Chapter 10: Pahsimeroi War

Two goons from Seattle were first to arrive at the Missoula airport. They rented an SUV and left for Salmon, Idaho, 140 miles south on US 93. It would be a slow drive. They’d climb and descend the steep, switch-back curves of Lost Trail Pass to cross the Montana-Idaho border.

They arrived in Salmon and checked into a double room. A young girl working the front desk recommended a good steakhouse. Gregor and Mikhail wanted something big and broiled on their plates. The short flight from Seattle served stale peanuts; they’d been too rushed to stop for a full meal.

Gregor carried two photos in his shirt pocket: one of Hawthorne and one of Rhys Jacobs. He’d memorized the faces while Mikhail drove. He glanced across the room to a corner booth and was startled to see Rhys Jacobs sitting with a young woman, eating, engaged in lively, smiling discussion.

“Gregor. Look only at me, but listen carefully. The friend of our target is here, in the corner booth across the room. Be ready. If they leave, we must follow. Call Golenko. Tell him.”

Mikhail and Gregor followed Jacobs at a safe distance and eventually learned where he lived. Conveniently, he parked his vehicle outside his rural subdivision home. Later just before dusk, Gregor jogged down the street in sweat pants and tee-shirt. When he reached Jacob’s Chevy Blazer he stopped, kneeled down and retied the lace on his jogging shoes. He slipped a tracking device inside the front wheel well. He jogged to the end of the block and just before night closed in, he drove back to their motel room.

Steve Barringer arrived in Salmon that same day. By some quirk of fate he had a reservation in the same motel where several of the Russians were staying. Others were scattered in two other motels, all that Salmon had to offer.

Barringer noticed three men sitting together in the steakhouse that evening. They were not local. Their gestures, body language, facial expressions, haircuts, clothing, everything was just a little off. He had a good view of them. He unfolded his cell phone and while making a call to his answering machine back on his desk in Washington, he took video footage of the three men. He couldn’t believe his luck. They were sitting in good light with their faces visible.

Shirley will have no trouble running these images through the database, he thought. He settled in to enjoy an excellent prime rib dinner. Idaho may brag about their spuds, but who wants to think ‘potatoes’ when they’ve got beef like this grazing on the hoof! He thoroughly enjoyed his meal, and hot coffee lightened with cream afterward. He was confident he’d know something about the three men in the morning.

Steve was disturbed when the database identified one of the three men as a leading soldier in the Volgograd syndicate. The other two were known to federal offices in Seattle, but there were no records linking them to known syndicates.

What the hell are the Russians doing here? Think, man, think! What would have their interest?

He called Shirley at the offices.

“Hon, see if you can get me a rundown on whatever might be in this corner of the wilderness that would have three Russian goons lurking here? They look like they’re watching and waiting, but I can’t imagine what they’re sniffing after. Get back to me as soon as you have something, would you?”

He wished he could make himself invisible. He had to locate Hawthorne or his buddy Jacobs, and now he had to avoid exposing himself to the Russians. God help them all if ... no, it was unthinkable. They couldn’t be looking for Hawthorne? Damn! He mumbled a few choice curses.

He noticed a convenient book shop across the street from the steakhouse. It was a good location to watch people going and coming. He timed his book browsing from just before noon. If there were other Russians in town they might meet over lunch. They were mostly big men with big appetites. A burger didn’t cut it with them. They wanted thick cuts of meat, bloody and smothered in mushrooms and garlic.

He wasn’t wrong. A little before 12:30 two men entered together and five minutes later a third man joined them. All were just different enough that he guessed he had them pegged correctly. He bought the small novel he’d been reading, walked across the street, and asked asked the waitress for a seat away from the windows, towards the back of the dining area. He chose a booth where he could observe the table with five men sitting around it, but they wouldn’t get a clear view of him.

His beef sandwich and barley soup arrived just as his cell phone rang.

“Lemhi Pass and thorium deposits. Nothing else?

“No, I guess not. The only time there was anything of national interest here was when President Jimmy Carter took a float trip down the Middle Fork of the Salmon River. Since then, bupkis, nothing!

“Yeh, there’s an open-pit molybdenum mine 80 miles upriver southwest of Challis, but that’s hardly a national concern. Okay, thanks, Shirley. I’ll keep in touch. My oh, crap! meter just went off the scale. Tell the boss I’m on it, but it’s starting to smell bad, okay? Bye, and thanks. I owe you!”

Steve concentrated on his excellent lunch. That’s another problem, he thought. If I don’t get away from here, I’ll gain ten pounds I don’t need!

The five Russians talked quietly but seriously. They were on an assignment for sure. It was written all over them, their faces and expressions. Steve suspected he and they were after the same thing. He needed just one move by them, one visible action, and he would call in some help. What he didn’t know was the size of the opposing force—another seven Russians waited in their motel room, unhappily eating mediocre pizza delivered to their rooms.

Golenko considered snatching Jacobs and applying persuasion to get him to give up his friend. He was troubled by the practical fact that it might not get the result he wanted, and it would be very dangerous. Although it would be easy to dump a body in this wilderness, there was too much risk of being seen while taking him. Keeping his group under cover without arousing local suspicion was difficult enough. Damn these provincial people! Didn’t they have anything better to do than watch everybody around them, looking suspiciously at strangers and barking to the sheriff like guard dogs when they saw something strange? he grumbled.

No, he grimly accepted. He’d have to keep most of his men out of sight until it was time to move. He and his sergeants would be very circumspect as they followed this Jacobs fellow until he led them to their target.

If some neutral observer had been aware of the bizarre train of events—the watchers tracking and following and the agency man watching the watchers—it would have seemed like a Spy vs. Spy cartoon.

Cabin Fight

When it hit the fan, bullets and gore erupted in a great bloody spray all over the remote valley hillside.

It started mid-afternoon on a Friday two weeks after Golenko’s team began tracking Rhys Jacobs’ vehicle. Rhys had no idea he was being followed, of course. He’d received a short note from his mother—she despised email and never used it—warning of Helen’s thoughtless gossip on the telephone. He was keeping a wary eye open for anyone paying unusual attention to him, but he’d seen nothing suspicious.

He’d decided to take his fishing gear and spend Saturday with Michael. There was good stream fishing in the Targhee National Forest east of the Pahsimeroi Valley. He wanted to get away from Salmon and the mining business for at least a day. Golenko’s tracker showed Rhys’s Blazer leaving town.

“Drive! We follow! Alert the others. Tell them to come, stay a mile back minimum. We see where he goes. Maybe this is to see his friend, yes?”

Steve Barringer had decided to his own satisfaction that he could best spend his time watching the Russians, who were obviously hanging about waiting for Jacobs to do something. He’d already pegged their rental vehicles. Agency inquiries learned that false ID’s were used for the rentals. He’d gotten digital snapshots of most of the team scattered around eating places in town. All had been vetted through the agency computers. All were known members of or had contract histories with the Russian syndicate.

He’d thought it through and decided that he needed a swift reaction team to out-snatch the snatchers. He wanted to follow Jacobs alone to Hawthorne’s location, and that was his original plan. But the Russians had barged in so he’d settle for letting them lead him to Hawthorne. He’d toyed with the idea of substituting his own tracker for the one he thought the Russians must have planted but it was too risky. They kept watch on Jacobs’ home with drive-by’s and jogging runs, and he dare not risk tipping his hand.

No, it’ll be better if I just bird-dog them and snatch Hawthorne after they lead me to him.

That was the riskiest part of the plan. He had a Jet Ranger helicopter on 24-hour standby at the Salmon airport, a small field used by mountain pilots. They flew hunting outfits into the back country. A National Forest fire patrol contractor kept a helicopter there and private planes filled hangers leased from the local fixed base operator. The FBO operated his own charter flying service. It was a very active general aviation airstrip for the size of the town.

Steve’s two backup men stayed in rooms adjacent to his. He and they dressed down in casual western clothing and blended in much better than the east european men. Steve evaded local questions by saying they were in the area checking out mining investments. That seemed to satisfy folks.

Steve got a call from his man that the Russians were pouring out of their motel rooms and hurrying away on the main road going south out of town.

“Follow them but stay back, out of their rear view mirror. Keep your radio on. John and I will get the helo in the air and we’ll catch up with you. If you lose them, don’t worry. We’ll give you their position when we get them in sight. You be ready at their back door, in case we need to turn or stop them.”

The helicopter raced southward, streaking over the river canyon on an intercept course. The winding bends of the river road added miles to the distance. The helicopter climbed and overflew the canyon walls, cutting that distance by two-thirds. The narrow canyon was a problem; there were few places to land except on the roadway. Well, hopefully, they’d arrive at an open area.They could land and move in to grab Hawthorne before the Russians reached him.

Steve checked their weapons. They carried a rack of M-16 carbines and a case of loaded clips. He and his deputy wore service pistols with extra clips. The pilot was armed but he would avoid a firefight unless he was attacked. Steve’s man on the highway had an M-16 and a pistol in his vehicle. Steve insisted on extra weapons when he decided the Russians were a probable threat to the mission. Everyone wore kevlar body armor for this intercept. He hoped they wouldn’t need the vests, but he worried they might.

Rhys drove on, enjoying the beautiful canyon drive along the north-flowing Salmon River. He never tired of seeing the alternating flow of deep pools, the foaming rapids and the long gravel bar stretches.

The winding drive was a pleasant way to relax after a stressful week at work. He loved the challenges of developing mineral resources but it was a brutally difficult economy. American industry was hell-bent on buying cheaply from Chinese and South American mines. He sometimes wondered if the Chinese would supply strategic minerals to the U.S. in wartime? Let the politicians keep on screwing it up; his job was to keep the investors onboard. Too many good mines had closed in the last decade.

Job stress. Well, God doesn’t count a man’s days spent fishing against his life. Maybe that held true for stressed-out mining engineers, too.

Rhys didn’t see the string of SUVs behind him. They were too far back. He did notice a helicopter pass over a high point on the ridge to his right and a bit ahead, but it was flying in a straight line ahead of him. Must be the contract forest patrol. A different bird today, though. Maybe the flying service took the other one in for service, he thought.

Rhys left a plume of dust high behind him when he sped up the dusty track to the cabin. He smiled to see Michael waiting for him on the front porch, waving a small brown bottle. Ahhh, good man. Cold brew!

He’d just pulled up when he saw Michael look up, his face a mask of disbelief; he dropped the bottle and raced back through the doorway. Rhys opened his door and was hit with a blast of wind, sand, and debris. The thwack-whack-whack of beating blades mixed with the ear-splitting whine of a helicopter setting down not 30 feet from his vehicle. He too, ducked and raced into the cabin. He slammed the front door behind him and tripped the lock.

“Who the hell is that? Who are those guys?” he yelled at Michael who emerged from the bedroom with a deer rifle in each hand.

“Damned if I know, but I’ll bet they’re those agency people I told you about. They must have followed you here!”

There was a loud pounding on the door.

“Michael Hawthorne! Open up. You’ve got to let me in. There’s a bunch behind me who want to take you. Open this door, NOW!”

Rhys ran to the side window and looked out between the curtains. He caught a glimpse of a black SUV lurching to a stop in the hay meadow a short distance away. Three men piled out of it with stubby box-bodied machine pistols in their hands. He saw another SUV racing up the lane, a quarter mile away.

“Unless those guys I’m seeing are with him, we’re about to get some nasty company, Mike. Better let him in before he kicks the door down!”

Michael stepped to one side of the door and flicked the latch. The door crashed open and two men half jumped, half fell inside. Michael looked outside and saw two more SUVs trailing dust plumes, racing to flank the cabin.

Steve flashed his badge case at Michael and Rhys: “You two’d better find a hole and pull it in over you. I thought we’d have a longer lead on those Russians, but we didn’t get lucky. We’re going to be pinned down in a minute. Put those damned deer rifles away! You’ll just get yourselves killed!”

The air was filled with the roar of the helicopter making a hurried full-power takeoff, and the blurred chatter of a machine pistol. Nothing hit the cabin; they must have been shooting at the chopper. Stupid move, that! Michael thought. Not likely those 9mm rounds will take down a chopper, unless they get extremely unlucky and hit the pilot. He’ll be on the radio screaming for every lawman in the state as soon as he hits altitude.

Funny what thoughts go through a fellow’s mind when things go to hell. The next rattle of sound came from a spray of slugs that streaked through the cabin in a spray of shattered glass. It sounded like angry hornets. He heard the distinct thunk-thunk-thunk when the slugs embedded themselves in the wall behind him. He’d dropped to the floor; he and Rhys frantically crab-crawled flat along the floor, scrambling for the back bedroom and shooting positions.

He yelled behind himself as he scrambled:

“Agent, one of you take the kitchen. There’s a back door that needs guarding, and a window there. You, other guy, get behind something and keep them from coming in the front door!”

Nobody took time to answer or tell Michael to shut up and stay out of it. There were twelve impatient Russians outside who wanted four bodies. Only one had to remain alive, and if Hawthorne was only half alive and bloodied, they’d take what they could get. A hail of bullets tore through four sides of the cabin, shattering glass and shredding the curtains. Walls on the opposite side erupted into splinters; debris and glass rained down on the floor. They choked on dust and dirt shaken loose through holes ripped open in the cabin’s inside walls.

“This is insane!” Michael yelled. “Agent, what the hell do those guys want? You damned spooks got us in a war or something?”

“Hell no, Hawthorne—they want you! They figure you know something they want. That’s why I’m here. I’m supposed to take you someplace secure so we can ask you some questions,” Barringer yelled back, while he tried to figure how to get into a better shooting position without getting himself killed. This had become fubar with a capital F. Damn those trigger-happy goons, anyway!