The Breach - Ghost Country - Deep Sky

CHAPTER ONE
    On the first anniversary of his release from prison, Travis Chase woke at four in the morning to bright sunlight framing his window blinds. He put his backpack in his Explorer, left Fairbanks on State Route 2, and an hour later was on the hard-packed gravel of the Dalton Highway, running north toward the Arctic Circle and the Brooks Range beyond. From the crests of the highest hills, he could see the road and the pipeline snaking ahead for miles, over lesser ridges and through valleys blazing with pink fireweed.
    The trip was not a celebration. Far from it. It was a deliberation on everything that mattered: where he stood, and where he would go from here.
    The console showed an outside temperature of fifty-nine degrees. Travis lowered the windows and let the moist air rush through the vehicle. The height of summer here smelled like springtime back in Minneapolis, the scent of damp grass just freed from snow cover.
    He reached Coldfoot at ten o’clock and stopped for lunch. The town, with a few buildings and a population of less than twenty, survived entirely on commerce from travelers on the Dalton. Mostly truckers bound for the oil field at Prudhoe Bay, 250 miles north. Coldfoot was the last glimpse of humanity along the highway, before the elevation divide and the long, downslope run to the sea.
    Travis wouldn’t be going that far. The mountains he’d come for were right here. To the west of town, Gates of the Arctic National Park followed the range in a two-hundred-mile arc to the southwest. There were no roads leading in—no foot trails, even. All hiking in the Brooks Range was back-country, though various websites and published guides detailed the most trusted and trafficked routes. Travis had studied them all, then plotted his own course to avoid them.
    He left the Explorer at the depot, filled his water pouches, strapped on his pack and was on his way before eleven. By the time he stopped for dinner—a freeze-dried packet of brown rice he cooked over his tiny propane burner—he’d reached the top of the first ridge, two thousand feet above town. To the south, the last seventy miles of the morning’s journey receded toward infinity—back toward the world, and the places between which he had to choose.
    Alaska or Minnesota?
    There was pressure to go back home, of course. Pressure from everyone he knew there. He’d only been out of prison a month when he’d bought his one-way ticket to Fairbanks; some of his relatives hadn’t even gotten the chance to see him. What future did he see for himself up north, two thousand miles from his family?
    What future did he see among them? Even to the few who could understand and forgive what he’d done, he would always be the brother who’d spent half of his twenties and all of his thirties in prison. Twenty years from now, in the eyes of the next generation, he would still be that guy. That uncle. You could only get so free.
    He pushed on to the next ridge before making camp for the night. What passed for night, anyway: a few hours of cooling twilight as the sun dipped through the haze toward, but not quite to, the northern horizon. He staked his tent into the soft earth beside a snowfield that planed away for miles across the upper face of the ridge, and sat outside for an hour waiting for sleep to settle over him.
    Maybe five miles to the west—distance was tricky up here—a stony ridge rose higher than the foothills he’d crossed so far. In the long light he thought he saw shadows flitting on the face of the rock. He took out his binoculars, steadied them on his knees, and scanned the ridge for over a minute before he saw them: Dall sheep, twenty or more, moving with spooky ease across a nearly vertical granite face. Lambs no more than two months old followed their mothers with sure-footed skill. Travis watched until they vanished behind a fold of the cliff wall.
    At last feeling a calming heaviness in his limbs, he climbed into his tent and sleeping bag, and faded away to the rustle of wind over the short grass.
    He woke with a quickened pulse, aware that something had startled him, but unable to tell what, exactly.
    The sunlight through the tent fabric was stronger. His watch showed that it was just past three in the morning. He blinked, trying to fully wake up, and then the treble range of a thunderclap crashed across the ridgeline. Seconds later the bass wave shook the ground, seeming to radiate directly from the mountain beneath