Uncertain Justice

Returning to the pickup, he dug in his pockets and emptied them of everything he couldn't use on the trail. He put the key in the ignition and stacked a pocketful of change on the small cooler he was leaving behind. Both actions invited someone to break in and steal the truck and its contents, and that would be a good thing for Miles.

Pausing, he wondered if he was forgetting something he would need but nothing came to mind. He closed the door carefully, firmly. His hand remained on the handle for a long moment as he gazed at the mountains down to the south without seeing any details of the view.

He was delaying the moment when he left it all behind. He knew this intellectually ... but the knowledge didn't help break the mood. In a few moments he would be leaving everything he had ... everything he'd been and worked for in his life. The realization was daunting. Shaking his head, he forced himself into motion

Mechanically, he sat on the lowered tailgate and pushed his arm through the backpack's right shoulder strap. Twisting slightly, he hooked his left arm through the strap on that side of the pack. He fastened the bulky, comfortably padded hip belt in place and stood erect. Taking the weight of the loaded pack on his shoulders for the first time, he walked away from the truck.

He busied himself with making the pack a comfortable load on his back, pulling the belt-stabilizer straps to position the pack better over his hips and buckled the sternum strap. Yanking down on the load lifters, he dragged the weight a little higher and closer to his body. He tightened and loosened the multitude of straps and buckles, rolling his shoulders and working his upper body until the pack settled into place and rode comfortably.

Returning to the pickup, he locked the tailgate in the up position. Walking along the side of the truck, he let his fingers trail along the fender to maintain the contact as long as possible. Then he trudged behind the gondola station to the trailhead, not letting himself look back.

Turning south on the big trail that followed the Continental Divide from Canada to Mexico, he began to climb the gentle slope along the ridge. He loosened the sternum strap for extra comfort when the exertion made him breathe heavier.

§

It was mid-morning before the pale green pickup with red and blue emergency lights on top pulled into the parking lot. The cleared area was frequently used by serious hikers using the Continental Divide Trail and passers-by who wanted to spend an hour or two in the wild.

Ranger Tim Cantwell checked the trailhead every day. Weekend hikers and tourists sometimes took on a little more than they could handle at the high altitude and got themselves in trouble. Some days it was absolute drudgery; today the bright sunshine and blue sky made him eager for a good walk.

The three vehicles he found there didn't surprise Cantwell. That was about normal for early March. He knew that many serious hiking enthusiasts were finding the summers too crowded even on a trail that punished hikers with rough terrain and high altitude.

Some experienced hikers were changing their habits and taking the trail in early spring and late fall to avoid the greater numbers in the summer. Grabbing the daypack full of survival gear and first aid supplies he carried ... even on short excursions into wild country ... he wandered over by the pickup and two SUVs.

Examining the truck, his pulse quickened a little. Park Service Rangers were responsible for law enforcement in the national forests, but that wasn't their primary focus. This morning, though, the day crew had been briefed to watch for an older model, dark-colored pickup driven by a white male with a Texas accent and armed with a shotgun. The supervisor passed on the word that two state troopers had been kidnapped for ransom in the eastern part of Colorado but later escaped. There was some thought the kidnapper might be headed west.

The dark green color and half-ton bed fit the description closely enough. It looked to be ten or twelve years old ... and that fit the description too. Ranger Cantwell saw the Texas plate on the front bumper and his heart began to pound. Dropping the daypack on the ground, he loosened his gun in its holster and scanned the parking lot carefully. A quiet breeze cooled the sudden flush on his face.

His boots crunching in the gravel, he walked closer to the truck. Unused to most law enforcement procedures, he self-consciously drew his 9mm semi-automatic. He yanked the slide back and let it snap forward to load a round in the chamber. His thumb clicked the safety off and he used both hands to support the pistol at arm's length in front of him as he'd been taught on the firing range.

The ranger scuttled three paces forward and peeked quickly in the driver's door while trying to watch the forest around him at the same. There was no one inside. He put his back against the side of the pickup and swung the semi-automatic from left to right, searching for the threat he knew had to be close by. In seconds, his vision had slowly contracted to a narrow tunnel. He reminded himself to breathe.

He swept the pistol in smaller arcs, pausing to aim at hiding places from which an attack might come. The tranquility of the deep forest continued undisturbed except for the occasional shriek from a hawk turning huge circles in the morning sky. If there were humans nearby, they weren't making a sound. The forest ranger began to feel a little silly. In another moment, the muzzle was pointed at the ground a few feet in front of him.

Carefully lowering the hammer and putting the weapon on safe, he holstered it. He hurried to secure the strap when he caught the sound of a car on the highway behind him. He didn't want to be seen acting foolish. Rising from the crouch he'd unconsciously dropped into, he looked inside the passenger cabin of the pickup again. Seeing the doors were unlocked, he opened the driver's side door to inspect the interior.

Dust and some small pieces of gravel littered the floorboard. A fair amount of coins were carefully arranged on the small cooler in the floorboard and the keys were in the ignition as if the owner had just gotten out and would be returning soon to drive off.

Ranger Cantwell ran back to his patrol vehicle to radio in a report of his find to his supervisor. His boss was sufficiently impressed with the information that he placed a call to the state police barracks in Pueblo to pass it on.

§

The grizzled sergeant working the desk was there because of a ski accident three months earlier. Sergeant Garza wasn't happy driving a desk but he knew his knee wasn't ready for field duty yet. The veteran officer considered all the details he could glean from the caller. He had more questions that needed answers and a three-way conversation developed. The supervisor relayed questions from the sergeant to Cantwell over the radio and passed the replies back to the deskbound trooper.

Thanking them, and making sure they understood how sincere he was, Garza gently hung up the phone. He ran a forefinger across his chin where the razor hadn't quite gotten everything this morning. The phone rang again, but he let someone else answer it while he studied his notes.

The ranger had found a big dark-green truck with Texas plates sitting in a parking lot often used by hikers. Inside was a set of keys ... in the ignition, no less. The owner couldn't be found. The inside was neat, the report said--a few stray bits of mud and small stones ... a gum wrapper under the seat--but no real trash. Several dollars in coins were neatly stacked in a prominent place.

The thing was ... the desk sergeant knew of another incident where the suspect had been unusually neat and organized too. That man had been organized enough to capture two armed law enforcement officers and tidy enough to not leave any evidence behind. Sometimes you just knew you'd hit pay dirt. Playing his hunch, the sergeant initiated the process of finding out why the pickup was parked out at the edge of nowhere, apparently deliberately abandoned.

By mid-morning, a request called in to the Texas Department of Motor Vehicles came back with the truck's registered owner. A trooper from the Texas Department of Public Safety was duly dispatched to the address listed for the owner. Unable to conceal their curiosity, the retired couple next door told him where the absent owner worked and the trooper drove across town to catch him just before he left for a late lunch.

The trooper found out the vehicle had been sold months earlier to a Mr. Miles Underwood and she knew that name instantly. When she came out of the pawn shop, she sprinted for her cruiser and its radio.

The information was relayed to the Colorado State Police office in Pueblo inside the hour.

For the first time, there was a name, and soon a fax arrived with a face, to go with the kidnapping reports from southeast Colorado. There was no proof linking the fugitive with the events at the deserted old farm house, but no one doubted he was responsible. Shown the faxed picture, the two officers who'd been kidnapped verified the kidnapper's identity immediately.

Wheels began to move with admirable, unaccustomed speed. District headquarters across Colorado dispatched all the troopers they could pry away from normal duties and sent them to a command post being set up in Monarch Pass. A search helicopter launched from the Colorado Springs airport and flew southwest.

Its support crew climbed into a truck headed for the airport in Salida. The chopper would use the airport there for refueling and maintenance. A second aircraft would be sent from the Denver region when repairs to the tail rotor were completed.

Finally, a call was placed to the governor's office alerting elected officials to the recent developments and suggesting the possibility the Colorado National Guard might be needed for additional manpower.

Everywhere, people began to coordinate personnel movements and reallocations of resources. What should have taken days was done in minutes. This SOB from Texas had dared to mess with some sworn officers and that helped to cut through masses of red tape.

Contempt of cop was not going to be tolerated in Colorado.

§

A few miles south of Monarch Pass, the object of all the furious activity remained blissfully unaware of it. Miles had stayed on the Continental Divide Trail for only an hour or so before he changed course and zigzagged down the mountain, through a shallow valley, and up another ridge that ran parallel to the one he'd been hiking. He climbed to almost the same altitude as the Continental Trail and began make his way south. He was heading in the same direction as the big path, but there were no hikers on this side of the valley.

He'd paused on the shore of one of the sapphire-blue lakes that dotted the landscape to throw the shotgun and ammunition into the middle. Fed by melting winter snow as well as a small spring, the small lake would never completely dry up and its icy water would serve to dissuade hikers from wading in far enough to stumble over the weapon. The backpack felt a lot lighter too.

§

It shouldn't have happened. A couple of days later and he would have figured out for himself he had to be wary of areas without adequate cover and he'd have thought to camouflage the bright yellow backpack with the forest-green rain cover he had tucked inside it. In a few more days travel, his legs would have toughened and his back wouldn't have been aching so badly he had to take frequent breaks to rest and massage tight muscles.

Perhaps he just wasn't emotionally alert. Maybe he'd subconsciously decided once he arrived in the mountains all the hard work was done. Getting to the mountains had been the goal for so long and he'd given little thought to what he would do next.

He still should have heard it; the engines laboring at high altitude announced the helicopter's progress well in advance of its actual arrival. There really was no excuse.

It was really bad luck from another angle too. The light was beginning to fail and the pilot was only running a short search pattern so he could say he had.

He'd arrived in the area a short time earlier from the state police post in Colorado Springs and he didn't have enough fuel to make anything more than a quick pass. He badly needed to refuel at Salida before he did anything else but the temporary command post at the top of the pass wanted a reconnaissance and they wanted it done yesterday, if not sooner.

He picked the south side of Monarch Pass mostly because they'd flown in from the north. He would keep going south until he could reasonably tell the CP he was too short of fuel to continue.

Whatever the reason, Miles didn't hear the chopper until it was, almost literally, on top of him. It had cleared the hilltop behind him and was coming fast. As it closed in, the pilot pulled back on the controls and added more power to get some altitude over the power cables while the fugitive trudged through the cleared ground beneath.

Miles took a couple of extra steps before the roar of the motor and frenzied thumping of the rotor blades penetrated the fog of weariness. By the time he thought to freeze, it was far too late. Stopping probably wouldn't have helped anyway. The bright yellow backpack stood out like a beacon in the grassy meadow.

He lurched into motion. Throwing off his fatigue, he dashed for the other side of the clearing as the chopper passed overhead at high speed. It was out of sight in seconds, disappearing behind a rise. Once the sound of the helicopter engines had faded to a distant drone, Miles changed course and ran clumsily back northeast across the naked fifty-yard wide strip of land beneath the power lines.

He ducked into a large grove of spruce and continued to run as hard as he could up the steep slope. There wasn't that much undergrowth at this altitude, but the trees themselves provided more than enough cover. The metallic taste of fear filled his mouth.

The pilot fought to bring the craft around as his partner screamed at him over the intercom. The observer sitting next to the pilot pounded on the frame under the window, cursing at the top of his lungs. In a few moments, with a rare command of the language, he damned all aircraft--especially helicopters--to everlasting perdition, followed quickly by mountains, trees, hanging power cables and the towers that held them off the ground.

"Shut the hell up, George. You know damn good and well I can't stop on a dime so you can get a better view!" The pilot wasn't in a mood to take anything from the observer in the left seat. He had enough to deal with at the moment.

Helicopter controls at eleven thousand feet above sea level were mushy and unresponsive--rotor blades didn't have the same bite on the air up here they did at sea level. It was a lot like driving a big car with soft power steering over a sheet of ice. The driver could pull on the wheel all he wanted, but it wasn't going to change the car's course very much. Slow and sure was the only way to get things done in the thin mountain air.

By the time the pilot had eased the aircraft through a gentle turn to get back to the power line, Miles had run across the clearing and more than four hundred yards into the woods. When he heard the noise of the chopper's engine getting louder, he threw himself under the dark green shield of a squat spruce tree's low hanging branches. His heart pounded and his chest heaved with the effort to fill his lungs.

The helicopter crew couldn't find Miles when they navigated their way back to the clearing. The pilot tried to hover so the observer could search for tracks, but the best he could manage was a maddening slow creep over the ground. Gaining some height, they did a few circles around the tower without seeing anything suspicious and then began to work southwest in the direction they'd last seen him running.

Miles waited for his heart to slow and his lungs to replenish his body with the oxygen it was demanding. When the chopper didn't reappear, he crawled from under the spruce and jogged northeast diagonally up the incline. He was alert now; he did everything he could to stay under cover. His head was on a swivel trying to keep all points of the compass under observation. He was in big trouble and he knew it.

He couldn't travel very fast in this terrain and the police had the benefit of hunting him from above. Climbing over the smallest of fallen tree trunks and negotiating rock formations to maintain a straight course was beyond him in his current state of exhaustion. He had to go around and that took time--more and more of it as he tired further.

It wouldn't be long before they would have a large search party on the ground and could begin hunting for him in earnest. The only thing in his favor was that it was late afternoon. The sun was dropping quickly.

Stopping to rest his aching legs, Miles faced back in the direction from which he'd come and squatted against the trunk of a thick fir. He couldn't see anyone coming after him. He guzzled water from his canteen, hardly pausing to breathe between gulps.

Suddenly the helicopter reappeared a mile or more south of him, climbing hard. It banked and flew almost due east through a pass ... away from where he was hiding. In seconds, it was over the horizon. It had been moving too fast to be searching for Miles. They were leaving.

After a few minutes break, his chest wasn't hurting quite as badly as it had been. He stood to stretch the muscles in his legs. The mountains loomed dark and massive all around, covered with thick forests of spruce and pine. Bald patches showed where fires had scared some slopes and there were signs of sporadic logging. He marked those as places he had to keep away from ... there was no cover there.

Here and there the stone heart of the mountain poked through the sparse soil and snow still covered some of the higher reaches. He had to stay clear of those spots too. If nothing else, travel was too difficult through them. He shivered as the frigid wind cut through the jacket as if it weren't there.

He studied the shape of the land so he could walk in something approaching a straight line while avoiding places he dared not go. The natural tendency to walk in circles in the wilderness was something he couldn't afford tonight. It was vital to get as far away as possible from the last point of contact. Forgoing the nicety of taking a compass bearing, he selected a tall chimney of rock on the shoulder of a ridge northeast of him that would stand out until total darkness took away all landmarks.

He grimaced. He would be climbing at about a thirty-degree angle across the slope. It was only marginally better than climbing straight up the mountain.

§

"Commander, I don't think you understand what the problem is here."

Sheriff James Barton was beginning to lose patience with the officious senior officer from the Colorado State Police. He might have been a fine policeman in his time, but the gut spilling over the gun belt testified to the fact the highway patrolman spent precious little time out in the field lately.

"All right, Sheriff. Pray tell, sir, what is the problem as you see it." Commander Prescott Winters bit his lip as soon as the words were out. The sarcasm wasn't going to do anyone any good and he knew it.

It was a sign he was already getting tired though he'd arrived and assumed command of the search only an hour before. He didn't know why, but the locals didn't seem to be as enthusiastic as they could have been.

"Please," he said, gesturing for the local law officer to continue. He tried to be conciliatory. "Let's figure out what we need to do."