t as bad as it sounded. It was a slick shiny black rock-star-style bus with tinted windows and an interior like a Manhattan penthouse. It had all the amenities: stainless-steel appliances, a washer and dryer, a steam shower. It even had a new Chevy Colorado pickup truck hitched to the back of it that they used to do their monthly grocery run.
“All the comforts of home,” Gannon mumbled as he pulled up the window blinds and looked out at his little slice of the middle of nowhere.
The elevated promontory their rock-star bus was perched upon afforded a clear view of a long curving dried arroyo that was used as a drive up into the desert canyon mine site. The high hills on both sides of the canyon were colored in muted tans with patches of green where the slopes were lightly bearded with shrubs and firs and spruce.
Gannon came forward to the window and tilted his head up at the highest eastern ridgeline. In the month and a half they’d been there, he’d seen several animals. Desert rabbits, bobcats, mule deer, even a bighorn sheep once.
There was a hunting hawk up there in the bright blue morning summer sky now. He watched it turning and turning and turning over the textured hills.
“Yeah, what else is new?” Gannon said as he finally sat on the couch beneath the bunk bed with his coffee to ponder his crazy situation for the millionth time.
Though the off-the-grid Utah desert lifestyle had its high points, his recent entry into it with his son wasn’t solely for recreational purposes.
Not long ago, he had run afoul of some people.
It had started out innocently enough. He’d been fishing down in the Caribbean and found a bag of money and diamonds in a crashed corporate jet. Thinking it was dope money, by the age-old law of finders keepers, he’d decided to keep it.
As it turned out, he probably should have thought again. Because wouldn’t you know it, instead of dopers, the money belonged to a bunch of corrupt-to-the-bone top-secret-clearance FBI counterintelligence people in the midst of committing a multitude of high crimes and treason.
Due to this unfortunate turn of events, there had been some problems. Problems involving the kind of automatic gunfire, violence and death Gannon had thought he’d put behind him when he’d left the navy SEALs and the NYPD.
Everything he had done was solely in self-defense, and he would have gladly tried to explain it to an honest judge and jury in an open court of law.
But that was actually sort of the problem.
Since the incident had involved a cabal of corruption at the tippity-top of the federal government food chain, it seemed like the whole bloody body-strewn incident had somehow been kept out of the papers and swept very deeply under the rug.
He’d had his old NYPD partner, Stick, discreetly look into it for him to see what was up. But there was nothing. Nothing in the computers. There was no open FBI investigation on him, no FBI warrant out for his arrest.
Or at least no formal official legal warrant, Gannon thought.
Call him crazy, but since he’d banged heads with the psycho killer lunatic wing of the shadow government, his thinking was they could still be out gunning for payback unofficially.
The fact that he was still in possession of the very large bag of corrupt loot that he’d salvaged from their crashed FBI Gulfstream 550 only seemed to add to this depressing theory.
Or maybe not, he thought for the thousandth time. Maybe no one was looking for him. Maybe it had all blown over and all the corrupt bozos involved who’d come out of it alive were happy to let bygones be bygones.
Then Gannon suddenly remembered the look on the face of the assistant deputy FBI director that he’d impaled with a scaffolding fence pole out in front of the Chilean embassy in London, England.
Or then again, he thought.
Gannon sighed as he heard his son start to sing in the shower.
It was true that the bus confines were tight for two people, he thought as he finally savored a sip of French roast.
But compared with a pine box or a prison cell, he decided with a nod, it wasn’t too bad after all.
11
Gannon was in the bus galley plating scrambled eggs a few minutes later when he heard the engine.
At the living room window, he saw a large vehicle coming up the dry streambed. It was an old wide-tire desert-beige Hummer truck, and Gannon’s face broke into a smile as he went back into the galley to turn off the burner.
He was outside with his coffee cup when the massive rumbling vehicle came to a halt in the gravelly desert dirt beside the bus. Gannon watched as its door shrieked open and a pretty college-aged blond girl in a Cabela’s hoodie and shorts climbed out from behind the wheel.
The lovely young lady’s name was Stephanie Barber, and she was the olde
st child of Gannon’s old war buddy, John Barber, who owned the remote Utah property where they were currently hiding out.
Gannon’s friend John and his wife, Lynn, and two other kids lived down in the valley below the mine, where they raised some sheep and ran a weekend-warrior-style shooting resort camp for deep-pocketed corporate executive types.
The outfit was called Hotel Juliet Bravo, and the old house he and Declan had just been goofing around in was its main attraction. Barber had spared no expense to convert the old brick house into a state-of-the art tactical firearm training shoothouse really no different than the one he used to train in with his SEAL team outside of San Diego.
“Morning, Mr. Gannon,” Stephanie said.
“Good morning, Stef,” Gannon said. “What brings you up here so early?”
They both turned as Declan emerged from the bus with his hair still wet, buttoning up his plaid shirt.
As if I didn’t know, Gannon thought as he saw Stephanie staring dumbstruck at his lean, nice-looking twenty-year-old son.
Gannon stifled a smile as Declan stepped over and gave the pretty college girl a hug and a little hand squeeze. They’d both hit it off pretty well in the almost two months they’d been staying there.
Gannon and Declan had actually gone on a rafting trip on the nearby Green River with the whole Barber clan the week before. Come to think of it, he couldn’t help but notice the two of them cutely holding hands as they all sat around the campfire. Since then, Stephanie was visiting more and more.
Go figure, Gannon thought.
“You’re lucky you caught us, Stef,” Gannon said. “Me and Dec and the rest of the dwarves usually like to get heigh-hoeing down in the old mine there real early, but wouldn’t you know it? Dopey broke the pickax again. That Dopey. Second time this week.”
“That’s real comical, Dad,” Declan said, rolling his eyes. “Desert mining humor isn’t easy. Most say impossible. But you manage to pull it off every single time.”
Stephanie smiled.
“Hey, I actually have a surprise for you guys,” she said as she turned and opened the Hummer’s back door.
On the floor of the back seat was a cardboard box. It had a blanket in it, and from the blanket came a high yip.
“What in the world?” Gannon said as he came in closer and saw a cluster of extremely cute tiny black furry creatures climbing all over each other.
“One of Dad’s dogs had puppies,” Stephanie said proudly.
“No way. Look at them,” Gannon said shaking his head. “What are they? German shepherds?”
“No. Malinois,” Stephanie said, petting one.
“Of course,” Gannon said, laughing. “What else would they be?”
John Barber, like Gannon, had been in the Special Forces, and Belgian Malinois were one of the breeds of dog SEALs and other Special Forces units used sometimes for bomb sniffing and raids.
“How many are there?” Declan said. “It’s hard to tell.”
“There’s eight of them. Dad’s busy out at the range with a new group that came in last night, but he said to come up this morning first thing and see if you guys want one.”
“Get out,” Gannon said, smiling down at the squirming bunch of them. “The pick of the litter, huh? You guys are too nice. What do you think, Dec? We could use a dog up here.”
“Hell, yes!” Declan said.
Gannon picked one up and was peering at it when there was a weird ringing. It was coming across the sandy clearing from the direction of the shoothouse.
“I got it,” Gannon said, handing Declan the puppy and jogging down to the old house.
He came in through the shoothouse’s doorless threshold and continued straight past the stairs into the ground floor kitchen. On the counter there next to an ancient soapstone sink was a dusty green box with an old telephone handset on it.
The box was actually a US Army Vietnam-War-era field telephone. In addition to his shooting ranch down the canyon, his buddy John Barber had a kind of war museum with hundreds of weapons and war paraphernalia. He had all kinds of stuff. Artillery pieces, WWII samurai swords. The Hummer out in the yard was actually a real one he had bought from army surplus.
Since they were SOL up here with no cell service, John Barber had run a mile and a half of some old copper military phone line up the canyon so they could still reach out and touch each other off-the-grid style.
Gannon smiled as the beat-up green field box that had probably called in more than its share of napalm strikes began to jingle again.
Like Gannon himself, his buddy, John Barber, was paranoid and nuts in the most beautiful way possible.
Only the paranoid survive, Gannon thought, lifting the ringing handset.
“Gannon residence,” he said.
“Hi, Mike. Is Stephanie there?” John’s wife, Lynn, said.
Gannon’s grin disappeared as he heard the no-nonsense tone in her voice.
“Yes. She’s out talking to Dec. What’s up? Is everything okay?”
“Could you just put her on, please? It’s important.”
“Sure.”
Gannon put down the phone and jogged over and stuck his head out the shoothouse front door.
“Stef, it’s your mom.”
“What’s up?” Declan said on the porch as Stephanie went inside.
“I don’t know,” Gannon said.
They didn’t have to wait long to find out. When Stephanie came back out a minute later, there were tears in her eyes.
“What is it, Stef?” Gannon said.
“My uncle Owen,” she said sobbing. “He’s a park ranger up in Wyoming, and his boss just called the house and said somebody shot him dead.”
12
Declan went down to the house with Stephanie in the Hummer while Gannon followed in the unhitched Chevy pickup.
As Gannon drove down the desert dirt road, he found himself thinking about his friend, John Barber, and the time they had spent together during the war.
Their former unit had been called a bunch of stuff over the years but when he and John were in it, it was called Task Force Orange. It was a special mission reconnaissance unit specializing in electronic surveillance and covert border transit. High-risk, sneak-and-peek missions where they wanted to softly penetrate into places where US forces weren’t officially supposed to be. Sometimes roping in off a Night Stalker chopper in the dead of a moonless night. Sometimes doing a High Altitude High Opening jump out the back of a C-130.
After they hit some jackpots, one of the brass pulled some strings and had them sent back to the States to go through the CIA espionage course in Virginia called the Farm. There they’d been taught the fun James Bond stuff. How to steal cars and pick locks and bluff their way through border checks. Then when they got back to the war, they started going into places on commercial flights in civilian clothes with passport cover. Those trips were especially great since they actually got to land inside the aircraft and use a set of stairs for a switch.
They’d send them in first before they did anything big. To listen and to find out things. Get coordinates. Count things like troop numbers or guards in prison towers.
Gannon remembered how on walk-in sneak-and-peeks they’d move nights, sleep days. They’d sleep in the brush undercover, taking turns to stand the two-hour watches.
John, who was five years older and who had started hunting with his own father at the age of seven out here in the Utah wilderness, had taught Gannon so much.
How to read a trail like a novel. How to cover your tracks. How to be completely silent. How to listen.
They’d become like brothers on those long nights listening. Deep listening, hours and hours of it. Listening so intense you started to hear the footfalls of insects. Think you were melting into the landscape, actually becoming the grass, the wind, the stone.
If there were anyone better at recon on the planet, at tracking someone down, and moving in and out of places at whim and without a trace like a ghost, Gannon couldn’t imagine who it could be.
He shook his head as John’s lake house came into view down in the valley below.
Whoever had murdered John’s brother better start praying that the cops caught him very quickly, Gannon thought.
And had a quality bulletproof vest for him to wear to the arraignment.
13
Getting out of the truck in the yard, Gannon found his old friend alone sitting at a picnic table in the side yard of his log-cabin-style house beside his small lake.
John Barber was a lean, wiry man of five-foot-ten. When Gannon had first met him in Afghanistan, his hair was longish and almost blue-black, but it was cut in a flattop now and streaked with bits of gray, as was his mustache. As Gannon sat across from his friend, he could see that he was still in his polo shirt that he wore on the firing range, and there was a book in one of his big muscular hands.
Gannon winced as he looked at the old family Bible. The cover soft, the old onion skin pages yellow and worn with handling.
“John, I’m so sorry about your brother,” Gannon said. “What in the hell happened?”
“We don’t know,” Barber said. “His boss and buddy, Don, called. He could only talk for a second. He just said Owen was working up in Grand Teton Park, and that there was a shooting sometime this morning, and that Owen was dead. It’s not even on the news yet. I checked twice.”
“That’s unbelievable,” Gannon said.
“That’s the word,” John Barber said, placing the Bible down on the weathered wood as he looked out on the lake and cliffs.
“Was he one of your younger brothers?” Gannon said.
“No, Owen was the oldest,” Barber said, wincing.
“Married? Kids?” Gannon said.
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