He had climbed to this point to plant the three-pound block of plastic explosive. Now he felt like a target, advertising not only his presence but that of Kane and Brigid Baptiste, who worked somewhere deeper in the gorge.
Turning slightly, he tilted his head, looking at the black bulk of the Bitterroot Range silhouetted against the late-morning Montana sky. The narrow canyon was the only path through the foothills into the high peaks. Once it had been a two-lane highway, and even now patches of the blacktop showed through the tangles of overgrowth. There was even a hint of a white line painted down the center of the road.
The cracked and twisted asphalt ribbon skirted yawning chasms and precipices. Although acres of the mountainside had collapsed during the nuke-triggered earthquakes nearly two centuries ago, much of the road remained intact. The highway pitched and turned treacherously, but it could still be negotiated by determined travelers in all-terrain vehicles. It led to only one placea mountain plateau and the Cerberus redoubt.
They had come down from the plateau to find a way to either disguise the road or make it completely impassable. The latter option was a blade that cut two waysthough the mat-trans unit in Cerberus was the primary means of transporting people and materiel into and out of the sanctuary, maintaining an open overland route made sound tactical sense.
After the events of the past ten days, the road was, more than ever, a channel for a full Magistrate assault. Although the Cerberus gateway was listed on all ville records as utterly inoperable, Lakesh extrapolated that Baron Cobalt would leave no redoubt unopened in his search for him. A hybrid spawn of human and other he might be, but the baron was no fool.
The baron had witnessed a group of interloping se-ditionists using his own personal gateway to transport elsewhere, so logically his quarry had to have a destinationand that meant another functioning mat-trans unit. The matter-stream modulations of the Cerberus unit were slightly out of phase with other gateways, so they couldn’t be traced. The baron’s only alternative was a hands-on, physical verification. Kane usually argued with Lakesh on issues of strategy, frequently just to be contentious, but not this time. If he were in the baron’s place, he would have done the same thing.
Besides the desire to rescue his trusted adviser from the grasp of people he believed to be murderous insurgents, there was something else at stake Baron Cobalt’s monumental vanity and ego. Kane had twice humiliated the baron, and that was three times too many for a creature who perceived himself as semidivine.
Grant prodded the explosive charge jammed into the cleft of the gorge wall, making sure the radio-activated detonation cap was securely affixed to it. The combination of RDX and polyisobutyleije plasticizer was very stable. Even if it fell, the C-4 compound wouldn’t go off, since its impact sensitivity was 0.75 kilometers per minute.
After careful examination of the canyon walls, Grant had decided the cleft was the best place to plant the block of C-4. At this height, the cliff rose in a series of ledges of dry, crumbling stone, separated by vertical slabs of granite that decades of wind, acid rain and snow had eaten away. Tons of delicately balanced and overhanging rock could easily be dislodged by the right kind of demolition charge, planted in the proper place.
He glanced down into the gorge again, taking a certain pride in looking for and not being able to spot the Hussar Hotspur Land Rover. He had done an exemplary job with uprooted shrubbery and camouflage netting.
At the faint squeak of saddle leather, Grant turned his head, looking out past the mouth of the gorge, feeling for and finding the compact binoculars attached to his web belt. Bringing them to his eyes, peering through the ruby-coated lenses, he swept his gaze over the gently rolling, pebble-littered hills beyond the defile. He wasn’t looking for Magistrates, who would have made too much noise, with Sandcat engines roaring or Deathbirds dropping out of the sky.
Intruders on horseback most likely meant Indians, from the small settlement of Sioux and Cheyenne. Many tribes of American Indians believed the nuke-caust was the purification promised by ancient prophecy, and over the past two centuries they had reclaimed what was left of their ancestral lands, protecting them ruthlessly from invasion.