Someone with access.
Someone knew our vehicle.
Someone knew our route.
And someone had arranged for Butch to provoke me.
“Why?”
Cross shook his head.
“I don’t know.”
Rex suddenly moved away from us.
His nose dropped toward the pavement.
“Rex.”
He ignored me.
That was unusual.
He circled the rear tire.
Sniffed the tracker.
Then froze.
His ears came forward.
His breathing changed.
I knew that behavior.
He knew a smell.
“What is it, buddy?”
Rex sniffed again.
Then looked toward the road.
Cross stared at him.
“You recognize that?”
“I recognize him recognizing something.”
Rex touched his nose to the device.
Then whined.
A memory hit me.
Not a visual memory.
A smell.
Metal.
Oil.
Burned insulation.
And something sweet beneath it.
A chemical odor from a place I had spent years trying to forget.
The Korengal cache.
I looked at Cross.
He had reached the same conclusion.
“No,” he whispered.
Emily looked between us.
“What?”
I held up the tracker.
“This has been somewhere it shouldn’t have been.”
“Where?”
Cross answered.
“A weapons storage compound that officially ceased to exist six years ago.”
Six years earlier, Rex had saved six men.
That was the story everybody knew.
It wasn’t the whole story.
Our team had been operating in a narrow valley against a network moving explosives across the mountains.
We found a hidden cache beneath an abandoned stone house.
Rifles.
Detonators.
Explosives.
Nothing unusual.
Then Rex alerted on a steel container buried beneath the floor.
Inside were American components.
Restricted components.
Optical systems.
Encrypted radios.
Hardware that should never have been outside a secure facility.
Someone was selling our equipment to the people trying to kill us.
We transmitted the discovery.
Two hours later, our position was attacked.
Not randomly.
Precisely.
Machine-gun fire from one ridge.
Mortars from another.
The enemy knew every approach.
Every exit.
They knew where our medic was positioned.
They knew where we would move if the east wall collapsed.
My closest friend, Staff Sergeant Michael Larkin, died in my arms.
Rex was hit protecting the rest of us.
The cache burned during the fighting.
The investigation went nowhere.
The official explanation was simple.
Enemy forces had captured American material from other battlefields.
Bad luck.
Coincidence.
Case closed.
I never believed it.
Neither did Larkin.
Thirty minutes before he died, he had told me something.
“Jack, this didn’t come from outside.”
“What?”
“The equipment.”
Gunfire cracked above us.
He leaned closer.
“Somebody brought it from home.”
Then the attack began.
I had buried those words with him.
Now, standing in a sheriff’s department parking lot six years later, Rex was smelling the same chemical residue on a tracker attached to my truck.
Cross handed the device back to me.
“We need federal authorities.”
Emily laughed bitterly.
“That’s what people around here always say.”
I looked at her.
“What does that mean?”
She stared toward the darkened road.
“People have disappeared in this county for four years.”
Cross frowned.
“People?”
“Drifters. Truckers. A mechanic who worked near the old quarry. A deputy who started asking questions.”
“Where’s the quarry?”
Her eyes met mine.
“Seven miles east.”
Rex looked east too.
We should have called someone.
Instead, we made the kind of decision people later describe as reckless because they weren’t standing there when it happened.
Cross drove.
Emily sat in front.
Rex and I rode in the back.
The road narrowed as we left town.
Trees closed around us.
No streetlights.
No houses.
Only headlights stretching over cracked asphalt.
“Tell me about the quarry,” I said.
Emily stared through the windshield.
“My father worked there.”
“Worked?”
“He disappeared four years ago.”
“I’m sorry.”
“They said he ran away.”
“You don’t believe that.”
“My father had never missed Sunday breakfast with my mother in twenty-eight years.”
Her voice stayed flat.
“He didn’t run.”
Cross glanced at her.
“Why were you still working at the diner?”
“Because Butch drinks when he talks.”
That answered everything.
“You were watching them.”
“For four years.”
“You should have gone to the FBI.”
“I did.”
“And?”
“Nothing happened.”
Cross tightened his grip on the wheel.
“Who did you contact?”
Emily named an office.
Cross and I exchanged a look.
He knew something.
“What?” I asked.
“That investigation was assigned to military liaison.”
My stomach dropped.
“Who?”