Page 81 of Thunder Pass

With a sick feeling in his gut, Gunnar thought about Dan Bradford, the guide from Wild North Adventures. Had he been one of the prospectors chased away by his father?

“I tried to get rid of him, thought I had, but he’s tough,” Luke went on. “I started looking again, and this time I got lucky. And then I got unlucky, thanks to Sam Coburn and that redhead. They set me back over a year.”

It didn’t add up to Gunnar. His father had no interest in gold or other forms of wealth. He used to mend rips in his work clothes until they were literally falling off his body. Not only that, if it was just about the gold, he wouldn’t have tried so hard to prepare Gunnar with all those sparring sessions.

No, his father must have been here for some other reason. And he was probably here now…closer than you think.

“If I find my dad, will you give him a share of the gold?”

Luke’s expression shifted, turned smug. He thought he’d found Gunnar’s price. So be it. “Is that your bottom line?”

“Yeah. He should get what he was working for. But you’ll have to let me go if you want me to find him.”

“I’ll let you go. But I’ll be keeping these two.” Luke motioned for the guards to take Ruth and Sarah into their custody. “Just in case you decide to do something funny.”

“You’re going to use your own daughters as leverage?”

“I brought them into this world for a reason.”

Two guards stepped forward and grabbed Ruth and Sarah. As the expressionless guard dragged Sarah away, she struggled and kicked at him. “I’m not even your real daughter!” she shouted at Luke. “You have no right!”

“I brought you to this world. You’re supposed to do what I say. Feel free to shut her up,” he said to the guard, indifferently. “We’d all be better off without her screeching.”

The guard wrestling with Sarah did something Gunnar couldn’t quite see, and she slumped against him.

“What’d you do?” Ruth cried, lunging toward her sister. The guard holding onto Ruth lost his grip on her. As she yanked herself free, Gunnar shouted, “Run, Ruth! Run!”

Stumbling across the clearing, Ruth reached into the waistband of her pants and pulled out her Bowie knife. Instantly, the remaining guards gathered around Luke to shield him—which meant that none of them were paying attention to Gunnar. He took a step backwards, moving slowly so they wouldn’t notice. If he could get his hatchet out of his backpack, he and Ruth might have a chance.

Ruth sliced the knife through the air in long swoops, left to right, fending off anyone who might try to approach her. She backed away toward the forest that grew right up to the rock wall, tree roots and granite outcroppings intermingled. All the guards had guns, but none of them drew them. Why not?

“Let her go,” said Luke. “She’s not important.”

“If she gets out—” said one of the guards, speaking with a strong Russian accent.

“She won’t. She wasn’t one of our militia women, all she did was childcare. She’ll be helpless out there on her own.”

Ruth reached the first shade of the forest, where she lingered for a moment, looking from Sarah to Luke, back to Sarah. She didn’t look at Gunnar at all. He knew what she was doing—trying to keep everyone distracted so he’d be able to escape the other direction. But he couldn’t leave until he knew she was out of there.

He shook his head at her—Go! Just Go!—but before she could move, something hard and heavy struck the back of his head and stars swirled through his vision as it turned to blackness.

When Gunnar woke up, he found himself tied like a deer carcass to the rear bench seat of an eight-wheeled ATV. The rig was bouncing across the meadow, somehow catching every grass hump and stray rock in its path. Whoever was at the wheel of this thing was a terrible driver, he grumbled to himself as he tested the zip-ties around his wrists.

Very tight, as were the ones around his ankles. They must be pretty anxious for him not to escape.

Which he could probably do. But did he want to? He wanted to know more about this operation, more about the supposed gold mine, more about Luke’s plans and how the citizens of Firelight Ridge fit into them. The best place to learn all that? In the dragon’s lair, so to speak.

But just to give himself a fighting chance, during one of those big bumps, he rolled his body just enough so his wrists came into contact with some metal. Having repaired hundreds of ATVs over the years, he was very familiar with a multitude of designs. This one, he knew, was an Argo Conquest Pro 950, probably brand-new. It had a ridge of metal at the back of the bench seat. If he could just reach that…

After three more bone-rattling collisions with grass humps, he managed to get his wrists next to that metal ridge. From there, sawing through the plastic was just a matter of time and plenty of bruising. Good thing he had strong hands that were used to banging against metal.

Once his hands were free, he reached into a side pocket of his Carhartt’s where he kept a Swiss Army knife, sort of a last-resort tool if he lost all his emergency supplies. Good, it was still there. He left it there, because his chances of losing it overboard during this crazy drive were pretty good.

Craning his neck, he tried to get a glimpse of the driver, and was surprised to see that it was Luke Chilkoot himself. Wasn’t he supposed to be getting chauffeured around by guards? What kind of cult leader drove himself?

No, Luke wasn’t leaning into the cult leader role anymore. Now he was a geopolitical extortionist, someone sitting on four aces, knowing he could write his own ticket.

One thing had stood out during all the bullshit he’d spewed back there by the cave. He hadn’t said one word about the mysterious Dmitri. That seemed significant. Was he afraid of Dmitri? Or afraid of revealing too much about him? If Dmitri really was part of the Russian mob, he was probably scared shitless by him. Those guards…most of them were Russian. Was their first loyalty to Luke or to Dmitri?

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