Last Track, The by Hilliard Sam

Author:Hilliard, Sam [Hilliard, Sam]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fantasy, tracker, Mystery, special forces, dude ranch, Thriller, physic, smoke jumper, Suspense, Montana, cross country runner, tracking, Paranormal
Goodreads: 7686634
Publisher: Buddhapuss Ink LLC
Published: 2010-02-02T05:00:00+00:00

She checked it twice.

01:13:26 PM

A man could learn much about survival and self-reliance from a few days in the desert. That’s what Mike thought about as he and Dagget trudged to the crest, watching for the sign. Given a choice between warm and cold-weather searches, Mike preferred winter. Tracking was simpler over a layer of fine, fresh snow. White powder made spotting marks easier, and a shallow dusting supported cutting the tracks over great distances. Also, during winter the lines dividing a day became less pronounced. With the right combination of moonlight and snow, searchers might continue from dusk through dawn, uninterrupted by the cycling of the sun. Mike relished rundowns like that.

There were technical advantages to the cold, too. Thermal-imaging equipment, like FLIR, functioned best in searches where gaps between body heat and the temperature of whatever surrounded that body existed. The more pronounced the gap, the more striking the image appeared on the screen, and the easier identifying an out-of-place heat source became.

And he believed in one more advantage of the winter without a doubt: low temperatures boosted his visual acuity. Though he could not prove it, Mike was certain that in the cold, he saw farther, clearer.

Yes, the summer had definite benefits to others: vacations, beaches, and glistening hard bodies in the sun—all pleasures unknown to Mike. The lion’s share of his sports-outfitting business landed squarely in the summer. Thanks to a stable North American and Western European customer base, the priciest and most sought-after packages launched in July. While others vacationed, he worked.

A sudden shift in the wind unsettled him.

The choppy breeze hinted of a possible storm. A thin ring around the moon toward the latter half of the last evening was another warning. That might have meant nothing at all, but the old superstition about a ringed moon forecasting bad weather was often true. What the phenomena proved to Mike was the existence of ice in the atmosphere. A patch of ice crystals at great elevations refracted the light in a similar way, and produced the illusion of a thin circle around the moon. He was moved neither by the legend nor by the armchair interpretation. Regardless, the shift in the wind held his attention. He decided to keep an eye out for cirrus clouds. The thin and wispy streaks often signaled an approaching storm front.

And maybe the wind was just a freak low-pressure zone, a curious quirk of the topography. Maybe.

He certainly wanted to believe that.

They reached the crest, which overlooked a vista lined with pine trees.

And along the horizon, a much more important object held the tracker’s eye. Seeing it, he recognized it at once.

He saw what Sean had been running toward from the beginning.

01:14:50 PM

First Mike and Dagget had crossed the ridge in the same stretch where Mike believed Sean had. Now he stood where Sean had stood. Seeing the expansive view from the crest revealed what Mike had hoped for: a critical break in the search.

Up to that point, the tracks

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