Ghost in the Rocks: Excerpt





Sawtell had been shot at before, but not with what sounded like the favorite weapon of terrorists everywhere, a sound-suppressed Kalashnikov AK- 47, 7.62 mm assault rifle with a thirty round magazine. Certainly he’d never been shot at across an international border, in a remote mountain range, and maybe more importantly, never in a situation where he had no backup. 

Technically, his contract with the University of Arizona didn’t include night work. His job was to check camera traps on the U.S. side of the border in the Peloncillo, Dos Cabezas, Little Hatchet, and Big Hatchet Mountains in Arizona and New Mexico. Day work. But he’d figured documenting movement corridors at night couldn’t hurt. Maybe that was not entirely true, he thought, as he fingered the bullet hole in his sleeve.