Chapter 17

" ... described the event as an absolute catastrophe. Sources close to the manhunt tell World Information News Network it will be weeks or months before equipment destroyed in a lightning raid on the base camp can be fully replaced. Estimates of the damage have soared since word of the attack first reached Washington last night. Some officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, say the cost could rise as high as three hundred million dollars.

"In the House, lawmakers say they have no intention of passing an emergency funding bill for the Department Of Justice to fund procurement of helicopters, supplies, and other equipment lost since the pursuit of the former Army Non-Commissioned Officer began.

"Instead, there is a growing movement for a special prosecutor to be appointed to investigate the actions of Deputy Attorney General Carl Brady ... with emphasis on his activities as the District Attorney in Bexar County, in Texas." He paused for a moment while he tried to find the information he had written on the hard copy of the script.

"I think ... yes, Bexar Country is essentially San Antonio, Texas and the surrounding metroplex. Our own April Cantrell is in San Antonio this evening and she has some insight for us. April ... what's the story from way down there in south Texas?" The anchor chuckled derisively. There was a lengthy silence and the expression on his face grew strained.

"Colin, things are getting interesting here too," April finally said. She'd allowed the moment of dead air emphasize her erstwhile co-anchor's foolishness. It was time to ease this fop off the stage and this would be the first shot in the war.

"You'll remember all of the initial charges brought against Underwood have been dropped because of..."

World Information News Network
"Evening News: First Look"
Jul 28

Miles Underwood, fugitive at large, sank to one knee and watched a helicopter fly south, well beyond him, where it stopped, hovering over something of interest. After a while, the chopper gained altitude and flew back north. A half hour later, he had to go to ground as the same aircraft, or one just like it, came by and stopped south and a little east of where he hid.

Miles was betting they'd dropped off ground searchers; it was what he would have done had he been in charge. Two teams had been planted across a narrow neck in the valley where they might be able to intercept him as he fled south. Where there were two, he had to expect more.

The way south was blocked. With impassable mountains to the east prohibiting movement in that direction, the only way he could go now was west. The mesa was his only hope.

The immense mesa dominated the entire western horizon. Looming over the valley, the top of the huge land formation looked to be flat as a tabletop, though it was a table that slanted slightly down from north to south. For much of its length, sheer cliffs hundreds of feet high rose from the valley floor. At their feet lay piles of scree ... mounds of rock fallen from the heights leaning against the cliff.

There was a break in the cliffs though, a place where the sheer walls gave way to less precipitous slopes. Here, water running off the mesa and ancient landslides had formed steep ramps leading up to the top of the mesa. It was toward this place that he was racing now, attempting to stay ahead of the manhunt he knew had to be gaining strength behind. He was stumbling more often now though. The overnight run from the destruction of the encampment had taken a lot out of him.

He was working his way up a ravine that angled upward across the slope. It provided excellent cover, but it had just about played out now. It was only a couple of feet deep here and following it any further would be pointless. Leaving the old water passage at a point where tumbled boulders provided a staircase upward, he climbed steep slopes until he reached a place where the trees and brush had given up trying to establish themselves.

The wind had polished the granite down to the bedrock here, carrying away all the rock dust and most of the small pebbles and sending it all plummeting down to the massive piles of rough scree he could see far below. He would leave no tracks here and dogs would wear themselves out long before they climbed up this far ... but he felt uncomfortably exposed.

In a space shielded from view by one boulder lying close to two others, he stopped for a rest. He knelt and tossed a pebble into the darker shade before he crept in among the rocks. Mountain rattlers liked protection from the noonday sun as much as he did and he would afford them the right of first discovery should any be hiding there. There were no answering rattles. Turning and sitting in the same motion, he dropped the rucksack beside him and leaned back against the cool stone.

After a long drink, he pulled out his binoculars and braced his elbows on his knees to provide a steady platform. He swept the glasses from his extreme left all the way around to the right ... north to south ... across the nearest ridge in front of him, searching for a pursuing party of men.

Finding none, he scrutinized the lower, farther ridgelines and then scanned the most distant slopes. He had an excellent view up here but there was no sign of anyone climbing purposefully in his direction. Relieved, he sighed and put the binoculars aside. He rested, trying to breathe slowly and deeply. He would go on in an hour or so.

Leaning heavily on the advice of the National Guard lieutenant, Owens changed tactics. In the early evening of the day after the catastrophic attack, the only two helicopters available to him had made a series of trips from the base camp into the surrounding mountains.

Twenty to twenty-five miles out, they dropped off teams with backpacks full of gear and supplies. The men and women had orders to establish observation posts and aggressively patrol assigned areas until they were relieved.

The single undamaged helicopter landed back at the base camp and was quickly serviced from the small supply of aviation gas that had escaped the fires. The other chopper headed east to Pueblo where spare parts were available to repair the slight damage it had sustained in Miles' night attack. It would come back to the area of operations carrying supplies and a five-thousand gallon bladder of fuel.

The only aircraft available now to the searchers would serve as a surveillance vehicle tomorrow, carrying a quick response team who would spend their time aloft searching with powerful binoculars. The hunt for the fugitive had a new urgency now. It was going to be a 24/7 operation.

This was all new to many of the police officers. None of them had been expecting a nine-to-five operation exactly, but the idea of spending the night out where wolves, bears, and mountain lions roamed unrestrained disconcerted many of the officers.

They were all volunteers though. They'd see this through, no matter what they had to do. Unfortunately, there weren't enough of these teams; there were only three out right now. Too much equipment and supplies had been destroyed in the night attack.

The three groups were spread in an arc across a broad valley between two ridgelines running loosely north and south. Hills to the west swept higher and higher until they came to the lower ramparts of the high mesa. To the east was another of the numerous, and nearly impassable, mountain chains that together make up the three thousand length of the Rocky Mountains.

The western-most patrol group was positioned atop a field of rock thrust upward from the depths of the planet's core before the dinosaurs disappeared. Though more hospitable now, worn down through millions of years of wind and rain, the place was still unsuited to watching the local area.

It looked good on a map; it was indeed slightly higher than the surrounding valley, but it was a long way from water and had no places for the officers to set up where the view was not blocked in some direction.

On day two after the attack, the FBI agent-in-charge there got permission to place his men and women on one of the tall bluffs that stair-stepped up to the western mesa. Those heights truly dominated the terrain, and provided a panoramic view of hundreds of square acres of forest and meadow.

The agent-in-charge took it upon himself to move even further west than desired by the command staff at the base camp. The team found a quarter-mile wide ledge on the lower slope of the mesa itself where they could spread out and watch great swaths of the valley down which they expected Underwood was fleeing.

At the back of the ledge, tucked up against sheer rock walls that towered into the sky, they set up a camp where it would be out of sight. They wanted the group's presence to be a surprise to a fugitive running through this section of the wilderness.

Something, a flash or perhaps just movement where there should have been none, caught his eye off to the south. Miles froze in mid-step and sank slowly to a knee, edging forward to put a boulder the size of a desk between himself and the possible threat. Looking around to his right and then behind, he made sure there was no one close. The air was clear of any helicopters. He checked again.

Rising slowly to put only his forehead and eyes above the top of the boulder, he examined the ridge where he thought he'd seen something. Searching each pile of rocks and growth of brush, Miles worked from the nearer places to the more distant ones but found nothing. He found nothing at all disturbing ... and that was, itself, disturbing. Something had attracted his attention.

After fifteen minutes more of watching, he decided it had probably been a wandering mountain goat or perhaps a mountain lion stalking one of them. On the other hand, perhaps it had been the sun glinting off a deposit of white quartz. It was often found with gold, and he knew for a certainty there was gold here. Maybe he should come back and look around someday.

Dropping down behind the boulder, Miles waited a short time longer while he took a deep drink from a nearly empty canteen. It did no good to ration it. Water in a canteen did nothing for a man's survival. He drank again.

He'd been up here before, curious about the mesa and hearing from some of the People of more of their villages to be found in places like this. On a couple of exploring trips, he'd actually found a few ruins but nothing to rival the ancient city in the mammoth cavern. More importantly, in the course of hunting for the ruins, he'd committed to memory the few sources of water he found.

Surveying the boulder strewn slope above him, he marked out a route he would use to get up to the near vertical heights beyond. The shallow wash over there was neck deep in runoff when melting snows and early Spring rains came to this region, but this late in the year, it was bone dry. Its primary allure was that it led directly to a place he knew. He set off again, bending over to make his silhouette smaller.

Near the top of the slope, the arroyo faded out. In the spring runoffs here, there was a narrow, and very temporary, waterfall that fell from the lip of the mesa. The falling water swept numerous small pebbles and bits of soil downward along with stray bits of brush, pieces of trees, and seeds of all kinds. Most of the debris was carried further down the ridge, but the slow flow of water in late spring allowed some to accumulate here. The small basins formed in the rock by eons of pounding water were, collectively, a tiny oasis on an otherwise barren slope.

Miles found this spot, in fact, during the spring and had been captivated by the beauty of the water cascading from the heights. Later, in summer, he found no waterfall but he marveled at the four small pools framed by small growths of trees and bushes that had been hidden behind the waterfall.

The approaches up the slope to the tanks were treacherous. A carpet of loose pebbles, twigs, dry bark ripped from tree trunks, dried out pinecones, and other debris--well mixed--made walking an adventure. By working his way slowly through the mess and watching where he put his feet, he got through safely and dropped his backpack beside the largest, the rearmost, of the pools.

This was a place for a well deserved rest and he made the most of it. It was a brief one though. He had to keep moving. Having drunk all he could and refilling both canteens, Miles nerved himself to negotiate the next part of the climb to the top of the mesa.

Leaving the shelter of the trees and brush, Miles was careful but after a hundred yards of progress, he slipped in the rubble and skidded backward. His arms waving and feet scrambling for purchase in the debris, he slid down backwards. His heart in his throat, he fought to keep from sliding off a precipice and tumbling down to the valley far below. He had a quick vision of himself shooting off a ledge and plummeting downward, his arms and legs flailing uselessly.

That actually could not have happened. He'd have slammed into one of the big boulders around the pools before he got anywhere near the edge. That would have meant broken bones and eventual death. Still, he feared the fall far more.

He caught his balance with one foot in the shallow end of the smallest stone tank while a short-lived cloud of dust drifted down the slope toward him. Chagrined, Miles relieved himself against one of the boulders that would have stopped him had he not caught himself.

Back beside the pools, he drank again, deliberately filling his belly with water against future need. He gathered himself to start back up. Dangerous as it was, there was no other way.

There was a faint trail up there, probably made by the bighorn sheep that scampered along the sheer cliffs. He needed to get up to the path to the mesa top and the only way there was back up the same pebble filled chute he'd just skidded down. He was almost up to the trailhead when the walkie-talkie on his belt blared into sudden, raucous life.

The small cloud of dust had nearly dissipated when Deputy U.S. Marshal Louis Robbins caught sight of it. The powdery haze in itself was nothing to be concerned about. In the three weeks he'd been in the mountains, he'd learned that something was always falling from the heights. Tiny shards of rock, broken off from larger ones, were constantly working themselves free and dropping away.

Just a few minutes ago, the friction holding a few square inches of pebbles had been overcome by the mass's own weight on a steep slope behind him and the whole thing had slid down three or four yards until a new stability was found. He'd been watching when it began. He knew nothing living had started it and he hadn't been alarmed but he needed to know what had started the slide over there. He might need to be alarmed about this second occurrence.

Gripping the binoculars tightly, he slowly swept the area below, then just above the dust, moving in tiny increments up and down until he found what had caught his eye. He was adjusting the focus when a hand slapped down on a rock squarely in the middle of the binoculars' field of vision.

Startled, Robbins' fingers twitched. He lost the view of the hand and had to spend a few seconds reacquiring it. He dialed the power back from its highest setting of fifteen to see more than just a hand. At a magnification of eight, he could see the whole man. Excited, he fumbled for the radio he'd set down on the rock beside him and thumbed the transmission button.

"This is Robbins. I've got a man climbing the mesa north of my position," he said, his words tumbling over themselves in his hurry.

Surprised, Miles lost his grip and had to make a hurried grab for another handhold to avoid a fall. Finding a place wide enough for both feet, balanced there for long enough to bring a hand down to turn the volume down on the walkie-talkie he'd appropriated weeks earlier. He hadn't known it was on so loud.

He squatted as low as he could get, shifting around in the inadequate cover and trying to find the source of the radio call. He soon found a man on the high bluff off to the south. The black clad figure was pointing in Miles' direction.

There was nothing Miles could do. He was committed to this trail and had to keep going. If he tried to get back down, the man over there could track him visually virtually the whole way. The slope was almost bare ... no cover to speak of except down in the lower portions of the ravine and that place would be a trap now.

Climbing the last few yards, Miles whirled to his right and began running north along the narrow trail angling up and across a steep slope to the vertical wall just below the summit of the mesa. A hundred yards up and three hundred along the bottom of the cliff wall, he was far enough around the curve of the ridge to be almost out of sight of the man who'd seen him.

Miles had to go slower here, jumping from rock to rock in places and jogging precariously in the smoother stretches. He slowed further, looking for the little crack he'd found months earlier. Then he found it.

This wall of the mesa was fractured all along its periphery. It was ancient rock, part of the original molten lava thrust upward to form the Rocky Mountains. Time had worn away the stone in some places but there were places of harder stone that resisted erosion.

Here tall chimneys of rock climbed high, some of them completely separated from the cliff wall. They stood as sentinels, some rising nearly as high as the mesa itself. Sharp edged rocks, pebbles, and sand from their decaying sides fell to lie in haphazard piles about their feet.

Where one of these pinnacles lined up with a distant peak, there was a place where the pathway widened, then narrowed immediately. Miles slowed to a walk, extending his left arm to trail his fingers against the rock face.

It was a place along the cliff wall where it seemed a minor blemish marred the perfection of the mineral striations in the rock. Somehow the multi-colored striations were offset by a few inches, probably the result of some shift in the earth's crust ages ago. in the surface.

Miles' hand fell into an empty space. Without slowing his pace, he turned and walked directly into the cliff.

Across the way, Deputy Robbins bit off a running commentary when the man he was watching simply disappeared between one step and the next. Frantically, he moved his field glasses around, trying to reacquire the climber.

Deposits of minerals in the ancient molten lava, exposed by the deterioration of the mesa, had created varicolored ribbons in the rock that extended horizontally along the rock face. The striations fooled the eye into assuming the wall was one continuous, beautifully colored, formation. Only at arm's length was there something that didn't look exactly right.

The south side of the apparent discontinuity was actually where one part of the cliff ended. At the place where he turned and walked into the side of the cliff, the colored bands actually continued on a wall that was displaced several feet back into the rock.

Walking into what would have looked like solid wall to an observer only a step away, Miles found himself in a narrow passageway that quickly curved back on itself until it ran back south, nearly parallel to the outer face.

Torrents of water had rushed through here at some point in the past. Conceivably, the springtime waterfall and the summer pools where he'd rested a short time earlier had been fed by this chute when dinosaurs roamed where the Great Plains now were.

The walls had been polished into a smooth, satiny surface by eons of the flowing water. The beautifully colored ribbons were beautiful, even hypnotic, seeming to rise and fall in waves at the corners of his eyes as he strode along.

The passage seemed to end a dozen yards inside, the multiple bands of color rippled again in Miles' vision to give another false perspective. At the apparent end of the corridor, he turned hard right to find another passage leading due west ... and up the side of the mesa.

It was a passageway, steep in many places and full of rounded, water-carved boulders and pebbles that had fallen inward from the heights. It was difficult, but it straight led to the top of the mesa.

Without pausing, Miles lengthened his stride and jumped to the top of a knee-high ledge. He quickly sidestepped to the left for a jump up to another boulder. He began the climb; his knees began to tremble faintly.

He'd been going for nearly thirty-six hours now and had already climbed hundreds of feet up the side of the monstrous mesa. He refused to consider stopping for a rest. If he did, fatigue would make it that much harder to get moving again. And the searchers had to be closing in.

It had been nearly an hour since he'd heard the radio suddenly come to life.

Radio transmissions in mountainous terrain are iffy at best. Practically speaking, reception is just line of sight. The reconnaissance team members on the southeastern flank of the mesa could talk to each other, but their handheld walkie-talkies couldn't be heard at the base camp. For the moment, they were on their own.

The FBI agent-in-charge on the mesa ordered eight of his men to find a way up the heights rising behind their camp. They couldn't move laterally across the shoulder of the ridge directly to where the fugitive had disappeared. Blank, sheer rock walls over there, extending above and below their position, fenced them off from any way to move north any further than where the observer had seen Underwood.

They could have gone down and found the trail the fugitive had used, but that was counterproductive. They wanted to get in front of the quarry, not get into a chase up the side of a cliff.

After some quick searching, the group of eight found a way leading to the top of the mesa that wasn't too rough. It was no more than a couple of miles south and around the curve of the mesa's lower slopes. There was easy access from there--it was almost a ramp leading upward--to just below the level top of mesa; it wouldn't even be necessary for climbers to rope up to climb steep cliffs. They started up without returning to the campsite.

In the middle of the afternoon, the helicopter returning from Pueblo with a five-thousand gallon bladder full of fuel slung in a cargo net below it, finally heard the increasingly plaintive calls from the FBI team leader and relayed his information to the main compound twenty-five miles away.

The crew of the chopper already in the air--it had been working with the eastern-most of the deployed groups--was on the verge of turning back to the encampment for more fuel. Instead, they were diverted to the foothills of the big mesa for a pickup on the remaining members of the patrol. The eight on foot were already so close to the top that they continued on.

Forty-five minutes after the helicopter inbound from Pueblo detected the radio signals, the reconnaissance patrol--all fourteen of them--was reunited on the top surface of the huge mesa. After a brief rest, they spread out and began a hard march to get above the place where Underwood had last been seen. The chopper flew ahead, trying to catch a glimpse of the fugitive. Just one sighting ... that was all they needed.

Though his knees tended to buckle if he wasn't paying attention, the prey of the intensifying hunt couldn't afford any time to give his body any rest when he reached the crest. Walking--he couldn't summon the strength any more to run--he oriented himself and set a course to the southwest.

The mesa tilted infinitesimally to the south and travel was that tiny bit easier in that direction. The further one went in that direction, the more the terrain subsided into forested hills and valleys too ... lots of cover to shelter him ... and any number of small creeks of clear, cold water.

He felt naked amid the sparse, stunted trees on the mesa,. Cover was scarce and water even more so. He picked up his pace to a stumbling jog that deteriorated to a walk much too often.

Moving about up here was difficult for man and beast. The elements had alternately frozen and warmed the rock, first splitting it apart, then spreading the cracks wider every season. Each of these was an obstacle that had to be negotiated with a jump, or a way around had to be found. Running water had created ravines and gullies from some fissures ... dry courses where streams had once surged. Thick brush collected in these places, much of it too dense for quick passage.

The surface tended to fall precipitously into deep canyons or ascend steeply to a hilltop. Nature had forsaken gentle slopes and flat places up here. It was a wild place--rugged, barren, and windswept.

Not many men had ever come here and most who did were driven by forlorn hopes. Few who'd come here ever left. The ghosts of the desperate ones walked with Miles as he struggled forward over the bleak, uneven plain.

He found what he was looking for ... a rounded, weather worn boulder split wide horizontally down low to the ground. That opening in the massive rock looked like a vast, partly open human mouth in a giant head that faced east. From a distance, indentations carved by untold millennia of wind and rain seemed strategically placed for eyes. When he'd explored this area, he'd been struck by the formation and thought of it as 'Skull Rock' whenever its image came to mind.

More importantly, a deeper recess would make a good hiding place for the Barrett rifle. He'd wanted to get rid of it earlier, but there hadn't been any place where he felt he could. It was necessary now, appropriate or not. He was too near exhaustion to carry it any longer. He stuffed the rifle deep inside the deep lips of the 'mouth' and pulled some scraggly brush over it.

The overhanging rock of the upper 'jaw' ensured the weapon would not be subjected to the elements and it was well concealed. Rounding the southern curve of the skull, he pressed on, jogging when his lungs recovered enough to permit the exertion. A little later, he turned west and south when the terrain allowed travel in that direction.

He was fast approaching another landmark he'd found in earlier explorations, one that he didn't really want to get to it just now. The sun was well past its highpoint now. It was the hottest time of the day, still too long before shadows would began to crawl out of the west. Sweating hard, Miles stopped in the scanty shade of a straggly pinion pine and tried to visualize the terrain as he'd seen it months earlier.

His head on a swivel, he scanned the skies for the aerial surveillance he was sure would come. Calmer than he would have suspected, he examined his chances. Briefly, he regretted the night attack on the encampment. It had been too much, the destruction too massive.

Instead of convincing them the search was futile--too expensive--he'd stirred up a beehive. It was too late now for recriminations though. He had a fight on his hands and no time for wishing. He walked away from the tree and shaded his eyes to scrutinize the landscape all around before returning to squat at the foot of the tree.

He was well away from the rim of the mesa; it was perhaps as much as four or five miles to the nearest edge, though he'd walked seven or eight by angling off to the southwest instead of moving at a right angle. He was a long way from where he had been last seen.

From the radio chatter, there had been a good dozen of the law enforcement officers in that group and he'd caught something about 'a way up' before he lost the signal. He suspected they'd been talking about a wide, shallow canyon over that way that formed an easily negotiated ramp leading up to the top. He'd been down it, though he'd never climbed up it.

Unless that team had moved due west from where it came out on the mesa's top surface, he had a good chance of being outside the area they'd think to search. They couldn't know how good a pathway up the cliff the trail he'd followed actually was. Their first instinct should be to scout the eastern rim of the mesa, seeking to intercept him when he reached the top. He hoped.

He roused himself for another look all around. His only chance was to be alert for any approaching men on foot and any aerial platforms. He hated to even think the word 'helicopter' these days.

They were the bane of his existence. Only bad things happened whenever one of them was around.

He snorted at the foolishness. He saw nothing on the ground or in the sky. It didn't make him feel safer. In fact, the tension ... the need to move away from the threat was all the worse because he didn't know where his enemy was.

Finally, his heart still pounding and his mouth dry, he couldn't sit quiet any longer. With final glances to the east and southeast from where he thought the threats would come, he set off. He walked fast but tried to conserve his strength. It was getting later in the day, but there was a lot of ground and much daylight remaining.

In front of him, no more than three-quarters of a mile away, was a curious line of rocks. Two pieces of the earth's crust had been compressed together here. Pressing against each other, their edges had been forced up to form a long, narrow stretch of insanely broken terrain.