Just then, the helicopter buzzed low overhead. Seconds later, it circled away.
"When she is dead, you can get back to your plants. Not a second sooner."
29
As the likelihood of rescue dimmed, it became easier to give in to the seduction of the cold. But Maria was stubborn. She had forests to save. She had Dan to contend with. Nate to apologize to. She looked down at herself. Clearly, she had stopped sinking. No quicksand, just deep mud. She decided to move.
Using her arms like stiff oars, she pulled herself ahead. She seemed stuck. She threw herself forward, then rocked back, loosening the mud. Throwing herself again as hard as she could, she began to come loose. At first, she could barely move but soon she discovered that she could crawl on her belly. Downstream twenty yards, the mud was knee-deep in thigh-deep water and she could walk. Within a hundred paces the ground became firmer. Then she rounded a bend and saw a man, standing. Although she could climb the canyon wall on either side, she would be exposed, and it would be very slow and noisy. Despair flooded her. She stopped, hiding in the rocks. Soon the gray light of evening would give way to bone-deep cold and the pitch dark of night in a wilderness canyon. Then she turned, and not fifty yards back and fifty feet up, she saw someone with a rifle.
Dan and Frank were getting frustrated. They could see little in the trees, and the pilot was running out of fuel. Only twenty minutes' worth remained. They were way beyond safe reserves. They would have to return to the airport, and then it would be dark.
"Let's run down the river drainage one more time before we land," Dan said.
"We gotta go," the pilot said.
"I still think she followed the creek," Dan replied. "Fly down it on the way back. Get down low and let me out."
"It's getting dark," Frank said.
"I know, but she's out there. I can feel it."
"Can't let you do it. After we try the creek again, we're outta here," Frank added.
The pilot banked the copter and aimed at the drainage. Looking back up the mountain, they could see foresters' trucks and sheriffs' vehicles pouring onto Jack Morgan's property. Dan prayed.
Frustrated that they were finding nothing, Corey went to the leader's position down in the creek. "Did you search the entire creek bottom?"
"Dutch looked down here," he replied.
"How exactly did he do that?"
"He went down next to the rock face and tried looking around the corner. There were no tracks. No sign of her."
Corey was not convinced. Making her way back up and over to the bluff, she looked for the best spot to approach the precipice. After traversing a steep rock shelf fifty yards long, she located a portion of the slope that appeared to have good handholds. She began the climb down, clinging to the rock surface as she approached the edge of the sheer drop. Lodging her fingers and toes in cracks as she went, she barely managed to avoid a precipitous slide. Reaching the drop-off, she could tell there was a considerable overhang. And no easy way to look down over the lip and maintain a good handhold. She dug her fingers into the only two available cracks and peered over the edge, half-expecting to slide out of control and over the cliff.
"Morons," she said as she saw the obvious trail in the mud along the rock wall.
Dan looked so hard his eyes hurt, but they saw nothing save Shane, who walked head down as if following a track.
"Put me down," Dan said, sounding more determined than he'd ever been.
"All right," Frank said, shaking his head.
Within seconds the copter was diving for the creek at a point where the brush patch and meadows began. Going down into the bowels of the ravine, they flew heart-stoppingly close to the steep hillsides, just 200 feet off the water. Slowing the copter to forty miles per hour, the pilot soon located a small clearing.
The landing point was a brushy spot just ahead of Shane, right by the creek. In seconds they had plummeted to six feet off the ground, and the pilot, in an obvious hurry, signaled a jump.
Dan hit the ground and they were gone. It was eerily quiet. Then he saw someone running toward him with a gun.
As Corey ran downstream, the wilderness calm was broken by a cop's ringing shout.
"Everybody freeze, put your hands up." The copter had come down ahead of her. Must have dropped a cop.
Knowing she might have just one last chance to kill Maria Fischer before they closed in, she sprinted the one hundred yards to the point where the rock wall became a steep incline and the muddy bench ended. She was still one hundred yards above the leader. At the creek's edge, she turned and looked back upstream. There were no tracks in the brown sand. She climbed back up on the rock bluff and moved upstream, perhaps another fifty yards. Not even thinking about protecting herself from a fall, she slid headfirst to the cliff's edge, barely managing to stop. The copter was now a quarter mile away and moving rapidly up the hill and away.
"Yes!" she shouted in a hoarse whisper after her first glance over the edge. There she was-seventy yards downstream, standing next to the rock wall. She swung the AR-15 around; the safety came off with a flick of her thumb. Maria was moving around a rocky outcropping. Shifting position, Corey steadied the rifle.
Dan had been traveling downstream fast and was below the man with the gun. Judging from Shane's far-off shout and the gunman's clothing, it couldn't be Shane. From his vantage point he was able to discern that the shooter was looking at the creek bottom somewhere below him. Refusing to think about the risks, he scrambled down the slope and peered over the edge, desperate at the thought of Maria pinned down in the rocks.
Seeing that the shooter was drawing down on her, Maria dived behind a rock no larger than a living-room chair. There was so little cover. She had to think. She couldn't even hear the chopper anymore. Risking a look, she saw the gunman moving toward her once again. She had to run before he got any closer. Sprinting down the rock wall of the creek as fast as the water and muck would allow, she found a small crevice and slid in. A shot smacked the rocks inches behind her, sending the grit flying. If she hadn't been moving, she'd be dead.
Dan flinched at the gunshot and kept running at the barely visible black-clad figure.
The radio rasped to life.
"Helo. 10–49 to my 10–20. 10–49 to my 10–20. I'm down the creek in the brush fields."
"This is Helo. We copy. We had to leave."
Having measured the distance to the muddy creek bottom at twenty feet, Dan figured he could jump and not kill himself. Before he hit the mud, he saw Maria, and when he splashed into the shallow water, he estimated the shooter at fifty yards. Too far away for him to hit even if he'd been armed. Maria, however, was close enough to reach in time. He hoped.
Shane's voice crackled over Dan's radio as he ran. "I hear shots from the gorge in the area straight ahead of me."
As he neared Maria, Dan took a quick glance back, saw the gunman on the cliff's edge, aiming at her. He dived in front of Maria, waiting for the shot.
Corey cursed. Only Maria's hip was visible under the cowboy-looking cop on top of her. She wanted a clean kill, not a martyr with a wounded leg and a dead cop. Then the cop shifted and she saw the middle of Maria's back. A heart shot.
"Oh yeah," Corey said breathily, bearing down on the trigger.
Her rifle bucked skyward. Her hands stung with the impact. But there had been no shot.