Off the Grid (14 page)

It stopped two and a half hours later.

Nate had worked his way silently toward the old ranch compound, keeping to the sandy, dry streambed and grateful for the high rocky banks that kept him out of view. Every twenty minutes or so, he’d crawl up to the lip of the eastern edge and carefully peer over to mark his progress. Because the dry stream wound through the valley floor in a loopy serpentine pattern, it sometimes seemed like he’d trudge for half a mile but not get any closer, like the buildings were a figment of his imagination and would forever be just out of reach.

When he picked his way through an old ranch graveyard of abandoned rusty pickups, discarded manual washing machines, and tangles of old barbed wire, he knew he was getting close.

Although it was very early, he assumed he’d hear something as he got closer: the ATVs, vehicles moving around, chatter. But it was just as silent when he got within two hundred yards as it had been
when he set out. It was as if the large collection of falling-down buildings had absorbed whoever had gotten close to it.

•   •   •

T
HE DRY STREAM DID
, in fact, halve the collection of structures. He stopped short of walking through the heart of the ranch compound and instead shinnied up the side of the cut until he could push his binoculars through thorny brush. That way, he could see the compound clearly without showing himself.

There wasn’t much to see. The three large sheds were gray and weather-beaten with sagging rooflines and whole panels of corrugated roofing gone. All of the windows he could see had been broken out, leaving toothy shards of discolored glass in the frames.

The two-story residence still stood but barely, and it was obvious a fire had long ago gutted it.

The only sign of activity he could see were tire tracks around the sheds and a packed set of them near the closed garage-like doors on the ends of the sheds. Someone had driven around, into, and possibly through the buildings recently. But there were no working vehicles in or around the ranch yard.

That was one thing about high desert, Nate thought. Any movement, whether by machine or animal, left a record on the surface for a long time. Only wind or rain—the first common and the latter rare—could eventually remove it.

•   •   •

W
HEN HE MOVED
farther down the creek bed and looked again at a different angle, he saw something that startled him: multihued
dome tents pitched haphazardly between sheds two and three. He counted six. It was early in the morning yet and no campers had emerged from them.

It didn’t make sense. Although he’d been trained in special operations always to expect the unexpected . . .
Campers?
he thought.

If nothing else, he questioned their judgment. Wyoming was a state filled with parks, forests, vistas, and wilderness. With all of that available, these people had chosen to camp
here
?

He recalled the sound of the ATVs the night before, and thought that perhaps a swarm of them had ended up in the shelter of the old ranch.

•   •   •

N
ATE SLID DOWN T
HE SLOPE
to regroup. He needed to puzzle out this new development.

That’s when he noticed the small oblong camo-colored plastic item sitting on a rock shelf on the other side of the cut. It was partially hidden behind stalks of brittle yellow cheatgrass, but there was no mistaking the perfectly black round eye and the short antenna on the side of it.

A wireless motion-detection security device. He recognized the make and model. It was a Spypoint, powered by a single nine-volt battery, and it was capable of sending the detection of a security breach up to a thousand feet—well within the distance between Nate and the ranch compound.

He cursed, and reached for the device to turn it off, when he heard the squeak of rusty hinges and heavy footfalls from the direction of the third shed, the one closest to him.

Then nothing. No voices, no more movements.

He drew his revolver. After stashing the satellite phone in a gopher hole and plugging the opening with a rock, he turned and took a step to climb back up the bank where he’d glassed the compound. The .500 was held loosely at his side. He could sense men out in the open, but he couldn’t yet see or hear them. By keeping his weapon out of sight, he’d give them no reason to fire at him.

As if they needed a reason, he thought. He had, after all, trespassed on the old ranch property.

With each step up the bank of the cut, he got closer to being exposed. In his field of vision, he saw the roofs of the sheds followed by the broken windows of the second level. Then, as he cleared the lip of the embankment, three men. They’d obviously come out of the second shed, likely alerted by the remote motion detector. The two on the wings stood among the dome tents. They were Middle Eastern–looking and each carried a modified AK-47 with a banana magazine.

The man in the middle was Ghazi Saeed.

Nate thought:
He goes first
.

It took a moment for Saeed to see him over the cutbank, but when he did there was a twitch of recognition in his eyes. The two men on the wings had yet to realize he was there.

Nate said nothing, and Saeed just stared.

Showdown.

After Saeed went down, Nate thought, he’d take out the one on the left before swinging on the man on the right, because that first man had the muzzle of his rifle slightly higher and therefore could react more quickly. Nate was already visualizing the movements it would take.

He had a fleeting advantage on them, he figured, because they
were in the open and he could drop back down into the cut, and out of sight, in a heartbeat.

Without turning his head, Saeed hissed something Nate couldn’t make out. That got the attention of the two men by the tents, and they turned to him. When they did, Saeed simply nodded silently toward Nate until both men saw him. The man on the right started to raise his weapon and Nate started to raise his when Saeed hissed again. This time the hiss contained several words in Arabic that Nate didn’t understand.

But the men on the wings did, and instead of pointing their weapons at Nate, each picked out a dome tent and aimed at it. They did it in a frighteningly casual way, Nate thought, like they’d done this kind of thing before, like it meant nothing to them. He had no doubt they’d carry through with the threat.

Nate was puzzled for a second until Saeed nodded toward him, then gestured to the right and left.

It was an unusual play, Nate thought, but he instantly understood Saeed’s move. Saeed was willing to bet that Nate would be less likely to gun them down if there was more of a chance that one of the men would fire into a tent than if the three of them aimed simultaneously at Nate. It was the play of a man who knew his adversary valued innocent human life more than he did.

So who was in the tents?

As if to answer Nate’s thought, a zipper on a yellow North Face dome slowly opened and the groggy face of a slight and wiry college-age girl poked out. Her nose and ears were pierced and her head was shaved to the scalp. Her skin was so pale it was almost translucent. Nate got the impression of a girl who wanted to look tough but was uncomfortable and wholly out of place. She rubbed her eyes and
stared out at the dawn with a grimace. She seemed to have no idea what was happening around her: that behind her tent a few feet away a man with an AK-47 was poised to chew her up in a hail of 7.62x39mm rounds that would perforate the nylon tent walls as if they didn’t exist. The camper wasn’t alone, either, because she turned her head and said a few words to whoever else was in the tent.

She never looked Nate’s way, or over her shoulder where Saeed stood.

The camper, after apparently seeing it was still too early to rise from her sleeping bag, withdrew back into her tent. A moment later, a thin arm fully inked with tattoos reached up and the front tent flap was clumsily zipped closed.

Nate noted that the man on the right was silently mouthing a mantra of some kind.

Was it
Allahu Akbar
?

Nate looked at Saeed, who nodded at him and mouthed the word
You
.

Nate nodded back.
Me
.

The message was clear.
Come out unarmed
, Saeed communicated with a grim smile,
or the people in the tents will die
.

The holstered .500 thumped to the ground on the edge of the wash and Nate followed with his hands up, palms out. The man on the right stepped forward to retrieve the gun. He walked sideways toward it with his AK-47 across his body pointed behind him so he was still capable of firing into the tents if Nate made a threatening move.

When the man had picked up the holster, Saeed locked eyes with Nate and chinned over his shoulder to the left. He wanted Nate to follow them out of the tents and toward the front of the closest shed. Nate nodded and followed.

Implicit in everything Saeed did, Nate thought, was his wish to get all of them out of the gathering of the tents to someplace else. For whatever reason, Saeed didn’t want the sleepers inside the tents to know what had just transpired around them. Nate saw no advantage in breaking the silence, either, and possibly endangering the lives of the people inside the tents.

Not until he knew more.

•   •   •

S
AEED LED THE WAY
and Nate followed. The two gunmen held back a few feet and flanked him on either side. He could feel rather than see the muzzles aimed at his back.

Once they cleared the corner of the first shed, Saeed turned and held out his hand and motioned to Nate to stop. Then he twirled his finger, indicating that Nate should turn around so his back was to him.

Nate waited a beat, then hissed, “That’s not a good idea.”

Saeed said something with his eyes to the men behind Nate, and Nate braced himself for a blow. Would they club him in the head with a rifle, or kick out his feet?

Instead, he heard a footfall and felt a twin bite of cold metal on the side of his neck before eleven million volts from a Stun Master stun gun blasted through his body and made his eyes seem to explode out of their sockets. Nate’s legs went limp and he involuntarily dropped to his knees while his ears roared from inside.

Although he’d been hit with both a stun gun and a Taser in special ops training, he’d known at the time it was coming. This was devastating because it was so unexpected. His muscles convulsed as if inhabited by electric snakes and he cramped up at the same time. He had no control of his arms and legs or neck and his head lolled forward as if his neck were the stalk of a dying sunflower.

He caught a glimpse of Saeed bending down with a long plastic zip tie in his hands. Although groggy, Nate had the presence of mind to clench his fists behind him and resist just enough so that the first knuckles of his thumbs butted together rather than letting them force his wrists on top of each other. Then he heard the
zzzzzzzzzzz
sound of the mechanism of the zip tie sing as it was pulled tight.

It took a full minute for him to recover enough to raise his head. When he did, Saeed was looking him over to see if he’d voided himself. After noting that he hadn’t, Saeed said, “Listen the next time.”

Nate shook his head to try and clear it. A smoky metallic taste filled his mouth from where the fillings in his teeth had arced with electricity.

His voice was a croak. “I’ll remember that.”

The two men on his flanks reached under his arms and helped him to his feet. His legs trembled but he managed to stay upright.

“Thank you for not screaming,” Saeed said.

•   •   •

T
HEY WA
LKED PAST
the closed barn doors of the first shed. As they passed it, Nate took a quick peek through a broken window and saw, just a few feet inside, a pie-plate-sized headlight covered with dead insects and a glimpse of a chrome grille.

“Keep your eyes straight ahead,” Saeed hissed at him from over his shoulder.

But he’d seen it: the toothy, grinning front of a Peterbilt semi-tractor. He wondered if the rest of the trailer was attached behind it. The shed was certainly long enough for a full-sized eighteen-wheeler. And it was wide enough for two.

“We go to the third building,” Saeed said aloud. They were far enough away from the tents that he spoke in a normal, though hushed, tone.

As they walked past the second shed, Nate again stole a look
through the window. It was too dark to see well inside, but he thought he could make out the shapes of haphazardly parked vehicles: pickups, a tractor, ATVs. He also caught a whiff of spilled gasoline.

“I want to talk to Ibby,” Nate said as they approached the side door of the third shed.

“You will.”

“I want to know what’s going on around here. Aren’t you guys in the wrong desert in the wrong country?”

No response from Saeed.

“Who is sleeping in those tents?”

Saeed turned. “Why do you even care? What does it have to do with flying your falcons out in the desert?”

“It has nothing to do with that,” Nate said. “It has to do with three men who came to my camp to try and kill me in my sleep. I thought maybe you knew something about that.”

There was no reaction on Saeed’s face. He said, “Who were they?”

“No IDs.”

“Where are they now?”

“Two of them didn’t come back,” Nate said. “The third came here.”

Saeed arched his eyebrows and shook his head. “It’s not possible. No one here would do something like that.”

“Then give me my gun back and let me go on my way.”

Nate thought it telling that Saeed didn’t ask about why the two men hadn’t come back, or what had happened out in the desert. Or why Nate thought the third man had returned to the old ranch.

“We talk first,” Saeed said.

He said something in Arabic to the two men with the AK-47s. Nate didn’t understand the words but it was obvious Saeed had told them both to stay and to keep an eye on him.

Unlike the other two sheds, the one they entered had been partitioned off inside. From the outside door they entered a room with low ceilings and cheap wood-paneled walls that looked like it had once been an office of some kind. There was a dusty metal desk, three hard-backed chairs, and an ancient cork bulletin board still showing the silhouettes of papers and business cards that had once been pinned to its surface. There was no overhead lamp and the only light was natural and filtered through the discolored and sandblasted window. Mouse droppings covered the floor like errant punctuation.

“Have a sit,” Saeed told Nate.

Instead, Nate walked across the ancient, curling linoleum and leaned back against the desk.

The two men with the AKs slid chairs from the middle of the room to the two corners opposite Nate and sat down, but kept their rifles ready.
They’ve had training,
Nate thought. By choosing the corners, they’d eliminated any chance of him taking them out at the same time. If he went after one, the other would cut him in two.

“Do either of you speak English?” he asked.

It was obvious they understood his question by the way they looked up. But neither spoke.

The man on the left had a close-cropped beard, a long nose that had been broken a few times, and thin, almost translucent lips. His fingers were long and spidery. He wore a loose-fitting oversized shirt and cargo pants made out of rough green canvas. A spare magazine for the AK-47 jutted out from a side pocket on his right thigh.

The man on the right, the one who had been silently chanting
while he aimed at the tent, was shorter and stockier, with a black bandana covering the top of his head. His beard was wispy and thin and came to a point under his chin. He wore a faded Batman T-shirt under a light desert camo jacket. Nate saw the strap of his portable Stun Master protruding from the breast pocket of his military surplus jacket. He noted it for later.

Both men were hard-looking and inscrutable, and both had been obviously instructed not to speak. They looked like jihadis Nate had encountered in the Middle East: devout, earnest, humorless fanatics who were also deadly. They were the kind of men, he guessed, who grinned only when someone’s face was beneath their boot, begging for mercy.

Saeed studied Nate for a few moments with his eyes narrowed. Then he asked, “Where are your hawks?”

“Falcons,” Nate corrected. “All falcons are hawks, but not all hawks are falcons.”

“These are the kinds of things I don’t understand.”

“You don’t have to.”

“Did you let them go?”

Not
Did they get killed when someone attacked your camp?

“They’re in my Jeep about three and a half miles away,” Nate said, nodding toward the west. “Let me go and I’ll bring them here. I haven’t fed them or hunted them yet today. Since you spend time with Ibby, you know that with falconers our birds come first.”

Saeed said, “I’ll go get him.”

“Ibby?”

“Of course Ibby.”

“And you’ll leave me here with your goons Ahmed and Ahmed? Or is it Muhammad and Muhammad?”

At the mention of the last name, the stocky man who’d used the stun gun on Nate started to get up angrily and come after him until Saeed said something in Arabic that stopped him.

To Nate, Saeed said, “Don’t provoke them. And don’t forget the reason you’re here is that you’re a trespasser. You entered our camp armed and without an invitation.”

“So call the county sheriff,” Nate said.

Saeed almost smiled.