“So we run faster.”
They ran as fast as they could, trying to stay off the loose dirt, into the harder tire tracks where their footprints couldn’t be seen. As they approached a spot where the road turned, they slowed and eased up to a house-sized boulder that defined the turn, and peeked around it.
The two vehicles were parked near a wide eroded crevice that cut toward the top of the mountains. The three men and the woman were standing behind the Jeep, talking. The unknown male, Letty thought, might be explaining something.
Letty got out her phone and took a half-dozen photos at the greatest possible enlargement, and Kaiser whispered, “Still gonna be about the size of ants.”
“Next time we do this, we bring a decent camera with a telephoto lens,” Letty whispered back.
After another minute of talk, the four people trudged into the crevice and disappeared. The unknown man was carrying an olive drab tool bag. When they reemerged, the woman and one of the men were looking at their watches. Then they all turned to the crevice, and crump!
Louder this time. “They’re burying the charge,” Kaiser whispered. “You notice there are no wires, no cell phones in their hands . . . the charge was on a timer.”
The four walked back into the crevice, were out of sight for four or five minutes. When they walked back out, Crain and Duran were carrying what might have been short lengths of railroad ties, but a reddish color, rather than brown. They dropped whatever they were in the back of Crain’s truck with a metallic clang. They talked for a moment, then went to their vehicles.
“Let’s hide,” Kaiser said. “Like, right now.”
A jumble of broken rock and boulders rose behind them, and they found a spot where they could sit down and not be seen. They heard the vehicles go by, and when the truck noises had faded, climbed out from behind the rock.
“We need to see what they were blowing up,” Kaiser said. They walked to the crevice, then up inside it, and found a narrow crack in a bluff that showed burn signs. “It’s C-4,” Kaiser said. “Smell it? And here . . .” He picked up a piece of green plastic wrapper from the ground. “It’s military stuff—at least, this is the way the military stuff is wrapped.”
He showed Letty a piece of green cellophane wrapper with yellow lettering.
Letty was kneeling next to the crevice, saw something deep inside that didn’t look like rock. She reached in and pulled it out, a sharp-edged scrap of heavy metal, c-shaped, the size of her hand from the heel to her fingertips.
Kaiser took it and turned it in his hand and said, “Oh . . . Good Lord. You see any more of this in there?”
Letty used her phone as a flashlight, saw one more piece of metal, pulled it out and handed it to him.
“You know what this is?” Kaiser asked.
“No, but I believe you do. And I don’t like the look on your face.”
“It’s a piece of I-beam,” Kaiser said. “You know, like the beams that hold up buildings? Those two pieces they loaded into Crain’s truck—that used to be three feet of I-beam and they used the C-4 to cut it in half.”
“A test and a demonstration,” Letty said. “We need to back out of here. A crime scene crew might find identifiable fragments of . . . whatever.”
“If we hurry, we might be able to see where they’re going . . .”
They jogged back to the Explorer, but by the time they got there, the convoy had made the turn at the highway and was nearly to the interstate.
“Gonna lose them,” Letty said.
“Now we know what kind of trouble we’re talking about,” Kaiser said, his voice as sober as she’d ever heard it. “This is bad shit, Letty. This isn’t for us anymore. Not running on our own. We need to bring in the FBI and the ATF. A whole team. Maybe a SWAT squad.”