by C. J. Box
But he wanted more. Sollis had listened to a couple of books on tape written by Marine snipers, and he desperately wanted to use his newfound skill on Iraqis, Iranians, or Afghanis. He had no strong feelings about which. So he signed up for the U.S. Marines, telling the recruiter in the White Mountain Mall in Rock Springs they were getting a blue-chip player, that they didn’t realize the LeBron of snipers was standing right in front of them, actually volunteering to join their playground pickup team.
The Marines rejected him because of his rap sheet of drug-related arrests, and because of that sexual assault charge with the underage cheerleader back in high school. Furious, he tried the Army, then the Navy. But the word was out among the recruiters and he was black-balled. The foreman told Sollis about private defense contractors who might be able to use his skill, and Sollis was interested. Anything was better than roofing for a living.
So when ex-Sheriff McLanahan drove up that morning before dawn as Sollis crossed from his rental house to his pickup to go to work and offered him a chance to go with him, Jimmy Sollis jumped at it. The opportunity to use his skills for the good of humanity and on the right side of the law? He was all over that.
He had no idea that it would result in a gut-shot hunter from Maine, or a desperate hike down a mountain in the middle of the night. And all because McLanahan hadn’t warned him off before he pulled the trigger on the wrong man.
It burned Sollis how McLanahan had acted once that son of a bitch Roberson had shown up. Suddenly, it was all Sollis, as if McLanahan hadn’t recruited him and given him the signal to fire.
It just wasn’t right.
To make matters worse, that phone Roberson had hidden in his daypack kept ringing and he couldn’t even answer it. He thought:
He’d had his nine-thousand-dollar rifle taken away from him;
He was lost;
If he somehow made his way back to Saddlestring, he’d likely be arrested for gut-shooting a hunter from Maine;
His belly was filled with rotten dead deer seepage;
Mosquitoes were feeding on the back of his neck where he couldn’t reach;
His cheek ached from the bullet that had creased it;
And. .
Nobody loved him.
And now he couldn’t even answer the goddamned phone.
Jimmy Sollis paused near the middle of a small clearing in the trees. He realized the hairs on the back of his neck and his forearms had pricked up because he’d seen, heard, or sensed something that was off. He stood still until his breathing returned to normal from the exertion of the trek through a long jumble of down trees and branches.
When he could hear again over the rhythmic pounding of his own heart, he slowly turned his head to the right, then the left. He wondered what it was that had made him stop, made the hairs prick up. Sollis had a creepy thought that someone might be watching him.
The terrain had leveled somewhat after an hour of clawing his way over and through the timber on a steep slope. The moon, straight overhead, lit up the grassy meadow in a shade of light blue. The wall of trees on all four sides of the clearing was dark and impenetrable by the light, though, which made him think that whatever or whoever was watching him hung back in the shadows.
“Who’s there?” he croaked. “Come on out, or I’ll come in after you.”
He regretted how the end of his sentence had risen in pitch and revealed his fear.
He listened for a response. Nothing.
Then a small puffball of a cumulus cloud drifted across the face of the moon and plunged the meadow into gloom. Sollis waited for the cloud to pass so he could see again.
He tried to recall what it had been that spooked him, something out of the corner of his eye, something he glimpsed or thought he’d glimpsed: a huge human face. It made no sense.
But because the moonlight was muted, his eyes adjusted, and the face, measuring two feet wide by three feet tall, emerged from the utter darkness just inside the trees to his right. Sollis gasped and squared off against it, his bound hands out in front of him to ward off the Attack of the Face.
He saw eyes the size of charcoal briquettes, a wide nose, a thick mustache, and a sardonic grin. He realized he was looking at the side of an ancient cabin or line shack, and some bad artist years before had painted the face on the siding.
“Jesus Christ.” Sollis sighed, dropping his hands and letting his shoulders relax. It was just an old shack.
He went to it, and saw what a crude and stupid face it was. He wondered if the mountain man or cowboy who had painted it had been doing a self-portrait or if it’d been the face of someone he knew. Not that it mattered now.
Sollis moved around to the front of the structure and saw the open misshapen door, and two broken-out windows that seemed to squint up and to the right because the building was leaning that way and about to fall over. There was no roof on the shack because it had buckled and fallen inside, which left no room in there to stretch out and sleep and no reason to go in.
He walked to the other side of the shack and found the rusted frame of what looked like a Model-T Ford pickup in a small grove of aspen trees. The rubber was gone from the tires and the fabric on the seats had long before been eaten away. Three eight-foot trees sprouted up from beneath the car frame, one from where the motor should have been.
Sollis cursed again. There wasn’t anything in the shack or around it that could help him. The crappy old cabin looked to have been built in the 1920s or 1930s-long before there was any electrical or telephone service available. Back before the Forest Service had closed all the roads to the public. Whoever had driven up there, built a shelter, painted the face, and left his pickup, was long gone.
Then he stared at the rusted frame of the Model-T, and he got an idea.
The front bumper was thin and insubstantial by modern standards, he thought, but the top edge was fairly sharp. Sollis was on his knees in the grass, working his arms and the plastic bindings back and forth along the edge, sawing at the zip ties. It made a low moaning sound.
It took him nearly an hour to feel some give, and another ten minutes to saw completely through. The shards of the ties fell to the ground.
Sollis cried “Yes!” and stood up and rubbed at his sore wrists. His mind had wandered a couple of times as he sawed away mindlessly and the sharp rim of the bumper had scratched his skin, but the bleeding wasn’t bad.
Feeling unbelievably free, he loped from the old car frame into the open meadow and slung the daypack to the ground. He felt so much lighter without it, and he opened the top flap and rooted through it to see what the contents were. Clothing, mainly, which he had no use for. But he found a filled plastic bottle of water, and he opened it and drank. It nearly washed the taste of the deer water out of his mouth.
He found no food except a can of Van Camp’s Pork and Beans. He started to root through the pack for a knife or can opener when the phone started ringing once again. He’d nearly forgotten about it, and Sollis found it in a side pocket of the pack.
The display showed a number with a 307 area code with no name attached to it. The face of the phone was confusing at first, but he saw the icon of a standard telephone handset and punched the button and held it up to his ear.
“Who is this,” Sollis said, “and why do you keep calling?”
There was a beat of silence, as if the caller was surprised there was someone on the other end.
A high voice with a slight Hispanic accent said, “Butch, this is Juan Julio Batista.”
“Who?” Sollis asked.
“Who is this?”
“Who do you think it is?” Sollis said cautiously.
“Butch Roberson.”
“Yeah, right,” Sollis said sarcastically.
“Let’s not play these games.”
“Fine, I’ll hang up.”
“No,” Batista said urgently. “Please stay on the line.”
“Technically, it isn’t a line,” Sollis said.
He could hear
muffled voices from the other end, as if the caller had placed his hand over the microphone. Sollis found it annoying, and was prepared to turn off the phone and call one of his roofer buddies to come get him, when Batista came back on.
Batista said, “Can you hear the helicopter coming? It should just about be right above you.”
Sollis was confused. Then he recalled Butch Roberson’s demands, and smiled a second time. Maybe, he thought, he could get the pilot to take him away. Off the mountain, away from everything, maybe far enough the cops couldn’t find him right away.
He heard the sound in the night sky. It increased quickly in volume. Sollis had never been close to a helicopter in his life, but in the movies a helicopter made a whumping sound when it flew. This sounded more like a flying lawn mower.
“Stay right where you are so the pilot can see you,” Batista said. “Is there enough clear space where you are for it to land?”
“I’m not sure,” Sollis said, looking around at the small meadow.
“Stay where you are.”
“I am. I can hear it coming, but I can’t see anything.”
“It’s coming, believe me. Look up,” Batista said.
There was more muffled talking in the background.
Sollis did, and saw a dark cigar shape hovering over the eastern wall of trees. There were no lights on it, and he could see it only because it blocked out a line of stars. It didn’t move but stayed in one place, which didn’t seem natural.
“That doesn’t look like a helicopter to me,” Sollis said, as a red ball of flame appeared from underneath the unmanned drone.
He heard the whoosh coming straight at him.
And he never heard anything else.
27
Joe Pickett’s eyes shot open at the sound of a sharp concussion. Instinctively thinking thunder, he expected the night sky to be filled with storm clouds, but it was still clear, the stars sharp and endless.
Then, like a distant thunderclap, the echo of the explosion rolled through the mountains. He sat up and rubbed his face, and noticed other bodies were stirring in the moonlight, disturbed by the sound. But no one else seemed awake.
At that moment, Underwood’s satellite phone went off and Joe got a sick feeling in his stomach.
Grunting himself awake and patting around in his blanket for the phone, Underwood sat up.
Joe was close enough that he heard Batista’s triumphant voice say, “We got him.”
Joe closed his eyes. He thought of Pam and Hannah Roberson, hoped they were sleeping, and hoped they’d be spared the news as long as possible, because their lives had just been changed forever.
The team of Special agents grumbled and thrashed as Underwood walked among them, nudging them with his boot to get up and get ready. Joe had already stowed his sleeping bag and pad in his saddlebags and was carrying his saddle toward Toby when Underwood said to his men, “Listen up, guys. I just talked to Director Batista. He said they located Butch Roberson west of us with the military drone and they fired a Hellfire missile and took the bastard out.”
Joe paused to hear the rest, and saw the faces of the team turn to Underwood. One of them said, “Holy Christ-a Hellfire missile?”
“Our drone used night-vision technology to pinpoint Roberson and transmit the video back to the FOB,” Underwood said. “He was standing in the middle of a small clearing, talking to Director Batista on the satellite phone. He didn’t have the hostages with him and he was in the clear, so the determination was made right then to fire.”
“Is he dead?” one of the agents asked.
“Deader than dead,” Underwood said. “With no collateral damage we know of. Director Batista is concerned Roberson might have killed his hostages before he was located, but our job is to confirm that. We’re supposed to establish a perimeter around the kill zone and keep everyone away until the FBI can send their forensics team to get a positive DNA identification.”
“Hold it,” Joe said to Underwood. “If they got video of him and determined it was Butch, why do they need to send in forensics to the site? Can’t they do the work later in their lab?”
“I don’t know the answer to that,” Underwood said. “I wasn’t the one who issued the kill order.”
“Who did?”
“Director Batista,” Underwood said. “He made the call himself. That much I know.”
“It’s over,” one of the agents said. “Riding horses, sleeping in the open-all this bullshit for nothing.”
“At least he won’t be shooting at us,” one of the agents said with relief.
“Let’s get ready, guys,” Underwood said. “We need to be at the kill zone as soon as we can. I’ve got the coordinates, and Batista said it’s about eight miles away.”
He looked up at Joe. “How long do you think that will take?”
Joe said, “Two hours if we can stay out of the down timber, a lot longer if we get tangled up in the forest.”
Underwood grimaced and nodded. He said, “Let’s not do that. Let’s get this over so we can get the hell off this mountain.”
As Underwood painfully climbed up into his saddle, Joe said, “So this is how it happens now?”
“What?”
“You don’t even bother with making an arrest or taking them to court. You just see them on a video screen and push a button.”
“Wasn’t my call,” Underwood said. “But I can’t say I’m all busted up about it. Better they blow him up than risk any of us getting hurt.”
Joe said, “And here I always thought part of the job of law enforcement was the risk of getting hurt.”
Underwood smirked and shook his head. “You and your old-school crap.”
“Let me borrow your phone again,” Joe said, reaching out.
“Not now. We have to stay off the line in case. .” Underwood’s argument petered out as he saw the illogic in it. “I guess Butch can’t use his phone if he’s blown up in a million pieces.”
“Yup.”
Underwood sighed and unslung the lanyard for the phone over his head. “Why do you need it?” he asked.
Joe said, “I need to quit.”
“What-this mission?”
“My job,” Joe said.
“Then you can’t have it,” Underwood said, pulling the phone back before Joe could grasp it. “I need you until we find the kill zone. You know these mountains better than anyone here.”
Joe took a deep breath and expelled it slowly through his nose. He felt the need to be a witness at the kill zone since he’d already come this far.
“That and no farther,” he said.
“Don’t worry,” Underwood said. “I’ll be as glad to get rid of you as you are to leave.”
Joe could see the reflection of his grinning teeth in the moonlight.
That’s when Underwood’s phone lit up again and trilled. Joe expected it to be Batista with more orders or more self-congratulation.
He was close enough to hear Butch Roberson’s bass voice ask Batista, “What the hell did you idiots just do?”
Joe looked up at the night sky and was a little surprised and ashamed by his sense of relief.
Then it hit him: If it wasn’t Butch Roberson who’d been hit by the missile, who was it?
28
Moments before, Dave Farkus had been jolted by what he thought must be a gunshot, and he spun on his heels and writhed and held his bound hands out in front of him as if they’d ward off an oncoming bullet. The sound was a big CRACK! that seemed to split open the very night itself and he was surprised that it took a second for the trees to the northwest to sway as shock waves blew through them.
Behind him, Butch Roberson hissed: “Get moving!” and the three of them sprinted across a rock- and grass-covered field toward the shelter of a broken cirque of rocks that looked to provide cover.
Farkus had glanced over his shoulder as he ran and saw a rose-colored ball of flame roll up from the dark sea of trees several miles away to the northwest. The explosion lo
oked to have happened in the timber short of the valley floor they’d come through the afternoon before.
Safely in the rock formation, Butch ordered Farkus and McLanahan to get down. They sat with their hands bound and resting between their knees while Butch Roberson climbed up a coffin-shaped outcropping with a squared-off top large enough for him to pace back and forth. He seemed to be planning their next move, Farkus thought. Either that, or Butch had been seriously thrown by the explosion.
As Butch paced on the top of the rock, his reverse silhouette could be seen only because he blocked out the wash of creamy stars in the sky. Then Farkus could see a glimpse of the ambient light of the satellite phone lighting up Butch’s cheek.
“What was it?” Farkus asked McLanahan.
“Something big.”
“Thanks, expert,” Farkus said.
McLanahan gestured toward Butch, who was activating his phone.
“Maybe he’s had enough,” McLanahan said. “Maybe Butch is ready to give himself up.”
“What the hell did you idiots just do?” Butch yelled into the handset.
Because Butch was above him holding the handset tight to his face and walking back and forth on the rock, Farkus could only hear one side of the conversation.
“Don’t try to tell me that was the helicopter, Batista. What do you take me for? I was a Marine. I flew in helicopters. I know the hell what one looks like and sounds like, and that wasn’t a helicopter. .”
Then: “Stop it with your lies. You sent another drone, but this one was loaded for bear. Don’t deny it, you liar. Do you know what you did? You blew up a miserable loser I’d sent away. I can’t say he was an innocent man, because he wasn’t. His name was Jimmy Sollis, and he’s the one who gut-shot that hunter. But you killed him, Batista. .”
