Chapter One

      Big sky...check. Flat plains...check. Storm clouds rolling in...check.

      Like ticking off his preflight checklist, Dante Thunder Horse reviewed what was in front of him, a typical early winter day in North Dakota before the first real snowstorm of the season. It had been a strange December. Usually it snowed by Thanksgiving and the snow remained until well into April.

      This year, the snow had come by Halloween and melted and still the ground hadn’t yet grown solid with permafrost.

      Based on the low temperature and the clouds rolling in, that first real snow was about to hit their area. The kids of Grand Forks would be excited. With the holidays just around the corner, they’d have their white Christmas after all.

      A hundred miles away from base, flying the U.S.-Canadian border as an air interdiction agent, or pilot, for the Customs and Border Protection, Dante was on a mission to check out a possible illegal border crossing called in by a concerned citizen. A farmer had seen a man on a snowmobile coming across the Canadian border.

      He figured it was someone out joyriding who didn’t realize he’d done anything wrong. Still, Dante had to check. He didn’t expect anything wild or dangerously crazy to happen. The Canadian border didn’t have near the illegal crossings as the southern borders of the United States. Most of his sorties were spent enjoying the scenery and observing the occasional elk, moose or bear sighting.

      Chris Biacowski, scheduled to fly copilot this sortie, had come down with the flu and called in sick.

      Dante was okay with flying solo. He usually liked having the quiet time. Unless he started thinking about his past and what his future might have been had things worked out differently.

      Three years prior, he’d been fighting Taliban in Afghanistan. He’d been engaged to Captain Samantha Olson, a personnel officer who’d been deployed at Bagram Airfield. Every chance he got he flew over to see her. They’d been planning their wedding and talking about what they’d put on their dream sheet for their next assignments.

      After flying a particularly dangerous mission where his door gunner had taken a hit, Dante came back to base shaken and worried about his crew member. He stayed with the gunner until he was out of surgery. The gunner had survived.

      But Dante’s life would be forever changed.