Fear No Evil

Chapter 93

Five hundred yards downriver and on the same west side of the South Fork, Matthew Butler and J. P. Vincente were separated by fifty yards and moving steadily south, keeping the muddy bridle trail between them.

They wore camo. Thermal-imaging goggles hung around their necks.

Even though it was daylight, every ten yards or so, Butler would lift the goggles and peer through them, looking for the heat signatures of men in the trees ahead of him. If Durango and the cartel men were waiting in ambush for Cross and Sampson, Butler felt in his bones that they would be up ahead, between him and Vincente and those rapids.

They’d stashed their e-bikes and Alison Purdy’s off the trail a mile back. She’d limped with them up the path until fifteen minutes ago, when Butler had sent her out on a point above the river, roughly seven hundred yards downstream of the narrows.

Seven hundred yards is a long shot for anyone, but Purdy carried a soft case for a .28 Nosler sniper rifle that Butler had stashed in the Land Cruiser along with several other weapons. The thief was a small woman and the Nosler a hard, flat-shooting weapon.

But the custom rifle came with an integrated tripod, an adjustable elevation turret, and a muzzle brake, which cut the recoil in half. With that setup, even Purdy could reach out and kill a man at close to a mile if need be.

He’d left her with orders to shoot whenever she felt she had one of the cartel men in her sights. And she’d play mop-up in case Cross and Sampson somehow managed to get past Butler, Vincente, and Big DD, who was working his way up the bridle path on the opposite side of the river.

“How are you making out there, Cap?” Dawkins whispered in Butler’s earbud a few minutes later.

“They’ve got to be right here ahead of us,” Butler said.

“Same on this side. I can’t be more than four-fifty out from the rapids.”

“Any thermal reads?”

“Negative, but there are ravines and folds where a man could hide without... we have a raft in the river bend!”

“I see them too,” Purdy whispered.

“Vincente, flank to the outside and advance,” Butler said. “I’m river-bound. If the cartel is here, they’ll start shooting any second.”

“Roger that,” Vincente said.

Purdy said, “Wait, there’s four in the raft.”

“Four?” Butler said, moving fast to where he could see more of the river. He trained his binoculars on the narrows and saw four people in a dark green raft coming into the whitewater, bouncing off one rock, hanging up a moment on another, spilling down a chute that threw a wave of water up and over two kids in the bow.

“Don’t shoot!” he warned. “It’s not Cross. Repeat, not Cross. Let them go by.”