Enemy of the People (Christopher Wren Thrillers Book 6) by Mike Grist & Michael John Grist

Author:Mike Grist & Michael John Grist [Grist, Mike]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Mike Grist
Published: 2021-06-29T16:00:00+00:00

28. FATHERS

Wren brought the helicopter in low over barren fields shorn of grain sorghum, wheat or soy for the winter, like echoes of the Iowa farm. Southern Kansas, close to the Oklahoma border and flatter than an ice rink, almost as sparsely populated as the surface of the moon.

Wren felt it in his gut. The dry cold in the air buffeting through the slitted cockpit window. No Interstates within a hundred miles, no railroads, no real airports. Quiet fields, big sky turning black with the gathering storm, small towns. A vision of another world, like the clock had wound back to the Wild West and any minute he'd see cowpoke rustlers pushing a cattle train across the great plains, Wild Bill Hickock surging out with his lawmen, Wyatt Earp following up with a jail stagecoach.

Intermittent structures flew by below. Ruined homesteads and storm-battered old barns, showing Bleeding Kansas' history as a Civil War-era holy grail. Chase that with decades of sharecroppers tilling life from the clay soil, then rip it all up with the great Dustbowl, as mass migration West left family lands to be swallowed up by the big banks, handed off to become the current system of factory farms.

Now there was only the occasional vast tractor squatted beside a field like an alien dropship, enormous plow spreading like an iron river delta, broad enough to do the work that once took thousands of men. Immense tin sheet barns stood clumped at the center of vast networks of fields, fringed by green fern-like sprays of coppicing; trees sprung up around shallow curling arroyos.

The history of America written in the scars of the land.

9:40 a.m., and Wren glimpsed his team up ahead as blots of color beneath the glowering sky. A white semi-trailer parked at the desolate side of the road, ten miles out of Medicine Lodge, with Sally Rogers at the front by a Ford F-150, her vehicle of choice, branded in blue and silver. Impressive work for a rip-off sprayed up by his junkyard mechanic Alli, flown in specially out of Arizona.

He put the helicopter down by the truck, killed the engine and took the keys, then ducked out of the cockpit as the blades wound down. Agent Sally Rogers strode across the low mound of raw dirt at the side of the road toward him, looking every bit the part.

Pale blue shirt with shoulder straps, embossed metal insignia studded through the collars, navy tie tucked in at the third button down, silver badge on the left shirt pocket, gear strap worn like a bandolier, Glock 19 at her hip, navy pants with a powder blue ribbon sewn down the outside, and to cap it all off, a broad-brimmed Stetson cap almost completely obscuring her straw-blond hair.

A Kansas Highway Patrolwoman, no two ways about it.

"Boss," she said, and her intonation along with the pale cast of her face said it all. The same vertigo sense of teetering over a vast drop that he'd been feeling for a week now.

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