Breathing Fire

Striking a key on the laptop, he brought up a jagged red line knifing across the lower part of the map onscreen. "You ever been through here before?"

"Once or twice," I said. "What is that?"

"It's the route taken by a wolf wearing a tracking collar," Childress replied. "He was shot by a rancher just north of Fort Peck this morning."

"And you want to find out where it came from? With a storm rolling in?"

"At the necropsy this afternoon, we found that its stomach was full of human remains."

Home for the winter at his cabin, Hawk Tate's plan for the next couple of days was the same as everyone else across the region. With radio and news broadcasts interrupted frequently to warn of the doubleheader blizzard ripping through the region, his intentions were to alternate between hunkering down inside and venturing out only long enough to keep the snow from accumulating on his roof and around his front door.

An intended schedule, interrupted before it even begins by a call for help from a visiting agent with the Fish and Wildlife Service. A request for aid to track down the victim whose remains were found in the stomach of a slain animal before the storm hits, after which it might be lost until at least spring.

If not forever.

Against his better judgment, Hawk loads up his snowmobiles and leads the young agent to the body, only to discover that the man wasn't a casualty of the elements, but the victim of a targeted strike. Someone who had been living under an assumed identity for the last several years, hoping to keep himself and his two young boys safe in the wake of a heinous incident that took place on the southern border.

Their own attempt at witness protection, hiding from a vicious enemy who appears to have tracked them down. Opposition with a massive score to settle, having already taken out the father, and willing to stop at nothing to eliminate the two boys as well.

Kids lost in a swirling snowstorm, their only hope that Hawk will get there first...