Force of Nature Page 25

  Twenty miles out of town, Joe got an inkling where the crossover might be headed.

  So much so, in fact, that he decided he could slow down and allow the cushion to lengthen, reducing the risk that he’d be spotted. Since dark timber now formed walls on both sides of the road and he couldn’t see his quarry ahead, he decided to simply stay in the tracks to see if his speculation proved correct.

  If so, he’d located the headquarters of John Nemecek.

  And now that he was sure of Luke Brueggemann’s involvement—or whoever his trainee really was—he smacked the steering wheel with the heel of his hand.

  It made perfect sense.

  JOE HAD no intention of following the Audi all the way to its destination. He just wanted to make sure it was going where he thought it was. When he confirmed it, he’d return to his house and have a lot of thinking and sorting and worrying to do—while he packed.

  The road narrowed, and the tracks he was following went straight down the center. The trees were so thick and close on both sides that if the crossover stopped suddenly and Joe came upon the vehicle it would be nearly impossible to turn around quickly. It wasn’t much farther until the old road he guessed Nemecek was aiming for intersected the pavement.

  He envisioned rounding a corner to find the Audi blocking his path, Nemecek straddling the tracks, rifle ready. Joe slowed down around the next turn, eyes straining through the darkness beyond his sneak lights, hoping to see the vehicle before the occupants of the vehicle saw him.

  THE TRACKS made an abrupt turn off the old highway onto South Fork Trail, and Joe stopped his pickup. He would pursue no farther, because he now had no doubt where the Audi was headed. He was both relieved and anxious at the same time.

  He backed slowly up the road he had come on, careful to keep his tires in the same tracks. If it kept snowing, the tracks would be covered and Nemecek would have no idea he’d been followed. But if the snow stopped suddenly, Joe’s pursuit would be revealed as plainly as if he’d left a note.

  So he ground backward in reverse, keeping his tires in the tracks, until his neck hurt from craning it over his shoulder. When he thought he’d retreated far enough from the logging road that the evidence of a three-point turn in the snow could be explained away as a wandering elk hunter, he headed back toward Bighorn Road.

  HIS CELL PHONE burred a few minutes after he cleared the timber, and he snatched it out of his pocket. Joe wasn’t surprised to see who was calling.

  “Hi, darling,” he said.

  “Are you okay?” Marybeth asked.

  “Okay enough,” he said. “Luke is working with Nemecek. I followed Nemecek as far as the road to his camp.”

  “My God,” Marybeth said, and he heard sincere disappointment in her voice. “He seemed like such a good kid.”

  “He might be,” Joe said. “I’m about forty-five minutes out. Is everything okay there?”

  “Everything’s fine,” she said. “Mike is sticking around until you get back. Every fifteen minutes or so, he goes outside and looks around. He said nobody is out and about yet.”

  “Good,” Joe said.

  “You sound distracted,” she said. He didn’t realize he was, but she was good at pulling things out of him.

  He said, “I was thinking about something.”

  As briefly as he could, and with a real effort not to color the theory or worry her any more than necessary, he told her about what Nate had said about the female operative on Nemecek’s team.

  “Since we haven’t encountered any young women that would fit that profile,” Joe said, “something came to mind….”

  She didn’t let him finish his thought. Her voice quickly rose through the scales: “A young woman, probably from the east. Sheridan’s new friend is from Maryland. She doesn’t know much more about her, I don’t think. The girl who wants Sheridan to go to the East Coast for Thanksgiving. It might be her. Nemecek may know Sheridan is Nate’s apprentice, and this girl might be in Laramie to keep an eye on her—or do something to our daughter to lure Nate.”

  “Calm down,” Joe said. “We don’t know anything yet.”

  “And she won’t answer her phone!” Marybeth said, clearly alarmed.

  “She never does,” Joe pointed out. “Really, we can’t do any good getting worked up.”

  “I’m not worked up!” Marybeth shouted.

  The juxtaposition of her statement with her tone gave them both pause. He waited until she came back, this time more calmly. “I could try to call a couple of her friends to go wake her up, if only I knew they’d have their phones on,” she said. “Or better yet, we could call the dorm front desk or the Laramie police department.”

  He told her about his conversation with Chuck Coon, and she agreed that was the best way to go.

  “I’m going to keep trying to get in touch with her, though,” Marybeth said. “She’ll have to wake up and turn on her phone eventually, won’t she?”

  “Yup.”

  “Hurry back,” Marybeth said. “We’ll need to leave for the airport in three hours, and you haven’t packed anything.”

  Joe shrugged, even though he knew she couldn’t see it.

  “Oh,” she said, “I had something to tell you when I called.”

  “Go ahead,” he said. The road was covered with an inch of slush as he descended from the mountains into the valley, where it was a few degrees warmer.

  “I looked at that book I brought home.”

  “Yes,” he said, prompting her.

  “It’s a lot to digest. Did you know the idea for al-Qaeda got started in Greeley, Colorado, of all places?”

  “Greeley?” Joe said, thinking of the northern Colorado city that smelled of feedlots and cattle. “Is that our connection?”

  “Hardly,” she said. “That was 1949. It’s interesting and sick at the same time. The Egyptian named Sayyid Qutb was at the college there as a visiting professor, and he became disgusted with Western morality because he went to a barn dance! I’ll tell you all about it on our plane trip.”

  “Okay,” Joe said.

  “But that’s not what I found that makes me think we’re onto something. I think we might know the secret of Nate: why he is how he is and how he got that way. And maybe why they’re after him. The timing is perfect as far as Nate goes, and we know he was involved in some bad stuff. Listen closely….”

  Joe strained to hear, as she obviously found her place in the book and began to read aloud:

  “In early February 1999 …”

  27

  NATE AND HALEY drove through Riverton without seeing a single person awake or out on the streets. It was 2:30 in the morning and the bars were closed and not even a Riverton town cop was about. For the past hour he’d filled her in on assignments he had undertaken on behalf of Mark V, and some of the things he’d seen and done. He said he used to have several passports, issued to him under different names. In fact, he said, he’d used the last clean one a month before to fly to Chicago and back under a false identity.

  Before they cleared town, Nate stopped at a twenty-four-hour convenience store and filled the gas tank as well as his reserve tank. Inside the Kum & Go, he awoke the Indian night-shift clerk. He bought two large cups of coffee, granola bars, and energy drinks, and handed over five twenty-dollar bills. Although it hadn’t occurred to him yet that he hadn’t slept for nearly twenty hours, he wanted to stave off exhaustion when it came for him.

  He climbed back in the Jeep to find Haley sitting up, wide awake. She rubbed her eyes and thanked him for the coffee, and said, “You left off in 1998.”

  “Do you really want me to go on?” he said, easing out onto the street. He turned north until it merged onto U.S. Highway 16. One hundred eighty miles until they hit Saddlestring.

  “Yes.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes,” she said. “You said Nemecek came to you with a special assignment.”

  IN MARCH OF 1998, John Nemecek called Nate Romanowski into his office. T
he building itself was a small, single-level brick residential bungalow. There was no plaque or sign out front to indicate it was anything other than one home of many at Warren Air Force Base in Cheyenne. Airmen and their families occupied the houses on either side of the bungalow. There were bicycles and wading pools in the yards up and down the street.

  “HE STARTED OUT as he usually did,” Nate said to Haley, “with a history lesson. In this case, it was about how important the sport of falconry was to the Arab emirs through time. How falconry was literally the sport of kings in the Arab world, and how it had almost mythical and religious significance. Unlike here, where anyone can become a falconer if they have the time, patience, and desire, in the Arab world only the royals and elite are allowed to participate. Think of it like fox hunting in England in the past—very elitist.

  “The pinnacle of falconry in the Arab world is to hunt a rare and endangered bird called the houbara bustard,” Nate said. “These are large birds that mainly stay on the ground, but they’re capable of short flights. Some weigh up to forty-five pounds. They remind me of prairie chickens but bigger and faster. When a falcon takes them on, it’s a wild and violent fight. Bustards live in high, dry country, and they’re all but impossible to get close to because they live where there are no trees. Bustards can see for miles if anyone is coming. The Arabs like to watch the kill through binoculars hundreds of yards away, like generals watching a battle far from the front line. They don’t eat the dead bustard or use it for any purpose. It’s all about the kill.

  “To me, their philosophy of falconry is perverse. They hunt their birds for the sake of killing, and it’s done in big social gatherings of the upper crust. They buy raptors from around the world as if they’re racehorses, and the royals gain status by having the most exotic and deadly birds.”

  Haley said, “How is that different from your experience?”

  “Every falconer I know hunts his birds as a means of getting closer to the primitive world,” Nate said. “It’s a way to become a relevant part of the wild. There’s nothing sweet or Bambi-like about it. It’s not about status or elitism. Most of the falconers I know are barely getting by, because it takes so much time to get good at it. You can choose a family and a career or you can devote your life to falconry. They don’t mix well. The only exception to that I can think of was Nemecek himself. He was able to maintain his falconry while running Mark V. He thought of himself as a royal falconer because of this strange connection he had with his birds, and I really can’t blame him for it.”

  WHILE NEMECEK detailed the Arab obsession with falcons and falconry, Nate listened patiently and waited for the general outline of the mission ahead. Instead, Nemecek asked him about obtaining young peregrine falcons from the nest.

  _______

  “AT THE TIME,” Nate told Haley, “peregrines were hard to find. They were on the endangered species list, and even though there were plenty in zoos and aviaries, it was illegal to capture the wild birds. Wild birds are what falconers want, not birds raised in captivity. They’re considered to be a much higher prize.

  “I knew of a nest—maybe two—in Montana where I grew up, and I told Nemecek about them. He asked me if there were young birds up there, and of course I didn’t know at the time, but I assumed so. Right then, without telling me anything more about the operation or explaining why there were no other team members present, he signed a travel authorization for me to fly up to Great Falls. He told me to go as a civilian, take my climbing gear, and operate under my real name.”

  ON A THIRTY-DEGREE spring day under leaden skies, Nate snapped on his climbing harness, threaded the rope, and backed off the edge of a five-hundred-foot cliff overlooking the Missouri River. Beneath him, car-sized plates of ice floated sluggishly with the current of the water and occasionally piled up at river bends. The northern wind was sharp and cold and teared his eyes as he descended.

  He rappelled down, feeding rope through the carabiners of his harness, bouncing away from the sheer rock with the balls of his feet. Tightly coiled netting hung from his belt.

  It was fifty feet down to the first nest, which filled a large fissure in the cliff face. The next was a huge crosshatching of branches and twigs and dried brush, cemented together by mud, sun, and years. It was well hidden and virtually inaccessible from below, but he’d located it years before by the whitewash of excrement that extended down the granite from the nest, looking like the results of an overturned paint bucket.

  As he approached it from above, he noted the layers of building material, from the white and brittle branches on the bottom to the still-green fronds on the top. The nest had been built over generations, and had hosted falcons for forty years. Nate couldn’t determine if all of the inhabitants had been peregrines, but he doubted it. The original nest, he thought, had been built by eagles.

  The nest came into view, and Nate prepared for anything. Once he had surprised a female raptor in the act of tearing a rabbit apart for her fledglings and the bird had launched herself into his face, shredding his cheeks with her talons. But there were no mature adults in the nest. Only four downy and awkward fledglings. When they saw him, they screeched and opened their mouths wide, expecting him to give them food.

  He guessed by their size that they were two months old, and would be considered eyas, too young to fly. Four young birds in a nest was unusual, he knew, since usually there were just two or three. If taken now, they would need to be immediately hooded and hand-fed until their feathers fully developed, and kept sightless in the dark so they didn’t know who gave them their food. If the birds saw their falconer too early in their fledgling maturity, the falconer would be imprinted for life as the food provider and the birds would never hunt properly or maintain their wild edge. Nate didn’t like taking birds this young, not only because of the work involved but because of the moral question. He no longer wanted to own his birds, preferring instead to partner up with them.

  But here they were. So where was Mom? He almost wished she would show up and drive him away. He could claim to Nemecek that the trip had been unsuccessful. But Nate was in a stage of his life where he refused to fail.

  He spun himself around, and the landscape opened up as far as he could see. The sun was emerging from a bank of clouds on the eastern horizon and lighting the skeleton cottonwoods below while darkening the S-curves of the river. There were no birds in the sky.

  He spun back around, pulled the net from his web belt, and reached inside the nest.

  FARTHER DOWNRIVER, on another cliff face, he found the second nest. He was surprised to find out it held three more birds. The seven eyas were carefully crated, and Nate drove them to Colorado, where Nemecek maintained his elaborate falconry camp in Poudre Valley near Fort Collins. For the next eleven months, the birds were slowly and carefully brought along by Nemecek and Nate. All seven turned out to be healthy, strong, and wild. All seven turned out to be exquisite killers.

  When Nate finally asked what the fate of the birds would be, Nemecek was vague, except to say their presence had a national security purpose, and that Nate would soon learn what it was.

  When Nate asked why no other operators had been involved in the mission thus far, Nemecek was contemptuous. He told Nate the answer to his question should have been obvious: there were very few competent master falconers in the entire country, much less Mark V. Nemecek and Nate were the only men capable of capturing, nurturing, feeding, and training the young peregrine falcons. So of course no others were brought in.

  Nate didn’t know whether to be flattered or suspicious.

  “ONE YEAR LATER, in February,” Nate said, “I found out. When the falcons were a year old and in prime flying condition, Nemecek and I took the seven birds with us to Kandahar in Afghanistan. We were met at the airport by a driver in a brand-new GMC Suburban and taken a hundred miles south in the desert. The driver seemed to know Nemecek by sight, and never asked for ID. There was barely a road, and the guy driving us didn’t speak a word of Englis
h.”

  “By then,” Haley asked, “did you know what your operation was about?”

  “Barely,” Nate said. “All Nemecek told me was we were to meet some important people who would buy the falcons from us for a minimum of two hundred and fifty thousand dollars each.”

  “Good Lord.”

  “That’s what I thought, but I didn’t say it. You didn’t say much around Nemecek, or question his planning. You simply did what you were told. But when I saw where the driver was taking us, I was blown away.”

  SEVEN LARGE jetliners and two cargo planes were parked on the desert floor on a huge flat expanse of hard rubble. Arabic writing marked the tails of the aircraft. As they passed through the makeshift airport, Nate could tell from the lettering and the green, red, white, and black flags painted on the sides that they originated in the United Arab Emirates. One had a slogan painted in English on the side that read visit dubai—the jewel of the desert. They continued on the poor road but the driver never slowed down. Uniformed men with automatic weapons waved them through two checkpoints and the driver didn’t even acknowledge them.

  This operation continued to be unlike any other Nate had participated in. There were only the two of them—his superior and him. If others had been embedded, that fact was kept secret. They were traveling under their own names, with their personal passports. And they had no weapons. Only the birds in their special darkened crates, their personal luggage, and a single satellite phone Nemecek kept turned off in his carry-on bag.

  The predominant color in all directions was beige, Nate noted. There was little green vegetation except in shadowed pockets on the sides of rock formations, and everything looked sun-bleached and windswept and bone dry. As they drove on, the terrain rose and got rougher and wind-sculpted rock escarpments stood like monuments. Nate could see the distant outline of mountains, and he was reminded of the bleak badlands of eastern Montana or western Wyoming. That impression went away, however, when the driver topped a small hill and below him he could see an elaborate desert camp.