Off the Grid (2 page)

Nate awoke with a start and a shout and sat bolt upright in bed. His eyes were wide and his bare skin was beaded with sweat. Strands of his long blond hair stuck to his neck and shoulders.

Olivia Brannan turned around from where she’d been packing a suitcase that was sitting on an old pine dresser. She’d chosen not to turn on the light so as not to disturb him while he slept, and she’d been using the ambient light from the hallway to see.

“Are you okay, babe?” she asked, arching her eyebrows.

“I had a bad dream,” Nate said, his heart still racing. He realized that both of his fists were clenched around imaginary pistol grips under the covers. He stretched his fingers out and placed his hands on his knees.

“Obviously. Are you better now?”

“Dandy,” he lied.

“Doesn’t sound like it,” she said.

Liv Brannan spoke with a soft Louisiana cadence that always seemed to wrap him in a warm blanket. Sometimes he asked her
questions to which he knew the answers. She was the only woman he’d ever been with whom he encouraged to keep speaking.

“What was it that happened in your dream?” she asked. “You really yelled there. It about scared me half to death.”

“What did I yell?”

Her smile was bright in the dark room. It contrasted with her mocha-colored skin. “Something about
‘Now you’re going to die!’
You know, your usual morning pleasantry.”

Nate rubbed his face with both hands and grunted.

“You haven’t done that for a few months,” she said, concerned. “I thought you were getting past all that.”

“This wasn’t the usual,” Nate said. “It wasn’t about getting ambushed or anything else that happened in the past. This one was completely new and I don’t know where it came from.”

She turned and put her hands on her slim hips and said, “Tell me about it.”

•   •   •

W
HEN HE WAS THROUGH
recounting the dream, she said, “Damn. That’s crazy.”

“I know.”

“What were they shouting at you? The men in the pickups?”

“Allahu Akbar.”

She paused. “‘God is great.’ So this dream of yours took place in the Middle East?”

“Seems like it,” Nate said. They’d discussed his experiences in Afghanistan when he was a special operator and had been sent to a falconry hunting camp in the desert in 1999. She’d been fascinated to hear about the time he’d had a throwaway discussion with a man
in the desert he later learned was Osama bin Laden. Osama was an aficionado of American Western movies and television series. He’d apparently grown up watching them. Nate told her they’d talked about several specific episodes of the Western television show
Gunsmoke
that they’d both seen in their youth.

“What brought all that back, I wonder?” Liv asked.

Nate shook his head. “It looked and felt like Afghanistan, but it
wasn’t
Afghanistan. There aren’t any pronghorn antelope or wild horses running around in Afghanistan that I know of. The only wildlife I saw when I was over there were the bustards we were hunting with the royal falcons.”

Bustards are large terrestrial game birds that thrive in the high desert. There’s no similar species in North America. The elaborate desert camp was set up with Bedouin-style tents, luxury SUVs, electric generators, and in the distance a fleet of custom 737s that had delivered the falconers from Saudi Arabia and other Arab countries. Outside each tent were several tall perches for hooded birds. Although Osama bin Laden wasn’t a falconer himself, he had business with the members of the Saudi royal family who were camped there.

“Maybe you imported a little of Wyoming,” she said. “No one ever claimed dreams had to make perfect sense.”

“This one sure as hell didn’t,” Nate said, swinging his feet out from beneath the covers. The floor was cold.

“And if Joe was there, it couldn’t have been Afghanistan. Joe never goes anywhere, as far as I know.”

It was true. Nate’s friend Joe was a Wyoming game warden. He rarely took time off, and when he did, it was to go fishing, camping, or hunting . . . in Wyoming. Joe had once told Nate he felt no need to visit anywhere else until he knew every square inch of the state. Since
Wyoming was nearly a hundred thousand square miles, the statement was akin to Joe admitting he would never travel anywhere ever.

Nate stood and stretched. He still felt lingering pain from his wounds, especially in the morning. Nate was tall and broad-shouldered and his flesh was marked by two dozen comma-shaped scars on the front of his thighs as well as across his abdomen, chest, and neck. That’s where the doctors had dug out the double-ought buckshot pellets that were slightly larger than the size of a .22 round. The previous spring, he’d been hit in an ambush by two men with shotguns. Nate was unarmed at the time.

While he’d been in critical condition in a hospital in Billings after the assault, Liv had been imprisoned in an underground root cellar on a compound owned by a family of savages. Rest, exercise, stretching, and reclaiming his life as a falconer had led to his recovery. Liv had recovered as well, although her injuries had been psychological. She’d healed, but not to the point where she could sleep yet without a light on.

After they’d reunited, he and Liv had gone off the grid and had stayed in a remote cabin they’d been offered by a friendly rancher in southern Wyoming.

His peregrine and red-tailed hawk—released from his van by the family of white-trash miscreants named Cates—had both somehow located him and returned. It was a small miracle, and the reunification had astounded Liz Brannan. Nate, who had become accustomed to small miracles he couldn’t explain, had simply shrugged.

•   •   •

“T
HERE WERE SO
MANY
strange things in that dream,” he said to Liv. “I’ve never flown a gyrfalcon, for one thing. I don’t know
where I got it. And I was wearing two guns strapped across my chest like some kind of Western outlaw. I’ve never packed two guns.”

“Maybe you should put some clothes on,” she said.

Nate slept naked and he didn’t mind walking around the cabin unclothed. Sometimes he perched on the branch of a cottonwood tree overlooking the Encampment River and simply watched it flow by for hours with his legs dangling. Occasionally, a raft filled with fly fishermen would float by underneath him. They never looked up.

He retrieved a light blanket from the bed and draped it over his shoulders. “I wish I could shake that dream,” he mumbled.

“Have some coffee. I made a pot while you were threatening bad guys.”

“I’d rather have you.”

“Nate, we don’t have the time.” She said it with less finality than he’d expected.

•   •   •

I
N THE SMALL KITCHEN
, Nate poured coffee into a mug and took it to the front window and parted the curtains. It was not quite daylight.

A carpet of light fog haunted the late-fall grass and it hung low in the trees. A mule deer fawn and doe picked their way through the close-packed trees to the river.

It was October—seven months after he’d been attacked and nearly killed—and it was his favorite month of the year. The temperature was cool at night, even cold, but it warmed during the day. It was a
serious
month in the mountains, he thought. At seven
thousand feet above sea level, it was time to get things done before winter roared in. Veins of aspens in the folds of the mountains had turned a brilliant yellow and red. Clouds scudded across the sky as if looking over their shoulders. Summer frivolity was over. The elk bugled at night in their mating ritual, beaver finished their lodges, and the river rose and flowed with true muscle as the upstream trees stopped drinking from it.

•   •   •

B
ECAUSE THE DREAM
had been so remarkably vivid and real, Nate reached up on top of the bookshelf to assure himself that his .500 was up there where he put it every night. It was, and there was no second weapon.

The house had been built of logs not long after World War II for cowboys who worked the farthest sections of the vast ranch. It had fallen into disrepair in the 1970s, and was no longer used as a line shack but as a hunting lodge for guests. Despite an extensive remodeling five years previously that had sealed the gaps in the logs and updated the electric and plumbing, it still seemed populated with the ghosts of postwar cowboys who, in their isolation, had carved local cattle brands and their own names—
Wiley, Buck, Slim
—into the doorframes. Liv had tried to brighten up the place with new curtains and rugs on the floor, but she’d declared defeat. There was no landline telephone inside, no television, and no Internet access. The shortwave radio on the counter was their only connection to the outside world.

Nate wouldn’t have it any other way.

He heard Liv zip her suitcase closed in the bedroom and he turned to see her wheel it out behind her.

It had been a long time since he’d seen her wearing her professional clothes: charcoal-gray slacks, a white blouse, a jacket, her pearls. She looked stunning.

“I’m going to miss you,” he said.

It stopped her and she tilted her head slightly to the side. Her expression was one of bemusement, but tears filled her eyes.

“You aren’t turning into goo, now, are you?” she asked.

He said, “I’ve never spent so much time with anyone on a day-to-day basis in my life. I think I love you more now than ever.”

“You
think
?”

“I know.”

“Stop it,” she said, although her expression belied her words. “I love you, too.”

He wanted to grab her, throw her over his shoulder, and march back into the bedroom. She sensed it and said, “Be good while I’m gone, now. I don’t want to hear any reports of a naked, wild-haired white man running through the trees.”

He grinned. “I can’t promise that. But it is getting cold in the mornings now.”

She let go of her suitcase handle and approached him, reaching up to wrap her hands around his neck. She rose on her toes so they could kiss. It was a warm kiss but it wasn’t going anywhere, because outside they could hear the sound of an approaching ranch pickup.

“Damn him for being on time,” Nate said.

“I know,” she said, stepping back and smoothing her blouse.

•   •   •

A
S
N
ATE WHEELED
the suitcase outside the cabin, he said to her, “I know I don’t need to say it again, but be careful. Never forget
for a minute that they’re trying to find us. Stay off the grid as much as you can, and only communicate with me the way we discussed.”

“You don’t need to tell me that,” she said. “Believe me, I’ve got it.”

“I know you do,” he said, swinging her bag into the bed of the pickup. In the back, there were stray hay stalks, a few empty beer cans, a haunch from a mule deer, and errant coils of baling twine.

“I’d be lying if I said I didn’t look forward to vegging out in front of a television and ordering in pizza,” she said. “Maybe a movie, you know? It’s been a long time, and I’m amazed how you can miss those kinds of things when you don’t have them.”

“I understand.”

The pickup was driven by a ranch hand named Rodrigo Ramirez. He was dark and short and wore the same misshapen straw cowboy hat in both the summer and winter. But the rancher, and Nate, trusted him to do his job and keep quiet about it.

“What time is your flight?” Nate asked as he opened the passenger door for her.

“One-thirty. I’ll be in New Orleans by four-thirty this afternoon.”

Four and a half hours south to Denver, an hour and a half to check in and get through security. That was why Rodrigo was there at six-thirty in the morning.

“Give your mother my best,” Nate said, leaning in to give Liv another kiss good-bye. “I hope she can get through this.”

“You’d like her,” Liv said. “But she won’t be around much longer. She knows that, and she’s prepared for it. I can’t say the same about me. That’s why I need to be there.”

He shut the door and Rodrigo rumbled away. Before the pickup vanished into the copse of aspen on the old two-track road that led
to the highway, Liv turned and smiled sadly at Nate through the back window.

•   •   •

N
ATE WR
APPED THE BLANKET
tightly around himself and waited until he could no longer hear Rodrigo’s truck. Then he stood and listened to the hush.

In the Upper North Platte River Valley of southern Wyoming, every day had its own personality, he’d learned. Often it was subtle, a combination of temperature, low humidity, cloud cover, and the ancient, ritual movement of big-game animals, as well as the location of cattle and ranch horses. Even the trout in the Encampment and North Platte rivers had their own rhythms and routines, and he was just learning them.

More often, though, the days differentiated wildly. It was a land of extremes: extreme winds, heat, and cold. He’d awakened to snow flurries in July and August, and he was learning that it wasn’t unusual for a fall or winter day to reach sixty degrees. Just the day before, for example, it had been so warm that a midmorning hatch of Trico flies on the river had sent the trout into a feeding frenzy that sounded like cupped hands being slapped down hard on the water.

There was something different about this morning, he noticed. What it was, he couldn’t yet discern. It was extremely quiet: no wildlife since the two mulies, no birds flapping from tree to tree, no squirrels chattering, no fish hitting the surface of the river.

He was anxious and a little paranoid. It was the feeling he used to get before a special operation. It was more intuitive than pragmatic.

And it was more than Liv departing to be with her dying mother in Louisiana or the desert dream he’d had.

Nate felt like he was on the edge of something big.

Whether it was the beginning or the end, he didn’t know. But later, when he heard another vehicle coming, he knew he would find out.

After a breakfast of elk steak and eggs, Nate pulled on his jeans and hooded sweatshirt and laced up his boots. He had the cabin to himself, but he had no desire to do anything different with Liv gone than what he normally did. There was no sense of freedom or liberation at all. He wished she’d just come back, although the reason for her to come back quickly—the death of her mother—made him feel selfish and small.

Because the feeling of dread from his dream still lingered, he threaded his arms through his shoulder holster and hung the .500 beneath his left armpit before going out.

He thought that, later in the morning, after he’d fed his birds, he’d climb up the tree that overhung the river and recall the desert dream he’d had. He’d run it back frame by frame, as if watching a surveillance tape. Maybe he could get more meaning from it.

But even as he opened the metal latch of an outdoor cage and reached inside for a pigeon, he wondered what the gyrfalcon meant. The questions mounted up.

Why two guns?

Where was he in the dream? Afghanistan? Some other country?

If he knew who was driving the lead truck, how did he know the man? What was his name?

Why did he think Joe Pickett was there somewhere, either hiding or backing him up?

And most of all, how was he going to defend himself against eighteen screaming jihadis?

•   •   •

T
HE MEWS WHERE THE FALCONS
were kept was tucked into a protected alcove between the cabin and the riverbank. He’d sunk the posts, framed it, and covered it with three-quarter-inch plywood that he’d painted camouflage green. The roof was peaked and covered with steel sheeting that would withstand the snow. Inside were three birds balanced on stoops—a peregrine falcon, a prairie falcon, and a red-tailed hawk. Each had a tasseled leather hood covering its eyes and had turned its head toward him when he entered the mews. It smelled strongly of nitrogen from the white hawk excrement that was practically cemented to the stoops.

Nate pulled an eighteen-inch-long welder’s glove onto his left hand and gripped the shaft of the glove with his teeth to make it snug. He held the pigeon tight to his body with his right elbow.

As quickly and humanely as possible, he gripped the pigeon’s head and swung the bird through the air with a sharp rotation to snap its neck and kill it. The pigeon’s wings flapped crazily in its death throes and he held it out away from him until it was still. The flapping got the raptors’ attention and they all stood stock-still in anticipation.

Then he pulled the pigeon apart. The blood of the bird spilled on the dust of the floor and smelled hot and metallic.

One by one, he took the hood off each falcon and untied its jess, a long leather string, from the stoop. With the jess fitted into the palm of his welding glove so the falcon couldn’t fly, he lifted each bird up and fed it.

The raptors ate with cold efficiency, breaking bones with their beaks and swallowing chunks of the pigeon whole—including the feathers. Nate watched as each bird’s crop swelled to the size of a golf ball on its breast. He often engaged in staring contests with the falcons while they fed. Their sharp black eyes were bottomless, and even after years of concentration he still couldn’t locate their soul. He always thought that if the raptors could talk they might say the same thing about him.

When he was done, he replaced the hoods and retied the jesses to small metal rings on the stoop.

Nate spent several hours a day gathering food for his falcons. He preferred pigeons for their high protein and fat content, followed by ducks, quail, and rabbits. He’d fed each of his birds tiny BB-sized rangle stones hidden in the meat that would lodge in their gullet and help them grind and digest the morning meal.

They’d be ready for more food by evening, which was when he’d take one of them hunting. The other two would eat pigeon or duck in the mews. He rotated the birds each day because he didn’t yet trust flying them all at once. Since the prairie falcon was his newest bird, he wouldn’t hunt her with the others quite yet.

When he hunted, Nate was more the bird dog than the hunter. His job was to release the falcon and try to kick up targets, whether on the ground or in the air.

Nate looked forward to the day when he could launch his little air force together to see what kind of havoc they would create.

•   •   •

H
E WAS TYING
the jesses of the red tail to the stoop when he heard the distant rumbling sound of a motor wash over the mews. It was coming from the direction of the ranch house, which was three and a half miles away to the north.

It was so rare that Nate and Liv saw visitors that he immediately tensed up. He was glad he’d strapped his weapon on before going out to feed the falcons that morning.

Then he heard a distinctive clatter, and his shoulders relaxed.

Ranch pickups always had loose trash, tools, and other objects in the back, just like Rodrigo’s truck that morning. As the vehicles navigated old two-track roads or washboard gravel trails, the objects in the back rattled around. Each truck had a different array of items, so each had its own unique clatter. Because of this characteristic, it was impossible for a rancher or cowboy to sneak up on anything, Nate thought.

He closed the mews door behind him and waited. The pickup rattled closer.

A maroon new-model Ford F-250 Super Cab nosed through the cottonwood trees. Nate recognized the truck as belonging to Dr. Kurt Bucholz, the rancher himself.

•   •   •

N
ATE SAW
IMMEDIATELY
that Dr. Bucholz wasn’t alone in the cab of his pickup—there were two other men with him. That fact alone meant something was hinky. Dr. Bucholz had
never
brought others
to the cabin. Plus, he looked stricken. It was obvious by the set of his mouth that he’d been coerced into delivering the two men.

Bucholz had grown up on the place as a boy before going to medical school and becoming a successful surgeon in Omaha. He’d returned to the ranch after his father died and still worked at the Carbon County hospital part-time. He’d explained to Nate that he still practiced in order to keep the ranch afloat financially. As with most family operations, the owners were land-rich but cash-poor. Even with beef prices up, the cattle and hay operation barely made a profit from year to year. The only way Dr. Bucholz and his wife would make any money from the ranch, he said, was to sell it or to parcel it off to developers. And damned if he was ever going to do that, he insisted.

Dr. Bucholz was wiry and spry, with a sharp long nose and silver-white hair. He was taller than he looked at first because he had a habit of bending over at the waist and looking up through his thick white eyebrows. He was well read and brusque, and he’d never hidden his view that “the country was going to hell in a handbasket.” Which was why he provided aid and comfort to people like Nate who’d been deemed outlaws.

There was a small network of men like Dr. Bucholz across the nation and it was growing by the month. These were men who’d all but given up on society writ large but still contributed and participated in their local communities. They were a step up from doomsday preppers or survivalists, although in a crisis they were more than prepared to take care of themselves, their families, and their friends. To them, the federal government and the coastal elites were practically foreign enemies. Nate felt comfortable with men like Dr. Bucholz, and they in turn offered him shelter and privacy.

Dr. Bucholz occasionally ventured over to the cabin he’d lent to Nate and Olivia to share a few drinks. He always brought good bourbon. He’d once told Nate, “This country was built by righteous rebels. Not by corporatists or elitists, and sure as hell not by politicians. If I can help keep that spirit alive, then count me in!”

•   •   •

I
NSTI
NCTIVELY
, N
ATE TOOK
a step back behind the trunk of an ancient river cottonwood and drew his weapon. The
snick-snick
sound of the hammer cocking back and the cylinder rotating was an audible signal that put all of his senses on hyperalert. Suddenly, he could hear the sound of the river flow increase in volume, and the clatter of Bucholz’s pickup became a cacophony. The bitter, dusty smell of the cottonwood tree stung his nose. And the faces of the two men sitting next to the doctor in the cab zoomed into high focus.

Both passengers were in their late forties or early fifties. The man next to the doctor, in the middle, was clean-cut and serious. He had short-cropped FBI hair, a jutting jaw, and black horn-rimmed glasses.

The other man, next to the passenger door, had a heavy brow, a shaved head, a broad nose, and sharp eyes. His face looked like a fist cocked back, ready to strike.

Nate placed the front sight of his weapon squarely between the bald man’s eyes. He could take him out first and kill the man in the middle with a snap second shot. He’d long ago perfected the technique of rapid-firing the single-action revolver: recocking it in a single smooth motion as he pulled it back to level from its massive recoil. He could fire all five rounds nearly as fast as a semiauto, but with more accuracy. It would take two-point-five seconds.

But what if the man in the middle had a gun jammed into the ribs of the doctor?

Nate hesitated, but didn’t lower his weapon.

Dr. Bucholz slowed to a stop and killed the motor. He was twenty yards away.

Slowly, the man in the middle raised his hands, palms out, so that Nate could see them. He said something to the bald man, and the passenger raised his hands as well.

Without moving the .500, Nate surveyed the brush and trees on both sides of the pickup for movement or sound. Had the men come alone?

He could hear nothing but the ticking of the rancher’s truck as the engine cooled.

The man in the middle said something again and a moment later both the driver’s-side and passenger-side windows whirred down.

“We’re going to come out now,” the man in the middle said. “We’re unarmed, so there’s no need for fireworks. We’re well aware of what you can do with that gun of yours. Dr. Bucholz and his wife have not been harmed in any way, have you, Doctor?”

Nate looked hard at Dr. Bucholz. He seemed concerned but not terrified. If the men in the doctor’s pickup had come to take him out, Nate thought, they wouldn’t have chosen to do it this way. They wouldn’t have driven right up to the cabin and made themselves targets.

“I’m sorry, Nate,” Dr. Bucholz said through his open window. “They didn’t give me much of a choice.”

The man in the middle gestured to the bald man to open his door.

“No need to get excited,” the bald man said to Nate as he stepped out.

“I’m not excitable,” Nate said. He kept his gun on the bald man’s forehead. “Now step around the door and come to the front of the vehicle. Keep your hands where I can see them.”

The bald man nodded and did what he’d been asked. He was tall and solid. He wore a canvas safari-like jacket over a button-down shirt and jeans that looked straight off the rack. The jacket had a lot of bulging pockets, Nate observed. He didn’t like that.

Nate said, “Let your coat slide off to the ground.”

“It’ll get dirty,” the man protested. But after a glance at the man still in the truck, he shimmied his shoulders so the jacket slid down his arms and fell into a heap at his feet.

The second man slid across the bench seat and took his place next to the bald man. He was taller but thinner and he looked fit and professional. He wore a North Face down shell over a crisp plaid shirt. Like the bald man’s, his blue jeans looked pristine. Both men, Nate thought, looked out of place because they had tried too hard not to. And both had a distinctive military bearing about them that Nate recognized from the first moment he’d seen them.

The man in the glasses said, “Nate Romanowski, you’re a hard man to find.”

Nate nodded. “That’s the point.”

“I’m Brian Tyrell and this is Keith Volk. We’ve been looking for you for months.”

“Why?” Although he had a good idea
.

Tyrell said, “I’d like to say that we’re from the government and we’re here to help you, but I have a feeling that wouldn’t go over so well.”

Nate didn’t respond.

“Let me get straight to the point,” Tyrell said. “You’re a wanted
man. You’re an outlaw. I’ve seen the charging documents that will be used to indict you and Olivia Brannan in federal court. As usual, they’ve overcharged you. But even if they can prove half of the crimes in the indictment, they could put you away for the rest of your life.”

Nate nodded.

“So you’re not here to arrest me?”

“I’m here to offer you a proposal and a deal. If you accept it, we can make all the charges go away for both you and Ms. Brannan. You won’t have to live off the grid anymore.”

“I kind of like being off the grid,” Nate said.

“I know you do. That’s why you were so damned hard to find and why you should be very interested in what we plan to offer, if for no other reason than to get Ms. Brannan off the hook. From what I’ve read, her biggest crime comes from aiding and abetting you.”

Tyrell seemed very sure of himself, Nate thought. And he was right about Liv. Nate couldn’t stand to see her go to federal prison.

“If you’ll come with us to Dr. Bucholz’s house, I can explain further,” Tyrell said.

Nate didn’t lower his gun. “Why can’t you just lay it out right here?”

“Look,” Volk said, unsuccessfully trying to hide his impatience. “If we wanted to kill you, you’d already be dead. If we wanted to arrest you, you’d be in custody right now. But we drove out here because Mr. Tyrell said he thought he could reason with you. That wouldn’t have been the way I would have played it, but he’s in charge.”

“In charge of what?” Nate asked.

“That’s part of our discussion,” Tyrell said. Then to Dr. Bucholz: “Would you please drive us all back to your lovely home?”