Close Enemies
Page 1
Close Enemies
MARC DANIEL
Text copyright © 2019 Marc Daniel
To my parents
Acknowledgements
As usual my first thank you goes to my beta readers Darwin, Michelle, and Katherine who soldiered through a thousand typos and errors to give me their feedback.
Sarah, at Cornerstones Literary Consultancy, worked her magic once again to provide the professional editing touch the manuscript required and for which my readers will no doubt be grateful.
The final proofreading touch was carried out by Katherine. For this and everything else, Katherine, I will always owe you.
And last but not least… Jasmin, thank you for putting up with me in general and with my writing in particular. You are a Saint.
Cover Design: Ivan Zanchetta (bookcoversart.com)
Table of Contents
Title page
Copyright
Dedication
Acknowledgements
Michael Biörn Series
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Chapter 72
Chapter 73
Chapter 74
Chapter 75
Chapter 76
Chapter 77
Chapter 78
Chapter 79
Chapter 80
Chapter 81
Chapter 82
Chapter 83
Chapter 84
Chapter 85
Chapter 86
Chapter 87
Chapter 88
Chapter 89
Chapter 90
Chapter 91
Chapter 92
Chapter 93
Chapter 94
Chapter 95
Chapter 96
Chapter 97
Chapter 98
Chapter 99
Chapter 101
Chapter 102
Chapter 103
Chapter 104
Chapter 105
Chapter 106
Chapter 107
Epilogue
Michael’s autobiography
Marc Daniel
A word from the author
Michael Biörn Series
Novels
Shadow Pack
Unholy Trinity
Close Enemies
Short Stories
Michael Biörn -A short autobiography
Download your free copy at:
http://bit.ly/MichaelBiornBackStory
Prologue
The two siblings sat in silence at their mother’s bedside. The woman who’d given birth to them had aged ten years over the past two weeks. Stage 4 brain cancer had that effect on its victims, particularly when it had spread to the lungs.
She’d appeared perfectly healthy a month earlier when she’d gone to the doctor for a routine physical. The exam had revealed an abnormal neurological response and two days later a CAT scan had shown the extent of the damage. After a few more exams she’d been sent home with a three months prognosis. There was nothing medicine could do for her at this advanced stage of the disease.
A month had gone by before she shared the news with her two kids and now, two weeks later, it seemed as if the doctor’s estimates had been optimistic.
“I’m running out of time.” The woman’s voice was raspy, as if the effort put too much strain on her larynx.
Tears started rolling silently down the daughter’s cheeks while the son remained impassive, shell-shocked.
“I don’t think I’ve been a very good mother to you, and now it looks like I won’t be able to make amends for my mistakes.”
“Don’t say that, Mom. You’ll get better. It’s just a phase.”
“Don’t be daft, boy. We all know this is the end. And the thing is, I’m not even sure I’m sorry about it.”
She closed her eyes, apparently exhausted by the effort, and remained silent for a while. The siblings were starting to think she’d fallen asleep when she finally spoke again.
“This will soon be over now, and there is something I need to tell you, Kewanee. Something I should have told you a long time ago.”
“What is it, Mom?”
The woman drew a long breath before answering. “It’s about Jack. He’s—” A coughing fit interrupted her mid-sentence. Her son helped her sit up in bed and he gave her a sip of water. The fit past, she continued, “Jack wasn’t your father, Kewanee. I was already pregnant with you when I met him. He raised you as his own so there was no need to tell you at the time, but now… you deserve to know the truth.”
“Do you know who my father was?” The question was fair. The succession of one-night stands, followed by low-life boyfriends and pseudo-stepfathers who had watched the two siblings grow up, was too long to recall.
“Give me a little bit of credit, Kewanee. I wasn’t that much of a slut.”
“Who was he?”
“I thought he was different at first. He looked to be a good guy, kind. And a looker, too. But he turned out to be just like the rest of them, another loser. As soon as I told him I was pregnant, he was gone.”
“What was his name?”
Another coughing fit overtook the mother; her frail body shook violently. Slowly, she regained control and, looking her offspring in the eyes for the first time, she answered, “His name was Michael. Michael Biörn.”
Chapter 1
The patrol Tahoe turned right onto a small access road reserved for park employees and rolled to a stop near a beat-up dark sedan parked on the edge of a wooded area. Something looked off about the vehicle; it didn’t belong here.
Park ranger Michael Biörn exited his white Tahoe and made a show of stretching his legs and back while inhaling deeply. The air held a pungent smell he recognized immediately: mountain lion.
Although numerous, mountain lions were rarely seen by the tourists visiting Yellowstone National Park. The cats were very elusive creatures. With a scent t
his fresh, however, the animal couldn’t be far away.
A quick look around revealed no immediate threat, so Michael walked to the abandoned vehicle for a closer look.
He placed a hand on the hood but retrieved it right away. The engine was still burning hot. A glance through the window revealed a messy interior littered with empty beer cans and food wrappers of all kinds. An empty box of rifle shells lay on the passenger’s seat.
The vehicle’s back license plate was covered with too much mud to be read, but the front one was legible. Michael punched it into his Tahoe’s computer and wasn’t surprised to learn that the car had been reported stolen two days earlier.
“Unit 2 to dispatch,” he said, talking into his dashboard radio.
“Go ahead, Unit 2,” came the dispatcher’s voice.
“Found stolen vehicle abandoned on Fairy Creek service road. Engine is still hot. Also found an empty cartridge box inside the car. This could be the poacher we’re after. I’m going to have a look around.”
“10-4, Unit 2.”
“Unit 2, this is Unit 1, stand by. I am in the area. I’ll be there in ten for backup.”
Michael didn’t bother replying to Unit 1; his new boss could be a bit overbearing at times. In Jason Parrish’s defense, he had no way to know that Michael was the last ranger in the park to require backup.
As a precaution, Michael let the air out of the stolen vehicle’s front right and back left tires. If the driver got back to his car while Michael was gone looking for him, he’d have a fun ride home.
He grabbed a pair of binoculars from his glove box and walked straight into the woods. Since the other side of the road was bordered by a fifty-foot wall of boulders, the woods seemed to be the most likely place to start looking. He also knew that a five-minute walk would lead him to the opposite tree line and out into one of the many thermally active zones of the lower geyser basin. He picked up the pace and reached the edge of the woods three minutes later.
The ground was a powdery gray and gave the impression it had been covered with ashes. The whole basin was composed of a patchwork of thermal features where geysers, hot springs, steam vents, and mud pots battled small islands of trees in a silent struggle between mineral and vegetal. Here and there, dead trees on their way to petrification gave a clear indication of which side was winning the battle.
Michael didn’t need binoculars to pick up the man carefully treading between mud pots and hot springs a couple hundred yards in front of him, but they helped to confirm that the object the man was carrying in his left hand was indeed a rifle.
The ground was particularly treacherous in this part of the basin. One step at the wrong place and one could go through the ashy-looking bare ground and end up waist-deep in a subterranean pool of water near boiling temperature. For this reason, access to the whole area was forbidden to the public.
But the man Michael was tracking appeared to know what he was doing. His steps were careful and deliberate, his feet following precisely the path Michael would have chosen himself. Intrigued, the ranger started following the man at a distance, knowing full well that catching up with him on this terrain wouldn’t be easy.
As the minutes flew by, the gap between the two men narrowed, however. Where was the man heading?
Some idiots had taken it upon themselves to control the park’s wolf population and three wolves had been found shot dead over the past month, but this area wasn’t where one would go to find wolves. The ground’s temperature was so high in this part of the basin that only hooved animals could tolerate walking on it.
Michael was closing in on the poacher. Now a mere hundred feet behind him, he was starting to ponder what to do about the unpleasant individual. Technically, carrying a weapon in a national park was no longer illegal, although firing one—including in self-defense—still was: a logic that could only be understood by the brilliant minds of the US Congress that had come up with the idiotic law in the first place.
They’d reached a foggy area where the smell of rotten eggs associated with the hydrogen sulfide gas emanating from the ground was particularly potent when Jason Parrish’s voice came loudly through Michael’s radio.
“I’m at your car, Michael. Where are you?”
The poacher turned around abruptly and, seeing Michael twenty feet behind him, started running.
The ranger swore under his breath as he started sprinting. Why hadn’t he turned off his radio?!
“I’m in pursuit,” he managed to reply between two strides. “The man is heading for the boardwalk area.”
“10-4. Heading there now,” replied Jason.
The man was surprisingly fast. Michael was far from slow, but he wouldn’t be able to keep up this pace for long. Bears weren’t built for endurance.
The man entered a thicket of lodgepole pines with Michael on his heels, but the copse wasn’t thick and a minute later they’d crossed it.
The terrain on the other side was much the same with the exception that this part was open to the public. A network of boardwalks had been laid over the ground to allow visitors to safely wander and observe the brightly colored bacterial mats decorating the area.
Despite the overwhelming rotten-egg smell, a different odor lingered in the air: the same that Michael had noticed when he’d gotten out of his Tahoe. The mountain lion was around, and the smell was getting stronger. Odd since, much like wolves, lions avoided this inhospitable area of the park.
Despite the bright sun shining over the lower geyser basin, the boardwalk was mostly deserted on this early May morning. The only tourists present were gathered around one of the hot springs a few hundred feet away, oblivious to the man making a beeline for them.
Michael could distinguish a uniform among the group and, for a second, he thought Jason Parrish had found his way to the best possible spot to intercept the poacher. But this hope only lasted a second; the uniform wasn’t the right type. This was an interpretive ranger on a guided tour, not a law enforcement officer.
The commotion generated by the man’s heavy steps on the boardwalk finally caught the attention of the group. Faces turned away from the spring, looking for the source of the disturbance. Noticing the gun-wielding freight train heading for them, the tourists quickly stepped aside—but not quickly enough.
As he flew by, the poacher collided with the youngest and lightest member of the group, sending her diving backward into the hot spring she’d been admiring a moment earlier.
The kid’s screams of agony pierced the silence of the park as the interpretive ranger lunged at her in a desperate attempt to pull her out of the scalding water. The ranger’s screams quickly echoed those of the poor child as the woman was forced to retrieve her grasping hand from the steaming water of the pool.
Without breaking his stride, Michael jumped into the pool in front of the other members of the group who were restraining the child’s mother to prevent her from entering the scorching bath.
The pain was indescribable, and Michael was unable to suppress a scream of sheer agony when he entered the water. Fortunately, the pool was shallow, the water reaching slightly above Michael’s knees. In an instant he had retrieved the thrashing girl and deposited her on the boardwalk.
Helen Fletcher, the other ranger, was on her radio asking for a life flight and ambulances to be dispatched. Her shirt was soaked to the elbow and Michael knew only too well the amount of pain the woman was attempting to suppress. His own legs felt as if they’d been dipped in molten lava.
Apparently unaware she was no longer in the water, the little girl was still thrashing around on the boardwalk, her mother unable to calm her down. She was wearing long sleeves and pants, but her hands, face and neck were brick-red. In several places the skin was already starting to shrivel and peel away from her flesh.
“Are you OK, Helen?” asked Michael.
“I’ll survive. But I’m not sure she will,” replied Helen in a hushed voice intended for Michael’s ears only.
Michael si
mply nodded, wincing in pain as he did so. “I must go. I need to catch the guy responsible for this.”
“You and I need to go to the hospital, Michael. You have third degree burns on twenty percent of your body. If you don’t go to the hospital you could die.”
“I don’t do hospitals. I’ll be fine, don’t worry.” He was gone before she had a chance to reply.
Each step brought waves of pains and he hoped he wouldn’t collapse on the long way back to his Tahoe.
“Michael!” called Helen from behind him. But he ignored her. He needed to get back to his cabin as soon as possible. Hospitals had never been an option. He’d likely be fully healed by the time he’d reached the ER and he would be left with a lot of explaining to do.
Chapter 2
The two wolves walked side by side on the vast grassland of the Lamar Valley. The bright morning sun had evaporated, and the ground was now covered with two inches of powdery snow, but the animals didn’t seem to notice. They were marching along a wooded area, facing the wind, when they heard a growl coming from behind. They immediately spun around to face a group of five wolves, all belonging to the Lamar Canyon pack.
The newcomers displayed unmistakable signs of aggressivity towards the two intruders that were now questioningly looking at each other.
In a silent agreement, the two wolves took off towards the woods, with the Lamar Canyon wolves close behind.
The beasts slalomed between the trunks at top speed, expertly negotiating last-second changes of directions when facing boulders or other obstacles, jumping over fallen trees.
The pursuit didn’t last very long. Although territorial, wolves seldom fight each other when no food is at stake. Once convinced the intruders had received the message, the Lamar Canyon wolves simply turned around.
A few minutes went by before the male realized they were no longer being chased. Following his lead, the female slowed down to a walk, panting heavily despite the cool air.
She was larger than the male but not by much, and they were both on the heavy side of the scale, the female in particular.
They were still walking at a slow pace, catching their breath, when almost simultaneously they noticed the odor. The female looked at the male inquisitively but he ignored her, trusting his nose to find the origin of the putrid smell. That didn’t take long. A moment later they were standing in front of a black bear who’d seen better days. The carcass was several days old, based on its state of decomposition, but it was clear the bear hadn’t died of old age.