Page 37 of Battle Mountain

As they droveby the airport on the top of the hill, Joe noted the private jet he’d seen earlier when he’d approached Warm Springs. The jet was parked to the side of the runway. The aircraft looked even bigger on the tarmac now that it was still.

Next to the large corporate jet were two others just as large.

“Wow,” Joe said. “What’s going on around here?”

“Have you ever heard of the Centurions?” she asked.

“No.”

“I hadn’t either until I moved here. It’s a big-time secret gathering of muckety-mucks from all over the country. They fly in every October and meet at a real fancy dude ranch about forty-five minutes away called the B-Lazy-U. Few people know this, but the Warm Springs airport is the third-largest airport in Wyoming when it comes to the length of the runways. It can accommodate aircraft all the way up to a 737. And we don’t have a single commercial flight. Do you see all those rental cars?”

They were hard to miss, Joe thought. Three rows of black SUVs were lined up between the highway and the small private airport terminal. He guessed there were eighty to ninety vehicles.

Kany pulled off the road onto the shoulder and gestured toward the parked jets.

“That first one is a Bombardier Global Express,” she said. “It holds twelve to sixteen passengers, depending on the interior configuration. The one in the middle is a Gulfstream G500. It’s a beauty that holds up to thirteen, I believe. The one that just landed, the biggest one, is an Embraer Lineage 1000. Nineteen passengers. But none of these jets are ever full. Often, it’s just one or two passengers.”

Joe looked over at her with astonishment.

“I told you I studied avionics,” she said. “I used to want to fly one of these private jets, so I learned all about them. I never thought I’d see them all in one place, much less a place like Warm Springs.”

“How did I not know about this?” Joe asked rhetorically.

“Hardly anyone does,” she said. “Just the pilots and the locals.”

“Are there more jets on the way, then?” Joe asked.

She took her hand off the wheel and swept it across the horizon from right to left, indicating the entire airport. “By the end of the week, the tarmac will be covered with them,” she said. “They’ll park small jets under the wings of the big jets. Believe me, you’ve never seen anything like it before.”

“Crazy,” Joe said.

“Like I said, it’s a big deal that no one knows about,” Kany said. “The folks here are more than aware of the event, but they’re encouraged to keep their mouths shut while the Centurions are here. It’s all kind of mysterious, and it took me a while to finally learn what goes on. As you can imagine, the event is quite the cash cow for the local economy, and it bridges the gap between summer tourism season and full-blown hunting season in the valley.”

Joe recalled that when he was there before he’d been surprised by how many well-known celebrities, politicians, and business tycoons frequented the location. On the exclusive guest ranch Sheridan had worked on, she’d had to sign nondisclosure agreements to keep the identity of many of the guests private. She’d been annoyed when her father wasn’t familiar with several of the names she leaked to him, even though Marybeth was aware of them. They included country music stars, famous actors, billionaire rappers, and real estate moguls. Sheridan had also explained to her father that the locals were used to celebrities in their midst and they were largely not impressed with them. Warm Springs residents just went on about their business, she said. It was one of the reasons famous people liked to visit.

“So what goes on at this big event?” Joe asked Kany, intrigued.

“Apparently, they meet annually at the B-Lazy-U Ranch and do all the traditional cowboy stuff: horseback riding, fly-fishing,skeet shooting, hiking, all that. Then they have a couple of formal meetings and initiate new members, then they all fly home. In a week, there won’t be a single aircraft at this airport.

“From what I understand, the Centurions have been around for sixty or seventy years. I’ve never been to the ranch they gather at, but I’ve talked to a couple of people who have been.”

Joe whistled. He watched as one of the black SUVs left the front line of vehicles and turned toward the airport exit. He could see that behind the driver there were two passengers in the back seat, who had probably arrived on the Embraer Lineage that had passed over his pickup on the way into town.

“So who are these big muckety-mucks?” Joe asked.

Chapter Nine

Mark Eisele wasn’tsure what time he awoke, but he thought it was midmorning. There were thin bands of light at the edges of the blacked-out window. His night had once again been fitful and hallucinatory, filled with dreams that included Megan and his in-laws, but there’d been something else that kept startling him into consciousness: the sound of gunshots.

On the street or grounds just outside the structure he was kept in, there had been rapid-fire, high-pitchedcracks, deepbooms, and snapping small-arms fire, along with the revving of engines and occasional shouts. It sounded like the people outside were involved in a skirmish or playing war games not far from his cabin. He wished he could get up from the bed, tear the taped cardboard from the glass of the windows, and look outside.

Then there were the pitiful sounds coming from Spike Rankin in the next cot. Rankin had yet to regain consciousness at any point, as far as Eisele knew, but he seemed to be weakening as the hours and days went on. Rankin didn’t weep or moan from pain,but he issued soft reactive grunts as if someone were applying sudden pressure to his chest. Eisele had called out to him several times, but Rankin hadn’t answered in any way.

No one had brought them anything to eat, for how long? Two days? Three days? Eisele tried to recall how long a human could live without nutrition of any kind, and he couldn’t remember the answer. He knew it was much longer than three days. Eisele wished he could simply google “How long can a human survive without food?” It struck him how vulnerable he felt that he simply couldn’t look at his phone and ask it that question. He hadn’t been without a working smartphone since middle school.

—

While he washearing gunshots early that morning, Eisele had discovered that he could access water to drink. Someone—Double-A?—had placed a water bladder of some kind on the pillow next to his head. He found that he could turn his head and suck in room-temperature water through a flexible tube. It tasted brackish, but he could feel himself healing from the inside out as the fluid replenished his body. He’d consumed half the bladder, but not enough yet to have to urinate. That would come, and he would welcome it as another step in his recovery. He didn’t want to wet his scrubs that had finally dried out. The pungent odor from his clothing hung in the air within the still, dark room.

---