Page 42 of Savage Ranger Daddy

The clearing quiets. The engines idle. The mountains stand where they've always stood, unchanged by anything that happened in this small fold of rock and gravel. But the women are out. All of them. Standing in the daylight, breathing cold air, alive because a bobby pin and two drainage grates and one very loud journalist bought them the thirty seconds they needed.

That's the story. Not the marshals arriving in the nick of time. Not the hero kicking down the door. Seven women and a journalist who refused to be cargo, who armed themselves with cast iron and anger, and who were already fighting their way out when the cavalry showed up.

That's the story I'm going to write.

21

Brock

The GPS signal dies at the south fork junction.

One second the blue dot is moving steadily south on the county road, tracking clean. The next second the screen shows "Signal Lost" and the dot freezes at coordinates that put the sedan somewhere in the lower passes where the cell coverage goes to zero. I stare at the phone mounted on the dash and feel the cold certainty settle in my chest like a stone. They're in the dead zone. The mountains just swallowed my only link to Hazel.

"I've lost her signal," I say into the radio. "Last known position is the south fork junction, heading further south. No further updates."

Mason's voice comes back from the second vehicle, two hundred yards behind me. "Copy. Silas, your units at the junction, do you have a visual on the sedan?"

"Negative." Silas sounds grim. "We staged at the junction fifteen minutes ago. No vehicle matching the description has passedthis point. Either they turned off before they reached us or there's an access road we don't have on the map."

An access road we don't have. Dale's operated in these mountains for four years. He knows roads that don't appear on any survey, logging tracks that were cut decades ago and left to grow over. If he turned off the county road before the junction, he could be anywhere in a twenty-square-mile area of mountain terrain with no cell coverage and no GPS.

I pull over at the junction where Silas's two units are staged. Three vehicles now clustered at the fork: my truck, Mason's SUV, and Silas's deputies. I step out into the cold and spread the topographic map across the hood.

"The logging camp is out," I say. "It's crawling with ATF and our evidence team. Dale knows that. He's not going back there." I trace the south fork road with my finger, looking for turnoffs. "Somewhere between the last GPS fix and this junction, there's a road we're missing. Something that leads to a secondary location."

"The old mill road," one of Silas's deputies says. He's older, gray at the temples, the kind of local who's worked these mountains long enough to remember things the maps forgot. "There used to be a sawmill operation up the east draw, maybe six miles back from here. The county decommissioned the road twenty years ago but the gravel's still under the growth. If you know where to turn, you can get a vehicle up there."

The old mill road. Alice mentioned it in the Marshals office hallway, when she was feeding Hazel her cover story. A detail meant to make the trap convincing. But details fed to targets often contain fragments of truth because lies work best when they're built on real geography.

"Show me," I say.

The deputy points to a spot on the map six miles back, where a contour line bends sharply east into a narrow draw. No road marked. But the terrain shows a clearing, and the draw leads to a plateau at about five thousand feet. Room for vehicles. Room for containers.

Mason leans over the map. "It's speculative. We could be driving into empty woods."

"We've got nothing else. The GPS is dead. They didn't pass the junction. This is the only turnoff that makes tactical sense for someone who needs a secondary staging point with vehicle access and concealment." I fold the map. "I'm going. You hold here with Silas's units as the blocking position. If I find them, I'll call it in and you move up. If I don't find them in thirty minutes, we regroup and expand the search grid."

"You're not going alone," Mason says.

"Harlan's team from Haven 7 is coming in on the north fire road. I'll coordinate with them to approach from two sides. If the clearing is at the top of the draw, Harlan can come in from above and I'll come in from below."

Mason doesn't like it. I can see it in his face. But the clock is running. Every minute we spend at this junction is a minute Dale has to move Hazel into a vehicle that takes her somewhere we'll never find.

"Thirty minutes," Mason says. "Then I'm coming up regardless."

I radio Harlan and brief him while I drive. He's ten minutes out on the north fire road with two Haven 7 operators. Good men. Steady. The kind who don't make noise when noise gets peoplekilled. We agree on a convergence: I'll approach the draw from the south, he'll come in from the north ridge. Radio silence until one of us has a visual.

I find the turnoff where the deputy said it would be. It doesn't look like a road. It looks like a gap in the tree line where the brush is thinner than it should be. But when I pull in and let the truck idle forward, gravel crunches under the tires. The old mill road, buried under twenty years of growth, is still there.

I kill the headlights and drive on parking lights, the truck grinding up the narrow track at walking speed. The draw closes in on both sides, steep rock walls funneling toward the plateau above. If anyone is watching this approach, they'll see me coming. But the alternative is leaving Hazel in a container while I wait for a better plan, and I don't have that kind of time.

The road climbs for half a mile, then levels out. Through the trees ahead I see it: a clearing. Two shipping containers on a gravel pad. A flatbed truck backed up to one of them. Three men loading crates. And beside a dark sedan that I recognize from the parking lot footage, Dale Weathers.

I stop the truck two hundred yards short and step out. Weapon drawn. I key the radio once, two clicks, which tells Harlan I have a visual. He responds with two clicks: he's in position on the north ridge.

I study the clearing through the binoculars. Three men loading the flatbed from the first container. Dale near the sedan, phone in hand. Alice leaning against the passenger door. A fourth man I haven't seen before standing near the second container with a rifle slung across his chest. Armed security. That's new. The logging camp didn't have armed guards.

Dale is adapting. The raid this morning taught him that his operation has been penetrated, and he's running the evacuation with muscle he didn't need before.