Rosner drove the truck over. He introduced Chee to pilot, copilot and technician, and started refueling.
“P.J. told me something about what you’re looking for,” the pilot said. “I’m not sure she had it right. Mine opening up on the canyon wall. Is that it?”
The pilot’s name was Tom McKissack. He looked a weather-beaten sixty or so, and Chee remembered P.J. had said McKissack was one of those army pilots who’d survived the risky business of rescuing wounded Air Mobile Division grunts from various Vietnam battles. He introduced Chee to the copilot, a younger fellow named Greg DeMoss, another army copter veteran, and to Jesse, who would be doing the technical work. All three looked tired, dusty and not particularly thrilled by this detour.
“Sounds like P.J. had it right,” Chee said. “We’re trying to locate the mouth of an old Mormon coal mine abandoned back in the eighteen eighties. We think it has a mouth fairly high up the canyon wall. Probably on a shelf of some sort. And then on top, maybe the remains of a tipple structure where they hoisted the coal up and dumped it.”
McKissack nodded and looked at the Polaroid camera Chee was carrying. “They tell me those things are a lot better now,” he said. He handed Chee a barf bag and a flight helmet, and explained how the intercom system worked.
“You’ll be sitting on the right side behind DeMoss, which gives you a great view to the right, but nothing much to the front or the left. So if your mine is on the east side, your best chance to see it will be when we’re going north, down the creek toward the river.”
“OK,” Chee said.
“We normally fly a hundred and fifty feet off the terrain, which means our equipment is scoping a swath three hundred feet wide. Down a canyon it may be lower, but we rarely get closer than fifty feet. Anyway, if you see something interesting, holler. If the situation is right, I can hover a minute so maybe you can get pictures.”
McKissack started the rotors. “One more thing,” he said, his voice coming through the intercom now. “We’ve been shot at a few times out here. Either people think we’re the black helicopters the Conspiracy Commandos are taking over the world with, or maybe we’re scaring their sheep. Who knows? Are we likely to get shot at in this canyon here?”
Chee considered that a moment and gave an honest answer. He said, “Probably not,” and they took off in a chaos of dust, motor noise and rotor thumping.
Later Chee had very few memories of that flight, but the ones he retained were vivid.
The tableland of multicolored stone, carved into a gigantic labyrinth by canyons, all draining eventually into the narrow green belt of the San Juan bottom. Multiple hundreds of miles of sculptured stone, cut off in the north by the blue-green of the mountains. The slanting afternoon sun outlining it into a pattern of gaudy red sandstone and deep shadows. The voice in Chee’s ear saying: ‘You can see why the Mormons called the Bluff area “the Hole in the Rock,” and the tech saying: 'If there was a market for rock, we’d all be rich.'
Then they dropped into the Gothic Creek Canyon, flying slowly north, with the rimrock of Casa Del Eco Mesa above them and the great eroded hump of the Nokaito Bench to their left. The pilot’s voice told Chee they were about two miles up canyon from the point their censor map had shown the streaks of migrated radiation along the canyon bottom.
“Be just a few minutes,” McKissack said. “Let me know if you see anything interesting.”
Chee was leaning his head against the Plexiglas window, seeing the stone cliffs slip slowly past. Here runoff erosion had sliced the sandstone. Here a rockslide had formed a semi-dam below. Here some variation of geology had caused a broad irregular bench to form. In places, the wall was almost sheer pink sandstone. In others, it was layered, marked with dark stripes of coal, the blue of shale, the red where iron ore had colored the rock.
“It ought to be close,” McKissack said. “I think we can presume the radiation from the old tailings was washing down stream.”
Gothic Creek Canyon had widened a little, and the copter was moving down it slowly and almost eye level with the rimrock to Chee’s right. Chee could see another bench sloping up from the canyon floor, supporting a ragtag assortment of chamisa, snakeweed and drought-stunted salt bush. It angled upward toward the broad blackish streak of a coal seam. Then just a few yards ahead and just below Chee saw what he was hoping to see.
“There’s a fair-sized hole in that coal deposit up ahead,” McKissack said. “You think that could be what you’re looking for?”
“Could be,” Chee said. They slid past the hole, with Chee taking pictures.
“Did you notice that structure above? Up on the mesa?” McKissack asked.
“Could you go up a little so I can get a picture of it?”
The copter rose. Almost directly above the mouth of the mine was the mostly roofless remains of a stone structure. Some of its walls had fallen, and a pyramid-shaped skeleton of pine timbers rose from its center.
“Well now,” said McKissack, "does that do it for you?”
“I’m finished, and I thank you,” Chee said.
“Unfortunately you’re not quite finished,” McKissack said. “We have to drag this all the way down to the San Juan, and then back, and then we go back over the mesa and finish our mapping there.”
“About how long?”
“About one hour and thirty-four minutes of flying four miles north, making a sharp climbing turn, and flying four miles south, and making a sharp climbing turn and flying four miles north. Doing that until we have the quadrant covered. Then we land, get the tanks rejuiced and do it all over again. Except this time it will be quitting time and we’ll knock off for the day.”
The next voice was the technician’s. “And then we come back tomorrow and do it all over again with another four-mile-by-four-mile quadrant. Only time the monotony gets broken is when somebody shoots at us.”
Chapter Twenty-two
Joe Leaphorn cleared away his breakfast dishes, poured himself his second cup of coffee and spread his map on the kitchen table. He was studying it when he heard tires rolling onto the gravel in the parking space in front of his house. He pulled back the curtain and looked out at a dark green and dusty Dodge Ram pickup. The truck was strange to him, but the man who climbed out of it and was hurrying up his walk was Roy Gershwin. Gershwin’s expression bespoke trouble.
Leaphorn opened the door, ushered him into the kitchen, and said, “What brings you down to Window Rock so early this morning?”
“I got a telephone call last night,” Gershwin said. “A threatening call. A man. Sounded like a fairly young man. He said they were going to come after me.”
“Who? And come after you for what?”
Gershwin had slumped down in the kitchen chair with his long legs stretched under the table. He looked nervous and angry. “I don’t know who,” he said. “Well, maybe I could guess. His voice sounded familiar, but I think he had something over his mouth. Or he was trying to talk funny. If it was who I think it was, he’s one of those damn militia people. Anyway, it was militia business. The fella said they’d heard I’d been snitching on ‘em, and I was going to have to pay for that.”
“Well, now,” Leaphorn said, "it sounds like you were right to be worrying about those people. Let me get you a cup of coffee.”
“I don’t want any coffee,” Gershwin said. “I want to know what you did to get me screwed like this.”
“What I did?” Leaphorn diverted the coffeepot from the fresh cup and refilled his own. “Well, let’s see. First, I just thought about what you were asking me to do for you. I couldn’t think of any way to do it without getting into a crack—having a choice of either telling a judge you were my source or going to jail for contempt of a court order.”