The pilot fretted and hemmed and hawed, but finally negotiated a stable landing place of sorts on a plain of brittle, dried mud at the floor of a bowl beside the trail. The canyon walls recorded a war between gods, strata burrowing into each other, lines of accreted geologic time plunging under invading rock of radically variant composition, as if the land itself here sometimes turned to water. Perhaps when the rainstorms had been more generous here, this had been a cauldron-lake, for at least part of the year, but for nature, this would have been more than enough. Cundieffe had heard of aquatic plants, frogs, and even "primitive" fish which could seal themselves in a membrane of water and sleep for decades, perhaps even centuries, until water came again. Cundieffe imagined the ground beneath him churning with forgotten species resurrected by the fleeting rainstorm, and plotted the shortest path to solid rock.
The skids settled a good couple of inches into the crust, and Cundieffe leapt out, splaying his hands out before him as a rough hand shoved at the small of his back. He hit the ground running and awkwardly caught up with his own forward momentum, the ground beneath his feet crumbling like petrified ash, turned and shielded his eyes from the portable sandstorm from the prop wash, watched the Delta Force commandos fan out to form a secure perimeter around the chopper. Unassisted, Hanchett climbed down and, steadying herself against the chopper deck, reached back in and dragged out an evidence kit. A few of the commandos joked about her bringing too much makeup, another answering back too loud that they didn't make enough makeup for a face like that, but she didn't give them the satisfaction of a blush as she crossed the mud flat towards him. She was a credit to her gender and to the Bureau, Cundieffe thought. He felt very warmly towards her.
"Too hot for this shit," one of the commandos groaned.
"Actually," Cundieffe broke in on their griping, "today's temperature is far below the average for this time of year. The high record was set on this day in 1913, and it was one hundred thirty-four Fahrenheit at two-thirty in the afternoon. Right now, it's six-thirty PM, and the temperature is only a little above ninety-four. The focus of our search is up that box canyon there, less than a quarter mile to the northwest of our present position. If you gentlemen can maintain your unparalleled professionalism and expedite rather than hinder our collection of evidence on this site, we can be in the air again before sunset. Agreed?"
They looked at each other, equal parts bewilderment and relief. "We'll sit tight," the lieutenant said finally. "You call out, if you need help."
Cundieffe hadn't even had to ask. He was afraid of agreeing too quickly, because then he was sure the lieutenant would feel obligated to send along his two least-disciplined men as an "escort." He made a tight, lipless smile to indicate his resignation, and led Hanchett up into the narrow box canyon.
Hanchett insisted on carrying the evidence kit herself. The canyon was scarcely wide enough for them to walk abreast, and Cundieffe took the lead, though he had a harder time keeping his smooth-soled leather shoes under him than Hanchett, who had thought to wear boots.
The rutted trail up the canyon was more of a gutter, not quite flat, and choked in a thick carpet of eroded sand, packed to the consistency of asphalt by the rain that had pried it loose from the canyon walls. The walls themselves loomed forty feet above them on both sides, the jagged, interlocking facets of the opposing faces testifying to a bygone cataclysm that had split this mountain neatly into halves. They were walking up into a jaw of earthbone, that would take far less of a seismic upheaval to close it again. Cundieffe picked up his pace, though Hanchett dogged him by less than a full stride, and almost caught him several times when the sand gave way under him.
"Sir?" Agent Hanchett called. "May I ask what might be deemed an impertinent question?"
To his mild chagrin, he had a harder time than she did finding his breath, but he managed, "Go ahead, Hanchett. And—" huff "—don't call me sir. We're both garden-variety field agents."
"Yes, Agent Cundieffe, but—well, perhaps you're unaware of it, but the entire task force holds you in the highest esteem, and has expressed nothing but admiration for your handling of the case since you stepped in, but…"
"That's untrue in my experience, but thank you, Agent Hanchett. Was that your impertinent question?"
"No sir, I was going to ask—are you absolutely positive this is the best disposition of our resources at this time?" She stopped, and Cundieffe gratefully settled back against a rock wall and caught his breath, looked at her quizzically. "I didn't mean it like that, I apologize. I had no intention of second-guessing you, sir, but, Agent Tufts' report sounded a bit speculative, and I—well, many of us on the task force have had occasion to question his observations in the line of duty. And, well, if you saw something, then that settles it, but we've come close to a half-mile from the landing point, and we haven't seen anything."
"Look at the ground, Hanchett," Cundieffe said. This canyon could not possibly accommodate a vehicle of the description of Storch's truck, and in the other direction, according to the survey map, is a sheer wall fifty feet high. That was where I saw the wreck of a vehicle, which would indicate that the vehicle in question was driven into the canyon off the cliff, with intent to dispose of it. The vehicle I observed, though partially obscured by a fan of eroded soil, was not corroded, and the chrome reflected light back. It's been there after the first rainstorm, but probably before last night's. So, if you've no more doubts—"
"I'm sorry, si—Agent Cundieffe. I never meant to question your—"
"Forget it, Agent Hanchett. We have some ground to cover, so let's get a move on."
Three turns of the canyon later, they found it.
The truck lay nose down in the basin of the dead end of the canyon, the walls like termite-gnawed wood spilling petrifying sand over its matte black hood and one exposed wall of the truckbed. A chuckwalla, a fearsome-looking lizard nearly a foot long, scurried out the shattered windshield and sought cover as they picked a careful path to the truck.
The truck had not been here long. Cundieffe's guess from the air had been spot-on. It had been exposed by last night's storm. It was an uncomfortable revelation, to say the least. The Highway Patrol and Death Valley Junction sheriff's deputies who pursued Storch out of Furnace Creek had claimed to have fired several dozen shotgun rounds at the truck, yet the vehicle they'd recovered had shown no damage from gunfire. Cundieffe had not taken the discrepancy seriously because, well, there was the damnable truck, with the plates and matching VIN numbers on the engine block and doorframes, everything tallied up with Storch's DMV records, and Storch was the one who'd left Sheriff Twombley's office, according to several witnesses in town, and the surviving deputy himself, when he recovered his senses.
But that had not been the truck. This was the truck that had fled the Furnace Creek massacre, Cundieffe was sure of it. The license plates might match, the VIN numbers might even match, but unless there were two Zane Ezekiel Storches walking the earth, the man who'd killed Sheriff Twombley and his deputy was, it now appeared, someone else entirely.
Hanchett sank to her knees behind the vehicle, methodically turning the sand piled up over the back bumper until she paused, brushed at something before her and called out, "The plates match those of the other truck, sir."
Cundieffe peered into the cabin through the shot-up rear windscreen. The entire back wall of the cabin was like a screen door, or the top of a salt-shaker, the headrests virtually atomized, but there was no blood. His understanding of forensics in extreme climes such as this were woefully deficient, but he knew enough to expect that no one operating this truck could have survived such an onslaught without shedding a single drop of blood. The tumulus of soil on the seats and in the footwells was still damp from the rains, but he could see the instrument panels inside. They were covered in dirt, but unbroken. Cundieffe closed his eyes and calculated, variables shunting into orderly columns, wild cards shuffled to the side for later consideration. He was left with very little to go on. Something had soaked up the hail of deadly lead that had penetrated this truck, but had not bled. Someone had taken this truck, which matched Storch's in every respect, and committed mass murder in his name. And that's when he'd begun running. The apocryphal raid had only sent him into hiding. It hadn't been enough, though, so this had been arranged. What did Storch know, that he merited such an elaborate ruse? What was Storch, that someone was using him so? And for what?
Out here, Cundieffe held his eyes closed and discovered what a disquieting sensation true silence was. All the background sounds that Cundieffe had always taken for granted as the humming of the world simply existing, were stilled here. The numbing music of air conditioners, appliances, traffic, power lines, the oceanic hush of millions of humans breathing, was painfully absent. The noise of a man's mind could run amok here, spreading to fill the silence like the frantically proliferating foliage, exploding in a riot of impossible color before drying out and going the way of the shadows at noon in this godforsaken place.
His cell phone trilled in his breast pocket. He took it out and flipped it open, still gazing into the dank cabin of the wreck.
"Special Agent Cundieffe here. Talk to me."
"Agent Simpson, sir, in Tango Delta. Sir, there's been a report—a sighting!"
"What? Of what?"
"The choppers! They're in the air again! They just crossed highway 190 on a northbound bearing—" clattering, hot sounds burning out the signal, Simpson's voice, muted, shouting, "Give that back!" a long, low whistle, and dead air.
"Good lord! Hanchett, we've got to get back to the chopper, now!"
She stood and looked at him. "What is it?"
"They're in the air! Whatever's going to happen, is going to happen now!" They both scrambled around the shifting wall of the basin, and were halfway around when Cundieffe heard it.
He looked up and his hand went for his sidearm. He almost expected to see them passing directly overhead—the two black sharks of the sky that had bedeviled the combined brains and might of the United States government for a week. That they were within earshot at all was astounding but—no it was only one chopper. It did pass overhead, though, and as it banked, he felt sure he could see the Delta Force lieutenant inside his chopper, waving to him before they passed out of sight over the far wall.
Then the silence came roaring back in.
32
The rain had stopped as quickly as it had begun, but the cloud cover would be stalled over the eastern half of the state until the high evening winds of twilight caused by the desert's massive convection cells swept them away.
They flew at dusk.
Clinging to the open ground, ducking under powerlines and snaking into canyons and the shadows of mountains at over one hundred miles per hour, they left no ripple on radar screens, left only pictures of clouds for the satellites, and if their shadows happened to fall across the hood of a semi or a station wagon on highway 190 as they skulked out of the Argus Mountains and into the Inyos, they were five miles of trackless wilderness away by the time the driver shaded his eyes to look. Like sharks on a blood trail, they traced the path of least habitation over one hundred and fifty miles of California, from Baker to the Owens Valley.
Only a little boy saw them. Riding a two-stroke dirtbike outside of Independence without a helmet or his parents' permission, he'd managed to total the bike and break his leg in three places in a dried-up tributary of the Owens River. As he lay screaming in the fine powdered sediment of the dead riverbed, he'd fallen silent as the sound of the cicadas in the trees on the unreachable bank thickened and became the susurrant roar of a helicopter. He was going to be rescued, just like in the Vietnam movies, he was going to be evacced to an aid station, and his parents would be so frightened and awestruck by his ordeal that they'd forget all about his reckless adventure and buy him a new bike.
Then they'd burst out of the trees and flashed overhead as they came to an almost complete stop, banked on the angle of the Owens riverbed, and vanished. There were two of them, and there was no mistaking them for Life Flight.
He'd seen these choppers in the movies, too, in
Rambo
, and
Apocalypse Now
. One was Russian, the other American, but both were black and unmarked, their matte hulls reflecting none of the dying golden light of the sunset. Big silver cables were wrapped around the bodies of both helicopters, like they were held together with duct tape. But what he would remember most vividly, though it was long gone before its image was a ghost on his retina, was the man sitting in the open doorway of the American chopper, wearing a tricked-out Army-green spacesuit and holding some kind of space helmet on his knee and a badass rifle between his legs. He was bent over as if in intense concentration, but as they passed overhead, he heaved violently and threw up.
Sgt. Storch wiped his mouth and backed out of the punishing rush of balmy evening air flowing along the body of the Black Hawk. The crewman observing the terrain gave Storch a hand finding his bench.
In his old unit, losing your lunch before a mission would've provoked a storm of jeers and contempt and a score of derisive nicknames, but everyone onboard was otherwise preoccupied—checking weapons and suit seals, pecking at laptop computers, praying. There was none of the boisterous bullpen chatter that solid soldiers used to keep nerves at bay, but the silence in the cabin was a sign of the web of tension that radiated out from the two commanders on the front benches, just behind the flight deck. The freefall inertia of the helicopter was only half of the reason Storch had to put a racing stripe on the chopper's hull. He had only to look around to see how far he was from the real Army.