Uncertain Justice

That actually could not have happened. He'd have slammed into one of the big boulders around the pools before he got anywhere near the edge. That would have meant broken bones and eventual death. Still, he feared the fall far more.

He caught his balance with one foot in the shallow end of the smallest stone tank while a short-lived cloud of dust drifted down the slope toward him. Chagrined, Miles relieved himself against one of the boulders that would have stopped him had he not caught himself.

Back beside the pools, he drank again, deliberately filling his belly with water against future need. He gathered himself to start back up. Dangerous as it was, there was no other way.

There was a faint trail up there, probably made by the bighorn sheep that scampered along the sheer cliffs. He needed to get up to the path to the mesa top and the only way there was back up the same pebble filled chute he'd just skidded down. He was almost up to the trailhead when the walkie-talkie on his belt blared into sudden, raucous life.

§

The small cloud of dust had nearly dissipated when Deputy U.S. Marshal Louis Robbins caught sight of it. The powdery haze in itself was nothing to be concerned about. In the three weeks he'd been in the mountains, he'd learned that something was always falling from the heights. Tiny shards of rock, broken off from larger ones, were constantly working themselves free and dropping away.

Just a few minutes ago, the friction holding a few square inches of pebbles had been overcome by the mass's own weight on a steep slope behind him and the whole thing had slid down three or four yards until a new stability was found. He'd been watching when it began. He knew nothing living had started it and he hadn't been alarmed but he needed to know what had started the slide over there. He might need to be alarmed about this second occurrence.

Gripping the binoculars tightly, he slowly swept the area below, then just above the dust, moving in tiny increments up and down until he found what had caught his eye. He was adjusting the focus when a hand slapped down on a rock squarely in the middle of the binoculars' field of vision.

Startled, Robbins' fingers twitched. He lost the view of the hand and had to spend a few seconds reacquiring it. He dialed the power back from its highest setting of fifteen to see more than just a hand. At a magnification of eight, he could see the whole man. Excited, he fumbled for the radio he'd set down on the rock beside him and thumbed the transmission button.

"This is Robbins. I've got a man climbing the mesa north of my position," he said, his words tumbling over themselves in his hurry.

§

Surprised, Miles lost his grip and had to make a hurried grab for another handhold to avoid a fall. Finding a place wide enough for both feet, balanced there for long enough to bring a hand down to turn the volume down on the walkie-talkie he'd appropriated weeks earlier. He hadn't known it was on so loud.

He squatted as low as he could get, shifting around in the inadequate cover and trying to find the source of the radio call. He soon found a man on the high bluff off to the south. The black clad figure was pointing in Miles' direction.

There was nothing Miles could do. He was committed to this trail and had to keep going. If he tried to get back down, the man over there could track him visually virtually the whole way. The slope was almost bare ... no cover to speak of except down in the lower portions of the ravine and that place would be a trap now.

Climbing the last few yards, Miles whirled to his right and began running north along the narrow trail angling up and across a steep slope to the vertical wall just below the summit of the mesa. A hundred yards up and three hundred along the bottom of the cliff wall, he was far enough around the curve of the ridge to be almost out of sight of the man who'd seen him.

Miles had to go slower here, jumping from rock to rock in places and jogging precariously in the smoother stretches. He slowed further, looking for the little crack he'd found months earlier. Then he found it.

This wall of the mesa was fractured all along its periphery. It was ancient rock, part of the original molten lava thrust upward to form the Rocky Mountains. Time had worn away the stone in some places but there were places of harder stone that resisted erosion.

Here tall chimneys of rock climbed high, some of them completely separated from the cliff wall. They stood as sentinels, some rising nearly as high as the mesa itself. Sharp edged rocks, pebbles, and sand from their decaying sides fell to lie in haphazard piles about their feet.

Where one of these pinnacles lined up with a distant peak, there was a place where the pathway widened, then narrowed immediately. Miles slowed to a walk, extending his left arm to trail his fingers against the rock face.

It was a place along the cliff wall where it seemed a minor blemish marred the perfection of the mineral striations in the rock. Somehow the multi-colored striations were offset by a few inches, probably the result of some shift in the earth's crust ages ago. in the surface.

Miles' hand fell into an empty space. Without slowing his pace, he turned and walked directly into the cliff.

Across the way, Deputy Robbins bit off a running commentary when the man he was watching simply disappeared between one step and the next. Frantically, he moved his field glasses around, trying to reacquire the climber.

Deposits of minerals in the ancient molten lava, exposed by the deterioration of the mesa, had created varicolored ribbons in the rock that extended horizontally along the rock face. The striations fooled the eye into assuming the wall was one continuous, beautifully colored, formation. Only at arm's length was there something that didn't look exactly right.

The south side of the apparent discontinuity was actually where one part of the cliff ended. At the place where he turned and walked into the side of the cliff, the colored bands actually continued on a wall that was displaced several feet back into the rock.

Walking into what would have looked like solid wall to an observer only a step away, Miles found himself in a narrow passageway that quickly curved back on itself until it ran back south, nearly parallel to the outer face.

Torrents of water had rushed through here at some point in the past. Conceivably, the springtime waterfall and the summer pools where he'd rested a short time earlier had been fed by this chute when dinosaurs roamed where the Great Plains now were.

The walls had been polished into a smooth, satiny surface by eons of the flowing water. The beautifully colored ribbons were beautiful, even hypnotic, seeming to rise and fall in waves at the corners of his eyes as he strode along.

The passage seemed to end a dozen yards inside, the multiple bands of color rippled again in Miles' vision to give another false perspective. At the apparent end of the corridor, he turned hard right to find another passage leading due west ... and up the side of the mesa.

It was a passageway, steep in many places and full of rounded, water-carved boulders and pebbles that had fallen inward from the heights. It was difficult, but it straight led to the top of the mesa.

Without pausing, Miles lengthened his stride and jumped to the top of a knee-high ledge. He quickly sidestepped to the left for a jump up to another boulder. He began the climb; his knees began to tremble faintly.

He'd been going for nearly thirty-six hours now and had already climbed hundreds of feet up the side of the monstrous mesa. He refused to consider stopping for a rest. If he did, fatigue would make it that much harder to get moving again. And the searchers had to be closing in.

It had been nearly an hour since he'd heard the radio suddenly come to life.

§

Radio transmissions in mountainous terrain are iffy at best. Practically speaking, reception is just line of sight. The reconnaissance team members on the southeastern flank of the mesa could talk to each other, but their handheld walkie-talkies couldn't be heard at the base camp. For the moment, they were on their own.

The FBI agent-in-charge on the mesa ordered eight of his men to find a way up the heights rising behind their camp. They couldn't move laterally across the shoulder of the ridge directly to where the fugitive had disappeared. Blank, sheer rock walls over there, extending above and below their position, fenced them off from any way to move north any further than where the observer had seen Underwood.

They could have gone down and found the trail the fugitive had used, but that was counterproductive. They wanted to get in front of the quarry, not get into a chase up the side of a cliff.

After some quick searching, the group of eight found a way leading to the top of the mesa that wasn't too rough. It was no more than a couple of miles south and around the curve of the mesa's lower slopes. There was easy access from there--it was almost a ramp leading upward--to just below the level top of mesa; it wouldn't even be necessary for climbers to rope up to climb steep cliffs. They started up without returning to the campsite.

In the middle of the afternoon, the helicopter returning from Pueblo with a five-thousand gallon bladder full of fuel slung in a cargo net below it, finally heard the increasingly plaintive calls from the FBI team leader and relayed his information to the main compound twenty-five miles away.

The crew of the chopper already in the air--it had been working with the eastern-most of the deployed groups--was on the verge of turning back to the encampment for more fuel. Instead, they were diverted to the foothills of the big mesa for a pickup on the remaining members of the patrol. The eight on foot were already so close to the top that they continued on.

Forty-five minutes after the helicopter inbound from Pueblo detected the radio signals, the reconnaissance patrol--all fourteen of them--was reunited on the top surface of the huge mesa. After a brief rest, they spread out and began a hard march to get above the place where Underwood had last been seen. The chopper flew ahead, trying to catch a glimpse of the fugitive. Just one sighting ... that was all they needed.

§

Though his knees tended to buckle if he wasn't paying attention, the prey of the intensifying hunt couldn't afford any time to give his body any rest when he reached the crest. Walking--he couldn't summon the strength any more to run--he oriented himself and set a course to the southwest.

The mesa tilted infinitesimally to the south and travel was that tiny bit easier in that direction. The further one went in that direction, the more the terrain subsided into forested hills and valleys too ... lots of cover to shelter him ... and any number of small creeks of clear, cold water.

He felt naked amid the sparse, stunted trees on the mesa,. Cover was scarce and water even more so. He picked up his pace to a stumbling jog that deteriorated to a walk much too often.

Moving about up here was difficult for man and beast. The elements had alternately frozen and warmed the rock, first splitting it apart, then spreading the cracks wider every season. Each of these was an obstacle that had to be negotiated with a jump, or a way around had to be found. Running water had created ravines and gullies from some fissures ... dry courses where streams had once surged. Thick brush collected in these places, much of it too dense for quick passage.

The surface tended to fall precipitously into deep canyons or ascend steeply to a hilltop. Nature had forsaken gentle slopes and flat places up here. It was a wild place--rugged, barren, and windswept.

Not many men had ever come here and most who did were driven by forlorn hopes. Few who'd come here ever left. The ghosts of the desperate ones walked with Miles as he struggled forward over the bleak, uneven plain.

§

He found what he was looking for ... a rounded, weather worn boulder split wide horizontally down low to the ground. That opening in the massive rock looked like a vast, partly open human mouth in a giant head that faced east. From a distance, indentations carved by untold millennia of wind and rain seemed strategically placed for eyes. When he'd explored this area, he'd been struck by the formation and thought of it as 'Skull Rock' whenever its image came to mind.

More importantly, a deeper recess would make a good hiding place for the Barrett rifle. He'd wanted to get rid of it earlier, but there hadn't been any place where he felt he could. It was necessary now, appropriate or not. He was too near exhaustion to carry it any longer. He stuffed the rifle deep inside the deep lips of the 'mouth' and pulled some scraggly brush over it.

The overhanging rock of the upper 'jaw' ensured the weapon would not be subjected to the elements and it was well concealed. Rounding the southern curve of the skull, he pressed on, jogging when his lungs recovered enough to permit the exertion. A little later, he turned west and south when the terrain allowed travel in that direction.

§

He was fast approaching another landmark he'd found in earlier explorations, one that he didn't really want to get to it just now. The sun was well past its highpoint now. It was the hottest time of the day, still too long before shadows would began to crawl out of the west. Sweating hard, Miles stopped in the scanty shade of a straggly pinion pine and tried to visualize the terrain as he'd seen it months earlier.

His head on a swivel, he scanned the skies for the aerial surveillance he was sure would come. Calmer than he would have suspected, he examined his chances. Briefly, he regretted the night attack on the encampment. It had been too much, the destruction too massive.

Instead of convincing them the search was futile--too expensive--he'd stirred up a beehive. It was too late now for recriminations though. He had a fight on his hands and no time for wishing. He walked away from the tree and shaded his eyes to scrutinize the landscape all around before returning to squat at the foot of the tree.

He was well away from the rim of the mesa; it was perhaps as much as four or five miles to the nearest edge, though he'd walked seven or eight by angling off to the southwest instead of moving at a right angle. He was a long way from where he had been last seen.

From the radio chatter, there had been a good dozen of the law enforcement officers in that group and he'd caught something about 'a way up' before he lost the signal. He suspected they'd been talking about a wide, shallow canyon over that way that formed an easily negotiated ramp leading up to the top. He'd been down it, though he'd never climbed up it.

Unless that team had moved due west from where it came out on the mesa's top surface, he had a good chance of being outside the area they'd think to search. They couldn't know how good a pathway up the cliff the trail he'd followed actually was. Their first instinct should be to scout the eastern rim of the mesa, seeking to intercept him when he reached the top. He hoped.

He roused himself for another look all around. His only chance was to be alert for any approaching men on foot and any aerial platforms. He hated to even think the word 'helicopter' these days.

They were the bane of his existence. Only bad things happened whenever one of them was around.

He snorted at the foolishness. He saw nothing on the ground or in the sky. It didn't make him feel safer. In fact, the tension ... the need to move away from the threat was all the worse because he didn't know where his enemy was.

Finally, his heart still pounding and his mouth dry, he couldn't sit quiet any longer. With final glances to the east and southeast from where he thought the threats would come, he set off. He walked fast but tried to conserve his strength. It was getting later in the day, but there was a lot of ground and much daylight remaining.

In front of him, no more than three-quarters of a mile away, was a curious line of rocks. Two pieces of the earth's crust had been compressed together here. Pressing against each other, their edges had been forced up to form a long, narrow stretch of insanely broken terrain.

The sharp-pointed ridgeline ran off to the northwest for twenty miles that he knew of. It faded into nothingness off to the southeast, but he couldn't go that way. That party of officers on foot was out that way somewhere.

In ancient times, the junction of the two masses of primeval rock had been hundreds of feet tall and perhaps a half-mile in breadth. The jagged peaks of solid stone had cut into the sky, completely impassible.

But that was then. The exposed rock had eroded badly and broken bits had fallen off to the sides and crumbled into dust and flinty soil. The approaches were gentler inclines now ... though still difficult to negotiate ... and there were low places scattered between the crests now. It was difficult going, but you could get over the ridge ... if you knew the right place to try.

In 1779, two Spaniards and six Indians had passed this way and found the same passage through the sawtooth peaks Miles intended to use. They'd worked their way north and east from the same route Father Escalante's larger party had taken three years earlier in his exploration of the American southwest, searching for the elusive El Dorado Pueblo Indians assured them was up here somewhere. Impressed, the Spaniards had even taken it upon themselves to name the serrated ridge. Miles plodded on, his legs so exhausted he could barely feel them.

With consideration made for changes in idiom and culture, the name they bestowed on the rock formation could be translated as the 'Devil's Backbone'. In their arrogance, the minor Spanish noblemen would have been affronted to know Miles used exactly the same name.

The bones of the Spaniards lay deep in a rock-filled ravine a few miles north. They'd found some gold, but the Indians had grown weary of the conquerors' haughtiness.

Half a mile away now, the only opening Miles knew of for many miles lay right in the descending sun's eye. He stopped in the shade of a big field of boulders--the last bit of cover before he would have to cross a wide open area. The open space before him seemed mostly loose dust and pebbles over flat slabs of rock.

He was uneasy. Once inside the rock field, he found it didn't seem to provide nearly as much concealment as it had appeared to offer from the outside.

It would have been better to wait here until darkness, crossing the open expanse by the light of the moon but he couldn't afford to wait. Every second he spent in the sparse cover here was time in which hunters got that much closer to finding him. Lurching to his feet, he set out for the ridge, trotting as fast as he could.

Tiring quickly, he refused to stop; he kept his pace up as high as he could. Once over the Backbone, he could find shelter and rest he told himself. He concentrated on leaving no sign of his passing. He left his straight-line approach twice to take advantage of expanses of bare rock, their smooth surfaces were undisturbed by anything more than stray clumps of tough grass that had found enough soil to grow in isolated cracks. He would leave no tracks there for searchers to find.

§

The big CH-53 was on loan from the Colorado National Guard to the Department of Justice. It was the one already in the air when the group of federal officers sighted Underwood climbing the mesa's walls. Having ferried the half dozen officers from the base to the top of the mesa to join the eight climbers in the unit, it was on the tail end of western leg of a zigzag search pattern.