The Alberta Connection Read online

  The Alberta Connection

  A Ryce Dalton Novel

  By R. Clint Peters

  Edited, Produced, and Published by Writer’s Edge Publishing 2012

  All rights reserved.

  Smashwords Edition

  © 2011 by R. Clint Peters.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be produced, stored in a retrieval system in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the author.

  All characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Epilogue

  Chapter 1

  Ryce Dalton gazed through his spotting scope for perhaps the tenth time in the hour. A small cabin stood directly in front of him. A woodshed to the right of the cabin almost overflowed with cut and split firewood. A swiftly flowing stream gurgled in front of the cabin. Far to his right, Ryce could see flashes of light glinting off a medium-sized, glacier-fed lake. Occasionally, between the trees, patches of the dirt road leading to the lake could be seen through the scope.

  The ridge where Ryce was positioned was a little over a half mile from the cabin and extended to more than one thousand feet above the valley floor. He was painfully hidden in a small copse of trees two hundred feet below the crest of the ridge. He was unable to move until it was dark and the lights had gone out in the cabin. He had learned to use zipper baggies.

  The cabin was the suspected hand-off point for smugglers transporting secrets across the border into Canada. The Montana-Alberta border was relatively close. It was two miles to the lake and then two miles up a dead-end canyon. At the closed end of the canyon, the trail climbed a shale hog’s back approximately the same height as the ridge Ryce now occupied. Once over the hog’s back, the trail was a twenty-mile walk in the park.

  Ryce squinted through the viewfinder of his spotter scope and spun the focus knob. With the crosshairs centered on the cabin, the range finder indicated it was 1,130 yards from his position. With the right sniper rifle, he knew several people who could make that shot. Oliver Pendergast II was one of them. Ryce chuckled. Oliver Pendergast did not like being called Oliver. He liked O2 much better. Ryce had not seen or spoken to O2 since departing Afghanistan.

  Ryce had been on the mountain for twelve days. A partial road washout had prevented his insertion team dropping him closer than six miles from this observation post. He hoped the road had been repaired, although he did not mind hiking. The US Army Rangers effectively introduced its members to the concept and love of hiking.

  Ryce scoped the road leading to the cabin. The road crossed the stream several times on large corrugated steel pipes. The last pipe, in front of the cabin, was clogged with trees, forcing the stream to flow over the road. Ryce shivered. If he needed to get closer to the cabin, he would get wet.

  Ryce checked the cabin once again. A faint stream of smoke drifted up from the chimney. The Dodge Ram 4-wheel drive pickup was still parked near the front door. The scene was still peaceful. Ryce chuckled to himself. He might even be able to dig into his MRE while it was still light out. Eating an MRE using the Braille method was highly over-rated.

  Ryce picked up his smart phone and synchronized it to the conversion box. The nearest cell tower was over twenty miles away and on the other side of three mountains. The box turned the cell phone into a satellite radio. Ryce kept an eye on the cabin as he typed his report for the day. He had only enough supplies to last for two more days. There were no signs that the group in the cabin had plans to go anywhere. Ryce closed the text message with, “What would you like me to do?”

  As he was waiting for a reply, Ryce detected movement on the road to his left, out of sight of the cabin. A Black Suburban came to a stop, blocking the road to the cabin. Ryce swung his scope around to the Suburban. Four men exited the vehicle and began to walk toward the cabin.

  All four were wearing forest camouflage with jump harnesses and side arms. They were also carrying automatic rifles with the distinctive outlines of an M-16. Ryce was puzzled when he noticed they were wearing running shoes instead of normal military-style boots. Ryce frowned. They might be carrying M-16s and wearing camo, but they were not trained military personnel. Ryce did not know who was sneaking up on the cabin, but he was confident that they did not know what they were doing.

  Ryce did a quick mental checklist of what they were doing wrong. They were walking down the middle of the road in two pairs less than five feet apart. Ryce could actually hear laugher from where he was located. If he could hear the laughter from a half mile away, the occupants of the cabin would also hear it. Their M-16s were hanging from the slings on their shoulders. A quick burst of automatic rifle fire would take out the first pair of the assault group. The remaining members would likely be mowed down trying to bring their weapons into play.

  They should be staggered. The first man should be as close to the edge of the road as possible. The second man, on the opposite side of the road, should be fifty feet behind the first man. With this group of four, two should be on each side of the road. And, they should be strung out for two hundred feet. Ryce chuckled. Apparently, he had learned something during his years in the Army.

  After watching To Hell and Back, the story of Audie Murphy, for the fifth time when he was eight, Ryce announced to his mother that he wanted to join the Army. At twelve, his dream was to become an Army Ranger. Using money received on his fourteenth birthday, Ryce sent for the Army Ranger training manual. While his classmates were rushing to the ball field, Ryce was sitting in the library, focused on “his” Rangers. The summer after his sixteenth birthday, he passed all the requirements from the manual except one. His mother would not allow him to jump out of an airplane.

  The day after he graduated from high school, Ryce applied to the US Military Academy. He eventually received a notification that his application was denied because he had not included a nomination from a Senator or Representative from Montana. He was devastated for almost five minutes, but he had a back-up plan.

  Ryce enrolled at Montana State University, Billings, and applied to join the Army ROTC program. During the second semester of his junior year, Ryce was selected as Unit Student Commander, a position normally reserved for seniors. Four days before his twenty-first birthday, Ryce was presented with his 2nd Lieutenant’s bars.

  Ryce glanced at the road once more. The group was perhaps halfway to where the road crossed the stream to the cabin. They were moving agonizingly slowly. Did they think they were taking a stroll in a park? Ryce looked around. This area was a truly beautiful place to take a stroll. He shook his head. Significantly nicer than some of the places he had visited.

  After gradua
ting from Montana State University, Ryce was faced with a choice. He could take a paid, two-week vacation, or he could stash his leave and report to Airborne School. He decided to begin qualifications immediately.

  Ryce graduated in the top five percent. As he recounted later, Ranger school had been the most difficult days of his short life. They were now remembered as the best days, if he did not include jumping out of airplanes. Before Ranger school, he could not climb a six-foot ladder without almost paralyzing fear. Now, he enjoyed diving out of an airplane that was still in perfectly good flying condition.

  Ryce looked through his scope once more. The four men walking up the road had split into two groups. One pair was continuing toward the lake. The other two men had forded the stream and settled in behind the Dodge.

  Ryce attempted to follow the pair on the road with his scope, but trees often obscured them. They completely disappeared no more than a quarter of a mile from the cabin turnoff. Ryce began a grid search. He saw them once again as they were exiting the stream not far from the woodshed. Ryce smiled. One of the men appeared to have fallen into the water. He had removed his tunic and was attempting to wring it out. Ryce could detect amusement in his partner even from this distance.

  Ryce swung his scope back to the men behind the pickup truck. They had unslung their M-16s. They were ready for a firefight.

  Using the trees as cover, the team near the woodshed inched closer to the cabin. When one of the men reached out to steady himself on the woodshed, Ryce changed his opinion that the cabin had no security. The wall that the man had just touched erupted in an explosion that blew both men off their feet. Ryce swung his scope to the two prone men. Both were bleeding profusely, and neither was moving.

  The two men behind the truck opened fire at the cabin. Ryce scanned the area. He noticed three figures barely visible in the trees to the left of the cabin. Ryce was only slightly surprised when one of the two men behind the truck fell over. The second man turned to see what had happened to his partner. He fell over. Three men carrying silenced M-16s walked out of the trees and approached the two men crumpled in the grass.

  One of the three from the cabin walked over to the still smoldering woodshed. He reached down and began dragging one of the bodies to the truck. After a close inspection, Ryce could see that the woodshed was still intact. Ryce wondered how the explosion had been triggered, but he was not interested in exploring the woodshed for clues anytime in the near future.

  A second man from the cabin walked to the second body near the woodshed and began dragging it to the truck. How did the men in the cabin know that they were under assault?

  Ryce carefully scoped the cabin and the woodshed once again. He saw no electrical services running to the cabin and no obvious power generation equipment. Were the lights he had seen in the cabin from lanterns or light bulbs?

  The four bodies were dumped near the rear bumper of the truck. One of the men from the cabin pulled a pistol from his shoulder holster and carefully fired a bullet into the head of each man on the ground. When he replaced the pistol in the holster, he helped load the four dead men into the pickup truck bed.

  The executioner pointed at one of his companions and then across the stream. The companion waded the stream to the main road and looked in both directions. When he saw the Suburban, he returned to the cabin and checked the pockets of the dead men. With the keys to the Suburban in his hand, he again splashed across the stream. A few minutes later, he parked the Suburban next to the woodshed and covered it with vegetation.

  Sadly, Ryce started composing a report of the incident. He did not know who the four men were, or why they were there, but no one deserved to be executed.

  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.