making that first pitch, hanging from my harness a thousand feet up. My heart pounded while my eyes swept the landscape below. As I passed Smiley's piton, I looked carefully at it. Stenciled on the side it said mountaineer. It had come from one of the boxes in his garage.
When I finally got to the top I was expecting a lot of praise, but nobody said anything, except Nacho. 'Stop using your arms,' he growled. Then they all turned and started the next pitch, with Scott Cook taking over as climb leader and Rick Manos as his second.
By ten o'clock I was so wiped out that I was unable to go much further. I had spaghetti arms from pulling myself up. Sonny Lopez was in the exact same condition.
Nacho said, 'I told you to use your legs. Your arms won't hold up on a long climb like this.'
'I warned you guys if this happened I was gonna leave you,' Grundy said. 'You're gonna have to get down on your own. Here's the spare key to the SWAT truck,' he said, handing it to me.
'You're not leaving me,' I said.
'This was your call,' Grundy responded. 'The deal was, you could go as long as you didn't slow us down. This guy is just up ahead. He's killed three cops and put a fourth in ICU. We're gonna get him, but not with you two holding us back. The last two pitches, you guys barely made it.'
'We'll be along in a minute,' Sonny said as the two SWAT teams turned away and took off up the next boulder. Sonny and I lay on our backs on a narrow ledge, out of breath, and watched them climb away from us. Despite the fact that the sun was out, at this altitude it was still cold. Scott and Gordon had left us some rock pitons, carabiners, and two lengths of rope for our descent.
'Let's go on up,' I said, pulling myself to my feet and moving to follow. 'I'm not being left behind.'
I approached the boulder and tried to do a solo lead climb, scaling the rock, going up about ten feet, pounding in some protection with my belt hammer. But I was shot. My arms were shaking from the effort.
'Whatta you stopping for?' Sonny said sourly as he watched me, still on his back. I was dangling ten feet up.
Then suddenly I lost my handhold and fell, zippering out my poorly set piton. As I landed I felt a rib crack. I lay on my side moaning in pain.
'That was encouraging,' Sonny said, his face strained with exhaustion. 'I especially liked the eekie little scream.'
'Let's get off this damn mountain,' I said angrily.
Climbing down was easier, but not a complete snap. We had to tie off and belay from above. We didn't get back to the foothills until almost two in the afternoon. I was monitoring the small radio Nacho had given me and could hear the two SWAT units talking to each other as they neared the SEAL camp at Silver Pass. Once we reached level ground, Sonny and I started the long, hot hike back to Camp Billy Machen. The temperature had soared on the desert floor, so we stripped off our Tac vests in the dry hundred-degree heat and carried them.
By five o'clock we were almost there. I triggered the radio. 'This is Scully. We're one or two klicks from the Billy Machen camp.' Scott Cook came right back on the radio.
'We just left that SEAL camp at Silver Pass. The place was empty, no sign of him. No tackle, foot, or rope marks on the climbing faces. You want my take, this guy hasn't been up here.'
'But we saw his piton,' I said.
'Roger that, but he's not on this side of the mountain. We're gonna check the back side, but if he's not over there. I think we've been messed with.'
I clicked the transmit button twice to indicate I understood.
Sonny and I didn't say anything but we were both walking faster, now afraid that Smiley had for some reason lured us out toward the Chocolate Mountains, then doubled back.
We got to the end of the Gas Line Road and pushed open the gate. The black Dodge was gone. Somehow he'd rewired the battery system. I wondered where he'd found a cable way out here. Then I looked over at our SWAT truck. The hood was up.
Spray painted on the side in black paint was a message:
nice try assholes.
Chapter 46
The back of the SWAT truck, where the spare ordnance was kept, had inch-thick metal doors with a bolt lock, impossible to penetrate. But Smiley had pulled the engine alarm wires and opened the hood. The emergency alarm had probably brayed until the system's battery went dead. As we approached, I could see that our battery cable was missing.
I reached into my pack and pulled out the one that Grundy had given me, then opened the truck with the spare key and found a toolbox in the back. Sonny went to work reattaching the positive cable to the engine battery.
'Yeah, nice try, asshole,' he said softly as he finished. We opened the driver's side door on the truck. Sonny slid one of the keys into the ignition and started the engine, then backed the truck out while I walked over to where Smiley's Dodge Ram had been parked when we pulled in. I knelt down and studied the tracks in the gravel, as Sonny rolled up and stopped the SWAT truck behind me.
I pointed to a service road, 'Cochise read many signs. Track many assholes.'
Sonny grunted, and was already talking on the radio by the time I had the passenger door open. 'You guys, he's down here. He got his truck going and went west, down the service road. We're tracking him in the SWAT truck. What's your ETA the parking lot?'
'We're losing light up here. It's gonna be slow going down at night. We can't get back there until around twenty-two thirty,' Scott Cook said.
Not till 10:30 p. M. I looked over at Sonny and he said, 'Looks like it's up to the dumb-ass arm-climbers to fix this mess.'
We put our SWAT Tac vests back on, then drove along the fenced perimeter of camp Billy Machen. It had once been a tent city, but now all that was left were some poured concrete pads. It looked completely deserted. We kept going until we hit the Niland Blythe Road, which wasn't really a road, as much as a narrow dirt trail. Sonny slowed the truck to a stop and we looked to the left out across open desert. We were trying to decide which way to go, when I thought I saw something flash way out in the distance.
'What's that?' I pointed toward the spot.
We focused on the dark landscape, working on our night vision. After a minute it flashed again.
'See if they've got any infrared stuff back there,' Sonny said.
'Good idea.' I ducked through the opening into the back of the truck and started reading the labels on the equipment drawers, finally spotting one marked: light-gathering scopes.
Inside was a single pair of heavy-duty infrared binoculars. I brought them forward, then settled back into the seat, turned them on, and focused them through the windshield, toward the spot where the flash of light had been.
As they heated up, the picture first turned green, then slowly brightened. I was looking at the same landscape, only now I could see details, almost as if it were daylight. Something was racing around on the desert floor at least two miles away. It was still too far away to tell if it was Smiley's black truck.
'Something's out there. Some kind of vehicle,' I said.
Sonny turned the wheel toward the spot and drove up the dirt road, heading deeper into the desert valley full of Joshua trees and cacti. Suddenly, the road veered right and we were running beside a ten-foot-high industrial- strength chain-link fence. Every quarter mile or so there was a large painted sign:
chocolate mountain aerial gunnery range danger explosives!
keep out!
by order of the U. S. Government
Then under that:
