The Alberta Connection (31 page)

John replied that he had one pinned to the
wall, but O2 and Ryce were simply two heat blobs on a grey computer
screen. They weren’t even in color like the nightly weather
report.

After the three men placed the laptops in a
saddlebag, they mounted their horses, turned, and started up the
trail. Ryce could hear faint laughter as they rode past the dead
bodies.

O2 looked over at Ryce. “We can take them out
at any time. You can have the one on the left. I’ll take the two on
the right.”

Ryce smiled. “They are one level up on the
food chain. I would like to see who the biggest fish is. Then we
can decide who gets to shoot twice.”

Ryce and O2 signaled to the team that it was
time to move out. As they approached the shack, Ryce asked John to
keep the pursuit team within a half mile of the riders.

Ryce grimaced as they passed the dead bodies.
So far, nine people had been executed. If the dead at the trailhead
were included, the number was sixteen.

Chapter 36

The riders were
not in a hurry. Had Dianne been aware that she had been followed?
Had she told the riders about the gunfire the previous day? Perhaps
they did not even care if they were followed.

The point man saw the trailing rider from
time to time as he reached a rise in the trail. O2 had instructed
the point to be very careful to not present an outline until after
the rider had again vanished from view.

After approximately two hours of travel, John
radioed Ryce that one of the riders had temporarily stopped. He
rejoined the others less than five minutes later. O2 chuckled. Was
this a potty break?

Ryce asked John to notify the pursuit group
when the point man was within a hundred feet of where the horseman
had stopped. When Ryce got the call from John, O2 keyed his
walkie-talkie and told the point man to freeze in his tracks. Ryce
was carefully scanning the edges of the tree line as they worked up
the trail.

Ryce set the scope to display the distance
and checked everything that was one hundred feet in front of the
point man. A large tree hugged the trail at exactly 32 meters. Ryce
chuckled. That would be an excellent spot to place something. Ryce
turned up the magnification setting for the scope. There was a
small, dark object on the tree. It did not resemble anything that
was usually on a tree. Ryce slowly scanned the tree from the object
down to the ground.

Ryce handed the scope to O2.

“That big tree next to the trail looks like
where they want to cause trouble. I think there is a motion
detector about chest high to a man on a horse. There is also a
small package of something on the ground next to that big root. I
don’t see any wires running down the tree so it might be wireless.
Does it look to you like there is another motion detector on the
package?”

O2 scanned the tree for several moments. “The
package is wired. I saw the wind move the wires. I think I can get
to the back of the tree without being detected and then cut the
wires. Wish me luck.”

O2 handed Ryce the scope, slid his pack off
his back, unzipped it, reached in, and pulled out a pair of wire
cutters. He then disappeared into the forest. Five minutes later,
Ryce saw an arm reach around the tree and cut the wires. The arm
reached around the tree again and pulled the package out of Ryce’s
sight. Finally, the arm motioned the group to come forward.

As Ryce began to move up the trail, O2
stepped out from behind the tree. He was holding a small package
wrapped in a torn section of a grocery bag. Inside was half of a
block of C-4. One of the SEALs knocked the motion detector off the
tree with butt of his M4. It was a rudimentary ambush, but if
someone was not careful, they would be unable to continue the
chase.

Ryce heard Ramona’s voice in his earphone.
“Ryce, John asked me to tell you that the riders stopped again for
almost a minute, but have resumed moving up the trail.”

Ryce looked over at O2. “I, for one, have
been convinced we should not be travelling on the trail. Even that
small chunk of C-4 would take out a couple people. I suggest we
split the group and move into the tree line to follow these
jokers.”

O2 shook his head in agreement, pointed at
three of the group, and then motioned for them to follow him. He
walked back up the trail about three hundred feet and then
disappeared into the trees.

Ryce selected two of the remaining six. They
would go out on point on the other side of the trail and about one
hundred feet above it. Ryce would follow three hundred feet behind.
If either of the point men saw any of the riders, he was authorized
to shoot first and ask questions later. At this point, Ryce was
content to shoot them off their horses and try to explain his
actions. The remaining four men would hang back and come running if
the others got into trouble.

John, or one of his radio operators, radioed
location data of the three riders to Ryce every fifteen minutes.
Ryce then passed the information to the group using their
walkie-talkies.

A little after 3:00 PM, Tanya reported that
the riders had vanished from the thermal display. John cranked up
the imaging and found a slightly warm, very large blob on a direct
line of their previous travel. A few minutes later, O2 radioed that
he had discovered a mining shack with an attached covered stable.
He could see three horses in the stable.

Ryce and his group worked their way to a
location where they could observe the cabin. They were far enough
back in the trees to likely be unseen, but Ryce requested they use
camo nets. He now regretted not bringing his Gillie suit. Although
it did not weigh much, it took up more room than a rolled up
sleeping bag.

Ryce scanned the cabin. The front door was
open as were the three windows on Ryce’s side of the cabin. He
thought he could see two figures in the shack through the open
door. Well, at least the boots of two figures. Ryce flipped the
scope selector to thermal. The shack was cold.

Ryce scanned the trail in front of him and in
both directions. Cold. He began scanning in all directions around
him. Two hot spots suddenly bloomed about two hundred yards to his
left behind the cabin. They were followed by a third thermal
image.

Ryce flipped his scope back to visual. The
three men who had murdered Dianne were following a faint trail that
appeared to lead directly up the side of the mountain.

Ryce’s radio growled in his ear.

“Ryce, this is Dexter. I have three hot spots
moving sort of east, almost on your two and a half.”

Ryce responded that he had just become aware
of them. He keyed the walkie-talkie and told O2 that they could
meet at the shack, but carefully. As soon as they arrived at the
shack, Ryce instructed the group to look everywhere, but be
exceedingly careful.

The two figures he thought he had seen were
actually just two pairs of very old cowboy boots stuffed with
paper. Ryce chuckled when O2 opened his pack and pulled out a
mobile explosives detector. The detector started growling. The
boots contained C-4.

They had done their job. They had focused
Ryce’s attention while the three men had escaped through an open
rear window. Ryce called O2 over to discuss what they should do
with the boots. They could not have an unsuspecting hiker think he
had found a treasure. O2 opened his pack once again, and pulled out
a spool of nylon parachute cord. He carefully constructed a loop
and dropped the loop over the shafts of the boots. He motioned for
everyone to leave the cabin, and began playing out the string.

When O2 was three hundred feet away from the
cabin, he pulled a long length of medical tubing out of his pack.
He tied one end to a limb and then stretched the tubing in the
direction of the cabin. When he had tripled the length of the
tubing, he tied the string to it.

“When I let go of the tubing, those boots are
going to fly out of the cabin. I don’t think they will travel this
far, but if I were you, I’d go a few yards farther away.”

O2 watched everyone increase his distance
from the cabin. He let go of the tubing and dived behind the
nearest tree. The boots came flying out of the cabin, but they did
not explode.

O2 walked to the boots and pulled the paper
out of each one. After collecting four blocks of C-4, O2 walked
back to the cabin and inspected where the boots had been standing.
Two small contact devices were lying on the floor of the cabin. The
wires from the contacts disappeared between the floorboards. Ryce
chuckled. The triggers had been ripped out of the boots before they
could cause the C-4 to explode.

Ryce stepped off the porch and shined his
flashlight toward where he thought the wires should emerge from the
floor. The wires were wrapped around the positive and negative
poles of a 9-volt battery.

Ryce stood and looked over at O2. “You didn’t
invent that device to deactivate exploding Tony Lamas.”

O2 smiled. “No, I invented that gizmo when I
was floating around the Pacific with the Gator Navy. They had a
device for underway provisioning that shot a line between two
ships. I tried to get one for my Glock but haven’t had any luck. I
lost a guy in Afghanistan when we were trying to discharge an IED
that was too close to an occupied house. We put a string on the
trigger but could not manually pull the trigger fast enough or far
enough to set it off. This device pulls the string a minimum of six
feet. And it has an exceedingly fast pull rate.”

Ryce laughed.

“I think I would have just put a shell in the
boots and blown the cabin up.”

Chapter 37

O2 and Ryce walked
behind the cabin to check on the horses. They were still saddled.
Only the saddlebag containing the laptops had been removed. Ryce
asked two members of the group to remove the saddles and look
around for some hay. The stable fence extended into the stream so
the horses would have water. Ryce planned to inform the Park
Service that they had abandoned horses at this cabin. Three pack
animals would be nice but he did not know where he was going.

Ramona was the radio operator while Ryce and
O2 were checking on the horses.

“They just went poof again, Ryce.
Vanished.”

Ryce thanked her and turned to O2.

“Our three friends just vanished again.
Somewhere on that hill east of us. Want to take a walk?”

It didn’t take long to find the trail the
three men had taken when they had departed the cabin. It rose
sharply through the trees on the opposite side of the stream they
had been following. The trail then disappeared into a crevasse in
the rocks less than a half mile from the shack. Ryce frowned.
This must be where the three men had vanished
. Ryce looked
into the crevasse and then walked into it.

Less than one hundred feet into the crevasse,
they were looking at a mine entrance. Ryce turned and walked back
out of the crease. They now knew where the laptops had gone. He
keyed his walkie-talkie and told the rest of the team to bring
everything up the trail.

Ryce called John and told him which hole the
three had gone into. But there was one big question. Why had they
gone into this mine? Ryce pulled his Barrett off his shoulder. As
he and O2 waited for their teams to arrive, Ryce heard Dexter’s
voice.

“Ryce, this is Dexter. I think I can answer
that question. That is the old Milburn mine. I explored it several
years ago. It has one tunnel from your side of the mountain that
goes about halfway and then splits. One of the tunnels goes all the
way to the east side of the mountain, but I do not remember which
one. I do recall that the mine tunnel is over four miles long.”

A few minutes after Dexter’s radio went dead,
Tanya announced that John had requested the thermal satellite be
relocated to the other side of the mountain. There were too many
blind spots in the present position. Relocation would take a
minimum of thirty minutes.

When the rest of the team arrived at the
crease, Ryce explained what he had learned from Dexter. The team
would split up at the junction of the two tunnels. They would have
no contact after they entered the tunnels. Whoever took the tunnel
that didn’t go all the way through the mountain would have to
backtrack.

As they walked into the tunnel, Ryce checked
his night vision headset. It turned the tunnel an eerie green
color. Ryce wanted to be able to move quickly through the tunnel,
but also move safely. After a long discussion with O2, Ryce decided
they would use their night vision equipment and keep a one hundred
foot gap. The vertical walls of the tunnel were jagged and might
provide some protection in a firefight.

O2 led the team for the first hour and then
stopped. They were almost halfway through the tunnel, and the split
was just ahead. Ryce pulled a coin out of his pocket and told O2 to
call it. O2 called “heads;” it came up “tails” and Ryce picked the
left-hand tunnel.

The tunnel that Ryce had chosen ran arrow
straight, as long as the arrow didn’t fly longer than five hundred
feet. Ryce turned around and motioned to his group to
backtrack.

Ryce soon caught up to O2. As the two walked
down the tunnel, they could feel a slight breeze on their faces. O2
reached into one of his pockets and pulled out a book of matches.
When he lit a match, they could both see the flame flickering in
the direction they had come from. They were close to the eastern
entrance.

Almost two hours after they entered the
tunnel, Ryce and O2 were viewing a door. As they approached the
door, both were checking the area for any hidden surprises. O2
pulled off his night vision and pulled a high-tech flashlight from
one of his cargo pockets.

It did not appear that the door had been
booby-trapped. Ryce looked around for any large object that he
could use to test the door. In a small room to the left of the
door, he found several 8-inch by 8-inch timbers used for the tunnel
bracing. Some were less than two feet long.