Tremanty more or less duckwalked out of the back, around to one of the front-facing seats, put on the headset, and tapped the copilot on the shoulder. The rest of them couldn’t hear the conversation, but it went on for a while. And then Tremanty duckwalked back.
“They’re willing to take a look. We’ll swing around and come in from the southwest, fairly low, from fifteen miles out, so the trailer will be in the sound shadow of the mountain. If the image is correct, there’s a hard-packed spot where they think we can put down, but they’ll have to eyeball it first,” Tremanty said.
The flight out took forty minutes—the pilots told Tremanty that they were pushing 200 miles an hour. At one point, well outside of Las Vegas, they crossed an enormous suburban subdivision.
Rae: “What are those people doing out here?”
“Cooking their brains out if they don’t have AC,” Bob said. “You really, really wouldn’t want to have a power outage here.”
* * *
—
THE LAST PART of the flight hugged the gray-and-tan desert terrain; at one point, they flew over a dozen huge, perfect green circles created by center-pivoting irrigation systems over some kind of crops, but what the crops were, none of them knew.
The pilots said something to Tremanty and he pulled the headset back on and asked for a repeat, then said to the others, “We just crossed the California line. We’ll be coming around for the approach.”
Bob had a heavily padded plastic case in his arms containing a bolt-action .300 Winchester Magnum sniper rifle. He’d taken it to a Las Vegas shooting range that morning, prior to joining the FBI SWAT team, to make sure it was still sighted in. He’d been satisfied then, but even with the padding he was worried about what the helicopter’s vibration might do to the heavy telescopic sight. He’d carried it cradled in his arms for the entire flight to give it further protection.
“Don’t want to shoot from more than two hundred yards out, if I have to shoot,” he said. “I hate this fuckin’ vibration.”
* * *
—
THEY WERE SLOWING, then slowing dramatically, then dropping. There was lots of dust thrown up that blocked the view, and the chopper eased back up and sideways for several hundred feet. Tremanty was wearing the headset again and said, “They see a rock. It’s flat and wide enough to land on. We’re going that way. Still well behind the hill.”
Rae was unzipping the equipment bag and pulling out a scoped M15 and then an unscoped M4. She handed the M15 to Lucas along with a thirty-round mag, slapped another mag into her own weapon, and asked Tremanty, “Do they see any snakes?”
Lucas took the rifle and said, “Not that funny.”
“Just askin’.”
They hovered over the reddish brown flat rock, a space some fifty yards across with a few desert plants pushing up out of the cracks. They settled, tipped a bit, settled some more, and were down.
Lucas got on his knees and unlatched and pulled back the side door and was hit by a wave of heat. He climbed out, followed by Tremanty, Bob, and Rae, all looking like an Outside magazine combat team in fashion-approved desert wear.
* * *
—
TREMANTY was carrying a backpack with the iPad, two bottles of water, and a pair of binoculars; he had a Sig P226 in .40-caliber on his hip. Lucas had the other pack with four bottles of water, plus his pistol and the M15. Both Bob and Rae had sidearms, and Bob broke the sniper rifle out of its heavy carrying case and slung it over his shoulder. Rae carried the M4 and a ton of ammo.
The copilot spotted their exact location on the satellite image and oriented them, pointing them toward the Deese mining claim, which was on the far side of a low mountain ridge.
“We’re all gonna feel like jackasses if they left there ten years ago,” Bob said.
Rae: “They didn’t. I got ten bucks says we’ll find them all right there. Deese and Uncle Deese and Cole, this blond chick, and Gloria.”
“Nobody take the bet,” Bob said. “It’d be bad luck.”
Lucas was pulling the chest straps tight on his pack. “Let’s stop bullshittin’ and start walkin’.”
Tremanty pointed, “That way,” and asked, “How come everybody’s got a machine gun except me?”
“Only one machine gun, and I got it,” Rae said. “Because I look hot with it. I might get a job modeling them.”
Tremanty said, “Hmm.”
Lucas nodded and said, “You could do that. Make the big