Читать книгу Going to Extremes - Amanda Stevens - Страница 9

It was done.

He’d killed the woman and buried her body in a shallow grave in the Montana wilderness. The wolverines would be at her soon enough, and then the vultures. By the time her body was discovered by some errant backpacker or trapper, her face would be gone, and if luck held, her fingerprints.

A DNA analysis would be required for a positive identification, and that could take days…sometimes weeks in this part of the world. Even if the authorities were able to trace her to the Montana Militia for a Free America, it would be too late. She could not tell them anything now.

Jenny Peltier had paid the ultimate price for her betrayal, and as Boone Fowler followed the stream through the woods back to his encampment, he felt no elation or remorse at what he’d done. He didn’t particularly enjoy killing, although he was good at it.

In war, people died. It was as simple as that.

And they were at war. A war to take back the country from the corrupt bureaucrats who contaminated the American way of life as surely as the pathetic junkies who infested the American street.

They would all be dealt with in time, those soft, greedy ingrates who knew not the meaning of honor and sacrifice. They would have to learn the hard way.

The bombing of a government building by the MMFAFA had shocked the nation, but that would be only one of the many “shots” that would soon be heard around the world.

The day of deliverance had dawned over Montana, and the winds of liberty would sweep down in triumph across the prairie states and march, like Sherman’s army, through the South, conquering nearly sixty years of malaise, apathy and moral decay. The avenging angel of freedom would stand victorious on the squalid doorsteps of the eastern cities and level, in God-like fury, the modern-day Sodom and Gomorrah to the West.

Fowler drew a deep, quivering breath. No matter how many times he delivered that sermon to the faithful, the message never failed to stir him. He had a gift and he knew how to use it. His mother used to say that when he spoke with such passion, he could make people follow him to the ends of the earth. He was counting on that.

Pausing, he knelt at the edge of the stream to wash the blade of the hunting knife he’d used to slit the woman’s throat, and then he scrubbed his hands, even though they were already clean. His soul was clean, too. Virtuous.

He was so caught up in the righteousness of his mission that he almost missed the telltale rustle of dead leaves upstream and to his right. The sound was slight, a mere whisper in the wind, but it sent a chill up his spine just the same.

And then Fowler realized that he’d been vaguely uneasy for the last quarter of a mile or so. Even though his mind was preoccupied, his instincts had been warning him of danger.

He should have listened. Whoever was behind him had managed to get the jump on him, so that meant that the tracker was good. A professional. Someone who knew the Montana wilderness as well as Fowler.

He continued to rinse the knife as his senses came fully alert and his mind raced with possibilities. He had a semiautomatic tucked in his belt, but he’d have to wait for the right moment to draw it. A sudden move and the tracker might open fire on him.

From the corner of his eye, he scouted the terrain. When the sound came again, still to his right, Fowler pulled his gun and began firing in that direction as he simultaneously rolled to his left. Seeking cover behind a boulder, he unloaded his weapon without pause and then grabbed a fresh cartridge.

“Drop the weapon!”

Fowler froze. The voice hadn’t come from his right at all. Instead, the tracker was downstream and to his left. He’d circled his quarry and now he had Fowler trapped. The rustle of leaves had been a diversion. Pebbles tossed over his head perhaps. A trick as old as time itself, and Fowler had fallen for it.

It wasn’t like him to be so careless. While his guard had been down, the man who hunted him had moved in surprisingly close. So close Fowler could practically feel the bastard breathing down his neck.

“Drop the weapon or I’ll put a bullet through your brain.” The voice was deep, fearless, commanding. A man used to barking orders and having them obeyed.

To prove his point, he fired off a round, blasting to kingdom come a pinecone that had fallen not ten feet from where Fowler hunkered.

Fowler threw down his weapon.

The man came out of the woods then, a tall, powerfully built warrior with the darkest gaze Fowler had ever looked into. He’d killed before. It was there in his eyes. In the steadiness of his hand on his weapon. He’d kill again, too, if he had to. Without hesitation.

He was a military man. His bearing gave him away, and his tracking skills suggested someone with a Special Forces background.

“Who are you?” Fowler asked. “What do you want?”

“I want justice, you son of a bitch.” As he walked toward Fowler, rage contorted the man’s features, and in the split second it took for him to get his emotions under control, Fowler whipped the pistol out of his ankle holster and fired.

The punch of the bullet knocked the man backward, and he fell with a hard thud to the ground.

A clean shot, right through the heart.

His muscles began to twitch, and Fowler walked over to put another bullet in his head to finish him off. Kicking the man’s weapon aside, he lifted his own gun and took aim.

“For the Cause!” he cried in triumph.

Montana State Penitentiary

Monday, 0400 hours

BOONE FOWLER CAME AWAKE slowly. For a moment, he thought he was back in the Montana wilderness, facing off against an old nemesis, but as his mind began to clear, he realized that it had been nothing more than a dream. A recurring nightmare of being hunted. The scenery and the enemy sometimes changed, but the outcome was always the same. It was he who stood victorious under a clear Montana sky—not the hunter.

In reality, it hadn’t gone down that way, and now Fowler found himself confined to a six-by-eight prison cell. As he swung his legs over the cot and sat, head in hands, everything came rushing back to him. His capture. The trial. The past five years of his life spent in a hellhole called the Fortress. A maximum-security prison from which no one had ever escaped.

And all because of a man named Cameron Murphy.

While Fowler had rotted in prison for the past half decade, Murphy had recruited what was left of a Special Forces team he’d once commanded and turned them into the most successful bounty-hunter organization in the country. Although Murphy was the only one Fowler had met face-to-face, he’d made a point of finding out the other men’s names. He knew their backgrounds, their specialties, what made them tick.

But it was Murphy alone that Fowler still saw in his nightmares at night. Murphy’s face he saw when he’d beat another inmate almost beyond recognition.

His hatred of Cameron Murphy had helped him survive nearly nine months of solitary confinement in the Dungeon, and his thirst for revenge had kept his rage in check when he’d been placed back into the general population of the prison.

He’d kept his nose clean all these years because he had a plan, and for that, he needed his friends, contacts with the outside world. He needed money for bribes and favors he could call in. He needed all the help he could muster in order to accomplish what had never been done before: escape from the Fortress.

And thanks to a generous benefactor with an ambitious agenda, the moment was finally at hand. Tonight, at lights out, he would instigate a riot, the likes of which the prison guards had never before seen. During the pandemonium, Fowler and his compatriots would be led off to the Dungeon, where they would lay low until the plan could be set in motion.

If all went well, they would soon be free men.

And Cameron Murphy would soon be a dead one.

God help anyone who got in the way.

“For the Cause!” Fowler whispered as adrenaline surged through his veins.