High Country- Pigeon 12 (19 page)

Worry over finding the lake had been pointless. At the top of a small boulder-capped knoll, not three hundred yards beyond the copse where she'd picnicked, the veritable pack of boot prints she'd followed half the day took an abrupt right turn off the trail.

Rather than thunder along this muddy highway, she drifted into the trees and walked parallel to the beaten path. Snow was heavier at this elevation. Drifts were a couple of feet deep, but there were bare patches and, in general, it wasn't more than six inches. The going was relatively easy. Around her, ponderosa pines, needles looking more black than green in the still air, vanished upward into the gloom. A granite streambed, slab on overlapping slab, black water laced along the edges with silver-white ice, ran in a westerly direction. The duff of needles on the forest floor provided the only real color; that and Anna's flame-colored fleece pullover. Mild discomfort niggled at the back of her mind for being so out of step with nature's decor. She ignored it.

The lake pierced white on white through a fringe of trees.

Approaching as quietly as crunching snow and heavy boots permitted, she surveyed this hard-won scrap of the park. Undoubtedly a jewel in the summer months, by the feeble light of the dying year it was unprepossessing in the extreme, disappointing even. Not more than ten or fifteen acres, she could see its entirety without bothering to turn her head.

Scrubby brown grasses, inundated in years with normal precipitation, spiked through crusty snow down to the water's edge. The lake itself slept under ice and snow. To the west, LowerMercedPassLake ended in a wall. At first Anna took it to be a berm of snow forty to sixty feet high but quickly realized it was granite shattered and tumbled over so many years the boulders formed a scree wall half as high as the shoulder of the mountain behind it. On the opposite shore from where she stood, trees reached to the water's edge, a jagged black line between gray ice and ice-gray skies.

Other than that, there was nothing. Anna didn't know what, exactly, she'd expected to find, but with the multitude of tracks, the same three or four pairs of boots trekking in and out over a period of time, the careful avoidance of the trailhead, the odd habits of the even odder men in Dixon's cabin, she'd expected something.

Damn. Staring into the colorless gloom, trying to get up the energy for the long cold walk down to the valley, she noticed a festooning of odd-shaped snow scraps in the fringe of evergreens across the lake. From ground level to about fifteen feet up, the trees were marred with what looked to be flotsam from a bygone flood. Drawn by the anomaly, she stepped out from the shore, tested the ice. It was rock-hard, a foot thick or more. Emboldened, she crossed. Twenty feet from the far shore she stopped to study the peculiar decorations these pines had acquired just before Christmas.

Chunks varied in size from several feet long and half that wide to tiny shards. Metal and tubing and what looked to be canvas, twisted and torn, was shattered and sprayed into the trees as if a large machine had been pulverized, then blasted toward the southern shore. Mystified, Anna scanned lake, trees and ice. Toward the granite scree wall was a near-perfect triangle several feet high. Perfect geometrical shapes weren't alien in nature, but they were rare enough to catch her eye and, on an otherwise flat field of ice, worth investigating. She dropped her pack to give her shoulders a rest, walked to the small white pyramid. Brushing the rime of frost away, she exposed a blue metal cone sitting neatly in the middle of the wilderness lake.

The cone made sense of the other disparate pieces. Kneeling in the snow, she cleaned it off. Thin metal, sky blue in color, rivets running up one side; it was the nose cone of an airplane, not abandoned rusting alone in the middle of nowhere, but intact and unharmed in the idiosyncratic way of disasters. Rocking back on her heels, she looked around with a new perspective. An aircraft-a fixed-wing-had crashed with tremendous force, blasting bits of metal, tubing, Plexiglas, fabric, anything that could be smashed, into the trees. The plane had crashed before the last snow, possibly during the violent storm that preceded the kids' disappearance. Looking behind her, she tried to figure the angle from which the aircraft had come down, find the main body of the plane or scars that would indicate point of impact. There were none. From the look of things, it had flown straight-or very nearly straight-into the ice-covered lake. The body of the plane broke apart on impact, the pieces blown into the trees with the resultant force. Smashing through the ice, the main fuselage along with the heavy engines would have sunk. Water closed; ice refroze; new snow re-created a virgin lake.

There would be corpses beneath her.

Standing, Anna wondered how many. A pilot. Maybe a copilot. Passengers? Why had the plane not been reported missing? California skies were painted with radar from both naval and civil installations. Pilots filed flight plans. In an area as well kept and densely populated as the great state of California, airplanes seldom went missing for long. Were any craft lost over this part of the Sierra, the park would have been notified immediately. With the hue and cry of the search the rangers would have been on hyperalert. This wreck was weeks old. There'd been no word, no hint, not even a rumor of a plane down in the mountains.

A failure of multiple systems-flight plan, radar tracking, friends and family reporting their loved ones taking to the friendly skies and never coming back-usually meant considerable effort had gone into circumventing the authorities. A pilot taking off from a noncommercial strip, filing no flight plan, flying at night in bad weather beneath the radar, those expecting him or her careful not to report failure to arrive; it had to be a drug plane up from Mexico or Baja, headed into Reno or maybe Salt Lake City.

This realization like a clarifying lens over her mind's eye, Anna saw what she'd been missing. A disappointed mind, tired eyes and light that damped rather than brought forth color, her brain had dismissed what it had deemed natural excrescences in the ice along the water's edge.

"My God there's bales of the stuff," she whispered. Stunned, she trotted toward the nearest. Half frozen in the ice was an eruption of black plastic three feet long and half again that wide and tall, littered with dark green sodden straw. Crouching, she pinched up the frozen hay and sniffed it. AV gas and dope. When the plane struck and ruptured, its cargo, along with much of the fuselage and probably the brains of the pilot, spewed across the ice and into the trees.

Now that she knew what she was looking at, Anna was astounded she'd not noticed before. Broken, half in ice, wrapped around trees, were fifty or sixty bales of what was undoubtedly prime Colombian or Mexican marijuana. Nearer the shore were places where the ice had been hacked away with axes to free the stuff.

The entrepreneurs who'd sent and/or purchased the weed would have known it had gone missing. Had they a brain in their head they would have had a pretty good idea where it had gone down. But an educated guess was nowhere near enough to locate something as small as an airplane in the vast rocked and wrinkled acreage of the Sierra. Either the pilot had contacted someone on the way down or the drug plane had been stumbled upon by sheer dumb luck and those who'd struck this mother lode decided getting rich was a higher calling than reporting an accident to the authorities.

The references of the ex-party boys to a gold rush were apt. Evidently the squatters in Dixon's tent had been mining this vein for some time, maybe since a few days after the crash. That accounted for greenhorns suddenly willing to hike past blisters and sore muscles, carrying double-bladed axes and backpacks reeking of fuel.

The squatters had not fortuitously stumbled upon it while on a Boy Scout campout. Anna doubted any of the four had spent a night outdoors in their lives. Therefore someone had told them, someone who'd seen it, knew the pilot was dead, the dope accessible. Someone in the park.

A detail she hadn't paid much attention to first time around flashed into her mind. About the time of Trish Spencer's disappearance the fire ax in the dorm had been taken from its place at the end of the hall.

The better to hack dope of out the ice with, my dear.

Had Trish stumbled onto the plane? No. Not Trish. Patrick Waters. Anna remembered where the punky trail crewman had last been seen: on the trail she'd just traipsed. Trail crew was re-habbing in a burned area six miles below the lake where the Illilouette had subsequently washed out. Who better to discover the crash, perhaps hiking on his day off?

So Patrick takes a sample to sell to Trish, his local connection. Trish worms the truth out of him and teams up with buddies Caitlin and Dix to become "miners" and strike it rich, buy brother Dickie his dream job.

When the local market was saturated, they must have gotten greedy, looked farther afield. Had Trish with her petty low-level drug dealing thought she could play with the big boys? Taken her wares to the nearest city and shot her mouth off? It wouldn't take long for the really big boys to decide to take over the excavation, cut out the middleman. Or in this case, woman.

A reverberating crack came on a high pitched singing sound. Anna staggered, her train of thought derailed.

Till she saw the blood she thought the ice had begun to give way.

CHAPTER 11

Another crack split the silence. White powder plumed at Anna's feet. Shots fired: she was a target, iridescent in the red pullover. Her mind snapped back to the unease she'd felt trundling this rag of color onto the ice. The tiny watchwoman in the back of her mind had been screaming of this possibility. In her preoccupation, Anna had ignored her.

Instinct overrode further thought. The snow had spewed toward the south and the wall of boulders. Guessing the shooter was at the lake's north end, Anna bolted for the eastern shore and the cover of trees. Gravity had gone mad. She fell. Rose. Fell again.

Shots rang out, two, three, fifty-Anna's mind wasn't on counting. Twice more she stumbled but managed to keep her feet. Reaching the line of trees, she dove, belly down, across the icy snow and duff.

"Safe!" a memory of Mr. White, her fifth-grade teacher, shouted as she slid into home on a base hit.

Crawling lizard-fashion, elbows and knees bent, she scuttled deeper into the trees. Like all of YosemiteNational Park, the shores of LowerMercedPassLake were littered with granite boulders. Anna didn't stop till she was snuggled up to the base of a big friendly rock.

Two more shots smashed into the stillness. If they landed anywhere near her, she didn't hear them hit. Either the shooter had bad aim or was using a pistol. Regardless of the reason why, Anna was alive and grateful for it. With this new lease on life came wracking pain. Every nerve in her left leg fired till the cacophony coalesced into a bone-breaking ache that nearly paralyzed her from toes to hip. She ignored it. Pain, shock and their attendant stupidity would have to wait. Crouching small behind her rock, she skinned out of the alarmingly red pullover. Beneath, she wore a gray turtleneck. The turtleneck was next. Then she pulled the red fleece on first and stretched the turtleneck over it. Feeling somewhat less visible, she answered the clamoring of pain from her ankle. Her sock blossomed with an oddly beautiful bloom of crimson. A bullet, probably a ricochet or even a shard of ice, given she'd walked away from the scene-albeit with less grace than was wanted-had struck just above the cuff of her boot, shredding her sock and tearing away a chunk of flesh. No spurting, but plenty of blood. Nothing to bind it with and no time. The cold would help stanch the bleeding.

The cold could also kill her. Pack, water, food and down sleeping bag were stranded in the middle of her own personal killing field. Move on. If she were to have a future, even a short one, there were plans to be made.

Making an educated guess, Anna figured there were two men, possibly three. They had at least one firearm, probably a handgun. Judging by the ice and what she'd seen outside the tent cabin, they also had a double-bladed ax.

She had a wounded leg and a Swiss army knife.

But they were city boys and Anna was home.

"Not bad odds," she whispered, not because she believed it but because it amused her to say the words. Far better to play Clint Eastwood than Little Nell.

For a while longer, she sat, the forest's quiet reknitting around her, and dared hope they'd gone away, confident they'd scared her off and could return to their harvesting or, given the lateness of the day, packing out their loot. Maybe they would choose to shut down the whole operation, cut their losses and escape to whatever hole they'd crawled out of, leaving Anna alive to report her find.