The Blood of Patriots

by William W. Johnstone

  The cabin was more or less what Ward had expected, save for the smell. The logs were broadax hewn and supported a steep rafter roof. It was about six or seven hundred square feet, a single large room that sat on a rock-ledge clearing a hundred or so feet back from the cliff. The logs were so tightly fitted that it hadn’t been necessary to fill them with plaster. It had been built by Randolph’s grandfather who was a part-time trapper, and the remnants of his work were everywhere. Antlers were functionally suspended for hanging pots and coats, and pelts lined the windward wall to retain the heat. The heat was generated by direct baking from the sun from late morning to late afternoon, and a large stone fireplace at night. There was a single bed, but among the items Randolph had brought was a bedroll for himself.

  Rows of smaller antlers mounted near the door supported a total of four rifles. As soon as the horses were tied up and the supplies brought inside, Randolph started a fire while Ward had a look at the firearms.

  “These aren’t antiques,” he said admiringly.

  “No sir,” Randolph said. “One on top is a Henry .22 pump, then a Browning lever-action rimfire—”

  “BL-22,” Ward said. Randolph seemed impressed. “That’s one of the rifles I bought from that dirtbag gunrunner.”

  “What’d you tell him you needed that cannon for?”

  “Car trunk. Human trafficking—Chinese and Malaysian girls, mostly.”

  “You had a whole story set up?”

  “Had to,” Ward said. He tried not to let his gut boil when he thought of Cherkassov.

  Randolph sensed his companion was slipping to a bad place. “Ever fire one?”

  Ward smiled. “Had to see if it worked. Some guys hold back a piece of the firing mechanism and charge you a few grand extra for that.”

  Randolph continued the tour. The other two rifles were Anshutz models which Randolph said were his favorites. “I’m a sucker for the old-fashioned bolt-action.” He pointed to a small night table near the bed. “I’ve got a set of .38s too in case a mountain lion or one of the other locals decides to say hello.”

  “You need two for that?” Ward laughed.

  “Naw, only for coyotes,” he said. “You get a hungry pack deciding your kill is dinner, you want both hands full of firepower.”

  Ward didn’t bother to ask if that ever happened. The detective kept a pair of guns in his apartment too. A man who wasn’t prepared wasn’t a man, he was a corpse.

  The rest of the day was busy. To Ward, healing his wounds did not mean sitting still. He believed in working through pain. Since the injury wasn’t going anywhere soon, he had to deal with it. And to deal with it, he had to experience it at its worst. That meant doing everything that Randolph did. Fortunately, the older man subscribed to Ward’s philosophy, using work to get through his neck injury. Each man spotted the other as they cut wood for the fire, trapped small game like rabbits and quail, and walked the horses through the relatively level woods that surrounded the cabin on three sides. Ward was tightly bandaged and that proved enough to hold him together.

  What struck Ward about being in the mountains was how the sun became their clock. When it went down that first night, the two of them, exhausted from the day’s activities and their natural penchant for overexertion, went right to bed. Ward didn’t even remember lying on the cot. He was out. They were both up at dawn, not just from the light but from the animals that rose with it. Birds were not something he heard often in New York, except for pigeons, and that was usually in the third person as a pedestrian cursed them out. He couldn’t begin to isolate the countless chirping sounds he heard.

  Ward was surprised to learn that a lot of them weren’t birds at all, but insects—locusts and beetles, mostly. He didn’t want to contemplate their size.

  The first full day was spent getting the cabin in order which included digging a latrine since the place had no plumbing. Water for drinking and washing came from a pump well in the back which was fed by an underground stream. If that went dry, there was a creek in the woods fed by cool water from the higher elevations.

  Ward didn’t mind because he knew the stay here was finite. He resolved never to complain about New York tap water again. At least it came to a bathroom that was inside one’s home.

  But it was the smell inside the cabin that surprised him most of all. Built without modern materials, Randolph’s place reeked of the Old West: the musk of the old skins, the nutlike smell of the ancient wood, the ever-present smell of the foliage and the animals—especially the dead ones that had fallen somewhere outside the perimeter. Whatever had not been eaten was left to rot in the sun. Except for those carcasses the smells were not unpleasant, but they were different and unchanging. In New York, smells changed from room to room and certainly from block to block.

  This cabin, this small piece of land scratched from the mountainside, may not have been where Ward would have chosen to live. But he had that choice because the thousands of settlers who came before him had made places like this their home. They had fought the weather, the terrain, the others who had lived there before them, others who wanted to live there after them; every conceivable hazard the mind could imagine, those people faced with ax, gun, and courage. They did not have organizations or foreign governments or banks behind them. They had only their resolve and ingenuity. Being out here was like attending a religious service, only the sermon wasn’t spoken. It was felt. The efforts of his forebears got into Ward’s soul in a way that surprised him. In New York, one heard the stories about immigrants. Their fingerprints, their ghosts were unavoidable in what used to be neighborhoods of Irish or Jews or Chinese or Italians. But there was, at least, some semblance of structure into which they could fit their skills and ancestry.

  Out here? You were lucky to find a stream that didn’t dry out seasonally. Even rusty tap water was better than that.

  It thrilled him, this piece of Americana the size of the Louisiana Purchase. He cherished the living spirit being added to the one he already knew. It formed a more complete picture of America, the place he had instinctively moved to defend.

  Now he understood, viscerally, why he had done it and why it was so important. His only regret was that his daughter was not there to experience this with him. Words would not be able to convey the richness of what became a permanent part of him.

  And that was just the first day.

  The second day was different. The second day the noise returned, the sounds he had been unable to place. Only now they were much closer, though they did not seem to be making their way toward the cabin.

  Which is why he and Randolph decided to make their way toward the sounds.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  The only thing Randolph and Ward knew for certain was that the sound came from the southwest.

  “That’s pretty steep rock there,” Randolph told him as they saddled their horses. “Too steep for recreational riding.”

  “But those are definitely ATVs,” Ward said.

  “That’s what the dirt cloud’s tellin’ us,” Randolph agreed. “Chainsaws’d be darker smoke, not kicked-up dirt. Can’t think of what else it could be.”

  They would find out soon enough. After sliding the two bolt action rifles into saddle scabbards and handing Ward a leather pouch filled with shells, Randolph started them out through the woods. After a few hundred yards the mountain went up again. The men took a trail that had been cut over decades by larger animals like black bear and elk. It was wide but not that wide, and once again Ward found himself impressed with the spirit of the people who tried this with carts or wagons. How many dead ends or too-deep gullies, hastily bridged with logs, did they have to endure before getting through?

  “The bears and deer didn’t always live up this high,” Randolph said. “Civilization drove them out of the lower elevations. The elk still have plenty of pine needles and grasses, and the bears do okay with the fish up here, though campers avoid the area. The bears seem to like canned beans more than trout.”

>   “Or maybe with trout,” Ward suggested.

  Randolph chuckled. “True enough. Who knows what’s on the mind of a bear?”

  “You ever have to shoot one?”

  “Have to? No. I did once, as a kid. The whole Davy Crockett rite-of-passage thing—“kilt him a b’ar when he was only three.” Except I was twelve. I felt bad afterwards ’cause I learned it was a mother. I left food for the cubs the rest of the winter.”

  The men rode on, the ride pleasant, the scenery stirring. It was one thing to be among the man-made skyscrapers of New York, which went back a hundred years or so. It was another to be in a place where the “towers” were measured in geologic time.

  The temperature stayed the same throughout the morning, in the low forties. The chill of the higher regions compensated for the unimpeded rays of the sun. They were at 3,000 feet; above them, atop another 3,000 feet of sheer, sloping wall, Ward could see snow. It humbled him again to think of a man with a family, and maybe only a mule, perhaps no water, little or no ammunition, coming to this height and—not knowing what or who was on the other side—deciding to go on.

  We owe it to them to see this through, wherever it leads, he told himself.

  The men went south when they reached the cliff. The path here was nothing more than areas clear of fallen rock; it was a jagged, carefully negotiated passage. Ward found himself surprisingly comfortable in the saddle, the major discomfort coming from his ribs and not from the ride itself.

  The sound they followed was naggingly intermittent. At one point it was gone for an hour and the men stopped until they could get a fresh fix on it.

  “I’ll be danged if I can picture exactly where it is,” Randolph said.

  “You know the mountains that well?”

  “Well enough to know that unless a man’s got some screws loose, he wouldn’t come up to this part of the peaks for recreational riding. There’s a valley ahead with trees sticking from walls that are too steep to ride and a floor that’s full of the kind of landslid rocks we’ve been negotiating. Even an off-road vehicle couldn’t navigate that.”

  “But someone is, and has been for at least two days,” Ward pointed out.

  “A bunch of someones, at least three from the sound of it. And like I said, I can’t figure who or why.” Randolph dismounted, knelt, listened. He put an ear to the ground the way the Indians had for centuries.

  Ward remained in the saddle. He had an unsettled feeling, something he felt when he was running on instinct without information.

  “Yep. It’s there,” Randolph said, pointing.

  The men set off again when the farmer had ascertained that the sound wasn’t bouncing from some other direction. That gave him a fairly specific compass reading and it still pointed to the valley.

  As they rounded the massive peak, Randolph suggested that they dismount and leave the horses.

  “The ground isn’t too solid ahead. This is one place you don’t want to take a header,” he said.

  They left the horses tied to a ponderosa pine that looked about a hundred feet tall. Ward had always wondered why people looked up at buildings in New York; now he understood. If it’s new to you, it’s damned impressive. Randolph took his rifle and Ward did likewise. He assumed it was for wildlife, but then he wasn’t so sure. The farmer also took a pair of pocket binoculars from his saddle bag, along with extra shells. A field of mostly flat, red boulders the size of pool tables lay in front of them. Randolph led the way, after first taking off his belt and turning it around. The buckle was polished brass and the sun was ahead of them: he obviously didn’t want it to reflect.

  The guy’s not just taking a look, Ward told himself. He’s reconnoitering.

  Ward pulled out his shirt tails and let them hang over his nickel-plated Brooks Brothers belt. He approached slowly, bending as much as the bandages would permit. There was nothing to hide behind at the ledge. Since Randolph wasn’t cinched around the middle he was able to approach at a very low crouch, creating a small, squat profile. Ward simply followed at a distance, waiting for instructions. He figured he could crawl if he had to.

  Randolph reached the edge, lay down, and remained very still for what seemed like a minute or more. Without taking his eyes from the valley, he stretched an arm behind him and motioned Ward forward. Ward got on his hands and knees, placed the rifle on the ground in front of him, crawled a little, then reached back for the gun and repeated. He did that a half-dozen times before reaching Randolph’s side. All the while the engines were an insistent buzz, like an electric carving knife, strangely more muffled now that they were upon them.

  “Quieter, right? Randolph said. He was peering through the binoculars.

  “I was just thinking that.”

  “It’s because they’re under the canopy of those cottonwoods,” Randolph said.

  He pointed to a thick clump of trees on the western side of the canyon. Between the thick foliage and the extremely steep stone walls the area was almost entirely in shadow. Randolph looked to the east.

  “See the way the ledges cut in and out over there?” the farmer said. “I’ll bet the sun doesn’t hit the ground there for more than an hour a day.”

  “I’m missing something,” Ward said. “Why is that relevant?”

  Randolph continued to study the spot through his glasses. “No old campfires that I can tell.”

  “Meaning?”

  “It gets real cold up here. They toughed it out rather than risk smoke giving them away.”

  “But we saw the dust cloud they kicked up—”

  “That dissipates real fast. Not like a fire that smudges the sky.”

  “Maybe they built them under the trees,” Ward said.

  “The way that canopy hangs there they’d damn near suffocate,” Randolph said. “Campfire needs an open space or a natural chimney.”

  “Portable heaters?”

  “Possible, though they’d have to transport gallons of kerosene each week and these guys look like they already got a full load.”

  “What do you mean?” Ward asked, straining to pick out anything useful with his naked eye.

  Randolph handed him the binoculars. “See that really tall cottonwood, the one slightly higher than the rest?”

  Ward swung the glasses over, focused. “I see it.”

  “Go east to the rock, then straight down.”

  Ward did. He watched the spot for several seconds before he saw movement. Someone in a black jacket appeared from the rock before disappearing under the tree.

  “A cave,” Ward said.

  “The mountains are riddled with them. Some are sacred to the Native American population—a lot of ’em served as tombs for chiefs and shamans. They’re supposed to be off-limits, but new ones are being discovered all the time.”

  “Those aren’t Native Americans, are they?” Ward thought aloud.

  “I’m guessing hell-no,” Randolph replied. “Even the kids, the rebellious ones who don’t give a spit about their history, treat the caves with respect. They certainly wouldn’t go roarin’ anywhere near them with dirt bikes.”

  “But we know people who might,” Ward said.

  “Yeah. We do. And I’m guessin’ they didn’t just happen on that cave over the last day or two. There are rutted tracks down there.”

  Ward checked them out. He was right. The thought was chilling, not because of the fact that the Muslim kids might be hanging out in the caves. It was what they could be doing there that alarmed Ward.

  The detective passed the field glasses back to Randolph.

  “You don’t come up here for recreational riding,” Randolph said, picking up the thought where he’d left it earlier. “You come to this spot because no one lives anywhere near here, the sounds are tough to pinpoint, and it’d be real difficult to see anything from the air even if you were looking for it. It’s pure luck that we found this. Hell, I wouldn’t even have known about it if we hadn’t come up here off-season.”

  “White supremacists
have hideaways in remote regions,” Ward said ominously. “They stockpile guns and explosives.”

  “So I’ve heard tell,” Randolph said. “Hey, look at this.”

  The farmer gave him back the binoculars, directed him to an area where a large boulder was covered with vines.

  “See that?”

  “What am I looking for?” Ward asked.

  “A bike under the vines draped north side of the rock,” Randolph said.

  “Got it. So?”

  “It’s not with the others. It’s partly covered with branches. Someone’s up here permanently.”

  Ward backed from the ledge and sat. He needed to straighten his back. And think.

  “We need to check this out,” Randolph told him. “I’ll mark myself a trail while it’s light and go down after dark—”

  “No,” Ward said. “We stake it out and go back before dark. That gives us, what, five hours?”

  “More like four—sun’ll go behind the mountains before it sets below.”

  “Okay, four hours. We watch to see what they do, what time they leave. Then we go back and check topographical maps. There may be a couple of ways into and out of that cave. We get the lay of the land as much as possible and then we make a plan and see how many other riders we need to execute it. We shouldn’t have any trouble getting volunteers.”

  “What about the police?”

  Ward shook his head emphatically. “They’ll come out of that cave with, what, a couple of guns? What did they say at Papa Vito’s—Hawks and two traffic cops?”

  “He was just bein’ cute—”

  “Still, Brennan doesn’t have the manpower she needs to do this right. Besides, what does she charge them with?”

  Randolph smiled crookedly. “You’re not thinking about hogtieing these punks and putting ’em on trial.”

  “I am not,” Ward admitted.

  “But you were against a lynch party—”

  “Still am. Maybe they’ve only got prayer mats and Korans down there. Maybe they’re not Muslims at all. But if they are armed, if there is something else going on down there—that changes things.”