Chapter Two
Sipping her coffee, Myra sighed, "Anytime, guys. Just say the magic word. What the hell is 'it'?"
Heh. Waiting wasn't her best talent. I sipped my coffee and leaned back as I looked at the other screen. One of the guys was serving portions of something from a fry pan. Fingers holding toothpicks stabbed evenly-sliced chunks of whatever in the pan. Did we really need probes for everybody? Nah. I canceled all but one probe at the campfire site, the probe for Steen's body, and a probe to monitor Clinton and Edwards.
Myra startled as the screen changes occurred and looked at me, but after a moment she settled back without comment and resumed watching the show. A few minutes later, she sipped her coffee and asked, "What do you think 'it' is?"
Trying to appear thoughtful, I ventured, "Well, I'd guess it's probably animal, vegetable, or mineral."
"Oh, brilliant, Sherlock! Care to try again?"
"Okay. Something some guy named Tony stashed." She started to say something. I added, "Something heavy that would be worth the climb and could survive this environment. Gee, I dunno, lady, maybe gold, d'ya think?"
She grinned. "Yeah. That's what I thought too. So why'd Mr. Tony stash it on a damned volcano?"
"This is prob'ly where he found it. The Cascades are cluttered with old mines. Maybe bad weather was closing in and he had no way to get it down the hill alone, or without being noticed. Clinton said one-sixty pounds each. Three-twenty total. But that's not the question of the moment."
Giving me a fisheye, Myra asked, "It isn't? What is?"
Pulling up park records on the screen, I pointed at line six, which read '11' and said, "That's how many individual climbers or groups have registered flight plans for parts of Glacier Peak for this week. Why are Clinton and Edwards interested in Cori's group in particular? For that matter, are they really interested, or are they just keeping an eye on them in transit?"
"In transit? You think Clinton and Edwards will keep moving through the night?"
Shaking my head, I replied, "Doubtful. It's hard enough by day. But now that Clinton and Edwards have caught up to Cori's group, I think Clinton will call a halt somewhat above them, where he can watch them a little more closely."
After a long moment, Myra quietly, coolly said, "Tell me exactly why you think that, Ed."
"You know why. High ground and field of fire. Look at the tracks around the tents and the campfire. Some of the tent lines are a little slack and there are half a dozen cat holes in the dirt twenty feet from the fire. They've already been there a couple of days and that's what's bugging Clinton."
My implant pinged and I put up a screen for Angela Horn. She was out of uniform and I could see her bedroom behind her as she said, "Hi, Ed. Bev showed me the stuff you sent her and I told her to send it where it needs to go. What do you think's going on?"
"It's hard to tell yet, Angie. Doesn't really matter, either. Myra Berens is with me and her baby sister is in a group of campers. We're gonna keep an eye on her."
Myra gave Angie a little wave and "Hi, Angela."
"Hi, Myra. Ed, what's your agenda?"
"Watch and listen. Nobody's done anything illegal 'cept maybe not reporting a corpse in the woods. If things get rowdy, I'll deal with it."
On my other screen, people with badges were approaching Steen's body. After a moment, Angie nodded. "Okay. Myra?"
Myra replied, "Yes?"
With a grinning glance at me, Angie said, "Ed once told me he thought you had magnificent legs. That's the exact word he used. 'Magnificent'. Just thought you'd like to know."
Grinning back at her, Myra said, "Thanks, Angela."
She laughed, "You're welcome. Goodnight, all," then she poked the 'off' icon at her end.
I removed the Steen segment from our screen and doubled the size of the Clinton-Edwards block. Clinton helped Edwards get his pack back on, then pulled him to his feet. After hefting their loads, they got moving on a course that would take them uphill almost two hundred yards from Cori's group.
As we watched them, Myra said, "You thought my legs were 'magnificent', huh?"
Meeting her grinning gaze, I replied, "As if you didn't know, right? As if you didn't change into shorts on your way from your office to my house? As if you can't remember the time I talked about licking my way up your thighs?"
She shrugged lightly and chuckled, "Okay, so I may have had a vague inkling, but it's been a few years, you know. Do you still think they're magnificent?"
Eyeing her legs, I nodded. "Oh, yeah. Definitely."
Motion on one of the other screens caught my eye and I checked it out. The probe covering the camp showed a bear snuffling his way along the side of the mountain, seemingly heading directly toward the campfire. Myra's gaze followed mine and she hissed, "Oh, my God! There's a bear behind... Oh, hell! I don't know his name!"
"The bear's a hundred feet from the camp. All we need is a good distraction. Flitter, hover above Clinton, please."
Grabbing Tiger's kitty kibble out of the flitter's console, I called up my board and slid off the deck to loop under the flitter before I turned on my three suit. The wind was flowing up the mountain, so I positioned myself a few feet off the ground twenty feet or so downhill from the bear. Opening the bag of cat food, I gently rustled the bag. The bear's ears flicked and its face turned in my direction. I rustled the bag again and flapped it open and closed a few times to get the food scent moving on the breeze. The bear's head came up and he froze as he seemed to give the matter considerable thought. After a moment, he began ambling in my direction.
I stayed twenty feet ahead of him for the next fifteen minutes or so, rustling the bag whenever his interest seemed to weaken. Once he heard something up the hill and turned his head to look, but the sound of the bag and the smell of the cat food helped him regain his focus. Once we reached some hefty chunks of rubble a good distance down the slope, I let a small handful of the kibble trickle around within arm's reach on the dirt just before the rocks and backed away from the spot.
The bear discovered the kibble and spent some time locating as much as he could find, then started sniffing in my direction again. I rustled the bag to regain his immediate attention and tossed a few handfuls of kibble around both the dirt area and the rocks. The bear found some kibble and looked for more. I tossed another handful into the rocks in front of his face and he startled slightly, but soon continued snuffling and began turning rocks to find the kibble. Good 'nuff. That ought to keep him busy for a while. Just to be sure, I dribbled a hefty handful that would be easy to find among some lower rocks.
Leaving the bear to his kibble hunting, I flew back up the mountain and had a close look at the student campsite. They had camping gear and science gear. People chatted around a fire and two of them entered a tent; the other guy and girl. Moving to the right a hundred yards let me see Clinton and Edwards choose a boulder-strewn area as an observation point.
Clinton shrugged out of his gear, produced a small pair of binoculars, and aimed them at the campfire below. Edwards sat on a rock, panting hard and not even trying to get his pack off.
After a few moments, Clinton aimed the binoculars laterally along the mountainside for a time, then said, "Thought I saw something move. There's a bear half a mile down. Take five, then set up the tent. I'll be back in a while."
Edwards stopped panting for a moment, then took a deep breath and asked, "What're you gonna do?"
"Have a closer look and a listen. Set up the tent."
Clinton moved away around one of the bigger boulders and began easing his way down toward the other campsite. About halfway between his site and theirs, he stopped and seemed to listen for a few moments, then he continued downward until he could crouch behind a boulder only thirty feet from the tents. For the next fifteen minutes or so he simply sat there, occasionally peeking around the boulder. We listened to Cori, Ted, and two of the other guys talk about glaciers, volcanoes, seismic instruments, and odd foods.
It wasn't too long before Clinton started to get to his feet and almost fell over. He was shivering and his right leg didn't seem to want to work right. Letting himself back down to the ground, he settled for crawling to a nearby bigger boulder, where he put his back to the uphill side of it and stood working his arms and legs for a few minutes.
Credit where it's due; despite hearing nothing that wasn't camp chatter and suffering the cold wind in an exposed, cramped position, Clinton maintained silence. He hadn't uttered so much as a grunt of discomfort from the time he left Edwards until he returned.
As he climbed into their two-man dome tent, Edwards asked, "Well? What'd you find out?"
Clinton replied, "Nothing. Didn't hear shit. I don't think they know anything about it."
Heh. I could envision Myra groaning -- or maybe even swearing? -- at yet another reference to the great unnamed 'it'. I zipped back to the flitter and turned off my three suit just before I passed through the flitter's hull field.
Walking past the bathroom field and between seats to put the kibble back in the console, I said, "I'm back."
Myra whipped around, eyes wide and pulse pounding. "Oh, Jeez! Where the hell were you all this time?"
"Leading bears downhill. Watching people. You heard what Clinton said when he got back to the tent?"
"Yes. He thinks they don't know anything." She looked at the campsites below and asked, "Wait. You were close enough to hear him? Why didn't I see you?"
"I went to a better spook school, ma'am. They taught us superior woodsmanship."
"Crap. The nearest trees are a quarter of a mile away."
"That's a damned good point. Flitter, if any potentially dangerous animals get within a hundred yards of the people we're watching, let us know immediately, please. Also let us know if either Clinton or Edwards should wander more than fifty feet from their tent tonight."
Calling up another field probe, I said, "Flitter, stop recording activities aboard, please," and sent the probe northward along the mountainside using penetrating radar to scan the surface. Myra watched the screen for a moment, then asked what I was looking for in particular.
"Holes. Places where stuff might be hidden."
"You're trying to find their gold?"
"If that's what they're looking for, yes. Might be something else, though."
"For instance?"
I shrugged. "Maybe money. How many hundred dollar bills are there in a hundred and sixty pounds?" I grinned at her. "Until one of them mentions what 'it' is, we're just guessing."
Myra gave me a sidelong glance and continued watching as the probe plodded on, slowly scanning the hillside. It was three hundred yards from the trail when a return echo displayed what looked like a collapsed entrance to a mine. I moved the flitter over there and sent the probe through almost twenty feet of dirt and rubble. Once the probe emerged from the other side of the blockage, I had it provide some light and discovered it was in a man-made hole in the mountain that extended about sixty feet further.
There were no wooden beams; it looked as if whoever had dug the hole had simply found a soft spot among ancient lava flows and had followed it until progress had been blocked by harder rock. Rusty remnants of a frying pan and a lantern lay on the floor of the shaft about halfway from the entrance. Three glass gallon jugs and a metal bucket lay on their sides at the wall near the lantern. A bolt-action rifle leaned on the wall nearby. Flat brown scraps of something lay here and there and I had the probe take a closer look at them. Leather? Yes. A bootstrap was attached to one of the pieces. Something had chewed a boot to pieces. Moving the probe further into the shaft, I discovered what had likely done the chewing; the skeleton of a good-sized dog lay on a ratty sleeping bag on one side of the shaft.
Myra muttered, "Oh, that poor thing! It must have been trapped in there!"
I moved the probe further and she gasped softly as the probe's soft glow revealed another -- human -- skeleton near a shallow hole in the floor of the shaft. Some of the bones were scattered around the spot and remnants of clothing had nearly disintegrated. I saw a damaged pair of black plastic men's glasses to one side of the shaft and spotted a ball-point pen and a small folding shovel leaning on the wall near them. This was no prospector from the olden days.
"Flitter, did you find any ID on or around that guy?"
"No, Ed."
"Can you figure out what killed him?"
"I may only speculate based on forensic evidence."
"Okay. Do so, please."
"A combination of disease, dehydration, and hypothermia."
Myra asked, "How can it tell that? Maybe the dog attacked him or maybe he was killed and sealed in with his dog."
The flitter replied, "There are remnants of diseased tissue within the skull and spinal column and concentrations of influenza spores in the soil beneath the body."
After a moment, Myra said, "It looks as if he was trying to dig his own grave." She looked at me and saw my doubt. "Well? What do you think he was doing?"
Pointing, I said, "The shovel's way over there, ma'am. It's more likely he just died while he was taking a dump."
Her expression soured a bit and she looked at the screen again without comment. I panned the probe around the immediate area and didn't see a number of things one might expect to see in a camping environment. No tent. Even inside a cave, a tent can be damned comforting. No backpack. No rope. No fire pit. No other tools. I sent the probe back into the rubble blocking the entrance. After a few moments, it found the ratty remnants of a wood-framed canvas backpack that held cans of food and various necessities, but it found no mining tools.
Possible scenario; a sudden collapse of the roof made him drop everything and dive clear of the falling debris? No. When a mine roof collapses, everything just drops. Maybe a landslide? I flew the probe outside for a look at the entrance. It didn't look any different from the rest of the area, but the guy had been there since before synthetic backpacks, so it might be hard to tell what caused the fall.
"Flitter, can you tell us what caused the collapse at the front of the mine and when?"
"Yes, Ed. Chemical residues and shock patterns indicate the use of dynamite. Deterioration of chemical compositions indicates the explosion happened in approximately 1947."
"Thank you. Show us where it exploded, please."
The probe burrowed back into the debris and through it to the left, then upward. I turned off its glow to avoid lighting a spot on the hillside as it emerged above the center of the blockage. The flitter said, "Approximately here. I am unable to be more precise."
"That's precise enough. Thanks, flitter."
Myra ventured, "So he was murdered?"
"Seems likely. Would he have sealed himself in?"
"So where's the gold?"
I grinned. "You've decided to assume 'it's' gold?"
With a wry grin, she nodded. "What else would it be?"
"Flitter, please scan the floor and walls of that shaft and let us know whether you find any gold."
A few moments passed before the flitter said, "I have found no gold, Ed."
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