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suddenly tossed it over the railing. Both men watched it sparkling, catching the rays of the moon, as it seemed to fall forever into the valley.
    â€œI’ll find someone for you,” he had said without turning to look at D. S.
    And tonight the memo.
    THE SOLUTION IS IN HAND. GO OR NO GO?
    D. S. telephoned Kast’s encrypted Nokia and the contractor answered on the first ring. “Yes?” Music played in the background, and a lot of people were talking and laughing. It sounded like a party.
    â€œGo,” D. S. said. “The down payment will be credited to your Command System’s Cayman account within the hour.
    â€œVery well,” Kast said, and the connection was broken.

 
    PART ONE
    OPENING GAMBIT
    Present Day
Early December

 
    1
    FIFTEEN MILES SOUTH of Medora in the North Dakota Badlands the panorama was nothing short of stunning, otherworldly, ancient, atavistic in a way in its appeal. The late afternoon was cold, near zero, a light wind blowing down from the Montana high plains when the forty-five-foot Newell Motorcoach, towing an open trailer with three rugged ATVs, topped a rise and pulled off to the side of the narrow gravel road.
    Barry Egan stepped out, walked a few yards farther up a gentle slope, and raised a pair of Steiner mil specs binoculars to scope out the broad valley that ran roughly north and south through the middle of the Badlands’ Little Missouri National Grassland. In the far distance he followed the tall, razor-wire-topped fence marked U.S. GOVERNMENT RESERVATION: VISTORS BY PERMIT ONLY to a group of buildings low on the horizon to the east.
    Another man got out of the coach, dressed like Egan in an elk hunter’s camouflage Carhartts, boots, and stocking cap, and took up a west flanking position down the road. For now he was armed with a .338 Winchester Magnum big game hunting rifle, with three-hundred-grain cartridges that had enough stopping power to put down a grizzly, or even a polar bear.
    Egan, a man in his late twenties, was good-looking in a narrow-faced but sincere way; his dark eyes and the thin line of his mouth sometimes showed happiness, and when it happened everyone within shouting distance seemed to relax. All the conflict went out of the air, and people felt good, even confident.
    But it was mostly an act, because Egan had been angry for as long as he could remember; at first because his stepfather had come back from the first Iraq war a changed, angry man, who beat on his wife, and then when life seemed to be getting at least tolerable, the old bastard had gotten himself shot to death inside a refinery in Texas, leaving his wife and son to fend for themselves in what was a tough old world.
    Like father like son, Egan thought as he lowered the binoculars and turned back to his outriders and grinned. “After all this trouble, doesn’t look like much after all, does it?”
    Craig “Moose” Swain, by far the largest of the five operators Egan had brought with him, laughed out loud. He was a former Delta Force corporal who’d gone a little overboard during what was supposed to be a preliminary recon mission in a mountain valley near Asmar on the Afghan-Pakistan border, killing a family of eight, including the father and five brothers, none of them armed. He’d been given an other-than-honorable discharge and had wandered around the Soldier of Fortune, American Firster, and Super Patriot organizations before finally winding up in Bozeman, Montana, where he’d appeared in Egan’s radar, moving in and around the New Silver Shirts, Christian Identity, and Sovereign Citizen movements. A player. A soldier for God.
    â€œTonight?” he asked.
    â€œSupper time,” Egan said. “Eighteen hundred hours. It’ll be dark by then.”
    Moose, who’d loved every minute he spent in Afghanistan, had been scoping a narrow plume of smoke rising in the southwest, lowered his rifle. “That it, Sarge?”