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THE MAN WAS ABOUT TWENTY-five years old and freezing.
The cold pierced through his skin and shot straight to his bones. The temperatures outside dipped into the low twenties, and the winter hadn’t even come on yet. Not fully. It was still the middle of November, but the mountaintops were snowcapped, and the sky was wet with the cold, dewy feeling that came with high altitudes and frigid skies. Which exactly described his location—high up in a stark, cold winter. He was in the Absaroka Mountain Range, a part of the Rockies. The elevation was somewhere around thirteen thousand feet, but he wasn’t sure of the exact number.
The man was hiding out in a familiar place. A place he used to hide when he was young. He felt safe there.
Outside, the night wind blew and battered the ruggedly built wooden structure. It was primitive but had endured the cold winters for many, many years. For the moment, nothing and no one would find him. He was safe, but it wouldn’t be for long. He had nowhere else to go. He had run out of options and time.
They were coming for him. They were coming, and they would come in hot with guns blazing. They would kill him for sure. No doubt about it. He had been running for days, and he knew he would come face-to-face with them soon enough. His cover had been blown all to hell and back.
No changing that now. No changing the past.
But that wasn’t the thing that worried him at the moment. The thing that was the immediate danger wasn’t the guys coming to kill him for betraying them. It wasn’t the fact that they had trusted him, and he had turned on them. It wasn’t the dangerous enemies who had once terrified him. The immediate danger wasn’t the contents of the stolen bulletproof briefcase that was covered in dirt and grime and still damp from being dragged through the snowy terrain.
The immediate danger that ate away at him was that he was starving. He hadn’t eaten in days, so many days that he had no idea when the last time was.
Two weeks ago, he had been on a military stealth helicopter on his way into Mexico, or maybe back from Mexico, across the Mexican-United States border. He couldn’t remember for sure. The details were fuzzy because his thinking was muddled. Five or six or seven days without food will do that to a man. He tried to remember his training, his tradecraft, but for some reason, all he could focus on was the stealth helicopter.
He had thought it was such a cool thing. It was a Comanche RAH-70, the most terrifying machine he had ever seen. Reports from around the world had claimed that highly modified Black Hawk UH-60s were the stealth helicopters used in the raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound in 2011. He hadn’t been there in 2011—he had been far too young at the time to have been involved in that operation—but he did have top secret clearance and was privy to knowledge that the helicopters used were, in fact, Comanche’s RAH-70s, cousins of the RAH-66.
Public knowledge said that the Comanche helicopters had been canceled way back in 2004. The programs were too expensive for the US military, but not for his employer. His employer had found use for them and had financed dozens of them to be created for stealth missions. They were housed in strategic military installations all around the world. Military service personnel was restricted from accessing them. Authorized persons had been told never to reveal any details about them to anyone.
The helicopter was a remarkable machine with deadly and accurate machine guns attached. It was equipped with special side turret-style machine guns based on the Vulcan-style gun and could fire M50 ammunition at 1,500 rounds per minute. The ammunition housed five hundred rounds and could be reloaded in fifteen minutes.
The man knew this information not because of his military training, but because of his tradecraft. Although now he did question the statistics and details in his mind because he knew one thing for certain—he was starving, and the lack of substance in his body was causing him to lose focus and reasoning. He tried desperately to concentrate on the details of the stealth helicopter. And it helped. But he was still starving.
He was in one of the richest states in the country, and at that moment he was a rich man. He was richer than he had been five or six or seven days ago because of the value of the contents of the security briefcase in his possession.
Next to the man was a Beretta 9mm, a service weapon given to him just before his secret mission. It rested on top of a closed shoebox next to him, in close grabbing distance. The safety was on, but that could change quickly. The shoebox was stacked on top of a large appliance box that held old items from a childhood long past.
The room the man was in was dark and dank and not well-insulated. Spiders indigenous to the region crawled in the far corner of the ceiling. They crawled in the shadows of a swinging bulb that hung down on a long cord and swayed back and forth in a curved arc from west to north. A wind that chilled the room blew the bulb from side to side. The man could hear a faint whistle that sounded with the gusts of wind from the outside terrain.
The man was sitting on the floor with his back to the wall. He craned his neck to look out of a snow-covered, shuttered window above his head. He had to press his body up against the wall and use his arms to hoist himself up just to see. Billions of stars shimmered across the stretch of sky. The ground was covered in snow, but the night sky was clear and dark blue and picturesque like the wallpaper on a desktop computer. Perhaps on a computer back in Langley, Virginia, which was where he had lived for the last year of his life.
The man leaned forward some more and looked straight down at the front of the house. He couldn’t see the front door from his position, but he was more than two stories up, and he could see more than a hundred yards down the steep land in front of him. Behind him were dense trees and then the edge of a rugged mountain. He wasn’t much worried about men coming for him from that direction. He figured these guys would just come straight up the long, wide driveway if they could find it. The snow had covered it over, leaving no signs of where it used to be. More than likely, his enemies would be coming in by snowmobile, and he would hear their engines in the dead silence around him. The noise would echo and bounce off the far-off trees or the sides of the mountains. No way could anyone surprise him on a snowmobile. The only alternative means of transportation would’ve been horses. The snow on the ground wasn’t deep enough to prevent them from riding on horseback up the track.
Either way, it wouldn’t matter. He was ready. His main problem wasn’t how they would come for him but when.
The owner of the house didn’t know he was there. He was hiding out. He prayed he wouldn’t be discovered. The last thing he wanted to do was involve innocent people.
Just then he heard a noise, a creaking on the staircase below him. He stretched back up and craned his head to look out the window. He couldn’t see the front door because of the huge porch, a fact he had forgotten. Then he remembered he had just looked down only moments ago.
The man heard more noises from below him. He heard footsteps growing louder and louder. A moment later, someone was on the floor beneath him, and then he heard a chair moving across the floor and light footsteps as if someone had climbed the chair and reached up for the rope to the attic door. He heard the creaks of his frozen bones as he twisted to look at the trapdoor and then the squeaking of springs from the door itself as someone pulled it down. The sound was deafening in the silence of the house.
He grabbed his Beretta and quickly pointed it in the direction of the attic door as it was pulled downward. Light flashed in through the crack and up onto the ceiling above him. Soon it filled half of the attic. He wanted to slide over to hide behind some of the larger boxes, but he couldn’t really move his legs. He had lost feeling in them some time ago but couldn’t remember when. The truth was, he had forgotten they were paralyzed.
The trapdoor went down all the way, and the folding staircase attached plopped down below. The man heard the creak of the wooden ladder as someone climbed it. A head stuck up into the attic, and a body followed. The small figure in front of him scanned across the attic and the boxes until their eyes connected.
The man lowered his Beretta when he saw a small boy, approximately six years of age. The boy glowered at him in a peculiar way. Most likely a combination of fright because of the gun and then recognition.
The man had been in and out of sleep for days and had expended so much energy in guarding himself, holding the Beretta up, that before he knew it, his eyes closed under the heavy weight of his eyelids.