Chapter 38
38
In the shadow of Thunder Pass, surrounded by armed men, his heart racing, Gunnar discovered that his brain was suddenly clicking on all cylinders. “Your name. Chilkoot. That was the trail that prospectors used during the Klondike Gold Rush. That’s why you chose it. You were looking for gold ever since you came here. It was right there in your name the whole time.”
Luke tipped his head in acknowledgment. “My great-grandfather heard about it from a Russian explorer. He killed him to keep the information to himself. It got passed down to my father, but he had other business interests. My father told me about it.”
“Before or after he went to prison?” Ruth asked.
Luke shot her a look loaded with both respect and anger. “You’ve done your research.”
“It’s amazing what can be learned when you’re not under someone’s thumb. Your real name is Fredrik Norsk, isn’t it?”
He didn’t answer that, since they all knew it was true. “You should have stayed with the family, stupid girl. You could have gotten your share of paradise. I knew if I stayed here long enough, and looked hard enough, I’d find gold. Over the years I found enough black sand and pyrite to keep me going.”
“You told my dad,” Gunnar said as another piece clicked into place.
“Got a little drunk one night in Afghanistan after we nearly got blown up by an IED. I learned my lesson. I never talked about it after that.”
“So he followed you here?”
“The sneaky bastard. I didn’t even know he was here. When I finally recognized him, it was like a lightning bolt waking me up. See, Naomi didn’t believe I’d ever find the gold. I let her convince me that establishing our own place, completely cut off from everything, would be more satisfying than an actual gold mine . It was, for a time. But it was a mistake. Never listen to a woman,” he added with a cruel smile. “Snakes, every damn one. That’s why the men are in charge this time. The only women allowed will know their place.”
The guards nodded along, as if Luke was singing their song. Gunnar knew how good Luke was at manipulating people.
“Are you saying my dad followed you here to look for the gold too?”
“Of course he did. He used to chase off other prospectors who came through.”
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?
Something else was nagging at him. The altering of the property records, the secret changes that had been made to official state databases…who had authorized that? It must be someone in the state government, maybe someone really high up there. Had Luke—or Dmitri—paid someone off? Or was someone else working with them?
And what did this Dmitri want—was it just about the gold for him or did he have another agenda?
Alaska used to “belong” to Russia, after all. Gunnar had always found that pretty absurd, since the Ahtna and other native peoples had inhabited the area long before Russia claimed it. But…empires will be empires, and the Russian Empire had sold it to the United States in 1867 for about $129 million in today’s money. A bargain, considering all the oil that had been discovered since then. And now…gold?
A Russian militia…a gold mine…and a practiced cult leader…with tiny Firelight Ridge caught in the middle. And no one knew what was happening except for Ruth, alone in the forest, and Gunnar, tied to an ATV seat like a dead moose.