CHAPTER TWO

November 8

3:17 a.m. Alaska Time (7:17 a.m. Eastern Standard Time)

Slopes of Mount Denali

Denali National Park, Alaska

Luke Stone did not move at all.

He crouched perfectly still on a rooftop, behind a low stairwell outbuilding made of slapped together cement. The night was warm and heavy – hot enough that the sweat had soaked through his clothes. He breathed deeply, his nostrils flaring, but he did not make a sound. His heart beat inside his chest, slow but hard, like a fist pounding rhythmically on a door.

Boom-BOOM. Boom-BOOM. Boom-BOOM.

He peered around the corner of the outbuilding. Across the way, two bearded men waited with automatic rifles on their shoulders. They stood at the building’s parapet, watching the harbor below them. They chatted quietly, laughing about something. One of them lit up a cigarette. Luke reached to his leg and slipped the serrated hunting knife away from the tape holding it to his calf.

As Luke watched, big Ed Newsam appeared, coming into view from the right, walking almost casually.

The big man approached the guards. Now they spotted him. Spotting Ed Newsam was an alarming proposition. Ed put his empty hands in the air, but continued to walk toward them. One of the men growled something in Arabic.

Luke burst around the edge, knife in hand. One second gone. He raced toward the men, his heavy footfalls crunching on the gravel roof. Three seconds, four.

The men heard him, turned to look.

Now Ed attacked, grabbing the closest man by the head, twisting it viciously to the right.

Luke hit his man chest high, knocking him to the rooftop. He landed on top and plunged his knife hard into the man’s breastplate. It punched through on the first try. He clamped a hand over the man’s mouth, feeling the bristles of the man’s beard. He stabbed again and again, in and out, fast, like the piston of a machine.

The man struggled and squirmed, tried to push Luke off, but Luke slapped his hands away and kept jabbing. The knife made a liquid sound each time it penetrated.

The man’s arms drifted down to his sides. His eyes were open, and he was still alive, but the fight had left him.

Finish. Finish it now.

Luke tilted the man’s head up, free hand pressed hard against his mouth again, and swiped the serrated blade across the man’s throat. A jet of blood pulsed out.

Done.

Luke kept his hand pressed against the mouth until the man was gone. He stared up at the black night sky, letting the life quietly ebb from his opponent.

“Look at your man,” Ed’s voice said. “Look!”

“I don’t want to,” Luke said. He just kept staring up at the sky, the great sweep of the Milky Way galaxy filling his vision. Millions of stars were visible. It was… he had no words for it. Beautiful was the only thing that came to mind. He wanted to gaze at those stars forever. He knew what he would see if he looked down – he had looked too many times already.

“You have to look, man,” Ed said softly. “It’s your job to look.”

Luke shook his head. “No.”

But there was no choice. He cast a glance at the body beneath him. The black beard of the jihadi was gone. The rugged face was replaced by the pretty features of a woman. The curly black hair was now long and soft and light brown.

Luke was covering the woman’s mouth with his hands. Her dead blue eyes stared at him, unseeing – the eyes of his wife, Becca.

Ed whispered now. “You did it, man. You killed her good.”

Luke snapped awake.

He sat bolt upright in the deep darkness, his heart hammering in his chest. He was nude, and his body was soaked in sweat. His hair was a long, matted tangle. His blond beard was as thick as that of any Islamic holy warrior. With his hair and his beard, and his weathered skin, he could easily pass for a homeless man.

He was wrapped in a mummy sleeping bag – rated for extreme cold, twenty degrees below zero. Outside his small tent, the wind howled – the tent’s skirt flapped madly, a sound so loud he could barely hear the wind itself. He was alone above 16,000 feet on the western slope of Denali, and the mountain was already deep into its winter. A snowstorm had blown in two days ago, and hadn’t stopped blowing.

He hadn’t had a fire since the storm came in. He hadn’t left the tent except to urinate in forty hours. He was 4,000 feet below the summit, and it looked like he wasn’t going to make it there. Some people might say he wasn’t going to make it anywhere.

He had come up here woefully unprepared – he realized that now. He had brought enough water for four days – it had run out two days ago. He was eating snow and ice for water at this point. That was okay. Worse was food. He had brought a stack of dried meals-ready-to-eat. They were mostly gone now. When the storm came, he had started rationing the food. He was eating less than half the daily calories he needed – luckily, he had barely moved in two days, and was conserving energy.

He hadn’t bothered to bring a camp stove. He didn’t have a radio, so he had no idea what the weather report was. He had choppered in with a private pilot, and hadn’t filed an itinerary with the park service. No one had any idea he was out here but the pilot, and he had told the guy he would call him when he was done.

“Am I trying to kill myself?” he said out loud. He was startled by the sound of his own voice.

He knew the answer. No. Not necessarily. If it happened, okay, but he was not actively trying to die. You might say he was daring it to happen, taking foolish risks, and had been doing so ever since Becca died.

He wanted to live. He just wanted to be better at it. If he couldn’t do that…

He was a failure as a husband. He was a failure as a father. His career was over at forty-one years of age – he had walked away from government work two years ago and hadn’t looked for anything else. He hadn’t checked his bank accounts in a while, but it was reasonable to assume that he was almost out of money. About the only thing he’d ever been any good at was surviving in harsh and unforgiving environments. And killing – he was good at that, too. Otherwise, he had been a total, abject failure.

He could die on this mountain, but the prospect of it held no terror for him.

He was blank, empty… numb.

“Gotta start thinking of a way out of here,” he said, but he was just making conversation – he could leave, or not. It would be an okay place to die, and an easy thing to do. All he had to do was… nothing. Eventually – soon – he would run out of food. Drinking snowmelt wouldn’t sustain him for long. He would become gradually weaker, until it was impossible for him to make it back down the mountain by himself. He would starve. At some point, he would drift off to sleep and never wake up.

How to decide? How to decide?

Abruptly, he shouted, unaware he was going to do it until he did.

“Give me a sign! Show me what to do!”

Just then, his phone did something it hadn’t done in a long time – it rang. The sound made him jump, and his heart skipped a beat. The ringer was on as loud as it would go. The ring tone was a rock song that his son, Gunner, had put on the phone two years before. Luke had never changed it. More than not changing it, he had kept it on purpose. He cherished that song as the last link between them.

He looked at the phone. It reminded him of a living thing, a poisonous viper – you had to be careful how you handled it. He picked it up, glanced at the number, and answered it.

“Hello?”

The sound was garbled. Naturally, the thick tent was blocking the satellite signal. He was going to have to go outside to take this call – not a cheerful thought.

“I have to call you back!” he shouted into the handset.

Even moving quickly, it took several minutes to assemble the layers of clothes he needed and get dressed. It was too cold outside to do it halfway. He unzipped the tent, crawled through the tiny foyer, and pushed out into the weather. The wind and the stinging ice hit his face at once. He’d better make this quick.

He hung a beacon lamp on the tent frame and stumbled away from the noise of the flapping material into deep snow. He carried a powerful flashlight with him, turning back every few feet to mark the location of his camp. There were no lights out here, and visibility was about twenty yards. Snow and ice swirled around him.

He pressed the button to make the call and brought the phone inside the hood of his parka. He stood like a statue, listening to the beeps as the phone shook hands with the satellite and the call tried to go through.

“Stone?” a deep male voice said.

“Yes.”

“Hold for the President of the United States.”

It was a short wait.

“Luke?” a female voice said.

“Madam President,” Luke shouted. He couldn’t help but smile when he did. “It’s been a long time.”

“Much too long,” Susan Hopkins said.

“To what do I owe this honor?”

“I’ve got trouble,” she said. “I need you to come in.”

Luke thought about that for a moment. “Uh, I’m a long way from anywhere right now. It’s going to be a little hard to – ”

“Doesn’t matter,” she said. “Wherever you are, I’ll send a plane. Or a helicopter. Whatever you need.”

“A big friendly Saint Bernard would be good for starters,” Luke said. “With one of those little whiskey kegs around his neck.”

“Done. He’ll bring you a sandwich too, in case you’re hungry.”

Luke nearly laughed. “Hungry is one way to describe it. And when I’m done eating, I really will need that chopper.”

“Also done. Before we hang up, I’ll give you to someone who can take your coordinates and send someone out to get you. We go the extra mile around here. We believe in door-to-door service.”

Luke had to admit he felt a quick flash of relief. Just moments before he had seen no way off this mountain, no second chance at life. Now, he had one. He hadn’t known before whether he’d wanted to die or live – but now he knew for sure. He could tell by the quickening of his blood when she mentioned a way out of here. Intellectually, he still didn’t know, but viscerally, his body told him.

He wanted to live.

Despite all the hell he’d been through, somehow, he wanted to live.

“What’s going on?” Luke said.

She hesitated, and her voice shook the smallest amount. He could hear it even through the wind whipping around him. “Yesterday was Election Day.”

Luke considered that. He had been off the grid for so long, he had no idea what the date was. Somewhere far away, in another world, people still campaigned for office. The wheels of government ground on. There were policies to argue about and important decisions to be made. There was media coverage, and talking heads shouting at each other. He hadn’t thought about any of these things in some time. In fact, he had almost forgotten they existed.

A long pause passed between them.

“Luke,” Susan said. “I lost the election.”