“What’s he doing?” Quinn asked.
“I only have a partial visual,” Nate whispered. “Waist and above. He’s walking down the road. East, in our direction. He’s armed. M16. And he’s wearing fatigues. Brown camouflage. Army… wait, he stopped.”
“He’s alone?”
“I don’t see anyone else,” Nate said. “He’s turning around and heading back the way he came. Looks like guard duty to me.” Nate said nothing for several moments, then, “Okay, he’s moving out of sight… and … gone.”
Quinn waited for Nate to crawl back down, then said, “I think we need to put a little more distance between us and the road. Just to be safe.”
“Safe sounds good.”
The sun slipped behind the ridge of the Sierras five minutes later engulfing Quinn and Nate in a dark shadow, and almost instantly dropping the temperature several degrees.
“Tighten up,” Quinn said into his mic. “It’s going to get dark quick. Let’s keep each other in sight.”
“Do you hear that?” Nate asked.
“You hear someone?”
“Not someone. It’s constant, low. I can almost feel it more than hear it.”
“Hold your position.”
Quinn jogged ahead until he was standing next to Nate.
“I don’t hear anything,” he said.
“My ears are younger than yours.”
“Go to hell.”
“Shhh. Just listen.”
Both fell silent again.
A half-minute passed, then there it was. Very low, almost blending into the background. Even as hard as it was to hear, Quinn could tell it was not something that belonged in the hushed hills.
By silent agreement, they moved toward the sound side-by-side. It seemed to be coming from just beyond the pile of rocks directly in front of them.
“Around, or over the top?” Nate whispered.
“To the top, but not over. Let’s see what we can see from there.”
The closer they got to the top, the easier it was to hear it. When he first heard it, Quinn had thought it was like the sound of a distant freeway. But now he realized it was more like a hum than a drone.
The valley was almost in complete shadow when they reached the top. And here, the sound was much louder, the hill no longer shielding the noise.
When Quinn brought night vision binoculars back to his eyes, he saw the fence right away. Rather, fences. There were two running parallel to each other, and disappearing off to the left and the right. The only break was at the point where they met the road. There a gate closed the gap. Next to it was a concrete building no more than fifteen feet square—enough room for some bunks, a table, a hot plate, and some storage.
Nate tapped Quinn once on the arm, then pointed a dozen feet right of the outpost. Quinn stared at the spot for several seconds before he made out what had caught Nate’s attention. There were three men standing in a loose group. Quinn assumed they were talking, but they were too far away to hear anything.
Nate tapped him again. But instead of pointing at anything, he made a waving motion with his fingers like he wanted to pull back, then he retraced their path down the hill. Quinn followed.
“Did you see it?” Nate asked, once they were off the hill.
“The men?” Quinn said. “Yeah, I saw them.”
“Not the men,” Nate said. “The fence.”
“I saw it. What about it?”
“It didn’t seem odd to you?”
“Tell me what you saw,” Quinn said.
Nate seemed to be lost in thought.
“What?” Quinn asked.
Instead of answering, Nate started walking along the edge of the hill, toward the fence.
“Wait,” Quinn said. “What did you see?”
“I might be wrong,” Nate said. “I want to get a closer look first. We should be able to approach it right up there.” He was pointing along a gully to the right.
As they neared the fence, the hum grew louder again. It was …
They came around the edge of a rock that looked like a gigantic T-bone steak, and found themselves only twenty feet away from the double fence.
