face in the dirt? Would that restore my values, make my work seem worthwhile again?
Even as I raced toward the Chocolate Mountains to apprehend him, I couldn't forget the look of hatred in that Compton grandmother's eyes. What the hell was I really looking for?
We turned off the interstate past Palm Springs at Indio, traveling south, toward the Salton Sea. Nacho Rosano stood, bracing himself in the jouncing truck, and started going through drawers, passing out communications equipment.
'Since we don't share a frequency, let's all use one of these.' He handed each of us a small radio transmitter with an LCD faceplate, and pointed to the small screen. 'That's a GPS. If you get lost, it'll tell you where you are, within half a meter.' After he showed us how to operate it, I loaded it into my vest.
I had my cell phone on and checked the battery. It was at three-quarters, but there was no signal out here.
It was after 10 p. M. by the time we took State Highway 111 to the Salton Sea Recreation Area, then continued south. After about half an hour Grundy pulled to a stop, set the brake and came back into the rear of the truck. He filled the door to the driver's compartment, his crewcut tickling the ceiling.
'Okay, we're outside of Niland,' he said, looking right at me.
I opened the map book. 'Go on up Coachella Canal Road to Camp Billy Machen. The Chocolate Mountains are on the left. There should be a parking area at that old camp. There's no more road, so we hike into the mountains from there.'
'Okay. Everybody saddle up now,' Grundy said. 'Smiley had an AK up at Hidden Ranch and he knew how to use it. I don't wanta be climbing out of this truck, hooking our shit together, while this jerk-off is up in the trees somewhere picking us off with three-oh-eights.'
Everybody started buckling up vests and chambering weapons. Then Grundy went back up to the front, put the truck in gear, and we were rolling again. Scott and Nacho gave Sonny and me a short course in mountain climbing, showing us the belt harness and how to use the carabiners.
'You're gonna feel like you want to climb using your arms,' Scott said. 'But that's a huge mistake. Use your legs. Your glutes are much bigger muscles than your biceps. Your glutes won't tire. Most newbies try and pull themselves up. You do that, you'll burn out in less than an hour.'
'In a lead climb,' Nacho said, 'a leader and a second go up first, set the protection, get to the top, tie off, and then bring the rest of the team up. Last up are the belay monkeys; that's you two. We change lead and seconds after each leg of the climb. Each leg is called a pitch. A pitch is a section of the climb that is slightly shorter than the rope. The ropes we use are a hundred meters long.'
I remembered Marion Bell saying that some of the climbs in Monument Valley were thirty pitches.
'The first climber, or leader, wedges a piece of protection into the rock halfway up the first pitch,' Nacho was saying. 'We mostly use SLCDs, which are spring-loading camming devices.'
He held one up. It matched the printed picture Smiley left in his garage.
'An SLCD can fit in a crevice and attaches to the rope with carabiners. We can use it for protection or for handholds on sheer cliffs. If somebody falls, the idea is the protection should catch and hold him until the rest of us can reel him back up. If the lead climber sets this thing too far down, then a fall will zipper out the protection and we're all toast. The last man on the climb is called the belayer. He holds the rope steady until the lead climbers make it to the top of the pitch. Once the lead and second have tied everything off and the others are secure up top, we pull the belay monkeys up and start all over again.'
Sonny and I glanced at each other. It sounded doable.
We were all rigged and ready to go when the truck pulled into a parking area at the old Camp Billy Machen.
Scott Cook opened the door and we stepped out into the darkness. The temperature was forty degrees and dropping. We were standing in the parking lot feeling exposed under a slim slice of desert moon.
Parked ten feet away, next to a weathered maintenance shed, was Vincent Smiley's black Dodge Ram 2500 pickup. It looked evil and predatory, sitting up high with its Bigfoot suspension on huge, tractor-sized tires. We approached slowly and looked inside. There was an empty box of.308s down in the floor well.
'Looks like he's locked and loaded,' Grundy said, pointing at the cartridge box. 'Let's decommission this truck.'
He and Nacho shinnied under the Dodge and checked the engine compartment for boobie traps. 'Looks clear,' Grundy shouted, and they both rolled back out.
Scott Cook popped the hood and removed the positive battery cable. 'Souvenir,' he said and handed it to me.
I put it into my pack.
'Now let's go get this guy,' Rick Manos growled.
We all turned and walked through a gate marked 'Gas Line Road,' and started the long trek across the sandy desert toward the dark brown Chocolate Mountains.
Chapter 45
We hiked in the freezing desert until midnight, picking our way across dry, sandy gullies and parched ground. Unseen cacti tugged at the bloused ankles of our jumpsuits. About a mile out we crossed a small trickling stream in a gully. In the damp sand were footprints. We all kneeled down and looked at them. Nobody had to mention that the cross-hatched sole prints came from Danner Terra Force jump boots. We continued on, then finally bivouacked at a little past midnight.
I lay on my side in the still warm sand and prayed I wasn't parked over a scorpion nest. Almost before my head hit the crook of my arm I was asleep. I was so tired I didn't dream. Before I knew it, someone was shaking me.
'Okay, we're heading out,' Scott Cook said. I rolled over and looked at my watch: 4 a. M. 'We need to get a jump on it,' he added.
By sunup we were four miles north in the foothills, working our way up through the crevices and canyons. I won't say it was easy, but for the first hour of the climb we had no need for ropes, carabiners, or harnesses. Then we reached the first huge rock, fifty feet high with no way around it. We had to go up and over, a feat Nacho called 'bouldering.'
Before we started Gordon Grundy took out his binoculars and, using the first rays of morning light, focused them on the face of the giant rock, looking for the best ascent.
'There's something there,' he said. 'Halfway up, somebody left a piton jammed in the rock.'
I took the binoculars and focused them on the metal spike. It had been pounded into the face of the boulder, and had a carabiner hanging off the threaded end.
'Probably part of his protection,' Grundy said. 'He had to leave it behind because he's climbing alone and couldn't yank it free.'
'Time for some white courage,' Scott Cook said. 'Let's chalk up.' The SWAT members all dug into their haul bags and broke out tin shakers full of powdered chalk. They chalked their hands like gymnasts, sharing it with Sonny and me. Then we faced the first part of the climb.
The initial boulder was surprisingly easy. We were warned again by Grundy and Cook not to pull ourselves up by our arms. The problem was, pushing up with my legs felt dangerous, as if I would fall backward off the mountain. The leg climbing technique fought all my instincts. Grundy did the first lead climb, with Nacho as his second. He put in the protection halfway up the pitch, pounding in a spike with his belt hammer, testing it by hanging from it, using all of his weight. Then he and Nacho went the rest of the way up to the top of the rock. The climbers following scrambled up using nubbins for footholds, taking advantage of the tiny flutes and chimneys, jamming the toes of their hiking boots into crevices for traction before finally reaching the top of the first boulder.
Nacho yelled, 'Off belay!' which was Sonny's and my signal to climb up and join them.
Lopez went up first. I was last. My job was to yank out our protection and bring it up with me. It was a rush,
