by Marc Cameron
Maycomb stopped at the trees, well away from the rocky edge. “How deep is it, do you think?”
Cutter moved to the square platform. Grabbing one of the steel posts where the cable attached on his side, he peered over.
“A hundred, maybe a hundred fifty,” he said.
“Okay,” she said, moving to join him. “As long as it’s deep enough to kill me outright. I don’t want to lay down there in agony for hours until someone can come down and get me.”
“Guess that’s one way of looking at it.”
A nylon rope ran in a continuous loop through a series of metal guides the length of the cable, then through pulleys on both sides of the ravine. The metal car or hand trolley was attached to this rope.
Cutter had no idea when the hand trolley had been built. The steel piping was screwed instead of welded. Two small wooden benches were bolted to the floor on either side of the open frame, facing each other. There were no seat belts, and the frame itself provided the only handholds beyond the rope used to pull yourself back and forth. The pulleys and cables were rusted, but appeared to be in good condition – at least good enough to carry the previous load across that day. The newest piece of the setup was the rope, a spliced length of twisted mountaineering rope called Gold-line. It was frayed, but serviceable, probably attached by Tom Horning or one of his group of adventurers sometime in the past year or so.
Cutter believed they might have pegged the trolley, making it impossible to bring over, but he gave it a stout tug and it began to move toward him.
“You can still wait—”
A loud pop came from the far side of the ravine. Cutter initially thought it was a gunshot, or some kind of sabotage to the line, but the hand trolley continued to squeak and wobble toward them. It took just under a minute to bring it all the way across.
“Get in!” he said.
To her credit, Maycomb complied without question.
Cutter stood on the opposite side of the trolley cage, balancing the swing as best he could. Both hands on the rope, he began to pull hand over hand. He needed to get them across as quickly as possible.
“Want to tell me what that was?” Maycomb asked, staring straight across the gorge, as they swung, and inched, and swung some more. She and Cutter both avoided looking down at the silver line of churning water in the rocks beneath their flimsy basket.
Cutter kept pulling, but nodded to a silver canister tied to the pulley arm on which the trolley rode the cable.
“A flashbang,” he said. “They set it and left it.”
Maycomb closed her eyes and groaned. “So now they know we’re behind them.”
“They know somebody is,” Cutter said. “If they’re close, they could send someone back to check – and we’re sitting ducks out here.”
Maycomb reached up to grab the rope. Timing her efforts to match his, she began to help him pull. “Yeah, and you look like a cop from a hundred yards away.”
Cutter stepped off the trolley as soon as they reached the other side, holding it steady for Maycomb.
“This way,” he whispered, stepping toward a line of devil’s club, fiddlehead fern, and alder on the uphill side of what looked to be Donita’s direction of travel. “Try your best not to touch any of the vegetation.”
“Yep,” Maycomb said, breathless with tension. She mimicked Cutter’s twisting dance to avoid disturbing the alder and berry leaves.
They needed to get off the trail as quickly as possible, but Cutter wanted to gain the high ground before he took a minute to see if someone returned to check their back trail.
He didn’t have long to wait.
Chapter 44
The first shot snapped through the branches to their right, skittering leaves and narrowly missing Maycomb. Cutter spun at the staccato crack, pulling her down behind a thick-hipped hemlock that was wide enough to cover them both as long as their aggressors attacked head on. If there were three of them, as Cutter suspected, there was a slim chance of that. They’d simply fan out, using their own trees for cover while they flanked the couple and picked them off.
Whatever he was going to do, he needed to do it fast, before the others got organized. To do that, he needed intel. Rather than removing his pack, Cutter asked Maycomb to get the compact Leupold binoculars from the outside pocket. He rolled to the side, staying low to come up behind a neighboring stump of old growth, peeking out a good ten feet away from where he’d last been seen.
There were three all right. An older man with a huge black and silver beard and a man with slick black hair, each carrying a pistol. Slick carried a pack with a coil of climbing rope. The third man was younger, more muscular, with a killer look in his eyes that distance couldn’t hide. A tough guy, and he knew it. He also carried a pack, out of which he took the components of a scoped precision rifle.
Cutter didn’t take the time to get any more information. He had all that he needed to make a decision.
He belly-crawled back to Maycomb behind the hemlock tree.
Two more pistol shots skittered through the foliage. WAG shots— wild-ass guesses for now, but they’d settle down and zero in soon enough.
“We have to move,” Cutter said. “Three bad guys. One of them is putting together a rifle – and he moves like he knows how to use it. Good chance he’s the shooter from the shrine.”
“We’re here, right?” Maycomb whispered, pointing to a spot on the map just east of the ravine.
“Yep.”
She traced a line on the paper with the tip of her finger, directly uphill. “That’s a mine, isn’t it?”
Horning marked his mines with triangles – deltas. This one was blue, underscored by three blue lines and the notation: CC#2. Cutter guessed this one to be no more than a couple hundred yards away. But every yard of it was uphill, with people shooting at them while they tried to find a hole in the mountain that Horning had warned them could be almost impossible to find.
Cutter tapped Maycomb on the arm so she’d look at him. He already had the Colt in hand. He passed her the Glock. “Know how to use this?”
She nodded. “My husband had one.”
“Good,” Cutter said. “When I say, give a slow five-count, and then shoot a couple of times in their general direction. Don’t stick your head around. Don’t try to aim. Just make them shoot back at you.”
“You want them to shoot at me?”
“Stay behind the tree and you’ll be fine,” Cutter said. “As soon as you hear my first shot, run as fast as you can for the mine, finger off the trigger. Hopefully, I’ll be able to get them to put their heads down for a second or two so you can get a head start.”
“What if they don’t? Put their heads down, I mean.”
“Then we’ll have one less guy chasing us,” he whispered. “Now, go on my first shot. And remember, finger off the trigger when you move. Ready?”
Maycomb gathered herself up to run and gave a snappy nod.
She had to be terrified, but she only looked determined.
“Start counting now!” Cutter rolled to his right, coming up behind the stump. He’d just come to a stop when Maycomb took her first shot.
Black Beard returned fire first. Slick waited a beat for Maycomb to shoot again. He was more deliberate, strategic, where Black Beard appeared to act on emotion. Good to know. Tough Guy had his rifle assembled now and lay on his belly behind the scope. Maycomb’s shot had done the trick, and he was zeroed in on the hemlock, ready to pick her off as soon as she exposed herself to shoot again.
Tough Guy had found himself a trough in the forest duff, a small hillock that concealed most of his body. Only his boots and the front half of his rifle were exposed. Prone and steady, Cutter maneuvered the Colt so the front sight covered the rifle’s action. He’d thought momentarily about shooting that Tough Guy in the foot, but decided he’d rather take the rifle out of the equation and deal with three guys with handguns.
He guessed the range to be less around forty yards. A reach for the pist
ol as far as pinpoint accuracy was concerned, but doable.
Maycomb’s shots were already going stale, and the three men’s eyes were starting to wander, looking for targets.
Cutter took a settling breath and, holding a hair high, pressed the trigger, sending a .357 round slamming through the magazine well of the rifle.
Tough Guy cursed, crawfishing into his makeshift foxhole away from the shot. Cutter fired toward his feet, but it was a snap shot and went low, kicking up dirt and moss. He wasn’t a fan of spray and pray tactics, but sent another round into the brush where he’d last seen Slick keeping them down. Cutter dumped his three empty shells, the topped off quickly before scrambling after Maycomb.
Sprinting uphill felt interminably slow, but Cutter consoled himself that the men pursuing them were running up the same hill. He swung around a boulder the size of a car, caught sight of Maycomb through the trees, and adjusted his course toward her. She ran with purpose, and hopefully had the mine entrance in sight. If they could duck inside before the men got there, they might have a chance.
Cutter vaguely registered another shot as wood shards flew off a knee-high deadfall the same moment he hurdled over it. He cut right, keeping Maycomb in sight, no more than twenty yards ahead through the trees. She had to be getting close.
Hiding in a hole was far from optimum. Cutter could think of a dozen ways he’d assault an enemy in a tunnel, but he needed time to formulate some semblance of a plan – and outgunned and in the open, time was fast running out.
Cutter ducked right again, skirting a line of spruce trees he hoped might offer some cover, and nearly stepped into an oncoming bullet in the process. The shot sent dirt spraying at his feet. He sprang left as another round thwacked the bark next to his head. He was already running as fast as he could, but rounds snapping in from downrange had a way of adding a little adrenaline kick to his step. Digging in again, he scanned for Maycomb, who’d suddenly dropped out of sight.
More shots peppered the trees around him, forcing him to sidehill, away from where he wanted to go. A bullet slapped the ground to his left, sending him back the other direction. They were lobbing them in now, but with three people shooting, it was only a matter of time.
Two more shots popped in quick succession – from uphill.
Way to go, Lori Maycomb, Cutter thought.
Another two steps brought her into view. She’d jumped into the mine entrance and was now laying down cover fire to slow the assault on Cutter as he ran.
The Glock held only eleven rounds, and she’d already used two at the tree.
The shots behind Cutter kept coming, but they were wide and sporadic.
Maycomb rolled onto her side when Cutter approached, giving him room to slide into the narrow opening. A flat rock the size of a dinner table and covered with dirt hung over the mine’s entrance, reducing it to a black gash in the mountain less than three feet tall and half again as wide. Cutter slid on his belly through a slurry of mud and rock, headfirst into the darkness. He came to a stop next to Maycomb’s feet and scrambled back up the scree to assist her.
He reached into his pocket for an extra magazine for the Glock. “You okay?” he asked.
Maycomb nodded. Firing her last two rounds when she saw the fresh mag. Meant for a larger model, this one carried fifteen rounds hanging out the bottom of the magazine well.
“They’re still coming,” she said. “What now?”
“I have one more magazine of fifteen after that,” he said. “So keep shooting, but be judicious. I’ll try and make a call on the sat phone to get the cavalry here.”
Maycomb answered, chambering a round and sending it downrange immediately.
Cutter extended the satellite phone’s antenna and held it as far out as he dared to try to get a clear view of the sky. A flurry of bullets slapped the ground around his hand.
“Shit!” he said, jerking the phone inside and trading it for the Colt Python.
Another bullet smacked the overhang, sending shards of rock into the tunnel. Whoever was on that gun was a better-than-average shot. Probably Tough Guy, Cutter thought, chiding himself for not taking off the rifleman’s foot when he had the chance.
Maycomb had the only semblance of cover in the form of a basketball-size lump of rock. Cutter rolled sideways, trying to find an angle or something to hide behind so he could look downhill long enough to take a productive shot.
“Let’s have you move back behind me,” he said. “Better that I do the shooting.”
She gave him an emphatic nod and then fired three quick shots. “Cutter!” she yelled. “They’re moving!”
“Moving?”
He and Maycomb were both half deaf from all the gunfire in the enclosed space.
“Two of them,” she said. “One right, one left.” She shimmied backward away from her rock, yielding the space to him.
He crawled into position in time to catch a glimpse of Slick and Black Beard working their way uphill on either side of the mine. He fired toward Slick, but it was wasted ammunition. He didn’t have the angle.
Cutter pushed away from the entrance a couple feet and took one of the Streamlights from his pocket. A rock fell from the jagged roof, making him wish for the helmet, but there was no time for that. He rolled onto his back, surveying the area around the entrance, then playing the beam past Maycomb into the blackness. The tunnel would have been head high for the miners when they’d built it – a little shy of six feet. Cutter would need to remember to stoop. His light bounced off a narrow stream that ran down the center of the tunnel. Old boards and rusted tools lay here and there along the arched gray walls. Water dripped steadily from the uneven rock ceiling, plopping into the trickle. The sweet odor of decaying wood came from the rough-cut timber frame just inside the opening forming a shallow puddle in the mud and shale. Sodden and sagging, the wood looked more like the trigger to spring a trap than any kind of architectural support. The upright timber beside Cutter’s leg was badly splintered, listing heavily as if it were carrying the weight of the entire mountain.
Gruff voices drifted down from outside. It was impossible to tell from where exactly, but a skitter of dirt and gravel falling from above the entrance told Cutter all he needed to know.
Cutter pointed the beam of his Streamlight down the tunnel again, found what he wanted, and then tapped Maycomb on the thigh.
“We need to move!”
Fist-size stones bounced inside the entrance, clattering against the rock and splashing into the puddle and punctuating Cutter’s urgency.
Scrambling to his feet, he grabbed Maycomb by the hand and ran, splashing and sliding through the ankle-deep water and silt to put as much distance between them and the tunnel entrance as he could. Fifteen steps in he reached what he was looking for, a shallow depression cut a scant three feet into the rock. He pulled Maycomb tight against him so they both faced the wall.
“Cover your head,” he managed to say, before a sullen woomf shook the mountain. A black wall of dust and stone blew into the tunnel on a gale-force wind, the pressure wave slamming against Cutter’s lungs. Jagged chunks of rock rained from the ceiling. One of them slammed against Cutter’s forearm, raised to protect his head. The sudden shock of the blow caused him to drop his flashlight into the muck at his feet, throwing the tunnel into complete darkness.
Chapter 45
“You hear that?” Lola Teariki said, standing at the tideline of sun-bleached driftwood and rotting kelp above the old dock.
Rockie Van Dyke’s hand dropped to her Glock.
“Gunfire?”
Both women had thought they may have heard a rifle shot on the way in, but the roar of the outboard motor covered everything quieter than a howitzer.
“Could be,” Lola said. “Sounded deeper, though. A rumble.”
“Probably my idiot sister-in-law starting a rockslide,” Van Dyke scoffed.
“Due respect, Detective,” Lola said, casting around the ground for tracks. “But you should give your damned
blood feud a rest for a quick minute. I’m trying to concentrate here.”
“Okay,” Van Dyke nodded at the mud, not quite sorry, but professional enough to get back on task. “So what do you see?”
“Not a damned thing,” Lola admitted. “And that’s the problem. Cutter always says that everything that moves across the ground leaves some kind of sign.”
She and Van Dyke had tied off next to the Smoker Craft and then walked directly toward the tree line in hopes of finding a trail – cutting sign, Cutter called it. Surprisingly, she’d found no fresh tracks at all, even in the willow-choked line of mud that ran parallel to the forest. They had to have crossed somewhere, so she walked north, scanning the beach.
“Cutter,” she mumbled into the wind. “What have you—”
She stopped when she looked back toward the water and saw a skiff bobbing beyond a line of rocks that jutted into the cove. The sight of the new boat focused both women immediately.
“He said someone is already here,” Van Dyke said under her breath.
“Keep an eye uphill,” Lola said. She started for the trees above the skiff, getting a better picture now of what Cutter had meant on the phone.
You didn’t need to be a trained tracker to locate a bunch of footprints in mud, but Lola had a moment of pride when she was able to suss out where Cutter had squatted to take measurements and make sketches. She’d seen him do exactly the same thing dozens of times. Another set of impressions stood well behind Cutter’s. Those would be Maycomb’s, observing Cutter work, just as Rockie Van Dyke was observing Lola now.
Lola looked up the mountain, trying to peer through the dense shadows of moss and brush and fallen trees.
Now came the hard part.
Behind her, Van Dyke held up the sat phone and shook her head. “I’m getting no answer from Cutter.”
“Understandable,” Lola said. “He’d have to be holding the antenna just right to get a signal in these trees.”
She searched the willows until she found a straight branch and then bent it so it was taut at the base. Her pocketknife cut through it like butter. She trimmed the leafy twigs along the length of her tracking stick and measured the stride between two tracks she believed to be Cutter’s. He would try and leave her a trail, so in theory, his tracks would be easier to follow. In truth, it didn’t matter. Lola wanted to save Donita Willets and arrest the bad guys, but it was Cutter she’d follow, wherever his tracks led. He was her partner. He needed her.
