At first the drops were about ten feet apart, and then as they continued up the mountain, they grew closer together. The animal was slowing and would seek cover soon.
He eventually found the buck hidden under the snow-laden limbs of a blue spruce. He crouched down and pushed one of the limbs aside. The deer was lying prone against the trunk of the tree; its eyes stared blankly into the distance, and its breathing was labored but steady.
A slight look of satisfaction crossed the man’s face as he pushed up his white-framed Oakley goggles and examined the animal more closely. It was a majestic buck, the largest one he had seen in months of tracking in the area. Its body was large and well toned. He guessed it weighed over three hundred pounds.
He had carefully stalked the buck for almost two weeks, noting its every movement and every routine. Nothing was left to chance; in fact, the man kept a running log of the deer’s activities and reviewed it for a half hour each evening. He had discovered it was the one way he could maintain his skills as he waited in the Colorado wilderness.
As the days passed, he had learned that the animal liked to feed in the valley late in the afternoon. When it arrived it would pause just inside the cover of the trees, watching for predators and waiting for the sun to drop below the mountaintops. If conditions were satisfactory it would then make its way out into the field, pushing the snow up with its snout to feed on the frozen tundra.
Once the man had determined the attack zone, the rest was easy. It hadn’t been necessary to bury himself in the snow, but he did so in order to maintain his ability to disappear into the landscape. It was a craft he had developed over the years, albeit to pursue a quarry of a different kind.
But the deer was not precisely a “kill.” It was very much alive and would be on its feet again soon. It had been brought down by syringe dart, which the man found buried in the flesh just behind the animal’s right shoulder blade. As usual, his aim had been flawless, and it had taken only minutes for the tranquilizer to have its intended effect.
He pulled out the dart, and a small trickle of blood ran down the soft brown coat. He had killed a number of deer on nearby slopes, but that one he spared. He had ample meat to last the rest of the winter, and to him it was a matter of respect for an animal that had survived for so long in that rugged environment.
Just after the man pulled the dart out of the animal’s flesh, a sharp noise pierced the silence of the mountain. It was a quick, high-pitched whistle, much like that of a teapot. He hadn’t heard the sound in months, so it took a few seconds for it to register.
The phone.
A second whistle sounded just as he pulled the specially modified Samsung smartphone from his pocket. After removing his right glove, he deftly unlocked the screen and pressed the text-messaging icon. His eyes then settled on a text that had no sender name. It was short and simple: F3. Orange 1.
The man’s brow furrowed as he recognized the significance of the characters. After three months of operational silence, contact had been made.
Upon receipt of the text, the man’s movements became more hurried. He pulled an antibacterial wipe out of a zippered pocket and quickly cleaned the wound. The animal’s breathing was no longer labored, indicating that the effects of the tranquilizer were already wearing off. He estimated it would awaken in the next half hour or so.
He glanced back and forth in the growing darkness. There was no movement along the steep slope, although the maze of fir trees and boulders prevented him from seeing very far. Apparently, the local coyote population hadn’t picked up the smell of blood yet, and even if they had, they would probably hold back until the human scent was gone. Satisfied the deer would recover, the man quickly gathered his effects and slung the rifle over his shoulder.
After making his way back down the mountain, he set off toward the northeast. Home base was just over two miles away. The route back would take him the entire length of the valley and up through a steep gorge before leading him home.
The man glanced at his watch and went over phone protocol. If he didn’t establish contact within one hour, a second text would arrive. If he failed to achieve contact within two hours, a reconnaissance drone would be wheeled out of a hangar at a secret base in another part of the state. After three hours, the drone would be launched and would fly over the outpost, using zoom optics and thermal imaging to determine who or what was present. If the results indicated trouble, a Chinook helicopter would drop in an extraction team to secure the site.
But the man wasn’t particularly concerned about triggering that series of events. Barring injury or worsening weather, he would be back at the outpost within the hour. He set a goal of forty-five minutes and adjusted his pace accordingly. It was a pace no ordinary man could maintain. He ran along the side of the valley, near the trees and cover. He had rarely encountered people that far out in the wilderness, but he still scanned the surrounding terrain for splashes of color or movement.
Precisely thirty-nine minutes later, two minutes ahead of schedule, the man stood a quarter mile from his destination. Darkness had set in, broken only by the light of an early-rising moon. He squinted until he was finally able to make out the details of the mountain directly ahead.
Despite being pressed for time, he reached into his pocket and drew out a thermal imaging monocular. He focused it on a grove of aspen trees about a third of the way up the slope. Soon he could make out the hints of a structure through the maze of trunks. To the left of the structure, the thermal imaging system picked up a small red blotch. The blotch moved quickly, then stopped. Then it moved again. The size and shape indicated it was likely a raccoon or a fox.
When he swung the monocular back toward the structure, another red blotch appeared, even smaller than the first. It was stationary, without the slightest hint of movement. The man smiled. Sam.
The man then made one final sweep of the mountain, searching for heat signals that might indicate a breach of the perimeter, but there was nothing.
It was time to go in and call home.
The structure the man approached was owned by a private clandestine organization known as the Delphi Group. Its mission was to take on operations the US government could not associate itself with, primarily the investigation of the bizarre and controversial. Its genesis could be loosely traced to the infamous events that took place in Roswell, New Mexico in 1947. Skeptics declared that the incident involved the crash landing of an alien spacecraft. The military agreed there was a crash, although they maintained it was a high-altitude weather balloon. Unbeknownst to the general public at that time, the government established a unit that operated under the umbrella of the Department of Defense (DOD). Its purpose was initially to safeguard all intelligence gathered at Roswell, and that purpose was eventually expanded to include any and all information not suitable for public consumption. Within a year, the group was also given investigative responsibilities, and it was eventually transferred to the CIA during the Cold War.
The unit continued to operate with varying degrees of activity throughout the next several decades. The first major change came in the years following the Iran Contra affair in the late 1980s. The CIA had fallen under a microscope, which in turn led to the shutting down of a number of controversial programs and initiatives. The small investigative unit was not shut down, but it was forced to go completely black. Only the president, the vice president, the director, the assistant director, and a select few senior CIA officers were aware of its existence. All information that fell under the unit’s authority was kept on a separate server, and all physical meetings could only be conducted in the director’s office or the Oval Office. It was known as the organization of last resort.