Scot couldn’t believe what he was hearing and sat up ramrod straight. “What? They were all taken out?”

“All of them.” Palmer paused for a moment to let it sink in before continuing. “We had several JARs, as you know, in the trees along that part of Death Chute, and they were sanctioned as well.”

“What about Hat Trick?”

“We don’t know.”

“What do you mean, you don’t know?”

“We haven’t been able to recover his body.”

“Holy shit.” Despite the anger and sadness he felt, his years of training had taught him that when the time came, he would be able to grieve privately, but that for now, he needed to filter his emotions. What mattered was not how he felt, but how he thought.

“So,” Scot continued with amazing composure, “the entire detail and the JAR team was sanctioned. There is no sign of Hat Trick. I can’t believe this. Somebody must have grabbed him.”

“We’re not positive, but-”

“You found all of the other bodies, sanctioned, but not his. Sounds like he was grabbed to me. Have there been any demands?”

“Hold on. You are getting way ahead of things here.”

“Palmer, how am I getting ahead? You found all the detail agents, but not Hat Trick. They normally stick pretty close to him.”

“Yes, but this was an avalanche. He could have been swept in any direction.”

“Don’t give me that. You know how this looks. If it was just an avalanche, that would be one thing, but his detail was terminated.”

“Scot, we’re all in shock. Never in the history of the Secret Service have we lost so many agents protecting the president. Nor has anyone ever succeeded in a kidnapping, which is how we’re playing this.”

“So, you do agree.”

“Yes.”

“Jesus, I can’t believe this.”

“We do have one lead, though.”

“What kind of lead?”

“Harper managed to get off a shot and kill one of the people we believe were responsible for the attack.”

Good ol’ Harp, Scot thought to himself. “They left the body behind? Who was it? What can you tell me?”

“We’re waiting for confirmation on the identity. We’ve had to wire the prints and picture off to CIA station chiefs in the Mideast.”

“Sand Land? You’re telling me the job was carried out by a bunch of Bedouin Bobs? That’s impossible! The only thing they know about snow is that it’s spelled with two different letters than sand.”

“What I’m telling you is that we’ve got upward of thirty dead Secret Service agents, a missing president, and one deceased male of Mideastern descent found at the scene of the crime with a bullet in the back of his head that I’m betting dollars to doughnuts was fired from Sam Harper’s SIG.”

Scot put his elbows on the cold granite countertop and rested his head in his hands. He had to be dreaming. Soon he would wake up and this nightmare would be over.

As he sat there with the microwave breakfast and coffee going sour in his stomach, the pieces began falling into place. “The failure in our communication systems wasn’t caused by the weather, then, was it?”

“We still don’t know.”

“So, what’s the status of our investigation? Are they gridding Death Chute and going through it millimeter by millimeter?”

“No.”

“No?” Scot asked incredulously. “What do you mean no?”

“Scot, you put the pieces together just as fast as everyone else did. The president has been kidnapped or worse, and that now makes this an FBI matter. We have been instructed to secure the area.”

“And that’s it?”

“Yeah, that’s it.”

“Who gave those orders?”

“It came from D.C. after Hollenbeck spoke with the director of the Secret Service. Agents from the Salt Lake FBI field office are already on-site waiting for the special agent in charge who is going to handle the investigation. He’s due in about an hour.”

Scot groaned, knowing who it would be. “Let me guess, the SAC is Gary Lawlor, right?”

“Yeah, the FBI’s deputy director himself. Makes sense. The director is gonna have no choice but to stay in D.C. and coordinate. This is going to be one hell of a firestorm.”

17

Harvath needed to clear his head. The information Palmer had relayed was overwhelming. Upward of thirty agents dead and the president missing, presumed kidnapped. It was too much to grasp.

Scot grabbed a blue-and-white Secret Service parka hanging by the back door of the kitchen and walked outside. Three agents taking a cigarette break looked in his direction, but didn’t say anything. What could be said?

Harvath walked into the woods alongside the house, and when he felt he was out of sight of the other agents, leaned against one of the tall trees and closed his eyes. A million questions raced through his mind. What happened? How could I not have seen this coming? Did I overlook something during the advance?

Every whacko in a four-hundred-mile radius had been accounted for, the more dangerous of them locked up for the few days the president would be here. There hadn’t been any pings on U.S. Immigration hot sheets, and there had been no new threats from any extremist groups that had even hinted at this.

He breathed deeply, letting the chilly air fill his lungs, and held it until it burned. Slowly, he let the air escape in a long hiss. He repeated the process again, trying to get a handle on what was going on.

Upward of thirty agents killed and the president missing. Scot began second-guessing himself, convinced that there had been some sort of warning sign that he’d missed. There were still agents out there trapped under the snow, but Palmer had been right. The chances that they were alive were slim to none. Scot fought back a surge of guilt. Many of those men had been his friends, and they all had been his responsibility. Not now, a voice inside him said. Turn and let it burn. But it was so hard. Even though he was trained to be a master of his mind and emotions, he was still human. He had lost comrades before, but it had been on missions to faraway places where he had been striking at threats to domestic or international security. Those men had fallen in battle, but this, this wasn’t the same. These Secret Service agents never had a chance, never saw what was coming. And they had been hit on home turf.

The thought of foreign insurgents executing this attack on American soil and then scooting back to wherever they came from, especially if it was Sand Land, really pissed Scot off. Deep breathing out in the woods wasn’t the road to the answers he wanted. Besides, his ribs were killing him. The answers would be found where the action was, up on Death Chute. Until Gary Lawlor got here, the crime scene still belonged to the Secret Service, and as the leader of the presidential advance team, Scot felt he had not only a right, but a duty to examine every inch of it.

”What, are you nuts?” said a young FBI agent from the Salt Lake field office when Harvath ducked under the tape and started making his way to the scene.

Scot had hitched a ride up with a Sno-Cat that was hauling equipment as close as it could get to the plateau, where a combination of Secret Service and FBI agents were acting as Sherpas, walking the gear the rest of the way to the crime scene.

“Listen, Agent”-Scot looked at the identification tag hanging around the man’s muscled neck-“Zuschnitt. I need to get in there and take a look around.” The man had about three inches and a good seventy-five pounds on Scot, but Scot had messed with bigger guys and come out on top.

The FBI agent was in no mood to deal with Harvath. His orders were to let no one in until Lawlor got there, and he intended to make sure those orders were carried out. “This is a crime scene under the jurisdiction of the FBI. No one goes in there except FBI. Capisce?”

Capisce? Where did a Salt Lake Fed with a name like Zuschnitt pick up capisce? Scot wondered. His need to get answers turned the flame up on his anger a couple of notches. “My name’s Scot Harvath, Secret Service. I was head of the advance team-”