The ground rose in swells of red and yellow rock. Quinn kept to the troughs of the ridges, weaving the pickup among great blocks of shattered stone. This was an area of upheaval, of cataclysm, Cork thought. The nearer they came to the mountains, the more pronounced was Heaven’s Keep. It thrust above the rest of the range in stark, foreboding grandeur, looking in every way like a fortress, an unassailable hold of secrets.
They came to a dry wash full of sand the color of bread crust. As Quinn started down, Cork said, “Wait a minute, Dewey. Hold up.”
Cork got out, walked into the depression, and knelt in the sand. Quinn and Parmer joined him.
“What is it?” Parmer asked.
“Tire tracks,” Cork said. “Somebody’s been this way.”
Dewey said, “That’s unusual. This isn’t exactly on a standard road map.” He knelt, too. “On the other hand, no telling when these tracks were made. We haven’t had a good rain here in a while.”
“Why would anyone be out this way?” Parmer said.
Quinn shrugged. “Prospecting, maybe.”
“Maybe,” Cork said. He stood up and looked toward the mountains. “I think we ought to be prepared for a reception, though.”
“Who could know?” Quinn asked.
Cork said, “It wouldn’t surprise me if these people know everything.”
They returned to the pickup. Quinn dropped the tailgate and hopped into the bed. He stepped around the shovels and pick and pry bar and the metal detector he’d loaded that morning, and he bent over a toolbox secured to the side. He unlocked the lid, lifted out a box of cartridges, and tossed them to Cork.
“Hang on to those,” he said.
He locked the toolbox, nimbly leaped to the ground, and slammed the tailgate shut. From the rifle rack affixed to the back of the cab, he pulled down a flat-sided, lever-action Winchester that had been cradled there. He slid half a dozen cartridges into the magazine and looked at Cork.
“You a good shot?”
Cork considered the weight in his hands. “Used to be,” he said, “but I haven’t fired one of these for a while.”
Quinn squinted at Parmer. “Can you shoot?”
“I was born to it. But I have my own weapon.” Parmer grabbed the knapsack and pulled out his Ruger.
Quinn said, “Let’s do it this way, then. Cork, you drive and I’ll ride shotgun. It might be a little rough, but it’d be good if you rode in back, Hugh. Somebody tries to hit us, we can both respond. I need to stay in the cab and guide Cork.”
“Works for me,” Parmer said.
Cork took his place behind the wheel. Parmer settled himself in back. Quinn sat on the passenger side with the rifle cradled in his hands. They headed off once again, and half an hour later, without incident and without seeing any further evidence of another vehicle, they arrived at their destination.
It was clear from a distance how, in a vision, the formation might appear as a bed or a box. The sides were dark red, like rough-finished cherrywood, and the floor of the canyon was dirt of the same color. It was half a mile long and a couple of hundred yards wide. It sat on a flat plain maybe a mile square that lay at the very base of the foothills. Behind it rose a small mountain that Cork figured had to be Eagle Cloud. This was the only large, flat area he’d seen all morning, and he understood why Quinn thought an airstrip could have been scraped there.
As they approached the opening to the canyon, Cork stopped the pickup and got out. His eyes swept the scene before him, east to west. Quinn and Parmer came and stood beside him and saw the same thing: a long, narrow band of earth, clear of rock and sage and all debris, leading directly into the canyon.
“They landed here,” Cork said. “The sons of bitches brought the plane down right here.”
“Where do we begin?” Parmer finally said.
“In the canyon, at the end of the strip they cleared,” Cork said. “If I was going to bury a plane, that’s where I’d do it.”
They drove into the shadow of the canyon a hundred and fifty yards to a place where the makeshift airstrip came to an end. There, very clearly, they saw a long rectangle where the earth had been disturbed. It was like a grave in a cemetery, old enough to have lost the mounding of dirt but still new enough not to blend in completely with the ground around it. Quinn dragged his metal detector from the bed of the pickup, clamped the headphones on, and ran the instrument over the area, all the time nodding to the others confirmation of their suspicions.
When Quinn finished, Cork asked, “Can you tell how deep it is?”
“No, but I’d say not deep. The readings are strong.” He looked back at the cleared strip behind them. “They didn’t bother to cover their tracks. Probably figured nobody would ever come out here. And if they did, the plane was out of sight. Unless you were really looking for something, like we were, hell, you probably wouldn’t even notice.”
“Well,” Parmer said. He looked at the others. “Shouldn’t we start digging?”
They spread out and began. At just over two feet, they struck metal. Parmer’s shovel found the plane first. Cork and Quinn left their own excavations and joined him. Together they cleared a large rectangle of white fuselage that sloped right. They dug a pit following the downward slope of the plane. Two men worked in the ground while the idle man stayed above with the rifle, watching for any trouble that might arrive. Parmer and Quinn relieved each other, but Cork refused to take a break. By midmorning, they’d created an excavation deeper than they were tall that ran for nearly eight feet along the plane and extended half a dozen feet outward. They’d uncovered the upper part of the door and cleared the latch. Cork carefully wiped the dirt from the mechanism and tried the handle. He leaned the weight of his body and the will of his spirit into the attempt, and he let out a cry as if the effort hurt him. The handle didn’t yield. He yanked and swore, grabbed his shovel and raised it to deliver a blow, but Parmer’s hand restrained him.
“Easy, Cork. We can’t open the door yet anyway, not till we’ve cleared the rest of the dirt. Let’s worry about the handle then, okay?”
Cork stood frozen, the shovel poised. He was deep in the grip of a desperation that, as the door had revealed itself, had coiled tighter and tighter around his heart.
“We’re almost there.” Parmer waited, and when Cork didn’t respond, he said, “If you damage the latch, we might not get inside at all.”
Cork finally heard the wisdom in the words. He stepped back, took a few deep breaths, and nodded. They’d cut crude steps into the side of the pit as they dug, and now Parmer climbed out and disappeared. He returned with bottles of water they’d packed that morning. The men drank and wiped at the sweat and grit on their faces, and considered in the silence of their own thoughts the prospect of what lay before them. Finally they returned to their labor.
On a shimmering crest of heat, the sun continued to rise. The only sounds were the occasional buzz of a flying insect, the dull chuk of the blades biting dirt, and the grunts of the men as they broke the earth free and catapulted it from the hole.
An hour past noon it was finished. They’d cleared the door. Parmer examined the latch.
“A lot of grit jammed in there,” he said. “Some water and a brush might clean it out.” He looked up at Quinn, who stood above, at the edge of the pit, holding the rifle.
Quinn nodded and left the hole. He returned with a bottle of water. He also brought a sponge and a soft-bristle scrub brush, which he said he used to wash his truck. Parmer unscrewed the bottle cap and poured half the contents around the handle, then took the brush and with short, careful strokes began to clean the grit from the mechanism.
Cork stood watching, aware from the throb in his chest and thickness in his head that his heart rate, and probably his blood pressure, was spiking. Sweat ran down his face and soaked his clothing. All of this, he understood, was a physical manifestation of something that had nothing to do with the long hours of exertion. Parmer was methodical and thorough, maddeningly so, and as the minutes dragged on, Cork struggled to hold himself back from leaping at his friend, grabbing the water and the brush, and attacking the door.