“Offered them a delivery fee they could not refuse. The van pulled in three hours later, right before dark.”
“And how far can they really go?”
“Twenty-five miles a charge, max.”
Butler thought about that. “Headlamps enough?”
“I had all four mounted with extra lights.”
He smiled and then frowned. “Why four?”
“Because I’m going with you.”
“Oh, no, you’re not.”
“Oh, yes, I am,” Purdy said. “You’ve tried twice without me and failed both times. You don’t want a third fail. You don’t want to strike out and have to tell M, do you?”
Butler felt his chest constrict. “What about the leg?”
“I don’t have to do a thing with that leg if I don’t want to. Now, get some food and some sleep. To be up there in time, I figure we need to be gone by five a.m. ‘And thank you, Alison, for your resourcefulness and ingenuity,’” she said with a smile.
Butler smiled back. “I appreciate the option, Alison.”
“Glad to be of service,” she said.
He left her room, went out in the Land Cruiser, and used the satellite phone.
When M answered, Butler gave it to him straight, listened to his self-congratulatory reaction to their finding the cartel by looking for Cross, and endured the inevitable barrage of anger that followed news of the helicopter’s current state.
“You cost us at least a half a million dollars!” M roared.
Butler said, “With all due respect, the helicopter was your idea. And it’s not like you can’t afford the penalty.”
“It’s the principle,” M replied in a seething tone. “They should all be dead now.”
“But they’re not. And the helicopter can’t fly. Or at least, I won’t fly it again.”
For several moments, M was silent. Then he said, “You have options?”
“Two,” Butler said. “First one, we sit on the pullout and trailhead where Cross and the cartel men will have to take their rafts out of the river. But that almost guarantees witnesses.”
“And option two?”
“We get a good six or seven miles up the trail that parallels the river to a pinch point and rapids below Black Bear Creek,” Butler said. “Do you see it on your satellite image? Anyone on the river has to get through that spot.”
“I see it,” M said after a few moments. “It does look like a good place for an ambush, but it’s rugged country all the way up. How are you planning to get in there seven miles with that much elevation gain without a helicopter? Hiking? Horses?”
“E-bikes,” Butler said. “Purdy bought four of them today.”
Chapter
89
Sampson and I woke up at four thirty in the morning. It was cold as we wolfed down freeze-dried scrambled eggs and drank coffee while again studying the river on the OnX maps.
We had decided the night before that our best chance for survival was to get down and off the river as fast as possible. But we also understood that the cartel was downstream somewhere and perhaps M’s men were as well.
Sampson pointed to a spot about five river miles below our campsite, north of Black Bear Creek, near mile marker 63. “I’ve read about this. Biggest rapids on the float. Gets tight and fast before it finally spills out into calmer water. If I were Durango and I’d caught up to that Nalgene bottle and now knew you and I didn’t come through those narrows yet, I’d be up on the cliffs above the rapids or just below them.”
“It is the likeliest place if they’ve found the bottle and the transmitter,” I agreed. “And it’s upriver enough that no one will hear the shots.”
Sampson nodded. “And we’d be distracted getting through the rapids, unable to defend ourselves in an attack from above.”
“We could get out here above the rapids at mile marker sixty-four, say, find one of the bridle trails, and walk out the last six miles,” I said. “But we risk running into them.”
“True,” Sampson said, looking at the map and then over at the raft and gear. “But then again, maybe we want to run into them.”
“Explain that.”
John was quiet and then gave me a more in-depth description of his evolving idea, which I could see was the most aggressive alternative to running the rapids beneath the guns of the cartel men and possibly M’s people. His plan also gave us a semblance of control and the element of surprise.