Harmon looked at Danny as if reappraising him.
“What?” Danny asked.
“That’s smart,” Harmon said. “That’s a good observation.”
Down below, the pudgy man got into the SUV, and it headed back toward the big houses. They listened for a couple of minutes, until they heard the car doors slam.
“Twist will be coming in forty-five minutes,” Harmon said. “We should head up to the highway, where we can flag him and get him the memory card.”
—
The words had just left his mouth when they heard the sound of another plane approaching and the SUV starting up again. The second plane was smaller than the first, a single-engine prop, a Cessna, Harmon said, one of the most common small planes in the air. It followed the same procedure as the first, flying the length of the strip, turning, landing, parking by the airstrip building.
This time they didn’t wonder about the identity of the person who got out.
“Thorne,” Harmon growled.
“He’s a pilot?” Cruz asked.
“Unless the plane flew itself,” Harmon said. “But yeah, lots of us are. It’s sort of a thing.”
“You’re a pilot?” Shay asked.
“Not a very good one,” Harmon said. “I can get from here to there, but you might not want to fly through a thunderstorm with me.”
“Could you fly those planes?” Shay asked.
“Not the twin engine, but I learned on a Cessna, and I rent one from time to time, when I’m looking for archaeological sites.”
“Cool,” said Danny. “I’m gonna learn to do that, if I get out of this.” Then: “I wonder what was in the box.”
Thorne had pulled a rectangular cardboard box perhaps six feet long, eighteen inches wide, and six inches thick from the cargo hold of the plane. He reached back in and extracted a black nylon suitcase. He loaded both into the waiting SUV and headed out.
Nothing happened for fifteen minutes, and finally Cruz and Danny went up the hill, walking diagonally away from the ranch to the highway, where Twist should be passing at eight o’clock, taking the memory card from Harmon’s camera with them.
Then car doors slammed, and moments later, the SUV drove past on the airstrip, headed toward the burn pit. Harmon and Shay slipped farther down the hill until they could see through some trees. The SUV had stopped at a fence post near the end of the strip, and Thorne and the pudgy guy in the gold ball cap got out.
“What are they doing?” Harmon asked.
Shay was looking through the binoculars. “Can’t tell yet; they’re doing something to the fence post….” Then: “They put up a stop sign.”
“What?”
“A red stop sign,” Shay said.
Harmon said, “Give me the glasses.” She handed them to him, and he looked, handed them back. “A stop sign. What the hell?”
The men got back in the SUV. The vehicle went past the airstrip building and kept going—nearly to the other end of the strip—and Thorne got out and looked back toward the stop sign with what looked like oversized binoculars.
Harmon said, “That’s a pair of binoculars with a laser range finder. But the stop sign’s too far away to be a rifle target.”
Thorne got back in the car, drove a little farther, got back out, and ranged the sign again. Rinse and repeat: Thorne and the other man made three more stops before pulling the SUV to the side of the runway. They popped the back doors and unloaded a table, two chairs, and some sacks.
“Beanbags. They’re setting up a shooting range,” Harmon said.
Then they took out a black nylon rifle case—“Bet that’s what was in the cardboard carton”—and the black nylon pack. They took the rifle out of the case, and Harmon said, “That’s a regular rifle, but it’s a weird scope. I need to get closer and take some pictures.”
“Daylight. You’ll be exposed.”
“I can handle that, and we need the photos. You stay here. When they shoot, watch that stop sign—see if they actually hit it. The bullet’s going to take, hell, a full second and a half or two seconds to get to the target.”
“Careful,” Shay said.
Harmon took a bottle of water, an energy bar, the camera, and a walkie-talkie, leaving his rifle and pack with Shay. “I might have to run,” he said. “If I do, I’ll try to make it five miles down the highway and I’ll be there at seven tonight. When you get close, I’ll click you.”
“Just come back,” Shay said.
—
Harmon disappeared in the trees, and Shay and X moved thirty feet to another clump of trees, one with better shade, where they could lie flat and still see both the men and the stop sign through the binoculars.
The pair had emptied out the pack and set up what looked like a laptop. They began plugging wires into the rifle scope, she thought, although she was too far away to actually see wires.
A couple of minutes after that, the man in the cap went back to the SUV and returned with two more bags. From one, he took what looked like a telescope, and from the other, a tripod, which he set up a few feet to the right of the table. He dragged one of the chairs over and sat down, adjusted the tripod height, and then said something to Thorne.
Thorne had settled down behind the table. He picked up the rifle, put the forestock on the beanbags, looked through the scope, then reached over and typed something on the laptop.
He looked through the scope again, for a long time, and Shay tensed, waiting for the shot. But then Thorne lifted his head away from the eyepiece and took his hand away from the trigger, and Shay felt herself relax just a notch.
And the rifle fired.
The shot was so unexpected and so loud that she flinched, but she twisted in time to put the binoculars on the stop sign—and see the sign jump at the impact of the bullet.
He fired a second shot a half minute later, just as Danny and Cruz returned.
“What’s up?” Cruz whispered.
“Target practice,” Shay said as the guys settled in. “Harmon’s trying to get close enough to take pictures.”
Thorne fired the gun ten times, and each time, his finger was off the trigger when the gun fired. He hit the target all ten times, with the other man watching through the telescope and apparently calling the point of impact. After each call, Thorne would type on the laptop for a few seconds.
When they were done, they talked for a bit, then packed up the equipment and drove back to the ranch complex.
Shay, Danny, Cruz, and X went back to the pit in the middle of the clump of piñons, drank water, ate energy bars, and waited.
Harmon showed up twenty minutes later, and the first thing he asked was, “Did he hit the sign?”
“Every time,” Shay said.
Harmon, who’d spent half his life on a shooting range, said, “That’s impossible. The distance is too long.”
Shay shrugged. “That’s what I saw. Every time he fired a shot, the sign jumped.”
Harmon took a gulp of water, splashed some in his hand, and rubbed it on the back of his neck. “Listen, I want to send everyone back with Twist. I don’t know what else we could see here that’d be more damaging than what we’ve already seen. And we need to have live witnesses for it to mean anything.”
“What are you going to do?” Shay asked.
“I need to wait until it gets dark again and then step off that distance on the rifle range. It’s easier for one guy to hide.”
“Why do you need to know the exact distance?” Cruz asked.
“Because that’s a very weird gun. Heavy caliber, probably a TAC-338 sniper rifle, and some kind of computer rig that lets them get some unbelievable accuracy out of it. But they were so careful in measuring the distance, I’ve got to think that they’re going to be shooting at a very specific distance. Very specific. It’d be helpful to know what that distance is.”
“You think, what? They’re…” Shay let the question die.
Harmon said, “Yeah. The only use for that gun is a long-range ass
assination. We need to find out who they’re planning to shoot.”
Shay said, “I can think of one person who knows way too much, who they might want to get rid of. Senator Dash.”
Cruz said, “Remember when we were watching her house from that mountain in Santa Fe? I wonder how far it is from that mountain to her driveway.”
“Why wouldn’t they just kill her here?” Danny asked.
Shay locked eyes with Harmon and ventured a theory: “Because they’d want to kill her in a place, and in a way, where they could blame it on somebody else. Like a former army guy who’s familiar with long-range shooting and who’s hooked up with some crazies.”
They all looked at Harmon, who said, “Awww…shit.” And a few seconds later, “You’re right.”
—
Harmon argued that Shay, Cruz, Danny, and X should all go back into Lordsburg, but Shay wouldn’t go. “It’s not me you need; it’s X. He’s gone on alert every time somebody was coming, and before we knew it. You need his special eye and his ears and his nose, and I don’t think he’ll leave me.”
After some argument, they decided that Cruz and Danny would go back, which left Cruz seriously annoyed. Shay took him aside and said, “Cruz, you’re not here to take care of me. And anyway, having you here wouldn’t reduce the danger; it’d add to it.”
“Don’t buy it,” Cruz said. “If they see you, you might need an extra person to fight.”
“If they find us, it’s not going to be a fight with our little pistols—it’ll be Harmon with his rifle and us running away.”
Cruz eventually gave up. “But I still think I should stay.”
“Gonna be really unhappy if you skip the ride,” Shay said.
Cruz grumbled, “I’m going.”
—
Shay and Harmon sat and drank water from time to time, and Harmon poured a full bottle into the bowl X carried in his vest pocket. X lapped it up, and Harmon gave the dog the other half of his. At one, they heard another plane, and the SUV rolled down to the airstrip.
This plane was a full twinjet, whining up to the parking ramp. Senator Dash got out, got inside the SUV, and the vehicle headed toward the big house. Harmon took more pictures.
“What we really need to do is find a way to bug the buildings,” Shay said.
“Have to find a good bug first, and that’s not so easy to do. And they probably have the best anti-bugging gear on the planet, which would give us away.”
“I’m just saying,” Shay grumbled. “In a perfect world.”
“I’ll tell you what would be good, though,” Harmon said. “To get pictures of those people going up and down the steps from the prisoner building. But it would be really risky. We’d be right in the high-traffic area.”
“Then let’s not do it,” Shay said.
Harmon looked at her and said, “I didn’t expect that. You’re always pretty gung ho.”
“But not stupid,” Shay said.
—
While they waited for more action, they heard trucks bouncing up and down the driveway and utility vehicles moving around, apparently doing routine ranch maintenance. They’d been up most of the night, and so they dozed, as did the dog. At four, the SUV drove down to the airstrip again, so they moved to the pit, where they watched as the man in the ball cap and Dash went to their separate planes. Before they parted, they stood talking for a moment, and Harmon took a series of photographs.
When the two were in their planes, he checked the photos on the camera’s screen. “Good. Got them together, their faces. It’d help if we could identify that guy.”
Other than routine ranch activity, nothing more happened until Thorne came out at six o’clock and flew away.
At seven, they began their move on the airstrip. When Harmon thought it was dark enough, they began walking from the shooting point down the long ribbon of still-warm asphalt. Harmon had Shay hold his shirtsleeve as he walked, head down. “Just keep me going straight,” he said. “I need to watch my feet.”
“You’re trying to walk yards?”
“No, I’m trying to walk my exact regular flatland stride, which is thirty-four inches. Now don’t talk to me anymore. I have to count.”
So they walked down the airstrip, striding along, X trotting beside them, until they got to the stop sign. Harmon said, “Twenty-three forty-eight. Two thousand three hundred and forty-eight strides. Remember that.”
They could barely see the stop sign against the sky, but Harmon put his hand up and rubbed it across the sign and then said, “Jesus.”
“What?”
“They shot a seven-inch group at two thousand three hundred and forty-eight strides. If we hadn’t seen it, I’d never believe it.”
Shay did some quick math, then said, “Call it twenty-two hundred yards. What’s that? A mile and a quarter?”
Harmon asked, “You do that in your head?”
“Yes, but it’s not exact. It’s close, though. So, a mile and a quarter—that’s almost impossible?”
“People have been sniped from farther than that, but not much, and that’s pretty much luck. Ten rounds in seven inches…that’s…that’s…”
“Scary.”
“Yeah.”
—
They were waiting when Twist came by at ten o’clock. They loaded up and headed north, then found a turnaround and drove back south toward Lordsburg. Nothing much doing on the road.
Twist said, “Well, that was long. Was it worth it?”
They told him about the shooting distance and the hit rate, and he said, “That’s, uh, alarming. We’ll be pulling the shades at the hotel.”
“Oh, yeah,” Harmon said. He turned to Shay, who was in the back with X. “You didn’t think of that, kid.”
Shay shook her head. “No. But I don’t think they’d waste that gun on us.”
Harmon agreed. “They’re after bigger game.”
“So, hell, let the sun shine in,” Twist said.
“Uh-uh,” said Harmon. “We crawl around the room like babies and pull the damn shades.”
Back in Lordsburg, everybody gathered in Twist’s room.
“Well,” Harmon said. “We found what we were looking for, but I don’t know what to do with it. The piñon forest is thick enough that we can move around without being seen. We can get close to everything, but close doesn’t help.”
“We’ve got to do something,” Shay said.
Danny raised a finger. “I’ll tell you what we need to do, but as a professional doper, I’ll deny it if you ever tell anybody I said this: we need to find somebody high enough in the FBI to authorize a raid on that place and tell them what we know….”
“Who’s going to raid a ranch owned by a U.S. senator?” Shay asked skeptically.
“They’d do it if they thought our story was real,” Danny argued.
Shay said, “But after Dash’s press conference, we’re back to being crazy animal rights radicals.”
Twist said, “This thing has gotten away from us. There must be twenty guys in there. With guns. What are we supposed to do?”
“Something,” Odin said. “Harmon and Shay saw them burning a body. Those people are dying.”
They argued about it into the night, went to bed late, though they were all exhausted. The next morning, the decision was made for them.
Twist, Shay, Harmon, and Odin were in Twist’s room when Twist’s phone rang. Twist looked at the screen and said, “It’s Lou.”
“She wasn’t supposed to call,” Odin said.
“Unless it was an emergency,” Twist said. He punched the answer button and listened, then said, “Tell the kids to chill—the feds can look at anything they want. No interference.”
He listened for another moment, swore, then said, “Okay, tell him I’ll be back tomorrow morning and will talk to him then. Tell Emily to lie low. Get everybody to behave, and let them in.”
He hung up and said to the group, “The FBI just showed up at the hotel. Six agents. The kids bloc
ked them, and they threatened to come back with more people and bust everybody. They’ve got a search warrant for my studio, so I told Lou to let them through—there’s nothing there.”
“Unless they’re the bad guys and they dump a bag of cocaine in your closet,” Odin said.
Twist said, “Yeah, well, if they did that, I could fight it pretty effectively. People know my attitude toward hard drugs. I got cops who’d testify for me.
“Anyway, there’s more. They’ve got a photo of Danny, and they’re asking if anyone’s seen him.”
“What? How?” Shay sputtered.
“He must have been spotted at the hospital when we boosted Eight,” Harmon surmised. “Shit.”
Danny said the same thing when they got the rest of the group together to fill them in.
“Shit, man. When I said I thought we should talk to the feds, I meant you should talk to the feds. I can’t be talking to the feds….”
“I know,” said Twist. “I dragged you into this, and you’ve put yourself on the line to help…and now I think you should go home.”
“What?” Odin was shocked.
But the rest of them thought about it and nodded.
“Wait,” said Danny. “I can’t just leave now….”
“Yes,” Shay said as she put an arm around him, “you can. It’s okay. You need to keep yourself safe. The rest of us might need to hide when this is over, and we’ll be knocking on your door again.”
Danny was quiet a long time. Then he sighed. “Oh, man…”
“I’ve got to go home, too,” Twist said. “I can’t leave the kids to face the feds alone. And if they have a picture of Danny, then I worry they’ll be on to Emily next….”
Harmon: “All right. I suggest we split up. Danny goes home. Some of us go back to L.A. with Twist, some stay here to keep an eye on the ranch.”
Twist peered at him for a bit, then said, “I wouldn’t want you to attack the ranch, you and whoever stays. You’d get killed.”
Harmon: “I wouldn’t go along with anything I thought was foolish.”
“That’s not exactly a promise,” Twist said.
“None of us can exactly make a promise,” Shay said. “We don’t know what’s going to happen when you get back to the hotel. What if you all wind up in jail?”
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