Falls Like Lightning (8 page)

But he’d learned hard work from his father. Even after his mother left, his dad didn’t fall into the bottle or take it out on the kids. He always found a way to get food on the table. Lots of rice. Lots of unglamorous portions of animals boiled twice over. But food for the stomach.

“I can get you through high school,”
he’d once said.
“Then you gots to be providing for your own self. You understand? You a man, now.”

Not long after that his dad’s heart refused to keep working as hard for his own body as he always had for his kids.

At eighteen years old, Bo labored to finish school and make enough money to pay the house rent. Before long they were evicted—sending him to a studio apartment in the projects, his twin sisters, much younger, to their aunt’s to finish out school. Bo found himself cannonballed into life, the structure and familiarity of home and family unraveled. It all filtered away through the colander of existence, leaving him alone with a dim and desperate view for the future.

Dust rose and swirled in a cloud by his knees. Sunlight angled through the canopy across the fireline. They’d covered another sixty-six feet. One more chain.

Forty lashes minus one.

CHAPTER

11

C
aleb finally found the chance to slip away. To hike without an entourage, using his combi-tool as more of a walking stick than a device to cut line. An hour before dusk, the sun painted a hundred different colors across cumulus thunderheads, mammoth vessels in the sky like nature-wrought warships.

Even though Pendleton had made the jump with them, Caleb was first on the jump list, first out the door, and that made him the jumper in charge. Fact was, he could size up circumstances and situations quicker than Pendleton. And where Pendleton deliberated—an attribute perhaps advantageous behind a desk—while holding a coffee mug and looking at a map, Caleb knew how to act decisively. It gave him an edge, despite the fact he was outranked by Spotter Pendleton. Caleb knew that the balance of respect in the crew swung his way.

While the guys set up a simple camp, he’d used the excuse of needing to put eyes on the greater perimeter of the fire to hike off toward a nearby hill. He palmed his GPS, walking toward the coordinates Chief Shivner had given him behind closed doors.

The crew had grumbled about cutting indirect line so far from the fire. Fortunately, their belief in the ability of the brass to make effective tactical decisions was already cynically skewed. Who were they to argue with Incident Command? Wouldn’t be the first time things on the ground appeared much different than they did in the war room.

Shivner had been right about the timing. Mother Nature had in fact provided a huge opening for them. All Caleb had to do was confirm the find and report back.

He drew a deep breath of pine and sweet smoke-tinged air. It was nothing like working the ambulance in San Francisco. He did not miss the blood spills and bleach bottles and exposure reports. The constant drunk calls. He had been an underpaid people-mover, occasionally able to exercise the authority of an emergency-room physician.

Caleb climbed atop a boulder and drew a deep breath. The air held the feel of electricity. Beneath broadening smoke columns, the land beyond rose and flattened with the organic lay of eons. Natural. Without the hand of man shaping it into something concrete and linear and lifeless.

He’d become a paramedic to spite his father. His financial-advising, stock-brokering, disinterested, and uncommunicative father. He didn’t regret the day he walked from the overpaid and insultingly low-responsibility brokerage internship he held. Dad wanted his son to follow in his footsteps, and to stay in his shadow as he did so.

Caleb lost himself in paramedicine, forgetting for a time that he had no real intention of pursuing it as a career, until one evening, after scrubbing his forearms with surgical soap to remove the blood of their latest patient, it all returned in one vehement tide. Who had he really spited? Who had he triumphed over?

Vexing one’s father was a fickle endeavor.

This—the mountains, the growing firestorm, and the building thunderheads—this held the flavor of freedom. And if Shivner’s coordinates were accurate and his story held water, then it would be Caleb’s unique portion of poetic justice.

He removed his helmet, letting the wind wick sweat from his brow. He estimated three miles lay between them and the main body of the fire. Cloud-to-cloud flashes of lightning lit off. The sound of thunder followed. About a half mile below his position, a line of thin wispy smoke wove into the air. He glanced at the handheld GPS and then back to the smoke trailing skyward. Not far from his goal.

It was too close to be a spot fire. Could be a single tree struck by lightning. Or . . .

He looked behind him. He wouldn’t be missed. Pendleton was no doubt caught up in planning and mapping out their route for tomorrow, trying to figure out why Chief Shivner had told Caleb but not him which direction to cut line.

The sunset faded into the melding hues of dusk. A full moon brimmed on the horizon, but the main fire’s mushrooming column threatened to overtake it. He could make it to the wispy smoke source before nightfall, but it was going to be a dark trip back.

———

Caleb expected the scent of woodsmoke, but not roasting meat.

His stomach tightened. He swallowed a fresh burst of saliva, lifted his canteen and shook it. The water tasted warm and stale.

He drove the handle of his combi-tool into the dirt atop the last rise before the smoke source. With a step he cleared the knoll and peered down upon a tiny but stout log cabin resting about a hundred feet from the bank of the creek. A river-rock chimney rose from one corner, the smoke now dim and hardly visible from it. A dim light flickered inside a small-paned window beside an open front door.

A strange, indistinguishable sound drifted out from it.

Plucking? Caleb leaned his ear. Not just plucking. Twanging. A banjo.

He huffed.
Great.

Mountain people. He always thought the sound of banjos ought to be the nineteenth Watch Out Situation.

Shivner hadn’t said anything about people in the area. Caleb leaned back against a tree and tilted his head. He would’ve felt safer if it were a spot fire.

The music stopped, followed by the sound of rustling and footsteps.

An old man in overalls stepped out. Wild, straight salt-and-pepper hair fell to his shoulders. He retreated inside and then returned with an oil lantern in one hand and a metal pie tin in the other. He closed the door behind him and set off on a narrow path into the forest.

Right in the direction of the GPS coordinates.

He disappeared into the trees. Caleb cursed. The man’s presence could throw their whole plan off.

Caleb shuffled down the knoll toward the cabin and at the bottom leaned over the pathway, staring into the darkening forest. A tiny glow swung in the distance. He clicked on his helmet LED, cupping his hand over it to give just enough light to walk by.

Gnats swarmed. He kept his distance, careful to stay out of earshot. The man moved on target toward Shivner’s coordinates. Caleb paused and clicked off his light. Long drops of sweat rolled down his spine. The sounds of the forest intensified. He wondered if he too was being followed. Ahead, the old man’s lamplight disappeared. The distinct sound of creaking hinges followed.

He was close.

Another sound. This one like metal rapping on wood.

Caleb inched forward, willing his pupils to adjust to the night. Faint detail materialized. Tree bark. Branches. The moon peeked through the clouds and the tree canopy.

His boot struck a rock. He reached down to feel it and struck his helmet. His hands felt a coarse rock wall. Clicking on his helmet light and funneling it to a pinhead, he saw that he stood in front of an enormous granite boulder, twice his height and five times that in length.

Keeping a hand on the helmet light and another on the boulder, Caleb sidestepped to the edge of the rock face. He clicked off his light and peered around the corner.

A stone’s throw away in a small clearing he saw a faint glow shining from a timber-framed entrance to what looked like a mine or a bunker tunneled at a shallow angle into the ground. From it he heard whistling and the sound of small rocks clacking down, one by one.

The full moon disappeared behind the cloud cover. Caleb checked his GPS. He’d arrived at Shivner’s coordinates. The opening to the bunker sat recessed between granite boulders on one side and a steep hill on the other. It was situated in such a way that, even with the coordinates, had Caleb not followed the old man’s exact route there, he would’ve likely walked right past the bunker without seeing it, regardless of whether it was night or day.

Caleb fidgeted his fingers on the handle of his combi-tool. The old man had looked unarmed. But that didn’t mean he didn’t have a firearm inside the bunker or somewhere on his person. Maybe it would be better to wait until daylight. Approach him with the crew before they set out in the morning.

How had Caleb gotten himself in this predicament anyway? He should have known the plan wouldn’t go as smoothly as Shivner had presented it. Regardless, he walked forward. Step by step.

The whistling stopped.

Caleb held his breath. Sweat, salty and stinging, rolled into the corner of his eye. He blinked blurry halos. The methodical clacking resumed, the metered sound of rock upon rock, this time accompanied by the old man’s voice. Caleb moved closer. Each step in silence. The voice became clearer.

“Twenty-one. Twenty-two . . . Twenty-three? No, no, no. You didn’t do it right. Start again.”

Caleb heard the sound of small rocks tumbling onto wood. The flickering glow spilled out the entrance onto his pant legs. The lantern-lit room was bordered by wooden wall slats with bare earth in the cracks. Crates labeled
Explosivo
lined a wall. The old man was bent over a small pile of pebbles beside the circular tin in the center of a plank floor. Beside him lay an open wooden chest and a metal pipe railing that guarded something mechanical out of view. Small glinting veins striped through some of the pebbles, perhaps small extractable amounts of gold. Perhaps pyrite. Nothing impressive.

The man arrived to the count of twenty-three again and then rebuked himself and dumped the pebbles onto the floor before proceeding to count them off again.

The scenario repeated numerous times before the old man ended at twenty-three, having counted off to his satisfaction. He poured the contents into an open wood chest. From his vantage point, Caleb couldn’t see what else lay inside of it.

The old man looked up at the doorway and Caleb froze. The old man stared out into the darkness, then broke his gaze and walked out of view toward a near corner of the room. Caleb waited, listening to what sounded like boots descending a metal ladder.

Inching toward the threshold, Caleb peeked inside. Sure enough, a ladder descended through the floor on the near wall. An antiquated dumbwaiter pulley system sat inside a square of pipe railing. The large wooden chest, appearing to be over a century old with splintering wood sides bound by iron framework, rested open beside the dumbwaiter. Inside it lay a pile of much larger rocks, all of them glittering with thick veins of unprocessed gold.

He blinked and smiled.
Shivner, you son of a—

Metal clanked, striking alarm in his chest.

Rusted wheel squeaking followed, moving the pulley system into motion. Caleb shot a glance down the hole and saw the old man walk out of view, headed toward the ladder. Against the basement wall, Caleb noted at least half a dozen wooden chests similar to the one beside him. Boot steps echoed off of metal. Caleb hid himself just outside of the entrance.

He knew from his internship at his father’s firm that gold, once processed, could easily bring a thousand bucks per troy ounce—making a single pound of it worth sixteen thousand dollars.

It was a dense and weighty metal. A full chest had to hold at least two hundred pounds of rock. Minus maybe a hundred pounds for extracted ore and that still left a hundred pounds of gold. Multiply that by sixteen thousand . . .

The whispered words left Caleb’s lips, “One point six million dollars.”

The pulley squeaking stopped. Boots shuffled across the wood planks. The old man muttered something to himself and slammed the chest lid shut. He groaned and Caleb recognized the sound of vertebrae popping. Wood and metal slid along the floor, accompanied by the old man’s grunts.

How many of these chests did the old man have in there? How long had he been living out there, searching for gold and adding trivial amounts to this enormous stash?

The man suffered from dementia, no doubt. Caleb had seen it too often in many elderly he responded to on the ambulance. Could even be Alzheimer’s. Would the old coot even notice if most of his stash went missing?

Caleb took advantage of the noise the pulley made and stole away. He strode back into the forest path and clicked on his helmet light.

Dementia or not, the man’s presence was going to change things.

It could change
everything.

CHAPTER

12

J
umper 41 rolled along the Redding tarmac, shaking with frequent wind gusts, the sun low in the sky. Having flown more in inclement weather than the other way around, Silas would have felt uneasy if there wasn’t any wind. He sat with the crew this time. Madison looked back at him through the cockpit doorway, wearing a microphone headset with earphones half the size of her head. She smiled and waved with her fingers. Silas returned the gesture.

It’d been a quick turnaround after flying back from Oakland. He’d remained in the waiting room the entire time, and from what he gathered, no new revelations had been discovered concerning Madison’s seizures. He took the narrow opportunity he had at the Redding base to grab a bite to eat and then loaded his stuff for what he expected would be a several-week stay in the greater South Lake Tahoe wilderness.