by C. J. Box
“And no fires,” Underwood barked.
Just then, Underwood’s satellite phone burred and lit up.
“Yes, Director Batista,” Underwood said, loud enough to quiet the team of agents.
“Jesus Christ,” one of the agents whispered. “Does the son of a bitch know we stopped?”
While Underwood listened to his boss and said very little except to grunt and agree here and there, Joe showed the agents how to loosen the cinch straps on their saddles, picket their horses far away from one another so that each horse could graze and not get tangled with another. Then he revealed to the agents where heavy rubber rain slickers were rolled up and tied behind the seat of each saddle itself.
“Don’t unfurl the slickers with a lot of noise and force,” he said to them. “You’ll spook the horses. They get scared at flapping things. You can use the slickers for sleeping. They’ll keep you warm enough on top and the moisture in the ground won’t soak into your clothes.”
“We’re the fucking Wild Bunch,” one of them said, pulling on a long dusterlike yellow slicker.
“I think they all died in the end,” another one said sourly.
The agents were grateful if not happy, and Joe left them sprawled in the grass of the meadow. The yellow slickers held the moonlight. Joe thought the sight of four yellow forms writhing around to get comfortable in the grass looked sluglike and slightly comical.
For himself, he led Toby to the far edge of the meadow and unsaddled his gelding and picketed him. There was a one-man bivvy tent in the saddlebags, but Joe didn’t set it up. Instead he spread it out to use as a ground tarp and covered himself with a thin wool blanket he always packed along.
He propped himself up on an elbow on the saddle he’d use as a pillow, and ate two energy bars that had been in his emergency kit for at least two years. They were dry and crumbled into dust in his mouth, and swelled into a paste when he washed them down with water from his Nalgene bottle. He waited in the dark for Underwood to sign off with his boss. Occasionally, he could hear a word or two of Batista’s voice cut through the silence. He heard the words strategic, nonnegotiable, location, and autopsy very clearly.
Finally, Underwood said, “I’ve got some worn-out special agents here, sir. They need rest. . I understand. . Yes, I’ll get them up and keep them moving, and I’ll keep the phone on all night.”
As Underwood let the phone drop on its lanyard, he said, “Asshole.”
“Are we moving?” one of the agents asked defiantly.
“No,” Underwood said. “But if he asks us later, we did.”
Joe waited a beat, then said to Underwood, “I put your horse up over here. I’ve got a space blanket I could lend you. Do you want it?”
Underwood said, “Is that one of those silver sheets that’ll make me look like a baked potato?”
“Yup.”
He sighed. “I’ll take it.”
Joe handed Underwood the blanket, along with the Ziploc bag with the remaining two energy bars.
“They aren’t very good,” Joe said.
“Thank you anyway,” Underwood said, tearing into them.
After Underwood settled in his silver-lined blanket in the grass, Joe said, “What’s the plan for tomorrow?”
“So you want to talk,” Underwood said with irritation.
“I’ll keep it low so your guys don’t hear.”
“What about me? I’ll hear.”
Joe asked, “Do they have a location on Butch?”
“Yes. His phone is on, and it has a GPS feature inside the circuitry. They know exactly where he is on the map at least.”
“I knew about that,” Joe said. “Butch is smart enough to know it, too, so it surprises me he kept it on.”
Underwood shrugged. “Maybe he isn’t so smart. Batista has been trying to contact him for hours, but he must have the phone set to mute or he just doesn’t want to talk. The director wants to tell him the helicopter will be arriving at dawn.”
“Which way is he headed?” Joe asked.
“West. It sounds like he doubled back after he talked to us and he’s working his way down the mountain. Batista said his route is pretty erratic, though. They’re guessing at the FOB that Roberson is looking for a nice flat piece of sagebrush for the helicopter to land.”
“But it won’t happen, will it?”
“No. There is no helicopter,” Underwood said.
“What else?”
“Leave me alone.”
“Not a chance. The sooner you answer my questions, the sooner you can get some sleep. Or I’ll take that space blanket back. You do look like a baked potato, you know.”
“Damn you.”
“Has anything happened in the investigation we should know about?”
“Like what?”
“I thought I heard you say something about an autopsy,” Joe said.
“Oh, yeah. There was a preliminary autopsy on our two special agents. Both were shot multiple times with small-caliber rounds. Tim Singewald was hit four times, and Lenox Baker was hit three times. Didn’t you say Butch Roberson was packing a.223 semiautomatic rifle?”
“I think so. It looked like a scoped Bushmaster.223 with a thirty-round magazine. They’re common around here.”
Underwood said, “The rounds that killed the agents were small caliber. Once they run ballistics on them, I’m sure there will be a match.”
“Lots of folks up here have.223s,” Joe said. “They’re a popular coyote-hunting round.”
Underwood snorted. “They also found Roberson’s fingerprints all over the car Singewald and Baker drove up from Denver. I suppose you’ll say lots of people up here have the same fingerprints.”
“No,” Joe said. “I won’t say that.”
“Good. So can I get some sleep now?”
“One more question.”
“Jesus-what?”
“Back to how your agency operates. How much juice would someone have to have to get a noncompliance action going the same day? Are we talking low level, mid-level, or big-shot level?”
Underwood covered his face with his hand and moaned.
“I’m just curious,” Joe said.
“I told you I wasn’t going there.”
“But why not at this point? You seem pretty convinced Butch did it, so why does it matter who turned him in in the first place?”
“I never said anyone turned him in.”
“You implied it. So which level?”
Underwood cursed and said, “Big-shot level, of course. The mid-level types might get some kind of investigation opened, but they wouldn’t be able to make agents jump like that. Obviously, somebody with influence knew who to call to get them to react like that.”
“So Julio Batista was in on it from the beginning, then?”
“I never said that.”
“You implied it.”
“Jesus fuck,” Underwood moaned. “Leave me alone. Yes, I would guess whoever called talked to the director in person. No one else could have made the decision so quickly to send agents directly from Denver. Usually, we’d let the local EPA staff handle it first.”
“That’s what I thought. Which means Batista knows who got this whole thing going, but he doesn’t want to volunteer that information.”
Underwood grunted.
“So if Butch Roberson just goes away, Batista will probably never be asked.”
Underwood grunted again.
Joe thought about it, and said, “So what’s our plan?”
Underwood took a deep breath and slowly expelled it through his nostrils. “We keep moving down the mountain to the west until we pick up his track. You’re a tracker, right?”
“Not really,” Joe said.
“I think even I could follow the prints of three guys.”
“Maybe.”
“Anyway, Batista said they’ve put together a big interagency task force that will be coming up this direction from the west. They’re on their way now in a convoy of four-wheel-d
rives. The idea is they’ll flush Roberson our way and we’ll trap him in a pincer movement and he’ll have no choice but to turn loose his hostages and we’ll nail the son of a bitch in the morning.”
Joe nodded in the dark. “So you’ll flood the zone with people until you corner Butch.”
“Yeah, I guess.”
“What do you think Butch will do when he realizes there is no helicopter? Do you think he’ll keep his end of the bargain?”
“Batista thinks he won’t have any options at that point.”
“Why is that?” Joe asked.
“Because we will have aircraft coming. Roberson won’t know it isn’t a helicopter until it’s too late.”
Joe felt a chill crawl down his neck. “What’s coming?”
Joe could see Underwood’s teeth in the moonlight as he smiled. “This is what I was worried about earlier, but I wasn’t sure he could make it happen. Drones-two of ’em this time. One is assigned to the EPA, and it’s just an observation unit like the last one. Just cameras and shit on board. But the second one is the kicker. Batista threw my name around and got authorization for a military drone to be assigned to us. All the way from an airbase in North Dakota. That one happens to be armed with Hellfire missiles.”
Joe was speechless for a moment. Then he said, “You’re going to blow him up?”
“Into a million pieces,” Underwood said, shaking his head. “Just like one of the many Al Qaeda number twos. That is, if Roberson doesn’t release the hostages and give himself up. So he will have a choice in the matter.”
“Aren’t Hellfire missiles used to blow up tanks on the ground?”
“Yes, and terrorists in their bunkers. But they’ll work pretty damned well on domestic terrorists, I’ll wager.”
Joe said, “If you want to start a war out here, this is the way to do it.”
Underwood shrugged it off. “I’m not worried about that.”
Joe said, “I am.”
“Please,” Underwood pleaded, turning his back to Joe, “leave me alone.”
“Good night, Mr. Underwood,” Joe said, and carefully reached up and clicked off the digital recorder again.
“Game Warden,” Underwood said, a few minutes after Joe assumed he was asleep. “Now I have a question for you.”
“What?”
“If a war started, which side would you be on?”
Joe hesitated. He said, “I’ll have to get back to you on that.”
Joe was in his sleeping bag, staring back at the hard white stars, when he heard Underwood’s phone buzz again. Batista, no doubt, with more orders, he thought.
Instead, Underwood walked over to Joe with the space blanket over his shoulders and extended the phone.
“It’s your wife,” he said with irritation. “Make it quick.”
“According to the bio on the agency website, Juan Julio Batista was born in Chicago in 1965,” Marybeth said. “That makes him forty-eight years old-our age. There’s no mention of a wife or children. He worked for an environmental group called One Globe in the Denver field office from 1989 to 2003, when he was hired by the EPA. He was named director of Region Eight by the Washington bigwigs in 2008.
“It says he graduated from Colorado State University in 1987. Majored in sociology and minored in environmental affairs.”
“Anything else?” Joe asked, aware that Underwood was hovering.
“Tons of media mentions,” she said. “He likes to give press conferences, and he’s mentioned dozens of times when his agency takes action against polluters.”
“Hmmmmm.”
“Let’s see,” she said, obviously scrolling through the site. “Region Eight oversees Colorado, Montana, North and South Dakota, Utah, and Wyoming. But we knew that.”
“Has he ever worked for Region Ten?” Joe asked.
“I know what you’re getting at-Idaho. The Sackett case. No, he never worked there. I can’t find any connection.”
Joe asked, “Anything at all to tie him to Pam and Butch?”
“Nothing I can find.”
“What about Pate?”
“I found some mentions, but they just stop in 1988.”
“That fits,” Joe said, and told Marybeth what Underwood had revealed.
“That’s just. . odd,” Marybeth said. Joe could visualize her mind racing. “I’ll dig deeper tomorrow at the library.”
Marybeth had access to several state and federal databases from the library computers that she wasn’t supposed to have. She’d assisted Joe with investigations several times.
Underwood extended his hand for the phone back.
“Good work,” Joe said.
“Stay safe.”
Later, as Joe closed his eyes, he heard the faraway sound of two unmanned drones whining through the sky.
26
Jimmy Sollis wept in the moonlight.
With the daypack strapped on his back and his wrists bound in front of him, Sollis stumbled on a tree root, lost his footing, and did a face-plant into the dank-smelling musky ground. He hit his head hard enough to produce spangles of orange on the inside of his eyelids, and his face was covered with dirt and pine needles.
He clumsily got to his feet again. That damned pack threw his balance off and he nearly sidestepped and stumbled to the ground again, but he got his tired legs beneath him.
And stood there and cursed and cried. He hadn’t cried for years, not for anything.
It was all so damned unfair. .
Since that son of a bitch Butch Roberson had shot a crease in his cheek and sent him away, Sollis had blindly worked his way down the mountain. Without a map, a GPS, or a good sense of direction, he simply went down. Whenever he was given a choice to continue on a line or veer to the right or left, he chose whichever side descended. Several times, this had led him into tangled ravines he had to tear himself out of-his clothes were rags now-but sometimes it was the right choice. His goal was to get out of the black timber onto the valley floor, where at least he could see and be seen if someone was looking for him.
He’d long ago given up trying to retrace their route up the mountain, as directed by the son of a bitch Butch Roberson. Sollis hadn’t paid much attention to the trail they’d taken on the way up because he’d been concentrating on his footing, and it had been in daylight. Now, everything was jumbled and confusing. He told himself that if he kept walking down he’d eventually hit the bottom. It only made sense.
The trek had been pure torture. He was without any food-although there might be some in the backpack he couldn’t unshoulder or open-and his thirst was quenched only when he bumbled upon a small trickle of stream or creek.
Two hours before, he’d found a tiny ribbon of running creek and had dropped to his knees and plunged his face into it, only to find out in the dark there was less than an inch of water. He’d inhaled sand, twigs, and a floating beetle with the first gulp, and spit it out down his shirtfront. Aching of thirst, he’d pushed his way upstream through thorny brush until he located what looked like a wide and deep natural cistern bordered by rocks. Again, he dropped to his knees in the brush and lowered his head halfway between two white and spindly tree roots and drank deeply. The water was cold and cut its way down his throat and chilled him to the bone. But he kept drinking, ignoring the metallic taste.
When he was sated, he sat back and wiped his mouth dry. He could feel the hydration seep through his guts, and spread out to his extremities. Sollis couldn’t remember how long a human could survive without food and water, but he knew it wasn’t long without water. So he knew he’d staved off an ugly death.
Then he realized he was sitting back on something large and spongy, something that had some give to it. Something that smelled putrid. He turned and looked into the naked eyehole of a dead mule deer. He was sitting on its body, and the two long white roots he’d drunk between were its decomposing legs.
That was the first time he cried.
He’d been twenty years old when he first heard about th
e sport of long-distance shooting. Until that time, it seemed he’d spent his life under the shadow of his muscle-bound older brother Trent, who had landed a job as a deputy under Sheriff McLanahan in the Twelve Sleep County Sheriff’s Department. Oh, how their parents loved Trent, who played high school football and basketball and lifted weights (and shot human growth hormone into himself) all through college until he emerged double the size he went in. Sollis, meanwhile, ran with a pack of losers and was frequently in trouble. The joke in the Sollis house-which Sollis never found funny-was that someday Trent would arrest Sollis.
Ha-ha, Sollis thought bitterly, although he admitted to himself it might have happened if Trent hadn’t been killed in the line of duty the year before. He didn’t miss his brother at all.
Jimmy Sollis had been on a crew of roofers who followed hailstorms around the state and into Montana, North Dakota, and South Dakota, when he first heard about long-distance shooting from the foreman. They’d been sitting on the peak of a roof eating their lunches in Lovell, Wyoming. The foreman said he still competed around the country, using high-end custom rifles to hit targets hundreds of yards away. Sollis got excited about the idea of it, and the foreman showed Sollis some of his rifles and agreed to take him to an event outside of Rock Springs.
Sollis was enthralled. He’d never been much of an athlete or a scholar, but something about propelling a small cylinder of polished heavy metal through the air to hit a target got him excited inside. It got him hard.
He learned about calculating windage, elevation, altitude, velocity, determining grains of gunpowder, learning how to breathe. .
At the events he attended with his foreman, Sollis collected business cards from custom gunmakers who had booths set up, and started saving chunks of his paycheck-and supplementing his income by dealing meth to roughnecks on the side. His first long-distance rifle, a Sako TRG-42 chambered for.338, won him $2,500 at the Orem, Utah, Invitational-and he was off. He’d reinvest his winnings into more precision rifles, because a man could never have enough rifles. He sent the rifles away to custom gunsmiths who tweaked the weight of the trigger pull and equipped the weapons with specialized scope rings and high-tech optics. Sollis found he had a natural ability to calculate velocity, drop, and windage. He could hit what he aimed at.
