C. Box - Breaking Point

“On the way there, I need everyone to keep on full alert. Keep your eyes and ears open. Look for tracks, or disturbances, broken twigs, anything. This guy is dangerous, and he’s desperate. But he knows the backcountry and we don’t, so we can’t assume he’ll roll over or give himself up easily.”

Underwood ordered the agents to prepare their weapons, and to mute cell phones and satellite phones. They would communicate with one another, he said, by radio. No one was to talk to anyone at the FOB without going through him first, so that lines of communication were clear.

As the agents unpacked headsets and earpieces to plug in to their radios, the man who had snickered earlier said to Underwood, “Sir, we aren’t exactly wilderness types. All these horses. . I don’t know. Looking for tracks? I don’t have any training in that.”

He looked around at the other agents and two nodded in agreement. Underwood turned and pointed to Joe.

“What about you?”

“I’ve done it,” Joe said, “but I’m not an expert in the field of man-tracking. I think Butch is smart enough to stay low-impact when he moves.”

“You’re the best we’ve got,” Underwood said.

Another of the agents spoke up and said, “I don’t think we’re prepared for this kind of thing.”

Joe nodded in agreement, although he knew Underwood wouldn’t grant him a vote in the matter.

“I understand,” Underwood said to the agent. “But you heard me. I’m relaying our orders.”

“Where do we sleep?” another agent asked. “Do we have tents and sleeping bags and such?”

“No.”

“What about food?” another asked.

“There’s bottled water and a couple of boxes of energy bars on the packhorse,” Underwood said.

“This is crazy,” one of the agents said, and the others agreed.

Joe was surprised when Underwood looked to him. “What do you think-will we find him by nightfall?”

“That depends,” Joe said, uneasy at the turn of events. “What are the coordinates?”

Underwood handed down a scratchpad with figures and a topo map of the Twelve Sleep National Forest. Joe sat down on the same stump he’d seen Butch Roberson sitting on and spread the map over his thighs.

When he calculated the location, he looked up. “It’s over the top of the mountains.”

Underwood said, “Seriously? How long would that take?”

“Most of the night,” Joe said.

“Let me call FOB One,” Underwood said, raising the satellite phone.

“It might make more sense to drive around to the other side,” Joe said.

Underwood conveyed the situation and relayed Joe’s suggestion. Joe could tell by the way Underwood’s face froze that it wasn’t received well. The agents looked on with stony silence.

“We proceed as ordered,” Underwood said after he signed off, and tried to get his horse to walk away from the glares. But the horse didn’t move.

“Click your tongue,” Joe whispered to Underwood.

Underwood clicked his tongue and his mount stepped forward. He mouthed “Thanks” as he walked the horse by Joe.

Joe led, followed by Underwood and his four special agents, and they climbed slowly up the mountain. The slope wasn’t steep yet, but the constant climb tired the mounts, and he stopped every twenty minutes to allow Toby to rest. They rode in shadow broken by shafts of afternoon sunlight that penetrated through the canopy. The ground was barren of foliage in large stretches, and was covered by a carpet of dry pine needles and bits of bark fallen from dead pine-beetle-killed trees.

The trees were dead, the forest floor was dry, and the slight breeze from the south was warm. As the horses stepped they made a crunching sound, and the combined cacophony of twenty-four hooves at times sounded like applause rolling slowly up the mountain. Joe wondered how they would ever attempt to be stealthy in the parchment-dry forest. A dropped match or cigarette butt, he thought, could make the whole mountain go up in flame. He was grateful none of the special agents lit up.

When he saw an aberration on the floor of the forest-a disturbance in the carpet, a flap of mulch turned over-he pointed it out to Underwood. Joe felt more than saw he was on Butch Roberson’s route.

The trunks of the trees were so dense in places that Joe had to weave Toby through them. Sometimes, he loosened the reins and trusted his horse to weave his own way through. The agents followed as best they could, but their trail horses balked at times and had to be urged to continue. It was a dangerous situation and could turn into a wreck if one of the horses panicked in the sea of trees, and he held his breath at times until the small string made it through the tightest spots. Trail horses liked trails, Joe knew. They weren’t thrilled with exploration, or tight fits, or climbing mountains, unlike Toby.

Although Joe could at times only intuit the route Butch had taken, there were places where, due to obstructions or granite walls, there was no choice where he’d had to go if his goal was to traverse the range.

His intuition was confirmed when they crossed a tiny stream of springwater from somewhere above them and he saw, quite clearly, a boot track in the mud. Joe photographed it with his digital camera to compare it with any other clear tracks they found later.

As Joe rode, he heard bits and pieces of conversation from the agents behind him. Underwood held his tongue.

The grumbling was typical of men being charged with a pointless and ill-conceived task, he thought. They didn’t like being so far from the FOB without proper food and shelter, they didn’t like riding horses, and they didn’t like Regional Director Julio Batista.

Joe thought he might be able to establish some common ground after all.

Two and a half hours after they’d left the dry camp, as the intense afternoon sun fused the forest with burnished orange, Underwood’s satellite phone burred with vibration on his chest.

Joe looked over his shoulder as he walked Toby and watched Underwood adjust the volume of the set as he listened. Something dark passed over Underwood’s face at whatever he was hearing, and after a minute or two Underwood looked up and gestured with his free hand for Joe to stop.

Were they being given the word to go back? Joe wondered. He halted Toby and sidestepped so Underwood could catch up alongside him.

As Underwood approached, he lowered the phone from his ear and covered the mic with his other hand. He said, “It’s for you.”

“Who is it?”

“Regional Director Batista.”

“What does he want?”

Underwood took a breath and extended the handset. “Our suspect somehow got ahold of a satellite phone of his own and he called the FOB. He’s on the line now and they’re patching it together into a conference call.”

“You’re kidding?”

“I’m not. He says he has a couple of hostages, including the ex-sheriff of this county. He’ll let them go, but only if we agree to a list of demands. And he says the only guy he can trust to be involved in the negotiation is Joe Pickett.”

“Is he on?” Butch Roberson asked Julio Batista. McLanahan’s satellite phone was pressed tightly to his face. Farkus noted Butch’s fingers gripped the handset so tightly they were nearly translucent white. And he noted the line of perspiration beads under Butch’s scalp. Since the sun was sliding toward dusk and it had cooled a quick twenty degrees in the past hour, he knew Butch wasn’t sweating because of the heat.

“We’re waiting,” Batista said. “Hold on-it’s a technical thing. We’ve got some guys trying to patch us all on together.”

Farkus could hear both sides of the conversation clearly. It was still and quiet, and Butch hadn’t turned down the volume of the speaker because he likely wasn’t familiar with the phone. Butch was nervous and twitchy, and his eyes burned red from exhaustion.