Page 84 of Battle Mountain

Before she could floor the accelerator and leave him standingthere, Sheridan’s SUV pulled up and stopped on the highway next to her Bronco. Bishop wheeled around, surprised by it.

Sheridan’s passenger window was down and the muzzle of a shotgun extended out of it. Marybeth heard her daughter say, “Drop the weapon and get on the ground or I’ll blow your head off.” To her mother, Sheridan called out, “I heard everything.”

Bishop looked over his shoulder at Marybeth. He was obviously frightened.

“I never wanted to do this,” he said bitterly as he tossed his weapon to the pavement. “Can we just forget this ever happened?”

“Down on the ground,” Sheridan warned. “Comply!” Bishop slowly shook his head from side to side as he lowered himself to his knees.

“Take off, Mom,” Sheridan said. “I’ve got this.”

“Are you sure?”

“Go,” Sheridan commanded.

—

In a smalldark motel room on First Street in Warm Springs, Nate and Geronimo assembled their weapons and gear on top of Nate’s rumpled bed. It was at Geronimo’s initiative.

“Our squad used to do this prior to any mission in Iraq and Somalia,” Geronimo said. “It was kind of a ritual, but a useful one. We wanted every guy on the team to have a complete understanding of our overall firepower and capabilities. That way, we could position each operator on the strike team in the best possible location, and adjust them depending on the mission.”

Nate said, “But there are just two of us.”

“Which makes this even more important, if you think about it.”

On the bed were firearms, boxes of ammunition, a pair of armored vests, and combat knives in sheaths. Piled on Geronimo’s bed were optics, and field equipment including a first-aid kit, camouflage paint, and handheld radios.

Geronimo gestured to Nate’s holstered .454 Casull and his accompanying Ruger Ranch Rifle chambered for 6.8mm SPC rounds. Three full fifteen-round magazines lay next to the rifle.

“Obviously, you’ve got long-range capability with your flat-shooting rifle. That weapon, even with open sights, is lethal up to three hundred yards. We already know what you can do with your hand cannon,” Geronimo said. “You’ll be our distance wing warrior.”

“Gotcha.”

Geronimo pointed at his weapons on the bed. “My Benelli is loaded with buckshot rounds. It’s devastating up to forty yards, and I can hit my targets at one shot per second. It holds eight rounds.

“I’ll have both of these on me,” he said, picking up two identical 1911 Colt .45 semiautomatic handguns from the bed. “One under each arm. As you know, these old babies are bruisers close-in. I’ll be our close-combat ninja.

“So,” Geronimo said to Nate, “how do you propose we do this? We can’t just blast our way in, and Iinsistthat we spare the guards manning the checkpoints.”

“I’m with you on that,” Nate said. “We want Axel, not service members.”

“How do we isolate him and take him out?”

“The hunter must become the thing he hunts,” Nate said.

When Geronimo looked at him quizzically, Nate said, “It’sfromThe Peregrineby J. A. Baker. Baker wrote that after studying falcons in England. We need to get inside of Axel’s head and imagine what he’d do, given the target and the terrain. Then we use that knowledge to go after him.”

Using the scarred top of a small desk in the motel room, Nate used his fingertip in a thin layer of dust to plot out their approach. “The road into the ranch is heavily guarded, as we know. Even if we took on the guards or blasted our way in, the guys at the other checkpoints would know we’re coming. The road goes along the North Platte River, so conceivably we could drop down to the water and hike upriver, where we couldn’t be seen by the guards up on the road. But that’s too risky. All it would take is for one of those guys to wander over from the checkpoint on the road to take a piss and see us.

“So what would Axel do?” Nate asked while moving his finger to the other side of the desk. “Axel would avoid the checkpoints, too. He’s a special operator like us, so he’d study the situation and search for soft entry points into the ranch and exploit them. He’d move in from behind the ranch, where there aren’t any roads and where heavy timber on the mountainside would conceal his approach. He’d come straight down Battle Mountain on the east side.”

Geronimo nodded his head in agreement.

“This is all really rough country,” Nate said. “It’s filled with deep gorges and black timber. But if he comes directly down the mountain and not from the side or along the river upstream, it’s easier terrain, even though it’s a longer march. So what we need to do is intercept him before he gets to the ranch.”

“How do we do that?”

Nate moved his finger to the center of the table. “There’s a steep trail over here called Purgatory Gulch. I’ve gone down it and it’s a bitch, but it takes you down to a river canyon, where it flattens out along the banks. We could go down there and cut across the side of the mountain to the south. We’ll have to use the terrain and cover to our advantage, and it’ll be tough going. But Axel won’t expect to be flanked by anyone.”

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