“You know how I feel about parachuting. If you hit paydirt, you’re going to be gone at least a week, right? Maybe longer?”
Joey didn’t want to go that long without an AA meeting, but he wanted even less to be left behind. “Still don’t trust myself, really,” he said. “I’ll have a hard time falling off the wagon if I’m seven hundred miles from the nearest beer, though.”
I don’t think anybody slept well. I spent half the night going over contingency plans with Rick and Luis.
“Okay, case one—you don’t hear from us for three days straight.”
Luis looked at the sheet before him. “We buy a Maule, hire an A&P, and rebuild it in the wildside hangar. The A&P never sees the outside of the hangar and he’s blindfolded on the way out to the farm. If necessary, we seal the tunnel after we have him working on the reassembly and worry about him after we rescue you. How do you seal the tunnel?”
“Rick will take care of it if we have to do it. What Maule?” I asked.
Rick said, “There’s one for sale in Houston, and two for sale up in Dallas. Whichever one we can get hold of fastest.”
“Okay, case two—feds grab Luis.”
Rick said, “When I don’t hear from him on our two-hour schedule, I seal the tunnel, with me on the wildside.”
“They move on the ranch?”
Rick said, “I seal the tunnel and wait on the wildside.”
Luis added, “When I don’t hear from him on the two-hour schedule, I start issuing press releases, subpoenas, and injunctions as well as bring in the Houston firm.”
“You suspect they’re moving on the ranch.”
“I seal the tunnel and wait,” said Rick.
“We haven’t covered everything, I just know it,” I said. “So keep your eyes open and use your initiative. But don’t give up the tunnel unless you have to, to rescue us, and don’t leave the farm while we’re away. If you have to, have Christopher bring you groceries, but, don’t break security. Okay, Rick?”
“Maybe I should just go with you guys. Maybe the waiting isn’t such a prime post, after all.”
“You’ve made your bed,” I said. “Lie in it.”
Rick grinned. “I will—but not alone.”
We flew out the next morning, Marie and Joey at the controls. Clara sat sideways in her seat and looked back at the tower until distance swallowed it. When we’d climbed into the plane, Rick said, “Be careful, you guys. I don’t want to have to come after you.” He’d avoided eye contact with Clara, shutting the hangar door as soon as we cranked up the Maule’s engine. He waved from the tower as we lifted off and then he shrank to insignificance, a tiny spot in the window of a tiny tower.
Clara finally turned in her seat, away from the base, and sank into herself, slumping in the seat and staring vacantly at the back of Marie’s head. Her mouth was a straight line that turned down at the ends.
For a moment, I considered trying to talk to her, but to be heard we would’ve had to use headsets and the intercom, which would hardly have been private. Instead I made myself a nest of sleeping bags and caught up on my sleep.
The Maule was heavily loaded with food and survival gear, extra ammo, and spare airplane parts. We underfueled to compensate for the load, stopping instead at each of the fuel stations between the Brazos and the Colorado border and filling our tanks half-full.
We landed at Moses in midafternoon, pitched camp, and collected dried buffalo patties for our fire. The grassy plain spread around us in undulating waves. We cleared the grass around the plane for a hundred-foot radius, using the gasoline-powered Weedeater to chop the dry, brown stuff down. On the high plains of northern New Mexico, it wasn’t as high or as heavy as it was back on the Llano Estacado, but we wanted to keep the predators back just the same.
I took the first watch, feeding the fire. Joey and Marie were sleeping in the tent and Clara was sleeping in the plane. I sat with my back to the fire—close enough to feel the warmth—far enough away to avoid catching on fire—and watched the darkness beyond my shadow. Occasionally I’d tilt my head back and watch the sparks from the fire climb toward the stars. Every ten minutes, my watch would beep, and I’d walk around the perimeter, then return to the fire, add more buffalo chips, and return to my seat.
I had no trouble keeping awake. I’d slept on the flight and my mind was on tomorrow. There were a thousand things that could go wrong and I was trying to think of each of them—and all the proper responses to each disaster, each complication, each injury, each mechanical failure. I was trying to think of everything.
And if this wasn’t enough to keep me awake, I was uncomfortably aware of Marie and Joey in the tent. They were being relatively quiet but they weren’t sleeping. I moved as far from them as I could and still watch things—the two hours went slowly.
Clara was awake when I opened the door to the Maule. “Everything okay?” she asked. She was staring at the cabin ceiling, her feet tucked under the rear seat and her body curled to fit around the cargo.
“All quiet,” I said. And it was. Joey and Marie were finally asleep—I could tell—Joey snored. I grabbed a sleeping bag and a ground cloth and spread them underneath the plane.
She snaked out of her sleeping bag and grabbed at her back. “Ouch. That seat strut is a real pain.” She sat in the door of the plane to pull on her boots. “Stay on watch long enough for me to pee?”
“A full bladder will keep you awake.”
She poked me in the chest. “A full bladder will make me go off and leave you guys unguarded if I have to pee while on duty.”
“Well, since you put it that way.”
She took her shotgun around to the other side of the plane.
When she came back, after a minute, she eyed my bed beneath the plane. “Leave room on the ground cloth—I’m not scrunching up again when my shift is over.” She dumped her sleeping bag down beside mine, and said, “Sir, I relieve you.”
I bowed. “You have the watch.”
“Sleep tight.”
“Don’t let the saberteeth bite.”
I fell asleep mentally dismantling and reassembling the landing gear near my head. Later I heard Clara wake Joey for his watch, then heard her sit heavily on the ground cloth beside me to take off her boots.
“‘severything all right?”
She took off her jacket and rolled it, lambskin lining out, to use as a pillow. “Everything’s fine, Charlie. Go back to sleep.”
I rolled over, away from her, and listened to her slip into the bag, zip it up, and lie back. After a minute I felt her back against mine. She was wearing long underwear, pants, a flannel shirt, and a winter sleeping bag. I was wearing much the same, and we were facing opposite directions. Still, I went from being half-asleep to wide-awake and very aware of her body.
An interminable amount of time later, she began to snore lightly, a regular buzz-whoosh that made me smile. For some reason this inelegant noise finally relaxed me enough to drowse, then sleep.
I dreamed of flight and my plane’s engine was quiet, only making noise when it flew on its back, and then, only when it exhaled.
“Well, what do you think?”
It was a half hour after dawn. There was frost on the Maule but it was clearing rapidly as the sun rose. The barometer was steady, precisely where it’d been the night before. What little wind there was came from the east and the sky had few altocumulus clouds. I wrote down the barometer reading in the log and answered Marie’s question.
“I think it’s go. We need the sun a bit higher, maybe. Let’s wait until we have all the frost off the wings. We’ll have shadows in the canyons if we get there before midmorning.”
We packed the plane carefully. Before we left, we used the shortwave to check with Rick.
“Weather’s good,” he said. “Nothing heading your way from down here.”
The first pass was above the ridgeline, dropping orange smoke pots out the window as close to the center of the valley as we could. I had my suspicion
s about the approach path. There were two canyons at right angles to our glide path that had high potential for crosswinds. We tried to drop three pots apiece where they intersected the Cripple Creek valley.
Try is the operative word—the ride was bumpy even above the ridgeline. The pots were only vaguely in the center, but they were close enough to see what the wind was doing.
“There,” said Marie from the pilot’s seat. “There’s a pretty hefty crosswind at canyon number two. What do you make that—ten knots?” She was referring to the angle of the smoke stream. We’d tested the pots at Wildside Base, when we could read the wind speed from our weather station, and we’d worked out approximate wind velocities based on how the smoke rose.
“More like twelve, I’d say,” I shouted, moving my oxygen face mask aside for a second. “We’ll have to check it when we’re down. Looks pretty calm, though, every place else.” The pots drifted a little upstream in the valley proper, away from the cross canyons. We circled for fifteen minutes, watching the smoke while it lasted to make sure the still air wasn’t a momentary fluke. “It’s not going to get any better—let’s do it.”
Clara and I had won the toss. We were perched in the back with the duffels, dressed to kill—or at least dressed not to be eaten, frozen, or asphyxiated. Besides our usual chute and equipment harness we wore insulated overalls over our other clothes and each had a small oxygen bottle slung under our safety chute. I double-checked the whole mess, then slid the back door open. Frigid air blasted in, finding exposed flesh and biting it.
Clara lowered her goggles and wrestled the cargo pack to the edge. Joey shouted, “Now!” and pumped his arm down. Clara shoved the pack out.
The static line popped the chute open and popped the tab on a yellow-green smoke pot attached to the pack. We circled to watch it drift down. “Hmm. Drop us a little more east. We’ve got some crosswind up here as well.”
The cargo pack landed in trees on the face of the west ridge. I couldn’t tell how far up it was, but the ridge towered nine hundred feet above the stream below. It was going to be interesting getting it down.
“Are you sure?” asked Marie, her head turned to look at the chute caught in the trees.
“We can steer our chutes,” I said. “The cargo pack couldn’t.”
Marie widened her spiral and brought us back a half mile east of the last drop sight and five thousand feet higher. Clara and I double-checked each other’s gear to make sure that our chutes wouldn’t tangle in any of our other equipment.
“Set altimeter!” shouted Joey.
Clara and I bowed our heads over the altimeter actuators on our chutes and put our thumbs to the set dials.
“Set to nine-er, fi-uhv, zee-ro, zee-ro.”
We dialed in ninety-five hundred and locked the dials. Then I checked Clara’s while she checked mine. I raised my hand, forefinger circled to thumb in an “OK” sign to Joey. No more talk for Clara or me—we’d secured the oxygen masks for the jump, four straps around the back of the head, under the helmet, and then the helmet chin strap on top.
We swung into the doorway, side by side, ready. The wind pulled at us, hungry. Finally Joey pumped his arm and said, “Go!”
Eternity opened its mouth and swallowed us whole.
Clara went first, followed—“One-one-thousand, two-one-thousand”—by me. We were not using static lines. This was a HALO drop (High Altitude-Low Opening) to avoid the crosswinds above the ridges and, hopefully, get us into the right valley.
She assumed the position, legs spread, arms up, but instead of leaning against a wall or a police car, she was leaning against a wall of air sixty feet below me and maybe the same distance off to my right. I saw her swivel her head, then drop a shoulder to slide sideways. I followed, half-watching her, half-watching the ground for—there it was. The yellow-green smoke from the cargo chute’s pot was a smudge on the green, gray, and brown landscape below.
We had thirty seconds to get into position before our chutes would open automatically. I was also counting in my head, a monotonous “one-one-thousand, two-one-thousand.” If I reached thirty-four without the chute opening, I was going to do it manually. I was also glancing at the altimeter. It was whirling around, a thousand feet every six seconds. I’d used a grease pencil to mark the target altitude. Again, if I passed it, I was going to manually open the chute.
Clara was gliding for the ridge opposite the smoke smudge. The valley was widest there, a flat meadow long enough to land the Maule once we dropped a couple of trees at each end. I tilted at an even more extreme angle and closed both the vertical and horizontal distance between us. She didn’t see me until I caught the sleeve of her coverall. I couldn’t read her face around her oxygen mask and goggles, but she took my hand in hers and we dropped on for five more seconds, still counting, still watching the altimeter.
Her actuator went off first and she was pulled from my grasp as her chute blossomed above.
For a brief instant I thought my actuator had malfunctioned and my hand was tightening on the D ring when my opening chute yanked me upright and slowed my downward plunge by over a hundred miles per hour.
I couldn’t see Clara—my own chute blocked my view above. The ground below was sliding briskly toward the east, which meant I was blowing west. I turned my parasail east and spilled air to slide into the wind, trading altitude for horizontal position. The east ridge was directly below me and, by now, about five hundred feet lower. I hauled hard on my right-hand brake loop and went into a spiral that dropped me rapidly. When I was much closer to the ridge I let go and steered west, crossing the ridge about fifty feet above the rocks.
I suddenly dropped thirty feet and cursed myself for an idiot. I shouldn’t have gotten so close to the ridge. Where the east wind flowed over the top of the ridge there was a downdraft at the trailing edge—basic aerodynamics. I sank rapidly toward a rock outcropping that projected over the Cripple Creek valley. If I landed, I would have to climb down into the valley, but, worse, it was more likely that I would land, my chute would partially collapse, and then the wind would catch it and drag me off the cliff with only a moderate chance of slowing my fall before I struck some rock outcropping below. I steered to the clearer side of the outcropping, pulled my knees to my chest, and prayed.
The heel of my left boot grazed rock and then I was over, past the ridge, with nine hundred feet of air under my feet again.
I did the rest in a spiral, coming out well clear of the trees and then dropping gently into the meadow. My shotgun was out and I was scanning all around when Clara dropped onto the ground fifty yards away.
She let her chute collapse onto the grass and pulled out her shotgun. The wind in the bottom of the valley was light. She popped her chute harness and walked out of it.
I did the same. I was sweating. The temperature was in the high forties and we were dressed for the weather over a mile higher. I took my eyes off the surrounding grass and looked up. The Maule came down the valley below the ridgeline, keeping well to the middle. I dropped my helmet, took off the oxygen mask, and pulled my handheld VHF out of its holster. “You all right, Clara?”
She was still scanning our perimeter and her oxygen mask still covered her face, but she held up her free hand signaling “OK.”
“You hear me, Marie?” I said, into the radio.
“Loud and clear, Charlie. You guys okay?”
“We’re fine. No problems.” I was turning as I said this. “Well, maybe one.” I looked over the thick stand of pines that lined the creek on the west side of the meadow.
“What’s that?”
“The cargo chute is halfway up the west ridge.” The chute had alternating white and international orange panels and stood out clearly against yellow and red leaves where it hung in a stand of aspens. “It doesn’t look like too bad of a climb, but it’s going to take a couple of hours, at least, to retrieve it. Then we have to clear the field. Looks like you won’t be able to land until tomorrow.”
“You w
ant us to hold station? In case you need help?” The Maule pulled back up above the ridgeline before banking back.
I thought about it. The Maule could probably circle the area for four more hours and still fly safely back to Moses. “No. Return to Moses now. Come back at eleven hundred tomorrow. If we’re ready and conditions warrant, you’ll land then. Hell, let’s be real optimistic. Pack the mechanical prospector.”
“The VHF certainly won’t reach to Moses, Charlie. You sure you don’t want me to check on you this afternoon?”
I looked over at Clara, who’d removed her oxygen mask and helmet and moved close enough to listen. “What do you think?”
“Every time we take off and land in the backcountry, it’s additional risk. I don’t think it balances.”
I pushed the transmit button down. “Negative. Tomorrow morning—now stop wasting fuel.”
“Be careful.”
“You too. Don’t break the plane, okay? It’s the only one in the neighborhood.”
“Don’t break yourself. You’re the only one of you in the neighborhood. Maule out.”
“Cripple Creek out.”
I holstered the radio and took up my shotgun. “See any wildlife?”
Clara gestured downstream. “I saw something big move into the trees right after we first landed, but it had antlers. Big deer or elk, maybe.”
I looked but didn’t see anything. The air was unbelievably crisp, laced with the smell of pine. The grass around us was less than a foot high, spotted with late daisies. The distant buzzing of the Maule was gone, cut off finally by distance, and I could hear the creek in the distance. I took a deep breath with my eyes closed. Then I opened them and took the safety off my shotgun. “I’ll stand watch while you strip off some layers.”
“I’ll just bet you would,” she said. She set her shotgun down and removed her oxygen set, her equipment harness, and the insulated coverall. “Well, that’s better.” She stood watch while I did the same, then we repacked our chutes.
“You know,” I said, “if we don’t get the cargo pack by nightfall, it could be pretty chilly.”