The Alberta Connection (2 page)

The cell phone Ryce was holding began to
vibrate. He checked the latest text message. His instructions were
to evacuate as soon as possible after sunset. However, the
retrieval team was still in Great Falls and was not expected to
leave until the following afternoon. If Ryce was not content to sit
around his campsite for twenty-four hours, he could walk to Chief
Mountain Highway.

Chief Mountain Highway was only a nine-mile
hike from Ryce’s observation post. The campground used as the
insertion-staging site was an additional five miles down the road.
If he had not yet gotten his fill of hiking, Babb, MT, was five
miles from the campground. Ryce looked at the message and smiled.
Had someone been talking to his Army buddies? Most Rangers could
hike nineteen miles before breakfast. And, he could fish for the
first six.

About an hour before sunset, the group at the
cabin came out, got into the truck, and drove toward the lake. When
the truck returned to the cabin, Ryce could see the bed was
empty.

Ryce had already packed everything except the
camo net, which was easily stuffed into his pack. He began to climb
the slope away from the cabin. He had less than two hundred feet to
climb to gain the top of the ridge, but did not want to create an
outline. He was using every shrub and tree available to cover his
movements, and often crawled to keep his silhouette low to the
ground. Ryce remembered Randy.

Randy had been a fellow Ranger in the
Philippines. One evening about this same time, Randy was assigned
to observe a village. Things were going well until Randy broke the
horizon when his group topped a small hill. A single shot ended
Randy’s career in the Rangers. He hadn’t provided much of a target,
but it was enough.

Ryce completed his climb and then started
down the other side of the mountain. The moon provided sufficient
light for him to see where he was going. On the hike in, he had
seen where the stream from another glacier-fed lake circled around
the mountain. Ryce wanted to intersect the second stream at least a
half mile from the road leading to the cabin. He was confident he
could find a place to get some sleep.

Stopping frequently to observe his
surroundings, Ryce took almost an hour to work down to the stream
and find a previously used camping area. He tied his tarp between
four trees for shelter and rolled out his sleeping bag. After he
dug a can of spaghetti and meatballs from his pack, he opened the
can and began to eat. Another cold meal, but after almost two weeks
of cold meals, he was used to cold meatballs. He had thought about
using a solar oven, but he would starve before he had enough sun to
cook anything. When he finished dinner, he quickly checked his
surroundings and then crawled into his sleeping bag. As he began to
drift off to sleep, Ryce considered how he had arrived on this
mountain.

After tours of duty in Thailand, the
Philippines, Afghanistan, Alaska, and two recruiting centers, Ryce
was sent for special low-level drop training. The target was next
to a stream with high granite cliffs on both sides. Although the
aircraft had slightly overshot the target area, someone decided to
go ahead with the jump.

Seven men drowned when their equipment pulled
them under. Ryce’s parachute snagged on the cliff and he was
slammed into the rock face. The impact shattered several bones in
his left arm. Several surgeries over a three-year period partially
repaired the arm, but he would never have more than 70% usability.
He would never jump out of an airplane again.

After the last scheduled surgery, Ryce
accepted the instructor billet he was offered. He polished an
office chair for two years and was re-evaluated, but his arm had
deteriorated to 65%. With his length of service, he qualified for a
90% pension. He decided to retire.

On the day he retired, Ryce dressed in his
best parade uniform. His roommate, Scott Wall, also a Ranger
Captain, looked across the room at Ryce and snorted.

“You look like you are either going to a
funeral or a wedding. You don’t have a girlfriend, so it isn’t a
wedding. And, you’re not dead, so it isn’t a funeral.”

Ryce could see Scott was pleased with his
humor. Ryce grinned.

“It sure feels like a funeral.”

Chapter 2

The sun was barely
clipping the top of the ridge when Ryce was awakened by a noise
coming from the road. It looked like a Park Ranger crew-cab pickup
was headed toward the campground at the lake. Ryce chuckled to
himself. He was glad he had not been interrupted in the best part
of a dream.

Ryce crawled out of his sleeping bag and
began to string his fishing pole. He rummaged around in his cold
pack, which was not cold, and found his last chunk of salt pork. He
sliced a small sliver of the fat off the chunk, threaded it onto
his hook, and then walked to the stream. Within minutes, he had
hooked two nice trout, which were certainly enough for breakfast.
After cleaning the fish, Ryce started a small fire. He had a choice
of a single-burner propane stove or a wood fire. He liked the smell
of smoke drifting up from a wood fire early in the morning.

As he was finishing breakfast, Ryce’s cell
phone vibrated. He checked the text message. The plans had changed.
Ryce’s retrieval team had arrived at the staging campground at
midnight. They had just departed and would retrieve him at the GPS
location included in the message.

Ryce loaded the location into the GPS in his
cell phone. The pick-up point was less than a half mile from where
he was camped. Ryce smiled. He still had thirty minutes to
fish.

Ryce arrived at the pick-up point with four
good-sized fish. The Park Ranger truck slowed as it approached
where Ryce was fishing, but did not stop. As it drove by, Ryce
noticed several trash bags in the bed. It must be trash pick-up
day.

Ryce had only a few minutes to wait until the
retrieval team arrived. When Ryce got into the van, he discovered
it contained only the driver. Ryce scowled for a moment. Travel
protocol required that agents travel in pairs, even if they were
only going to get a Slurpee. This agent was going to learn the hard
way that Matt, the Great Falls office chief, followed protocol.

When Ryce and his driver arrived at the
campground, everything was ready to load into the van. Ryce pulled
a laptop out of a bag on the car seat and composed an email. The
campground had Wi-Fi, giving Ryce access to the Internet.

As soon as he clicked “send,” Ryce closed the
laptop and looked over at Matt Yearly. Ryce was surprised to see
Matt for two reasons. First, Matt did not usually go out on routine
assignments. Second, the agent who had driven Ryce to the
campground did not have any teeth marks. He had obviously not been
chewed out to the extent Ryce expected Matt would chew, based on
Matt’s reputation.

“What’s next, Matt?”

In addition to being the Great Falls office
chief, Matt Yearly was the area supervisor of the
Montana-Idaho-Washington region. He and Ryce had served together in
Afghanistan for a little less than six months.

Matt was Major Yearly then. He was riding in
the last Hummer of a four-vehicle patrol hit by an IED (Improvised
Explosive Device). The second vehicle was destroyed and the first
and third heavily damaged. The fourth vehicle, where Matt was
riding, was shot up. Matt took three slugs in his right leg below
his knee. The resulting surgery gave him a rather distinctive
limp.

Matt was still in the hospital when the
Director of the Joint Border Task Force approached him. The
Director asked one question. Would Matt like to join the task
force? Matt accepted on the spot.

Matt looked up. “We’re going back to Great
Falls, and then you go back to Billings. The scuttlebutt says you
are going to Idaho to hook up with the Pendergast group. You get to
see O2 again.”

Matt laughed. Matt had met O2 in Afghanistan
and had great respect for him. In Matt’s book, O2 was either a
really good SEAL or a moderately good Ranger, although often a
little crazy. Matt turned to help load the van. Ryce put his
backpack on the seat and then climbed into the back of the van. He
was happy he was going back to Billings. He had not seen Tanya for
more than two weeks.

Chapter 3

The drive back to
Great Falls took less than three hours. The van was large enough
that Ryce could nearly stretch out behind the second row of seats.
Even after years of sleeping on the ground, Ryce had not developed
the ability to sleep on hard surfaces. Nor could he sleep while
being tossed around the cargo compartment. As he tried to recover
some lost naptime, Ryce thought about the Joint Border Task
Force.

The Joint Border Task Force had sprung into
existence shortly after an incident on the Trans-Canada Highway
near Brandon, Manitoba. A Royal Canadian Mounted Police officer
clocked a vehicle exceeding the speed limit by over 20 KPH. During
the pursuit, the vehicle attempted to exit the highway. At the
bottom of the off-ramp, the automobile blew through a red light,
and impacted the side of a delivery van in the intersection. All
four passengers were pronounced dead at the scene.

Six laptops with tags indicating they were
the property of The McDonnell-Douglas Corporation were recovered
from the vehicle. A phone call revealed that the laptops were
stolen eleven days earlier from the Skunk Works, near Los Angeles,
California. The ramifications of equipment stolen from the
top-secret design and construction facility for McDonnell–Douglas
were enormous.

The local RCMP officers informed their
superiors, who contacted the FBI. After several telephone calls, a
group of FBI agents and RCMP officers sat down to discuss what they
should do.

The McDonnell-Douglas laptop discovery
created numerous questions. Who are the people involved? Why has no
one known about this group before? Where are the laptops crossing
the border? What is the destination? What are the participants
planning? Are they affiliated with existing terrorist
organizations? Is there a security crisis?

JBTF-Canada was formed to find answers on the
Canadian side of the border. Their counterpart, JBTF-USA, focused
on discovering how the items were transported from California to
the border. That was the reason Ryce was sitting on a hill in
Montana. Ryce smiled. He had found no answers to how the laptops
were taken into Canada. He did, however, discover that the cabin
occupants knew something about explosives and were competent
short-range shooters from cover.

During the first year of the task force, six
groups were apprehended running the newly designated “Canadian Top
Secret Corridor.” They carried everything from highly classified
material and documents to complete circuit assemblies and
computers. All were confirmed as Canadian citizens, but the task
force was unable to establish a link to any U.S. participants.

The first significant break came when an RCMP
officer patrolling Highway 1 east of Banff, Alberta, noticed a
vehicle slightly exceeding the speed limit. When the officer ran
the plates, he discovered the vehicle had been stolen in British
Columbia. JBTF-Canada requested that the officer tail the
automobile, but not stop it.

The vehicle was followed to a motel on the
eastern outskirts of Calgary. As the car was unloaded, the officer
watching the vehicle noticed one of the occupants carrying what
appeared to be a gun case into the room. When a SWAT team was
called in to assist in apprehending the occupants of the car,
someone in the motel room opened fire with an automatic weapon. In
the resulting firefight, all five occupants of the motel room and
three police officers were killed. A close inspection of the room
determined that all five were Americans, and all of them lived in
Great Falls, Montana. An informational bulletin with the names of
the five Americans was sent to all law enforcement departments in
British Columbia.

More than three hundred top-secret US Navy
documents and three encrypted laptops were found when the motel
room was examined. The FBI was contacted when the RCMP forensic
technicians could not breach the laptop security walls.

The FBI dispatched Special Agent Cameron
Wilson to Calgary. When Cameron suggested the laptops be
transferred to John Pendergast in Idaho, the RCMP district
commander grinned.

“I have actually had dinner with John
Pendergast. I should have remembered him. Do you think John and O2
would like to live in beautiful, central Alberta? We have the
Calgary Stampede every year. I am sure I could find a spot for
them.”

A faint question was heard from across the
room. “Could he have your job, eh?”

Five days after the motel shoot out,
JBTF-Canada received a telephone call. A car registered in Montana
had been ticketed at a park-and-ride lot in Burnaby, BC. When the
vehicle was impounded, the local police department discovered the
car belonged to one of the men killed at the motel in Calgary. Did
JBTF-Canada want the contents of the car?

Three days later, JBTF-Canada received a
package. It contained a small bag of receipts, a prepaid cell
phone, and an invoice for two tires purchased in Great Falls,
Montana.

The GPS location found in a text message on
the cell phone was the reason Ryce had been observing the cabin.
After nine visits in three years, Ryce had only confirmed that the
occupants of the cabin were supremely talented sharpshooters. And,
they liked living thirty miles from civilization.

The three occupants had never changed. They
had no visitors. They rarely left the cabin for more than three
hours. When they did return from the longer trips, they always
unloaded grocery bags. And, Ryce had never seen any of them with a
fishing pole.

The access road to the park was closed during
the winter. Where did the occupants go when it was snowing? Was the
cabin accessible using snowmobiles? This area got more than six
feet of snow each year. Maybe the cabin occupants simply hibernated
for the winter. Ryce had only staffed the observation post after
the winter snow melted. He had no idea what happened before he
arrived on the mountain.