floor of hard- packed dirt was crisscrossed with countless tire tracks. Anne Armstrong said, “Off-road enthusiasts use it for dirt biking and ATVs, and teens come out here to park and get drunk and generally party.”
Jack said, “Might not hurt to see if any of the locals have been reported missing in the time from early Thursday morning to now. Someone might have seen something that somebody else didn’t want seen and been disappeared for it.”
Armstrong radioed in to Central requesting information on that score. Central replied they’d look into it and get back to her.
The canyon was seemingly unoccupied today with no other humans in sight. Arroyos, gullies, and gorges branched off to the east and west of the main trunk. A couple of miles deeper into the ravine brought the CTU team in view of a sugarloaf-shaped bluff on the western side of the passage. Its slope was honeycombed with vertical and horizontal trails and speckled with bits and pieces of old weathered wooden structures: here a half-collapsed platform supported by a framework of trestles and cross-braced timbers, there a section of diagonal sluice spillway leading to nowhere, and scattered throughout, the ruins of shacks and sheds.
This was the one area of the canyon where an attempt, however feeble, had been made to restrict public access. The base of the slope was bordered by a chain- link fence; a gate barred the way to a dirt road stretching to the summit.
Armstrong said, “That’s Silvertop. The bluff held a rich lode of silver ore and was mined extensively in the 1890s. It gave rise to a boom town, but when the deposit played out, the town did, too.”
The SUV and the pickup halted at the gate at the foot of the road that climbed the hill. The long, gentle rise was stepped with terraces that had been carved out so that different veins of the lode could be mined.
The occupants dismounted from the vehicles. The tac squad consisted of four men, Frith, Bailey, Holtz, and Sanchez. All were fit, well-conditioned, clear-eyed, and cool- nerved. They were action men — trigger pullers. Frith and Holtz were armed with M–16s, Bailey and Sanchez with M–4 carbines. They were all equipped with sidearms, too, semi-automatic pistols in hip holsters.
CTU wanted to minimize its footprint in Sky Mount and environs so the squad members wore civilian clothes, utility vests, and T-shirts, baggy cargo-pocketed pants, and hiking boots. They, like Jack and Armstrong, were all outfitted in flak jackets. The squad men openly carried their weapons. Clandestinity only went so far before being superseded by the demands of security.
Frith, long-faced and lanky, was in command of the squad but subordinate to Jack and Armstrong. There was a sensitive issue of protocol here. Jack expected to be obeyed when he gave an order but he was the outsider here, an unknown quantity to the others. He would let Armstrong take the lead, couching his commands where possible in the form of suggestions. The key phrase: where possible.
It was hot out here in the open, hotter still because of the flak jackets. Jack consoled himself with the thought that it was nothing compared to how hot things could get without the protection of the Kevlar vest if trouble happened. Shooting trouble.
Shadows were short under a midday sun that stood almost directly overhead, pouring its rays straight down into the canyon. Sun- baked flats and rock walls threw back the heat. The CTU team all wore headgear. Frith and Sanchez wore baseball caps, Holtz and Bailey wore soft, shapeless fabric hats. Armstrong and Jack wore unmarked baseball caps that had been supplied from tac squad stores at Pike’s Ford. Jack’s headache had subsided in recent hours but the pounding heat made his temples throb, a portent of returning discomfort.
The fence enclosing the bottom of the hill was old, rusted. It was hung with a number of no trespassing signs, all of which were nearly illegible due to being bullet-riddled by high-spirited sportsmen. Gaps opened in the barrier where whole sections had been trampled flat by dirt bikers and ATV riders, the tracks of whose vehicles had worn clearly marked trails up the sides of the bluff.
The gate blocking the main access road was made of stronger stuff and stood solid and intact. It was secured by a length of padlocked chain. Both chain and lock were shiny and bright. Jack said, “They look brand-new, like they were put here yesterday.”
Anne Armstrong said, “Maybe they were.”
“But by whom?”
The Explorer’s rear hatch was opened, revealing a variety of gear. There were hard hats and flash-lights, coils of rope, picks and shovels and other tools. Bailey pulled on a pair of work gloves, picked up a pair of bolt cutters, and went to the gate. He snugged the open pincers against one section of a link of shiny new chain and squeezed the handles. He had to put some muscle into it, his face reddening and veins standing out on his forehead.
The section parted. He did the same thing to the other half of the link until it parted, too. The chain fell away from the gate. Holtz opened the gate all the way. Bailey stowed the bolt cutters and the work gloves in the rear of the SUV and closed the hatch.
Jack and Armstrong got back into their vehicle, the squad men into theirs. The SUV climbed the main road up the long, low-angled slope, the pickup following. They crested the summit, rolling to a halt on a spacious, flat- topped expanse.
Anne Armstrong radioed Central, informing them that the team vehicles would now be going out of service. Central acknowledged, their response scratchy with static. Armstrong said, “Radio reception is spotty here due to interference from the canyon walls and the mountains, Jack. Our portable handsets lack the power to send or receive messages to Central. The truck radio is stronger because it works off the vehicle’s battery, but even it’s barely adequate for communication purposes. The same goes for the SUV. So when we go out of service here, our outside comm is really closed down.”
Jack nodded. They got out of the pickup. The tac squad piled out of the Explorer. The squad men shared one trait in common: ever-alert eyes that were constantly scanning the surroundings, always in motion, never lingering for too long on any one fixed point. The eyes of hunters. Jack recognized the behavior pattern because he was the same way.
The top of the bluff was a rough oblong the size of several football fields put together, its long axis running north- south. Its western edge bordered the foot of a long, low ridge beyond which could be seen lines of wooded hills, rising in tiers to southern spurs of Mount Zebulon.
The flat-topped mound was littered with remnants of what had once been a thriving mining town at the end of the nineteenth century. It didn’t fit in with Jack’s notions about a western ghost town. It looked more like a war ruin. Some of the buildings were made of brick or stone and might have been factories or warehouses. Others were rows of wooden frame buildings that had collapsed into heaps. Not a single structure was fully intact. One consisted of fragments of two stone walls that met to form a corner, another was a heap of plank board rubble with part of a stone chimney remaining. That was the pattern.
The weed-grown site had been plucked, pillaged, and otherwise deconstructed by generations of vandals, looters, and troublemakers. No standing section of wall or foundation was without layers of spray-painted graffiti, no pane of glass was unbroken. Mounds of ashes and charred timbers marked the spot where houses had been burned down.
It was a popular site with the locals, judging by the remains of bonfires and the profusion of broken bottles and empty beer cans. Tire tracks from two-, three-, and four-wheeled vehicles overlaid the ground. The raggedy fence and gate below had proved no deterrent to the many who’d driven their machines up and down the sides of the bluff.
Jack and Anne Armstrong each had a set of field glasses. The entire CTU team was equipped with headset communicators, miniaturized transceivers consisting of an ear bud with a flexible plastic frame that fitted around one ear, extending into a curving plastic tube the width of a pipe cleaner that terminated near the wearer’s mouth in a condenser microphone. They all now donned the transceivers, running a comm check to make sure each unit was properly sending and receiving.
The receiver bud buzzed in Jack’s ear as he and the others sounded off. Audio quality was good, the signal strong and clear now that they were all grouped together. Whether it would remain so once they were scattered around the mound and no longer in one another’s line of sight had yet to be determined.
Anne Armstrong addressed the group. “Watch your step. The town was built on top of the mine and is shot through with vertical air shafts. Some are boarded over and posted with warning signs, others are open holes in the ground that go down a hundred feet or more.”
She had accessed the maps and diagrams of Silvertop’s inner workings that were archived in the computers
