“Couldn’t agree more,” Jayden concurred. Carter took a compass heading and then pocketed the instrument. Then they set out in that direction, walking as fast as possible though the plants without bending them too much so as to draw attention. They kept up a steady pace but would stop periodically for a few seconds at a time to listen. On one of these stops, Carter could barely make out voices, too faint to tell what was going on or where they were coming from. Somehow, he doubted Daedalus would be just sitting around, though. Something told him they should keep moving, that they needed to get back to town in Turkey and leave the country as soon as possible.
But first they had to get off this holy mountain.
Chapter 23
Jayden was first to reach the lip of the lake basin, which was windswept and barren compared to the lake below. Carter, encumbered by the backpack and not willing to take the gun out of his right hand, was a little behind him. Again, they faced a situation where they had reached the edge of their concealment and now faced an open run. With no signs of their pursuers, they scrambled up the open face with its thin layer of snow. It led to a smooth, wide mountain slope, similar to the one on the other side. From this vantage point they could look out across the entire lake basin to the Treasure, Inc. camp on the other side. Both men dropped to a prone position. Carter handed Jayden the gun while he removed the small pair of binoculars from his pack.
He focused in on the destroyed rope pulley station. Nobody there. He scanned the surrounding camp area, but also saw not only no people, but no sign of them at all — no backpacks, tents, gear, anything. It was as if they had already broken down the site and moved out. While Carter watched through the optics, Jayden kept a naked eye out while holding the pistol, monitoring their nearby surroundings.
“They’re coming up.” His voice was so calm that it belied the import of the words.
“What?” Carter looked away from his binoculars, where’d been scoping the far side of the lake basin, near the snow tunnel to see if he could detect traces of their passage. He could not.
“Where?”
Jayden pointed down at a sharp angle.
“Whoa!” Carter didn’t know what he had been expecting — some sort of tactical approach, he guessed. This might involve Daedalus splitting his team member into two squads of two, perhaps, or even retreating back to town to resupply and come back with more technology with which to track them down, maybe even a helicopter. What he was not expecting was for all four of them to have beelined single file down to the lake basin, and all the way across the bottom of it to climb the far slope at the top of which Carter and Jayden now lay. He eyed them carefully and noticed they carried minimal gear.
“They must have hidden their campsite gear up top, carried it somewhere off site, before moving out to find us.”
“Well, I give them an A for effort,” Jayden said as he turned to look back in the other direction, plotting a potential egress route. “But I don’t want to do it in person. Let’s blow this popsicle stand, shall we?”
Carter stuffed his binoculars back into his pack. “Where to? See any good routes?” He eyeballed the direction Carter had just looked in.
“We’re just going to have to go that way and wing it.”
They could hear the signs of human passage below, as Daedalus and his men trekked their way up the slope. The efficiency with which they had moved this far this fast was frightening, and so Carter and Jayden lit out onto the broad slope, where hopefully they would have sufficient space in which to get lost. The area was a broad one once again, no longer a confined lake basin.
“If we get far enough out in front of them,” Carter said as they started to walk, softly so as not to give away their position, "we can break into a run and then hopefully get far enough away where they won’t be able to tell which way we went.”
“Try not to leave footprints or bend the tall grass,” Jayden said, stepping around a stand of scrub brush as he looked back to see if he could spot their pursuers. Not yet.
Looking ahead, Carter saw only a wide open area sloping gently up, with a few plants over two feet high that struggled to eke out an existence between small boulders and rocks amidst a patchy crust of snow. Once they got farther up the slope….
“I don’t see how we’re going to be safe up here,” Carter said, slowing down. “Once they get to where we are, they’ll be able to see us, even if we’re all the way up there.” He pointed far up the gentle slope, to where the mountain leveled off for some distance before the much steeper peak began its majestic rise.
“Got to make the best of it,” Jayden said.
Carter looked around for some way to set a booby-trap, or to build an impromptu shelter of some sort — anything to temporarily buy them a little more time. But he could see or think of nothing constructive, and he recognized the beginnings of panic beginning to wrap around the edges of his mind. A decent amount of his military training, and he knew that of the SEALs, of which Jayden had been one, dealt with how to recognize and forestall panic. It seemed just as he was about to come up with something, the wind would blow stronger and ruffle his hair in some distracting way, or knock a small stick into him or some trivial thing that normally he could ignore.
“Let’s go this way,” Jayden suggested, pointing out a course that was parallel, around the broad mountain face, rather than straight up it. “Wind’s blowing with us if we go this way, we’ll go a little faster.”
Carter knew they needed every edge they could get. He could hear the Treasure, Inc. killers forcing their way through the uppermost basin foliage now. They were reasonably quiet for four men moving quickly through the brush, but not Navy SEAL silent as Carter and Jayden had been. But now that no longer mattered. They knew they were here, and it had come down to a footrace. A race with the wind, Jayden was telling him. Carter tried adjusting his pack to balance it as best he could with only one remaining strap for the run ahead, and that’s when he thought of it.
The wind! It was really howling now, exposed on the open face like this, and he thought he knew how to take advantage of it. He flung his pack back on the ground and knelt to open it. “Jayden, I need you to cover me while I set something up.”
Jayden looked wide-eyed at his friend. “Now’s not the time for experimental stuff, Carter. I can see the first guy coming up now.” He lined the gun sight up and stared down it at the oncoming foe.
“One minute…”
“Are you kidding, me? They’ll be here by then. What’ve you got?”
Carter didn’t answer with words, but removed their tent’s nylon ground cover from the pack. He unfolded it rapidly, spreading it out to its full length. “Need you to stand on one end to hold it down,” he told Jayden, who begrudgingly did as he was asked.
“This thing doesn’t exactly blend in with the ground, Carter, if your plan is to hide under it,” Jayden said, frowning at the dark green tarp, which contrasted sharply against the white snow and light brown rocks and soil.
“Bear with me while I get this going….” They heard voices now, able to recognize the Greek language. Carter unspooled a length of rope and threaded one end through one of the grommets on the ground cover.
“Bear with you?” Jayden’s voice betrayed his exasperation now. “Carter, you’re not giving a PowerPoint presentation at a conference, you know that? There are four armed men coming through those bushes to kill us right now.”
Carter didn’t look up from what he was doing with the ground tarp, but continued threading the rope through the grommets. “You still got that Swiss Army Knife handy?”
Jayden frowned while aiming the pistol toward the oncoming threat. The wind had picked up to the point it was impossible to tell if the plants were moving due to wind or because people were moving through them.