device, he won’t have signal strength or direction, he’ll just know there’s radio chatter in the area. There’s not much we can do about it unless you want to skip the radios. Since our handhelds can’t interface with the helicopter’s NavCom, I’m thinking we keep Grangeland and Ernie at the chopper. We’ll need her to relay anything Mansfield sees from the surveillance birds. I’d say using the radios outweighs being blind out here. Lesser of two evils.”
“Booby traps?” asked Harv.
“I’ve thought about that too. I think it’s unlikely they’d have any kind of long-term trip wires or pressure- triggered devices because of all the wildlife in the area. They wouldn’t want a random accident to call attention to their cache. They might have something at the actual location of the buried money, though. If he does, it’ll be a bomb-disposal job. Can your people handle it, Grangeland?” Nathan already knew the answer, he just wanted to distract her from her airsickness.
No answer.
“Grangeland?”
“Yeah, I think so,” she said tightly.
“You okay back there?”
“I’m feeling really woozy.”
“There’re barf bags in the seat pockets. Harv, how far to Dutch Creek Road?”
“Maybe four thousand yards.” He looked down at the satellite image. “Adjust heading to three-four-zero. That should take us pretty close to the LZ.”
Nathan pushed the cyclic slightly to the left and watched the LCD screen’s digital compass rotate. “Copy.… Three-four-zero.” He snuck a look out the port window. The snowcapped peaks of the Flathead Range were a damned beautiful sight.
“Should we risk a visual pass down the canyon to the money drop and back?” Harv asked.
“It won’t help us that much. For the kind of detail we’d need, we’d have to move slightly faster than a hover. Let’s set her down right away.”
“You’ll have my undying gratitude,” Grangeland said.
“Reduce speed to sixty knots,” Harv said.
“Sixty knots.” Nathan lowered the collective, pressed the right anti-torque pedal, and pulled back on the cyclic control. Maintaining its altitude, the helicopter flared and rapidly bled off air speed.
“Oh shit,” Grangeland moaned.
“Hang in there,” Harvey encouraged her.
“I’m gonna be sick.”
“We’re ninety seconds from being on the ground.”
She didn’t make it.
Nathan heard violent retching sounds as Grangeland leaned forward and vomited into a barf bag. The distinctive odor filled the cabin.
“Don’t worry about it,” Nathan told her. “Happens to all of us. Keep track of your weapon, Ernie might try something.” She didn’t respond. “Harv, what’s happening?”
Harv whipped around.
“She’s okay,” Harv said. “Crossing Dutch Creek Road. Slow to thirty knots.”
A dirt track passed beneath them, no more than twenty feet below their skids. Sixty seconds later, the landscape suddenly dropped off as they cleared the canyon’s southern ridgeline.
“Set her down inside that copse of trees at two o’clock,” Harv said.
“Power lines?” Nathan asked.
Harv scanned the area. “Clear.”
Twenty seconds later, leaves cartwheeled away from the LZ as Nathan set the chopper down. “Shutting down,” he said. “Any bullet holes in us yet?”
Harv grinned. “The afternoon’s still young.”
Grangeland heartily agreed with being delegated to guard duty. The nausea left her weak and in no condition for physical exertion. With Harvey covering, she handcuffed Ernie to the skid support just below the rear door and sat down in the sand facing him. The cord was stretched tight, but her headset was still plugged into the ceiling consule.
Dressed exactly as they were at Freedom’s Echo in their ghillie suits, they parted company with Grangeland and headed east along the northern edge of the canyon’s streambed. Nathan estimated the canyon’s width at three hundred yards, tighter in places, wider in others. Because the north wall of the canyon caught more sunlight, the underbrush was thicker with more trees present. In the middle of the canyon, a small stream flowed toward the east. The canyon’s seventy-foot limestone walls were steep in places and shallow in others, where smaller streams fed the main creek. In hundreds of places, striated layers of rock were exposed in a series of ten- and twenty-foot ledges like giant steps. Dark recesses in the rock formations created ideal shooting positions for a potential sniper.
They moved quickly along the tree-lined bank of the sandy wash, stopping every three minutes or so to scan the area in front and behind them with their field glasses.
“Ground zero is on the south side of the wash about thirty feet above the bank,” Harv said. “In the oblique shot, it looked like a giant stack of flat boulders.”
“How far?”
“Another thousand yards or so. We should be able to see it once we clear the next bend in the wash. I don’t like being down low like this with the sun in our faces.”
“That’s affirmative, neither would Leonard. But don’t worry, if he’s already here, he can only nail one of us at a time. Your odds are fifty-fifty.”
“The hell they are,” Harv said. “He’ll shoot the man carrying the rifle first.”
“Maybe you should carry it.”
“Nice try.”
Nathan toggled his transmit button on the radio. “Grangeland, radio check.”
“Copy,” came her response. “I gagged Ernie just in case he has the notion to sound off. He’s livened up a bit. Mad as a hornet.”
“Good thinking. Five-minute check-ins from now on. We left the helicopter’s master switch on. In the event Malmstrom calls, you’ll hear it through your headset. If you need to contact Malmstrom for any reason, all you have to do is pull the red trigger on the cyclic, the control stick. Copy that?”
“Copy,” she said. “Good hunting.”
“Despite her gritty personality,” Harv said, “I kinda like her.”
“Me too. She’s a trooper. Okay, we’re going stealth from here on. Ten-meter separation, I’ll take the lead. You’ve got my six. How long before our next surveillance bird’s overhead?”
Harv looked at his soap-smeared watch. “Twelve minutes.”
Chapter 26
With her nausea gone and equilibrium back, Special Agent Grangeland felt a lot better. She surveyed her surroundings. Light-to-moderate tree cover surrounded the helicopter to the north, east, and west. From the south rim of the canyon, the helicopter was in plain sight. From the other directions, it wasn’t totally screened, but unless someone was purposely looking for a parked helicopter in the middle of nowhere nestled within a canyon surrounded by trees, they’d never spot it from those directions. She supposed Leonard could be looking for just such a situation. She’d overheard Nathan and Harvey talking. This spot was nearly a mile-and-a-half from the money stash. Would Leonard Bridgestone reconnoiter out to this range? Would he start at such an extreme distance and spiral in, checking the perimeter? No doubt, he’d be exhausted from a twenty-two-hour drive and need to get some sleep, unless he was wired on drugs.
Shit. Too many questions without answers. She felt vulnerable in her current position, exposed from the
