Page 92 of Battle Mountain

Nate continued trudging down the game trail without looking up.

“You knew it would stay with us, didn’t you?” Geronimo asked with astonishment.

Nate grunted, “Yes.”

“How did you know that?”

Nate took a deep breath as he trudged forward. After a long moment of silence, he said, “There are things that were revealed to me during my months in the Hole in the Wall Canyon living with my falcons twenty-four seven.”

“Are you going to tell me what they are?” Geronimo asked with exasperation.

“Not now,” Nate said.

—

Eisele stayed backin the brush with Henry while Joe worked his way to Summit along the side of the road. He advanced from tree to tree, and he was terrified the entire time that someone would emerge from one of the buildings and spot him coming. Judging by what Eisele had told him, the people who had occupied “Soledad City” were heavily armed. If they saw a game warden in a red uniform shirt approaching the location on foot, they would likely shoot first and ask questions later.

Joe began to breathe easier as he cleared each building and structure. He worked around the edges first, leaving the old hotel for last.

He found a log lean-to where they had obviously parked ATVs, evidenced by the wide knobby tire tracks in the dirt and the spots of oil and gasoline within the shelter. Joe opened the doors of the camper trailers one by one with his shotgun ready. Most were cluttered and unkempt, filled with sleeping bags, clothing, wrappers, half-filled mugs of coffee, and a few books. In one, he reached in and came out with a long scarf-like item he recognized as a Palestinian kaffiyeh. He tossed it back in.

It was obvious to him that the trailers had been used very recently and that whoever had used them planned to return.

Joe approached the old hotel from the back while watching for any movement from behind the windows. Thirty yards from the building, he ducked behind a three-foot-high elevated mound of dirt that would shield him if someone inside took a shot at him. But there was no movement from the hotel.

As he moved around the dirt mound and looked back, Joerealized the feature was the top half of an underground bunker of some sort. Several steps down a stairwell, thick yellow electrical cords came out along the ground from under the closed door. Joe followed the cords with his eyes and saw that they snaked through the grass and led to the hotel.

He descended the partially rotted set of stairs to the bunker and opened the door, which revealed a surprisingly large diesel electrical generator, which was turned off. Joe assumed that Soledad had put the generator in the bunker—which Joe now realized was an ancient meat cellar—to keep the sound of it muted when it was running. He placed his palm on the side of the unit. It was warmer than the air outside, meaning it had been recently used.

Joe backed out of the cellar and neared the hotel, walking as silently as he could. Then he entered it through an unlocked back door. There was a dark hallway that led to a larger room, presumably the hotel lobby. He stopped and simply listened for a moment.

Hearing no sounds inside, Joe proceeded with his shotgun at the ready. The lobby was filled with empty chairs and tables, as well as a laptop computer and a projector on a tall stool. The projector was aimed toward a bedsheet that had been tacked on the wall to serve as a screen.

The stairs going to the second floor were damaged, with several treads missing. The handrail was also snapped off in several places. He assumed they had not used the rooms on the second floor.

Joe walked behind the front counter and opened a door directly behind it. Inside were two cots that could barely be seen because the window was boarded up from the outside with a sheet of plywood. The cot on the right had rumpled bedding, and loosenylon straps were coiled on the floor on the side of it. The bed on the left had been stripped clean. It was exactly as Eisele had described where he’d been held. Next to the door, on a shelf at shoulder height, was a medicine bottle of clear liquid and a syringe. Joe assumed it was the morphine Eisele had been sedated with.

As he backed out of the room, Joe heard heavy footfalls on the wooden porch outside. Someone was coming. He quickly sidestepped so he was behind a pillar, and he shouldered his shotgun and aimed at the front door.

Joe saw the doorknob turn and he eased the safety off his weapon. Then Eisele pushed his way through and stood stock-still for a moment, blinking into the gloom of the room.

Joe lowered his shotgun and stepped out from behind the pillar. “You were right,” he said. “They’re all gone.”

“I’m glad you didn’t shoot me,” Eisele said with a grimace. “That would have been a hell of an ending.”

“We’ve got to search this whole compound before anyone comes back,” Joe said. “There has to be a comms room around here. Do you have any idea where it might be?”

“I don’t,” Eisele said. “My familiarity with this town consists of that room behind you.”

“I found a generator in the back,” Joe said. “I’ll go see if I can get it going. It would be helpful if we had light to see. Plus, I’m curious what’s on that computer.”

“I’ll go take a look around myself,” Eisele offered.

Joe approached the man and handed him his service .40 Glock. “Take this,” Joe said. “I assume you know how it works.”

“No safety, right?” Eisele said. “Just point and shoot.”

“That’s right. Maybe you can hit something with it, because I sure can’t.”

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