Woo pulled in beside the Explorer, got out, and exchanged curt greetings with the search team members. I stepped out — and set foot directly in a patch of cold, sticky mud.
“Careful of the goop,” the larger of the graybeards said. “It’ll get you every time.”
“Now you tell me.”
He grinned, which made his bulbous nose, scarred white from bouts of skin cancer, seem even larger.
“Tom Wood,” he said, extending his hand. “I’m team leader.”
Wood was six foot one, my height, but stockier than my 190 pounds. The other male member of the team was five foot eight and 150 pounds at most. He wore a faded Batman sticker on his helmet and wire-frame eyeglasses. Wood introduced him as Richard Wojewodski.
“And this lovely lady,” Wood said, “is Bree Kelly. Better mind your manners. Bree teaches tae kwon do.”
“ ’Preciate you helping guide us in,” Bree said. She had the grip of a professional wrestler.
I observed how none of them looked like cops. That’s because they weren’t, Wood said. They were unpaid civilian volunteers, he said, who coupled their love of the outdoors with passion for public service. Wood taught junior high math. Wojewodski designed software. Kelly was an electrician and part-time ski-lift operator at the nearby Heavenly Mountain Resort.
“I understand you’re a pilot,” she said.
“Flight instructor.”
“Where?”
“Rancho Bonita.”
If any of them were impressed by my occupation or city of residence, they hid it well.
“Good luck,” Woo said, climbing back in his Jeep.
“You’re not coming along?” Wood said.
“Too cold.”
The search and rescue folks, Woo said, would give me a lift into town after they’d completed their mission. I watched him turn around and head back down the road, brake lights glowing, the SUV bouncing among the furrows and over rocks, before the forest swallowed him from view and he was gone.
Wood spread out a topographical map on the hood of his SUV, along with various satellite photographs. He asked me to confirm the location where I’d observed aircraft debris. After I did, he punched some buttons on a miniaturized GPS strapped to his wrist. We were looking at a two-hour climb at the minimum, he said, excluding rest breaks.
“You didn’t bring any climbing gear of your own, obviously,” Wood said.
“I hadn’t planned on doing much climbing. I prefer flying over mountains.”
He looked down at my low-cut, mud-caked Merrell hiking shoes, the kind favored by many covert operators in the field, including those of us who’d served with Alpha.
“You’ll probably be OK in those,” Wood said of my choice in footwear. “We’ll take along an extra pair of crampons just in case. Might wanna lose some of that mud before we shove off. Your legs’ll start to get heavy pretty quick otherwise.”
He snapped open a folding knife and handed it to me. I walked across the small clearing toward a large rock, where I intended to sit and clean the soles of my boots while Wood and the others squared away first-aid equipment and shrugged on their backpacks. That’s when I noticed fresh tire tracks on the frosty ground.
“Somebody’s been up here already,” I said.
Wood walked over and took a look at the tread marks. “Nobody was here when we showed up. And that was at five.”
“Then they were here before then.”
“What makes you think that?”
“Frost forms on clear nights, in early morning hours. Soon as the sun tops those trees, it’ll melt off, just like it would’ve yesterday, given the weather. If you got here at five, then that means they were here sometime last night.”
“How do you know we didn’t leave those tracks, backing in and out?”
I glanced at the tires on Wood’s Explorer, then at the marks left on the ground.
“The turning radius and wheelbase dimensions are different. Also, these tracks were left by smaller tires — a van or a small truck, would be my guess. Plus, you can see where the driver pulled in, put it in reverse, and headed back down the mountain.”
Wood squatted for a closer look.
“For a flight instructor,” he said, “you sure seem to know a lot about tire tracks.”
We learned all about tire tracks at Alpha, along with hundreds of other seemingly trivial topics of study. When you stalk terrorists across the globe in the name of national security, any knowledge, our instructors constantly reminded us, can become an all-powerful weapon, however inconsequential that knowledge might seem in the classroom. Tom Wood didn’t need to know all that, though.
“Tires are groovy,” I said.
He strained to laugh.
Where the pine forest was thick and the sun could not penetrate the tops of the trees, the trail was hard packed and easily negotiated. Where the trees thinned, enough so that light could filter through, the path devolved into mud. You didn’t need to be Tonto to spot two distinctly different sets of man-size footprints embedded in the brown muck. One set of prints was left by heavy-soled boots; the other, what looked like basketball or running shoes. And there was something else: to the right of the boot prints, plowed the length of the trail, were two shallow, thin gouges in the mud, spaced about a foot apart, like someone had dragged something down the mountain.
“Hikers,” Bree Kelly said as she followed me up the trail. The same two hikers, she speculated, whose tire tracks I’d noted at the trailhead, now more than an hour’s climb behind us.
“Can’t be the same hikers,” I said. “There’s only one set of prints coming back down the hill — the guy wearing the boots.”
“Could be the other guy found another way back down,” Wojewodski said, bringing up the rear. “These mountains have unmarked game trails going off all over the place.”
We stopped five minutes later for breakfast. Wojewodski offered me an apple from his pack. Wood gave me water from his CamelBak. Kelly shared a bag of trail mix. I pretended to eat the raisins, chucking them into the trees when nobody was looking. Why anyone eats dried, shriveled grapes unless they’re starving is beyond me.
The trail ascended into a narrow canyon where the sun could not go and the temperature dropped at least ten degrees, then curved northeast along a barren moraine. We traversed across talus, avoiding a modest-sized snowfield, before picking up the path on the other side and climbing in elevation. I didn’t complain when Wood stopped to check our bearings on a sun-splashed promontory overlooking Chalmers Peak and the barren granite ridge that ran south-to-north, bridging Chalmers to Mount San Marcos. I needed the rest. My legs and lungs were burning.
Wood studied the terrain ahead with a pair of scratched and dented field glasses.
“You say you saw the wreckage inside the tree line?”
I pointed. “Three hundred meters below that saddle, almost square in the center.”
We were no more than a mile from the site, Wood said. The least exhausting way to get there, he concluded, was to find a chute leading to the top of the saddle, cross the saddle to its midpoint, then make our way down the rock face and back into the pines.
“Piece of cake,” Wojewodski said, tightening the waist belt on his pack.
It was no piece of cake.
That one mile translated to a grueling, sweat-soaking, seventy-minute endurance test which probably would’ve taken considerably less time had I not lost my footing and slid about thirty feet down a sheer rock slope, twisting my football-damaged right knee and scraping up my left elbow. Wood and his colleagues had to rope me back up.