Judgment at Alcatraz by Dave Edlund (carter reed .txt) 📕

soaked in blood. The bullet had grazed her right side after running the entire length of the Ford Explorer—passing first through the tailgate, then two seat backs, and finally the dash.

Her spare key was still secure under the rear wheel well. Fortunately, no one had vandalized her pickup. Even the MP5 submachine gun was still in the cab of the truck, exactly where she’d left it.

She retrieved the first aid kit from behind the seat. It contained adequate sterile gauze bandages, tape, and antibiotic to dress the wound. Even more important was the QuikClot® powder, which she applied to staunch the bleeding.

She removed her blood-soaked top and put on a clean sweatshirt fished out of the small duffle bag she’d prepared for what she expected to be a two- or three-day trip with Toby. Next, from beneath the seat, she removed a military surplus bayonet originally made to fit the first-generation M16. It was a thick blade that came to a spear-like point.

With the bloody shirt in one hand, and knife in the other, she returned to the Ford SUV and punctured the gas tank with three thrusts of the bayonet. Gasoline poured out onto the parched dirt. She captured enough of it on the soiled shirt to saturate it, then placed it over her blood stains on the seat. She tossed a lit match into the cab, and a second one onto the expanding pool of gas beneath the Ford. The expanding fire quickly engulfed the vehicle, ensuring there would be no fingerprints or DNA to be recovered by forensics.

By the time the FBI helicopter returned to the dirt airstrip, and Flynn conferred with the pilot and the rest of the team, she was several miles from the burning vehicle. She cruised back through Owyhee, and on to Elko, where she stopped to top up with fuel and fill up on fast food. She made good time on her drive back to Toby’s home near Hatfield, on the Oregon-California border, and arrived late at night. After dousing the headlights so as not to startle Toby’s mother if she was home, Danya drove into the barn and hitched up her trailer. A quick check indicated that her possessions—including many firearms—had not been touched.

She opened a safe hidden inside the trailer beneath a floor panel. Inside was the cash she’d taken from the gun deal in Idaho. She removed a dozen bundles of hundred-dollar bills, $120,000 in total, which she stacked inside a brown paper bag as if she were packing groceries. Using a black felt-tip marker, she wrote a note to Toby on the Kraft paper.

Channel your drive and passion. You have the ability, intelligence, and charisma to advance the cause for Native American rights. Maybe this will help.

—D

After locking the trailer door, she placed the bag on the gravel floor of the barn and settled behind the steering wheel of her red pickup. Once she left the driveway, she pulled to the side of the rural road, next to the mailboxes, where she jotted down Toby’s address, planning to send a postcard every now and then.

She drove north for a couple hours, until she found a secluded and unmarked dirt road not far from the Steens Mountains. It was about a mile to the end of the road, and that’s where she parked on a level plot of ground. Overcome with exhaustion, and feeling the effects of the bullet graze to her side, she decided not to prepare a cooked meal. Instead, she popped some more ibuprofen and antibiotic, changed her dressing, and climbed into bed. With shotgun and pistol within easy reach, she fell asleep.

In the morning, over a cup of coffee, or maybe two, she’d decide where to go.

s

Hundreds of miles to the south, two FBI offices were working overtime to process four crime scenes—three on the Duck Valley Reservation, and one on the entire island of Alcatraz.

The San Francisco FBI office, under the direction of Special Agent in Charge Andrew Flynn, ordered Alcatraz closed for weeks, while they completed their investigation. A mountain of evidence was collected, labeled, and cataloged.

It took several days to repair the gift shop, where much of the fighting had occurred. And the park service did their best to spot and fill the hundreds of bullet holes. But a few would escape discovery and become the focus of gawking visitors when the former prison was reopened for tours.

At the same time, the Las Vegas office was doing similar work on the Duck Valley Reservation. Officially, they were treating three locations as crime scenes—Leonard’s house, the hangar, and the plane crash site. They also investigated the burned-out Ford Explorer on the shore of Sheep Creek Reservoir. The tribal police had received a report of the abandoned and burned vehicle three days after Danya had fled. It had taken another four days for the report to reach the right person within the FBI’s Las Vegas office. It was easy to connect the dots—SUV with bullet holes certainly pointed to this being the escape vehicle. But without any useful forensics concerning the driver, this thread was soon dropped.

The hazmat crew arrived by helicopter shortly after the fire had consumed every flammable material on the crashed Malibu Mirage. Not surprisingly, the aircraft was a total loss. No less than six lead-lined metal boxes were recovered, thrown free of the cabin. Fortunately, none had split open on impact. Dressed in protective suits, the hazmat team secured the deadly cargo in additional radiation shielding. Only then were they transported away by helicopter.

Later analysis would reveal that the boxes contained enough enriched strontium-90 and cobalt-60, in the form of fine oxide powder, to have contaminated downtown Las Vegas for at least a century. Privately, the FBI breathed a sigh of relief, knowing how close they’d come to a disaster of unprecedented impact on property and lives. No one understood this better than Flynn, who buried the evidence on the mysterious woman, his savior, and reduced the priority of investigating