Honor Road by Jason Ross (best non fiction books of all time TXT) 📕

Pregnant, lofty snowflakes drifted on the breeze. It’d be a night of unsteady winds. A serious snowstorm often did that—halted the other functions of weather until it had its way. Heavy, quiet snow would mute sound, but it would confuse the winds; send them swirling like ballet dancers across the prairie.

A steady wind would’ve been better. Sage worried that the little dog might scent them outside the ranch house and alert the Commissioner. He fretted it might end in violence, with the Commissioner or his family getting hurt. Despite their folksy demeanor and family ties, this mission was still an armed incursion. Sage knew from experience: bad things happened fast when guns were involved.

“It’s a good night for an arrest,” Captain Chambers whispered to Sage.

“Good night for dark deeds,” Sage answered without weighing his words.

It’d been a mistake to say that. He didn’t turn to look at the captain, hoping he hadn’t heard him. Turning to look at the captain would only make it weirder, plus it was utterly dark beneath the cloak of clouds. Not a scintilla of moon showed.

“They’re asleep. We can leave soon,” Sage added to cover his gaff. He’d been watching the house through binoculars. The back corner bedroom, where he assumed the Commissioner and his wife slept, had gone dark.

“It should only take half an hour to get down,” Captain Chambers said.

The urge to turn and check the captain’s face was almost too much, but Sage resisted.

Chambers continued. “Let’s wait until two o’clock before we roll out. I don’t trust these boys to stay quiet, not when they’re cold.”

Sage focused on the tactical issues. “We’d probably be better off making them run laps in their snowshoes because they’re going to freeze their balls off waiting for two a.m.”

The snowflakes were fat and heavy. They floated aimlessly, like children wandering home from school. Too much snow might bog down the snow machines the next morning, but this amount of snow would quiet their footfalls and cover their tracks. It was good weather in which to operate, and in truth, it wasn’t that cold.

A chunk of bile had lodged in Sage’s gut, and it ground at the cold, freeze dried meal he’d choked down for dinner. He hadn’t taken a shit in two days.

On the eve of the mission, he should’ve felt tense, or even excited. He was doing his part in a law enforcement action—like a SWAT team in snowshoes. He had no idea how county lines worked when arresting someone across boundaries. He was following the orders of a police officer, and beyond that, he hadn’t a shred of legal understanding that hadn’t come from watching re-runs of the Dukes of Hazard.

But in his gut, he knew this arrest wasn’t legit. If Commissioner Pete had done anything wrong, he deserved a day in court, not to be swept off his porch with his dick out. Swooping down on a home carrying rifles wasn’t how good men resolved issues of property and cattle.

Captain Chambers wasn’t a good man, no matter what Aimee Butterton said.

Sage had given the man the benefit of the doubt. He’d done his best not to judge the man for shagging another woman. He could even forgive the captain for hoarding food and playing favorites with the locals.

But this raid seemed like a power grab—like a desperate warlord playing out his land-envy using younger men, rifles and a badge.

Sage was in over his head, and the realization felt like an anvil hitting the floor. At seventeen years old, he had plenty of opinions and very little experience. How could he be expected to navigate the dealings of men who owned tracts of land and thousands of head of livestock; men who’d been elected to public office?

He decided: the chunk of bile in his stomach would have to be tolerated. He’d have to follow orders and live with the outcomes. He was a pawn in this game. He didn’t rate an opinion. If he got uppity, odds were good he’d make a bad situation worse. He’d hunker down and keep his promise to his dad, and that meant doing this damned job.

Sage walked circles in the snow. He could feel the captain watching him in the dark. The blood flowed back into his legs and the exercise warmed him. The knot in his stomach loosened a little. He dug out the insulated hose from his Camelbak and sucked down some water.

“You okay?” the captain whispered.

“Yeah. I’m just cold. I’m good to go, sir,” Sage lied.

At two o’clock in the morning, they rallied the boys and padded downhill single-file.

They left nothing at camp. Their plan was to snatch up the Commissioner and have him out before the roar of the snow machines echoed across the valley: clandestine incursion, lightning-fast exfil. They’d whisk him back to La Grande and stick him in a cell until the winter played out.

They bet everything on the snow machines. It’d taken them two days, and all their physical reserves, to sneak into the far reaches of the valley on snowshoes, but the snow machines would cover the same distance in two hours.

If something went wrong, Plan B was to hide the Commissioner in an outbuilding on the edge of the airfield, then steal snow machines from nearby ranches. That’d be Sage’s mission should all else fail, and it’d set them back a couple hours. In either case, they’d be long gone by daybreak—before the commissioner’s family could raise the alarm. Telephones were dead and, most likely, nobody monitored radios through the middle of the night. Even if the family discovered their missing father and reached another house by radio, the ranch houses were all at least a half-mile apart. It’d take at least an hour to go door-to-door raising enough men for a rescue operation.

The snowshoes floated over any ankle-busters that would otherwise imperil their passing in the night. Sage’s blood was up, to be sure, but he couldn’t enjoy it. The mission felt cursed.

Sage stopped abruptly.