“We’ve got the canyon mouth covered,” Purdy said. “We’re high left and right.”
Butler sprinted past his cabin and up a slight incline, not caring a whit for everything that was being left behind, focused only on the black maw of the canyon ahead of him and on reaching its safety before a cartel bullet could strike him down.
He heard feet pounding over the sound of guns and picked up Dawkins coming hard to his left. Bullets slapped off tree trunks to their right and left. They pinged off the rock ledges at either side of the canyon mouth.
Butler and Big DD vanished into the blackness of the narrow canyon. But when they turned around, they could see a mob of cartel men coming up the incline behind the cabins and moving through the trees.
Butler found a boulder, got behind it, reloaded, and aimed at the killers rapidly approaching. “Give them hell, now,” Butler said. “Make them pay before we get out of here.”
All four of them opened fire at once.
Chapter 70
I had never been to Laramie, Wyoming, much less in a state police helicopter flying fifty miles northwest toward the ten-thousand-acre Circle M Ranch. We arrived around noon mountain time, landing in a hayfield below barns, loafing sheds, and cabins set in a large oval of gently rising ground surrounded by pine trees and steep, rocky hillsides.
It was hot. Thunderclouds rumbled to the west as Mahoney, Sampson, and I hustled out from under the chopper blades toward flashing blue lights atop two Wyoming State Police cruisers that blocked the gravel road into the ranch yard.
“We know who this place belongs to yet?” I asked.
“Some Brazilian company that owns big working cattle ranches all over the world.”
Sampson looked around, awestruck. “I don’t think I have ever been to a prettier place for a massacre. Or a mass murder, for that matter.”
“Forty-plus dead?” Mahoney said. “I’d say that’s a massacre in anyone’s book.”
But when we were given protective booties and gloves and led onto the scene by FBI agents out of Cheyenne, Mahoney was grim.
“Looks more like a battlefield,” he said as he scanned the lower yard, seeing bodies baking in the sun — four adults around a picnic table to our right, a couple of teenagers who’d died in each other’s arms to our left, and three younger kids apparently shot in the back as they’d tried to flee.
On the side of the barn behind those children, someone had spray-painted Death to Maestro! Long live the cartel!
Vultures and crows circled above nine other bodies strewn on the hillsides. Through binoculars we could see that most of them were heavily tattooed, Hispanic, and armed with war weapons: machine guns and grenade launchers.
Behind a huge pine tree about halfway up the gentle rise, the body of a tall, gaunt man in his forties lay beside a scoped rifle.
I went over, skirting the dark pool of dried blood where he’d fallen and the ribbons of it where he’d been dragged behind the tree. Two steps more and I saw his face and the gun, which was no hunting rifle.
“It’s the same guy we caught on that camera at the country club,” I said. “Dale Cortland. The sniper who died in Afghanistan five years ago.”
The state troopers and FBI agents on the scene had told us that most of the dead were up behind the cabins, near a canyon mouth about twenty yards wide. We walked up there and found twenty-seven Hispanic men sprawled dead, with hundreds of brass rifle casings lying in the pine duff around them.
“The Alejandros didn’t kill all of M’s men,” I said. “A group of survivors defended the canyon, shooting anyone who tried to come at them until the surviving cartel gunmen gave up.”
Mahoney said, “Jesus, how many men did Emmanuella send after them?”
“Fifty? Sixty?”
Sampson walked into the mouth of the canyon, studying the dirt, then sniffing the air. “Smells like a grenade or two went off in here,” he called.
Mahoney and I followed him into the canyon, smelling the acrid odor of a blasted place, seeing debris thrown against the wall and the charred spots where the explosives had gone off in addition to dozens of empty bullet casings on the ground.
Sampson, ahead of us, crouched and said, “I’ve got blood here. Looks like one of M’s men was hit.”
“Back out, John,” Mahoney said. “I want a dog in here and the chopper above the canyon before we go any farther.”
Chapter 71
We waited for a police dog to arrive and for the FBI helicopter to get in the air.
My cell phone buzzed in my pocket. It said Paladin on the caller ID.
“Alex Cross,” I said.
“It’s Steve Vance, Dr. Cross,” the data-mining company’s CEO said. “We’ve found definitive links from three different attacks by the cartel going back to a small town named Santa Madera. It’s in the mountains about fifty miles east of Mexico City.”
Fifty miles, I thought. Sounds like the car ride I took to see Emmanuella. “What about here?”
“Where’s ‘here’?”
“Southern Wyoming,” I said. “There was a fight here between the cartel and Maestro. More than forty dead.”
“Forty?” Vance said, shocked. “My God. Can you get us authorization to mine cell phone data in that vicinity?”
“Special Agent Mahoney will get it for you ASAP.”
By the time Ned had made the call, a German shepherd named Maximus was on-site and the FBI helicopter was lifting off with a spotter aboard. From Google Earth, we’d been able to study Fell’s Creek Canyon, which was narrow at the mouth but broadened and steepened deeper into the drainage.
“We going all the way to the back?” I asked as we entered the canyon for the second time that day, now carrying AR rifles we’d gotten from the Cheyenne FBI agents.
“Six miles,” Mahoney said. “And we’ve got the chopper to bring us out.”
Maximus got on the blood scent fast but his handler, Sergeant Arthur Brayton, kept him on a tight rein, especially when we approached the creek bed for the first time.
“You’ll want to check for tracks there in the wet stuff,” Sergeant Brayton said. “See how many folks we’re dealing with.”
Mahoney and I went forward and counted four different sets of human tracks. Three sets were made by large waffle-soled boots of varying sizes, one close to Sampson’s size 13. The fourth set was smaller, with a running shoe sole, and the wearer had been limping badly. There were blood specks to the right side of the right shoe.
“Too heavy for a kid, too light for a man,” Brayton said. “It’s a woman and she’s hit in the meat of her right leg somewhere.”
The wound continued to throw blood, though it became sparser the deeper we went into the canyon. Brayton’s ability to read tracks combined with Maximus’s fine nose had us moving fast but alert in case we pushed them out.
“Anything upstairs?” Mahoney called into his radio.
“You’re running quite a few elk and deer ahead of you,” the FBI pilot replied.
We covered the first three miles in under an hour. Brayton had us slow while the helicopter flew off to refuel. He didn’t want to push them up and over the head of the drainage before we could spot them.
The helicopter returned when we reached mile four. The sky was darkening. Thunder boomed to our west. The pilot made a run up the canyon and saw no activity.
“If they’re still in here, they’re right up ahead of us,” Brayton said. “We get close, I’ll let Max take over.”
The wind picked up. The helicopter flew back to the pasture below the ranch to ride out the storm.
Tensions were high when we reached the last mile, where the trail passed through dense, dark timber before climbing into an alpine bowl. We could see the rock walls of the upper bowl ahead of us as lightning began to crack and flash.