Donita began to sob, in shock. “Did Childers…? Is Levi really dead?”
“I don’t know.” Cutter peeled off his sodden shirt and put on the merino wool top from his pack.
Maycomb changed into a dry thermal top as well, offering a crushable down jacket to Donita in place of her wet shirt.
“Do you think someone will look for us?” Donita asked.
“I think so,” Cutter said. “But what I know is that we need to start digging from this side.”
“And what if they don’t?” Maycomb asked.
“Same thing.” Cutter shouldered his pack. “We dig.”
Chapter 56
An orange US Coast Guard Jayhawk overflew the mountain twenty minutes after the explosion. Five minutes after that, a Trooper helicopter touched down in the clearing above the cave-in. USFS LEO Bobby Tarrant, two troopers, and three FBI agents, including Supervisory Special Agent Beason, got out to find Deputy Lola Teariki and Detective Rockie Van Dyke, bruised and bleeding but alive.
Tom Horning was the last to exit the helicopter. Absent the plaster cast, he wore a dark-blue walking boot and fairly skipped down the mountain with the aid of two trekking poles.
He caught Van Dyke looking at the boot and gave a tense shrug. “I cut the damned thing off. Had an itch – to be up here helping.”
“Thanks,” Van Dyke groaned. Her hearing was shot from the blast and she spoke much louder than she needed to. “But it’s kind of over now.”
One of the troopers checked Lola and Van Dyke for trauma, while Beason stood and looked at the large depression in the mountain.
“Are we sure they were in there?”
“Grimsson, Dollarhyde, yes,” Van Dyke said. “They were the ones behind the AUSA’s murder.”
Beason shook his head. “I don’t care about that right now. Cutter and the reporter. Were they down there?”
Lola bowed her head, tears welling in her eyes. “They must have been.” She sniffed. “We were behind him the whole way, all the way here.”
“Did you see him go in?” Beason asked.
“No,” Lola said. “I never did see him. He was always a mile or two ahead.” She buried her face in her hands, muffling an angry sob. “But I was on his tracks.”
Beason prodded. “Are you sure they were his?”
Lola nodded, her face still covered, her voice taut. “We found some of the spent cartridges for his Colt, then followed the tracks past the first cave-in, to where we came across Grimsson.”
“What do you mean, first cave-in?” Tom Horning asked.
Lola stared up at the sky in despair as she explained the rock slide over the trail.
“Sounds like the second entrance to the Cross Cut.” Horning gave the area where the blast had occured a tip of his head. “This is… was also an entrance to the Cross Cut mine.”
Lola’s jaw fell open. “You mean they could have gotten out at the other end?”
Horning grimaced. “The passages in between are flooded. But we should probably take a look at that other rock slide. That tunnel is open for a couple hundred yards before it reaches the water.”
Lola lead the way, up and moving before the rest of them could make a plan.
Special Agent Beason found blast marks on the rocks above the first slide while Lola studied the tracks.
“You said you found Cutter’s spent brass?” the FBI supervisor asked. He sat on a flat rock, on the slope of the hillside.
“Down there,” Lola said. She pointed down the mountain into the forest.
“Let’s think about this,” Beason said. “Cutter and that reporter get in a firefight with Grimsson and then they run up here.”
Lola and Van Dyke nodded in unison.
Van Dyke patted the flat rock. “So Cutter and Lori make a stand here. But the bad guys blow the tunnel shut, sealing them in.”
Lola dropped to her knees and began turning over rocks, gently at first, until she found what she was looking for two feet in from the outer edge of the rockslide. She pointed to the Xtratuf track, faint but visible in the dirt. “I’ve been following the particular crease in that heel ever since the shoreline. That’s Cutter’s boot – and it’s pointed toward the mouth of this tunnel, not away from it. He went inside, not past it like I originally thought.”
Not daring to hope, she picked up a rock and sent it tumbling down the slope. Frantic with worry, she picked up another, and then another, clawing at the dirt and rock until her fingers bled.
Horning, seeing she was going to dig harder than anyone else, with or without tools, gave her the gloves from his back pocket.
Van Dyke, Tarrant, the troopers, and the FBI agents, including Charles Beason, joined in. An hour in, a team of deputy marshals showed up in a chartered helicopter jumping out with picks, pry bars, and looks of grim determination. Most of them still wore business suits, straight from their protection details over Judge Forsberg and the surviving assistant US attorney. They’d heard what was going on and hauled in diesel-powered construction lights from the clearing a half mile away.
By sunset, the area around the mountain looked like a small city, with a first-aid station, rain shelter – thankfully it hadn’t been needed – and Porta Johns. A trooper wife had sent up a plastic tote full of sandwiches, but so far, they’d remained untouched. Everyone focused on excavation.
Tom Horning ran the operation. He’d dug out enough old mines to know what made them tick – and how to open a mountain without having the rain-soaked earth crash down around his ears. His wirehaired dog, Kat, scampered around the dig, sniffing, helping.
An hour after dark, the little dog homed in on a particular spot. She whined, then stuck her toffee-colored snout in a narrow crevice, and began to dig. One of the FBI agents got down on all fours to listen, shouting that he thought he could hear tapping from under the rocks. Like ants, the group focused their efforts in
