“If you say so. It’s not my place to judge,” Taggart admitted.
“It was criminal. Dad — you — you can’t just—”
She was on the verge of breaking down and she knew it. If he said one more thing, one more word—
“I don’t care if it was wrong. I loved my daughter and I wanted her to have a future, that’s all. I loved you, Julia, and I still do.”
She opened her mouth; she wasn’t sure if she was going to say she loved him too or scream in rage or just howl in anguish, but she had to open her mouth to do it, and then—
— closed it just as fast.
“Julia, you don’t have to forgive me, it doesn’t matter,” Taggart said, “because—”
“Shut up,” she told him.
“No, you need to hear this,” he said.
“No, you need to shut up,” she replied. She ran to the door of the laboratory shed and cracked it open. The sound she’d heard was much louder, then. It was definitely what she’d thought it was. The sound of snowmachines coming closer.
“That’s not Chapel,” she said.
Taggart got up from his stool and joined her.
Together they watched as four snowmachines came roaring up the clearing toward the lab complex. The men on them were dressed in black parkas and goggles that hid their features.
All of them were carrying guns. One of them carried a big shiny revolver. He used it to wave the others forward.
“Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit,” Julia said. “Dad, they’re going to kill us. We have to fight them off.”
“What, make a last stand like the French Foreign Legion?”
“I have my pistol,” she said. “You must have some guns in here, right? You live in Alaska. You must own guns.”
“I have a tranquilizer rifle,” he said. “Huh.”
“What is it?” she asked.
Outside, the men were climbing off the snowmachines and spreading out to approach the buildings. She saw that they were making the same mistake she and Chapel had made when they first arrived. They were headed toward the biggest building in the complex, assuming that had to be where everyone was.
“I have a sudden brilliant idea,” Taggart said.
DENALI NATIONAL PARK AND PRESERVE, ALASKA: APRIL 15, T+84:33
“Where the hell is Chapel?” Julia breathed, as she watched the CIA men swarm over the little complex. Any second now they would realize where she and her dad were hiding. They would come for them, with their guns, and—
Taggart tapped a key on his keyboard, and his computer flashed a warning at him. He tapped the same key again.
“It turned out to be quite simple, really. A single hormonal pathway that I could manipulate with a very small molecule, something easily synthesized. In the end I could put them into a denning state or wake them up any time I wanted, simply by misting them with a low dose of the chemical.”
Julia stopped listening to him. Outside men started screaming, and something like hope burst inside her chest. Because she understood what her father had just done.
In the big building, she realized, the three bears were waking up. And waking up angry — and hungry.
The screams came from inside the big building and they didn’t stop. Julia shuddered to think what was happening in there. The man with the revolver — who was obviously in charge — waved more of his men inside, but they looked like they didn’t want to go. Julia could hardly blame them.
The leader shot one of his men in the arm.
That got their attention. Two more of them rushed inside the big building. That just left the leader and the wounded man standing outside.
Two too many. Julia had killed Malcolm and shot Laughing Boy in the foot, but she knew better than to think that made her an expert gunslinger. She could hardly expect to get the drop on both those men without getting shot herself.
But if she stayed inside the lab shack, she and her dad were going to die. The bears had bought them a few seconds of grace, but that was it.
Behind her Taggart loaded a dart into his tranquilizer rifle. It was a big weapon, and it looked unwieldy.
“Aim for the one standing next to the snowmachines,” Julia told him. That was the leader. “I’ll take the other one. You really think that dart will drop him?”
“Every dart is dosed to take down a grizzly,” Taggart told her. “It might kill him, actually.”
“I can live with that. Okay. When I say go, we go, right?”
“If you’re sure about this,” he told her.
“I have never been more sure about anything in my life,” she promised.
Which was, of course, a lie. She didn’t believe this would work, not at all. But she had no other ideas.
“Go,” she shouted and kicked the door open. She didn’t let herself think about what came next; she just started shooting, barely bothering to aim as she fired three shots in the direction of the wounded man. He looked up and even through his goggles she could see the surprise on his face.
Taggart ran out of the lab shack holding his rifle like it was a club. She started to yell at him, to tell him to shoot, but then he brought the rifle up to his eye, aimed carefully, and squeezed his trigger.
The dart bounced off the side of the snowmachine, a few inches away from the leader’s arm. The leader looked down and saw it glinting on the snow.
Then he lifted his revolver and pointed it straight at Julia’s face.
She froze in place, paralyzed by fear. Part of her brain was screaming at her to move, telling her how ashamed Chapel would be if he could see this, but her legs wouldn’t work. She barely had control of her hands. As if in slow motion she started to bring her own gun up.
The leader aimed his revolver and started to squeeze his trigger.
And then his hand exploded in a cloud of blood.
“Over here,” Chapel shouted, firing round after round at the men staggering around the clearing. He was running toward her as fast as he could, his feet digging deep into the snow with every step. He waved toward the old, dirty snowmachine that was parked outside of the large building. He jumped on the back of it and pointed his pistol at the leader’s head.
He needn’t have bothered. The leader was too busy just then, down on the ground searching for his severed fingers.
“Come on,” Julia said, and grabbed her father’s arm. She dashed across the flattened snow between the buildings and jumped on the snowmachine. It started up as soon as she turned the throttle. She glanced down and saw the keys were in the ignition. She hadn’t thought to check before.
Other than the leader, the rest of the men who’d come to kill them were down on the ground, dead or wounded. She didn’t have time to check each one. She saw that one of them had three big slashes across the front of his parka, exposing the white stuffing inside. She remembered the sleeping bears, how sweet they had looked when they weren’t dangerous, and she shuddered.
She glanced back just once to make sure that both Chapel and her father were on the snowmachine. Then she put it in gear and roared out of the clearing as fast as she could go, even as bullets started whizzing all around her.
DENALI NATIONAL PARK AND PRESERVE, ALASKA: APRIL 15, T+84:37
Trees and rocks flashed by as Julia sped them down the trail toward the road. Chapel held on as best he could with one hand while constantly looking back, trying to see who was coming after them. He could hear nothing over the roar of the snowmachine’s engine, but he was certain they weren’t in the clear yet.
Up ahead the trail headed down a steep slope toward a creek. It looked like the surface had frozen over. Chapel didn’t want to have to find out if it was solid or not.