Cherry Adair - T-flac 06 (14 page)

He picked up the rifle. Nice. He didn't have one of these. He hefted it in his gloved hands. Yeah. Real nice. The spoils of war. He'd keep it as a memento.

He held it up and looked through the scope. Oh, yeah. The shit had hit the fan down there, all right.
What
a dimwit
! Here came Wright to the rescue. He turned the barrel of the rifle to the left and scoped out Derek Wright's face. Man, he'd love to blow
that
all-knowing, all-seeing dick away. He looked at Wright through the high-powered scope. Looked like the son of a bitch was looking right back. Man, his eyes were cold.

Fear coiled in his belly. He resented the fuck out of it even though he couldn't quite shake the sensation.

Wright
couldn't
see him with the naked eye.

But he wasn't being paid to off the rancher. Still, maybe later, he'd toss Derek Wright in as a freebie. If he felt like some real sport—

Time to book.

Not a hunter, Derek knew with utmost certainty. He recognized the sound. Only a high-powered, fully scoped rifle made that kind of echo.

A sniper.

An
inept
sniper.

He frowned. Jesus. He didn't know anyone like that. The people in his line of work, and the tangos they dealt with, were, on the whole, damn accurate. So what he had here was an amateur sniper?

Who'd he pissed off lately in his civilian life?

He bit back a smile. Besides Lily.

He smelled death before he saw it.

Sam Croft. Derek recognized the man immediately, and frowned as he crouched down to feel for a pulse. There wasn't one. Not surprising. This was a bloodbath. His marrow chilled at the sight of such
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horrific violence. Not that he wasn't used to seeing scenes like this. Not in his line of work. What chilled him was how close this violent death had come to
Lily
.

His two worlds were colliding.

For one of the few times in his life, Derek tasted fear. Croft had worked for him. Sean had hired him about a year ago. The guy was quiet, and kept pretty much to himself. He was a decent hand, and there'd never been any problem other than a couple of fistfights on a Friday night after payday. Not uncommon.

What the hell was Croft doing in Alaska? Was he the one shooting at Lily? It didn't make sense. Derek rolled him. A blur of red marked where the man had been stabbed in the kidney. Jesus. Talk about overkill. The killer had sure as hell enjoyed his work.

But whoever had killed
him
sure as hell knew what he was doing.

But why kill Croft? Because he'd taken a shot at Lily? Or because he'd missed?

Derek rose to his feet, taking in the scene. Croft had probably been the sniper. He'd stood right here…

Derek scanned the valley below from the sniper's vantage point. He followed Lily's zigzagging footprints down the hill, imagined her panic and terror. He remembered her white face and frightened eyes.

"Son of a bitch." He turned to look back at the body, and at the footprints behind it to try and reenact what had occurred before he'd arrived at the scene. "Someone crept up behind you, didn't they, asshole?

Someone you knew?" Derek narrowed his eyes at the footprints.

"Yeah. You knew each other. He didn't scare you. You never turned around, did you? But he stood right there behind you. Talked for a few minutes, perhaps. Then he grabbed you from behind and slit your throat." He looked at the spatter pattern. "Over and over and over again."

"To stop you from shooting Lily?" Derek asked, still sorting out the footsteps imprinted in the bloody snow, trying to figure out who did what. Trying not to think of Lily, but instead to think like the operative he was. Cold. Methodical. Detached. "Or as a warning to me?"

He crouched again and searched the dead man's pockets. Nothing. The sniper's rifle was glaringly absent. Nearby, a pair of red-drenched leather gloves. Nothing else was on the hill but the body and the churned-up boot prints of the two men. No shell casings, no indication of who the other person was or what he'd wanted.

"Let's you and I have a chat, pal," Derek said grimly, turning to track the widely spaced steps leading away from the scene of the crime and deep into the forest. The second guy had walked in, run out.

Judging by the spacing and depth of his footprints, the man was probably medium height, about 150 to 160 pounds. He tried to place anyone of that general description hanging around Croft back at the ranch.

No one came to mind. The hand had been a loner, as were many of the men that worked for the Flying F.

Dawn turned the snow a milky pink and lightened the chiffon gray of the sky to a pale, soft smoky blue.

The air was cold enough to slice a man's lungs, but it smelled of pine and was as fresh and intoxicating as the scent of newly mowed grass on a summer morning. Derek was used to snow. Enjoyed it in fact. He'd spent a brutal couple of weeks last year in the Ural Mountains to the east of Belarus tracking a high-profile terrorist, and had enjoyed the hell out of pitting his strength and intellect against a man who'd

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been born in that unforgiving landscape.

He'd not only captured the tango, he'd hauled his ass all the way back to Minsk for extradition. No, the cold didn't bother him. Truth be told, he found ranching in Montana's arctic winters to be a damn sight more challenging than anything he'd faced in the field.

The question here was, why had Croft been shooting at Lily? And was Lily the one he'd been aiming for? If so, he was, thank God, a lousy shot. Still, she could've been seriously hurt. Intentional or not.

Croft wasn't a professional hit man. Not even close. He'd missed too many times. Still, Derek's blood ran cold. Dressed as Lily had been, and from this distance, it was possible she'd been mistaken for a man.

For
him
?

Possible, but not probable if the guy had been using a scope, which at that range he would've done. He would've seen exactly who his target was. Croft worked for him. He knew who Lily was. He'd've recognized her almost immediately.

Besides, the idea that anyone would want to hurt Lily was illogical. She was a country vet. She didn't
have
any enemies. Everyone loved her. She was gentle, and God only knew, kind to a fault. She'd rather bite her tongue than hurt anyone. He was, apparently, the exception, Derek thought wryly.

Croft couldn't possibly have been shooting at her. He let the cold ball of fear dissipate from his stomach.

No. For some reason Croft had been trying to smoke
him
out.

Lily'd been the bait.

But who had killed Croft? And more important—
why
?

Seven

Derek followed a faint trail up the mountainside. He tugged his fur hat more securely over his ears as he tracked the second man's footprints straight up and over the rise. It was a steep climb to the ridge. The guy had slipped here, indicated by the running steps and churned-up snow. Fleeing the scene of the crime. "Yeah. You were in a hurry," Derek said harshly. "Weren't you, you bastard? Did you get off on the stink of blood? Did you watch his eyes as he died?"

He tracked for twenty minutes before reaching the summit of the hill and coming across the treads, narrow, sledlike ruts made by a high-powered Polaris XL snowmobile.

He stopped. No point continuing. Narrow-eyed, he visually followed the tracks of the vehicle until they disappeared over the next rise. Somewhere down there, another vehicle must be hidden by the trees.

He'd send a team in to pick it and Croft's body up later.

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His sat phone vibrated against his chest just as he turned to go back down. He paused to take the small phone from his breast pocket. "Talk to me."

"Elevated to code three," Darius, his control, said briskly, sounding as though he were standing right there on the breeze-swept hillside beside Derek. More than an alert, T-FLAC was now taking the Alaskan terror threat to the next level.

"Four
w
's?" Derek asked Darius as he continued walking, indicating
who, where, what, when
. He slung the strap of his rifle over his shoulder, but kept the Baer firmly in his left hand. He hastened his steps. For all he knew the killer would double back and show up at the camp in the valley below. And while he knew Lily and the men with her all carried weapons, he would be a hell of a lot more confident if he was there with her himself.

"The who is Oslukivati," Darius told him. "All we have right now is that they've been sighted in your neck of the woods."

Oslukivati was a Serb group known for their expertise with dirty bombs. They particularly enjoyed blowing things up. They'd blown up the Zimbabwe airport at high noon on a Friday before a holiday weekend, killing several thousand people. They were responsible for the bombing of the South African consulate in London and the total destruction of a train station in Prague. Usually they wanted their people freed from some prison somewhere. But in most cases, it would take years to track down and round up the prisoners, and they were some of the most dangerous tangos on the planet. Their freedom was nonnegotiable.

"What are their demands?" Not that Derek gave a fuck, but he was mildly interested to know.

"Haven't made any. Yet."

Unnecessary, but a given: Whatever they wanted, they wouldn't get.

It would now be a race to see who won before something went up with a big, spectacular bang and hundreds of people died.

"Alaska Pipeline?" Derek asked, interest sparking. He thrived on the chase. God only knew, he was already on the most important one of his life. A terrorist warning would be the whipped cream on his sundae. There was an outside chance that the two were interconnected. But he doubted it. Very few people knew he worked for the anti-terrorist group.

"No," Darius said in his ear. "Not even in the neighborhood of the pipeline. Word is something bigger, with more of an 'Oh my God' factor. Your old pal Milos Pekovic is up to his ass in this one. Personally."

Pekovic. Just the bastard's name made the scar over Derek's kidney ache. The terrorist's group was large and far-reaching. Derek's most recent run-in with Pekovic had been seven months and almost one lost kidney ago in San Cristobal. The man liked to be hands-on, and he enjoyed getting his hands dirty. It was a wonder he ever got the blood off. The terrorist was brutal, soulless and unstoppable. Known as the Butcher because that had been his profession before he started amassing large groups of rabid followers to his cause. Milos Pekovic and Derek had been dancing around each other for nine years.

And they both had the scars to prove it.

Derek didn't flatter himself that the leader of one of the top-five terrorist groups was up here in Alaska just for him. But he bet if Pekovic knew he
was
here, it would add that extra fillip to whatever the hell the
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