Manhunter

But tonight the weather was his friend.

He flattened himself into the wet loam, his breathing ragged as he studied the small cabin in the clearing below, the whites of his eyes stark against his mud camouflage.

Lightning cracked open the sky, and for a brief moment the darkness split, revealing a monochromatic snapshot of the churning gray river beyond the cabin, giant logs spinning violently among bobbing flood debris.

Then the image was gone.

He waited for a second for his vision to readjust, then approached the cabin slowly on hands and knees, creeping round to the side with no windows.

Rain leaked into his eyes and blood continued to gush from the ragged bullet trough across his left thigh.

Pain was his friend, he told himself. Adrenaline was his friend.

Twelve months in maximum security might have blunted the brutal edge of his massive physique, but not the steel of his mind. Being a prisoner of war had trained him for this.

U.S. military black ops had trained him for this.

His art was combat. Tracking. Evasion. Infiltration. Torture. He was a killing machine.

A human hunter.

He inched around the cabin, peered up into a window. He needed clothes. Equipment. A needle. Thread. Disinfectant. Then he needed to make it appear as if he’d drowned in that river while he was heading south for the Canadian-U.S. border.

But he was really going north, to the Yukon. To the small town of Black Arrow Falls where they were sending Gabriel Caruso, the cop who had put him behind bars.

He wanted that Mountie.

The game isn’t over yet, Caruso, he told himself. It’s not over until one of us dies.

He found a rusted piece of crowbar buried in the grass. Ducking round to the front door, he quickly jimmied the bar between the lock and the door. One sharp jerk, and the lock splintered away from wood.

He stilled. Listened. The heavy iron fisted at his side, he entered the dark cabin.

The real hunt had just begun.

Chapter 1

Black Arrow Falls

Northern Yukon

Population 389

Silver Karvonen swung her hunting rifle round to her back and hefted a bag of feed into the bed of her red pickup, three husky-wolf crossbreeds milling around at her feet. The bag landed with a dull thud, releasing a cloud of fine gray glacial dust.

Everything was dry. Hot. The leaves had turned brittle gold and the bush was redolent with the scents of late autumn, the air adrift with the white fluff of fireweed gone to seed, blowing on the hot afternoon breeze like summer snow.

Silver swiped the perspiration from her brow with the back of her wrist as she returned to the shade of the airstrip hangar for another load.

Although the night had brought fresh skiffs of snow to the high granite peaks, the mid-September afternoon had spiked to sweltering temperatures. Even so, it would be a mere matter of days before snow blew into the dusty streets of Black Arrow Falls itself, blanketing the small northern town for six months of long, dark and isolated winter.

Silver didn’t mind. She liked winter best.

That’s when her work at the hunting lodge was over. Time was her own, and she could run with her dogs.

But right now she was tired, and in need of a shower. She’d been tracking a large grizzly sow for the better part of the day, arising when the grass was still stiff with night frost and the trail easy to follow.

She’d set off at first light with her three favorite hounds, moving quickly, wanting to sight the grizzly one last time before nightfall.

Silver had encountered her quarry in a wide valley colored rust with fall berry scrub. She’d observed her bear quietly from up high on a ridge, downwind of the animal.

The omnivore was massive—maybe five hundred pounds, close to her peak hibernation weight, sunlight glinting on a majestic golden-brown coat that rippled over powerful haunches as she foraged along the valley bottom.

Within a week the bear would be digging a den oriented leeward of prevailing winter winds. She’d enter it a few days later when she scented the first winter storms in the air. Hopefully her troubles would then be over.

This grizzly had mauled a British hunter last week.

Silver had been contracted by the understaffed conservation office to hunt—and shoot—her.

But after tracking and watching the sow for the last three days, Silver did not think she was a predatory man killer. The British hunting party had alleged one story, but the tracks had told Silver another.

From the evidence around the attack site, Silver deduced that the men had encountered the sow shortly after she’d been injured in a fight with an aggressive and mature male grizz who’d just killed her male cub-of-the-year.

The sow had fought off the much larger male but lost her cub and a claw on her left front paw in the process.

From that point Silver had dubbed her Broken Claw, and as always, she began to emotionally connect with the creature she was tracking.

Injured and severely stressed, Broken Claw had been guarding her cub’s dead body when the hunters had startled her along a narrow trail high on the rocky outcrop. She had charged the group in an attempt to warn the hunters back. The men fled, triggering chase.

The grizz swiped at the last hunter who’d been spared death only because the power of her blow had sent him tumbling like a rag doll down the sharp scree of a narrow ravine; he’d later been airlifted out. This much Silver knew from the conservation officer’s report. The scuffs and tracks, the remains of the cub, told her the rest.

Retreating quietly from the rock ridge with her dogs, Silver had made up her mind this afternoon to let the bear be.

There was no way she was going to kill that bereaved mother to satisfy a misguided lust for vengeance. Things had played out as nature had intended. Wild justice, she called it.

Silver understood what it meant to lose a child to an aggressive male. She knew just how far a mother would go to eliminate a threat.

It didn’t make her a killer.

In a few days the healing snows would come, and Broken Claw would be asleep in her den.

She lifted another sack of horse feed from the airstrip hangar, lugged it to her truck, perspiration dampening her T-shirt as she launched it into the back. One more to go, and then she’d be done with the delivery Air North had flown in for her that morning.

But she stilled at the distant drone of a plane. Silver squinted up into the hazy sky and saw the small twin-engine prop used by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police emerge shimmering between gaps in the massive snow-capped peaks.

The new cop, she thought, shading her eyes, watching as the plane banked around Armchair Glacier, coming in for the steep descent necessitated by the valley formation and prevailing crosswinds.

In a community this small, everyone already knew the new Mountie’s name—Sergeant Gabriel Caruso. Big shot detective from British Columbia.