Heaven's Keep (15 page)

She handed him her business card, and after she’d stepped back, he closed the door.

While they ate, they watched television, CNN’s continuing coverage of what had become known as the Hargrove standoff. The compound was surrounded, and Hargrove was threatening to blow everything sky-high if anyone tried to rush the place. The authorities weren’t certain how many people were inside, but they did know a significant number of them were children. They were attempting to negotiate.

Halfway through their meal, another knock disturbed them.

“Damn it,” Cork said and stomped to the door. “What?” he snapped as he opened up. Dewey Quinn stood there, looking startled. “Sorry,” Cork said. “I thought you were that reporter.”

“Felicia Gray? She was here?”

“Just a few minutes ago.”

“What did she want?” He waved it off. “Doesn’t matter. I got a call from the office. You dropped by looking for me?”

“Yeah. Come on in. Gray might still be out there.”

When Dewey was inside, Stephen said, “Hello, Deputy Quinn.”

“It’s okay if you call me Dewey, Stephen. I understand you’ve been looking for me, Cork. Sorry to make this short, but my wife’s waiting in the car.”

“We talked to Will Pope this afternoon,” Cork told him.

“And he has you believing in Baby’s Cradle?”

“I think it’s worth sending some search planes that way.”

“Cork, when the question of Baby’s Cradle first came up, I talked to Commander Nickleson. She was absolutely convinced that there
was no merit in searching that area. Apparently it’s a tough airspace to fly, and none of her pilots were particularly eager to try. Honestly, I agree with her assessment. There’s no value in diverting planes to Baby’s Cradle. But I’ll tell you what. If Jon Rude is willing, I’ll give him my blessing to join Nightwind.”

“There’s a new weather forecast, Dewey. Have you heard?”

He nodded. “Snow in a couple of days. Cork, we don’t have any real idea where to look. I understand that if you don’t check out this lead, you’ll be left wondering. I don’t want that. Go with Rude tomorrow and the next, if need be. In the meantime, we’ll try to cover everything else.”

Cork noticed for the first time that Quinn was wearing a sport coat and tie. “Going out?”

“My wife likes to dance. There’s a place in Riverton.” Quinn looked uncomfortable. “I have a life beyond the office.”

“I know, Dewey. Have a good time.”

“You guys get some sleep, okay?” He smiled wearily at them both and left.

Although it was late, Cork called his family in Aurora and filled them in. He tried to sound hopeful about Baby’s Cradle. By the time he’d finished, Stephen had nodded off with his clothes on. Cork looked at his son, who was really not much more than a boy. This was hard business, something no boy should have to endure, yet Stephen continued to be strong and Cork was proud of him.

He put the room key card in his pocket and slipped outside. He went down to the courtyard, as he had the night before, and stood amid the vapors rising from the hot spring water that filled the small pool. He eyed the black sky and the stars and thought about the mountains to the west, which had begun to seem to him like malevolent, living things, angry giants against whom he felt puny and weak. And beyond those mountains was something worse. The fury of another storm. It seemed that all the great forces of the earth were mounted against him. And against Jo.

He closed his eyes and began to pray, but in the middle of the prayer, his mind took an odd turn. He saw, unexpected and startlingly vivid, the image of the blazing cross above the small church
in Red Hawk and the boy who’d stood under it. He had an overwhelming sense that if he opened his eyes he’d find the boy before him now.

But when he looked, there was only the darkness of the night, the ghosts of the vapors, and the lost words of his prayer that had been cut short.

W
hen Cork and Stephen arrived at the airfield the next morning, Rude was already there with another man, bent over a map spread on the hood of Rude’s pickup.

“Morning, guys,” Rude said. “This is Lame Deer Nightwind.”

Nightwind looked up from the map.
“Boozhoo,”
he said. In response to the surprise on Cork’s face, he brought out a relaxed smile. “I go to a lot of powwows. I can say hello in a dozen indigenous languages. That and ‘I’ll have a beer.’” He was no taller than Cork, a decade younger, lean and hard as rebar. He had eyes like shiny beetle shells, high, proud cheekbones, and that easy smile.

The sky was clear, the morning cold, the air dry. The southern Absarokas on the horizon were like a big wave rolling out of a calm sea. The men and Stephen stood around the hood of Rude’s pickup, peering at the topographic map.

Nightwind drew a circle with his index finger. “This is where we’re headed. You can see from the contours why it’s called Baby’s Cradle. These ridges form a box roughly ten miles long and five miles wide. At the bottom is Sleeping Baby Lake. It’s a good-size glacial lake. It drains through a break in the ridge to the north—here.” He nailed the spot with the tip of his finger. “The break’s called Giant’s Gate. That’s where we fly in, and that’s where things can get tricky. I’ve been telling Jon that when the wind comes out of the north, it funnels through Giant’s Gate and whirls around inside Baby’s Cradle like a
hurricane. Kicks up snow so bad it’s a blizzard in there. Can be plenty rough. Either of you prone to airsickness?”

“No,” Stephen said without hesitation.

Cork said, “Don’t think so, but it might depend on how bad it turns out to be.”

“Wind’s out of the west today, so not so bad,” Nightwind said. “Jon’s willing to give it a try.”

Cork studied the map. “If Baby’s Cradle is so difficult to get into, why would the pilot have flown in there?”

“Mostly it would have been by accident,” Nightwind replied. “The ridge to the north is the lowest side of Baby’s Cradle. Up here is where the last radio transmission from the pilot was made”—Nightwind tapped the spot on the map—“indicating he was descending from eighteen thousand feet. If he turned back and then decided he couldn’t make it to Casper and headed instead for the Riverton airport”—he traced the line with his finger—“depending on the altitude he was able to maintain and the radius of his turn, he could have flown straight into Baby’s Cradle.”

“How about flying out of Baby’s Cradle?” Cork said.

“Depends on the conditions, visibility, the trouble the pilot was experiencing with his plane. If he got in there and didn’t begin a climb pretty quick, the ridge at the south end would’ve been hard to clear.”

“Still game?” Rude said.

Cork nodded. “Let’s do it.”

Rude lifted off first and headed northwest. After Nightwind became airborne, he took the lead and Rude followed. They flew over the little valley where Rude had his spread, and then across the desolate landscape of the northern Owl Creek Reservation. Where the sun had heated the outcroppings, the snow had melted completely, leaving a patchwork of yellow or red rock surrounded by white earth in a way that reminded Cork of the mottled hide of a mangy dog.

After twenty minutes, Nightwind climbed steeply and banked to the north. Rude followed. Below them, the peaks of the southern Absarokas seemed to reach toward the belly of Rude’s chopper as if to snatch it from the sky. In the distance, Cork recognized the immense,
icy wall of Heaven’s Keep, more imposing than anything else in that part of the range. The air currents grew powerful, knocking the helicopter around like a cat with a ball of yarn. Nightwind curled sharply to the west, and Rude stayed on his tail. Cork felt his stomach object to the maneuver, and he glanced at Stephen, who seemed not bothered in the least.

“We’re lucky,” Rude said. “Lame knows these mountains better than anyone I can think of. Hell, he’s a better pilot than anyone I can think of.”

“What’s his story?” Cork asked.

“Don’t know it all. Born on the rez, but no father ever came forward. His mother was caught up in booze and drugs. They found her dead in her trailer when Lame was just a kid. Story is he was sitting beside her like he was waiting for her to wake up. She’d been dead awhile, I guess. When they tried to remove her body, Lame went berserk, stabbed one of the guys with a knife. Andy No Voice swears it’s true. Fierce little five-year-old protecting his dead mother.” He shook his head, and Cork couldn’t tell if it was out of admiration or bemusement. “An old uncle took him in. Kept to himself in a place he’d built way out to hell and gone in the foothills. Raised Lame like a little mountain man, hunting, fishing, trapping in the Absarokas. Somewhere along the way, his uncle died, don’t know how. Lame got sent to live with his mother’s cousin, woman who’d married a guy in Lander. That was Ellyn Grant’s family. Gave them trouble, I guess. At seventeen, he took off to God knows where. Gone for a lot of years. Nobody heard boo from him. Then he shows up on the rez maybe half a dozen years ago. He’s got himself a nice plane, some capital. Builds a place on the land where he’d lived with his uncle, snug up against the Absarokas. He still flies out periodically, gone for a few days or weeks. Nobody knows where, but everybody’s got a speculation.”

“Like what?” Stephen asked.

Rude shrugged. “He flies a Piper Super Cub, kind of classic among bush pilots. So could be he runs drugs or guns or smuggles anything from cigarettes to human cargo. He’s kind of a swashbuckling figure around here.”

Rude broke off suddenly and held up his hand to silence the talk
in the cockpit, and he resettled the radio headphones so that they covered his ears.

“We read you, Lame,” he replied into his mic.

“There it is,” came Nightwind’s voice over the headset in Cork’s flight helmet. “Giant’s Gate.”

Rude pointed through the chopper’s windshield. “Dead ahead,” he said.

Stephen leaned forward. Cork saw it, too, a high, rugged ridge with a mile-wide break in the middle where a thread of white water coursed through. Timber covered three-quarters of the ridge; above that was bare rock buried deep in snow.

Static in Cork’s headphones broke up the next transmission from Nightwind, but he heard Rude’s reply, “I read you, Lame.” Rude turned toward his passengers. “When we go in, Lame will maintain his altitude and continue to scan the higher slopes. We’re going to get as close to the lake as possible. That’s been a problem for him. Hold tight.”

They swept into Baby’s Cradle a hundred yards behind Nightwind’s yellow Super Cub. Once inside, Cork saw swirls of snow kicking off the high faces of the ridges on both sides. The chopper slid sideways, and Rude gripped the control stick and fought the powerful shove of air currents as he guided the helicopter toward the lake far below. From the snow line on the evergreens that covered the slopes, Cork could see that the snowpack was already several feet deep. The flat surface of Sleeping Baby Lake was covered with a solid blanket of white, wrinkled where the wind had pushed the snow into long, rippled drifts.

They spent a couple of hours flying a grid that took them across the floor of Baby’s Cradle first in a north–south pattern, then east–west. There were several meadows, none more than a hundred yards wide, not nearly large enough for a plane to land. They found no sign of wreckage. Rude finally brought the chopper to a hover above the lake.

“I’ve been thinking about that vision of old Will Pope,” he said. “He told us the eagle went under a white blanket, so maybe the plane went into the lake and is under the ice.”

Cork nodded. “I’ve been thinking the same thing.”

“To a pilot looking at an emergency landing, Sleeping Baby Lake
might have presented an enticing possibility. But if that was the case…” Rude didn’t finish with the obvious.

But Stephen did. He said, “They’re all dead.”

Cork looked at his son. Stephen’s face gave away nothing, though the weight of his realization had to have been awful.

“Can we land?” Cork asked.

Rude shook his head. “I wouldn’t risk it. No idea how thick the ice is. In one of the meadows maybe. But what good would it do?”

Cork said, “If there’s a possibility they’re here, Jon, we’d like to know one way or the other.”

“I understand,” Rude said. “I just don’t know how to do that.”

“Divers?” Cork suggested.

“Getting them up here would be hard enough. Then we’d have to clear snow and break a hole. And once they’re in, it’s a big lake to try to cover in the little time we have before the next storm hits.”

“Please, Mr. Rude,” Stephen said.

Rude was quiet awhile, considering. The wind lifted a sheet of snow off the lake and threw it at the chopper.

“I suppose we could use a magnetometer,” Rude said.

Stephen looked puzzled. “What’s that?”

“It’s a device a lot of geologists and oil companies around here use. It measures variations in magnetic fields. A concentration of metal like the plane would probably register on a magnetometer. If we were going to try it here, we’d need a good handheld model.”

“Where do we get one?”

“I suppose once we’re out of Baby’s Cradle, we could radio Dewey and have him start calling.”

“What are we waiting for?” Cork said.

Rude told Nightwind, who’d been circling above, to rendezvous outside Baby’s Cradle. Once there, he contacted Deputy Quinn and explained their thinking. Quinn said he’d see what he could do.

They flew back in somber quiet. Stephen kept his face turned away. Sometimes he stared at the pure blue sky, and sometimes at the mottled earth below. Cork had nothing hopeful to offer his son. At the moment, the prospect on the horizon was heartbreaking, and there was nothing he could do to shield Stephen from it.

Nightwind landed at the Hot Springs airfield ahead of them and was waiting when they touched down.

“Wish we’d come up with something more hopeful,” he said, standing with his hands shoved in the back pockets of his jeans. “But tell you what. You get hold of one of those contraptions Jon’s talking about, I’ll be glad to go back up there and help out.”

“Appreciate that.” Cork shook his hand gratefully, and Stephen did the same.