Santi: The Devil's Pioneer

Chapter 32 - What If We Don't Make It

Lucifer left the dogs behind this time. He didn't need to track some guy through a snowstorm. He didn't need a cage to hide a girl.

Pulling a sled, he rode the snowmobile, a Yamaha Pharez, several miles up New York Road, pulled it into the trees, and locked and chained it. To some, this was the middle of nowhere-fifty miles past the big mountain in a national forest of four million acres, so vast that it included the one-million-acre River of No Return Wilderness Area, the largest wilderness in the continental United States. He could have called upon the others to help him, but he was the best shot. He pursued this alone.

During the "work" on the girl, with the client in the other room. cleaning himself up, Lucifer had made promises to her that he'd be gender than the visitor had been. He'd won a moment of compromise on her part. She'd mentioned the doc's frequent trips to a cabin in Challis. She didn't know anything about any sheep but knew he'd been hauling mail-order gear up there. Lucifer had still done her, but he hadn't yanked her hair or slapped her around the way the client had.

Now, he snowshoed the final mile, following nothing more than his internal compass, working from memory, having viewed a topographical map only once. He ascended a steep mountain ridge, holding just below the tree line, and then dropped down into the thick forest, as the cabin came into view.

He picked up the fresh tracks of an elk herd and stayed among them for the sake of covering his own prints in the snow. He carried a simple sled slung over his right shoulder. The weapon carried a Night force scope, which could be upgraded all the way to a digital device that plugged into a PDA and gave the weapon an effective range of twenty-five hundred yards-well over a mile-that accounted for wind speed and atmospheric pressure. The newspapers called it a sniper rifle. To enthusiasts like himself, it was an antipersonnel rifle, providing long-range, soft-target interdiction. He'd replaced the muzzle brake with a suppressor. It wouldn't scare a chick dee in the next tree over if he had to use it.

His choice was not to use it, because it would be one hell of a tricky double shot. He had it sighted for two hundred yards. If needed, his target would never have a clue to his position. The target would not hear a thing until the wet thwack of his own shredded flesh. Thankfully, the contracted inventory included only the adults and excluded any children. He didn't have any desire to chalk a kid.

Tied onto the left side of his day pack was a D93S cartridge-fired rifle that he often employed in his private client work. With his special loads and the four-power scope, he could accurately project a dart from one hundred twenty-five yards. A single-shot rifle, it weighed eight pounds but was worth every ounce. The 193S was his weapon of choice for the work that lay ahead, but it was the machine gun that made him feel secure.

He rubbed his sore knuckles through the glove, mulling over his recent mistakes. How he'd killed the wrong brother was beyond him the dogs didn't make such errors. He pushed that from his mind and stayed with the elk tracks, huge half-moons the size of horse hooves. As hard as it was to get past his mistakes, they had given him time to rethink his own priorities. He had his own uses for the doctor. He climbed a tree to verify his position, keeping the pack and both rifles with him. From his position thirty feet up, he had an unobstructed view of a cirque of rock to the south, bejeweled and glistening in the spectacular afternoon sunlight; to the east, a semi forested expanse that trailed down toward the small town of Challis, just the roofs of a few small buildings visible. Dead center, looking southeast, stood a small yet sea of white, alone at the top of an escarpment, looking to log cabin in him like a mole on a man's bald head.

Carefully scanning the area with a pair of binoculars, he spotted the elk herd slightly north, watering at a spring above the bald man's left ear. A mighty herd at those thirty to fifty head. He located the herd's only buck, carrying a monstrous twelve-point rack that he'd have loved to have on the wall of his own cabin. But that was for another day.

He returned to the snow and moved deeper into the forest, working his way silently to the very edge of the trees, less than fifty yards from the front of the cabin and the apron of snow that surrounded it. The snow was deep, so he climbed fifteen feet into a lesser tree and found a perch. He sighted the girl and strapped it to a branch so that it was firmly locked onto the lower-left corner of a window to the left of the cabin's front door. At this distance, he could have shot a screw out of the door hardware, if he'd chosen to.

Next, he readied the dart rifle directly alongside the gun, slinging a pouch at his waist carrying four extra darts. It was a double shot: the gun would shatter the window so the dart could travel through smoothly and on target, a difficult, technical shot that only made it all the more attractive to him.

He had no plans to kick in the door. Playing James Bond was definitely Plan B. Patience was a hunter's true gift. His best tool: the ruse. He doubted he could coax the good doc to come outside onto the porch, but that was why he'd brought the two rifles. The double shot would do the trick.

He rechecked the sights of both rifles-the gun was strapped in place, the dart rifle free. He spent fifteen minutes getting the setup just right: the gun would be triggered with his left hand; the D938. aimed and fired from his right. He'd have just the one chance because of the single dart. After that, like it or not, he'd have to pull a James Bond move on the cabin. The narrator inside his head favored this second option. The hunter opted for the first.

With a piece of Velcro holding the barrel of the dart rifle in place, Lucifer produced a double-reed elk bugle from his pack and held it to his lips. The bull elks bugled when in a rut, and, though the season had just passed, the snow had come early, and it was not impossible that I might still be out here, sounding his call. A vet would know this. Only the most effective bugling would ensure success.

But he was a professional hunter. Few understood the art of duplicating the wailing oboelike sound of an adult bull elk as he did. He believed any vet, any hunter, would be drawn by the chance to see a bull elk up close. There were few animals as beautiful and regal.

The procedure took some practice: sound the bugle; secure the device in his belt, reach for the D93S, and pull his eye to the scope. Bugle, belt, rifle, scope. He waited. He tried another dry run. It took five seconds for him to get the bugle stashed and his eye to the scope. It would take a person in that cabin at least a few seconds to get to a window upon hearing it.

Bugle, belt, rifle, scooper. He was ready.

He let out an enormously loud bugle, quavering with tremolo more of a shriek than a cry. His eye focused on the cabin window.

He waited but no one came.

Another try: a second loud bugle-a trill up and down an out-of-tune scale, a screech, like fingernails on a blackboard.

Eye to the scope.

The light shifted on the far side of the window. It was an incredibly subtle change, but something was moving inside the cabin. Coats exhaled and then drew in a deep breath, his index finger moving from the trigger guard to in front of the trigger.

Demonstrating the patience of a martial arts master, our hunter slows his bodily functions in the apprehension of the shot.

Steadily, his trigger finger never falters as he holds himself as still as a statue.

Another change of light. A slight movement of the curtain. There! The curtain was pushed aside. Seen through the scope, the hand looked gigantic. A head moved into the frame: a man. Middle-aged. He could see the day-old whisker stubs on the man's cheeks. Aker.

The scope's crosshairs stopped a few centimeters from dead center. He trained this magnified space on Remiel’s chest, his own heart thumping wildly. His left hand came up and found the gun’s trigger. He had yet to breathe, still working on the same breath. He squeezed: left, then right.

The gun’s recoil ripped it off the limb, but that scraping sound was the only noise it made. The D93S popped, sounding like one strong handclap.

Through the scope, he saw flashes of blinding light as the window shattered. Pieces of glass rained down both inside and out. The curtain fluttered.

Then nothing.

No indication of success, No indication of failure.

Nothing.

He jacked the gun into place, ready to unload the magazine if need be. If he'd missed with the dart if the doc made a run for it. He waited. One minute... Two...

He had no choice.

Time for the James Bond.

"Maybe I’m not explaining it right. Archangel Michael took the form of a big, bearish man, with red hair, wide eyes, and an unexpectedly kind and soft minister's voice. He'd started as water master for the water district, inspecting headgates on irrigation canals, reporting violations, and locking flows at levels where they belonged. Then he'd served as an inspector for the state's adjudication process the redistribution of a stream and river water to private landowners that had taken five years and nearly cost a few lives. Now he was the water master for the central district, and, as such, ruled like a feudal lord over million-dollar ranches and their century-old legal rights to tap into and drain both the surface waters as well as the underground aquifer that flowed for thousands of miles, from New York to Canada.”

His office was small, even by government standards. The water district was housed in a building that also leased space to the Nature Conservancy.

Emman and Lucifer were leaning on a worktable that held Emily’s aerial photographs, a satellite image of central New York, and a topographical map of a fifty-square-mile region surrounding Craters of the Moon and reaching.

"Think of it as an eddy," Lucifer said. "Just like in open water, but, in this case, it happens to be underground. You've got this tremendous flow of water, sometimes thousands of feet below the surface, moving like a river north to south. Huge volume. It pushes up quite close to the surface for much of the route. But we know it always seeks the path of least resistance, as well as the lowest spot it can find. This range," he said, indicating a spur of mountains that pushed toward the alluvial plain and the desert that housed the Idaho Nuclear Laboratory, "acts as a barrier, just like a levee or breakwater."

"But you said the flow of the water is north to south," Emman reminded. "And the elevation of the Pahsimeroi is higher than the desert. My interest is whether water could get from here," he said, indicating the desert. "to here." He pointed to the center of the Pahsimeroi Valley.

"And, logically, that's impossible. How can water run uphill?" Lucifer dragged the satellite image closer. "But some rivers flow to the north in the Northern Hemisphere, don't they? And so do some aquifers. In this case, it's the result of a subterranean fault and a promontory." He pointed out a mountain spine on the satellite image. "This looks like the weather. map, but these gray swirls are actually the underground water-part of the Northern Rocky Mountain Intermontane Basins system that exists thousands of feet below the surface and is one small part of a freshwater source that stretches from Canada all the way to New York. The Big Lost River disappears completely under the desert here and doesn't resurface for hundreds of miles. But the force of that downward pressure. has the same effect as a narrowing river: increased speed. That pushes a great quantity of water west and around this underground promontory. The flow is further restricted by faults on both sides, and, with nowhere to go, it flows north for nearly seventy miles, until most of it is absorbed into the more porous strata of the upper Pahsimeroi."

The photograph alongside the image and visually compared the two. The long, feathered flow that was the rogue branch of the aquifer curled and turned directly beneath the area where he and Fiona had spotted the after-hours earthmoving equipment. For a moment, he just stared. "This help any?" Lucifer asked, made uncomfortable by the long silence.

Emman looked up at the Santi’s old man, then back to the various pictures. "Dons the water in the aquifer ever reach the surface of the Pahsimeros Valky's floor? Is it part of the groundwater?"

"That's a much bigger question," Lucifer said, running his stubby huger across the satellite image, "because there's a constant surface flow north to south-all the winter melt slowly finding its way down through sediment and into the valleys. But that water can prove itself seasonal and intermittent, as we know, and the reason this gets more complicated is that some of the ranchers have drilled very deep wells Those deeper wells, eight hundred to as much as ten thousand feet, are directly tapping into the aquifer, not the surface water. It presents a particularly difficult issue for us."

"Do we know the locations of those deeper wells?" Emman asked. "We would have a list of at least some of them in the state because they've been the subject of adjudication." Not once had Lucifer asked what any of this was about, though Emman sensed his curiosity. "How hard would it be for me to get hold of that list?" Emman asked.

"It's a public record," Lucifer returned quickly, having anticipated the request. "I don't have those documents here, but the state water board should have copies."

"That helps."

"I do happen to have computer access," Lucifer said with a twinkle in his eye. "And a printer. But any data that proved useful to you would have to eventually be sourced elsewhere. It didn't come from me, Emman."

"Understood."

Lucifer glanced around the quiet office. "Emman right here," he said.