The Target Read online

  Strom Pace groaned. He rolled over on his sleeping bag and worked on his back stretches. “We may starve here, but if we do, I’ll know I’ve lived a full life. Life is short, so I took my disability check and said it’s time to start living. I guess I picked the wrong cruise for that.”

  “Oh, great,” Ava said. “I hope you’re not going to start complaining about your disability again. I’m not going to put up with it.”

  Jake closed his eyes and dreamed of war booty and treasure.

  Strom grumbled something, but Jake wasn’t sure what. Jake tried to stay focused on his visions of scuba diving and hoisting netfuls of loot up to his waiting zodiac.

  “I’m surprised you can sleep.” Jake somehow knew this was directed to him, and he opened his eyes.

  He saw that Ava’s sleeping bag was still rolled up by the door.

  “You may want get your sleeping bag unrolled,” Jake said. “That way you’ll be set when we turn the lights out.” They had no generator or power, so the only lights were flashlights.

  Ava hissed. “I’ve got my own light. Anyway, I’m not sleeping in here.”

  “Why’s that?” Pace said.

  “I’m not one to judge, but Jake is in here. I don’t know how he can sleep. He never did explain the paint on his clothes. I think it’s clear that he’s working for the killers.”

  Jake laughed and then wished he hadn’t. “I wish you’d stop telling lies about me. Do you know that you’re a liar and a bully?”

  “What’s the matter with you, Ava?” Red said. “Why do you talk to people like that?”

  Ava glared at Red. “You sure have been quiet lately. Why’s that? You got something to hide?”

  Red pushed his climbing axe out of the way and rolled over. “What’s the matter with you?”

  “Who are you to judge me?” Ava said.

  “You’re being disrespectful.”

  “I’m sick of him. If not for him, we wouldn’t be here. Great funeral, Sands. Thanks a lot.”

  He opened his eyes and looked over at Ava.

  She said, “It was your shooting the other day that stirred up all this trouble. That’s why we had to have a funeral.”

  Jake sat up and leaned back on his elbows. “It seems to me the shooting was well under way before I got involved.”

  She pointed at him. “You escalated it. Now Andreas is dead, too, and that’s on your conscience.”

  Talia looked up from her diary. “Ava, why don’t you just shut up? We’re sick and tired of your criticizing and blaming. Jake has been trying to help.”

  Ava scoffed. “I doubt that. Why don’t you get me off this island? Did you hear me?” Now she screamed: “Get me off this island!”

  Talia sat up. “Didn’t I tell you to shut up? I don’t like bullies, so I recommend you don’t provoke me.”

  “We have to give up our guns and talk to them. It’s our best chance.”

  “They just killed nine innocent men,” Talia said. “I don’t trust them.”

  Ava stood and turned the door handle. “I’m out of here. I’ll be sleeping over in the supply shed.”

  “Don’t worry,” Pace said. “No hard feelings. You don’t have to sleep over there all alone.”

  She shot him a hateful look on her way out.

  Jake lay back and listened to the screeching wind and the shaking rafters. He needed to relax. Many things were bothering him, some related to Ava. Her accusations were an irritation, and now she was behaving in strange ways.

  After ten minutes or so, Red Mayo crawled out of his sleeping bag and put on his shoes. “I’m going to the supply room. I’ll be back in a minute. I left my stocking cap there.”

  Pace groaned in response.

  Jake said, “Alright” but kept his mind on visions of prying open a big chest inside the foc’sle of an old World War Two cargo ship. He saw bubbles rising in front of his scuba mask, but then he was interrupted by the horror of seeing an eye in the gloom of the silt-thick waters—the eye of a killer whale. Jake’s dreams were interrupted when someone fell against the door. Even with all the howling wind, the moan of a human had a distinct sound, and so did the fist that pounded the door three times.

  “It’s open,” Pace said. “I’m in bed. You trying to kill me?”

  Jake was on his feet. Pace may not have sensed trouble, but Jake did. He bounded to the door and pulled it open. Red Mayo fell into the room followed by a flurry of snow.

  “He got me,” Mayo said. “The bastard got me.”

  “Talia, get over here. He’s hurt.”

  “Supply room,” Mayo said. “He came out of the shadows.”

  Dressed in her loose pajamas, Talia kneeled down and pulled back Mayo’s bloody shirt.

  “Knifed me,” Mayo said.

  “Who did?”

  “Horace and his boys were”—He groaned in pain — “stealing supplies.” Mayo reached up and grabbed Jake’s collar with a shaky hand. “Watch out, Jake. I was a marine, but Horace is fast. He’s a demon. He only spared me to tell you that he plans to kill you.” Mayo gasped, and his eyes came open wide.

  “Give me some room,” Talia said. “I need to stop the bleeding.”

  “I can help with that,” Len Jackson said. “I did it a dozen times in Somalia.”

  “Fine. Just don’t talk. Jake, back off and give us some room.”

  Jake moved away and sat down on his sleeping bag. They had it under control, but he was frightened at the thought of losing Red Mayo. If anyone seemed invincible, it was Mayo. He was exactly the kind of guy that Jake would want to have around in he was in a tough situation, but now Mayo was in trouble. Jake was worried. He liked Mayo. The man kept his cool and did what had to be done. A former marine, he was as tough as can be, yet look at him now, Jake thought. He’s fighting for his life. That reminded Jake what Mayo had said. Horace let him live only to pass on a death threat to Jake.

  It was grim to hear something like that, but Jake had bigger worries. That’s why he’d been trying to keep his mind on other things. The way he saw it, Horace wasn’t his biggest worry even if he was threatening to kill him and using a knife to prove he meant business.

  Jake might not live long enough to face Horace’s blade. He was more worried over the Gitano, who might strike this very night and spare no one. There were only two days worth of supplies left at best—and a lot of mouths to feed, but they might all perish at any time. The Gitano was the biggest worry because when the grim reaper came, he rode on the black horse named death.

  Talia worked on Mayo for a long time until the morphine took effect and he drifted off to sleep.

  Jake put all the suffering and fear and tragedy out of his mind and tried to relax. For what he was planning to do, he would need a clear head.

  CHAPTER 15

  The storm lasted two days and two nights, burying the new graves under a foot of snow. After that, the wind, died down to around forty knots. More importantly, the precipitation and storm clouds thinned out at low altitudes, and Jake could see the mountains. Early on the third day, he put on his snowshoes and set out into the darkness, climbing up the mountain. Hiking in snow and ice was not easy, but his eyes got used to the darkness, and he struggled hard against the slope. The pain from the gunshot came back, but it wasn’t as bad anymore.

  When he crested, it was still dark, so he burrowed down into the snow and rested. The deep snow gave him wind protection, and he lay there and listened to the wind. Somehow he fell asleep there. When he awoke, it was light out. He scanned the mountainside with his binoculars. The sniper was nowhere to be found, and after studying the terrain and the fresh snow for a while, Jake felt reasonably confident that the sniper was not in the area. He was neither stalking the whaling station nor watching over the hidden cruise ship in the next bay. Jake was impressed that the massive camouflage tarp had held fast. They must have really secured it well.

  Because the sniper was also dressed in white, Jake spent a long time on the mountainside, double-
and triple-checking his conclusion. Mistakes were costly, but overlooking a sniper would be fatal, and a good sniper would be hard to spot.

  Jake studied the terrain until the smallest imperfection in the snow along a high ridge caught his attention. Twenty minutes later, he crested on the ridge, and sure enough, he was onto the sniper’s snowshoe tracks. His trail, however, surprised Jake. The sniper had hiked southeast along the mountain ridge, heading away from the station.

  Buffeted by forty knot winds, Jake set off after his prey at a slower than usual pace due to his leg wound, which was becoming more aggravated.

  The ridge was largely wind-swept ice, so the tracks disappeared after a while. Jake saw quartz running through some of the rock, and for some reason he thought of places he’d been in the Cascades Mountains of Washington State. He recalled his tracking lessons with Stuart in the Cascades. When Jake was a kid, his stepfather, a disabled former Navy Seal had put him through six years of brutal training. It gave Stuart a purpose in life, and Jake learned survival skills. The training was kept secret. Stuart feared that if a bunch of bleeding-heart social workers found out that a kid was pushing himself beyond exhaustion on a regular basis, they would leap at the opportunity to break up a family and thrust the kid into a system where he would be raised by random strangers.

  That was all a long time ago. Now, here Jake was years later, and those lessons in tracking flooded back into his mind. Based on how fresh the tracks were, he put himself an hour behind. He slogged 2 ½ miles over snow, rock, and ice. The sniper’s strategy made no sense to Jake because he’d moved out of striking range of the whaling station. He’d climbed to the very spine of the island and headed southwest.

  Snowshoeing along the ridge, Jake saw where the tracks turned downhill and disappeared into an area of huge boulders on the slope. Dozens of these boulders, which were twenty feet or more in diameter, created a giant rock pile-up that stretched two hundred yards along the mountain’s slope.

  Now he was nervous. The sniper had cover and Jake didn’t, but the man was probably on the other side of the boulders watching the coast; otherwise, Jake would be dead. Favoring his good leg, he hiked down to the boulders as quietly as possible, but the sound of the snowshoes was mostly drowned out by the pounding wind.

  What was the shooter up to? he wondered.

  Once Jake got down to the rocks, he breathed more easily. Now he not only had cover, but he had the element of surprise. Discarding his snow shoes, he pulled out his handgun and stalked through the rocks, moving slowly, inches at a time. Wind howled around him in the dim cavities. Mostly, the rocks created natural walls and ceilings, but wind cried through the openings. Light slipped in through gaps and cracks in the mound. He studied the ground and saw little pieces of quartz that had been driven into the ground by boots. A well-worn path wove between the boulders. The sniper had evidently been using this as a base camp for some time. This surprised Jake because until the Atlas showed up, there couldn’t have been any other enemy to hunt. Whoever these people were, this showed they were obsessive about security. The sniper was a coast watcher, probably on alert for boats that came through. Jake froze when he heard what sounded like a rock pick.

  After creeping through natural passages among the rocks, he looked around a corner into a cavern, dim but with some light coming in through fractures in the ceiling.

  Jake didn’t move. Confusion blasted through his brain.

  He was not surprised to find a natural cavern among the rocks. What had taken him off guard was that he’d stumbled upon the entrance to a mine. What had surprised him was the seal skin draped over a boulder, the dozens of strips of meat strips hanging from driftwood sticks and cross-country skis that were stretched from rock to rock. Shovels and picks leaned against stone walls, and Jake saw a wooden box labeled ‘Danger, Handle with Care’, which apparently held explosives for mining. Even with the weeping wind, he could now hear the smashing and crashing of a pick deep in the tunnel.

  The situation began to take shape. The reason the sniper had chosen a location far out of range of the station is that this wasn’t the sniper at all. There was someone else on the island—a miner. The one thing that bothered Jake was a hand-grenade resting on a little shelf among the rocks.

  “Who are you?” Jake yelled.

  The pinging stopped.

  “Our crew is stranded down at the whaling station. What are you doing here?”

  After a pause, a man said, “How do I know you’re telling the truth?” He spoke English in an American accent.

  “We’ve been here a few days. There’s a sniper in the mountains from the next bay to the northwest. I followed your trail because I thought you were him.”

  “Why don’t you people go back to where you came from?”

  “As I said, we’re stranded. Our ship was sabotaged. Are you coming out or not?”

  “You won’t shoot, will you?”

  “Just keep your hands where I can see them.”

  “Good because I’m armed and I can shoot just as well as you can.”

  “I said I won’t shoot. Put your gun down.”

  “Dream on, mister. You’re the trespasser here.”

  “Alright, come on then.”

  Jake saw a lantern emerge in the darkness. Then a man stepped out into the cavern in the rocks holding a revolver in his other dirty hand. His gray hair and beard suggested he was about a year or two late on his trip to the barber. He was well overdue for a shower, too.

  “You sound like an American,” Jake said.

  “It don’t matter where I’m from, does it?”

  “I guess not.”

  “You guess right.”

  Jake nodded toward the grenade. “How do you explain that?”

  “That’s nothing. I found it over at Leith Harbor ten years ago. During World War Two, the Germans destroyed some of the British and Norwegian factories and boats; in response, the Royal Navy armed a merchant ship to patrol the area. They also set up some coastal-defense guns like the four-inch gun over at Stromness Bay. It was manned by Norwegians. The gun’s still there.”

  “Why are you here?”

  “Been here twenty-one years. What’s this you say about sabotage?”

  Jake sat down on a flat rock, but he held onto his gun. “The ship was supposed to just drop me and a few others off at Grytviken, but a saboteur disabled it. Then we were attacked by a gunboat. What do you know about the crew north of the whaling station?”

  The bearded man leaned against a rock, lowering the six-shot revolver but keeping it handy. “I stay away, and you better not tell anyone I’m up here.” A wild energy glinted in his gray eyes.

  “Don’t worry about it,” Jake said.

  “Good. I don’t know who they are, but I seen what they done to your crew. I been watching. I don’t get many visitors around here, and that’s how I like it.”

  The howling of the wind hit a high, eerie pitch as gusts shrieked in the rocks. The cavern made a nice wind block and allowed no more than a breeze to enter.

  “We’re stuck for the time being,” Jake said, “but the gunboat crew has already taken out eight of our guys, plus the caretaker. I picked up your trail and thought it was their sniper.”

  The miner cursed. “You said the ship was going to drop you off. Are you a scientist?”

  “No, I’m—”

  “Then what are you after here anyway? If it’s gold, you’re wasting your time. It took me years to hit a vein and I’ll defend it with my life.”

  “I’m not a miner,” Jake said. “I’m a maritime historian. I’m looking for a lost ship that may have left some clues around this area. Records show she visited the island back in 1945. She was never seen again, but that doesn’t mean she never got here. Man named Köhler arranged to pick up orders from Grand Admiral Dönitz. I have reason to believe a second set of those orders are still on the island.”

  “I don’t follow you.” The man looked at Jake with skepticism. “Why you care about
some old document?”

  “Like I said, I’m a historian.” Jake wasn’t about to mention the fortune in lost Nazi loot. “Part of that cargo was a man named Köhler.”

  The miner was quiet for a moment. His gaze drifted off to the side.

  “That mean something to you?” Jake said.

  The man nodded. “I knew Köhler. He built a large cabin a couple of miles up the coast.”

  “What?” Jake said, incredulous. “Here?”

  “That’s right. He didn’t care much for neighbors, and neither do I, so we got along just fine.”

  “A cabin on South Georgia.” Jake was suddenly wondering if the Greifswalder might have stashed her plunder here. It seemed unlikely.

  “Yeah, he built it with cedar planks he shipped in. It’s down by the Sacks Glacier. Go take a look if you want to. Don’t go inside though.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because Köhler was a Nazi. Far as I’m concerned, that cabin is cursed. I stay away from it.”

  “How could he live on a British Island? He was German.”

  “We don’t ask personal questions down here. Anyway, who was going to complain? Few people come here.”

  “I didn’t get your name.”

  “Let’s just say it’s Rivera.”

  “Will you take me to Köhler’s cabin?”

  “Not interested.” The miner turned his back on Jake for a moment and peered through a hole in the rocks.

  “Why not, sir?”

  Rivera looked at Jake’s boots and then slowly lifted his gaze up his eyes. “I’ve got my reasons. Anyway, it’d be a waste of time. There’s nothing there anymore. The place has been abandoned for twenty years. Why do you want to go there?”