by Emery Hayes
“Sisk?” Nicole called.
“Hell if I know,” her deputy returned. “Maybe a spike strip?”
His adrenaline was pumping, but his voice was steady.
“Have to be spikes with the cut of a machete,” Lars said.
They were both crouched behind the front seats.
“I think one tire blew,” Sisk said. “Back left. The others are holding on.”
Nicole figured the same, judging from the violent swaying and pull of the vehicle.
“What do you see?” she asked.
From her position, she watched Sisk scan the geography in front of him, take a quick look in the rearview mirror. He returned to it twice.
“Nothing in front of us. We’re closing in on the exit ramp for Route 9,” he said. “But behind us—” He shot another look through the rearview mirror. His hands tightened on the steering wheel. “Plumes of dust, coming in from several points. Fast.”
“How many?” she asked. “Count the plumes.”
“I see five. There could be more.” The uncertainty wavered in his voice.
“Five is a good place to start,” she said. She turned to Lars. “Green and some of his agents.”
“Looks like.”
“Call it in.”
She turned back to Sisk. “Pull over,” she ordered. “Get into the turnout there on the right, and position us so the passenger side of the van is facing incoming.”
Nicole heard Lars on his cell, sending out the alert. He glanced at the GPS and provided their coordinates. There would be no radio use, because even when the message was scrambled, some people were able to break through and make use of information that would leave them vulnerable.
“It’s like we discussed,” she said. “You listening, Sisk?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“You’re out first. Throw it into park and stay in the protection of your door.”
“I remember.”
They had gone through scenarios and likely outcomes before starting out.
“The van is armored, but it doesn’t make you invincible.” Bullets could still penetrate the metal, especially if they were high caliber and shot at close range. Same thing to blow out a window. All these precautions really did was slow down the inevitable.
“You hear me, Sisk?” she asked, as his door swung open and he scrambled onto the gravel roadside. She watched as he positioned a Colt Commando in the crook between window and door.
“Loud and clear. I’m set up northeast as ordered.”
And he was a damn good shot. She’d double-checked that before making the switch in drivers that morning.
Lars hit a button, and the driver’s side back door opened. They both jumped out and took position, Lars at the rear of the vehicle. Nicole sidled past Sisk and took a stance at the hood, directly in front of the passenger’s seat. She cast a glance behind her at her deputy.
“You didn’t see the strip?”
Sisk shook his head. “There were a couple of dusty patches. Been seeing them here and there the whole drive. Some clodded pretty thick.”
“Left by cattle and horse crossings.” Nothing irregular about that.
“Must have been hidden in one,” he said.
She nodded and turned back to the road, a two-lane state highway framed by open fields. It was in these fields that their adversaries were approaching, on what Nicole thought might be dirt bikes or ATVs.
“Coming on fast,” she said.
“Looks like they’re on Yamahas, one-seaters,” Lars said.
“Steady at five,” she returned. And they were a measured distance apart. Green and company could easily surround them, overtake them. Nicole knew they were outmanned and possibly outpowered. She leaned against the hood of the van, propped the stock of the Commando against her shoulder, and looked through the sight. She tried to get a bead on each of the men, make a quick study of visible weaponry.
Her breath clutched in her throat. Each man had an ammunition belt wrapped bandolier-style around his torso and the muzzle of a rifle peeking over his shoulder. Thirty or fifty caliber. Enough firepower that a single bullet could blow her and her officers off their feet.
“They’re armed with machine guns. Every one of them,” she said.
“Yeah, looks like each of them has a Deuce,” Lars said.
Nicole spared Sisk a glance. The deputy held his rifle steady. They were positioned so that Nicole was three feet clear of his trajectory and a good foot under the fire line. Still a pretty tight margin for error. Though his hands were still, she noticed that some of the color had left his face.
“How do you stand, Sisk?” she asked.
“Solid, ma’am,” he said.
She nodded once, turned back to her Commando, and peered through the sight.
She trained on the figure farthest north and staked her claim.
“I’ll take the guy furthest south,” Lars said.
That left the three in the middle, from which Sisk could take his pick.
“Whichever is the sure thing,” she told him.
“Easy,” Sisk said. “Like lunch at the buffet.”
The Commando was midrange. She counted under her breath. One thousand, two thousand … at the current rate of approach, she calculated engagement at forty-five, maybe fifty seconds.
Strike line.
The wait seemed protracted, minutes rather than seconds. Green pulled up in center and the four additional agents fanned out around him, forming a half circle around Nicole and her men. Standard agency procedure when attempting to apprehend an armed suspect. They wore helmets and BP-issued ballistic vests. Nice touch, and Nicole felt her mouth twist with derision. In addition to machine guns, they carried pistols in shoulder harnesses and possibly more than that concealed in the barrel seating of their Yamahas.
They climbed out of their ATVs and stood beside them, engines idling and their machine guns raised but crossed over their shoulders rather than aimed at center mass. There was a distance of twenty-five yards between each man, and the only hide-behinds were the Yamahas they rode in on.
Green raised the visor on his helmet. “You know what we came for, Sheriff,” he said.
“Of course I do,” she returned. “You could have saved yourself the trouble and called ahead.”
“Now’s not the time for banter,” he advised.
“Yes, you’re running out of time,” she agreed. “The net is tightening.”
She knew she’d scored a hit as she watched his lips thin. He brought his Deuce down and set his aim on Nicole.
“Feels like a noose, doesn’t it, Green?”
“You can give us what we came for,” he said. “Not a shot fired.”
“Or we’ll take it,” one of his agents said. “After we walk over your dead bodies.”
“You’re no fool, Green,” Nicole said. “You know we lured you out here, that we have men closing in. So why don’t you lay down your weapons and raise your hands in the air?”
“I’m not that evolved, Nicole. The drugs,” he demanded.
He lifted a hand, and Nicole watched as his men responded. All guns lowered, all trained on Nicole. She said a small prayer that her vest would hold out against a blast the size of a fist.
“We don’t have them, Green,” Lars said, drawing their attention. “You must have realized by now that what you got instead are three top guns and incoming calvary.”
“I wouldn’t risk contaminating evidence that will put you behind bars for the rest of your life,” Nicole added.
“What!” An agent stepped out of formation, swinging his gun wide as he approached Green, nearly prancing in his anger. “What the fuck! I told you she would do that. We needed to divide and conquer. We needed to take the station and the transport.”
“Divide?” Green snarled. “There’s not enough of us left to split the deck. And that was your fuckup.”
She knew his voice, his build, and even his swagger. “Gates?” she called. “What a surprise.”
>
He swung toward her, sliding his finger through the trigger guard. “Shut the fuck up!” He opened fire. And the others followed. All except Green, who seemed to stand unnaturally still while rage consumed his face.
Bullets kicked up dirt and gravel that pinged against the undercarriage of the van. Windows were shattered, the glass pebbling but not falling from the frames. Bullets plugged the armored siding. Nicole and her men returned fire. Their singular pops lost under the barrage of automatic weaponry. And above that came the distinctive chop of an approaching helicopter.
“This keeps up and the gas tank on this thing is gonna blow,” Lars warned.
Sisk got a piece of one of the agents, a shoulder shot that caused the man to spin like a top and fall to the ground. It created a pause in the shooting as Green and Gates assessed the situation, and into it Nicole shouted, “You hear that, Green?”
Gates did, and he looked up. The chopper was still off in the distance, just a pinhole against the blue, cloudless sky. He dove into his ATV and gunned the engine. The other agents followed, even the injured man clambering aboard his Yamaha, fishtailing as he spun it around.
It shook Green from his stupor, but instead of making a hasty getaway, he bore down on them. He pulled the trigger, the bullets feeding from his bolero. He swung the rifle back and forth, driving Nicole and her crew back from the van as he advanced. Overhead, she heard the crackling static of the chopper PA system. Demands were issued: Drop your weapon … lie facedown on the ground … The message was broken, scattered, but it reached Green; it sank deep enough to mean something. It aborted his anger and triggered the survival mechanism inside his brain. He stopped, finger resting on the trigger, then canted and took aim at the back of the van. At nearly one hundred rounds per second, they were already out of time. He was going to blow the gas tank. It would turn the sky into a hailstorm of shrapnel.
Nicole, Lars, and Sisk turned and ran, stumbling over brush and uneven terrain. And the van blew, followed by a rush of heated wind that singed their heels and knocked them to the ground.
“Cover your heads,” Nicole yelled.
By the time the last of the metal fell to earth, Nicole could see only a distant plume from Green’s ATV.
“He wanted to make sure we couldn’t follow him,” Sisk said, getting to his feet.
He wanted them dead. King of the mountain. Matthew Franks could not have called it better.
“The chopper will do that,” she said. It would give direction to her men on the ground as well.
She brushed dirt and debris from her uniform, walked the short distance to where she had dropped her Commando, and picked it up.
Lars stood, his hands propped on his hips, his gaze locked on the horizon. Each of them was covered in pinpricks of blood drawn from shrapnel that had penetrated their uniforms. No serious injuries.
“His mistake was to leave us standing,” Lars said.
31
It was afternoon by the time Nicole and Lars were back at the station, bent over maps and reports on the desk in her office. Her team had lost Green and Gates and another man when the fields merged with the wooded vales. They had been able to skinny through the trees, where the Sheriff cruisers could not; ATVs had given them the edge, the ability to take to back passes and beyond. The two men they had arrested had been cut off from the others by the deputy closest to the scene. The man Sisk had hit was nearly faint from blood loss by then. Neither man was talking. They had lawyered up and shut up.
Nicole couldn’t waste her time on them. It was conceivable that Green and company could make it over the border by nightfall. She wanted to stop them before that.
“I say they’ll go by way of Shoe Horn,” Lars said, tapping a spot north of Sunburst. “Green and Gates won’t risk being spotted by law enforcement. They’ll know we put out their photos on every available outlet, that we won’t be the only ones looking.” He shook his head. “They won’t go anywhere near Lake Maria.”
Nicole was inclined to agree. Lake Maria was closer. It was an easier way across the border, but it was also a popular place with boaters and hikers, picnickers and fishermen. The area was a magnet for day-trippers, especially on the weekend.
“Then let’s do it,” she said. “We direct all our resources towards the Shoe Horn.”
Nicole studied the map, circled the spot Lars had indicated, and traced with her eyes the distance from that point to the small curve in the Astum River Trail where the Scouts would hit the midway mark in their round-trip hike. There wasn’t a lot of geography between the two. The area was heavily wooded and the Scouts would raise their overnight tents just off the trail, tucked between the thick trunks of white pine and lodgepole. It was a 7.2-mile climb from this highest point of the trail to the border at Shoe Horn, with the elevation increasing sharply. Sheer walls created channels through which a person could slip through but required careful navigation, as many were bedded with shale. It was a damn obstacle course for those who didn’t know the area well.
She was sure Green had at least a passing acquaintance with the Shoe Horn, being the man in charge at BP North. Gates too, since they had so clearly hooked up and had probably investigated the area as a possible rabbit hole. She didn’t know that she and her men would fare so well tracking them into this wilderness. She hoped it wouldn’t come to that.
Lars’s cell phone rang, and he looked at the screen before answering. “Radio transmission from the chopper,” he reported.
They had sent a pass over to warn not only the Scouts but also members of the public at large who were currently using the trail or fishing from the river. They’d kept the message vague: Be aware … possible criminal activity in the area … for your safety, return to your cars … Be aware … possible criminal …
She waited for him to finish the call.
“Well?”
“Visual contact was made. Pilot reports the Scout leader confirmed receipt of message with a salute.”
They’d gotten the message. They would turn around and head toward safety. Nicole breathed a little easier.
“It’ll take some time, though,” Lars said. “Pilot noticed that several tents had already been pitched and the group was divided by about a mile or so, with some Scouts at the river’s edge and the others at camp.”
Nicole nodded. Nothing they could do about that. They’d gotten the message. They would make their way down the mountain, and Nicole and her men would make their way up, aboard ATVs. Were Green and Gates and the third man the last of the dirty crew, or were there others? Franks and Monte weren’t sure. They’d given a guesstimate based on observation, and so Nicole would move with caution.
She picked her vest up off the desk. It was made to sustain heavier artillery, and each of her men moving uphill would wear one. Including Matthew Franks, who would accompany them as a deputized observer. As a Marine, he had trained over challenging terrain and performed while under fire. But it was his perception of Green and company that would benefit them most.
Green had a voracious greed that rendered human life insignificant.
She shrugged into her vest. It was heavier than her usual Kevlar, bigger, the gaps at the arms and neck narrow. It covered the hips and pelvis and had a notch that fell neatly into place just under her throat. It wouldn’t be comfortable to wear, but dead would be a lot worse.
“Let’s go,” she said.
The trail was a steady climb. It meandered in places, and there were washboards from the winter snows that were in need of repair. They bumped over those and caught air, and a few times their engines coughed and torqued down but didn’t quit. By ATV, taking the trail from the east end, they’d reach the farthest point, where the Scouts had pitched camp, in twenty minutes.
She rounded the final curve. Lars had his own ATV as well, but the others—Sisk, Casper, and the Frankses—rode in side-by-sides behind her. Each fanned out as much as the width of the trail allowed. Nicole spotted several things at once—the pitched roof of a red ten
t just south of the trail, under a canopy of thick pine, and Green and Gates in the center of the trail, dressed as they had been earlier, complete with boleros and Deuces. But that wasn’t the most alarming part of the scene. They were waiting for her. Gates had the Scout leader on his knees, placed so that the man partially shielded his body. As Nicole came to a sputtering stop, Green raised his rifle until he had a bead on her.
Behind her, her men came to a stop. Nicole rose from her Yamaha, pulling her Commando, positioning it so that she had it aimed between Gates’s eyes. Her men followed suit. She felt them form a half circle behind her, listened to the crunch of dirt and rock and branches beneath their feet.
She scanned the small clearing, her gaze falling on the gathering of boys, among them Jordan and MacAulay. All lined up like toy soldiers. The wind picked up and pulled through the tents, snapping the nylon.
She turned back to Gates.
“So you’re the big man now,” she said.
“I should have been in charge from the beginning. This whole thing has been a fuckup.”
“You bring the drugs, Nicole?” Green wanted to know. “We’re open for a trade.”
Nicole pretended to think about that. Beside her, Lars shifted on his feet, seeking a window through which he could safely fire. She hoped the same was true for Sisk. Their sharpshooter. They had outfitted him with a Remington 700P, expecting a shot at longer range.
She nodded at the Scouts. They stood close enough that their shoulders rubbed as they wavered on their feet.
“Let them start walking down the trail,” she said, “and then we’ll talk about a trade.”
Green laughed. “You’re not very good at poker, are you, Cobain?”
“Let me ante up,” she returned, “and then you can decide.”
She spread her arms wide, holding the Commando in her left hand, and then bent at the waist, reaching into the barrel of her seat. They had planned for this, with the Scouts so close to the trail. With the possibility of random day-trippers crossing their paths and Green and Gate’s desperation. She pulled out a bag of fentanyl and stood up. She raised it into the air and waited.