Kohl Ranch
Texas High Plains
It had been at least a week since Garrett Kohl had spotted the trespasser’s tracks on the ranch. The first time he’d seen them hadn’t rung any alarm bells. But with the second occurrence came a trail of blood. He had no problem if a deer was taken in hunger or desperation. In this case though, the poacher had killed three bucks, cut off their antlers, and left the meat there to rot.
As a former Green Beret, DEA special agent, and, more recently, an undercover operative for the CIA, Garrett had spent the better part of his life hunting people who didn’t want to be found. For that reason, and a natural instinct for tracking, he was damn good at finding them. He’d hoped those days were behind him, but apparently he wasn’t done just yet.
His new area of operations was the place his forefathers had settled back in 1893 and his family had lived on ever since. His particular piece of heaven was seventeen thousand acres of ranchland, roughly twenty-six square miles of prairie that ran north of the Canadian River and beyond the majestic ridgeline that towered above their farmhouse.
This two-hundred-mile stretch of caliche cliffs, known as the Caprock Escarpment, spanned from New Mexico to Oklahoma and jutted up from the vast plains over a thousand feet high in places. It divided the ranch nearly perfectly, marking upper and lower grazing areas of windswept heights of open savanna, and river bottom pasture plentiful with cottonwoods.
Garrett turned to his son, Asadi, who was riding beside him on a red roan quarter horse named Scamp, and pointed at the footsteps in the snow. “Well, what’s your assessment, Outlaw? When were those tracks made?”
Asadi dropped from the saddle and led the gelding up to the trail. He knelt and studied the prints for a good ten seconds. “Late last night or early morning hours.”
“And what makes you think that?” Garrett always pressed for a reason that would rule out any lucky guesses. “Seems like kind of a narrow time frame, don’t you think?”
Asadi took off a glove, reached into the divot, and let his fingertips glide along the powder. “We got a few inches of snow yesterday afternoon. But there’s a light dusting on top of the tracks. Probably from what blew in today before dawn. Means he was here in between then.”
“And how do you know it was a he?” Garrett had never heard of a female poacher, but that wasn’t the point. The point was never to make claim that you couldn’t back up. “Sounds like you’re weeding out about fifty percent of the population without any evidence.”
Asadi eyeballed the tracks for a moment and then turned back. “Boots are at least a size twelve. D width. And the tracks are deep. Whoever made them was big and heavy.”
“I’ve met some big ol’ gals in my time.” Garrett shot his son a wink to let him know that he was having a little fun. “Some of them wearing clodhoppers too. Maybe it was one of them?”
Asadi rose from his crouch and stuck out his hand to shake on it. “Wanna bet?”
Seeing dollar signs in Asadi’s eyes, Garrett moved on from a wager he was sure to lose. “So, where do you think he or she might be headed?”
It was a bit of a difficult question. Whoever made the tracks had clearly tried to hide them. They’d taken a circuitous route back to the barbed-wire fence that separated Kohl property from the neighboring Mescalero Ranch. The poacher was more than likely hunting deer from a vehicle. But given all the oilfield traffic in the area, there was no way to narrow it down.
Garrett hadn’t expected to catch anyone in the act. Rather his end goal of the outing was a little uninterrupted father-son bonding. If he had broached the idea of a heart-to-heart talk, his increasingly aloof teenager would’ve certainly balked. But a sunrise mission to hunt down a poacher on horseback had all the makings of a really badass time.
Since starting up his own oil and gas exploration company nine months earlier, Garrett had been preoccupied at best, and borderline absentee. Asadi wasn’t neglected by any stretch of the imagination. His surrogate grandad, Butch, was a constant fixture in his life. And the kid was just plain busy like most his age. Between school, ranch work, and the rodeo team, Asadi had his own thing going. In fact, he seemed to love his newfound independence.
A recent breakup, however, with this girlfriend, Savanah, had left him a bit on the mopey side. Garrett wanted to visit with his son one-on-one uninterrupted, just to make sure he wasn’t trying to hide his pain.
As Asadi climbed back into the saddle, Garrett eased over on Sadie, a buckskin mare he’d trained the year before. He flashed a guilty smile that forewarned a ruse. “Want to talk a sec?”
Asadi looked over, clearly skeptical of the overture. “Talk about what?”
“Nothing specific. Checking in, that’s all. While it’s just you and me.”
A slow nod came from Asadi, who was probably terrified it was going to be a follow-up to the birds and the bees conversation they’d had a couple of years ago. “Okay . . . I guess.”
Garrett feigned nonchalance. “Anything pressing on your mind these days?”
Asadi glanced back at the footsteps in the snow. He was either totally uninterested or pretending to be uninterested. Either way, it was a solid showing. “Ah, no. Not really.”
“Nothing at all?” Garrett pressed. “You can talk to me about anything, you know.”
Asadi looked up and narrowed his eyes. “You mean about Faraz?”
The mention of that name hit Garrett hard, although it probably shouldn’t have. It was only natural that Asadi would bring up his brother in Afghanistan, who they’d once falsely believed was executed by the Taliban at the same time as his parents. Where Faraz was located or what he was doing was anyone’s guess, and the not knowing made it a whole lot worse.
Asadi could neither give up and grieve nor dare to dream of a day when they would be reunited. It was an odd purgatory. Although it wasn’t the topic Garrett had been aiming for, it was obviously on Asadi’s mind. So, he decided to fake it and keep going.
“Still think about him a lot?”
Asadi looked out at the blanket of powdery white plains, seeming to stare at the nothingness on the baby blue horizon, with its sunrise streaks of pink and orange. “Every day I think about Faraz. My parents too.”
“That’s good,” Garrett reminded him. “You should always keep them close to your heart.”
“That’s the problem, I guess.” Asadi turned back. “I’m starting to forget everything. How they looked. How they talked. And I’m worried that one day there’ll be no memories at all.”
Garrett had also lost his mother tragically at an early age, but he at least had his father and brother with whom to reminisce. Even his sister, Grace, bore a striking resemblance to Mena Kohl. But Asadi had none of that. There was no evidence that his family even existed. He’d fled his village in the Hindu Kush with nothing but the clothes on his back.
“Well, don’t give up. Keep Faraz in your prayers. Because he might still be out there.”
Asadi brightened. “You really think so?”
Garrett didn’t really believe it to be true, but this wasn’t the time to admit it. The kid needed a little lift in his spirits, even if it came from false hope. “You remember what Kim said?”
Asadi didn’t miss a beat. “That she’d never ever stop looking for him. Ever.”
“That’s exactly right. And that woman is a bloodhound. Once she gets on the scent, she won’t let go. We just need to give her some more time. Okay?”
If anybody could track someone down to the far ends of the earth, it would be CIA operations officer Kim Manning. But Garrett hadn’t heard from her in months. He only knew that she was leading a task force to track down a network of Iranian Quds Force operatives. Having done his share of deep cover work with Kim and her deputy chief, a paramilitary officer named Mario Contreras, Garrett suspected it would be a while before the duo resurfaced again. With no real idea if they would ever get resolution on the Faraz situation, Garrett opted for a subject change.
“Aside from all that, everything else okay?”
“Why?” Asadi looked a little nervous. “Did Butch say something?”
It was actually Garrett’s girlfriend, Lacey, who had spilled the beans. “Nope. Just noticed you haven’t been spending as much time with Savanah as you used to.”
Asadi’s face fell. “Well, we’re not together anymore.”
“Really?” Garrett feigned surprise. “What on earth happened?”
There was a moment of silence before Asadi answered. It was as if he were still thinking through it, struggling to come to an answer that made sense. “It’s like we started talking less and less. And now we don’t talk at all. Or she doesn’t want to for some reason. I just don’t get it.”
Savanah had lived out at the Kohl Ranch a few months prior. But when her dad, Ray Smitty, was offered a job as foreman out at the Mescalero, they moved and she started going to a new school. Although vast and expansive, the Texas Panhandle could be the smallest of worlds. Garrett would never say it, but he suspected that she’d found a new boyfriend.
“Well, sometimes things sort of fizzle out. You’ll find someone else though. I’m sure of it.”
Asadi shrugged. “But I don’t want anyone else.”
Garrett was just gearing up for the old plenty of fish in the sea conversation when a thundering BOOM came from behind. His thoughts turned to the obvious culprit—the poacher on the prowl. But this was no crack of a rifle. It was the rumbling thunder of an explosion. It was on a scale that he’d not heard since his war zone days in Iraq and Afghanistan.
As his horse tried to bolt, Garrett pulled the reins to bring the spooked Sadie back under control and turned to the horizon, where a plume of black smoke rose into the sky about a half-mile away. Although he couldn’t see the origin, for the line of mesquite brush on the fence blocking his view, he knew what it was.
Asadi, who was working hard to get Scamp settled, stared in awe at the billowing cloud. “That from the Kaiser place?”
The Mescalero Compressor Station, which pushed natural gas through pipelines across the surrounding ranches, had become a permanent fixture and largely went unnoticed. But accidents at places like these happened on occasion, and when they did, they could spark an inferno straight from Hell. It was rare for anyone in the near vicinity to survive that kind of blaze.
Garrett didn’t even want to mention the first thought that came to mind. But his best friend’s son worked there. “Yeah, that’s on the Kaiser side.” After a few seconds of contemplating a plan, he turned back to Asadi. “This is gonna be real bad. We need to get over there now.”
Although Asadi had become a capable rider since his transition from Afghanistan to Texas, he was still nowhere near the skill level of his dad. Trailing right behind Garrett, he was in awe at how deftly he maneuvered Sadie through and around clumps of mesquite brush at nearly a full sprint. Fortunately, there was no guesswork as to where they were headed.
Beyond the billowing black cloud rising high into the ice-blue sky, he could hear the hissing shriek of the gas leak, even over the rumbling four-beat pattern of Scamp’s hooves as they pounded the earth. Asadi broke the line of mesquite trees to find the pumping station in worse condition than he’d imagined. The facility, which was a football-field-sized hodgepodge of silver tubing, industrial machinery, and steel tanks, wasn’t only spewing flames from a ruptured shaft, the fire had spread to the main building that housed the control center.
By the time he was at the back exit on the security fence, Garrett was already off his buckskin and kneeling beside someone on the ground. Looking away from the horribly burned body, Asadi locked eyes with his dad. “Is he still alive?”
“Barely.” Garrett pointed to a dip in the terrain about forty yards back. “Need you to move him out of here. Could be another big explosion coming.”
Asadi nodded but couldn’t really wrap his head around the calamity. It was almost too much to process. It wasn’t the first time he’d been near a fire of this magnitude, but it was the first time he’d been so close to one that was being artificially fed by an unlimited supply of fuel. It reminded him of the footage of the Hindenburg disaster he’d watched in his social studies class.
“Wait, what are you going to do?” Asadi followed his dad’s gaze and saw the familiar red Toyota Tundra that belonged to a close family friend, then looked over at the building, which was engulfed in flames. “You think David’s inside there?”
“I don’t know. But I couldn’t live with myself if I didn’t try to find out.”
Garrett removed the lariat from his saddle, shook out the loop, and slid it over the unconscious man. He tightened it beneath his underarms, yanked out the slack, and handed the rope to Asadi. “Okay, now dally it off on your saddle horn and pull him away from here as gentle as you can.”
By the time Asadi was mounted again and had the rope secured, his dad was already loping onto the facility grounds. Asadi nudged his horse onward but they had made it no more than a few feet when heard the WHUMPH, and then felt the shock wave of another thundering BOOM.