Echoes of the Dead--A Special Tracking Unit Novel

by Spencer Kope

  It was simple as airports go: one runway, one terminal building, and a few hangars and support buildings. But then, planes and pilots weren’t as plentiful as they are today, so a single runway was more than enough.

  Times change.

  * * *

  According to the interactive map on my iPhone, it’s supposed to be an hour-and-thirteen-minute drive from Meadows Field to the town of Kernville. Somehow, we make it in fifty-seven minutes. I’m not saying the yellow Mustang convertible we got as a rental had anything to do with it, but Jimmy had a nonstop grin on his face from the moment we left Bakersfield.

  “Ahead on your right,” I say, pointing as the Sequoia Shopping Center comes into view.

  Jimmy slows and then slows some more.

  There’s no traffic behind us, which is fortunate because we’re soon doing barely five miles an hour as Jimmy stares ahead at our destination. A mix of disgust and disappointment is on his face, and his eyes dart frantically about, no doubt searching for a Starbucks—though I suspect that any coffee shop will do at this point.

  When at last he turns into the parking lot, he comes to a complete stop, blocking the entrance, and just stares at the long building stretched out before us. Most of the shopping center seems to be composed of the Sequoia Market, with a gas station just to the north.

  “Not much of a shopping center,” Jimmy mutters.

  “Maybe it’s seasonal.”

  Releasing the brake, he pulls ahead and noses into a parking space facing Sierra Way. Shifting into neutral and applying the emergency brake, Jimmy lets the Mustang idle for a minute before finally shutting it down. He leaves the radio on, playing low in the background. I don’t recognize the song, but it has a nice beat.

  Checking his watch and seeing that we have time to spare, he opens the door and steps out. “I’m going to see if they at least have coffee,” he says, thumbing at the market. “Want anything?”

  When I shake my head, he just nods and hurries off in search of caffeine.

  Five minutes later he’s back with a twenty-ounce cup of bitter black and a decidedly better disposition. “You should go in and check the place out. Not bad for the middle of nowhere.”

  “Well, middle of nowhere is a bit of a stretch. It’s not like we’re in the middle of the Olympic Peninsula or Montana.” As if to make my point, I gesture to the surrounding hills. “Check out the landscape. There’s no way four guys go missing on those hills. They’d have to be either stoned or as dumb as the rocks they’re walking over.”

  The satellite imagery we’d studied back at Hangar 7 suggested as much, but now, seeing it with my own eyes, I have a sudden sinking feeling deep in my gut. It’s been two weeks since I’ve had to look down at a dead body. I’d prefer that the trend continue.

  Jimmy takes a moment to glance at the hills to the east and west as he sips gingerly at the hot coffee. The peaks are barren and rocky, some of them as bald as Jean-Luc Picard’s head on shaving day.

  The longer we sit, the more time the caffeine in Jimmy’s coffee has time to work through his system, eventually making it to his brain. You can almost see the moment of its arrival because he begins to glance around with renewed purpose, his eyes suddenly coordinating with his brain as the latter calculates the odds and probabilities of a simple search and rescue.

  When he finally looks at me, his eyebrows are knit. “Doesn’t seem to fit, does it? Too many landmarks and observation points for someone to get lost. Even if you got turned around and found yourself ten miles from where you started, it wouldn’t take much to figure out what direction to go.”

  “Not like back home.”

  He shakes his head. “What’s the name of our contact?”

  “Sergeant Joe”—I pick up the packet Diane dutifully prepared and rifle through it quickly—“Mingo,” I finish a moment later. “Joe Mingo. Says here that he’s the SAR coordinator for the Tulare County Sheriff’s Office.” I glance at Jimmy. “I thought Diane said this was going to be a Kern County operation?”

  “It’s kind of a multijurisdictional thing. We’re in Kern County right now, but a half mile north, the Sequoia National Forest begins, and about a mile and a half beyond that is the county line. Seems our missing gents were camped up the river quite a bit farther. For now, the Tulare County Sheriff’s Office is handling the search and rescue.”

  I nod my understanding. “Let’s hope it doesn’t get any more complicated than that.” Glancing at my black Movado, I note the time. “Mingo should be here any minute.”

  * * *

  Waiting is always worse when things are most urgent.

  When the sergeant finally arrives a half hour later, he’s behind the wheel of a thundering white military Humvee with Tulare County Sheriff’s Office markings on the side and a light bar overhead. Pulling up to the Mustang in a cloud of dust and exhaust, he jumps out almost before the rig comes to a stop and comes around the front to greet us.

  “Sorry to keep you waiting.” He pumps Jimmy’s hand, then mine. “One of the teams found something down by the river. I’m guessing it’s just fish blood, but it took us a while to get it sorted out.” Gesturing toward the Hummer, he says, “You guys wanna ride with me or follow in your car?”

  “Oh, we’ll ride with you,” I reply before Jimmy has a chance to say anything. I’ve never ridden in a Hummer, and I’m getting windburn from the convertible.

  * * *

  Just north of Kernville, we enter the Sequoia National Forest, which seems a misnomer because forests generally require trees. The only trees I see are at the base of the hills, and most of those are scraggly-looking things next to the river.

  It’s not out of some Pacific Northwest snobbery that I make this observation. Yes, our forests are thick with towering green titans, and they tend to be expansive, the kind of place where you can get lost for real and never found. Mount Baker–Snoqualmie National Forest, which is our backyard, is almost 2 million acres. By comparison, these bare hills are, well, they’re not a forest.

  I loathe forests.

  Not that I have anything against individual trees; as long as they mind their business, I’ll mind mine. It’s just that I suffer from something called hylophobia, which is an unreasonable fear of forests. It’s the result of trauma from my youth, the same incident that gave me the ability to see shine when I was eight. I guess that’s what happens when you get lost in a real forest only to be overtaken by a wicked-cold blizzard that freezes the life out of your tiny body.

  That we’re driving through Sequoia National Forest and I’m perfectly at ease in the rear passenger seat of the Humvee is proof positive that this is not a forest.

  “The camp is another five miles,” Joe explains as he brings us up to speed on the search. “Or at least what we think was the camp. It’s a spot they’ve used frequently, and the congressman’s sister seems to think it’s the right place. They all came together in the same SUV, but damned if we can find it. We’ve checked all the pull-offs, the trailheads, even the remote camping sites. It’s just gone; same with all their gear. It’s like they packed up to go home and just never arrived.”

  “Only they weren’t scheduled to go home yet,” Jimmy observes.

  “Exactly. And the sister insists that it would have taken a national emergency to get them to quit their trip early, and even if they had, they would have called home.” Joe downshifts into a corner. “We pinged his phone a few hours ago with no luck, so the battery is either dead or it’s turned off. The last tower hit was Friday evening and suggests the phone was likely in the campsite or parking lot.”

  Joe downshifts again as an ungainly RV lumbers onto the road just ahead, accelerating with all the speed and grace of an oil tanker.

  “So, whatever we’re dealing with, it probably started either Friday night or Saturday morning,” I surmise. “Are there any caves or old mines—maybe a ghost town? Someplace they might have wanted to explore that didn’t involve fishing?”

  “There are a handfu
l of places within a thirty-mile radius, but they’ve already been checked by either deputies or SAR members.” Joe shakes his head. “I can understand losing four men, but an SUV?”

  Jimmy studies him from the passenger seat. “How long have you been the SAR coordinator?”

  “Seven years.”

  “And how many people have gotten lost in these hills during that time?”

  Joe glances over. “Along the Upper Kern…?” He thinks a moment, then shakes his head. “I can’t think of a single one. We get reports of lost people regularly, but most of those are drowning victims. In some areas you’ve got to watch for rockslides; those can break bones or kill you quickly, but most are smart enough to either stay clear or stick to the established paths. All you have to do is look at the side of some of these hills and you can tell which ones are dangerous.”

  “Is there any evidence of a recent slide near the campground?” I ask.

  “None—and if there had been, we would have heard about it.”

  “So,” Jimmy muses, “we’re back to four men missing in an area where they couldn’t possibly be missing.”

  “Just our kind of show,” I mutter to myself.

  * * *

  When Joe turns off the road minutes later, we find ourselves wheeling through a patch of dust and dirt tucked alongside the silver-hued river. The area is hemmed in by a string of large boulders that seem to assign boundaries on three sides. Vehicles are scattered about, which suggests the place is a parking lot, though, as far as parking lots go, this one looks like it landed here by accident. Like the god of structures and byways was reaching into his pocket while stepping across the mountain peaks and accidentally dropped a dusty parking lot without noticing.

  It happens.

  I do it all the time with loose change and pocket lint.

  A single porta potty and a large green dumpster occupy the center of the lot, while the right corner—the northwest corner—is occupied by a large RV marked TULARE COUNTY COMMAND VEHICLE. Eighteen or twenty private vehicles are clustered around the RV, most of them displaying a Search and Rescue sticker in the rear window. Several have colorful bumper stickers with the words THAT OTHERS MAY LIVE emblazoned across them; a common motto for SAR units.

  The Special Tracking Unit also has a motto: We save the ones we can. Not quite as optimistic as the SAR motto, and not available on bumper stickers, but it’ll do.

  Parking the Humvee alongside the command vehicle, Joe shuts it down and then points to the north. “We think they camped next to the river about a hundred yards up the path. After a cursory search first thing this morning, we did a sound-sweep search, and then around ten o’clock, we started a more systematic grid search using four teams of six each. That’s two teams on each side of the river heading away from each other.”

  Removing my special glasses, I place them carefully in their case, then Jimmy and I follow Joe’s lead as he exits the Humvee. We start across the parking lot without a word. As Joe steps through the Maginot Line of boulders containing the parking lot, he glances back and with a sweep of his head says, “The camp is this way.”

  A well-trodden path lies before us, ripe with shine of every hue and color. It snakes off to the north, mimicking the nearby river in its motions.

  It’s here that I pause.

  Glancing back at the parking lot, I take in the army of footprints stacked one upon the other as they crisscross, mix, and cover every inch of the packed earth. Any hope of ferreting out the specific shine of the four missing men seems beyond reach. With no car, no tents, no sleeping bags—not even a firm idea where they pitched their tents or fished the river, all we’re left with are assumptions and the vagaries of happenstance.

  Sergeant Joe Mingo waits patiently as I take everything in. He, better than most, understands the importance of getting the lay of the land.

  “Do a lot of people fish the river?” I ask.

  “This time of the year it’s pretty quiet, but, yeah, it’s a popular place. And not just for fishing. There’s rafting, swimming, hiking, horseback riding, even panning for gold, if that’s your thing. The hottest days of summer are the most popular. Air-conditioning may be a blessing, but there’s nothing like being in the shade of a tree next to a river when the temperature grows unbearable.”

  “Amen,” Jimmy says.

  I’ll take the air-conditioning, I think, then ask, “How long until your teams are done with the grid search?”

  “Shouldn’t take long.” Joe sweeps an arm at the scrabble of trees and low brush. “The vegetation is tame enough that we can space our searchers out as they walk the grid. In areas like this, we can put them forty feet apart. A good stretch of the Kern follows a narrow valley between the hills; most of it is barely three hundred feet from the base of one hill to the base of the other hill, and that includes the river and the road.”

  “Where are your teams now?” Jimmy asks.

  “Two or three miles north and south of us. We passed the southbound teams on the way in.” He grins. “You didn’t see them, did you?” Before we can answer, he says, “I probably wouldn’t have noticed them either, if I hadn’t known what to look for. They were in an area where the valley widens considerably. Vegetation is still relatively sparse, especially compared to what you’re used to up north, but there’s still enough brush to hide someone.”

  “Including our missing men?” Jimmy suggests.

  Joe nods. “Including them.”

  “If you’re two miles into the search,” I ask, “how much farther do you intend to go?”

  “Five miles in each direction. I can’t imagine them going that far, but you never know. If that doesn’t do it, we’re expecting a helicopter with FLIR this afternoon.”

  “And the SUV that’s missing, it belonged to the congressman?”

  “Yeah, a 2015 BMW X5. The DMV database doesn’t list the color, but his sister said it’s a bright midrange metallic blue—Long Beach Blue. She said it really pops.”

  The really pops part of his statement digs at me and sets me to wondering why we can’t find a bright blue SUV among the abundant tans and sparse greens that constitute the Sequoia National Forest. There are only so many side roads they could have traveled.

  More ominously, where are the men that came in that vehicle? How could they have disappeared in an area with one road in and one road out? And not just disappeared but vanished utterly and completely. I feel my stomach pitch at the thought, and a sudden rush of fear washes over me. Not fear for myself, but fear for Marco Perez, Wade Winchell, Jason Norris, and Noah Long.

  Fear for what might come.

  * * *

  “This is a disaster,” I whisper to Jimmy after just a few minutes.

  He nods his understanding.

  The Upper Kern appears to harbor as many former campsites as it does gnats, and they tend to cluster together in the same manner. The ground is a kaleidoscope of shine, crossing and recrossing and trailing off into all 360 degrees of the compass. Most tracks appear to be more recent—less than a year old. The soil here goes to dust in the dry season, and dust tends to shift and move, dismantling shine and scattering it to oblivion.

  The oldest tracks are buried under layers of newer shine and survive because they’ve attached themselves to the more resilient sedimentary rocks and granite that give structure to the valley and its mountains. These tracks are decades old, perhaps centuries.

  They won’t last forever, though.

  I’ve found that with rock, cement, and other hard surfaces, shine penetrates about a half inch. It takes a long time for wind and rain to erode a half inch of stone, but if I’ve learned one thing in my short years, it’s that there are two unstoppable forces in the world: time and decay.

  Among the new tracks scattered about are the shine of fifty or so park rangers, deputies, and search and rescue personnel who have flocked to the area since last night. Had I arrived before them, I may have had a shot at identifying the tracks of Marco Perez and his compan
ions. I might have been able to follow those tracks and perhaps gain insight into the odd disappearance of the four men, but it’s not to be. The area is a jumble of color that even I can’t sort through.

  Almost all of the prints I see pulse gently with life’s energy, but a few lie flat and still, marking those who no longer walk the earth. I notice that the dead shine is mostly among the older prints, giving me hope that the congressman and his comrades are still alive.

  Turning to our guide, Jimmy asks, “What about that blood you mentioned?”

  Joe Mingo nods and points to a spot downstream. “I’ll show you.”

  Jimmy and I have some well-established protocols, one of which involves distraction. As he falls in behind the sergeant and follows him to the river’s edge, I get to work—doing what the director calls my thing. This mostly involves studying the ground, vegetation, and any physical evidence left behind. To an observer, it would look like what one would expect of a man-tracker, but not always.

  That’s when misdirection is sometimes required.

  Jimmy’s good at keeping the locals busy while I hunt for shine, and as the two of them walk away, I hear him ask Joe how long he’s been at the sheriff’s office. Other questions will follow, and my gregarious partner will learn that the sergeant has a wife, Carol, and two strapping boys. They own a nice home with a pool just outside the Bakersfield city limits, a place they bought cheap after the bottom fell out of the housing market in 2008—a financial move that Joe seems particularly proud of, though cheap in California seems a relative term.

  When Jimmy relays all this to me later, he seems most impressed that Joe was an Eagle Scout, and that he competed in three Spartan Races—once qualifying for the regional championship.

  When I ask what a Spartan Race is, Jimmy just rolls his eyes and walks away.

  He’s sensitive that way.