Burning Bright (Peter Ash #2)(105)

Things could change fast in the mountains.

His path had thinned down to nearly nothing when it leaped upward again in a long series of switchbacks. At the top he stopped for a drink of water and could finally see the figure clearly below him, head down, walking steadily without pause or hesitation.

Then he knew. Shit, the dude was no ghost. And he was keeping up.

He could have been some local, out for a hike. Mailman on his day off. It was possible.

Not likely. But possible.

Lewis took out his new Nikons and glassed the man. It was hard to be certain through the screen of trees, but he thought he saw a black barrel sticking out of the top of the man’s pack.

Lewis didn’t like that.

He was locked and loaded, the rifle assembled and strapped to his ruck but easy enough to get at. He could fire from here and likely kill the man, remove that particular problem.

Or maybe kill some dumbass civilian out hunting squirrels for his stewpot.

Maybe also miss his shot, which was possible even for Lewis, firing downhill with an unfamiliar weapon, and start some run-and-gun bullshit. Have to duck and dive and generally fuck up his timetable.

Either way, not worth it. Not yet.

So he left the trail, heading straight upslope through the thinning timber, trying to gain some distance with the shortcut and make the upper snowfields before dark.

When he came to the wide white bowl, he could hear the sound of meltwater running somewhere under the snow. Bare black boulders poked up here and there where they’d fallen from the high granite peaks above. The light was fading but he could still see a line of bootprints walking away from him in the knee-deep snow.

More than one set of prints, he figured those were Peter’s friends. There was no way the ghost dude had gotten ahead of him. But the man could still be behind him, and Lewis had no desire to make his own trail so visible, and even less desire to skylight himself against the frozen white moonscape still hanging on at this altitude.

He ducked back into the cover of the stunted little evergreens and began to skirt the perimeter of the big windblown bowl as he watched behind him for the dude and in front of him for Peter’s friends. He could get killed as easily by a friendly sentry as by the ghost dude, and that would be a goddamn shame for himself in addition to leaving him unable to do the job he’d promised Peter.

Then there was Dinah, and the boys. He tried to put them out of his mind as he made his slow and silent way through the trees and the cold and the wind.

It was fully dark and he’d covered half the perimeter before he saw them, a clump of too-deep shadows in the lee of an overhanging boulder. He sat and pulled out the Nikons and scanned for the sentry, finally finding him nestled into a rock pile in the center of the bowl, probably cold as hell but commanding a view of the whole snowfield except for the overhanging boulder at his back, blocking his sight line. You’d have to run fifty yards in deep snow without cover to reach him. You’d never make it.

These jarheads were pretty good, he had to admit.

Still, he had a smile on his face as he walked the blocked sight line in toward their camp, hands empty and clearly visible, whistling softly through his teeth. From the halls of Montezuma . . .

There were five of them, dressed in faded woodland cold-weather tacticals and watch caps. “Shit,” said the man in the center of the group, rising to meet Lewis. His voice was quiet and his face was brown and thoughtful. He looked as wide as he was tall. “I’m guessing you’re Lewis.”

“And you’re Manny.”

They had no fire and no tent. With the sun down, the temperature was below freezing. The other four men stood and shook hands and introduced themselves.

“How did you make it in here?” asked a man with Baltic cheekbones, a nose that had been broken several times, and sad eyes. His name was Laukkanen, and he didn’t seem upset, just curious. Lewis was pretty sure his perimeter trick wouldn’t work twice.

“I had the advantage,” said Lewis. “I knew you were up here, and I knew you’d have a sentry. I just stayed inside the trees until I found you. I found your sentry last.”

“You serve with Ashes?” This was Sanders, his skin so dark he looked blue against the snow. He was the blackest man Lewis had ever seen, and he’d seen more than his share.

“No,” said Lewis, “we met after. Why do you call him Ashes?”

Sanders smiled, his teeth bright in his dark face. “He call down the fire, yo. Fucking smite those evildoers.”

Hightower, the biggest of the group, with redbone skin and an Aztec nose, just shook his head. Lewis looked at Manny, whose face twitched in something that might have been a smile. “Sanders got himself some custom homemade religion over there,” he said. “Hand of God and all that. We were all kind of hoping it’d wear off, but it seems to be sticking pretty good.” He shrugged his broad sloping shoulders. “Whatever it takes to make it through, you know?”

“Listen,” said Lewis, “you got any stragglers bringing up the rear? There was somebody on the trail behind me carrying some kind of long gun.”

That got their attention. “No,” said Manny, “we’re it.” He looked at the fourth man. “Blanco, you want to take a look?”

Blanco was very pale with gray eyes and a white-blond beard, the smallest of the group but lean as a shadow, even in his cold-weather tacticals. He stood and silently retraced Lewis’s steps out to the perimeter, then vanished in the scrub. “Blanco could sneak up on a coyote,” said Laukkanen. “And he can run basically forever. Freak of nature.”