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.
“More blood here,” Sergeant Brayton said, pointing to a thick splash on a rock. “I say they’ve got her in a tourniquet and probably have a coagulant patch on the wound.”
“Fresh?”
He touched the blood. “Sticky. Hours ago. But she’s hit hard. As long as Max can stay on the scent, we will find her.”