Page 9 of Battle Mountain

The man with the rifle looked to two of his companions, said something too low to hear, then turned his attention back to Rankin and Eisele.

“Drop your weapons,” the man said.

“How about we just back away?” Rankin said. “I’ve got clients coming next week and we can hunt on the other side of the range. Plus, you wouldn’t want to leave a man up here without protection.”

That word again, Eisele thought.

“I said, drop your weapons,” the man repeated. As he did so, the four others squared up and raised their rifles as well. Eisele fought against a sudden explosive bowel movement. He couldn’t move. All he could see were five tiny black dots, the muzzles of the firearms.

“Look,” Rankin said, showing the people below the palms of his hands, “I don’t know what you’ve got going on here, but it isn’t our intention to crash the party. We’ll back away and move along.This is a public national forest, after all. We all have a right to be on this mountain, but we respect giving you some distance.”

Eisele’s hand twitched near the butt of his holstered .357 Magnum. His inclination was to pull it out very slowly and drop it at his feet. And then turn and run like he’d never run before.

One of the other men in the group said something to the lead gunman. To Eisele, it sounded harsh and definitive, although he couldn’t make out the words.

“Maybe you folks could tell me what you’re doing up here,” Rankin said. “Does the Forest Service know you’re up here? Does the local game warden?”

Eisele wished his boss would just hand over his weapons and shut up. This wasn’t worth a confrontation, he thought.

Then Eisele clearly heard the woman say, “Sarge, they’ve seen us.”

And suddenly, the morning was split open with booming gunfire. Rankin was thrown backward by the impact of bullets as if kicked by a horse. Eisele dropped and spun as rounds sizzled through the air above him, but as he started to run, he was hit, and the velocity of the bullet sent him sprawling face-first into the grass.

For a few seconds, he lay there, his arms at his sides and his mouth gaping open. He couldn’t move and he couldn’t quite locate his arms and legs to crawl away. There was a severe burning sensation in his right shoulder and from the left cheek of his buttocks.

He struggled to keep his eyes open, and he could hear the scrambling of the gunmen as they ran up the slope to where he lay. As his revolver was roughly pulled out of his holster, someone said, “This one’s still alive.”

“The old man is, too, but he doesn’t have long to go,” someone else said. “We’re gonna have to strap his body on the ATV and take him back.”

Eisele felt someone grip his right shoulder to turn him over. The pain was sharp, and he gasped as he was rolled onto his back.

A foot above him were the faces of Sarge, the lead shooter, and a woman with green eyes and a full mouth. Both of their faces were smeared with paint. Both leaned over him, partially blocking the sky.

“What are we gonna do with these two?” the woman asked.

Eisele felt absolutely hopeless. His fate was up to them, and he couldn’t find the words to try to convince them otherwise. He wished his wife and father-in-law were there so he could say to them, “Look what you got me into.”

As the woman spoke, Eisele noticed something over her shoulder that seemed remarkably out of place. It was a sleek small jet airplane streaking across the sky toward the north. It was descending, and its landing gear was deployed.

The scream of the jet distracted the woman and she looked up.

“Here they come,” she said. “Right on time.”

Chapter Three

At the sametime, two hundred and fifty-two miles to the north-northeast at the confluence of Buffalo Creek and Spring Creek within the steep red rock walls of Hole in the Wall Canyon, Nate Romanowski eased around a truck-sized boulder and peered up at his falcons in the sky. There were two of them, a prairie falcon hovering almost still in a thermal current and a peregrine hundreds of feet above it doing a slow rotation. Both were tiny specks within the massive light blue sky, although the high-flying peregrine occasionally intersected the wispy tail of a lone cirrus cloud.

Nate was in the act of hunting, but here he wasn’t the hunter. Although he was armed with his revolver in a shoulder holster and his falconry bag was looped over his shoulder, his role in this hunt was that of a human bird dog, whose sole purpose was to flush game birds and small creatures that hunkered within the jumble of broken rocks and tangled brush that covered the wide canyon floor.

That’s when he felt it: a tingle that washed through him from scalp to toes. Someone was coming.

He froze, squinted to sharpen his vision, and carefully scanned the length of the switchback trail that was cut into the side of the canyon wall to his right. The trail was wide enough to accommodate a hiker—or, in years past, outlaws on horseback—and it was the only approach from the top.

There was no movement on it at the moment. No interlopers.

But still, Nate had come to once again trust that feeling, the tingle. If someone wasn’t sneaking down the trail—and they weren’t—there was still a disturbance in the natural order of things. Maybe it was hunters or ranch hands on the surface above, and they’d back off.

Or maybe not.

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