“The Gate complex,” they said almost in chorus.
Tom smiled wryly, and began cutting the man’s hands free with swift jerks of his belt knife.
“And incidentally, he’s real disillusioned, and willing to cooperate.”
Tully nodded. “You know, there are times when being a son of a bitch is its own punishment. What’s this guy’s name?”
Tom put the question to him; he seemed a little surprised to be asked. “He says the Russians just called everyone by numbers or nicknames. His name…” They went back and forth on it for a while.
“It’s One Ocelot. That’s the name of the day of the month he was born on.”
“Maybe it should be One Lucky Cat, instead,” Tully said, and grinned. “After all, we got here before the coyotes.”
A day later, Tully took off his hat. “Do you realize where we are?” he said solemnly, pointing to the open country to the north of the creek whose bank they were following.
“No,” Tom sighed. “Where are we, exactly, Tonto?”
“This, Kemosabe, is Movie Flats.”
He swept a finger around the rolling sage-and-grass-covered circle, taking in the towering peaks of the high Sierras behind them to the west, and the rough upthrust slabs and boulders and wind-worn arches of the Alabama hills ahead. As he spoke the dawn broke over the Inyo Mountains still farther east; they were nearly as high as the Sierra Nevada, towering ten thousand feet above the Owens. The first spears of light hit the snow still lingering on Mount Whitney behind them, then ran down the sheer face of the sawtoothed granite range like a speeded-up film. A few seconds later it struck the tops of the Alabamas, only five thousand or so feet but still looking formidable in their scarred, tumbled, boulder-strewn steepness, turning them blood colored for an instant.
Tom felt a prickle of awe at the sheer bleak grandeur of the view, then thrust it aside. Tully continued:
“They filmed Gunga Din here. Springfield Rifle. And How the West Was Won. And Maverick… And pretty well all the Hopalong Cassidy, Tom Mix, B-movies, and all the Lone Ranger episodes…”
“You’re impossible,” Adrienne snorted.
“Naw, just highly improbable,” Tully said.
Tom grinned; sometimes Roy’s clowning got a little wearing, but it was also a welcome break in the tension at moments like this.
After a moment Tully went on more seriously: “It’s a lot prettier in real life, though.”
They urged their horses into a canter; they were heading down Lone Pine Creek, eastward toward the canyon it cut through the hills. There was no road along it on this side of the Gate, barely even a trail just north of the water, but there was plenty of cover—big Freemont cottonwood trees reaching up to nearly a hundred feet, their serrated-edged leaves clattering overhead; the dark cool damp-smelling air was thick with their downy seed fluff. Sycamores and willows formed the understory, hanging over the water; walnuts showed their furrowed, dark brown trunks. He heard something snort, grunt, and crash aside through the undergrowth as they passed—wild boar, by the tracks—and there were the broader cloven marks of feral cattle in the same wet sand, and the neat prints of deer.
Stone closed around the little stream, but not in unbroken walls; there were gaps between the tilted rock ledges. Tom counted them carefully; it was easy to get lost in this tangle, and easier still when the version he was familiar with was different in so many details. He’d been through here on Fish and Game business FirstSide, and on hiking trips, but… There was a lot more vegetation for starters, and no network of dirt roads, and that didn’t complete the list. Hundreds of years of difference in the details of the weather had made an impression even on the rocks—a boulder falling one way rather than another, or the shape of a wash.
“We turn north here,” he said at last.
The open sandy wash was as good as a road for horses; better, since it was easier on their hooves than a hard surface. It was also more open than the growth along the creek, which made him nervous. If he’d been in command of the conspirator’s forces, he’d have had more Scouts and lookouts combing the area. But there hadn’t been any sigh of humans or shod horses, even though the sandy dirt showed tracks well.
Well, that’s what you get for using untrustworthy troops, he thought, a little smugly.
Half a mile up the wash a ridge let up to the crest of the hills—and to a weird-looking loop of rock, a natural arch at the crest. They dismounted and handed their reins to One Ocelot; the Zapotec was almost pathetically grateful and eager to please, being even more completely isolated and lost than he’d been as one of the Batyushkov’s mercenaries. If he lost their help… well, it was a very long walk home. Until they told him, he hadn’t ever realized that there was an overland connection.
Together the three of them made their way up the steep ridge; Simmons and Kolo were off looking over Cerro Gordo, and Sandra had to stay with their horses at the base camp—you didn’t leave a hobbled horse alone in grizzly and leopard country.
The ascent took about ten minutes of hard climbing, enough to have them breathing deeply. They took the last bit before the crest very slowly. He felt the rock harsh and gritty under his hands, the smell dry and dusty in his nostrils; his rifle was across the crook of his elbows. Carefully they raised their heads until their eyes were over the ridge.
“Well, that’s not just a hunting lodge, by Jesus,” Tom said, looking at the settlement several miles away through the clear dry air.
The original building might be—it looked a lot like a fairly fancy dude ranch, complete with corrals and stables and barns, all in Western form and what looked at this distance to be adobe; the swimming pool added an appropriate touch….
“Marble?” he said.
“There’s a quarry of it a couple of miles that way,” Adrienne said, pointing southeast. Snidely: “I’m shocked the whole place isn’t built out of it.”
The patch of cultivated ground northward looked too large, several hundred acres… and so did the X-shaped airstrip south of the house and near the edge of the great lake. Each arm of the landing field was fifteen hundred feet at least. A Hercules stood on it, and several smaller two-engined planes he couldn’t identify at this range were parked slightly off it in earth revetments. There was an improvised-looking wooden control building with a radar pickup and broadcast antenna on its roof at one end, next to the wind sock. Southward at the edge of the water was a boathouse and a fair-sized sailboat tied up at a long wooden pier.
And east of the house was a tent camp. Several dozen big twelve-man tents were up, with more rising; he could see the unmistakable centipede of a column of marching men there, raising a trail of dust. So did vehicles heading south and east, along a rough dirt track around the lake and back toward the mountains. Guard towers stood at the four corners of the camp, even if it was still mainly empty space; they were tripods of lodgepole pine with a central ladder. The platforms had roofs and walls of thick logs squared and notched, and poking out through the slits were the barrels of heavy machine guns. Searchlights too…
“Well, that’s proof,” he said, softly.
“With a dollop of whipped cream and a maraschino cherry on top,” Tully said.
“And you know,” Tom said, “those guard towers would be absolutely useless for defending that camp. Against anyone with modern weapons, that is; and not even really useful against Indians. Shooting down at a steep angle like that, you don’t get a beaten zone. The bullets just hit the dirt and stay there. But they’d be crackerjack for keeping people from getting out.”