Ancient Echoes (13 page)

Hammill grimaced as another man appeared from the tree-lined
bank.
“Nose, good timing.”

Brownley, aka Brown Nose or simply Nose, smirked. His hair
had been clipped to no more than a quarter inch, his black mustache connected
to a goatee that circled large, rubbery purple lips. He held an H&K G36
assault rifle across his chest, the stock nestled under his arm, and one hand
on the trigger.

“They aren’t being helpful,” Hammill said.

Nose marched toward Big Kyle. Without hesitation he spun the
H&K around and drove the butt into Big Kyle’s mouth and nose. Blood
spurted, and the mountain of a man went down flat on his back, his eyes glazed
as pain hit. Nose struck two more times.

 “Wait! Don’t!” Skinny Buck cried. “No need for that.
They were looking for pillars! We can’t take you there ‘
cause
there’s no such place! We left them on the banks of the Salmon. That’s all.
They were fine. Let us go, please, fellas. We didn’t hurt
no
one
.”

Nose turned on him. After two hard blows, Skinny Buck howled
like a baboon. His attempts to fight back were pathetic. His nose split open,
and blood gushed through his mustache to his mouth and the sides of his face.
He lay on the ground whimpering.

Hammill turned to Big Kyle now on his hands and knees. “So
they’re wandering around, and you can’t help us.”

Big Kyle’s bruised mouth swelled, his broken nose, and
cracked front teeth left his face unrecognizable, but he somehow managed to
open his eyes wide and look innocent. “Maybe...maybe I do have some idea where
those pillars might be. There was talk, the kind that old timers tell kids.
Don't go here. Don't go there.
Bad medicine.
Bad spirits.
Weird, scary animals that
nobody never seen before.
Folks go there and are never heard from again.
But it's all mumbo-jumbo. Not real.”

“Where did they say those pillars were, these old timers
whose tales you're just now remembering?”

“Way the hell out in the middle of nowhere.
The central wilderness area.
Nobody goes out there. Never
have. That's the reason for the tales. Heard tell there are some plenty weird
animals there, too.
Big, dangerous things.
Nobody’s
ever caught one, but those who survive tell tales that don’t even sound real.
That’s why people stay away, even the Indians.”

“You've got a reason for everything, don't you?” Hammill
said.

“It's God's own truth!” Big Kyle insisted.

The Hammer grabbed Skinny Buck by the hair, lifted his head
up off the ground and held a Blackjack hunting knife against his throat. Skinny
Buck's eyes opened wide and he made croaking sounds of terror. “I don't believe
you.”

“Tell him!” Skinny Buck croaked, wary of the sharp steel
touching his skin.

“All I know,” Big Kyle blubbered, “all I can tell you is the
professor wanted to go northwest from Telichpah Flat.
To the
pillars.”

“That you say don’t exist.”

“I could be wrong! I could find them!”

“I doubt it.” Hammill drew the knife in one slick slice
across Skinny Buck's throat, opening his carotid artery and jugular vein. Blood
gushed out, splashing Big Kyle.

He crouched down, rocking and shaking so violently he could
barely speak. “Please! I'll take you there. I’ll find them.”

Hammill shook his head. “Now you're lying to me.”

Big Kyle cried hard now. “No! I swear it!”

Hammill said, “Nose, you know what we do to liars, don't
you?”

Hammill walked back into the forest to the sound of Big
Kyle's gurgled screams as the Nose pried open his broken mouth and cut out his
tongue, leaving him to drown in his own blood.

ON THE FLIGHTS between Washington
D.C. and Boise, Idaho, Charlotte finally slept. Her emotional and physical
exhaustion left her blissfully unaware of the news story captivating the area
she headed toward.

She had snuck away from her burning house amid the hubbub of
fire trucks, police, and nosey townspeople, made a quick stop at the bank to
clean out her savings account, and then used cash to buy a plane ticket to
Idaho. She might have been crazy to go there, but she had nowhere else to turn.
Hiding and hoping that somehow, miraculously, this madness ended wasn’t her
style. The scum behind this had taken away her home, her sanctuary, and years
ago, her husband. She had nothing left to lose.

For a brief moment, in Jerusalem, she remembered how it felt
to live, not merely to exist. She remembered how it felt to love, to laugh, to
care.

She refused to go back to the emotionless woman she had
been, the one filled with bitterness. Bitterness
be
damned; anger filled her. Despite her exhaustion and fear, doing something to
answer unspoken questions buried deep in her soul caused her to feel more alive
than she had for the past thirteen years.

As she left the Boise airport, a startling
Idaho
Statesman
headline caught her eye. Professor Lionel Rempart and a group of
his students had disappeared.

She bought the newspaper, absorbed every detail of the
story, and even then remained stunned by the news.

Dennis had often said if something was too coincidental to
be believable, it was no coincidence. Lionel Rempart’s disappearance was no
accident, neither was the fact that he had come to Idaho, and that Dennis had
learned Idaho was important to all that had happened.

A grim rage spurred her to action. Many phone calls later, she
found a car company willing, for a hefty deposit, to rent via cash instead of a
credit card. At a local D&B Supply sports outfitter, she bought boots, warm
clothes,
an
extra box of ammo for her Glock, and a map
showing the way to the town named headquarters for the search operation.

An all-night drive over winding mountainous roads took her
to Telichpah Flat. Only it wasn’t a town. It was no more than a blip on a dirt
road north of the Salmon River.

The Telichpah Flat General Store, a white clapboard building
with a covered porch at the main entrance, seemed to be the only active
business in town. A hand-painted sandwich board read “Temp Search Hqtrs In
Back.”

 The back of the building also had an outside entrance.
A Lemhi County Sheriff Department car and gray Ford F250 were parked beside it,
and a large make-shift parking area had been set up. She approached a scene of
barely controlled chaos with news trucks, vans, trailers, satellite dishes and
communications gear. Beyond that, to the right of the store, she saw a
permanently closed bar-restaurant, and a couple of houses. To the left,
a trash dump
that included two rusted trucks and six wagon
wheels. Nothing but darkly forested emptiness surrounded the town.

Welcome to Telichpah Flat. She parked at the edge of the
town, lit a cigarette, and watched until the sun came up.

“JUST KEEP HIM away from me!” Lemhi
County Sheriff Jake Sullivan growled at his deputy as he pounded the stapler on
his desk only to find it empty. Barrel-chested and muscular, he had
close-cropped brown hair mottled with gray and receding at the temples.
World-weary green eyes in a craggy, weather-beaten face missed little. They
glowered now at the mounting paperwork around him.

He'd had it with the journalists, family members, university
people, and miscellaneous busybodies who descended on Telichpah Flat, his
patience stretched thinner than string on a crossbow.

Two days before, he received a call from the president of
Boise State University informing him a visiting professor, his graduate student
assistant, six seniors, and their guide had vanished on a field trip to the
national preserve. The U.S. Forest Service area station wasn't staffed for
search and rescue, so the job went to local law enforcement. Although only a
small portion of the Wilderness Area was situated in Lemhi County, the
university group had entered via Telichpah Flat which was, so Jake got stuck
with the operation.

Everyone from the governor on down didn't want their names
connected with the potentially tragic situation, and agreed the sheriff should
take complete charge of the problem. It had rapidly turned into a very big
problem for Jake Sullivan.

The college students' mysterious disappearance had captured
the public's imagination. Human interest stories about them abounded. The fact
that the professor's brother was Michael Rempart, the broodingly handsome
archeologist that
People
magazine once called “a modern day Indiana
Jones,” added fuel to the media fire.

Phone calls, emails, and media reports, along with the usual
flood of crank sightings, dubious eyewitnesses, and publicity-seeking,
self-appointed best friends bombarded Jake. At one point, he slammed down the
phone before he realized it really was Katie Couric.

Not only did the story intrigue the media, but also the
utter desolation of the area. Reporters and photographers descended on the
wilderness, acting as if they had just discovered Idaho and had just learned
that it consisted of not thousands, not hundreds of thousands, but millions of
acres of barely charted virgin land.

They airlifted in satellite dishes and expensive gear to
give them a few of the comforts of home. Jake expected to see a Starbucks open
up any day now.

The university group’s guide, Dan Hoffman, found himself the
scapegoat for the disappearance. Cable TV talking heads bellowed that if any of
the students or their teacher were found dead, he should be charged with
negligent homicide for walking away from the group after the professor
“allegedly” fired him.

A crazed psychic announced that Hoffman went mad and killed
everyone as they slept. The story earned the main headline slot on
The
Drudge Report
.

Hoffman led the search party to the place where he'd left the
hikers, and pointed out the direction the professor had insisted on taking. The
road back to civilization was well-marked. Had the professor so desired,
Hoffman insisted, he could have easily turned around and marched the students
to safety.

The searchers discovered, as Hoffman had warned, that the
trail Rempart wanted to take had been cut off by a landslide, the terrain
around it too steep and slick for inexperienced students to traverse.

Dogs brought in to track the students revealed that they
hadn't traveled over the landslide, but avoided the area completely via a
circular route to the banks of Squaw Creek. The creek entered the Salmon River
just above some treacherous rapids.

Once the news leaked, the press, in a caravan of news trucks
and rented SUVs, demanded to see the area. Higher ups ordered Jake to assist.
He’d be damned if he would let a bunch of tinhorns trample all over a spot that
might have some significance later in his investigation, and took them instead
on a teeth-rattling, bone-jarring, off-road ride for several miles along the
Salmon River road.

Their relief when the ride ended vanished when they learned
they needed to carry their equipment uphill to see the wild, frothing
turbulence of the Salmon's Pine Creek Rapids. Once there, the sheriff pointed
out that they stood on the exact same location as Captain William Clark when he
decided he could not navigate the Salmon River and turned away to meet up again
with Meriwether Lewis. In his journal, Clark described the river as
“almost
one continued rapid...the water is Confined between huge Rocks and Currents
beeting from one against another for Some distance below &c. &c. At one
of those rapids the mountains so Clost as to prevent a possibility of a
portage....The water runs with great violence from one rock to the other on
each Side foaming & roreing thro rocks in every direction.
”

The reporters and cameramen gasped at the dangerous flow,
and seconded Captain Clark's wisdom.

Jake then told them they would need to hike yet another two
miles to reach the place where the students had disappeared along “Sego” Creek.
He lied about the name to keep the politically correct off his back. Exhausted,
cold, and miserable, the reporters chose to go no farther. All were quite happy
to return to the relative warmth and safety of their rented trailers.

Since the trail went cold at Squaw Creek, Jake believed
Rempart must have met with some rafters who offered to help him. Unfortunately,
once on the Salmon River, the university group could have ended up just about
anywhere along its banks, provided they survived the rapids. That meant the
search area was considerably larger than originally thought.

He had no choice but to call in reinforcements even though
he hated that so many people would be tramping through the pristine wilderness.
Normally, except for the heart of summer, this part of Central Idaho stayed
almost devoid of humans. Rowdy sportsmen from out-of-state were the biggest
problem Jake faced, and he liked it that way just fine. The attention the disappearance
received would cause many more people to learn about Idaho’s national forests,
and perhaps decide to visit.

He didn’t
wanted
to see any of this
change. Born forty-eight years earlier in Salmon City, he had left as a young
man for Los Angeles, only to crawl back to escape unwanted, regrettable
notoriety. He found himself middle-aged, divorced, childless, and appreciating
the beauty, peace, quiet and particularly the seclusion of the area.
All of which were sadly lacking at the moment.

And now his deputy had just told him that someone from, of
all places, U.S. Customs, wanted to speak to him! How lost was this guy? Since
no international border, seaport, or air terminal was anywhere near, Jake
wasn’t interested.