Chapter 32 - Tracks in the Red Cedar
The rain across the Olympic Peninsula did not fall in drops; it descended as a dense, suffocating cloud of moisture that hung suspended between the four-hundred-foot canopy of Sitka spruce and western hemlock.
Fifty miles west of Port Angeles, the paved highways ended, giving way to unmapped logging roads carved through the wilderness during the timber booms of the 1940s.
Our convoy was lean: my 4Runner, two unmarked tactical Suburbans carrying Tommy’s elite interdiction team, and an FBI mobile communications van keeping an encrypted satellite lock on our transponder.
"The wool fiber matched commercial maritime forestry gear distributed through a supply depot in Forks," Tommy explained over the tactical radio, his voice cutting through the hiss of the tires against wet shale. "Three weeks ago, an extremist splinter faction calling themselves the 'Sovereign Redoubt' bought forty sets of wet-weather gear and six commercial misting foggers. They’re led by a disgraced former Army chemical officer named Garrett Vance—no relation to David Vance, but a fanatic who blames the federal government for the loss of his family’s timber holdings."
"The antivenom theft was insurance," I said, watching Jax through the rearview mirror. The young dog sat upright, his nose pressed against the cracked window, cataloging the changing scent profile of the rainforest: rich loamy humus, crushed ferns, rotting bark, and ocean ozone blowing inland from the Pacific.
"Garrett Vance engineered a mutated, aerosolized variant of the diamondback hemotoxin," Tommy continued. "If he releases it via commercial foggers in an enclosed municipal center—like the Seattle ferry terminals—it causes massive, systemic internal hemorrhaging within minutes. And he holds the only supply of the synthetic cure. He can hold the entire Puget Sound hostage for whatever terms he dictates."
Two miles past the abandoned Calawah River bridge, Jax gave a sudden, hard whine from the back seat.
He didn't just smell the target; he felt the road change.
I cut the engine and coasted onto a shoulder overgrown with thick sword ferns. Tommy’s vehicles mirrored the maneuver, their headlights extinguished, leaving us submerged in the deep emerald gloom of the ancient forest.
I opened Jax’s door. He stepped onto the moss-covered gravel without a sound, his body instantly dropping into an aggressive hunting stalk.
Ten yards ahead, hidden beneath a fresh carpet of cedar boughs, was an engineered spike strip designed to shred tactical run-flat tires. Jax walked up to the edge of the concealment, turned his back to the road, and planted his paws squarely on the centerline, blocking my advance.
"Good boy," I whispered, pulling the evergreen branches back to expose the jagged steel teeth. "Trap confirmed."
Beyond the spike strip, the ground sloped sharply down toward a misty ravine. The air here was unnatural. Over the sweet, earthy fragrance of the rainforest drifted a faint, terrifyingly familiar scent: the musky, dry odor of hundreds of reptilian scales, blended with the chemical tang of synthetic laboratory preservatives.
Garrett Vance hadn't just built a hideout here. He had constructed an industrial-scale breeding and extraction compound deep inside the protected timber preserve.
"Foot mobiles on the ridge," Tommy’s voice whispered through my earpiece.
Through the thick moss hanging from the cedar boughs, I saw them: two sentries wearing ghillie suits made of wet burlap, armed with suppressed assault rifles, patrolling the perimeter of a rusted chain-link fence topped with razor wire.
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Jax’s lips curled back over his ivory fangs in absolute silence. The black mask of his face was carved from pure, unyielding resolve.
"Tommy, set the outer cordon," I breathed into my mic. "Jax and I are taking the low ditch."
