Prologue
CHICKEN, ALASKA
Wednesday, May 15th
PAUL BRADY WOKE up with a start and went for his rifle. Sweat poured down his face, his cotton T-shirt sticking to his sleeping bag. For nearly a minute, he sat up breathing deeply, trying to figure out where he was.
He wasn’t in Ramadi.
That was nearly fourteen years ago.
He wasn’t in the Korengal.
That was twelve years ago.
Heart pounding, he fumbled with the switch on his head lamp and turned it on, illuminating the small one-person tent.
Rushing water, the rustle of leaves, and creaking trees sounded outside.
Then he remembered.
It was 2019. He was in Alaska, six miles south of the town of Chicken, camping on the bank of the Fortymile River.
He had thought coming up to Alaska would clear his mind. That the fresh air and seclusion would mitigate the stress and anxiety that had plagued him for the last four years.
Over two years ago, Paul Brady had been diagnosed at the San Diego VA with PTSD.
It explained all the nightmares. The short temper and the jumpiness. It explained the depression, anxiety, and the manic episodes.
As a former chief petty officer in SEAL Team Two, Paul Brady never thought he’d have to deal with the effects of the trauma he’d experienced in his nearly seventeen years in the Teams. He’d always thought SEALs were impervious to such symptoms. It was true that he’d seen terrible things on his deployments. War was hell, no doubt, but he’d thrived in those environments. It wasn’t until he’d left the navy and moved from Virginia to San Diego with his family that his life started to spiral out of control.
It started with the night terrors and then escalated to a point where he couldn’t hold down a job.
The VA-sponsored psychotherapy didn’t work.
Neither did the medications. He pushed everyone away, including his wife and two boys, who, after nearly two years of trying to help, finally packed up and left.
He’d lost nearly everything in the divorce: his job, the house, the kids, and most of his money.
After the divorce was settled, the former SEAL found himself left only with his Ford truck and the meager amount of money in his savings account, which was spent quickly on Bud Light and whiskey.
For three months he lived like a bum out of his truck near Mission Beach, close to Coronado where he had gone through BUD/S training, until one day he was struck with an idea.
What if I can just get away from it all?
What if I can go to some far corner of the world and just live?
It took him three days to sober up, and another five to drive to Canada’s Yukon territory, where he stayed at a quaint hotel near the Alaskan border.
The owners had been welcoming and, when hearing his plan to camp in Alaska for the summer, had given him a list of their favorite spots.
That’s how he’d found this little plot of paradise on the river.
Brady kicked out of his sleeping bag and unzipped the door to his tent. Grabbing his bear rifle, he stepped out into the cool night and stood on the sandy shore.
Small wisps of smoke rose from the dying embers of his fire pit and caught wind, blowing out over the river. It was that time of night in the great north where you could see the stars and the Milky Way, that three hours of darkness where the forest finally took a break and went to sleep.
Brady paced in circles around the camp, trying to get his mind under control. He found that the pacing helped rein in his thoughts. He’d been sober nearly eleven days—the longest he’d gone in years—but, damn, could he use a beer right about now.
Directing the beam of his head lamp over to the group of trees twenty yards behind his tent, he gazed up at his food box hanging by a rope from a tall branch and considered what was inside.
He’d bought the pint of Jack Daniels as a test for himself as he left Southern California.
A test in self-control.
For too long, he’d been self-medicating with alcohol.
And look where it got me.
I can’t go back to that.
Brady turned his head away from the swaying food box, stopped his pacing, and closed his eyes.
You’ve come here to start again. You’ve come here to recover.
It was a mantra he’d repeated to himself during his long drive north, a quasi affirmation to keep him on the straight and narrow.
For nearly ten minutes, the former SEAL stood in this meditative state and had finally started to relax, when a sharp sound snapped him out of his trance.
Instantly, the hair on the back of his neck stood on end, his senses elevating. He spun to look at the dark forest behind him.
His food box continued to swing in the wind, and he primed his eyes for any sight of a potential threat.
The sharp snap had sounded like a heavy stick being broken under a great weight.
The dark shadows of the forest continued to dance in front of him and suddenly he got the eerie sensation that he was being watched. He’d had that feeling many times before, the calm before an ambush.
Brady clicked the safety off his rifle and brought the stock of the weapon into his shoulder, his eyes still scanning for any movement. His mind scoured through the list of potential predators in the Alaskan wilderness—wolves, mountain lions, and inland grizzlies.
Snap!
Brady whipped the barrel of his rifle to the left in the direction of the new sound.
Snap!
Another stick broke to his right. Brady started backpedaling sideways toward the river, cutting off the angle to potential threats when a large, hulking figure stepped out of the forest.
The figure looked like no animal he’d ever seen, it looked—
“Hey!” Brady shouted. “What the hell are you doing?”
Aiming the rifle directly at the figure, he started to apply pressure to the trigger. He was just about to shout again when a loud sound—pop!—cut through the midnight air and something thudded to a stop in the sand at his feet.
Brady squinted down at the mysterious object. In the starlight, it looked like some sort of thermos. Then, suddenly, a loud explosion rocked Brady off his feet. The brilliant flash of orange and red blinded him as he was thrown onto the sand.
Something hissed loudly. He clawed at the sand, desperately searching for his rifle. Ears ringing, he finally grasped the wooden stock of his weapon.
His world suddenly began to swim. Vibrant colors kaleidoscoped all around him.
Then Brady gasped deeply and felt a sharp burning sensation.
His body locked up and he pitched backward, darkness engulfing him.
Chapter 1
YUKON TERRITORY, CANADA
Friday, June 21st
THIRTY-TWO HOURS BEFORE Cassie Gale went missing, she was driving her green Toyota Tundra west on Yukon Route 2 through dense forests of spruce and aspen. Though it was late June, the air was cool, and in the light rain that fell from dull gray clouds, it almost smelled like fall.
Every so often there were breaks in the trees that flanked the highway, and Cassie caught glimpses of pristine valleys and faraway peaks, and slowly grew calmer, at ease, not at all the troubled woman who’d left Montana three days before.
But just as quickly, the vista was swallowed by thick, gloomy claustrophobic woods that seemed to gnaw at her mood. On impulse Cassie reached for the center console. When she did, the regal, male German shepherd in the passenger’s seat cocked his head, and his eyes narrowed.
Cassie stopped her hand short of the console and willed it back to the wheel.
“Sorry, Maverick,” she said, reaching over and scratching the dog’s head. “I promised I wouldn’t go there today, didn’t I?”
Maverick nuzzled Cassie’s arm as she drove past a sign that read: Dawson City, Yukon 50 kilometers.
Thank God, Cassie thought, fighting a yawn. Just thirty miles.
It was past seven in the evening by then and she’d been driving nearly twelve hours. She had come all the way from Watson Lake in the southeastern corner of the territory and had sat through dozens of summer highway work delays on the route. She looked forward to a shower, food, a cold beer or two, and a clean bed in Dawson. She desperately wanted one more good night’s sleep before she pushed on into the great unknown.
That thought made her feel better. The great unknown. Adventure. Wild places. A break from the hustle and bustle of the modern world and the pain she was leaving behind. The thought made her smile and take an appraising glance at herself in the rearview mirror.
Cassie was in her early thirties, five foot five, and very fit, with short ash-blond hair, and dark sapphire eyes. She wore little makeup, and her skin was deeply tanned and sun spotted due to many years out in the extreme elements. As a result, she was more handsome than beautiful, and at this stage in her life that suited her just fine.
And so did traveling alone with Maverick. Cassie believed she and the shepherd were more than capable of handling themselves in any situation. She was just trying to enjoy the sheer newness of every turn in the road ahead.
But then, in the deep recesses of her mind, a little pang of familiar misery ran through her. She reached for the center console again, only to stop.
Returning her hand to the wheel, she rolled her shoulders back, and lifted her chin up high. It was something her dad had taught her as a young girl when she was feeling down.
Act like you are queen of the world, Cassie, stand like you’re queen of the damn world, and everything else will fade away, he used to tell her when she was young and moping about some minor tragedy.
Crossing a bridge, she glanced down to the creek below, swollen, silted, and rushing with runoff from the snowfields high above.
The frothing water triggered another memory, a bad one, and before she could stop herself—raw, stinking emotion as swollen and roiling as the creek below filled her chest and throat. Tears blurred her eyesight until she had to pull over beyond the bridge.
Throwing the truck in park, she rested her forehead on the steering wheel and sobbed. Maverick began to whine and snuffle at her cheek and ear.
“I know,” Cassie said, wiping her eyes, then hugging the dog. “I love you, too, big guy.”
Maverick’s tail wagged as he licked the tears off her face. Ordinarily, that would have been enough. Cassie would have bathed in her dog’s unconditional love and driven on. Instead, she lifted the center console lid and got out her Globalstar GPS satellite phone.
“I know you don’t like it, but I have to,” Cassie said, turning the phone on.
Against a voice in her head commanding her to stop, she dialed the moment she had a solid connection. At the other end of the line, a phone rang four times before going to a voice mail.
“This is Derrick,” the voice said. “You know what to do. In the meantime, remember, only dead fish swim with the current.”
The current, Cassie thought before the beep.
She wiped at her eyes and spoke into the phone, “Hi, I know I promised I wouldn’t call. But I was missing you, and… I’m going to Alaska, just like we said we always would. I’ll probably be there tomorrow, and I… I’m doing well, for the most part. Taking it minute by minute.” She paused, “Derrick, I need to tell you a secret. I need to say that—”
The phone chirped—she’d lost the satellite connection.
Cassie cursed and put the phone back in the center console before putting the Tundra back in drive.
Rolling west again, she turned on the radio and got the weather report on an AM station out of Haines Junction, which called for localized showers before clearing up with warmer weather for the next few days.
That’s good. It could easily have been pouring buckets.
She’d no sooner had that thought when the iron gray skies opened and lashed the highway with sheets of water so thick it forced her to slow to a crawl.
As the water pounded on the windshield, Cassie’s memories leaped back years. She saw herself at fourteen, crouched under an overhung cliff, watching a spectacular summer storm roll up an alpine wilderness valley where granite crags soared like cathedrals on all sides. A fire burned beneath the overhang, the smell of coffee wafted, and she remembered feeling safer and surer of herself than ever before.
How old was I that day? Fourteen?
Fourteen, and I already knew.
He was the one.
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