Next he readied the dart rifle directly alongside the CheyTac, slinging a pouch at his waist carrying four extra darts. It was a double shot: the CheyTac would shatter the window so the dart could travel through smoothly and on target, a difficult, technical shot that only made it all the more attractive to him.
He had no plans to kick in the door. Playing Bruce Willis was definitely Plan B. Patience was a hunter’s true gift. His best tool: the ruse. He doubted he could coax the good doc to come outside onto the porch, but that was why he’d brought the two rifles. The double shot would do the trick.
He rechecked the sights of both rifles-the CheyTac was strapped in place, the dart rifle free. He spent fifteen minutes getting the setup just right: the CheyTac would be triggered with his left hand; the D93S aimed and fired from his right. He’d have just the one chance because of the single dart. After that, like it or not, he’d have to pull a Bruce Willis on the cabin. The narrator inside his head favored this second option. The hunter opted for the first.
With a piece of Velcro holding the barrel of the dart rifle in place, Coats produced a double-reed elk bugle from his pack and held it to his lips. The bull elks bugled when in rut, and, though the season had just passed, the snow had come early, and it was not impossible that a male might still be out here, sounding his call. A vet would know this. Only the most effective bugling would ensure success.
But he was a professional hunter. Few understood the art of duplicating the wailing oboelike sound of an adult bull elk as he did. He believed any vet, any hunter, would be drawn by the chance to see a bull elk up close. There were few animals as beautiful and regal.
The procedure took some practice: sound the bugle; secure the device in his belt, reach for the D93S, and pull his eye to scope. Bugle, belt, rifle, scope. He waited. He tried another dry run. It took five seconds for him to get the bugle stashed and his eye to scope. It would take a person in that cabin at least a few seconds to get to a window upon hearing it.
Bugle, belt, rifle, scope.
He was ready.
He let out an enormously loud bugle, quavering with tremolo- more of a shriek than a cry. His eye focused on the cabin window… waiting… waiting.
No one came.
Another try: a second loud bugle-a trill up and down an out-of-tune scale, a screech, like fingernails on a blackboard.
Eye to the scope.
Light shifted on the far side of the window. It was an incredibly subtle change, but something was moving inside the cabin. Coats exhaled and then drew in a deep breath, his index finger moving from the trigger guard to in front of the trigger.
Demonstrating the patience of a martial arts master, our hunter slows his bodily functions in apprehension of the shot.
Steady.
His trigger finger never falters as he holds himself as still as a statue.
Another change of light. A slight movement of the curtain.
There! The curtain was pushed aside. Seen through the scope, the hand looked gigantic. A head moved into the frame: a man. Middle-aged. He could see the day-old whisker stubs on the man’s cheeks.
Aker.
The scope’s crosshairs stopped a few centimeters from dead center. He trained this magnified empty space on Aker’s chest, his own heart thumping wildly. His left hand came up and found the CheyTac’s trigger. He had yet to breathe, still working on the same breath. He squeezed: left, then right.
The CheyTac’s recoil ripped it off the limb, but that scraping sound was the only noise it made. The D93S popped, sounding like one strong handclap.
Through the scope, he saw flashes of blinding light as the window shattered. Pieces of glass rained down both inside and out. The curtain fluttered.
Then nothing.
No indication of success.
No indication of failure.
Nothing.
He jacked the CheyTac into place, ready to unload the magazine, if need be. If he’d missed with the dart, if the doc made a run for it…
He waited. One minute… Two…
He had no choice.
Time for Uncle Bruce.
15
THE BARREN, SNOW-COVERED HILL ROSE STEEPLY FROM THE locked gate like a bubble of shaving cream. A primitive road had been cut into the winding hillside, jutting out like a frown. Walt saw what might have been tracks-it could have been game or people-but there was too much drifting snow to know for certain.
The top of Mark Aker’s four hundred acres abutted the western edge of the Challis National Forest. A quarter mile to the west ran Yankee Fork Road, a dirt track, snowed in for the winter, that connected the town of Challis to the abandoned mining town of Sunbeam. To the east were a few sprawling ranches. This was God’s country, the last vestiges of community before the National Forest spread north and east for hundreds of square miles.
“No sign this gate’s been opened recently,” Brandon complained. “You still want to go through with this?”
A sharp but distant rifle report sounded. Small-gauge, Walt thought, as he connected the sound to the one he’d heard the night of the search: like a limb snapping. If anything was the Wild West, it was Challis, Idaho; the sound of a rifle, even out of hunting season, would normally have been of no interest. The reverberating dull echo prevented Walt from determining the direction of origin, but its proximity to Aker’s cabin put a spur in his backside.
“Hurry!” It had taken him all morning to round up Brandon and to make the three-hour drive. The sound of a gunshot fueled his impatience.It made sense that Mark might hide his family here-with the property listed under Francine’s maiden name there was little chance it would be connected by others to Mark-but maybe they hadn’t been the only ones to figure it out.
They vaulted the gate. Walt pulled his snowshoes through and was strapping them on as Brandon beat him to it and started up the unplowed road.
Walt charged off and quickly caught up, the technique more familiar to him. Larger and heavier, Brandon sunk down more deeply and couldn’t find a rhythm to his mechanics. Within a minute or two, Walt found his pace and passed Brandon. Brandon then leaned into the hill and regained lost ground, pulling even with Walt. It didn’t escape Walt that they were acting like schoolboys, but it didn’t slow him any either.
After a quarter mile of climbing, steam pouring off them, and just as they rounded the last of three ascending turns, the buckle on Walt’s snowshoe popped loose and he went down into a face-plant.
Brandon glanced back but didn’t slow down.
Walt sat up and tried to make sense of the equipment failure. He couldn’t find the buckle. He knotted the straps together, as tightly as possible, and took a few steps. It held.
Ahead of him, Brandon was closing in on the tiny cabin. It had a covered porch that wrapped around two of its sides. A stovepipe jutted out of the roof, no smoke coming from it. The one window on this side was blocked with a curtain.
“Hold up!” he hollered to Brandon. Procedure dictated they approach the structure with one man covering.
But his deputy took this as Walt’s attempt to fix the race and continued ahead.
“Stand down, Deputy!” Walt tried again.
Brandon glanced back, grinned, and then bent over to loosen the snowshoes. He came out of them fast and climbed up onto the porch, banging a shoulder into a wind chime. Light flashed from the spinning metal, and the tinkle of bells carried on the wind.
A spurt of blood burst from Brandon ’s shoulder, and the exterior wall of the cabin splintered with a thwack. He spun, reached out, and pulled down the wind chimes with him as he fell to the deck.
“Tommy!” Walt dove into the snow, rolled onto his back, and dumped his gloves in order to lose the snowshoes. He fumbled with the straps, finally kicking the snowshoes loose. Beretta in hand, he belly-crawled toward the cabin. “Stay down!” he shouted. “And don’t move!”
He stole a glimpse up the hill toward the woods, believing the shot had come from somewhere out there. Fresh tra
cks led through the snow in that direction. Then he lowered his head and continued his belly crawl, staying below the snow’s surface. He crawled… paused… listened. It felt as if the cabin was moving away from him; as hard as he crawled, he didn’t seem to get any closer.
“Fuck!” It was Brandon, from the porch.
“Stay down!” Walt shouted.
“I’m hit.”
“Stay down and don’t move.”
“Shut the fuck up! I’m hit.”
“I’m coming.”
“The fuck you are. He’ll pick you off.”
There’d been only the one shot. It offered two possibilities: a shoot and run or a shoot and hunt to the death.
Walt needed cover: he saw the move, as he finally drew closer. He jumped up onto the deck, spun, back first, to the house, tucked himself into a ball, hands over his face, and vaulted backward through the window. The glass exploded and rained down around him. He hit a table, caught a lamp with his toe, and brought both down on top of him. He scooted away from the glass, came to a standing position, and rushed the front door.
The other window was shattered too, glass on the inside. Had that happened when Brandon had been shot? He didn’t recall the sound of breaking glass, only the bells of the wind chime. He reached the open window and peered out past the jagged frame.
Brandon lay below him, faceup. The man’s glove was gripped high on his left arm, which was blood-covered and still oozing.
“You okay?”
“Dandy,” Brandon answered with a grimace.
“I’m going to pull the door open. We’re going to do this fast, on three. You with me?”
“Three,” Brandon said, and he started to slide on his back toward the door.
“Shit!” Walt said, as he yanked open the door, reached out, and found the man’s right shoulder. He dragged him-the man was heavy-through the door and slammed it shut.
“Motherfucker hurts!” said Brandon. “Goddamn it!” He ran through every expletive he knew, as Walt opened the jacket and worked it off the man’s left arm. As wounds went, it was pretty awful. The bullet appeared to have missed the bone, but the exit wound was twice the size of the entrance, leaving a hole the size of a golf ball. The bleeding was severe, possibly arterial. The wound wouldn’t kill him but the blood loss might. With Brandon compressing the wound, Walt stripped a shoelace out of the man’s boot.
“No,” Brandon said.
“I’m going to tie it off.”
“The hell you are,” Brandon said. “Once we do that, we can’t go back. The toxins’ll kill me if we loosen it, and, if we don’t, they take the arm. Fuck that. Compression for now. We only go to tourniquet if I pass out and you see no other choice.”
“There is no other choice.”
“I’m not losing my arm, Sheriff. Nice try.”
“Tommy!”
“No… fucking… way. I’ve done the course, Sheriff. I’m not losing this arm unless I have to.”
Walt looked around the room, as if someone might arrive to help him.
“You’ve got to go after him,” Brandon said.
“The hell I do.”
“Yes, you do.” Brandon couldn’t point, so he shook his head in the direction of the door.
It took Walt a moment to see the plastic dart canister wedged into the intersection of the wall and floor.
“They got him, Sheriff. That’s what we heard with that first shot. We’re maybe, what, fifteen, twenty minutes behind him?”
Walt processed everything Brandon was saying and his eyes were telling him. “Darted him inside the cabin? I don’t buy that.”
“Who the fuck knows? That’s a dart, and, unless I’m mistaken, no one’s home.”
“You’re bleeding out.”
“I can get down the hill. It’s easier than going up.”
“Bullshit.”
“Give me the keys.”
“This isn’t going to happen, Tommy. I’m going with you.”
“We’ll use the radios,” Brandon said. “I’ll keep talking. As long as I’m conscious, you keep heading up there. I go silent, then, sure, come back and be the hero.”
“Give it a rest. There’s procedure, Tommy. I’m evacuating the wounded.”
“You’re pursuing the hostage. The first twelve hours, Sheriff. You know the drill.”
“If someone took Mark, they’ll be on snowmobile. I’m on foot, Tommy.”
“And when I get down to town, I’ll send a deputy up Yankee Fork on a snowmobile looking for you.”
“Got it all planned out, do you?”
“Yes, sir, I do.”
“Mark’s a vet. The dart could be his,” Walt said.
“Could be.” Gripping his arm tightly, Brandon said, “I’ll need help with the snowshoes, and you’ll need a pair of gloves.”
“We’re going to clean and wrap the wound,” Walt said. “We can get a lot of compression with the wrap.”
“Well, fucking hop to it!” Brandon said. “He’s got a head start on you.”
Walt passed him the keys.
16
WALT FOLLOWED THE TRAIL OF PACKED SNOW FOR ONLY the first fifty yards, then gave one final look back at Brandon before cutting to his right and entering into a stand of towering lodgepole pine that formed the southwestern boundary of the National Forest. He had first learned to track in Boy Scouts; but where other kids picked up footballs or soccer balls, Walt had spent his school-day afternoons in the wilderness with his head down. A man named Jeff Longfeather, a Blackfoot Indian who worked as a farmhand for his maternal grand-father, had seen the boy’s passion and had taught him the natural state of indigenous flora and fauna, the different ways and speeds that mud dried, the forces behind impact prints. Taught him the feeding, watering, and mating habits of big game. How to bugle an elk to within fifty yards. How to construct a blind. To survive in the woods for days at a time, eating pine nuts and edible roots, and burying his own scat. In the process, Walt had come to respect the environment in ways that wouldn’t be popular for twenty more years, but his reverence had paid off. Jeff Longfeather turned a wet-behind-the-ears Boy Scout into a fine tracker who could stalk a bull elk or deer for days without revealing himself. Walt had not stayed with scouting, but he’d visited the family farm weekends and school holidays and had come to view Jeff as something of an older brother, spiritual adviser, and mentor.
He disappeared now into the woods, his mission twofold: to track the man who had kidnapped Mark Aker, for there was only one set of snowshoe tracks coming and going, and to make certain no one tracked him.
Brandon ’s ramblings crackled on in his earpiece, as his deputy descended from Aker’s cabin toward the Cherokee. The reception wasn’t great, but he continued to hear Brandon ’s voice, which was all that mattered.
The snowpack was thinner inside the woods, most of it caught by branches. He doubled back on his own tracks, removed the snowshoes, and climbed rocks to break his own trail from being followed. He climbed trees for surveillance and never left the confines of the forest, even when the tracks he was following reached across acres of snowfield. He located and climbed two trees that had clearly been used to scout the cabin; they’d been climbed by a strong man with a good-sized leg spread-a man with coarse black hair, judging by the strands he found stuck to the pine sap. At the top of one of the trees, he found a rubbed spot on a stout branch that suggested an object had been braced there-a rifle or monocular-the location offering an unobstructed view of the cabin’s porch.
Brandon had not been shot from such an elevation, but the dart on the floor of the cabin lingered in Walt’s mind.
What was Mark involved in? Why would anyone want, first, to try to kill and then, later, kidnap a local veterinarian? If he’d been willing to shoot Brandon, why not Mark Aker? Why the dart?
Being up a tree helped with radio reception. Brandon had reached the vehicle and felt able to drive himself into Challis. They signed off, with Brandon promising Walt a snowmobile on Ya
nkee Fork Road in short time.
Walt returned to the snowfield and stayed parallel to the tracks. Jeff Longfeather had taught him about time and patience; where possible, he stole into the center of the well-traveled elk trail and reestablished the snowshoe tracks-the man was pulling a heavy sled. Mark? He’d clearly made good time, establishing himself in Walt’s mind as big and strong. He was also an expert with a sniper rifle, keeping Walt mindful of his cover.
An hour and a half passed before his radio barked again. The Challis sheriff and a deputy were waiting nearby on Yankee Fork Road.
Walt discovered some cigarette ash, dancing on the snow. The butt had been GI’d, or packed out, leaving only the rolling worms of ash as evidence. The man towing Mark had paused here, had come back to the sled and done something-had administered more drugs, maybe, or delivered a warning. Walt followed the tracks and soon met up with two men on snowmobiles. They wore sheriff patches.
A track of a snowmobile towing a sled was evident. It headed not toward Challis, as he’d expected, but deep into the National Forest.
Introductions were made. Steam poured from Walt’s clothing. The two eyed him apprehensively; he sensed reluctance in them that he didn’t understand.
Riding a snowmobile would chill him down quickly, so he took a moment to strip down to his bare chest and change into a fresh Capilene undershirt. He redressed in his uniform shirt and zipped up his jacket, shifting on his feet to get his body heat back. The conversation never stopped as he caught up the Challis sheriff, a man with whom he’d had a major falling-out over the killing of a wolf a year earlier. There was no love lost between them, and he thought that that explained their mutual reluctance.
The Challis sheriff established that they’d crossed no fresh snowmobile tracks. “This guy’s headed back the way he came.”
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