by Mike Baron
“Yeah,” Otto said just loud enough to reach the ledge and drop over. “Somebody took a shot at me from up there.”
“What do you want to do? I can get the Air National Guard up here with a chopper.”
“Let’s not do that. I think I see a way to circle around and come up behind him.”
“You sure you want to do that? What if they’re both up there?”
“Give me an hour, Gus. You’re packing, aren’t you?”
“Yeah.”
“I’m pretty good at creeping around. You want to go back down and form a posse that’s gonna take hours.”
“No way. I’m sticking.”
Otto eased out of his backpack and set it in the shade against the sheer cliff wall. He pointed at Steve. “Sit. Stay.”
He unscrewed the fat lid from one of his canteens and poured Steve some water in a natural depression. Looping the canteen over his shoulder Otto took off. He carried his Ruger in a pancake holster on his left hip. Otto had studied the topographical map closely and saw that each of the mountains was accessible by two routes: the obvious one facing the lodge and the lesser known one up the backside.
Back to cliff, Otto inched himself clockwise around the ledge. It dropped off abruptly to a boulder field shielded from the summit by a towering abutment. Otto eased himself down onto the boulder field and began the laborious process of traversing it, climbing over rocks the size of house trailers. Frigid rivulets ran between the rocks.
Some thirty minutes later Otto emerged from the boulder field on the northwest face of the mountain. A natural chimney formed by some antediluvian eruption provided a concealed route to the top. Otto crouched by the rock and drank deeply from his canteen. He pulled on a pair of leather gloves and approached the chimney. He wasn’t aware of the rattlesnake until it started shaking its maraca. Spying the coiled reptile sunning itself on a rock Otto calmly stepped out of range and waited. The rattler undulated off the rock and away.
What is the message? Does everything have to have a message?
Otto jammed himself into the crudely rectangular chimney and climbed using natural toe and hand-holds caused by flaking granite. He moved his pancake holster around so it nestled against his belly and looked up. The chimney grooved out of sight some fifty meters up. It was almost like climbing a ladder. He climbed in shade most of the time keeping an eye out for snakes. Gray/green lichen covered the granite surfaces and tough little vines grew in the cracks.
A sudden wind whistled down the chimney chilling him. He was almost at 4000 meters. Colorado had fifty-two peaks over 4,267 meters, or “fourteeners” as the locals called them. There was ice wedged deep in the granite that never saw the sun. He pulled himself out of the chimney and crouched on the gently rounded sloping summit. The actual summit lay thirty meters up. Otto approached carefully, pistol in hand. From the summit, he would have a better idea where the shooter was. A deep drift of snow remained on the north side.
Otto scrambled up a twenty-five degree grade studded with boulders and looked up. A flash of red glinted. The red sphere was three quarters buried in the rock. How had they done it? Did they heat the rock to liquid and insert the sphere? Did the sphere grow from within the rock like a pimple? Otto crouched and laid his gloved hand on the smooth red surface. It was warm to the touch, about the size of a bowling ball.
Otto had no doubt what he’d find on the third peak.
He carefully traversed the dome until he was above the shooter. Inching forward on his belly he cleared the rim and looked down. A series of ledges jutted out like stacked shelves concealing those below.
Seeing no obvious path Otto unwrapped the paracord bracelet around his wrist. He fixed one end of the super strong fiber around a jutting tooth of granite and let it fall over the ledge. Quickly he shinnied over and down to the topmost ledge. He lay on his belly and crawled to the lip of the ledge, which extended about five meters from the sheer cliff face.
The sun was still climbing and would not cast his shadow. Ever so carefully, he eased his head over the rim and looked down. A black tube projected from the ledge four meters below. The protruding rifle barrel looked like the appendage of some poisonous insect like the scorpion in the Libyan desert that appeared from time to time in his dreams. The rifle barrel twitched from side to side like a scorpion’s tail.
Dude was using a telescopic sight.
Otto withdrew and examined his surroundings. Where the ledge met the cliff, a tumble of boulders formed a cobby surface running down the mountain. The rocks were big and looked like they hadn’t moved in millennia. But you never knew. If Otto tried to climb down and popped something loose the shooter could easily get the drop on him.
Or he could be crushed in an avalanche.
Same story on the other side. Otto inched over and looked at the rocks. They weren’t going anywhere. Like a spider, he climbed down belly up and reached a precarious perch where three spindle-shaped boulders leaned together like tent poles. He crouched as the wind whipped around. An eerie howling sound issued from below.
Otto realized it was caused by the wind striking the rifle barrel, which, from the sound, was mere meters away. Balanced precariously on crystalline granite, Otto eased around the abutment, pistol in hand, until he could see a portion of the shooter’s shelf.
Hairy hands and a rifle. He couldn’t see more without stepping off into air.
Steve’s barks ascended followed by their echo. Fool dog must have spied a pika. The shooter inched forward and sighted sharply down. Triangulating the shooter’s position with his eyes and his hand, Otto held the pistol around the rim and squeezed off two shots.
The rifle clattered over the edge. Using one hand, Otto swung free of his perch into full view of the ledge, pistol extended. Ralston Goldfarb lay in his loud Hawaiian shirt, blood pooling beneath his whale-like body.
Vapor poured from his ears, nose and mouth.
Otto just had time to scramble back behind the abutment before Goldfarb erupted into a fireball.
***
CHAPTER SIXTY-TWO
“The Summit”
Wednesday noon.
The heat through the rock felt good, which was obscene. Otto flattened himself against the side of the abutment and let the heat enter his body. After a few minutes it died down and Otto once again inched around the natural buttress until he was looking at the shelf. Goldfarb had been reduced to ashes, which the wind whipped away so that there was little left of him save a black stain on the rock and a lump of gold with a ruby in it.
Otto went to the edge of the ledge and shouted, “GUS!”
Seconds later, the agent responded. “WHAT?”
“Come on up! Bring my backpack.”
Otto turned his attention to Goldfarb’s remains. His skull looked like a used charcoal briquette. There would be no X-rays on this one. The underside of the ledge above was stained with soot. Where did Goldfarb get a rifle? Where did he learn to shoot? Otto had a feeling Winner would be unable to answer those questions if they could find him, but now Otto worried that whatever had possessed Goldfarb had taken the actor as well.
Where was Winner?
Otto perched at the lip of the ledge and scanned a slow one-eighty. Across the valley on the slopes of Mt. Archimedes, a long-horned Rocky Mountain sheep grazed sticking to the mountain through sheer animal magnetism. Below in the Ponderosa, which reminded Otto of a bad case of hair plugs, there was no human activity. From here he could just make out the main lodge, tiny in the distance. He’d left his binocs with Alvarez and had no way of knowing if anyone at the lodge was reacting to the shot.
People heard gunfire in the mountains all the time. Canyons and wadis could conduct sound through dozens of dog legs and over great distances. From his perch Otto could see north to the Mummy Range and the Never Summer Mountains, close to his own spread.
He looked down at the bright blue lake, the tiny lodge. Could a sniper have fired the projectile they found in Tyler’s skull from up here?
The projectile was too small to have sufficient mass to cover the distance with any sort of accuracy, assuming it would fly that far. Unless it was made out of some unknown compound, heavier than plutonium. Or was intelligent and self-propelled. Many of the flame-outs occurred inside buildings. The shooter analogy didn’t hold water when you considered victims like Senator Darling. Certainly Sally hadn’t shot him.
Froines had erupted in an underground parking garage, a place where someone could easily conceal himself and fire from cover. Albrecht had been in a crowded casino where the constant razzle-dazzle would distract from a shooter. But the casino was always under close observation by operatives trained to note deviant behavior. A canvas of the rest of the casino’s security tapes revealed nothing suspicious.
Otto heard the scrape of steel on rock and stuck his head over the ledge. Alvarez had just picked up Goldfarb’s rifle--a Remington with an attached scope. Steve scrambled up the steep embankment and ran grinning to his master. Otto endured furious face licking.
Alvarez flopped Otto’s backpack, heaved himself over the edge and lay there for a moment panting.
“That’s a little harder than I thought,” he said lying on his back and staring up at fluffy white cumulus clouds scudding east. “I saw the fire. Know who it is?”
“Goldfarb,” Otto said.
Alvarez sat up abruptly. He stood and looked at the man-sized burn scar. “How can you tell?”
Otto pointed to the melted ring.
“There’s his pinky ring. His gold necklace is probably fused together under that soot.”
Steve sniffed around the edges, eyes darting nervously. He licked the rock.
“Steve! Don’t lick the rock!”
Looking chagrined Steve ran around to Otto. Alvarez took out a small digital camera and took pictures.
Steve stuck his nose in the air, sniffed a few times, and zoomed toward the back of the ledge that lay in shadow. Otto peered into the depths and for the first time realized how deep the shelf ran under the mountain. It was a cave that daylight barely penetrated. The ceiling lowered as he entered so that Otto had to crouch to see where Steve stood, apparently barking at the cliff face.
“What is it, Steve?”
Steve barked, turning to look at Otto then back to the wall.
That’s when Otto saw the door.
***
CHAPTER SIXTY-THREE
“Inside the Mountain”
The ceiling narrowed to two meters at the back. The door was one and a half meters by a half meter and oval on the top and bottom like the hatch in a submarine. It appeared to be made of smooth gray metal set in a frame sunk smoothly into the wall like the red spheres. Gabe and Alvarez duck-walked back and crouched before the door. It had a black handle.
“Ho--lee shit,” Alvarez said.
Otto reached out with a gloved hand and touched the door. It felt like metal. He rapped on it causing a faint thud. It didn’t sound like metal. Steve pawed at the door and whined.
“He’s got a scent,” Otto said.
The question lay between them unspoken. Should they barge on in or wait for reinforcements? Otto turned the handle and pulled. The door swung silently, smoothly open emitting a whiff of cool dampness tinged with creosote and gun grease.
Otto had a disturbing flashback to his anti-terrorist training at Quantico, when they were simulating urban warfare. Entering a hostile environment.
“Gus, can you find me some kind of stick?”
Gus duck walked out of the cave and disappeared. Moments later he reappeared with the remains of Goldfarb’s rifle, perhaps a half meter ending in molten slag. Gripping the barrel in one hand and his flashlight in the other Otto jammed the barrel into the room’s airspace.
There was no response.
Holding gun and flashlight together Otto shined through the door and discovered a chamber the size of a three car garage with a floor as flat and smooth as an operating room. There was a meter drop off from the door’s rim.
“Hang on to my belt,” he said. Alvarez grabbed the back of Otto’s belt as he eased himself into the space, slowly shining the flashlight all around. He started at six o’clock, directly below and circumvented the chamber laterally and longitudinally.
He eased back, turned around, and lowered himself through the opening.
As soon as his feet hit the ground, the entire ceiling glowed softly like a phosphorescent reef. Brackets on the inside and a metal bar could be used to seal it shut. Otto swung his gun around the room. Piled against three walls, sitting on wooden plats were hundreds of wooden cases, many marked with a red warning diamond and the name of a factory in Azerbaijan. One of the boxes had been opened leaving a gun-shaped depression in the straw. The interior reeked of creosote and contained five AK-47s. Other boxes contained ammo and grenades.
Steve leaped onto the smooth stone floor followed by Alvarez.
“Fuck me runnin’,” Alvarez exclaimed. “This is a terrorist stockpile.”
“Wait a minute, Gus,” Otto said while scanning the back wall. “If they were going to use this for terrorist purposes, why would they store it in this inaccessible place? You can’t even land a helo around here.”
“Well who would think to look here? Maybe there’s another way into this room.”
“Bingo,” Otto said watching Steve growl at the back wall from ten centimeters. On closer inspection, Otto made out the outline of a door, a minute crack that was arched on top. No handle was visible. Otto placed his gloved hand flat against the door and with a subdued hiss, it pulled back and slid noiselessly to the side. Beyond lay a vast darkness.
Otto looked at Alvarez.
“Freaky,” Alvarez said.
Otto pulled a whining and pent-up Steve away from the opening. “Stay.” Gripping flashlight and pistol together, Otto shined a light through the door. It dissipated before delineating the cave’s dimensions. This was not a prepared room but a system of caverns that probably permeated the whole mountain. And it was enormous.
Pulling to the side so he was not visible through the opening Otto flicked off his light and said, “Witherspoon and Casey are inside the mountain.”
“Let’s go,” Alvarez said.
Otto snapped his fingers and Steve fell in beside him.
Quietly they stepped through the door onto the smooth sloping floor of the cave. The door slid back into place with a safe-like thunk leaving them in complete darkness.
“Wait,” Otto whispered half expecting Charon to appear with his boat. Perhaps it was from sitting through too many fire and brimstone sermons. Every time Otto entered a cave, he felt he was in hell’s outer circles. He believed in heaven. He believed in hell. Could hell exist at 4,700 meters above sea level?
They waited. Gradually they could make out a faint glow somewhere in the distance. Otto flicked on his light and shined it on the ground in front of Steve. “Let’s go,” he whispered. Steve trotted cautiously as he’d been taught. Alvarez followed gripping his Sig Sauer in both hands.
They had gone perhaps a hundred meters when they came around a bend into a chamber with a bedroom-sized pond. Light emanated coolly from the water showing a soaring ceiling draped with dramatic stalactites. Steve surged to the edge of the pool and stuck in his snout. Otto crouched and shined his light in the water. Hundreds of tiny nearly transparent fish veered in unison like a pack of starlings.
What did they eat?
What ate them?
Steve led Otto and Alvarez clockwise around the pond to another passage, which descended in a tight spiral with a rippled surface like frozen waves of Saharan sand. The temperature was a steady fourteen centigrade. They heard the drip of condensation falling into water.
The walls narrowed then opened into an expansive chamber with columns the size of redwoods stretching from the cave floor to the ceiling. Natural phosphorescence swirled through the walls like the Milky Way, casting just enough light to see, a perpetual twilight.
Cautiously they approached the
“forest.”
Steve growled deep in his throat and the hair on the nape of his neck stood up.
“Drop!” Otto spat a split second before the bullets flew.
***
CHAPTER SIXTY-FOUR
“Spider Hole”
Wednesday afternoon.
Hornbuckle put the pedal to the metal and felt the tall Jeep lean in the corners. He was a lead foot who attracted tickets that he fended off with his badge and some bullshit. He’d had a hard-on for White ever since Firebrand. He was deeply resentful that a flake like Aardvark should be placed in charge of the combustion squad in the first place.
It should have been Hornbuckle’s job. He’d been tracking the immolations for years before White ever learned about them. Had been since Control had brought him into the loop, back when they learned that Libya planned to deploy SHC as a weapon. And that Malik was in charge. The agent slowed way down to permit some backpackers to cross the highway--college students with multi-colored knit caps. Probably going to smoke dope on the mountain, maybe start a fire.
Control was convinced that the combustions were connected to the internet. Hornbuckle’s actual goal was to recruit Kleiser in a crash mission to find out how they did it--whoever they were. No question it was a foreign power, probably Iran.
Estes Park was chock-a-block with gawkers and bikers. It took twenty minutes to work his way through the center of the crowded little village before he turned north on Devils Gulch Road. A half hour later he arrived at the locked gate to the Grove. Hornbuckle pulled off the highway and got out of the car. The aluminum gate had been closed with a Master padlock. There was no one else around.
Hornbuckle returned to his vehicle and withdrew a massive bolt cutter with which he cut the lock. He pushed the gate open with a hair-raising screech, drove through, and shut the gate behind him.
Highly unusual. Where were the police? A hot investigation and no one was controlling access?
On the other hand they wouldn’t know he was coming, which gave him an advantage. He emerged from the forest into the parking lot which held a handful of vehicles including Gus Alvarez’ car with its federal license plate. Hornbuckle parked in the handicapped spot next to the front door and got out. No one.