Chapter 18
Marcus’s F250 rolled smoothly over the recently paved surface of Goldenview Drive. He recalled the time years earlier when, as a teen competing in track meets at South Anchorage’s Service High School, he drove through the Goldenview area. At that time, it was little more than a dirt track with a handful of remote homesteads, much like his own hometown of Salt Jacket. Salt Jacket had a current population of eight hundred inhabiting an area of nearly fifteen hundred square miles. A third of those residents still were not connected to full-time power, telephones, and running water. Goldenview, on the other hand, was a very different story. The descendants of the original mountainside inhabitants had mostly sold out their two-hundred-acre homesteads in the nineties and early years of the current century, pocketing millions in the housing boom.
In place of lush sub-arctic rain forest vegetable farms and horse ranches, million-dollar mansions had sprung up, stacked almost literally on top of each other on plots barely larger than the six-to-ten thousand square foot living spaces custom designed for Alaska’s rich and famous. Every massive home had an impressive view of the upper limits of the Pacific Ocean, Mount Illiamna, Turnagain Arm, the Anchorage Bowl, and the roof of the house below them. Marcus despised the design that comprised the “Upper Hillside” gated communities along much of Goldenview Drive, what he often termed “Beverly Hills AK.”
The packed collection of mansions gradually thinned and gave way to something more like what he remembered as they continued south a couple of miles. Further down the road, the scene was again wooded. The occasional average house poked through heavily treed yards in the increasingly the rural setting. A smattering of ancient-looking log cabins and a few single-wide trailers with wooden additions popped into view here and there. Many of them topped with blue plastic tarps to help the roofing stay water proof under the winter snow load. These were, of course, holdouts from the old days. Most of the area had been bought up by the richest of the rich. The larger tracts of land had become estates with a much greater degree of privacy, planting massive ten-thousand square foot micro-kingdoms on their own twenty-acre parcels of arctic paradise.
“So,” Mike said, “got any idea what we’re looking for, other than a white Audi driven by a British Albanian guy?”
“No, not really,” Marcus replied. “I figure it will be like the old days back in Force Recon, though. If we drive around in the area where the bad guys hang out, we’re bound to run into them, or at least their trail, at some point.”
“How far back does this road go?” Mike asked.
Marcus pointed south. “A little ways further, it splits up into a bunch of smaller dirt roads that wind around the hills. Most of them are steep and unmaintained dirt paths. I don’t think Farrah’s Audi will be down one of those roads — it looked too clean.”
“Yeah, he didn’t seem like the backwoods type.” Mike jerked a thumb toward the stacked mansions that made up the Prominence Point subdivision. “You think he might be up in mini Beverly Hills back there?”
“I doubt it. While his profile fits someone who wouldn’t mind that environment, he’d be looking for seclusion. Maybe even a defensible position.”
“That makes sense.”
Marcus passed the new Muslim retreat center. There were no signs or markings on the road to identify its location, and he almost missed it. The owners of the center tried to stay out of the public eye as much as possible. The only reason he knew about it at all was from a popular radio talk show earlier in the year. The host was decrying the growth of fundamentalist Islam in the US and cited that even Alaska now had multiple mosques. Marcus mulled the possibility of a connection. He never liked to base opinions on stereotypes, but he had spent too many years in the Middle East fighting men who regularly used mosques as bases for military operations in hopes of giving Western forces bad press when they fought back. One of the bloodiest days in his life took place beneath the minarets of a mosque in Iraq.
They reached the end of the paved road. Working on the assumption Marcus had made about Farrah’s character, he turned the truck around and started another pass along the main road. A few cars had passed as they drove, mostly Lexus, Mercedes, and Volvo SUVs and a couple of minivans with middle-class soccer moms at the wheel. The majority of the area’s residents were in the city at work. The giggly sound of children playing in the summer sun bounced on the air from behind a house set back from the road. Halfway back to Rabbit Creek Road, a sky-blue minivan with a taxi light on its roof topped a rise nearly half a mile in the distance.
“Pull off!” Mike hissed.
Marcus obeyed and turned onto a side street.
“What’s up?” Marcus asked as he rounded the corner.
“That cab. What’s the likelihood someone out here would hire a cab? It’d cost fifty bucks to get a ride all the way out here. And Kharzai was in a cab just like it.”
Marcus turned the truck around and nosed back up to the intersection. The cab passed a moment later. The rear driver’s side fender was badly dented, the back bumper twisted away from the body and pointed up like a tail. Mike caught a good look at the driver as he passed. His face jutted forward, bearded neck stretched and mouth open wide. His thick black hair quivered with a sudden motion as he bobbed his head forward, presumably in time to music.
“It’s him,” Mike said, “but that damage wasn’t there yesterday.”
“Yeah, just as I remember him too,” Marcus replied. Memories of Kharzai's erratic antics when they first met in Iraq nearly ten years earlier played across his mind.
“Give him some space, then let’s pull out. It doesn’t look like he saw us.”
Marcus waited about ten seconds, then turned onto Goldenview. Kharzai’s cab was a couple hundred yards ahead. He was traveling fairly fast, the blue Ford Freestar bounding over the short rolling hills with the grace of a turtle on caffeine.
Brake lights flared and the van abruptly slowed, then turned off the road and into a driveway, kicking up dust as he drove to the house at the end. Marcus did not slow as he passed. Mike glanced up the dirt-and-gravel drive and saw the minivan pull behind a large garage built out of the same thick logs as the house next to it. He noted the address on the side of the mailbox that stood beside the road. Marcus continued to the end of the road, then turned onto the winding, unpaved sections and took the back route to return to the highway so as not to be seen passing that house a third time.
Chapter 19
Hilde arrived in the hotel lobby to meet Lonnie. Not finding her immediately, she took a seat on one of the wide leather chairs to wait. She pulled out her cell phone and dialed Mike to let the husbands know where they were going. Before the first ring started, the distinct sound of gun shots popped in rapid succession from somewhere outside. She hung up the phone and ran toward the noise, dread filling her. Through the windows, she could see that the sidewalks and streets outside the hotel were mostly empty. She ducked through a side door onto the street just in time to see a blue minivan taxi with a mangled rear bumper turn the corner away from the hotel, not speeding, driving at a normal rate and therefore not an immediate suspect. She took a step further and saw a white van jutting from the alley behind the hotel. Its front bumper was smashed, and she saw a man sitting straight up in the driver’s seat.
There was something strange about the man, something about the way he held his mouth. She moved forward to offer help and gasped at what she saw. A solid object jutted from his open mouth. His eyes were wide with surprise. Pain and shock were captured in the tight skin around his face. The object was the handle of a knife, its blade jammed through the back of his skull, pinning him to the seat.