“This is California, not Texas. People are born here with a big liberal ‘L’ stamped on their foreheads. You know, ‘medicinal’ pot, hippies, Hollywood, and all of that. No one’s coming after me out here, I assure you.”
Stein could hear the rage creeping into Dorn’s voice for the first time since he’d taken on the job as chief of staff. But he didn’t care. His number one responsibility was to do what was best for the country, and therefore what was best for the president. If Dorn wanted to get angry, so be it.
“Sir, I’ve got to—”
“No more,” Dorn hissed, ordering the Secret Service detail outside the suite and into the hallway with a curt wave. “That’s it,” he continued when the door was shut and they were alone. “You raise this issue again, Rex, and I’ll fire you on the spot, so help me God. You’re really becoming a major pain in my ass.” Dorn hesitated. “Maybe I’ll fire you anyway. The powers that be who hired you for me a year ago can’t control me anymore. I’m too popular. It’s my show now, and there’s nothing they can do about it.”
Stein stared at the president, wondering what he was supposed to do. Dorn was right. He could do anything he wanted now and none of the party heavyweights could do a damn thing about it at this point.
“Yes, sir,” he said quietly.
“Did you call Beckham?” Dorn demanded. “Did you find out if Carlson sent the information over to him?”
“No, not yet.”
“Well I suggest you do, damn it. When I give you an order like that I expect you to carry it out immediately. One more screwup like that and I will fire you, Rex. And I’ll make sure you never work in Washington again.” Dorn’s eyes narrowed. “I never liked you, but at least I respected you.” He shook his head. “But I don’t even respect you anymore. Now get the hell out of here.”
“You OK?”
“I’m fine.”
Jack and Karen were standing on the dock where Turner’s seaplane was lashed, waiting for the big man to come out of the general store that overlooked the pier. He was inside, using cash Jack had given him to pay for the spot the plane had been using.
Karen hadn’t looked up when he’d asked her that question, Jack realized. She usually looked him straight in the eye whenever she answered him about anything…but not this time.
“I’m glad Troy’s alive,” she said softly.
“Could be alive,” Jack reminded her. “The only thing Ross said was that Bobby Mitchell admitted to floating a raft to Troy out the back of the Arctic Fire the night the other guys threw him overboard.” Jack was trying to be low key about all this, but he had to admit he was damn excited. Just the possibility that Troy might still be alive had sent his spirits on a rocket ride. “But Mitchell couldn’t tell if Troy made it into the raft. It was too dark.”
“I guess we’ll find out. But I’ve got a really good feeling about it, Jack. I think you’re going to see Troy again.”
“We both know the chances are still so small,” Jack cautioned. “Mitchell said they were still forty miles northwest of Akutan when they threw him over. Even if Troy made it into the raft, the thing could have flipped over or sunk or just headed out to sea.”
Karen shook her head. “It didn’t sound like Ross thought that was the case while we were walking over here. He seemed to think with the winds and the tides that were going on that night the raft would have gone to shore somewhere east of here. He said he’d checked into all of that, and he was pretty sure the raft wouldn’t have been taken out to sea. Right?”
She was still looking down at the ground. “What is it?” Jack moved in front of her. “You seem…well, you seem kind of sad.”
“It’s nothing.”
He ran his fingers through her hair. They’d made love the other night in Missoula when they’d gotten back from the bar. It had been awesome, and afterward he’d held her in his arms until they’d gotten up a few hours later to drive to Seattle. It had seemed like the most natural thing in the world to hold her like that too. They’d fit together all night like two puzzle pieces, which was a new experience for him. Every other time he’d held a woman all night, he’d gotten up in the morning with a stiff neck and an arm that was fast asleep.
He hated to think it, but it was almost as if she now regretted what she’d done. And that was going to hurt so badly if it was true. He’d already started missing her when she was gone for just a few minutes. He was hooked on her, and he didn’t like thinking that she wasn’t hooked on him. Especially after she’d told him she was the other night. She didn’t seem like the kind of woman who’d change her feelings like that so quickly. But, when it really came down to it, he didn’t know her that well.
“It’s something, Karen.”
“I was just wondering what I’d do if somehow Charlie’s still alive too.” She touched Jack’s arm. “I guess I’d have a problem on my hands. I guess we both would.”
He couldn’t even bring himself to think about that possibility. “Well, I guess—”
“Come on,” Turner called loudly as he emerged from the store’s entrance. “Let’s get out of here. Let’s go find Troy.”
Jack watched Karen hop down onto the pontoon and climb into the plane. He shook his head. How could he possibly hope that Charlie Banks was dead? How could he be that terrible a person?
“You’re not shooting my son!” Duke yelled at Maddux as he barged his way past Sage and Grant into the Arctic Fire’s galley.
Maddux swung the barrel of the pistol quickly away from Speed Trap’s forehead and straight at Duke. It stopped Duke in his tracks five feet from his son, who was still tied tightly to the chair and beginning to sob.
“It’s a matter of national security,” Maddux answered matter-of-factly. Speed Trap had just finished telling him everything. “Your son must die.”
The kid had admitted floating the raft to Troy that night on the Bering Sea, and to telling a man named Ross Turner the same thing a few minutes ago at the Fish Head Pub. He’d also informed Maddux that Turner was working with Jack Jensen and that they were heading out in a seaplane right now to look for Troy. If those two found Troy first, everything Maddux had worked so hard to execute might be stopped a foot short of the goal line, and Roger Carlson would have died in vain. Maddux simply could not accept that outcome.
“I have no choice, Duke.”
“Please don’t kill me,” Speed Trap begged, starting to cry hard. “I don’t want to die.”
“You’re not killing him!” Duke shouted. “Don’t worry, son,” he called past Maddux.
“I have to,” Maddux said evenly. “And if you try stopping me, you’ll all be killed by the men waiting for me on the dock.” He nodded to the dock side of the ship. “Speed Trap too, so what’s the point? You might get me, but they’ll definitely get you. And it won’t be pleasant. They’ll make you pay.” He glanced quickly at each of them in turn. “You know me, you know what I do, and you know I’m telling you the truth. Don’t fuck with me. You’ll live to regret it…and then you’ll die.”
Duke shook his head as he glared at Maddux. “I don’t care. You can do whatever you want to me, but you’re not killing my son.”
“Get back, brother,” Sage urged. “We knew what we were getting into with these people. We didn’t have a choice. We owed the bank so much money from that other boat that sunk.” He shook his head sadly. “Speed Trap shouldn’t have gotten involved in this, Duke. He shouldn’t have thrown that raft out the back of the ship. It’s terrible, but it’s his own damn fault.”
“Troy saved his life,” Duke shot back angrily, taking a step at Maddux. “What did you expect my boy to do?”
“Get back,” Maddux ordered. “Now.”
Maddux was worried he was going to have to shoot Duke too—which could cause a major problem because Sage might not be able to handle seeing his brother go down. A nephew was one thing, but a brother might be different. And Maddux had to get out of here. Jack Jensen and Ross Turner were widening their lead on
him with every second. He could feel them getting ahead, and he could feel himself starting to panic—and he never panicked.
“Let him go!” Duke shouted, taking a step toward Maddux, then two steps back when Maddux brought the gun up quickly with his finger on the trigger. “Please.”
“Stay back!” Sage yelled.
“Don’t kill me!” Speed Trap screamed. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have done it. But I’ll never tell anyone.”
“See,” Duke yelled, “he’ll never say anything! He’ll never say a word!”
Maddux swung the gun at Speed Trap and then back at Duke, who came at him again and then retreated again.
“Don’t kill me, don’t kill me. Please, God, don’t kill me!”
“I can’t have this,” Maddux muttered to himself. “I can’t have this right—”
The explosion shocked everyone as the chair Speed Trap was tied to tumbled backward with a loud crash. The gunshot had sounded incredibly loud inside the galley. Even Maddux had thrown himself to the floor out of instinct when the bullet blasted from the gun.
Maddux scrambled to where Speed Trap lay. He was still secured to the chair, which had crashed to the floor, and Maddux tried to find a pulse in the young man’s wrist and then in his neck. But there was none in either place. The single, well-aimed bullet had blown Speed Trap’s heart to bits, and he was dead.
Maddux glanced up at Grant, who was still aiming the smoking gun at his younger brother. “Good job, son,” he muttered to Grant approvingly as he stood up and moved to where Sage was standing with his hands to his face. “Get this ship out on the Bering Sea right now, Sage. And I mean right now.” Maddux glanced down at Duke, who’d crawled over to Speed Trap and was sobbing pitifully as he rested his head on his dead son’s bloody chest. “I might need you out there.”
Maddux patted Grant on the shoulder as he went by. “Good job,” he repeated. “The United States thanks you.”
When Maddux emerged onto the deck of the Arctic Fire, he glanced up just as a seaplane roared overhead. He knew who was in that plane.
It occurred to him as he signaled to the three men who were waiting for him on the dock that the man who’d just flown overhead was risking everything to save his brother. And that the man below had just killed his brother in cold blood.
CHAPTER 35
“RED, RED, red,” Karen shouted excitedly as she pointed down at the ground through the late afternoon sunshine. She was sitting on the right side of the plane, directly behind Jack, who was in the front seat opposite Turner. “Red at two o’clock!”
“I see it, I see it,” Turner confirmed as he banked the seaplane a few degrees right so they were heading due east toward what Karen had spotted. The mass of material lay on the ground at the end of a brittle-looking wooden pier. The pier extended into the wide inlet behind the barrier island and the Bering Sea. “That’s what Bobby Mitchell told me to look for. He said red was the color of the rafts on the Arctic Fire. He said his Uncle Sage always had orange survival suits, yellow harnesses, and red rafts.”
“I don’t know if it’s a raft.” Jack stared down at the crumpled mass lying on the sand by the end of the dock. “But it sure is bright red.”
Everything seemed to be falling together, but he had to be ready for a dead end too. If he didn’t and Troy wasn’t in that lonely house a hundred yards inland from the pier, he’d be devastated. He’d always had the habit of preparing himself for disappointment, not anticipating success, because he never wanted to feel vulnerable. And he still couldn’t let go. He’d finally thought he could in that Montana bar the other night, when he and Karen seemed to be doing so well. But now she was being so distant. At least he knew why, though that didn’t help much.
“Great spot, Karen,” he called over his shoulder above the hum of the two propellers.
“Thanks.”
Other than her excited call about what was lying at the end of the pier a few moments ago, that was the first word she’d spoken in the plane.
After taking off from Dutch, Turner had pointed the nose of the seaplane east-northeast and then hugged the top of the Aleutian archipelago. They’d flown past Akutan and Mt. Gilbert, and then Turner had brought them down to three hundred feet as they reached the west end of Unimak Island. Since then they’d been skimming along the north side of the island looking for anything that might lead them to Troy.
Using the Arctic’s Fire’s approximate location as a starting point—which Speed Trap had given Turner at the bar in the Fish Head Pub—he’d done some rough calculations using winds and tides from that night. The calculations indicated that the best chance of spotting anything was on the north side of the island chain between the east end of Unimak Island and Nelson Lagoon on the Alaska Peninsula.
If this turned out to be a dead end, it would be too dark to spot anything else once they were up in the air again, Jack realized. They’d have to cover the rest of the search area tomorrow, if the weather cooperated—which it wasn’t supposed to.
Turner landed the plane on the calm waters of the inlet in front of the little two-story house, which was in desperate need of repair, Jack saw as he jumped from one of the plane’s pontoons down into the shallow water Turner had taxied to. His heart was starting to pound hard. Mostly because he was close enough now to the mass of red material Karen had spotted to see that it was indeed a deflated raft—but also because he’d never done anything like this in his life and he was loving it.
Now he understood why Troy was constantly challenging nature. It was crazy to be out here in the wilds of a remote place like this. Maybe it wasn’t as dangerous as climbing Mount Everest or as remote or exotic a destination as Nepal, but it was still exciting as hell. And it was a lot better than sitting at Tri-State Securities trading bonds. If there was one thing he’d figured out from all of this, he knew he never wanted to work another desk job again.
“Everybody got guns?” Turner asked as he came around the front of the plane and slogged out of the shallow water. He was holding an over-and-under shotgun.
And, Jack saw, Turner had a .44-caliber Magnum in his wide belt. The thick, black handle protruded ominously. “Yeah, I’ve got my nine millimeter,” Jack answered with an impressed grin. Ross Turner was one damned intimidating presence. And Jack was damned glad he was here with them.
Turner pointed at Karen. “You?”
She gestured at the small of her back. “I’ve got my thirty-eight.”
“OK, let’s go.”
Jack pointed at the small, weather-beaten house as they walked toward it. “Why do people live like this, Ross?”
“What do you mean?”
“There isn’t a town anywhere near here. Hell, there probably isn’t another house that near here. Who lives like this?”
Tucker shook his head grimly. “People who really don’t want you to ask them what their last name is.”
As they closed in on the house, the front door burst open and an older woman dressed in jeans and a sweatshirt rushed out onto the porch brandishing a shotgun. She looked pretty weather-beaten herself, Jack noticed, but she certainly wasn’t lacking in the guts department.
“What do you want?” she demanded angrily, aiming the weapon at Turner before he could raise his gun.
“Easy, ma’am,” Jack called out loudly, stopping quickly and holding both hands out with his palms facing the porch. “We sure don’t want any trouble.”
“What do you want?” she asked again.
“I’m looking for my brother, Troy.”
“Never heard of him and never seen him,” the woman answered. “Now get the hell out of here.”
“What about that raft?” Jack asked, motioning over his shoulder toward the pier. He didn’t want to let this go. It had felt like Troy was so close. “We think it’s the kind he would have been in.”
“That’s just an old raft from my husband’s fishing boat.”
“What boat? I didn’t see any—”
�
�He’s out on the ocean right now,” the older woman interrupted, stepping forward and swinging the shotgun in Jack’s direction. “So I’m alone, and I got a real itchy trigger finger when I’m alone.”
It felt to Jack as if his heart actually dropped out of his chest just then. He’d been so ready to see Troy, so certain that they were seconds from reuniting. And he realized that no amount of prepping himself for disappointment would have been enough to ease the sadness he was suddenly experiencing. Apparently, they were going to have to head back to Dutch Harbor and try looking farther east tomorrow.
But he’d come so far.
“Ma’am, I don’t mean to—”
“I told you,” the woman said, bringing the gun up and aiming it directly at Jack’s chest, “I don’t know who he is.”
“I believe that’s our cue to leave,” Turner said quietly, backing off two steps very slowly. “Let’s go, Jack.”
“OK, OK,” he murmured softly. “Well, I’m sorry we bothered—”
“Hello, brother.”
Jack’s gaze flashed to the left as a slim figure stepped out from behind the worn, gray shingles on that side of the house. “Troy!”
“Jackson!” It was the nickname Troy had used for Jack since their playground days.
They hustled toward each other and hugged hard, slapping each other on the back and shoulders over and over.
“Sorry for that cat-and-mouse crap,” Troy apologized, “but I had to make sure who it was.”
“No problem. God, you’re thin,” Jack said, still experiencing the overwhelming wave of emotion that had hit him as soon as Troy had stepped out from behind the house. He brushed tears from his eyes and cheeks as he finally pulled back from their embrace. “I knew you weren’t dead. I knew it, goddamn it!”
“What are you doing here?” Troy asked as he wiped away tears of his own.
“Saving your ass.”
“Yeah, yeah, but why? Why are you here?”
“We heard you were washed off the Arctic Fire by a rogue wave.” Jack shook his head. “I knew that wasn’t true when I found out that the other four guys aboard the Fire were OK. I was convinced you would have been the last to go off that ship, not the first. So I came here to find out what really happened.” He pointed at Turner. “This is an old friend of mine from Denison. His name’s Ross Turner.”
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