Track Down Wyoming Page 2

  “You don’t have to worry none ‘bout Burl,” the proprietor said. “He’s been guidin’ ‘round these parts long as I can remember. Best damned guide in the Range.”

  “That’s good to know, but I still want to see his license and give him the coordinates of our camp.”

  The proprietor laughed, a deep rumbling laugh that seemed to come from somewhere in the depths of his considerable belly

  “I ‘spect he’ll be here directly. You don’t have to worry ‘bout ol’ Burl. His grandson is the Game Warden assigned to your area.”

  Taggart had heard enough, and a plan was forming in his head as he strolled out past the sentry. Ainsley was going to be the solution to all his problems. It took him only a couple of seconds to figure out where Jeffries and the others were hiding. Thirty seconds later he was outlining the specifics of his plan. The men were happy. So far, their little soiree in the Wind River Range had been a boring blur of work details. Things were about to get a little more exciting.

  * * *

  Burl Oates turned out to be a clone of the outpost’s proprietor, or vice versa since Burl was obviously the older man. He produced the laminated copy of his guide license and Ainsley pointed out the map coordinates of his camp.

  “’Bout where I figgered fella. Fishin’s good up at the lake above ya, caught a four an’ a half pound golden trout there last fall.”

  “Good to know. We’ll check it out before if we get a chance before we leave…”

  “I’ll be up there in two days…got a fella from Denver on a hunt right now, gotta get him his elk…tomorrow mornin’ I ‘magine. Elk are movin’ good right now in the high meadows, an’ that’s where I’ll be takin’ ya.”

  “Thanks Burl, we’ll be looking forward to it.” Nick stuck out his hand and Burl shook it. Twenty minutes later, Nick and Simon left the outpost loaded down with food…and some antiseptic for Byron, who was resting gratefully back at the camp…and began the long walk back. Neither of them noticed the five men who were following them at a distance.

  * * *

  The day was gorgeous and the sky was the most beautiful shade of blue Nick could ever remember seeing. The vista was breathtaking, and he and Simon were chatting inconsequentially as they walked, talking about everything but work. The guide was all set to show up, Simon had purchased a bottle of whiskey for them to share around the campfire later, and the prospect of checking out the lake near their camp for golden trout was looking pretty good. Everything was perfect up until a bullet ricocheted off a stone near Nick’s left foot.

  “Not him you dumbass! The other guy!”

  Stunned, Nick turned around to see a group of men running toward them, one holding what appeared to be an old lever action rifle. An angry looking man with a two weeks growth of heavy beard wearing aviator sunglasses and a fishing hat was yelling out instructions as the group close rapidly on them. In disbelief, frozen to the ground, Nick watched as the guy with the rifle stopped in midstride and lifted the rifle to his shoulder. He started to scream at Simon, but at that instant, Simon’s head disappeared in a spray of blood.

  There was no doubt that he could do nothing for his friend, Simon was unquestionably dead…and the group of men was closing on him fast. Nick dropped his rucksack, and fled as fast as his feet would carry him.

  TWO

  Day One

  There is an old saying, ‘Once a Marine, always a Marine,’ and Brad Jacobs was the living embodiment of that adage. He had joined the Corps eighteen, right out of high school. His father had been a career Marine, killed at the end of the Gulf War during Operation Desert Storm while serving under General Norman Schwarzkopf. Brad had always been proud of his father, and proud of what the Corps stood for.

  A solid six feet two inches tall, he had a muscular build and sandy blonde hair cut high and tight. He had a lantern jaw and a look in his sea green eyes that said he was ready for anything the world could throw at him, a look that came from an iron core of inner strength. He lived by a code and expected everyone else to do the same.

  Brad had spent fifteen years in the Corps, the last ten in Force Recon. When he had gotten out, he had moved back to his hometown of Dallas, Texas, and taken up the profession of Bounty Hunter, occasionally tracking down and locating missing persons who had vanished while in dangerous countries that traditional law enforcement tended to avoid. From the start, he had always enlisted the help from a select pool of friends he trusted, most of whom he had previously served with. Eventually, he’d built a world-class hostage retrieval team (HRT) working for international corporations to retrieve high level executives who have been abducted in foreign countries.

  Mason Ving, his closest friend, had been with him from the beginning. Ving. Ving had grown up in a shotgun house in the Central City district of New Orleans, and his mom had died when he was twelve years old. The oldest of three brothers, he had taken a paper route to help his dad put food on the table. The Marine Corps seemed to be his ticket out of oppressive poverty.

  A retired Force Recon Gunnery Sergeant, Ving was a behemoth of a man, six feet tall and two hundred and sixty pounds of muscle, tendon, and bone. He’d acquired a small beer gut since his retirement from the Corps, but it hadn’t slowed him down much. His skin was so black it that it had blue highlights in the light of day, a bald head that positively glistened, and smiling brown eyes could turn deadly and reptilian when he got riled. Brad learned over the years that when Ving’s eyes frosted over it was best to be somewhere else.

  * * *

  Brad, Ving, and another member of Team Dallas, Jared Smoot (a tall, lanky Texan with a passion for his own blend of hot chocolate…he carried them with him in a Ziploc bag and referred to them as his ‘makin’s…that rivalled Ving’s lust for bacon,) are on a well-deserved week-long fishing trip for golden trout near Pinedale, Wyoming while contractors put the finishing touches on the barn and the ranch house Brad had bought near Dallas.

  * * *

  “Hope Pete is havin’ fun with that new grandbaby a his,” Ving said. He was squatting down by the fire circle he had carefully and lovingly constructed to support the lightweight griddle he had cleverly used as a backboard for his A.L.I.C.E. pack so that he could satisfy his craving for bacon in the wild. Better than a pound of the stuff was sizzling on the griddle while he picked and prodded it with the tip of his Kabar. He had rigged up a travois at the outpost and loaded a heavy ice chest packed with bacon in dry ice along with his pack, rifle, and fly rod onto it. Then he had dragged it the entire distance from the outpost without complaint.

  Brad and Jared had liked the travois idea so much that they had lashed together their own, though Jared had bitterly lamented the outpost’s lack of rental horses.

  Brad had laughed at him.

  “If they’d had any packhorses available we’d have had to haul in feed for them too Jared. At least this way we only had to bring what we needed.”

  “We coulda brung the Mrazors…” Jared grumbled. “This ain’t combat ya know.”

  It was highly unusual for Jared to complain about anything. The lanky Texan was tough as old leather, and had endured extremes of combat, temperature, and terrain with a slow smile. Brad wrote off his unusual mood to what he believed was a budding romance with the diminutive Fly Highsmith, Team Dallas’s newly hired tech guru. Fly was the first woman Brad had ever known to capture Jared’s attention for more than a week or two, and Jared was obviously in the throes of separation anxiety, something he’d never had to suffer before.

  Brad and Ving privately believed that the antique sniper rifle, a .52 caliber 1874 Sharps Buffalo rifle in pristine condition that Jared desperately wanted to try out on live game was the only reason Jared had pried himself away from the ranch…and Fly. The rifle was a legendary buffalo gun, and a big bull elk would be a real challenge for the black powder metallic cartridge at range.

  Brad lifted his fly rod case and threw his tackle bag over his shoulder.

  “While you two are lollygaggin
g around the campfire, I’m gonna head out to that lake upslope. The guy at the outpost told me there’s golden trout in there, maybe a new state record…”

  Jared, busy running a patch down the bore of his Sharps, glanced up at him.

  “I’m gonna head out to that long ridgeline back behind us, see if I can zero this thing with this new ammo I got.” Jared didn’t trust store bought ammo, he preferred to load his own. He hadn’t had time to pick up reloading supplies for that before the trip, he’d just taken delivery of the rifle from a collector in Dallas the day before they’d left.

  “Y’all go ‘head an’ do whatever ya want boys, I’m baconatin’!”

  Brad shook his head in amusement at Ving’s peculiar obsession, then turned and began to walk the steep, mile long incline up to the lake above their campsite.

  * * *

  The space she had laid out in her sketches was huge, fifty by thirty-four feet. It was larger than her research lab at NSA had been, and there was no bureaucracy to put limitations on her vision. She’d been absolutely correct in her first assessment of Brad. He was the kind of employer that paid well for expertise, assigned a budget to the task at hand, and then turned the task over to the pro.

  She had the knowledge, the expertise, the necessary contacts in the Intelligence community, and Brad had given her a free hand; he wanted the most advanced communications set-up she was capable of developing. With the seven figure budget he had given her to work with, she was feeling like a kid cut loose in a toy store with daddy’s credit card.

  The contractor’s foreman was a competent fellow with a good understanding of what she wanted, and the work was on schedule and under budget, something she had never experienced with a government contractor. He wasn’t bad looking either, and another time she might have considered taking him up on his flirting and his offers to take her out to dinner and dancing…but the foreman didn’t hold a candle to Jared. Damn him! Just as she was warming up to him, he ran off for a couple of weeks hunting and fishing with the boys!

  Sighing, she turned around and watched as the foreman corrected one of the workmen who had the application of one of the hundreds of coaxial cable compression fittings.

  “Dixon! You have to prep the cable end before you put the fitting on, man. Even if it looks clean, make a fresh cut so you’re sure the conductor on that RG-6 cable makes a proper connection!”

  The foreman turned around and gave Fly an embarrassed look.

  “He’s a new apprentice…” Shrugging his shoulders, the foreman turned back to watch the young man at work.

  Satisfied that the foreman had things well in hand, Fly decided to go over to the big house, where Vicky and Willona were deciding what colors to paint the rooms. Not such a big deal, but she suddenly felt the need for the company of women. Not just any women, but women who knew and understood men like Brad, Ving, Pete…and Jared.

  * * *

  The shore of the lake was rocky and barren, and there was snow lying in the cracks and grooves of the stony walls that encompassed the lake. The far shore was flat, though it was stony and rough, all rounded edges as he expected. The water was clear and icy cold, and Brad could see the fish swimming in the water, surprisingly active in water so cold. The fish were a dark reddish gold, with a speckled back much like the rainbow trout he had caught in the Guadalupe River Canyon Tailrace, below the dam.

  The wind wasn’t bad, and his first cast sent his floating line toward a rock in the water that just tickled the surface of the water, causing a ripple. The clear monofilament leader with its feather fly attached floated down gently and settled just at the edge of the ripple and was savagely attacked as soon as it touched the water.

  The active fish fought energetically, and Brad had his hands full keeping it from throwing the tiny hook. The fight was tense, and it lasted for a good seven or eight minutes before he managed to land the fish.

  A shout rang out across the lake and echoed off the rock walls. Startled, Brad scanned the shoreline and finally located a lone man, obviously injured and in considerable pain, trying to run across the rocky ground. There was a pack of men chasing the first one, and that piqued his curiosity.

  He carried a compact pair of Steiner 2035 Military-Marine 10 x 50 Porro Prism Binoculars in a stout case packed away in the fanny pack he wore on day trips and hikes, and he quickly dug them out and brought them to bear on the lone runner out in front of the pack. To his astonishment, he recognized the runner, a very public figure, a famous Silicon Valley computer guru reputed to be as wealthy as Warren Buffet or Bill Gates. Ainsley, that was his name. Nicholas Ainsley. His picture was frequently on the front of the celebrity magazines at the checkout lines in the grocery stores. Always had a good looking woman or two hanging from his arms in the pictures. Right now he didn’t look as happy as he did on the magazine covers…he looked hurt and he looked scared.

  Concerned, Brad shifted his focus to the men chasing Ainsley and instantly recognized the face of the man leading the pack. The beard, hat and sunglasses didn’t fool him for a second. There was no way in hell he would ever forget the face of Harlan Taggart, not in a million years. Taggart would be bad news wherever he was at.

  There is no question that he has to find some way to intervene. Brad knows he has to help Ainsley, and besides, he has a long-standing personal score to settle with Taggart anyway. The drama is unfolding too far away, and at least one of the men is armed. There’s nothing he can do but go back to camp and get Ving and Jared. Mentally marking their direction of travel and fixing landmarks in his memory, he races back toward camp.

  Hope I don’t trip on one of these rocks and bust my ass! Won’t be able to do a damned thing to help anybody if that happens. Why the hell did I leave the satellite phone back at the camp?

  The loose stone around the lake bed gave way to grass covered meadow and Brad picked up his pace.

  What the hell is Harlan Taggart doing chasing a multi-billionaire celebrity around the Wind River Mountain Range? Sonofabitch can’t be up to any good, that’s for damned sure. Hell, I wonder what Taggart is doing out of Leavenworth anyway…last I heard they finally caught up with him and court-martialed him down at Pendleton. That was only a few weeks ago, wasn’t it? Board found him guilty on all counts, so what’s he doing up here?

  Got to get back to camp in a hurry! Need to call somebody, but who? FBI? Homeland Security? The State Police? Who the hell would have jurisdiction in a case like this? More importantly, who can I get out here in time to help that poor bastard Ainsley? Taggart looked mad as hell, and unless he has some use for Ainsley, he’s going to kill that guy. Wouldn’t be the first time, I’ve known him to do it before for no reason other than just sheer cussedness. Taggart is a waste of good oxygen.

  * * *

  What the hell? God! They shot Simon! Why?

  A stone chip from the first ricochet had clipped his calf like a piece of shrapnel, and Nick could feel the warm wet blood running down into his boot as he fled. He had no idea why these maniacs were chasing him, but he could see he’d made a serious mistake. Nolan Shepard, his chief of security, had argued like hell against him not bringing a security team up here, but it had seemed an unnecessary precaution to Nick. The Wind River Range was remote and sparsely populated, and Nick and Simon were familiar with the place, they had been here many times since their college days at Cal Tech. The idea of bringing body guards (Shepard hated that term, he called his men ‘Security Specialists’) had seemed ludicrous.

  It wasn’t funny now. Simon lay dead a couple of miles back and the only weapon available to Nick was back at the camp…with Byron for Pete’s sake! Byron had the satellite phone; Nick didn’t want to be interrupted on his vacation, but the head of a multi-billion dollar tech conglomerate could never be completely unavailable. Byron’s function was supposed to be as a screen, to decide whether whatever was being called about could wait until their return, so the satellite phone had stayed with Byron.

  The crazies are too close!
If I go back to the camp they’ll kill Byron too, and they’re so close behind I’ll never get to my rifle in time. Think, Ainsley!

  He formulated a plan as he ran. The only chance he had was to find a way to elude his pursuers. Find a place to hide and then circle back to the camp under cover of darkness so he could arm himself and use the satellite phone to call for help. It wasn’t much of a plan, but it was all he could come up with at the moment. He didn’t figure in the injury to his leg though, and he didn’t realize just how much blood he had lost…

  THREE

  Day One, 1300 hours

  The camp was in sight, and Ving was still ‘baconating’. Ving glanced up from his mostly empty griddle as he stuffed two more crisp pieces of bacon in his mouth. Jared was nowhere to be seen.

  “Saddle up Ving! Trouble!” Brad shouted as he dove for the door of his lightweight mountain tent.

  Ving had known Brad for many years, and he recognized the urgency in Brad’s voice. Leaving his prized griddle with bacon still sizzling on it lying on the ground beside the makeshift stove, he reached inside his own tent, scarfed up the butt pack he’d prepared for day trips, and then grabbed the Remington Model 700 SPS Tactical in .308 and the single box of cartridges he’d brought along. He had no idea what was up, but there was no question in his mind. When Brad’s voice carried that tone, there was probably shooting business at hand.