C. Box - Force of Nature

And when he emerged from the Wind River howling and trembling and thirty yards from where he’d left his duffel bag of clean dry clothes upstream, he fought back the depraved and exhilarating sense of yarak that had engorged him until he’d have to summon it back again.

She was still staring at the snow-covered windshield when he climbed back into the Jeep. He’d found an old pair of jeans in his duffel as well as a dark green wool tactical sweater from the old days to wear. He closed the car door and sat in silence for a few minutes, letting the heat from the vents warm his body until his muscles stopped quivering.

Then he turned to her and swiftly reached out and with his right hand grasped her ear through her dark hair. At his touch, her hands fluttered briefly in her lap like wounded birds. He drew out his. 500 with his left hand and pressed the gaping muzzle against the white flesh of her neck just below her jawbone.

“This is how it starts,” he said.

She still wouldn’t look at him, but her eyes welled with tears. She said, “Do whatever you have to do, Nate. Torture me like you tortured that man back there. I’m sure once you get started you’ll get me to say whatever you want me to say, but it won’t be true.”

“How did you hook up with Cohen?” he asked.

“You should believe me when I tell you he hooked up with me,” she said. “The man was relentless. Why would I throw my life away to go off in the middle of the mountains in Idaho and live like a hillbilly with a bunch of other men? There’s only one reason people do such things. It’s called love, Nate. Maybe you’ve read about it.”

He gripped her ear with more pressure and said, “Haley, the man back there told me there was a young and beautiful operator on the team. He didn’t know her name except by code. I’m thinking she was the one that got to Merle a month ago. I didn’t ask him to identify you in person, but now I want you to tell me something. Did you ever leave Camp Oscar?”

“I can’t believe you’re asking me this,” she said. He could tell she was trying hard not to let her lips tremble and betray her emotions. “If he said it was me, he was lying. He couldn’t even see me in the Jeep. The headlights were on him, and we never made eye contact.”

“Did you ever leave Camp Oscar?”

After a beat, she said, “Yes. And yes, it was two weeks ago.”

He increased the pressure but didn’t twist.

“My father is dying back in North Carolina,” she said. “I flew home to see him. Then I flew back.”

Nate said softly, “That would have been the third week of September?”

“Yes,” she said. “Right now I can’t think straight. Cohen took me to the airport on a Monday night…”

“September seventeenth,” Nate said.

“Okay. I got back Friday.”

“The twenty-first.”

“If you say so.”

“Merle was gutted on September twentieth,” Nate said. “So you had time to find him, get close, and murder him. Or did you just set him up so one of the operators could get to him?”

She blew out a quick, frustrated breath. More tears. “That whole week I was either at my parents’ house in Rocky Mount or at Nash General Hospital seeing my dad.”

She laughed bitterly. “I assured my dying father I knew what I was doing out here. That I’d found a good man and I was safe. That gave him some comfort, and I didn’t know I was lying at the time.”

She tried to turn her head toward Nate, but the grip on her ear prevented it.

She said, “I wasn’t in Wyoming. In fact, this is the first time I’ve ever even been here. If this is what it’s like, I never want to come back.”

“I never said Merle died in Wyoming.”

“Oscar told me. He knew because you contacted him. Think about it, Nate.”

Nate said, “I can check on that story pretty easily.”

“Do it,” she said, pleading. “Please do it. I flew from Idaho Falls to Salt Lake City and on to Raleigh, where my mom picked me up.”

“What airline?”

“Delta.”

“What flight number?”

“I have no fucking idea.”

“Why didn’t you tell me this sooner?” he asked.

“Why should I?” she asked. “I guess I didn’t realize you planned to torture me. That you didn’t trust me.”

“Oscar told me you’d been there the whole time.”

“Oscar… must have forgotten,” she said. “It was before everything started to happen. Or maybe,” she said, a lick of flame reentering her tone, “maybe Oscar was in on it, too. Maybe you should drive back to Idaho and break his fingers and pull his goddamn ears off if you can find what’s left of his head.”

He released her ear and slipped his weapon back into the shoulder holster.

“I had to be sure,” he said, and turned back and put the Jeep into gear.

“Are you sure now?” she asked, then followed it with a sharp slap across his face. He flinched but didn’t retaliate.

“I think so,” he said.

Her words reminded him of his own father, and how he’d left him in Colorado Springs. Nate wondered where Gordo had taken his new family, his stepmother and two half sisters he barely knew. The thought flooded him with remorse for uprooting them, and he hoped someday he’d be able to make things right. Gordo had made him what he was, for better and worse. Nate no longer resented him for that, and he hoped to tell Gordo all was forgiven. Then Nate shook his head to clear the thought away. The task ahead of him left no room for sentimentality.

The lights of Dubois emerged through the snowfall ahead. It was a small, sleepy mountain town of barely a thousand people surrounded by closed guest ranches, hunting lodges, and working ranches, and rimmed by the Absaroka and Wind River Mountains.

Nate slowed before he reached the town limits, looking for activity ahead, a roadblock or law enforcement presence. He saw nothing unusual.

Finally, she said, “What else did you learn from that man back there in Jackson?”

“Enough,” Nate said. “The playing field isn’t close to even, but at least it’s not as stacked against us as it was before. Now I know there are more operators where Nemecek set up his headquarters.”

“How do you know he wasn’t lying?” she asked. “How do you know he wasn’t just telling you what you wanted to hear, or making something up you’d believe?”

“I know the difference,” Nate said. “He lied at first. He lied through all of his fingers being broken back. He was a tough guy.”

“What you did to him,” she said angrily, “it was awful. Savage.”

“I let him live,” Nate said. “I called the hospital with his phone when I could have let him bleed out or freeze. I could have finished him off. Now I’ve got a broken Special Forces operator out there who may someday come back at me.”

“But what you did to him…”

“Means to an end,” Nate said. “Torture works. It always has. That’s why they call it torture.”

“You looked like you were enjoying yourself.”

“I told you not to watch.”

“I finally turned away,” she said, “but by then I’d seen too much. In ten minutes I went from kind of trying to like you to hating your fucking miserable guts.”

He shrugged.

“That’s all you’re going to say?” she said, eyes flashing. “‘Means to an end’?”

“Look,” he said, “that guy back there was a Peregrine. I went through the same training. He’s been waterboarded, sprayed in his open eyes with pepper spray, and dropped off in both jungles and deserts with no weapons or food. He wasn’t going to just tell me what I wanted to know unless he was convinced I wanted to kill him slowly. If there was a shadow of a doubt in his mind, he wouldn’t have talked.”