At length she turned from the smoke and found the men soon enough, maybe a half mile away. They were trusting her tip, following the trail out. The tracker, Luke, was going to be screwed now, because there were enough hikers here that following boot prints was not an easy task. In the backcountry, he’d have had better luck.
It took her much longer to find their shadow. He’d moved off the trail and climbed up to where an overgrown ridgeline ran parallel to it but elevated, some eighty feet above. Following that would slow him down but it would also allow him to see everything a little faster. While she watched him, he turned back toward the tower, and he swung the rifle with him. For an instant her stomach tightened and her bowels knotted and she was certain he was going to shoot.
He didn’t. He was using the scope in the same way she was using the binoculars. Checking his surroundings, nothing more. He pivoted in a full circle and then continued on. The search party would hike down the trail and he would follow, and so she and Connor could not walk that way. Eventually, it would become apparent that a mistake had been made, and the shadow would return, and when that happened, she and Connor could not be here either. She needed to get him to help, but she’d just blocked her one path to safety by sending his pursuer on the only trail back to town. She had studied the map and stared through the binoculars for hours each day, and she knew well what waited for them off the trail. Treacherous climbs, impassable canyons, swift rivers, remnants of the glaciers. It would be slow going for Hannah and the boy, and they would leave a trail, and they would be caught.
To the west, the smoke met the angled sun and she thought of what was happening down there. Dozens of men and women at work in the woods, radios at their belts, helicopters awaiting a call. The model of emergency response was in action down there, in a place where no one would think to search, because no one would ever walk toward a forest fire.
Unless they understood a forest fire.
A panic run was a fatal run, that much she understood far too well, had learned from far too many aspects of her life, and so she stared at the wilderness through her binoculars and she tried to think of a way out other than the one she saw.
Still, her eyes returned time and again to the smoke.
They could reach the fire by dawn and they would not encounter the man with the rifle, who was walking in the opposite direction, and once at the fire, help would be easy to find. Radios would abound, trucks would be brought in, helicopters might settle down and drop a sling for them if they required it.
Can you make it there? she asked herself, and the ghost of the girl she had been answered, Of course, it’s not so bad a hike at all. Then the voice of the woman she was now said, It’s not about the miles. It’s about returning. Can you make it there?
Neither voice had an answer to that one.
23
Between Red Lodge and Cooke City, Ethan began to count. It had started as a simple exercise, a fight against the adrenaline and rage and fear. It had started as simple numbers. One to a hundred, then in reverse. When that grew old, he counted the cars they passed, and then, because there weren’t enough of them, he counted the switchbacks. Later, higher up the mountain, he chose something else.
He began to count the men and women he had trained in the art of survival. Started with the ones from the most recent days, the private work, and went back in time. Back to the Air Force, to the jungles and the deserts and the tundras where they’d dropped him off for a week or ten days or a month. There were about thirty in each group, and he trained four groups a year, and he’d trained for fifteen years. That was eighteen hundred for the military alone. Add in the civilians, and he believed it was close to twenty-five hundred. Perhaps, all told, it knocked on the door of three thousand.
Three thousand people he had taught how to be survivors. For some of them, it had worked. He knew that. A pilot downed in the Pacific; a soldier separated from his unit in Afghanistan; a hunting guide who’d broken his leg in a fall. Ethan had received letters and phone calls. Not to mention commendations and awards.
Three thousand sets of instructions.
Not one test for himself.
Not a real one, at least. He’d trained, and trained, and trained. With the best in the world, for a lifetime, he had trained, but he had never been tested. The finest fighter never to see the ring.
Only he was no fighter. It was the old conversation with his father again: a Marine’s son who’d joined the Air Force, that had been the first offense, but his dad had been able to shake it off, reckoning that the world had entered a new age of combat and in the future all scores would be settled with missiles and drones, sad as that seemed to make him. Then Ethan had become a survival instructor, and that was even more of a personal affront to his father somehow, more disappointing in some perverse way that came from his father having measured his own worth based on his ability to kill.
You just teach them what to do if they’re out there alone? he’d asked. From over here? How will you know if it works?
How it had pained him, the idea that his son would always be over here. There was no war at the time, but that didn’t matter to Rod Serbin-there might be, there would be, and when it came, his son would be on the sidelines, by choice. Whether or not he saved any lives didn’t seem to matter. He wouldn’t take any lives, and that was the measure. It bothered him, but not Ethan. Not until today. Now he drove, and he planned, and he wondered.
Could he do it? Would he?
When they returned to town, the smoke from the fire was high and clear and Ethan was surprised to see how much it had grown since the morning. Then again, there wasn’t much of the world the same since the morning.
“Where do you believe the boy is now?” the burned man asked into the quiet.
“I have no idea. It’s been more than twelve hours. If he kept moving, he could have covered some ground. Or he could have been located already.”
“We’re going to need to know that. The problem is simple: if they already have him, then we’re going into the woods for nothing, and I’m wasting hours that I can’t afford to waste. Rather, I’m wasting hours you can’t afford to waste. I’m sorry, Ethan, to have forgotten the joint nature of our venture. So you have to check. Your job is to find him, regardless of whether he’s hiding under a rock or in a hotel room with three marshals outside the door. It could have gone either way by now.”
“Then I’ll need to make a call.”
“That’s fine.”
“We’ll have to stop,” Ethan said. “This isn’t cell-phone country. You lose signal in Red Lodge and don’t get it back up here.”
“So we’ll stop. You’ll check. It should take no more than a phone call. I’ll be right here with you. Say the wrong word and you’ve chosen the outcome more surely than I have. Something you need to remember-she’ll go first. I’ll see to it.”