Stone slid his pistol in his waistband and crept out of the woods, keeping as low to the ground as he could. There was a bright full moon that had made the night far less dark than usual. He reached the truck, glancing at the barn as he did so. He moved the tarp away and slowly slid a box toward him. Fortunately it wasn’t taped shut, just closed up. He opened it and peered in.

He’d been right. Clear baggies filled with what looked to be prescription drugs. Probably in the oxycodone family. Two hundred bucks a pill on the street, Willie had said. Based on that he was looking at millions of dollars in this box alone.

And the black baggies the druggie miners had taken were probably their payment for driving the boxes to what was probably the next step in the pipeline, with the final destination being some major urban area on the East Coast. It was pretty powerful leverage when all your employees were addicts. They’d do whatever you told them to get the pain meds they couldn’t otherwise afford. It was also pretty damn heartless—not surprising with drug dealers.

With the sixth sense that he possessed, Stone reacted to the presence he suddenly felt behind him. Yet it was still a fraction of a second too late.

The gun muzzle was next to his head and Stone heard the man say, “You move, you die.”

Stone could feel the man’s other hand expertly pat him. His gun was yanked out of his pants, dropped to the dirt and kicked under the truck.

Stone didn’t move. He just stood there with a baggie of pills clutched in one hand.

The man said, “What the hell is that?”

“Illegal prescription drugs,” Stone said, confused. “Why, who the hell are you?”

“Joe Knox. Central Intelligence. And you’re John Carr.”

Stone didn’t know whether to feel a bit of relief that it was the CIA who’d caught up to him and not the drug runners. However, the end result might not be all that different. “Well, Mr. Knox, you just walked into a drug transport going down.”

“What?”

“I suggest we carry on this conversation somewhere else.” Stone pointed to the men coming out of the barn.

“Hey!” one of them screamed when they saw the pair next to the truck. Shotguns and pistols appeared in the men’s hands even as other men rushed out of the barn to join them.

“Run, Knox!”

Using the truck as a shield, Knox and Stone sprinted off, hurtling into the woods. The men raced after them, taking aim with their weapons.

Running next to Stone, Knox snapped, “What the hell is going on?”