Kodiak Sky

CHAPTER 11

Kodiak Island, Alaska, was Commander Skylar McCoy’s home. She’d been born on this island, grown up here, and learned how to be a warrior here. So it was good to be back after two years away, even if her stay would be short. She needed to recharge, especially after that mission to Daran, and Kodiak was the perfect place to do it. Those three boys were the youngest lives she’d ever taken, and it was the first mission she’d ever reflected upon. She didn’t regret it, but she couldn’t shake it, either.

What she liked most about coming home, particularly to this remote spot on the island, was that it never changed. She was just twenty-four, but many things had already died or deserted her. However, this spot in the middle of the forest was always waiting, and it was always the same.

She glanced down into the puddle at her boot tips — it had rained heavily last night. Staring back up was a pretty young woman, she had to admit, and she wasn’t being arrogant. Her beauty was simply a fact of nature. She’d been blessed that way. She was a product of good genes — a handsome, wonderful father and a gorgeous, hateful mother. Well, mostly good.

She was five-five with jet-black hair — a precious reminder of her distant local heritage. She would have preferred to keep it long, but, given the physical nature of her missions, that wasn’t practical. So she kept it trimmed above her shoulders, and usually pulled back in a brief ponytail, as it was today.

She had a slim face with high cheekbones, full lips, and big eyes the color of the Caribbean Sea as well as every drop of New Zealand water she’d ever seen. She was “cut,” in excellent physical shape, though she was not at all bulky and took great pains to avoid that thick build. She worked out constantly but maintained her slender, feminine shape despite the demanding regimen.

She was pretty, but she’d been only the second prettiest girl in her two-daughter family. Her younger sister, Bianca, had been headed for the fashion runways of Paris before being killed four years ago at seventeen in the pickup truck of a drunken boyfriend — who, regrettably, had survived the wreck.

That guy was dead now, the victim of a mysterious backwoods fall off a steep cliff in Denali on a wonderfully clear day just like this one. He’d been a good climber, too. No one could figure out what had happened, especially with the weather so fine.

Skylar turned away from the image at her boot tips and moved through the forest to one tree in particular, which stood at the edge of a sheer cliff overlooking the ocean. It had been two years since she’d been here, but the tall spruces of this familiar grove on Kodiak’s northeast coast didn’t seem different at all. And her initials, SIM for Skylar Indigo McCoy, which were carved into the trunk, were as legible and sharp as they had been the day thirteen years ago she’d carved them, on her eleventh birthday — after making her first overnight trek out here, with only her father’s Remington rifle strapped securely to her shoulder as company.

The stream at the bottom of the slope behind her hadn’t changed course a degree through the shiny black rocks, either. The clear, cold waters were still teeming with rainbow trout, too, just as they’d always been.

And the incredible view of Katmai over on the mainland from atop this ridge near the water’s edge was identical to the one she remembered after that trek thirteen years ago, still untouched and unblemished.

It was as though time stood still in this place.

Skylar smiled nostalgically as she thought about Betty Malutin. The old Alutiiq woman had taken her in and mentored her after her father had died on the Bering Sea. A few months after her father had gone down in his crab boat in a terrible storm, Skylar had moved in with Betty when her mother had moved back to California, fed up with the solitary life on Kodiak without a husband and no serious prospects of finding another — not one she wanted, anyway. Betty had died in Skylar’s arms four years later, the victim of a heart attack.

She missed Betty so much. Betty had finished the warrior lessons her father had begun.

And Skylar hadn’t spoken to her birth mother in a decade. Bitch.

She still missed her father every day, even more than she missed Betty. But she didn’t blame the Bering Sea for tearing his ship apart during that raging storm so quickly that none of the five-man crew even had a chance to climb into their orange survival suits. When you went out on the Bering Sea, you knew what you were getting into — or you were stupid. Either way, whatever happened was on you. Those had been her father’s very words many times at the dinner table when he wasn’t on the hunt.

She turned away from the waves crashing on the rocks far below to stare into the dense forest. At a hundred miles long and averaging forty wide, Kodiak was the United States’ second largest island. In area, it was more than double the size of Long Island, which included the New York City boroughs of Brooklyn and Queens.

She took a deep breath of crisp, clean air, filled with the pungent scent of spruce. Long Island’s population exceeded eight million, while Kodiak was home to just fifteen thousand — most of whom lived in the only major town on the island. It was lonely out here in the woods and the wilds, and she loved it.

There were thousands of bears, many more than humans living outside Kodiak’s lone town, and they were huge brown bears. Not the puny little black ones that terrified the population of the Lower Forty-Eight. The Kodiak subspecies was the largest and most ferocious of all grizzlies, as big as polar bears thanks to a steady diet of protein-rich salmon and rainbow trout that constantly ran the waters of this island. The inland grizzlies of the Alaskan mainland were still big, but not like the Kodiak strain.

She took another even deeper breath of crisp, clean air. God, she loved it out here so much. So much more than any of the other exotic destinations she’d slipped into lately — Afghanistan, North Korea, Iraq, and Venezuela. Those places had their allures, but none of them stacked up to Kodiak. Not even close.

The snap of the twig was faint but clear, and Skylar pressed her body to the closest tree.

As she listened intently, she glanced down at the two rainbow trout lying on the rock beside the tree. A few minutes ago she’d snagged three of the red-stripes from the stream at the bottom of the ridge with her bare hands. She’d eaten the first one raw, as it was still struggling, seconds after catching it as she stood knee-deep in the crystal clear water — including the eyes and eggs of the beautiful fish, which were the most nutritious parts. She’d needed energy after the long hike and paddle. But she was going to cook the other two in butter and with the spices she’d brought along in her pack. Despite her disdain for the civilized world, she still enjoyed bringing a tiny piece of civility to the wilds of Kodiak.

A second twig snapped, even more faintly than the first. It seemed she might be adding another source of protein to tonight’s menu.