Page 98 of Battle Mountain

Other than the occasional murmuring from the other side of the wall, it was remarkably still and quiet. The evening had cooled at least twenty degrees since they’d set out, and it felt like fall in the high mountains. The air was thin, and every sound carried.

Someone, a male, said, “Look. What kind of bird is that?”

Nate looked straight up into the darkening sky to see his peregrine soaring above the mountain. The bird had caught a current that flowed north to south at a lower elevation than before, and the raptor was close enough that Nate could see its light-colored, mottled breast.

“Where is Axel?” he whispered to the peregrine.

But he received no answer, because all at once four things happened almost simultaneously. First, there was the throaty roar ofa two-stroke engine starting up, followed by several rifle shots. Then there were three rapid-fire shotgun blasts. Then a scream.

Geronimo had begun the assault, and Nate scrambled into place by quickly climbing through the scree to a position above and to the left of the ridge. As he cleared the scree, he saw three camo-clothed figures to his right twenty yards away. They were turned with their backs to the wall, and one was pointing up the timbered slope to where he apparently thought the shots had come from.

Nate had hoped the militants would all be bunched together in a pack, but that wasn’t the case. There were groups of two, three, and four along the length of the wall. The closest group of three raised their rifles and two of them fired wildly uphill. He could see now that it was two men and a woman. They hadn’t spotted him because they were looking the other way, up and to the right.

He heard Geronimo’s semiautomatic shotgun bark rapidly three more times. Geronimo was apparently going after a group of four militants farther down the wall. Nate saw two of them fall immediately, and one scramble into a crack between boulders.

Since the three closest to Nate were all standing side by side away from him, he aimed his rifle at the head of the closest one, a lanky white male with dreadlocks, and shot him. When the man dropped away, Nate’s front sight was already trained on the male farthest away in the group, because he was taller than the female in the middle.

Nate fired and that man cried out and fell, leaving the woman.

She was small, with pink hair and terrified eyes. Nate shifted his aim to a spot on the bridge of her nose. She looked to be in her midtwenties and her face was all sharp angles. But instead of thewoman in front of him, he saw the face of Bethany in bed in that Sublette County vacation home, and couldn’t make himself pull the trigger.

Only when she snarled at him and swung her rifle up in his direction did he squeeze off another round. She fell on top of the third militant.

It was chaos. The remaining activists were shooting up into the trees as fast as they could fire their semiautomatic rifles. It was now dark enough that muzzle flashes popped and lingered for a moment in his vision. But they were firing wildly, blindly.

Geronimo had apparently put aside his shotgun and was now going after them with both of his 1911 .45s. Nate could see the heavy rounds smacking and sparking against the granite wall. The militant who had slipped between the boulders a moment before screamed when he was hit, and he tumbled out onto the dirt.

Through it all, Nate could clearly make out a furious monologue coming from a radio clipped to the uniform of one of the three militants he had taken out. It was Axel, screaming at them to “Get down behind cover. Don’t fire blindly, you idiots! Pick a target and squeeze the trigger. Stop panicking!You assholes are completely useless!”

The pincer movement Nate and Geronimo had applied had worked almost perfectly, Nate thought. Geronimo had wiped out the four militants on the southern end of the wall, and he had cleared the three on the north side.

That left three in the middle—two men and another woman. They had huddled together after throwing down their weapons.

“We give up,” one of the males shouted, his voice cracking. “We give up. We’re not armed anymore.”

He stepped away from the other two and raised his hands high into the air.

As he did so, there was a sharpcrackof a rifle from somewhere up above them in the trees, and the man in the process of surrendering was hit and fell straight back into his comrades. Nate ducked down, knowing the shot hadn’t come from Geronimo.

Twenty yards ahead of him, the two surviving activists broke their embrace and bolted across a clearing away from the wall into thick brush. They did so holding their arms over their heads, as if that gesture could ward off bullets. There was anothercrack, but the shooter missed, and the round smacked into the scree and threw sparks.

“Fucking useless morons,” Axel Soledad screamed from the shadows.

Then the two-stroke engine whined as he rode away.

Geronimo appeared from behind a boulder to Nate’s left. He’d holstered his .45s, but held his combat shotgun loose and ready at his side.

“That was Axel,” Geronimo said. “He killed one of his own and tried for another one. Then he took off like the coward he is.”

Nate didn’t say anything. The wild cacophony of gunshots still rang in his ears, and his nostrils were filled with the sharp odors of gunpowder, dust, and blood.

Geronimo looked at the carnage around them and shook his head sadly. He said, “It’s just a bunch of stupid kids. When I saw what they looked like, I hesitated. But one of ’em sawmeand started blasting away, so I shot back.”

“I heard the sequence,” Nate said. “You had no choice.”

Geronimo said, “It’s a good thing for me that they couldn’t hitwhat they were aiming at. In fact, they didn’t even know what they were doing. They had no training to fall back on when things got crazy. And two of ’em got away, but I’m fine with that.”

“Agreed,” Nate said. “They aren’t worth chasing down. But we’re not done.”

---