Page 27 of Battle Mountain

“Go on,” Nate said.

“We saw the glow up in the trees when we drove back from the clinic two hours later,” Geronimo said. “I knew it was our house, and it was like a kick in the gut. I mean, everything was in that house. Paintings, jewelry, cash, family photos,everything. My triple-barrel shotgun. Thank God my gyrfalcon was in its mews out back and it didn’t get burned up.

“Jacinda and I accused each other of being careless and causing the fire to start. She thought I left a lit cigar in my man cave and I thought she’d forgotten to turn off the stove or something.

“But it turns out,” Geronimo said, “that our neighbors saw a car on our road fifteen minutes after we’d left. They described it as a muddy four-by-four with no license plates. There were two men in it, but it was too dark to see them clearly enough to get a description that’s worth anything. Those guys torched our house. The fire department’s arson investigator confirmed it. The guy said a fast-acting accelerant caused the fire and was put on all the outside doors and triggered at once.”

“Sounds professional.”

“It does. And get this: The arson investigator said the accelerant was likely diethylene glycol gel packs adhered to the doors.”

“Diethylene glycol?” Nate said. “That stuff will stick to anything and burn really hot, even on wet wood in the rain. I remember using them in the military.”

“Yeah, me too. I guess you can buy them commercially, but you’d need to know what to buy, you know? My assumption is that the arsonists have a military background.”

“Uh-oh.”

“And because we’d left all the lights on when we left with Pearl, I’m pretty sure they thought we were inside.”

“Any idea who did it?” Nate asked.

“Not at first,” Geronimo said. “But after I sent Jacinda and Pearl to Detroit to stay with her mother, I did some digging.”

“Axel Soledad’s thugs,” Nate said.

Geronimo nodded. “And if it weren’t for that bead up Pearl’s nose that made us leave the house unexpectedly, he would have killed us all.”

Nate continued to look ahead.

“I should have finished off that dude when I had the chance,” Geronimo said. “He was down and I should have gotten close and blown his head off.”

“I wish you would have,” Nate said.

Both men went silent until they descended into Norris Junction, where steam from the geyser basin wafted up through the heavy pines. Nate thought about how different his life would have turned out if Geronimo and Joe Pickett hadn’t left Soledad to bleed out in a lot in downtown Portland. How they’d assumed, incorrectly as it turned out, that the man they’d chased across half the country was gone for good.

He had no doubt that Geronimo was thinking the same thing.

—

“How did youfigure out that Soledad was behind the attack?” Nate asked as Geronimo turned north at Norris Junction for Mammoth Hot Springs.

“A few ways,” Geronimo said. “First, when I found out that Soledad survived, I knew he’d come after me just like he came after you. I mean, I’ve made some enemies in my time, but only one of them would send goons to my house to burn it down with me and my family inside.

“Second was what I learned on Bal-Chatri,” he said.

“Ah.”

Bal-Chatri was a special portal within a crude retail website that sold falconry gear like hoods, jesses, nets, traps, and other paraphernalia. The name of the portal came from an especially effective trap for capturing wild raptors. Most users scrolled right past the tiny button on the site with the strange foreign-sounding name. Butwhen the button was clicked, it took the user to an encrypted other world on the dark web. Bal-Chatri was used by authorized falconers to communicate, exchange best practices and tips, and to call out unscrupulous falconers who had violated the unwritten rules that had been agreed upon within the small but fervent universe.

The community with access to Bal-Chatri was highly specialized, and the members could only access it with a series of passwords and prompts. The members were limited to outlaw falconers with a libertarian bent, most with military backgrounds like Geronimo, Nate, and, for a time, Axel Soledad. The discussions within the portal were candid. Names were named.

Most falconers hunted a great deal on public lands, which were largely undeveloped and comprised half or more of the surface area of the western states. Federal land managers, depending on the administration and the whims of bureaucrats two thousand miles away in Washington, D.C., could make life miserable for falconers who wanted to hunt their birds on public lands. Many of the falconers on the Bal-Chatri site thought their freedom and liberty were under attack as new rules and regulations were handed down and administered. The group was largely pro–Second Amendment and profoundly anti-fed. One of the longest and best-documented threads was of the many encounters members had had with agents of the federal law enforcement community who suspected them of being traitorous insurgents.

But they also policed themselves. Members within Bal-Chatri insisted on maintaining a strict code of conduct among falconers, which included not encroaching on one another’s backyards and not trapping birds strictly for commercial sale to foreign customers.

Axel Soledad had been kicked out of the group long before for breaking most of its rules. He had targeted other falconers to trespass on their private nesting sites and steal their birds outright. Soledad then sold the birds to unscrupulous buyers, who were the representatives and officials for corrupt and criminal regimes, primarily in the Middle East. Soledad then used the money—hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth—to finance anarchists in the U.S. and to foment riots and violence in cities throughout the country.

Since Geronimo was one of the administrators on the site, he monitored it closely and had special access to the actual identity of nearly all of the members. He referred the site as “BC.”

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