Not yet, no. Not yet.
But coming.
Salvetti drove them a short distance past his ranch house and then pulled the truck to a halt. Up ahead, a single-prop Grumman Tiger sat on a twelve-hundred-foot improved airstrip.
“That plane come with the ranch?” Ricci asked from the backseat.
Salvetti craned his head around.
“Uh-huh,” he said. “The chickens also.”
Ricci just looked at him.
Salvetti turned away, pushed open his door, glanced up at the cloudless sky, and checked his watch.
“Haul out your gear and I’ll get us loaded aboard and flaps-down in the air,” he said. “Under these flying conditions, we should be over the Sierra in a hop and a skip.”
Pedro pushed through a tangle of manzanita and joined the three lookouts he’d posted on the other side. Then he gazed straight ahead northward, where the double buttes heaved up from the flat valley bottom, scored and knobbed with erosion, but stacked high above the surrounding landscape as if in a display of resistant strength.
After a moment Pedro turned to the man beside him. Leaving the hut out of sight had quieted his ache for their captive in a way the whiskey had not, but now he felt a restlessness to spring the ambush. It would, Juan Quiros had promised, be an action well worth his trouble.
“I take it the others are on the move, Lafe?” he asked.
“As you ordered,” the guard said.
Pedro grunted with satisfaction, looked toward the buttes again. Though still washed in afternoon heat, he could barely wait for the chirping of the insects to announce dusk’s arrival in the valley.
“The
With its thirty-one-foot wingspan and high-rev Lycoming engine, the Tiger had been designed to be feather- light and fighter-powerful. And so it was as Salvetti piloted the little four-seater over an irregular terrain of jutting peaks, pine-forested upper slopes, and arid, shadow-splashed foothills and depressions studded with thickets of dryland scrub, all of it visible in panorama below vaporous white swags of low-altitude clouds.
Quiet since they had gone wheels-up, Ricci sat behind Salvetti trying to match what was depicted on the USGA map across his lap to what he saw through the aircraft’s wide canopy and windows, occasionally glancing at the digital ground image on the avionic panel’s navigational display for additional comparison. In the copilot’s seat, Lathrop also kept his words to a minimum, but had seemed not once to look at the ground as he gazed outward into space.
Ricci observed this by chance and filed it away in his mind without particular inference.
Half an hour after takeoff, Salvetti pointed out the lined, wattled necks of the buttes projecting between the walls of a shallow valley or basin to his left.
“You’re going thereabouts,” he said, and then nodded his head toward the forward curve of the canopy. “Look out and you’ll notice the land flatten in front of us almost like it’s been smoothed over by giant rollers. A kind of dark rim around its edges, see?”
Ricci leaned forward.
“Shadows,” he said.
Salvetti nodded.
“They outline the mesa’s plateau, give you an idea how it barely rises over the plain,” he said. “If this was around noontime instead of three in the afternoon, you’d have the bright sun overhead and might not even notice that it mounts.” He paused, adjusted himself behind the controls. “You fellas better strap in — I’m going to drop down and run a couple of passes to scout a landing spot that won’t throw our spines out of whack.”
Lathrop reached for his seatbelt buckle.
“We hope,” he said to finally break his long, staring silence.
It wasn’t exactly easy. But it could have been much worse.
The Tiger grooved out of the sky to land with a jarring bump and then rumbled shakily on across the mesa’s open table for several hundred feet, its propeller whipping up a cyclonic cloud of dust, its treaded wheels scraping out corrugated channels of parched earth and pebbles that tacked like hail against the underside of the airframe.
Inside the cabin, Salvetti had his lips puckered into a spout as he gripped the control column. Ricci couldn’t hear him through the noise, but looking around his contoured headrest thought for a second that he might have been whistling.
Then there was another, lesser jolt. Ricci lurched forward against his seatbelt, and back against the leather upholstery, deceleration slapping his stomach like an iron hand in a furry mitt. Moments later the grating bombardment of dirt abated and the prop’s blurry rotation slowed until its separate twin blades were distinguishable at the nose of the plane.
Salvetti rolled to a halt and exhaled a surge of breath, his mouth wide open now, his knuckles relaxing around the column.
“Did it again,” he said in a half whisper.
Then he took his hands off the controls, leaned back, and briefly closing his eyes, tipped a finger toward the heavens and crossed himself.
The five guerrillas came midway down the trail, where they could see the bend of the sluggish creek it followed winding away from the buttes. Then they took cover, three hiding in the snarled vegetation that bordered the trail on its right, two splitting off to its left.
They dumped their knapsacks, put their weapons down at their sides, and settled into position.
“There are still hours until sundown,” one of them said to the man beside him in Spanish. He extracted a pack of cigarettes from his pocket and shook a couple out. They were unfiltered American Camels. “Nothing to fucking do but wait.”
The man beside him nodded and accepted the cigarette that had been offered.
“It should be cooler soon,” he said.
“Yes,” said the other man, putting the rest of his cigarettes away and reaching for his Zippo lighter. “But then the biting flies come out.”
“They are hateful creatures.”
“Yes, that is the word. Hateful.”
“I wish I could kill them. Kill every last one.”
“I wish I could kill them all, too,” said the man with the pack of smokes. He fired the cigarette in his mouth, then held the lighter to the tip of his companion’s. “And I would like to kill both those fools who come for the girl.”
“For making us sit out here in these bushes?”
“Yes. I ask you, what extra pay will we get for it?”
“Nothing.” The man who’d been given the Camel puffed to get it started. “You have a point, but we can only kill the one.”
“Yes.”
“We are, unfortunately, limited.”
“Yes, limited, I agree,” said the man with the lighter in his hand. “That is another very good word.”
He spit a fleck of loose tobacco from the tip of his tongue and then lapsed into silence, smoking and waiting for the dusk.
Outside the plane, Salvetti got their packs and other gear from the luggage hold and handed them off as they waited.
