Trackers Omnibus [Books 1-4]

by Smith, Nicholas Sansbury

***

  A pounding woke Colton at one in the morning. He fumbled for the Colt .45 resting on the bed stand.

  “Who is that?” Kelly mumbled. Risa’s head popped up on her other side, eyes wide and frightened.

  “Daddy, I’m scared,” she said.

  “Shhh, baby,” Colton whispered. He walked over to the window and peeled back the curtain to see a man standing on the front step. He was draped in shadow, but a familiar old Chevy pickup was parked in the driveway. Colton had been sleeping so hard he hadn’t heard the clunker drive up.

  The person on the step knocked again and yelled, “Colton!”

  Not a man, after all. The voice belonged to Lindsey.

  He stepped away from the window and lowered his gun.

  “Everything’s okay,” Colton reassured them. “It’s just Detective Plymouth.”

  “At this time? It’s the middle of the night,” Kelly said.

  “Stay here,” Colton said. He knew whatever Lindsey had to say wasn’t going to be good. He rushed down the stairs, bracing himself for the bad news, and opened the door before she could start pounding on it again.

  Her face was waxy in the moonlight, her freckles standing out against her pale skin like flecks of blood.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Too much to tell,” she said. “Come hear for yourself.”

  He followed her to the pickup truck. Instead of getting behind the wheel, Lindsey pulled out the digital radio that Leroy Travis had donated. Colton grabbed it and brought it to his lips. “This is Colton. Go ahead, over.”

  Raven’s frantic voice sounded over the channel.

  “Chief, shit, Chief. I screwed up bad.” A chopping noise roared in the background, so loud he could hardly hear Raven. Was that a helicopter?

  “Need men…guns,” Raven said, his voice breaking up. “A fucking tank if you got one.”

  “Slow down, Raven,” Colton said. “I can’t hear you. What the hell was that noise?”

  The background noise abruptly cut off.

  “Sorry,” Raven said. “That better?”

  “Are you on a chopper?”

  Raven laughed, a manic edge to his voice. “In a manner of speaking. That was a Harley.”

  “Start at the beginning, Raven.”

  There was a long pause followed by another rustling sound. A minute later, Raven came back online.

  “Sorry, Chief, thought I heard bikes.” There was another pause. “Nathan and I ambushed a gang of skinheads on the road, led by a guy named General Dan Fenix. Bunch of jumped-up Aryan assholes calling themselves the Sons of Liberty. We tracked them to a location called the Castle last night and went in to find Ty.”

  “What? Why the hell didn’t you wait for backup?” Colton asked.

  “Because our radio was shot. This is one of theirs,” Raven said. “I know. I fucked up. We thought we found the kids, but they weren’t at the skinheads’ camp. Fenix has an army, and they captured Nathan. We have to get them out before they kill him and the kids, Chief. We need men. Lots of men and lots of guns.”

  Colton shook his head. He didn’t even know where to start, so he simply said, “Where are you?”

  “South of Estes Park. I don’t know…pretty far. Maybe forty miles. I’ve been driving for a while. There are still fires out here, and I need help. I can’t do this on my own.”

  Colton could hardly believe he’d just heard those words from Raven Spears. A voice came from the porch before he could answer.

  “Is everything okay, Marcus?”

  Kelly was standing in the doorway. Risa came down the stairs and sat on the bottom step, gripping her stuffed animal in her arms. They both looked scared. He knew in that moment he couldn’t leave them. Not even to save Nathan and his nephew, or bail Raven out of whatever scrape he’d gotten into. At some point, he had to put the safety of his family before everything else. He had already failed his town—he wouldn’t fail Kelly and Risa.

  “It’s okay,” Colton told his wife. “Take Risa and go back to bed. I’ll be up in a minute.”

  The radio crackled. “Chief, you there?”

  Colton held the receiver up. His next words hadn’t gotten any easier to say. “I’m not chief anymore.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “I’m not in charge. Don is running the show now. We lost everything, Raven. Your old buddy Mr. Redford came to Estes Park while you were away. He took everything. Our meat, our supplies, our medicine. He burned the Stanley to the ground. Do you understand what I’m saying? Even if I was still chief, nobody else here would be willing to help you after what happened.”

  There was silence on the other line for several hard moments.

  “Is my family okay?”

  “They’re fine, I checked on them last night. Sandra and Allie are staying at your place,” Colton said. He turned to look at Kelly again. She was sitting on the step next to Risa, her long, rope-like braid falling over one shoulder. She met his eyes, and there was a question there: Them or us?

  Colton raised the receiver again. “Where did these men take Nathan?”

  “The Castle. It’s an old camp a few miles north of Interstate 70. About sixty miles from Estes Park, or so. I’m not exactly sure. There are mines in the mountain behind the camp though. I figure that’s where they’re hiding out. They have a fucking army, Colton.”

  “Which is why you need to get your ass back here and make sure you aren’t followed. There’s only one thing we can do for Nathan now. We have to get a message to his sister and let the military handle this.”

  “No,” Raven replied. “By the time they arrive, he will be dead. I made him a promise. He helped save my family, now I have to help save his.” There was a pause, and then Raven spoke again, his voice rough. “So tell my sister and niece I love them, okay? And tell Creek he’s a good boy. And…and hell, Marcus. Just don’t let anything happen to them because of what I did, okay? Don’t let my mistakes ruin their lives too. I’m sorry as I can be about Redford. But if I make it back, I’ll take care of that asshole.”

  “I will look after your family,” Colton said heavily. Static broke over the channel, the connection severed.

  Colton turned to Lindsey. “Detective, I need you to do me a favor.”

  She nodded. “Anything. Name it.”

  “I need you to get a message through to Secretary Montgomery before Raven gets himself killed.”

  — 19 —

  Raven couldn’t tell if the blood covering his fatigues was from the men he killed or if it was his own. It was probably a mixture of both.

  An hour earlier, not long after he had spoken with Colton and learned of Mr. Redford robbing Estes Park blind, Raven had ditched the Harley and covered it with fallen limbs. Then he had slipped into the woods along the frontage road leading to the Castle. Since then, he’d been making his way through the forest, being slapped in the face with branches while the underbrush tore at his legs.

  He was using the radio to monitor the movement of the skinheads in the area, staying just out of reach. Through the gaps in the trees, he noted a clearing that opened into a meadow. His trained eye caught motion in the knee-high grass. A baseball cap, and then a shiny bald skull bobbing up and down in the glow of the moonlight.

  Gotcha.

  Raven ran at a hunch, eyes flitting over the two-dimensional canvas for any surprises. Clusters of chokecherries scraped against his arms, but he ignored them. He barely felt the pain, and his fatigue had been replaced with the rush of adrenaline. He should have been going insane with worry, but instead he felt in tune with his surroundings. There would be time to deal with Mr. Redford later. As long as Sandra and Allie were safe, Raven could zone everything else out.

  He listened to the whistle of the breeze and the cry of a raccoon somewhere in the hills. Chirping bugs, crickets, and the croak of a bullfrog joined the din. Over all the sounds of nature came the faint voice of a man he was about to kill.

  He reached the cleari
ng and took up a position behind a ponderosa pine with a trunk wide enough to cover his body. This hill overlooked an open space with patches of late-summer wildflowers that seemed to glow in the moonlight.

  Moving through the sea of knee-high grass, about halfway across the clearing, were the three men. They were headed for the base of a mountain on the other side of the field. The bluffs towered thousands of feet overhead, peaks tipped with snow.

  Raven pushed the night vision goggles up and centered the scope of his rifle on the patrol. Two were carrying M16s, while the third had a shotgun.

  He planned to take them down and then move in for the close-up work. Raven picked his first target, but just as he was about to pull the trigger, the silhouettes of more soldiers moved out of the forest below.

  The three newcomers quickly overtook the patrol. They lifted a downed tree at the edge of the woods and moved it to the side, revealing a narrow dirt path that led up into the mountain. Raven could take three of them with his rifle from here, but six? That was too many to take alone, and he didn’t want to draw reinforcements. He needed to wait until the two patrols separated.

  While he sat there, he looked to the sky. The cloud cover had dissipated, leaving only fragments floating across the stars. He easily located the two pointer stars of the Big Dipper, Dubhe and Merak. Using those, he visualized an imaginary clock. Using basic math—the only kind he was good at, as Sandra would point out—he made calendric calculations to determine it was almost four in the morning. He had just under three hours of darkness before dawn.

  At last, the first patrol headed west toward a stream. The other three stood guard at the open entrance to the dirt path. They were around fifteen hundred yards out by Raven’s estimates. Killing all three would be near impossible, even with the Leupold Mark 6 riflescope.

  He had to get closer, and he preferred to deal with the patrol heading back out first so he didn’t get boxed in later when he went to infiltrate the Castle.

  Raven melted back into the forest and stalked the three soldiers from a distance. Hugging the trunks of the trees around him, he watched them like a prowling wolverine. The vicious animals were known for ambushing larger prey at close range. That’s exactly what he was going to do.

  As he neared the patrol, he slung the rifle over his back and took off running. The trio was about to cross the creek at the western edge of the clearing. They moved in a straight line, more of a march than a patrol, which allowed him to move faster without fear of being sighted.

  He darted through the woods and slid down a slope where a ravine divided the forest. At the bottom, he stopped at the muddy crossing. He stepped a few paces back, then ran and hopped over the three-foot-wide rift. Using the momentum from his leap, he climbed up the hill and back into the forest.

  This time he moved more cautiously, careful not to slip on the beds of pine needles. He had lost sight of the men in the green hue of the night vision goggles, but he could hear them moving through the woods.

  A Douglas fir provided a temporary refuge. Raven crouched next to its base and caught his breath. When his breathing had slowed, he pulled out his hatchet and knife, then peered around the tree. The three men were trudging through the forest with their rifles lowered. They didn’t speak, but they moved without care, snapping twigs and crunching leaves like mindless beasts. Raven was going to enjoy gutting them.

  Focus, Sam. Focus. Let go of your fear and anger.

  He bent down to pick up a rock in the same hand that he held his knife. Listening to the footfalls, he could tell the man approaching to his left was the heaviest. Raven would deal with him last.

  When the crunch of their boots sounded about ten feet away, Raven tossed the rock at a tree to his left. The crunch of footsteps abruptly ceased.

  “Did you hear that?” one of the men said.

  Without a moment of hesitation, Raven flung his hatchet at a muscular soldier holding an M16, burying the blade into his skull with a crack that scared two birds from a nest in the canopy overhead.

  Raven darted behind another tree and raised his knife. Two seconds had passed since he’d thrown his hatchet. It took two more seconds to move around the side of the tree and flank the other two men. He came up behind a soldier carrying an M16.

  He traced the blade across the man’s thick neck from ear to ear. The blade cut clean and deep, blood shot out like a fountain. He relieved the dying man of his rifle as he fell and laid him down gently on the grass.

  “Guys?” the heavyset soldier said. “Guys, where the hell did you go? This shit ain’t funny!” He pumped his shotgun and turned in the darkness, looking for his dead friends.

  Raven prowled quietly in the shadows, enjoying the fear from his final chase. Ten seconds after he had flung his hatchet, he snuck up behind the overweight man and whistled from three feet behind his head.

  The guy turned with his shotgun muzzle lowered to the ground.

  Amateur wannabe soldier, Raven thought.

  He lunged with his blade before the man could fire a shot. The tip sliced through a layer of fat under his ribcage and Raven twisted it deep, watching the white eyes of his enemy widen in the moonlight.

  The man let out a guttural cry and dropped his shotgun. Raven withdrew the blade and stuck his prey in the side of the neck with a meaty thump. Blood gushed out, and the skinhead reached up in a futile effort to stop the flow. He grabbed Raven with his other hand.

  Raven yanked from his grip, darted around to stab the kidneys with a series of short jabs that made the man screech like a pig being slaughtered, and then watched with grim satisfaction as the soldier clawed at the blood-soaked ground.

  He retrieved his hatchet from the first kill, plucking it from the skull, and kicked the body of the second skinhead just to make sure he was dead. Then he checked on the third man. Somehow, he was still squirming. His legs kicked the dirt slowly, like a cricket with a cracked shell.

  Raven got down next to him so he could meet his gaze. He snapped his fingers to draw the man’s attention, but the spark of life was already draining from his eyes.

  He didn’t feel bad about killing this man. If anything, he was proud. His niece would grow up in a world with three less white supremacist assholes in it.

  “Help,” the skinhead wheezed.

  “What’s the magic word?”

  The man managed to croak out, “Please…please…”

  Raven laughed in his face.

  The caw of a bird sounded, mimicking his laughter, and a flash of light speared through the sky. A meteorite, he realized.

  The Raven Mocker.

  Tonight, it was Raven’s turn to bring a Cherokee legend to life.

  ***

  If Charlize had to read one more report about bandits in Iowa or roadblocks in South Carolina, she was going to scream. She’d been trying to keep herself busy with work ever since the call had come from Estes Park. A detective from the police force there had relayed enough information to put together an operation to rescue her family. Teams from Buckley AFB were preparing to move on the Castle. There was nothing for her to do now but work—and wait.

  Albert opened the door to the conference room holding two cups of coffee. She smiled when he set one of the cups in front of her and took a seat.

  “Ma’am, do you have a moment to talk?” he asked.

  Charlize closed her laptop. “Of course, Al, what’s on your mind?”

  He slowly sat down and massaged the outside of the coffee cup with his index finger, looking at it like he wasn’t sure if he wanted to take a drink.

  Charlize summoned the soothing voice that she used on Ty when he was upset. “It’s okay, Big Al, you can talk to me.”

  “It’s about my family,” he finally said. “I know Jane and my girls are probably…” He paused and swallowed, choking a bit. “I know they are gone, ma’am, but I have a sister in Charlotte.”

  “Why didn’t you say so before?”

  He looked down at the table, then met her gaze. �
��You’ve been so sick, and so focused on your own family. I don’t blame you for that. I’m just—”

  “I totally understand. I’ve been selfish, and I apologize. I can’t begin to know how badly you’re hurting inside. I will do what I can to find your sister, I promise.”

  “Thank you, ma’am.”

  “What’s her name?”

  “Jacqueline,” Albert said. “She’s my twin sister.”

  Charlize raised a scorched eyebrow. “You never told me you have a twin.”

  “Sorry,” Albert said, shrugging a large shoulder. “We’re not identical, if you were wonderin’.”

  Charlize smiled. “I also didn’t know you had a sense of humor.”

  He smiled back at her and then turned as the door opened, letting in a flurry of voices. Colonel Raymond stood outside. “An HSM team picked up a possible hit on the radar, ma’am.”

  “Show me,” Charlize replied. She tugged on the sleeves of her new uniform, which included a white button-down shirt that almost covered her burns. Then she grabbed the Air Force baseball cap and put it over her cropped hair.

  They moved into the circular command room, where General Thor stood rubbing his forehead. On the wall-mounted monitor, three MH-60R Seahawks armed with anti-submarine torpedoes and hellfire missiles glided through the skies.

  A dozen other staffers were staring into the glow of laptops set up on the long table in the center of the room. The clock overhead showed 0600 hours. Charlize hadn’t slept—her mind was racing too much to shut off. Everyone around her looked exhausted. This was the reality of war. Sleep, showers, and food were a luxury.

  She crossed the room and stood next to General Thor and Colonel Raymond.

  “Morning, Secretary Montgomery,” Thor said. “We’ve had a radar hit about twenty-five miles east of New York City. There’s a fleet of ten aid ships coming from Great Britain. The anomaly appears to be moving with the convoy.”

  Charlize cursed. “Those slick bastards are using the cover of the ships as disguise.”

  Raymond agreed with a nod. “I had the same thought.”

  “Did the Royal Navy send any protection for those aid ships?” Charlize asked.