First to Kill (40 page)

But Leonard’s presence wasn’t what he heard right then.

What he heard warmed his soul—the distinctive whooping drone of a helicopter’s blades biting into the afternoon air. Harv was flying Grangeland out of here.
Way to go, old friend
.

“McBride, you copy?”

He made Bridgestone wait.

“McBride, you there?”

A little longer…

“McBride?”

“I’m here. That’s Harv, flying out of here with Grangeland. It’s just you, me, and the mountain lion now.”

“Good.”

“Don’t be so pleased. There’s a catch, Bridgestone. You see, time is not on your side. In two hours, Harv is going to call in the cavalry and you can kiss your millions good-bye. You can’t know how much that breaks my heart.”

“Like you said, McBride, we’ve got a couple hours to settle things.”

Nathan yawned audibly. “I’m a little tired and I’ve lost a lot of blood. Maybe I’ll take a little R and R. One eye on the money, of course.”

“You former Marine or Army?”

“Marine.”

“Sniper?”

“Sniper.”

“How many?”

“Including your brothers, fifty-nine. Guess that makes you number sixty, a nice, round number. Is the money really worth your life? Is flipping burgers or stuffing envelopes beneath you? Who says you can’t start over and earn an honest living?”

“Not my style.”

“Being dead is?”

“I’m not dead, McBride, far from it.”

“Soon enough, Bridgestone, soon enough.” He resumed his trek downstream to the east. After another hundred yards, the undergrowth thinned and Nathan could once again see the southern rim of the canyon. He figured he needed to advance another two or three hundred yards before looking for the right spot to set up.

It took fifteen minutes to cover the last leg. He’d seen the rock spire several times through openings in the underbrush. At one point, he had to divert away from the creek, nearly to the canyon’s wall to keep inside the cover of growth. Up ahead, a wide thumb of greenbelt would take him back to the sandy wash where a large copse of mature oaks and thick brush dominated the creek’s bank for several hundred yards. Perfect. He knew he’d find what he was looking for out there. Crawling on his belly, he inched his way forward through the labyrinth of tree trunks, slowly closing the distance to the creek’s bank. His arm stung like hell and he resisted the urge to look at the wound. No upside to doing that.

Up ahead at the creek’s bank, the canopy of oak branches screened him from the canyon’s rim, but gave him little cover from a lower perspective. He doubted Leonard would descend into the canyon and give up the high ground. Advancing toward the creek, he kept studying the canyon’s southern rim, looking for potential shooting positions. From what he’d seen so far, there were at least half-a-dozen really good candidates up there.

He wondered how long Leonard would last before desperation set in. Would he risk his life and try to recover the cash as time ran out? He might as well commit suicide, because Nathan wasn’t going to let him come within fifty yards of that rock spire without nailing him.

When he closed to within thirty yards of the creek, he spotted what he needed directly ahead, a huge fallen oak whose roots had been undermined by a flash flood. The exposed root ball was perfect. It towered over the sand in a chaotic tangle of worm-like tendrils, clods of earth, and river stones. The main structure of the tree fanned out toward Nathan’s position at a 45-degree angle from the creek. Its trunk looked to be almost four feet in diameter, with large branches jutting out from its central structure.

As Nathan studied the tree, a plan came to him, fully formed.

He crawled to its prone form and shucked off his ghillie suit and backpack. The trees flanking the fallen oak gave him spotty cover at best, so he made slow, deliberate movements to avoid catching Leonard’s eye. He shouldered his weapon and slowly swept the canyon’s southern rim from west to east, ending at the rock spire. Nothing at all. No movement. Was Leonard up there? If so, where would he be? Would he pick the most obvious position, the deepest recess offering the darkest shadow? Probably not. A trained Army Ranger wouldn’t choose a predictable location. He’d pick an unlikely spot, with marginal cover. But he
would
pick a location from which he could relocate after shooting.

Okay
, Nathan thought,
let’s assign names to the four most likely shooting positions up
there
. He started with the closest place to the spire, a long bowl-shaped dip in the rim with a sandy surface flanked by low ledges of fallen limestone. He’d call that spot Ledges. The next place moving west was a shadowed crevice with a thirty-foot long fallen slab of rock in front of it. That would be a good location because the slab of rock looked to be about three feet high, suitable for bench resting a rifle. He called that location Bench. The next good candidate was a missing piece of striated limestone shaped like a coffee cup. He named it Coffee. The final location was a leaning chunk of limestone that formed a triangular-shaped opening with deep shadow. He’d call that spot Shadow.

Nathan didn’t favor Shadow as much as the others because it didn’t allow a large radius of fire. If Leonard chose Shadow, he’d have to sacrifice nearly half the canyon in order to stay concealed. It also didn’t offer an easy way to relocate because it wasn’t at the very top of the canyon’s rim.

He studied each location through the rifle’s scope again. Ledges. Bench. Coffee. Shadow. He favored Bench because along with its length of nearly thirty feet, it offered Leonard the easiest relocation capability. He put Ledges in second place, followed by Coffee. He thought the least likely spot would be Shadow.

Okay, now he had to find a position that could be seen from each of those four locations. He slithered along the fallen tree trunk and every five feet or so peered over the top, checking each shooting position up on the rim. Five minutes later, he found an ideal place near a main arterial branch. From this location, he could see all four of the potential shooting positions, and as a bonus, this spot could also see a large section of the southern rim stretching toward the rock spire in case Leonard wasn’t occupying one of those four spots.

Perfect.

Ignoring his blood-soaked sleeve, he crawled back to his ghillie suit and backpack and removed the spool of fifty-pound fishing line. Dragging the pack and ghillie suit, he made his way back to the arterial branch and began looking for a piece of wood around three feet long and two inches in diameter. He found what he was looking for attached to the fallen oak’s trunk. He removed Harv’s Predator knife from the ankle sheath and began cutting the piece of wood free.

When the branch was detached, he cut a six-inch section off the end of it and notched the middle of it like a log cabin. He did the same to the longer piece near one end. Using the fifty-pound fishing line, he secured the six-inch piece to the longer piece at the notches. When he finished, he ended up with a crude-looking crucifix of sorts.

Using loops of line around the butt of his Sig Sauer pistol, he attached the weapon to a branch extending out from the fallen tree trunk. He tied the handgun to a point on the branch where only the top of the gun could be seen from the other side. When the gun was tight and wouldn’t budge, he cut the line and tied the loose end to the trigger.

He looked over his shoulder for a place to loop the fishing line around a branch or heavy rock. Shit. There was nothing. How could he have overlooked such an important detail? More to the point, what was he going to do now? He cursed himself for being so sloppy and ill-prepared. Damn, his arm hurt. His shirtsleeve was literally dripping wet with blood and so was the upper half of his shirt. Worse, he was beginning to lose sensation in his right thumb. Nerve damage, he feared. Not to mention he couldn’t remember the last time he’d slept.

Running on fumes, he considered kicking back and waiting for the cavalry to arrive. It didn’t seem like such a bad idea right about now, but that might give Leonard a chance to escape. He thought about Grangeland and the cowardly bullet Leonard had fired. He thought about Harv’s wife, Candace, and imagined Leonard shooting her through her kitchen window. Anger flared and he temporarily tapped it, then forced it aside. He studied his options again. Where would he loop the fishing line?
Think, damn it. Think
. He’d spent nearly twenty minutes setting up in this location. He didn’t have time or energy to find a different location. His body was beginning to shut down.

An old hatred began to flood his soul. How could he have been so stupid and shortsighted? He was going to die in this remote Montana canyon and Bridgestone would get away—
with
his money. A feeling of rage bored into his mind like an ice pick. He wanted to scream at the top of his lungs and beat his fist into the tree. He hated the idea of Bridgestone living a life of luxury, having never answered for burning James Ortega alive and killing all those FBI people. He squinted and balled his hands into fists.
Bridgestone, you lowlife piece of shit!

He closed his eyes and concentrated. This meltdown served no useful purpose. He needed to suppress it. Nathan brought his mental image forward—his safety catch. He put himself under imaginary trees and let autumn-colored leaves flutter past his body. They brushed past his skin and tumbled along the ground. He slowed his breathing and relaxed his hands, then leaned his head back against the trunk and sighed. Falling leaves. Falling from where? From above. He opened his eyes and smiled. The solution had been right in front of him all along.

Chapter  29

Leonard hadn’t heard any additional pistol shots for over half an hour. Maybe McBride had finally scared the cat off or he’d bled to death. From his current position on the south rim, he had a clear view of the canyon below, but he hadn’t seen any movement at all, feline or human. Was McBride telling the truth? Were reinforcements arriving within the next hour? Maybe it was bullshit. Maybe McBride was just trying to force his hand, to flush him out. He wasn’t sure. He knew nothing about McBride’s past other than what he’d just learned. One thing was certain: The guy was a damned good shot. At the compound, he’d killed Sammy at a distance of six hundred yards. He didn’t know how far away McBride had been when he’d nailed Ernie, but as with Sammy, it had been a single shot. One shot, one kill. The sniper’s motto. If this guy truly had been a Marine scout sniper, taking him out wasn’t going to easy.

Was the cash really worth it? Hell yes, it was. He’d spent ten long years amassing it, putting up with Ernie’s short temper and endless baggage. Shit, he had three million dollars in cash no more than two hundred yards away, all he had to do was go dig it up. He knew McBride would be watching the spire, but from where? He silently cursed Ernie for bringing McBride up here. Knowing he couldn’t approach the money until McBride was dead, he had few options. Maybe he should try a different approach. What could it hurt at this point? Yeah, it might just work.

He pulled the radio and thumbed the transmit button. “McBride, you copy?”

Nothing, no response.

“McBride?”

“I’m a little busy right now.”

“I’m willing to split the money. Fifty-fifty.”

“Not interested.”

“Come on, you can’t use a million-and-a-half in cash? Tax-free? Last chance. I’ll split it with you. Right down the middle.”

“Not interested.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“No doubt you are.”

“I’m going to enjoy killing you, McBride.”

“Go ahead, give it your best shot. You’ve already missed twice. Why not go for the hat trick?”

“You’re all talk.” Leonard turned off the radio and clipped it to his belt.

Looking for anything out of place, he made a quick scan of his combat uniform. He found nothing dangling, out of place, or shiny. Satisfied, he began a slow scan of the creek’s northern bank through his rifle scope. If McBride were down there, he’d be hidden in all that green undergrowth. The problem was, there was a ton of it and McBride’s ghillie suit made him virtually invisible. If McBride were telling the truth, and he had no reason to assume otherwise, time was indeed running out. If he couldn’t find McBride within the next twenty minutes or so, he’d have to abandon his cash and bug out. In that event, he vowed to kill McBride and his lousy partner. It might not happen two weeks from now, or two years from now, or even ten years from now, but McBride would die for denying him his money.

As Leonard swung his scope across a particularly dense area of brush, he heard two quick pops of a handgun. He focused on the general location where he’d heard the reports. “What’s the matter McBride?” he whispered. “Your furry friend come back?”

A few seconds later, he saw a bush move as though it had been bumped. There. Two more shots from deep within undergrowth followed by the distinctive crackle of the shots echoing down the canyon. Handgun shots, not a rifle. He’d seen the actual muzzle flashes and had an exact location pinpointed.

 “You’re mine, McBride.” He steadied his weapon and saw the top half of a handgun atop a fallen tree. As if looking at a gift from heaven, Leonard watched in abject fascination as his enemy revealed himself. Slowly rising from behind the fallen trunk, the hood of a ghillie materialized like a ghost emerging from a grave. He caught the glint of a pair of field glasses inside the dark recess of the hood.

He added a click of elevation, took in a lungful of air, and blew half of it out. Placing the crosshairs directly between the lenses of the field glasses, Leonard smiled and pulled the trigger.

* * *

The supersonic crack announced the bullet’s arrival. Nathan figured he had a good chance of actually seeing the muzzle flash. He’d been betting on Leonard being in the location he called Bench, but that was clearly wrong. He’d been watching the long slab of limestone nearly continuously. Nothing. No movement at all. No muzzle flash. If Leonard had been on that formation of flat rock, he would’ve seen the muzzle flash. He swung his rifle east toward the rock spire and looked at his second pick. Ledges.