Deep Trek

The chief of the Hunters of the Sun glanced at her wrist chron. Just forty-five minutes had passed since Nanci Simms had butchered two experienced guards and broken out of the compound with an important prisoner. She wouldn’t have gotten too far away in less than an hour.

The red button on her desk intercom brought an instant response from her assistant. “Yes, Chief?”

“Get the chopper out.”

“Now?”

“No. I thought around about the end of February would be a real good time.”

“Sorry, Chief.”

“Being sorry doesn’t butter the turnips, does it?”

“No.”

“I want a search for that woman. We know what she’s driving. Probably she’ll have headed north. Toward where we think… Then again, she might try and second- or third-guess us. Tell the pilot to sector the land for… for fifty miles around.”

“That takes us to the hills.”

“Yes.”

“We don’t have too much gas for the chopper at this particular temporal window, Chief. Difficult to get our hands on more of it right now.”

“We’ll manage.”

“Sure, Chief.”

IT WASN’T too much of a surprise to Margaret Tabor when the helicopter pilot reported back to her two hours later. “Fuel arrow was down in the red, Chief.”

“So I would expect. And you found nothing.” It was a plain, calm statement, not a question. But the woman pilot chose to treat it as a question. “Nothing. Spotlight picked up tracks, heading off into the back country. Toward the north. Then they went onto a ribbon of old blacktop, and that was where I lost it. Quartered the whole area. Long as I could.”

“Don’t feel bad about it. Looks like we thought we had us an old, harmless sheep in our trap. Turned out we caught a real vicious wolverine.”

Chapter Twenty-Eight

It was Jeanne who finally managed to persuade Henderson McGill to stop the hopeless task of trying to retrieve the buried corpse of Angel McGill.

The others had all tried.

After the thunderous avalanche had swept half a mountain of thawing snow down the steep cliff, erasing the woman from life in a handful of seconds, the whole family had rushed to the scene. Paul had been there first, skiing from the other side of the broad valley, slicing across with speed and control, glancing up above him to see whether there was any danger of a further fall. But the rock face had been scoured clear.

By the time Mac himself had strapped on a pair of skis from the back of the Phantasm and lumbered clumsily to join the others, there was only silence. The spray and turbulence of the avalanche was over. Already there were dozens of birds appearing, eager to find whether any potential food might have been revealed from beneath the snow cover.

Mac had slung a shovel across his shoulders as he left the huge RV. While the others looked unbelievingly at the massive fall, he had started digging, working like a demented fury, clawing his way into the mixture of snow and water and mud.

“No point, Dad,” said Paul. “We don’t even know where she might be.” The mountainous pile was fully three hundred yards long and at least forty feet high.

“There’s a chance,” Mac had panted.

But there had never been any sort of a chance.

It took Jeanne’s hand on his arm to persuade Mac to finally give up the pointless, hopeless struggle. His own hands were blistered and raw, his back a tangle of strained muscle.

“Come in, love,” said Jeanne gently.

“She’s gone.” He straightened painfully, dropping the scratched shovel at his feet. “By God, but she’s gone. Just plucked away from us. No goodbyes.”

“It’s often the way.” Jeanne looked around. “Thaw’s still going on.”

“Yeah. I guess we… Oh, Christ!” His hands covered his face, shoulders heaving. Jeanne put her arms tightly around him and held him like a child while the sorrow shook him. She hugged him and whispered her love.

Eventually Mac sighed, swallowing hard and trying for a smile. “All right, now,” he said softly. “I can deal with it. But there’s so much damnable death around. Seems that where I let my shadow fall, somebody goes to meet their Maker. It’s not rightly fair, Jeanne.”

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