The mountain offered them no cover. Michael grabbed Ceinwen and pulled her with him toward the upslope, and the two lay flat. Jianjun followed.
Jake and the other deputy, Rosenfeld, had drawn their sidearms as they dropped to the ground and tried to figure out where the shot had come from.
“Drop your weapons,” a voice shouted from below. They couldn’t see him. “We don’t want to kill anyone else. We only want the pearl.”
Deputy Grayson had carried a rifle, one Jake and Rosenfeld might need. Rosenfeld made a sudden break for it, but as he ran, a shot was heard and he fell, hit in the leg.
“We warned you!” the voice said.
Jake saw that the shot came out of a patch of sagebrush on the downside of the mountain. He returned fire over and over. As he did, Michael crept then sprinted toward the rifle, picked it up and ran to Jake’s side, diving for cover as rifle shots from below filled the air.
“The warnings go both ways,” Jake called. “Show yourself.”
“Look back here,” yelled a different voice. “And if you shoot, those two will die.”
Jake and Michael looked behind them. On rocks high overhead, two men stood, one with a long rifle, the other with a crossbow, aimed at Ceinwen and Jianjun. The men wore hats, dark glasses, and what—even from a distance—looked like fake beards.
“Here I am.” A tall, stocky fellow stood up from behind the large sagebrush where he’d crouched and now walked toward them, the stock of his rifle at his shoulder and a finger near the trigger. He wore a green baseball cap, dark glasses and had a beard. But his beard was graying and looked real. “Now, toss the pearl this way, along with your rifle and guns, then my men and I will go. If not, we can always shoot you and take the pearl, anyway.”
“How do you know about the pearl?” Michael called.
“I’d say that’s the least of your worries.”
“If your men shoot, you won’t make it off this hill alive,” Jake said.
“Maybe. Maybe not. But I’m counting on you fellows to be reasonable.” His voice was gruff, but had a cloying, whiny quality to it. “Is some pearl worth all your lives? And mine, too? I don’t think so. Toss it down! Or you—”
From behind them, Michael and Jake heard a series of shots. They turned their heads to see as the spokesman stopped talking and stared past them.
Ceinwen was firing a 9 mm. Above her, one of the two gunmen dropped his rifle, clutched at his midsection, lurched forward, and fell. The other began firing wildly at Ceinwen and Jianjun, hitting Jianjun, before running for the cover of nearby heavy brush.
Michael turned from the gun battle on the upper slope to the spokesman who recovered his wits and took aim at Ceinwen. Michael raised his rifle and fired. Surprise and anger flared on the gunman’s face as he turned to run for the dense sagebrush. He seemed to stagger, than stumbled into the brush in full flight.
“God damn, I think you winged that running-off-the-mouth bastard,” Jake yelled.
“Yeah, I hope so,” Michael growled.
“Hey, up here!” Ceinwen was shouting. “I’ve got two wounded!”
As they heard horses riding away, they ran up the slope as Jake groused about the ones that got away.
Michael rushed to the wounded Jianjun. The shot to his back hit his lower rib cage. He was bleeding and unconscious.
Ceinwen had removed Deputy Rosenfeld’s belt and wrapped it around his leg as a tourniquet.
“I’m sorry,” Ceinwen said to Jake as she pulled the strap tight. “Maybe I’ve watched too many American shoot-’em-ups, but when I realized Jianjun, who was shielding me, had a revolver, and no one expected that I’d know how to use it. I saw a chance and took it.”
“There’s nothing,” Jake said as he gawked at her, “to be sorry about.”
Jake used his satellite phone to call Mallick and get a Medivac helicopter to fly out to help the wounded and retrieve the dead. At the same time, Michael and Ceinwen compressed Jianjun’s wound to try to stop the bleeding.
A little more than an hour later, the helicopter arrived.
Jake rode in it with his men and Jianjun, giving Ceinwen the keys to drive his truck back to Salmon. He could scarcely speak over the death and the serious wounding of his deputies.
Michael was also devastated. He remained quiet as he and Ceinwen made their way back to the fire trail where they had left their vehicles.
“There was nothing else you could have done,” she said, after a long while.
“I should have come here alone.”
“And then you’d be dead.”
“The deputy had a wife and kids. I’ve got … no one.”
Ceinwen’s breath caught at the bleakness of his words and the sadness with which he spoke them. “I know one thing for sure,” she said. “Those weren’t demons shooting at us. Some very human person wants that pearl. Who could it be? Who knows we’re out here?”
He shook his head. “It’s got to be someone following my movements, someone who realizes I’ve decided to get the pearl, and that’s why I’m out here. But who? Those in Japan know I’ll bring the pearl to them.”
Ceinwen thought a moment. “You’d bring it to the Nakamuras. But what if some other person there wants it for himself? They knew what you were up to. They could easily have found a way to track your phone and then hire mercenaries to be ready to attack as soon as you retrieved the pearl. Who knows how many people Lady Nakamura told about all this.”
Michael nodded, lost in thought between what she was saying and the guilt weighing down on him, the guilt of being his father’s son.
They reached the vehicles and drove through the night to Salmon, stopping only for a couple of hours sleep before facing the long, winding road over the Bitterroot Mountains. They arrived in Salmon early the next morning.
Jake and Mallick were already at the sheriff’s station.
“How are they doing?” were Michael’s first words upon seeing Jake.
“Len Rosenfeld and his wife have gone to one of the hospitals in Boise, and Jianjun is being treated at the medical center, just a few blocks away. He had surgery, and the doc sounded pretty positive. A couple of ribs are worse for wear, but they deflected the bullet from hitting anything vital. But, good God, he lost a lot of blood.”
“I’m glad for the basically positive report,” Michael said, but then his shoulder sagged and he bowed his head. “I never meant to bring any of this on you. I’m so sorry.”
Jake gripped Michael's arm. “Whatever is going on started before you ever got here. You aren't to blame." He let go as he added, "We’ve had deaths, mutilations. We saw what was out there, human and … not. And like always, it's the human element that's the most dangerous. I can’t help but wonder if the things spooking us here in Salmon weren’t done by those shooters. The way they killed my deputy, a really good man, with no warning, nothing, shows pure viciousness. Plus, they had guns, supplies, horses. That isn’t the sort of thing they could get at a moment’s notice. It means they’ve been lurking around Idaho a while.”
“Good point,” Michael admitted.
“Damn straight. In fact, I’m thinking this was all a set-up. They were probably nearby, watching and waiting for you to come back to Salmon, somehow knowing you’d have to come back for the pearl. And when you did, they were ready.”
“But how did they know where we were going?” Ceinwen asked.
Jake shrugged. “As soon as I found out, I talked to the deputies who might have told their wives. I told Mallick, had to say a bit about where we were going to the INL to get the rare earth elements. Anyone could have told the wrong person or had their conversation overheard. It even”—he glanced quickly toward Ceinwen—“might have been one of us. Anyway, if those guys took a bush plane out of Salmon, they’d have arrived well before us and waited at Selway Falls. I’ll be checking small airfields around here for three or four men.”
“Four?”
“I figured there had to be four. Three do the dirty work, one to tend and protect the horses for a fast getaway, and to act as backup. Things happened too fast for him to get in on the action. A break for us.”
“Makes sense,” Michael said. “But I also know none of that would have happened if I hadn’t brought the pearl here to begin with. I honestly thought it would be safe since it’s surrounded by metals that are supposed to neutralize it.”
“But it’s not the demons in the pearl that have caused the problem,” Ceinwen pointed out. “It seems they were neutralized. So you weren’t wrong. The problem came from outside forces—from very human outside forces.”
Jake nodded in agreement. “That sounds right.”
“But you can’t deny there were also demonic forces out there,” Michael said.
“I don’t want to believe in such things,” Ceinwen said, “but I know what I saw attack me out there, and we know Rachel’s problems aren’t being caused by men on horseback in Idaho.”
She looked so forlorn, Michael found himself putting an arm around her shoulders and drawing her to his side. He then faced Jake. “We’re going to have to leave, Sheriff. Once the pearl is out of your state, I bet you’ll find things get a lot quieter here. But we’ll come back, and when we do, we’ll make whoever is behind this pay for all they’ve done.”
Jake nodded. “Just be careful.”
To both men’s surprise, Ceinwen gave Jake a quick hug. “You be careful, too, Sheriff. You’re a good man, even if you don’t know me well enough to trust me yet. And I’m sure she has not stopped loving you. Woman’s intuition.”
“I’m listening and hoping,” Jake said with a grin.