Force of Nature (18 page)

Joe said, “Yup. You guys have a lot on your plate right now, and there’s two of us available.”

The sheriff snorted a response.

Joe ignored him and looked around. There was very little that stood out about the scene, Joe thought. The convenience store was still, the we’re closed sign propped in the window. Bad Bob’s blue Dodge pickup was parked on the side of the building where it always was, meaning he hadn’t driven it away. Two battered Dumpsters had been turned over behind the building and the contents inside scattered across the dirt. The concrete pad housing the gas pumps was dusty but not stained with blood.

Joe said, “I was wondering if you’d talked to the folks at the school. They seem to know everything that’s happening on the res.” He was thinking in particular of Alice Thunder, who had her finger on the pulse of the community and was supposed to be gone, according to Nate.

“We really don’t need your help with real police work,” Sollis said. “Aren’t there some fishermen you can go out and harass?”

“Not many,” Joe said. “Most folks are hunting by now.”

Joe was struck by McLanahan’s demeanor. He was usually blustery and sarcastic, roiling the calm with quaint and colorful cowboy sayings. But he looked gaunt, and the dark circles under his eyes were pronounced. This whole thing—the murders, the disappearance of
Bad Bob, the upcoming election—was getting to him, Joe thought. There were many times in the past when Joe would have paid to see the sheriff in such pain. But for a reason he couldn’t put his finger on, this wasn’t one of them.

Joe said, “Bob is kind of a renegade. He might show up.”

“You think we don’t know that?” McLanahan said. “Do you think we want to …” But he caught himself before he finished the sentence.

“Get a move on, the both of you,” Sollis said. “We’re busy here, and you’re interfering with a crime scene.”

“A crime scene, is it?” Joe said.

“You heard him,” McLanahan growled. Joe noted that when the sheriff was truly angry, the West Virginia accent he once had and now suppressed poked through.

“Hey,” Luke Brueggemann said to the sheriff, gesturing toward Joe. “He’s just trying to help. He spends a hell of a lot more time out here than you people do, and he’s a lot more effective. Maybe you ought to listen to what he has to say.”

Joe raised his eyebrows in surprise. Sollis glared and squared his feet as if bracing for a fight. McLanahan turned his attention from Joe to the trainee.

“Who in the hell are you?”

“Name’s Luke Brueggemann.”

McLanahan let the name sit there. After a moment, he shook his head and said to Joe, “Get him out of here. He ain’t no older than my grandson, and even stupider, if possible.”

Joe hooked his thumbs through his belt loops and rocked on his boot heels. He nodded and said, “I guess you’re right. We’ve got fishermen to harass.”

He turned and put his hand on Brueggemann’s shoulder as he walked past. Brueggemann gave Sollis a belligerent nod and the sheriff an eye roll before turning and walking with Joe toward their truck.

“What was
that
about?” Joe whispered.

“They piss me off,” Brueggemann said. “They’ve got no good reason to act like that.”

“The county sheriff has jurisdiction in his county,” Joe said. “We can assist if asked, but he can say no.”

“That guy needs a lot of help, if you ask me. And I don’t even know what the hell I’m talking about.”

“Welcome to game warden school,” Joe said, a smile tugging on the corners of his mouth.

As he opened the door to his truck, McLanahan called after him, “And you can tell your friend Nate we’re going to find his ass and put him away.”

JOE AND LUKE BRUEGGEMANN
stood in front of the counter in the principal’s office of Wyoming Indian High School, waiting for the principal, Ann Shoyo, to conclude a phone conversation. She held a slim finger in the air to indicate it would be only a few more seconds.

She was native, well dressed, and attractive, with a long mane of jet-black hair that curled over her shoulders. He noted the pin on her lapel, a horizontal piece that had a red wild rose on one side and a flag with parallel red and black bars on a field of white on the other side. The pin represented the two nations on the reservation: the rose was the symbol of the Eastern Shoshone, and the flag was the Northern Arapaho.

Ann Shoyo sat back and blew a stray strand of hair out of her face. “I’d like to talk to Alice myself,” she said. “But she hasn’t come in for two days. I would
really
like to talk to Alice.”

Joe quickly fished a card out of his pocket and handed it to her. “Please call me if she shows up or if you hear anything,” he said.

“NOT GOOD NEWS,”
Joe said to Brueggemann as they approached the pickup.

His cell phone burred and he retrieved it from his pocket. Deputy Mike Reed calling.

“Joe,” Reed said, “I’ve hit a brick wall. Pam Kelly isn’t here, and her stock is going crazy, kicking the fences all to hell and screaming at me.”

Joe could hear braying and anguished bleats in the background.

Reed said, “They act like they haven’t been fed for a couple of days.”

“Did you look inside the house?” Joe asked.

“I looked in through the windows, is all. I’ve got no probable cause for going in, although I might just make something up. I wonder if she did herself in, considering she lost her husband and her son?”

Joe paused for a moment, then said, “That doesn’t sound like her. She’s too mean.”

“I’ll keep looking,” Reed said. “I’ll let you know if I find her. But this place gives me the creeps, and I’ve got a real bad feeling about it.”

Joe understood. He felt the same way as they turned into the rough driveway off Black Coal Road that led to the back of Alice Thunder’s home. Her GMC wasn’t parked on the side, which gave him an ounce of hope.

“Give me a minute,” Joe said to Brueggemann as the trainee reached for his door handle. “I’ll be right back.”

Brueggemann shrugged a
whatever
shrug.

Joe realized as he walked up Alice’s broken concrete path that something was amiss. It was when he rapped on her back door that he realized what it was: no dogs. Every time he’d ever been there, her little dogs put up a cacophony and she’d have to push them aside to get to the door.

She wasn’t home, and the dogs were silent.

He thought:
Bad Bob, Pam Kelly, and now Alice Thunder.
His chest tightened, and he took several deep breaths as he stepped back and pulled out his phone. He was surprised to see he had a message from Marybeth. Apparently, she’d called while he spoke to Mike Reed and he’d missed it.

He punched the button to retrieve it.

Her voice was tense. “I’m frustrated. I’ve looked everywhere—every database I have access to. John Nemecek doesn’t exist,” she said.

He thought:
Yes, he does.

THE NEXT MORNING
, in the long cold shadow of the sawtoothed Teton Range in the mountains outside of Victor, Idaho, Nate Romanowski smeared a tarry mixture of motor oil and road dirt below his eyes, across his forehead, and over his cheeks. The morning sun had not yet broken over the top of the mountains. Light frost coated the long grass in the meadows and the cold, thin air had a scalpel-like bite to it. Below him, through a descending march of spindly lodgepole pine trees that strung all the way to the valley floor, a single sodium pole light illuminated the center of a small complex of faded log structures. It was 7:40, Thursday, October 25.

He raised the field glasses. Below was a lodge and four smaller outbuildings in the complex: a garage, a sagging barn, a smokehouse, and what looked like a guest cabin. He focused in on the hoary metal roof of the lodge and noted several wet ovals on the surface, meaning there were sources of heat inside. That was confirmed when he shifted his view to the mouth of a galvanized chimney pipe that exhaled a thin plume of white woodsmoke.

When the wind shifted from east to west, he thought he caught the slight aroma of coffee and bacon from below.
Breakfast
, he thought. The place was occupied, but by whom?

He turned to his vehicle and slid the scoped Ruger Ranch rifle from beneath the front seat of his Jeep. It was the rifle he’d liberated from the old man in the boat. He checked the loads. The thirty-round magazine was packed full with red-tipped Hornady 6.8-millimeter SPC shells in 110 grain. Nate seated a live round in the chamber with the Garand breech bolt-action and slung the weapon over his shoulder. His .500 shoulder holster was buckled on over his hoodie and fleece for quick access. A pair of binoculars hung from a strap looped around his neck.

He was ready.

THE TRIP
from Colorado Springs to the compound in Idaho had taken slightly more than nineteen hours after the killing of the third operator.

Despite initial objections from Gordon, Nate had persuaded his father to take his family away. Nate gave him half a brick of cash and apologized to his stepmother and half sisters for meeting the way they did.

Nate didn’t leave the scene until 1:00 in the afternoon. No other operators arrived.

He’d debated himself how much evidence—if any—to leave behind. The body contained no legitimate identification. The man had a wallet in his pocket with $689 in it and a Colorado driver’s license. No credit cards, no receipts, no other cards of any kind. And when Nate studied the license, he recognized a professional forgery right away. The license was too new, stiff, and shiny. It was the kind of identification Nate had been given to use a hundred times in the past. There wasn’t a single thing wrong with it except the wrong name, Social Security number, address, and birthplace. Nate had nodded to himself in recognition. In the rare circumstance that the body of a
member of The Five was left in a country they weren’t supposed to be in, there would be no means of identifying him. It rarely happened—they prided themselves on bringing everyone back every time—but it was standard operating procedure. This alone would send Nemecek a message.

RATHER THAN
backtrack through Colorado Springs and drive north on highly trafficked I-25, he took rural county roads for sixty miles until he merged onto I-70 west and on to Grand Junction, Colorado. The way north and west from there lost him five hours more than if he’d taken the other route, but he thought if anyone were looking for him, he’d escape their attention. It was evening when he hit the outskirts of Grand Junction and stopped to fill the tank and spare gas can before proceeding west into Utah, and then north toward Salt Lake City. He was never out of sight of the mountains, and he drove with his eyes wide open, noting every potential escape route toward those mountains if he encountered a roadblock or an enemy vehicle.

AS HE DROVE
and lost his light, he replayed all the events of the morning, from meeting his father to sending his old man away from his own house with a wad of unmarked cash. He could only speculate on what faced him, based on his knowledge and experiences with John Nemecek. When he ran everything back through his mind, he concluded with more questions than answers.

Nate needed to know how many people were in the team with Nemecek. Once he knew for sure, he could tailor his strategy and defense. His mentor liked working with small strike forces of no more than eight, but it wasn’t a hard-and-fast prerogative. Nemecek
liked eight because the number was perfect for a small footprint but an effective infiltration. Only one large vehicle or two midsized cars were necessary to move everyone into place on the ground. Eight could be broken up into the smaller units Nemecek favored: two killing squads of four each, including the team leader, a communications operative, and a jack-of-all-trades (JOAT) operator trained in emergency medical triage and whatever other special skills the particular mission required.

Assuming eight was the number, Nate could identify five so far. This included the three dead operators, and the mystery woman who’d killed Large Merle. That meant there were three other operators out there somewhere—maybe with Nemecek, maybe on an assignment of their own. In this case, Nate guessed the JOAT would be the woman. She was attractive and aggressive enough to turn Large Merle’s head and manipulate him into giving away Nate’s previous location as well as cold-blooded enough to kill his colleague when he was no longer useful to her. Women were rare in the ranks of Mark V, but not unheard of.

He didn’t count the three locals Nemecek had recruited to ambush him from the river.

And what if there were more? Nemecek knew Nate knew
him
. The number could be smaller, but Nate doubted that because of logistics. But it could very well be larger, maybe even double or more the size Nate anticipated. If that was the case, Nate would need help. And he knew there was only one place he could find it: Idaho.

NATE WAS
still puzzled by the demeanor and physical appearance of the three dead operators in Colorado. The colleagues he had worked with years before were unique in looks and attitude in that they were fairly normal and didn’t stand out from the crowd: Nate and
Large Merle being two exceptions to that rule. The Peregrines who made it through training weren’t the bodybuilders, or the ex-jocks, or the street fighters and ex-bouncers who volunteered for special ops. They weren’t the hard cases covered with tattoos and jewelry. The men who’d spent their young lives being ogled, brown-nosed, or feared by peers couldn’t handle what Mark V training threw at them. They didn’t have what it took when the mental part of the training took place, the weeks designed to humiliate and break down the recruits.

The ones who made it, like Nate, made it because of something different inside: a desire to succeed no matter what, a defined and accomplished hatred for their tormentors, and an almost pathological desire to be a member of one of the most elite special-operations units ever devised. The Peregrines who emerged had unbelievable mental toughness, what Nemecek called “high-tensile guts.” They weren’t necessarily the greatest physical specimens, or the tallest or biggest. The majority of them were fresh-faced and soft-spoken. Most came from places like Oklahoma, or Arkansas, or South Carolina, or Montana, or Wyoming. Many were raised on farms and ranches, and most were hunters and fishermen or mountain climbers or kayakers. Men who had grown up amid the cruelty and amorality of nature itself, where predators were predators and prey was prey.