Chapter Nine
Chase sat his horse staring at the GPS and its telltale lack of any blip indicating a live, moving person. He pursed his lips in anger as Aiken cast about for any sign that the pair had come this way.
“Jesus,” he griped. “Two horses, dogs and two people just don’t disappear!” He complained.
Aiken said, “they do if they know how to track and know they’re being hunted. I can see where someone wiped out their back trail, doubled back and left a false trail. That cost us half a day. This old man knows what he’s doing, he is Indian after all.”
No sooner than he’d said that, the GPS started beeping. A strong signal indicating it was within a mile. Aiken pointed, excited. “Just over that ridge.”
They stared, it was a massive slope towering at 14,000 feet and an impressive climb even on horseback. It would take them hours. They kept to a steady trot where they could, following deer trails and old logging trails, not that there were many. The last time that this forest had been harvested had been over a hundred years ago and it showed in the huge trees.
It was nearly 3 a.m. when Aiken called a halt. He had spotted a flickering light in the distance. “That’s a campfire,” he told them.
Chase sent Ferron and Aiken out to reconnoiter. “Don’t use force,” he warned them. “I don’t want the boy injured.”
“The trank gun?” The scout raised an eyebrow. “What if the people at the camp are armed?”
“If they shoot, you can shoot back,” the Washington spook shrugged. “If you hit the boy, don’t bother coming back.”
Ferron and Aiken dismounted, tied their horses up and stepped lightly through the brush. They got close enough to see a man around 5’8” stoking up a white man’s campfire. A hunting rifle was at his side. He wore camo coveralls with Day-Glo orange patches that were just as bright in the firelight. Although the pair made no sound something alerted the man for he stood up and reached for his weapon.
Ferron’s reaction was instinctive, he brought his weapon up and pulled the trigger as the man yelled, ‘hey!’ A soft burp was all the noise that the silenced gun made. The hunter fell over just missing the fire but his rifle fell into it.
Dogs barked and other figures appeared in the tent’s shadows. Ferron waited for the other man to step out before he shot him only to have Aiken slap the barrel of his gun down but it was too late, he’d already fired on the hunter.
“No shooting,” he argued.
“He was going for his weapon.”
“You idiot! Go see if they’re dead and who they are. I’ll take care of the dogs.”
Out of the corner of his eye, he saw movement and fired, heard a dog yike and then they were gone. “Didn’t the doc say they had two dogs? Look sharp, the kid must be here.”
“There he goes!” Ferron shouted as he saw a youngster running for the trees. He took off after the boy and Aiken hurried to catch up. The boy was fast, agile and desperate. He ran without looking back to see how close was the pursuit. He ran like an athlete, leaping over obstacles with an uncanny sixth sense that should have been impossible in the dark forest. When he stopped, it was with disbelieving eyes that they saw him flying only to realize that he was in fact, falling. In the distance, they heard a falling body hit the water.
When they returned to camp and went through the dead man’s pockets, Aiken was speechless. He held up the man’s wallet and said, “you shot a Corrections Officer. That’s gonna bring a lot of heat down on us. Chase is going to be pissed. Who was the other guy?”
Ferron said, “some auto repair shop owner. Their hunting licenses say they’re from Denver.”
Aiken had dragged both bodies out around the fire, gathered up all their weapons and gear. He found the boy’s pack and that of the grandfather side by side.
“What happened?” Chase asked flatly as he rode up on his horse. Before Aiken could open his mouth, Ferron jumped in to explain. Chase listened, interrupted Ferron. “He fell off a cliff?”
Without another word, Chase shot the man right between the eyes. He fell over backward and Chase dismounted, walking past the body as he entered the tent. The spook emerged from the tent seconds later. “Who were they?” he asked Aiken.
“Correction officer, auto repair shop owner - both from Denver.”
“Get rid of the bodies.” He told Aiken, who then told two of the other men to drag the bodies off into the woods and throw rocks on the corpses. He watched them walk off and waited for Chase.
“Three bedrolls.” His ice cold eyes scanned the area around the fire ring. “Those their packs? The boy’s?”
“Yes. He ran off without any of his gear.”
“The GPS is still tracking him. Downriver, a river that isn’t on any of your maps. How far did he fall?”
“Forty, fifty feet counting the seconds between his drop and the splash. Survivable if the water was deep enough, if he can swim and if hypothermia doesn’t get him. He has no spare clothes, no coat, no food and no means to start a fire. I suggest we keep on after him. Sun will be up in three-four hours.”
“Can you track in the dark?” Chase was skeptical.
“Don’t need to, just need to follow the river,” Aiken said laconically.
“You let that idiot shoot when I said no killing.”
“Couldn’t stop him. He was trigger happy. Had a silenced HK on him.”
“What do you have, Sergeant?” Chase demanded. “Give me one good reason to keep you alive.”
“I’m the only one who can track.”
“I have the GPS,” he snapped.
“And when it doesn’t work like last time?” Aiken returned calmly.
Chase said nothing but nodded to the packs and the horses. “Bring their gear. Pack this place up so that it looks as if nothing happened here.”
“Twenty minutes,” Aiken promised. When the rest of the group returned, they policed the area putting it back to the pristine condition it was in prior to the hunters’ arrival.
They mounted and rode on; no one commenting on the empty saddle. The boy’s two horses followed as if they were afraid to be left behind and being herd animals, that was to be expected. Aiken reined in at the edge of the bluff. Far below, they all heard the sound of rushing water. Here, the sergeant dismounted tracking back and forth until he found a game trail. Handing Andrews his leathers, he told them all to wait until he could determine if it was passable for horse and rider. He returned in ten minutes stating that he thought the trail down the bluff was suitable if they got off and walked their animals.
It was. Just. Had they seen it in the daytime, no one would have tried it but the horses were mountain bred and took the narrow steep trail in stride.
Dawn was just peeking over the ridge tops when they reached the flat where the river wound through the canyon. As they turned to look back, all of them glanced at the sight of the escarpment they had descended in the dark.
The valley broadened out, the river widened and deepened. Parts of it could classify as a Whitewater class IV and Aiken winced as he thought of a twelve-year-old trying to swim through it after a fall of 50 feet. They rode until broad daylight and Chase called a halt on a wide curve that had grass and a small stand of willows and aspens. The river curved around the finger of land making almost an island of about 5 acres. It had water, shelter, and grass deciding for him to make a camp from which Aiken could trail the boy or find his body. The curve of the river would have caught a dead child and washed his body up on the banks.
The men dismounted and put together a military style campsite, out of sight and efficient. The unluckiest got to dig a pit to be used as a latrine.
“Get some sleep,” Chase ordered Aiken. “Then, you can go look. State you’re in, you’re likely to fall and break something. Then you’d be useless and we all know what useless deserves.”
Aiken didn’t argue, he pulled out his bedroll, found a spot near a fallen tree trunk and shook the bag open. He was inside it and sleep in ten minutes. A few of the others went fishing, catching some nice brown trout which were soon cooking over a fire on the campwear. Chase went into the tent to report to Director Hamilton. He let Aiken sleep for two hours and sent Andrews to wake him up. Andrews laughed at that, if he knew anything about a former military man, especially ex-SF, it was that Aiken would be awake before Andrews could reach him.
Sure enough, as he stood a respectful distance away and cleared his throat, Aiken opened his eyes. “Andrews.”
“Boss wants you to start looking.”
“He doesn’t like to be called boss,” Aiken returned and tossed aside his sleeping bag. He carefully folded and rolled it back up, hanging it from a string off a limb of the tree behind him. At Andrews questioning look, he explained, “keeps the snakes and bugs from getting in where your body heat is.”
“Snakes? It’s too cold for snakes!” Andrews protested.
“Want to bet your ass on that?” Aiken returned and strode off to the fire. A taciturn blonde gave him an MRE with added fried trout and hot strong coffee. He ate and disappeared into the brush following the right side of the riverbank.
Two men followed one on each side, moving quietly and efficiently on the wide banks of the river where it was slow. Scrambling on the wet, slippery rocks where it was fast and chaotic. And it was cold. More and more, Aiken was convinced that he was going to find the boy’s corpse.
The further upriver he traveled, the more he was amazed at the terrain. Huge boulders dominated both sides of the water, many of them ribboned with quartz and in the quartz, he saw seams of gold. Soft enough so that his fingers could pry loose nuggets. In minutes, he had a small fortune in his pocket. His walkie-talkie crackled and it was Andrews from the left side of the river.
“Find anything, Sarge?”
“No.”
Working his way up to the foot of the escarpment from which the boy had fallen or jumped, he stared. The river started there, bursting out of a hole in the overhanging rock wall like cheap champagne from a bottle. The sunlight caught the misty droplets in the air and turn them into scintillating diamonds of every color. Here, Aiken thought, was the real gold of this place.
If the boy had landed here, he would have easily survived a 50-foot fall without breaking anything, the pool was deep enough to break his dive.
Aiken couldn’t cross to the other side so he headed back downstream to find a way across. At one such possible fording spot, he studied the narrowing of the river where the boulders would allow an agile and careful man a way to step from one side to the other using the rocks as footholds. There in a gap between two rocks in the gravel and sand, he saw a track. At first, he dismissed it as a wolf but decided it was too small. Following it out, he found a few more sign that a pair of dogs had traveled that way.
“The dogs are tracking him,” he mused in amazement. Another half hour brought him to the hollow between the rocks, the remains of the fire and tufts of dog hair. The interior smelled of smoke and wet dog, vomit where the boy had puked up river water and the remains of his last meal, probably what he’d been fed by the hunters.
On the rocks were the outlines of where wet clothing had been hung and steamed dry leaving lighter areas against the smoke-darkened patches.
“You’re smarter and luckier than I thought,” he muttered. “No sign of Gramps, though.” He found his radio. “Aiken here. Chase? I found where he rested and dried out. He is alive but the grandfather isn’t with him. He did make a fire and his dogs found him. You have a GPS location on him?”
Chase radioed back coordinates and soon, the former Sergeant was moving inland for the stationary dot.