Mountain, p.1
Mountain, page 1
Mountain
Shadow Recon Book 8
Dale Mayer
Books in This Series:
Magnus, Book 1
Rogan, Book 2
Egan, Book 3
Barret, Book 4
Whalen, Book 5
Nikolai, Book 6
Teegan, Book 7
Mountain, Book 8
Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
About This Book
Prologue
Day 1
Day 2 Morning
Day 4 Late Afternoon
Day 5 Morning
Day 5 Afternoon
Day 5 Late Afternoon
Day 5 Near Dinnertime
Day 5 Evening
Day 6 Morning
Day 6 Late Afternoon
Day 6 Evening
Day 7 Morning
Day 7 Afternoon
Two Weeks Later
Epilogue
About Jasper
Author’s Note
About the Author
Copyright Page
About This Book
Deep in the permafrost of the Arctic, a joint task force, comprised of over one dozen countries, comes together to level up their winter skills. A mix of personalities, nationalities, and egos bring out the best—and the worst—as these globally elite men and women work and play together. They rub elbows with hardy locals and a group of scientists gathered close by …
One fatality is almost expected with this training. A second is tough but not a surprise. However, when a third goes missing? It’s hard to not be suspicious. When the missing man is connected to one of the elite Maverick team members and is a special friend of Lieutenant Commander Mason Callister? All hell breaks loose …
Mountain hit the Arctic, knowing full well they would have to drag his dead body back out of the tundra before he ever quit on his little brother, Teegan. Theirs hadn’t been the easiest of upbringings, but, when times had been tough, there’d always been the two of them.
Yet the series of events so far has gone from mysterious to downright deadly, and just what is the elusive Dr. Amelia’s part in all this anyway? Like a ghost, she slips in and around everyone. What is her problem with the base, and, more important, what is her end game?
Dr. Amelia Morrison had seen too much in her life to trust anything she can’t fathom with her own eyes. So, what she sees here makes no sense. Something is rotten at the Arctic international military training camp. She needs to stay close, but, deep inside, she just wants to run for cover. But this mountain of a man keeps her coming back, and his younger brother she manages to keep alive. However, saving a man out in these harsh elements is a completely different story than saving him from his fellow man.
Together, Mountain and Amelia need to solve this nightmare, before no one else is left alive …
Sign up to be notified of all Dale’s releases here!
Prologue
Puzzled, Mountain stared at Chef Elijah. “None of us can figure out why. Why would you do such a thing?” he asked the big, likable man.
Chef shrugged, didn’t say anything, and crossed his arms over his chest. He remained silent.
“See? It doesn’t make sense. There’s no motive. There’s absolutely nothing. I don’t have a clue why you would even try to knock out Teegan.”
“Not saying nothing,” Elijah replied through gritted teeth.
Then the door opened, and the colonel stepped in. Mountain stood and tilted his head. “Sir.”
“Did you get any answers from him?”
“No, not yet,” he replied in frustration.
The CO looked over at Elijah, disappointment evident in his expression. “I don’t know what the hell you’ve been playing at or how long you’ve been at it,” he muttered, “but you’ve sure as hell disappointed a lot of people.”
Elijah closed his eyes and didn’t say anything. Mountain watched the two of them, sensing a way-bigger betrayal happening here, as Chef and the CO had been friends for a very long time.
“I’m sorry, sir. He doesn’t want to talk, and I’ve been at it for a couple hours now,” Mountain confirmed, as he stretched his large frame.
“Oh, I can talk to him,” the colonel declared. “Might be the best thing for both of us. We go way back.”
“Not alone, sir,” Mountain noted, a warning in his tone.
The CO nodded. “No, of course not.” He glared at Elijah. “A damn nuisance this is,” he muttered. “And here I was looking forward to my breakfast.”
“We can’t let him back into the kitchen, not after …”
The colonel shot a hard look at their beloved and trusted chef and then left the room.
Mountain shook his head at Chef. “I don’t know what the hell’s going on here,” he admitted in a low voice, “but I don’t believe it for one second.”
“Mountain!” The shout came from the other side of the door. As he stepped out to the hallway, leaving a guard on Elijah, Magnus raced toward him. “What’s up?” Mountain asked, with a fierce gaze.
“You’ve got a visitor,” he said, “and unfortunately she’s hurt.”
His eyebrows shot up. “She? Who is it?”
“It’s Amelia,” Magnus confirmed, as excitement filled his voice—panic too. “She got here on her own, but she’s hurt, and she’s hurt bad. I’ve got her in with Sydney, but you need to come—now.”
Day 1
Mountain Bear Rode raced to the clinic, his footsteps thundering in the hallway, dodging people who turned to stare. Already a crazy buzz filled the air, and that was before anybody on base had heard about Amelia’s arrival. Knowing that Chef Elijah was being interrogated and was banned from the kitchen was enough to set the entire place on edge. The rumors were rampant, and everyone was divided on the subject. Mountain couldn’t imagine what was going through their minds at this point. Hell, he was in the same boat himself and couldn’t clarify the thoughts in his own head.
It felt so wrong to think that Elijah was involved in any way with any of the madness that had plagued this base and this particular survival session, especially any intentionally drugging of Teegan, Mountain’s brother. One theory was that both brothers had been drugged, via their dinner plates set aside for them that night. However, there must have been a bigger dose for Mountain, but Teegan got it instead, explaining his dangerous reaction thereafter.
Now it seemed more nefarious.
This drugging of Teegan could not be passed off as somebody else’s dirty deed. With everybody eating Chef’s food over these last twelve weeks and counting, a lot of questions arose regarding the recent illnesses that had spread through the place—not to mention whispers of poison. Mountain couldn’t imagine that their beloved Chef would have done that. Yet somebody had obviously done something, and they needed answers fast.
But fast didn’t mean accepting answers that weren’t correct. Mountain and both investigation teams, covert and overt, must have the facts in order to truly get to the bottom of all this. He couldn’t imagine how the CO felt right now either. That had to be one of the worst things to deal with, considering the longstanding close relationship between the colonel and Chef. Mountain himself had dealt with enough in-house betrayals to know how rough that was.
When he reached the clinic, the door was closed. He gave a perfunctory knock and stuck his head inside, grateful it wasn’t locked. Sydney looked over at him and glared, but he stepped inside and closed the door behind him. “How is she?” He tried to keep his voice low but failed, as it came out more as a harsh roar.
Sydney winced, then told him to keep his voice down and returned to her patient.
Mountain saw the blood dripping from the hospital bed to the floor. He stared at Sydney and asked again, “Oh my God, how is she?” Again his attempt to keep his voice calm and quiet went out the window, as the question came off as a heavy growl.
Sydney glared at him. “Stop interrupting me,” she stated in a tone that matched his mood.
With that, he had to shut up, as Sydney worked feverishly on the poor woman. Mountain walked closer and pulled the blanket out of the way and saw a fresh bullet wound oozing, the source of all the blood.
He sucked in his breath, glaring down at the evidence in front of him. Shaking his head, he muttered, “Good Christ, she was shot? What the hell?”
“Yeah, that would be my take, and this isn’t the only one.” She indicated the second bullet wound, and he looked at her in shock.
“Did she say anything?” he asked, speaking urgently.
“Yes, that she tried hard to not come here, but I was her only chance of survival now.”
He stared down at Amelia. “Why didn’t she come in before? Did she say anything at all that would tell us why?”
“I don’t know if it means anything, after her first few words. She was in shock, and, by the looks of it, she’s got old wounds that she’s dealing with as well. I haven’t had a chance to get to those yet because I’m too busy trying to stop the bleeding in the two fresh wounds,” she shared, cleaning out one now.
As more blood welled up, she started cursing, and he winced. Sydney was overwhelmed, and, no matter how good of a doctor she was, she didn’t have all the resources she needed.
“Put me to use,” he declared.
“I need a nurse in here to help,” she replied, still working feverishly.
“No time for that, and I’ve got an awful lot of field dressing experience.” She gave him a sharp look, and he gave her a flat one back. “Come on. Tell me what yo u need.”
And, with that, she barked orders that he struggled to keep up with, but, about twenty minutes later, she gave him a nod, as if acknowledging his help. “We might have beaten it.” She watched anxiously, as she released the tourniquet slowly, waiting to see if the blood would start pouring again, but instead it appeared to ease back.
She sucked in her breath in relief. “A slight reprieve.” She quickly pulled back the covers and checked the rest of Amelia’s body, looking for more wounds. He waited, his gaze equally discerning, as they both sorted through the wounds. When he saw torn flesh and the puckering of a closing wound high up on her shoulder, he sucked in his breath. “That’s another bullet hole.”
“It is,” she agreed, “but it’s also weeks old.”
“Jesus,” he muttered, the shocks continuing to reverberate through his system, as he realized that not only had Amelia been shot but she’d been recently shot at two different times. The first time had been earlier, and she had done amazingly well at tending to herself, cleaning and stitching up her wound. Still, the second shooting had dropped Amelia to the point that she needed someone else to give her a hand. He wondered what it would have taken for her to come here for aid, and now he knew.
“The only reason she wouldn’t have come,” Sydney guessed, looking at her patient intently, “is that Amelia had to be suspicious of the person who shot her the first time and the possibility that it’s someone from here.”
“That’s a huge leap,” Mountain noted.
She glared at him. “I’m in the business of huge leaps.”
He winced at that because, in some ways, so was he. Sometimes those leaps were all he had in order to make the next set of questions rise to the surface to be answered, and those answers often took him right back around the same circle.
“I can’t imagine what she went through,” he murmured, with a tic in his jaw revealing how close he was to losing control of his temper. “She was out sledding, which is exhausting, especially with that shoulder still healing from an earlier bullet wound.”
“These two more recent wounds are worse. However, one appears to be much more superficial. The other one she took through her side. I can’t find any damage on the inside,” she shared, and he looked at her skeptically. “Yeah, I’ve already checked. I don’t want to stitch her up though, not until the bleeding has fully stopped.” Sydney sagged back a step, looked down at her bloody hands and the pools of blood on the floor. “That poor woman.”
Mountain checked the bruises on Amelia’s shoulders and her legs. Her body was heavily and quite decently muscled, yet looked to have suffered for the last while. She was lean—almost too lean. “Is there anything else she needs from us right now?” he asked.
“She needs blood, but that’s not happening here. She’s cold, and we need to get her covered back up soon,” Sydney replied, checking Amelia’s vitals. “I staunched the bleeding, so now I can stitch her up. Then we’ll bandage her and get her as warmed up as we can. I can do the bandage part, so you go see if you can roust up something warm for her.”
“Heated blankets?”
“Sure, although, with Elijah out of commission and not in the kitchen, you’ll have to check in with Avalon and Chrissy.”
“I’ll sort it out.” Mountain walked to the sink, quickly washed his hands, and then headed to the kitchen. As he got there, he found the two women busily working.
Avalon winced at him. “Don’t know where you’ve been,” she admitted, squinting her eyes and checking him over, but then her face relaxed. “You’re still standing, so I presume you won.”
He glanced down and noted he hadn’t gotten all the blood washed off his arms. He nodded. “I need a heated blanket, so if you have any way to make that happen, let’s do it as quickly as you can, please.”
“Yeah.” She pointed to the heaters on the side. “We have blankets set aside just for Sydney.” She didn’t say anything more, just quickly popped a blanket in one machine and pushed the button.
In a few minutes, Mountain stepped out of the kitchen, a warm blanket tucked up close, and he raced back to the medical clinic. As he got in there, Sydney was putting the final bandage on.
“Bandages are a good sign,” he said, as he carefully covered their patient with the still-warm blanket.
“Yeah, she’s holding her own at the moment, and I’ll keep her knocked out for now, so she doesn’t destroy my handiwork by moving too much.” He frowned at that, but Sydney shook her head. “I understand how you feel. It would be nice if we didn’t have to do that, but I can’t have her opening any of the stitches. She’ll hemorrhage, and we’ll lose her,” she stated flatly.
That was a stark reality. When it came to medical experience, Sydney had the final say.
“Fine, but I need to know if she says anything.”
“If she says anything right now, it won’t be coherent, and you can’t go with it.”
“I don’t care if it’s coherent or not,” he argued. “We need answers, and she’s got the bulk of them.”
“Maybe so,” Sydney admitted, “but Amelia’s also the most injured witness you have had so far and will be largely incoherent for quite a while. So I’ll keep her drugged for now, at least until I’m satisfied that I can get her out of this without any problems. I need her airlifted out pronto, but the weather out there is shit.”
He nodded. “I guess in that case, I’m staying here then.”
“Why?”
He shrugged. “I won’t take a chance of her saying something and me missing it, not to mention a repeat performance to harm her. Remember what happened to Carl.”
“Fine,” she agreed. “As long as I don’t need that other bed, you can have it.” She pointed to the second hospital bed off to the side.
He gave her a small smile. “How many times has this bed been used as surveillance during this training session?”
“Too many,” she replied, “as in, seriously too many times. Honest to God, I’ve lost count.”
He gave a half laugh. “The good news is that, with her arrival and with your magical hands,” he noted, with a smile in her direction, “Amelia should pull through.”
“I really hope so,” Sydney said. “You need to inform the colonel, and we should get word out to her family.” Mountain frowned at that, and she watched the expression on his face change. “Obviously you don’t agree with that idea, and you need to tell me why.”
“Somebody tried to kill her, not once but twice—that we know of. Since I have no idea who that might have been, I would just as soon keep it quiet for now. Plus, nobody seems to think she’s missing,” he pointed out. “As a matter of fact, they all seem to think that she’s very capable out there.”
“I agree,” Sydney replied. “And I think, in this case, if it weren’t for human interference, she is very capable, but, the fact of the matter is, somebody shot her.”
“Exactly. So, I would prefer to keep her presence here as secret as possible, for as long as we can, at least until she can get back on her feet anyway.”
She gave him a sideways look. “Her family?”
He frowned. “I may have to go to the village.”
“How can you go to the village and keep an eye on her?” she pointed out, with a bright smile.
He shook his head. “At the moment I have no clue. First things first. I’ll stay close and confirm that she makes it through the night.”
“Then we’ll both be here,” she declared, with a warning glance at him, “because I have no intention of leaving her, not until she’s a bit more stable.” And that was the last she had to say on it.
He pulled up a chair and texted Magnus. When a knock came on the door a few minutes later, Sydney looked over at him, and he shrugged. “That’ll be Magnus.”
She walked to the door and let Magnus in.
“Nobody else comes in or out,” Mountain ordered.
“Not even a nurse?” Magnus asked.
“Nobody. Just Sydney, me, and now you.”
Magnus studied him, then nodded and walked over for a closer look at the woman on the bed. “What do we know?”
Mountain let Sydney give Magnus a rundown of Amelia’s physical ailments, his expressions mirroring Mountain’s when he had heard about the recent double gunshot wounds. “Jesus,” Magnus muttered. “No wonder she didn’t want to come in. She was already injured and probably figured somebody here shot her—or maybe she knew it for sure.”
