Force of Nature

by C. J. Box

  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.

  17

  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 a
nd 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.

  Nate had always thought he had an advantage over the others in his class, and it was that thought that kept him going. He had since realized that perhaps it was a false advantage, but at the time it sustained him and drove him on. Nate thought at the time, during the training, that no one around him could possibly understand the single-minded dedication it took to be a falconer. The rigors and psychological suspense of logic and disbelief he’d encountered capturing and flying birds of prey had honed his disposition and dedication to a place none of his fellow operators could yet grasp. Nemecek got it, which is why he’d approached Nate in the first place.

  The men who survived Peregrine training were highly intelligent, resourceful, entrepreneurial, apolitical but loyal to their country and their fellow operators—and capable of killing without second thought or remorse. Killing was considered part of living, a by-product of the job and nothing more or less. It had to be done, and there wasn’t anything particularly glorious about it. And those who were killed had it coming.

  So the look of all three operators Nate had encountered ran counter to his experience. The two in the Tahoe looked like hyped-up gangbangers. The older one in the house looked like a middle-management thug.

  It puzzled him. Either Nemecek’s standards had slipped or his current operators were harbingers of a new generation.

  NOW NATE picked his way down the mountainside toward the compound below. He moved from tree to tree, and paused often to look and listen. Despite what many people thought, mountain valleys didn’t awake in silence. Squirrels chattered warnings of his approach to their compadres. A single meadowlark perched on an errant strand of wire sang out its haunting chorus.

  He moved within a hundred yards of the compound before he slid down to his haunches to observe. Although the outbuildings and guest cabin looked unoccupied, he could see the shadowed grille of an old Toyota Land Cruiser in the open garage. The vehicle was familiar. It was a stock SUV that had been retrofitted to accommodate a handicapped driver. But he wondered why there was only a single auto present when there should have been three or four.

  Although he couldn’t yet figure it out, something was awry from how he remembered the place. His only proof was a sense of unease.

  Through his binoculars, he swept the tree-lined slopes on the far side of the small valley. In the early-morning sun there was the chance of a glint from g
lass or metal. If there were operators up there in the trees watching the compound, he couldn’t pick them out.

  THE LAST FOUR TIMES he’d visited the compound there were five ex-operators who used it as a base camp and headquarters. Oscar Kennedy, who’d been a paraplegic since taking a bullet in the spine in Somalia, owned the compound and managed its operations. Kennedy was a contemporary of Nate’s in Mark V, and the man he knew best and trusted the most. Kennedy maintained close contacts with personnel in the Defense Department in Washington and operators within the Joint Special Operations Command, the small and secret agency that oversaw special ops for every branch of the military. When Nate needed to know what was going on, he asked Oscar Kennedy to make inquiries.

  Oscar Kennedy was a man of God, and the reverend for a small wilderness church located off Highway 33 between Victor and Driggs. His congregation was small and diverse, including not only ex-military and isolated survivalists but counterculture diaspora from the resort areas over the Tetons in Jackson Hole. Nate had attended a couple of services over the years. The Reverend Kennedy preached self-reliance and self-determination, and shameless love for a tough and judgmental God. He worked in themes and lessons he’d learned in Special Forces with a twist, and spoke of the holy need for warriors, the moral authority of Christian soldiers, with special emphasis on Romans 13.

  _______

  OTHER EX–SPECIAL OPERATORS who had found their way to Idaho and the compound—dubbed Camp Oscar—were Jason Sweeney, Mike McCarthy, Gabriel Cohen, and Aldo Nunez. Only two of the men, Sweeney and Kennedy, had been operators for Mark V. The others had been members of other branches. Naturally, there was a built-in rivalry between them, but they had one thing in common: all had turned their backs on the government they had once worked for but considered themselves patriotic Americans. They were well armed, well trained, and absolutely out of the mainstream. Since Idaho and Camp Oscar offered refuge and common ground, they’d found their way there. Nate had told no one of the existence of Camp Oscar, including Joe Pickett. It was important to maintain the secrecy and integrity of the camp and its occupants.