Page 81 of Battle Mountain

Could he trip the release and loosen the strap?

He decided to give it an hour or two before trying. Eisele wanted to make sure that Soledad’s people had left the area.

Chapter Twenty

In the morning,Joe groaned aloud as he shinnied out of the one-man tent onto the frost-covered grass. Although he’d been physically exhausted from the day before, it had been a tough night and he’d slept soundly only in stretches. His sleeping pad was too thin and he felt the impressions in his back of every small rock and pine cone beneath the floor of the tent.

He grumbled, “Getting too old for this” as he rose to his feet and stretched painfully.

The mule eyed him coolly while munching a mouthful of meadow grass.

“Good morning, Henry,” he said. “Looks like you had a better night than I did.”

Using torn pages from his notebook, he started a fire and fed sticks into it, then foot-long lengths of dry, broken branches. He squatted and held his palms out to the fire to warm his hands. Then he placed a small soot-blackened pot of water on the grate to boil. That always took so long at elevation.

Susan Kany had not called during the night and he wasconcerned to see that there was only a twenty percent charge left on the sat phone. Nevertheless, he punched in her number.

“Good morning,” she answered. “You’re up early.”

He glanced at his watch. It was six-fifteen. “So are you,” he said.

“That’s because someone called me. Did you make any progress finding those guys after I left?”

“Nope.” Then: “Maybe. I found something interesting last night.”

He described the two-track he’d stumbled upon and the location of it.

“Somebody cleared it with chain saws recently,” he said. “And there are a bunch of tire tracks on it. I want to see it in the daylight, and I hope I can tell you more.”

“It’sopen?” she said, clearly surprised. “That doesn’t make sense to me. The Forest Service isn’t exactly known for clearing old roads in the mountains.”

“What if it wasn’t the Forest Service who cleared it?” Joe asked.

“Then who would it be?”

“That’s what I’m asking myself. Who would open an old road to a ghost town in the mountains?”

“Hunters, maybe?” she said.

“Maybe. Maybe it wasourmissing hunters.”

“Then where are they?” she asked rhetorically.

“How’s it going on your end?” he asked.

“Joe, it’s barely six in the morning. Last night, I called the dispatcher and asked her to have Sheriff Haswell call me back, and I left a message on his cell phone. I haven’t heard back from him yet.”

“Ah.”

“If I haven’t talked to him in a couple of hours, I’ll drive down to the Warm Springs resort and look for him there. He always has breakfast there. Every morning, like clockwork.”

“Good. Let’s get this thing moving.”

She said, “Haswell needs to call up the search and rescue team, and they’ll need to gear up. They’re all volunteers, so they’ll have to get off work and so on. I wouldn’t count on us getting up there until the afternoon at the earliest.”

“That’s what I figured,” Joe said.

“I left a message for the Civil Air Patrol for when their office opens at eight, and I did the same at headquarters to see if we can get a search plane into the air today.”