Breaking Point

DAY FOUR
25

It was past midnight when Joe reached the summit of the mountain and turned to look back. He could see for miles and even locate the distant thread of highway because of the lights on the few vehicles using it. Twenty-five miles away was the tiny cluster of lights from the headquarters of Big Stream Ranch. The FOB was obscured from view by the ocean of trees below, but he knew approximately where it was by a faint glow of lights powered by generators.

The mountaintop was bare of trees or any kind of vegetation except stubborn lichen holding on to granite for dear life, and it was illuminated by moonlight and millions of pinprick stars. Underwood and his team were behind him, their horses picking their way up through the icy granular crusts of snow and loose dark shale. The wind blew from the west into Joe’s face, and he kept the brim of his hat tilted down so his eyes wouldn’t tear. The wind was surprisingly cold for August and numbed his face and hands.

Joe checked his cell phone for bars because sometimes he could get a wayward signal on the top of a mountain at night, but there was no reception. He was glad he’d made contact with Marybeth before, so she knew he was all right. He hated to have left her alone.

One of Underwood’s team cursed the darkness and the cold, his voice harsh enough to cut through the wind. When the agents were close enough to start to crowd him, Joe nudged Toby on over a wide snowfield that looked like a pond or small lake in the moonlight, and led them over the mountain to the western slope. As he descended, he left the cold wind on top. And as he walked his horse into the thick stand of trees, he left the moonlight as well.

Deep in the trees, Joe could see only what the yellow orb of his headlamp would reveal. Toby could see better than he could in the dark, so he had to trust the horse wouldn’t trap them in down timber or walk over a cliff. When he glanced over his shoulder, he saw the lenses of five bobbing headlamps, and sometimes the wayward beam of one slicing out to the side.

He emerged into a small mountain meadow where the canopy opened to allow moonlight. He reined Toby to a stop and waited.

Underwood joined him a few minutes later, and Joe said, “This is ridiculous. We’re only going to get our horses or ourselves hurt trying to ride down this mountain in the dark.”

“We have our orders,” Underwood said without conviction.

“Fuck the orders,” one of the team grumbled from the dark. “We need to get some rest, and my legs and butt are numb. If we ran into trouble right now, it would take me five minutes just to get out of this goddamned uncomfortable saddle.”

The others agreed, and they slowly dismounted. There were plenty of moans from saddle sores and distended knees and aching buttocks. One agent said loudly this was the worst assignment he’d ever had. Joe thought it interesting that Underwood no longer reprimanded them for their loose talk.

And by painfully climbing off his own horse, Underwood seemed to agree with them. They’d gone far enough for a while.

One of the agents said, “I guess we’re just supposed to sleep in the open. Oh, thank you, Regional Director, for your excellent planning.”

Underwood said, “Try spooning. That’s what they did in the Civil War.”

Joe stifled a grin when Underwood’s suggestion was met with a fusillade of angry curses. He thought for a moment that the expedition might just implode under its own combination of aimlessness and disorganization. That would be just fine with him, he thought. Joe almost felt sorry for Underwood, who was tasked with commanding a mission by a man he didn’t like or respect. He was a professional, though, and his background girded him for unpleasant duties.

“And no fires,” Underwood barked.

Just then, Underwood’s satellite phone burred and lit up.

“Yes, Director Batista,” Underwood said, loud enough to quiet the team of agents.

“Jesus Christ,” one of the agents whispered. “Does the son of a bitch know we stopped?”

While Underwood listened to his boss and said very little except to grunt and agree here and there, Joe showed the agents how to loosen the cinch straps on their saddles, picket their horses far away from one another so that each horse could graze and not get tangled with another. Then he revealed to the agents where heavy rubber rain slickers were rolled up and tied behind the seat of each saddle itself.

“Don’t unfurl the slickers with a lot of noise and force,” he said to them. “You’ll spook the horses. They get scared at flapping things. You can use the slickers for sleeping. They’ll keep you warm enough on top and the moisture in the ground won’t soak into your clothes.”

“We’re the fucking Wild Bunch,” one of them said, pulling on a long dusterlike yellow slicker.

“I think they all died in the end,” another one said sourly.

The agents were grateful if not happy, and Joe left them sprawled in the grass of the meadow. The yellow slickers held the moonlight. Joe thought the sight of four yellow forms writhing around to get comfortable in the grass looked sluglike and slightly comical.

For himself, he led Toby to the far edge of the meadow and unsaddled his gelding and picketed him. There was a one-man bivvy tent in the saddlebags, but Joe didn’t set it up. Instead he spread it out to use as a ground tarp and covered himself with a thin wool blanket he always packed along.

He propped himself up on an elbow on the saddle he’d use as a pillow, and ate two energy bars that had been in his emergency kit for at least two years. They were dry and crumbled into dust in his mouth, and swelled into a paste when he washed them down with water from his Nalgene bottle. He waited in the dark for Underwood to sign off with his boss. Occasionally, he could hear a word or two of Batista’s voice cut through the silence. He heard the words strategic, nonnegotiable, location, and autopsy very clearly.

Finally, Underwood said, “I’ve got some worn-out special agents here, sir. They need rest. . I understand. . Yes, I’ll get them up and keep them moving, and I’ll keep the phone on all night.”

As Underwood let the phone drop on its lanyard, he said, “Asshole.”

“Are we moving?” one of the agents asked defiantly.

“No,” Underwood said. “But if he asks us later, we did.”

Joe waited a beat, then said to Underwood, “I put your horse up over here. I’ve got a space blanket I could lend you. Do you want it?”

Underwood said, “Is that one of those silver sheets that’ll make me look like a baked potato?”

“Yup.”

He sighed. “I’ll take it.”

Joe handed Underwood the blanket, along with the Ziploc bag with the remaining two energy bars.

“They aren’t very good,” Joe said.

“Thank you anyway,” Underwood said, tearing into them.

After Underwood settled in his silver-lined blanket in the grass, Joe said, “What’s the plan for tomorrow?”

“So you want to talk,” Underwood said with irritation.

“I’ll keep it low so your guys don’t hear.”

“What about me? I’ll hear.”

Joe asked, “Do they have a location on Butch?”

“Yes. His phone is on, and it has a GPS feature inside the circuitry. They know exactly where he is on the map at least.”

“I knew about that,” Joe said. “Butch is smart enough to know it, too, so it surprises me he kept it on.”

Underwood shrugged. “Maybe he isn’t so smart. Batista has been trying to contact him for hours, but he must have the phone set to mute or he just doesn’t want to talk. The director wants to tell him the helicopter will be arriving at dawn.”

“Which way is he headed?” Joe asked.

“West. It sounds like he doubled back after he talked to us and he’s working his way down the mountain. Batista said his route is pretty erratic, though. They’re guessing at the FOB that Roberson is looking for a nice flat piece of sagebrush for the helicopter to land.”

“But it won’t happen, will it?”

“No. There is no helicopter,” Underwood said.

“What else?”

“Leave me alone.”

“Not a chance. The sooner you answer my questions, the sooner you can get some sleep. Or I’ll take that space blanket back. You do look like a baked potato, you know.”

“Damn you.”

“Has anything happened in the investigation we should know about?”

“Like what?”

“I thought I heard you say something about an autopsy,” Joe said.

“Oh, yeah. There was a preliminary autopsy on our two special agents. Both were shot multiple times with small-caliber rounds. Tim Singewald was hit four times, and Lenox Baker was hit three times. Didn’t you say Butch Roberson was packing a.223 semiautomatic rifle?”

“I think so. It looked like a scoped Bushmaster.223 with a thirty-round magazine. They’re common around here.”

Underwood said, “The rounds that killed the agents were small caliber. Once they run ballistics on them, I’m sure there will be a match.”

“Lots of folks up here have.223s,” Joe said. “They’re a popular coyote-hunting round.”

Underwood snorted. “They also found Roberson’s fingerprints all over the car Singewald and Baker drove up from Denver. I suppose you’ll say lots of people up here have the same fingerprints.”

“No,” Joe said. “I won’t say that.”

“Good. So can I get some sleep now?”

“One more question.”

“Jesus-what?”

“Back to how your agency operates. How much juice would someone have to have to get a noncompliance action going the same day? Are we talking low level, mid-level, or big-shot level?”

Underwood covered his face with his hand and moaned.

“I’m just curious,” Joe said.

“I told you I wasn’t going there.”

“But why not at this point? You seem pretty convinced Butch did it, so why does it matter who turned him in in the first place?”

“I never said anyone turned him in.”

“You implied it. So which level?”

Underwood cursed and said, “Big-shot level, of course. The mid-level types might get some kind of investigation opened, but they wouldn’t be able to make agents jump like that. Obviously, somebody with influence knew who to call to get them to react like that.”

“So Julio Batista was in on it from the beginning, then?”

“I never said that.”

“You implied it.”

“Jesus fuck,” Underwood moaned. “Leave me alone. Yes, I would guess whoever called talked to the director in person. No one else could have made the decision so quickly to send agents directly from Denver. Usually, we’d let the local EPA staff handle it first.”

“That’s what I thought. Which means Batista knows who got this whole thing going, but he doesn’t want to volunteer that information.”

Underwood grunted.

“So if Butch Roberson just goes away, Batista will probably never be asked.”

Underwood grunted again.

Joe thought about it, and said, “So what’s our plan?”

Underwood took a deep breath and slowly expelled it through his nostrils. “We keep moving down the mountain to the west until we pick up his track. You’re a tracker, right?”

“Not really,” Joe said.

“I think even I could follow the prints of three guys.”

“Maybe.”

“Anyway, Batista said they’ve put together a big interagency task force that will be coming up this direction from the west. They’re on their way now in a convoy of four-wheel-drives. The idea is they’ll flush Roberson our way and we’ll trap him in a pincer movement and he’ll have no choice but to turn loose his hostages and we’ll nail the son of a bitch in the morning.”

Joe nodded in the dark. “So you’ll flood the zone with people until you corner Butch.”

“Yeah, I guess.”

“What do you think Butch will do when he realizes there is no helicopter? Do you think he’ll keep his end of the bargain?”

“Batista thinks he won’t have any options at that point.”

“Why is that?” Joe asked.

“Because we will have aircraft coming. Roberson won’t know it isn’t a helicopter until it’s too late.”

Joe felt a chill crawl down his neck. “What’s coming?”

Joe could see Underwood’s teeth in the moonlight as he smiled. “This is what I was worried about earlier, but I wasn’t sure he could make it happen. Drones-two of ’em this time. One is assigned to the EPA, and it’s just an observation unit like the last one. Just cameras and shit on board. But the second one is the kicker. Batista threw my name around and got authorization for a military drone to be assigned to us. All the way from an airbase in North Dakota. That one happens to be armed with Hellfire missiles.”

Joe was speechless for a moment. Then he said, “You’re going to blow him up?”

“Into a million pieces,” Underwood said, shaking his head. “Just like one of the many Al Qaeda number twos. That is, if Roberson doesn’t release the hostages and give himself up. So he will have a choice in the matter.”

“Aren’t Hellfire missiles used to blow up tanks on the ground?”

“Yes, and terrorists in their bunkers. But they’ll work pretty damned well on domestic terrorists, I’ll wager.”

Joe said, “If you want to start a war out here, this is the way to do it.”

Underwood shrugged it off. “I’m not worried about that.”

Joe said, “I am.”

“Please,” Underwood pleaded, turning his back to Joe, “leave me alone.”

“Good night, Mr. Underwood,” Joe said, and carefully reached up and clicked off the digital recorder again.

“Game Warden,” Underwood said, a few minutes after Joe assumed he was asleep. “Now I have a question for you.”

“What?”

“If a war started, which side would you be on?”

Joe hesitated. He said, “I’ll have to get back to you on that.”

Joe was in his sleeping bag, staring back at the hard white stars, when he heard Underwood’s phone buzz again. Batista, no doubt, with more orders, he thought.

Instead, Underwood walked over to Joe with the space blanket over his shoulders and extended the phone.

“It’s your wife,” he said with irritation. “Make it quick.”

“According to the bio on the agency website, Juan Julio Batista was born in Chicago in 1965,” Marybeth said. “That makes him forty-eight years old-our age. There’s no mention of a wife or children. He worked for an environmental group called One Globe in the Denver field office from 1989 to 2003, when he was hired by the EPA. He was named director of Region Eight by the Washington bigwigs in 2008.

“It says he graduated from Colorado State University in 1987. Majored in sociology and minored in environmental affairs.”

“Anything else?” Joe asked, aware that Underwood was hovering.

“Tons of media mentions,” she said. “He likes to give press conferences, and he’s mentioned dozens of times when his agency takes action against polluters.”

“Hmmmmm.”

“Let’s see,” she said, obviously scrolling through the site. “Region Eight oversees Colorado, Montana, North and South Dakota, Utah, and Wyoming. But we knew that.”

“Has he ever worked for Region Ten?” Joe asked.

“I know what you’re getting at-Idaho. The Sackett case. No, he never worked there. I can’t find any connection.”

Joe asked, “Anything at all to tie him to Pam and Butch?”

“Nothing I can find.”

“What about Pate?”

“I found some mentions, but they just stop in 1988.”

“That fits,” Joe said, and told Marybeth what Underwood had revealed.

“That’s just. . odd,” Marybeth said. Joe could visualize her mind racing. “I’ll dig deeper tomorrow at the library.”

Marybeth had access to several state and federal databases from the library computers that she wasn’t supposed to have. She’d assisted Joe with investigations several times.

Underwood extended his hand for the phone back.

“Good work,” Joe said.

“Stay safe.”

Later, as Joe closed his eyes, he heard the faraway sound of two unmanned drones whining through the sky.