PRECIPICE (3 page)

Two dark specks appeared over the trees to the north, flittering in a straight line over the field where Moore sat waiting on the southeast edge, the morning sun at his back. He lifted the shotgun slowly off his lap and leaned forward, readying himself without any sudden moves as the specks grew to distinct silhouettes of doves in flight. As they drew to about twenty yards away he raised the gun quickly to his shoulder, sighting along the barrel and leading the first bird by about two feet. He was startled by the sudden sound of a tinny marching tune blaring from the cell phone in his chest pocket, the volume turned up to counteract the decades of gunshots which had left him hard of hearing. He jerked in surprise and fired the Benelli, the pellets flying high of their mark as the two doves weaved out of sight over the tree line.

Moore set the shotgun back across his knees and fished in his breast pocket for the phone with his left hand. He eyed the caller ID, seeing that it was his chief of staff on the line.

“Dammit, Ortiz! I told you not to bug me while I’m huntin’,” he drawled, his voice as deep as the Alabama mud his forefathers had farmed. “You made me miss my shot.”

“I thought you would be finished by now,” came the reply with only the faintest hint of a Hispanic accent discernable. “It’s ten-thirty already.”

“It might be ten-thirty in Washington, but it’s nine-thirty in Alabama and the birds are still flyin’. Shouldn’t’chew be cookin’ huevos rancheros or sump-n?”

An American born to Mexican parents in Houston thirty-seven years ago before spending several years of his childhood back in Mexico, Juan Ortiz was accustomed to these not-so-subtle barbs about his ethnicity—it had become a standard, if tiresome, joke between him and his boss. He played along, affecting a much thicker Hispanic accent, “I was cooking tacos and working on lowering my Monte Carlo when my cousin called. I didn’t want to interrupt you while you were making love to a pig in your pickup truck, but it’s very important news.” Turnabout to redneck jokes was fair play and part of the usual banter. And Sheldon did drive a pickup, while Ortiz had an Audi.

Moore grew more serious. “What’d he say?”

“He’s pretty sure that the international trucking bill will come up next month. He really hopes it will pass.”

“How
much
does he hope?”

“He hopes
a lot
,” Ortiz replied, emphasizing the amount. “He knows it won’t be popular with your party or your constituents, but he’s very intent on having you push it through your committee and then vote for it. With the balance this close in the Senate, your vote should decide the whole issue.” Moore was chairman of the Senate Transportation Committee.

“I’ll be back in Washington tomorrow afternoon. Let’s talk about it more on Tuesday.” Moore could see the way out clearly now.

“You need me to pick you up from the airport?”

“Naw. It was only three days, so I left my car there.”

“See you Tuesday.”

After twenty-three years of public service, Sheldon Moore had little to show for it other than the house he had built here on the rim of the Little River Canyon. His father had bought the land decades ago with his military pension, hoping to someday build a mountain vacation home up here. He’d had no idea that one of the deepest canyons in the eastern US would one day be made into a National Park, turning his piece of property into a unique inholding sandwiched between the park and the Little River Wildlife Management Area. It was a national park view with prime hunting right out the back door. Sheldon could hear the booming echo of the hurricane-swollen river thundering through the bottom of the canyon even from where he sat a half-mile away. Aside from his slice of Alabama paradise, though, Moore had little to show other than the mortgage, an even more expensive mortgage on the spacious house that he thought of as his wife’s place in D.C., and his daughter’s fifty-two thousand dollar-a-year tuition bill from Stanford—which didn’t include books, travel, or spending money.

Unlike most senators, he hadn’t come from money and had no law degree or qualification for any other kind of work. His resume before senator listed only Army grunt and farmer. He’d fallen into politics and felt as though there was no graceful way out. It wasn’t that he was stupid; it was just that growing up on a string of army bases with a Colonel father had not encouraged him to think outside the box. He had lived his life doing exactly what was expected of him with minimal complaint, and he’d gone about being a senator in much the same way. He didn’t dislike being in the Senate and was actually quite good at politics—if there was one thing he had learned growing up in a military family, it was how to work a system without seeming to buck it. What troubled him was the daily grind of being a poor farmer living amongst the wealthy aristocracy, a reality which had worn all of the glow off the power and prestige of his position. Unfortunately, it wasn’t in his nature to actively seek more than his lot in life. However, now faced with the choice between money and power, he’d decided to take the money. Every year at tax time he was embarrassed when the reports were released listing him among the congressmen with the lowest annual incomes. Enough was enough.

A vote for allowing Mexican tractor-trailers and their drivers to cross freely into the US didn’t seem like a big deal if it meant he could comfortably retire. He would lose a lot of campaign money from the party over it, and probably a lot of votes—which would make it a natural choice to not seek re-election next year. He would simply claim that his Mexican-American chief of staff had talked him into a foolish vote. It was better to look weak than duplicitous when breaking the law to this degree. Plus, guys who got caught were using the money to maintain power, not to leave office—and there wasn’t much political hay to be made from investigating a guy who was on the way out. He wouldn’t miss the Senate, and he’d finally have the time and the funds for another hunting trip to Alaska—maybe he’d shoot a moose or at least a big elk.

Moore dropped the phone back into the chest pocket of his vest, lifted the shotgun from his lap and stood, taking care not to topple the stool. He bent and collected the three doves in one large hand, slipping them into the oversize pouch in his hunting vest at the small of his back. He tugged the stool free of the mud and folded it, slinging the strap over his left shoulder, and leaned the top of his shotgun back against his right. He trudged across the muddy field toward the trail to his house, his feet feeling like oversize clown shoes with the huge gobs of red mud clinging to their soles.

*

Exhausted and with his spent arms feeling like jell-o, Chip paddled up to a beach on the right at the end of the river. Harris looked over and grinned from where he and the men were already rolling up the raft near the SUV. It had been a harrowing twenty-six miles. Called the “Marathon” by Gauley River regulars, combining the Upper, Middle, and Lower sections into one grueling day was not for the faint of heart or weak of body. The SEALs had flipped the raft three more times but had required no rescue assistance from Chip. They were almost inhuman in their swimming ability, and they absolutely never lost their cool in water that would have scared many hardened river guides.

Chip stood slowly and stiffly from the tight confines of his kayak, and Harris tossed him a cold beer from a cooler in the back of the SUV. These guys were all business during the day, but they cut loose nicely when the work was over. It turned out that the same lust for adventure that attracted many guides to the river also attracted people to the SEAL teams, and Chip found himself surprisingly similar to these guys in some ways. Unlike most military types, their hair was grown long enough to part. A couple also wore beards, lessening the stark physical contrast between themselves and average Americans, or average dirty river guides. Like many adventurers, they unwound with intensity directly proportional to the intensity with which they focused when the action was on. In fact, they had unwound pretty hard last night on the guides Chip worked with, leaving a rubble of spent beer cans and passed out rafters around the campfire when they finally turned in during the wee hours of the morning. High water meant the river was too dangerous for commercial rafting, so the guides weren’t working today; and drinking was one of the only pastimes available in rural West Virginia on days when there was no work. The SEALs had been up to the challenge, but you would never know they’d won the party last night by the way they paddled today.

Chip cracked his beer open as Harris walked over and toasted him. They fist bumped with their other hands as they gulped their beers, splashing the cool barley juice sloppily down their chins to mingle with the river water that still coated them. They weren’t that different in build, although Harris was about two inches taller at just over six feet and a couple years older having passed thirty. Both were lean and hardened from heavy physical activity, but Harris’ hair was dark while Chip’s was bleached sandy from a full season of river sun. Both were scruffy, neither having shaved for the past four days. Their faces could not have conveyed their divergent lifestyles better. Chip’s features held a round, jovial softness, while Harris had a seriousness to his chiseled chin and cheek bones that conveyed the might of a primordial war god.

Harris’ dark eyes were twinkling with the buzz from the day on the river, but he was guarded in his expression, never wanting to brag openly about his accomplishments. Plus, he wasn’t yet sure of just how much he’d accomplished. The river had been crowded on Friday and the weekend; they had passed hundreds of other rafters and kayakers each day despite even the torrential downpour they had paddled through on Sunday. It had been like a whole new river today, the floodwater morphing it from a fun jaunt into what felt like a very serious, life-or-death situation. They hadn’t seen another soul out there today, either.

“That was some serious shit,” Chip said evenly, watching Harris finally release the stress of the day to break into a chuckle and a wide smile, “I think you boys are ready for Africa.”

The other three whooped and raised their beers in a toast, grateful to finally be assured that they had done something exceptional. They had developed a tremendous respect for this young whitewater virtuoso, who all weekend had acted like nothing they were doing was out of the ordinary in any way. Not many people could run with SEALs—especially in water—and although they would never let him know it, this kid had been lighting them up all weekend long. He was like some kind of duck—totally at home in the water and looking like nothing ever fazed him out there. While they had been furiously paddling and swimming, he seemed to move effortlessly through the river’s chaos with perfect, almost meditative economy of motion.

They had developed a bond over the last few days, Chip telling them river stories of his adventures exploring Central and South America, and them telling him hints and bits of their days on the SEAL teams, flirting with the line of things that were never supposed to be spoken of. All had lost friends in action—Chip on rivers and the others in places and ways so far out of the realm of common experience that Chip couldn’t fully imagine it. If not for a family rafting trip when he was twelve, though, Chip didn’t think it was that far fetched that he might have wound up with these guys, looking for a similar level of challenge along a more disciplined path. Still, at his current stage in life he thought piloting adventure tourists down rivers sounded like a better job than killing people in far-off hostile lands. He’d save his adventuring for unexplored foreign rivers.

Ten minutes later the beers were finished, dry clothes were put on, and the kayak, raft, and gear were loaded. They piled into the SUV for forty-five minutes of winding roads back to Chip’s tattered ’97 Tacoma, still parked at the top of the river.

“So you paddle shit that big all the time?” Roberts asked Chip. At six-foot-two and a burly two-fifty, Roberts was the largest member of the crew. Due to his bulk, he had been the most challenged by the swims back to the raft, and thus the most wide-eyed in the boat all day. The amount of power the bushy-black-bearded behemoth had brought to their paddling had been a huge asset, however, and he certainly hadn’t uttered a word of complaint about the swimming.

“Naw, that’s pretty rare,” Chip answered earnestly, his serious tone another affirmation that today’s adventure had been above and beyond what most whitewater enthusiasts would tackle. “That’s the most water I’ve ever seen here. When I was in South America we skipped over to Peru to explore a creek that nobody had done before. We had to hike seventeen kilometers carrying our kayaks just to get to it. We ran a few nice waterfalls on the creek, but on the second night it poured rain. When we paddled out into the bigger river the next day, the water was cranking high. We had to run about twenty kilometers of huge rapids way down in a canyon. We managed to look at most of the bigger rapids from shore before running them; but there were three or four where there was no way to walk around due to cliffs, so we had to paddle ‘em whether we wanted to or not.”

Carrying the boat around rapids had not even entered their thoughts yet, and the men suddenly realized there was a lot more to this whitewater business than was obvious from their limited experience, just like there was much more to their jobs than simply pulling a trigger. Judgment and experience could mean the difference between life and death.

“Whoa,” Roberts responded softly, nodding. These four men who had seen and done things beyond the comprehension of average people were still unaccustomed to a civilian regularly telling stories that gave them pause.

“How much does that kayak weigh?” Mendez wanted to know. The sleight man was the smallest of the crew at five-foot-eight, though you would never know it—he always gave two hundred percent effort in compensation for his size.

“It’s forty-five pounds empty,” Chip explained. “But with all of my gear and food for four days it’s more like ninety.”

The men all nodded at this. Hauling heavy loads for long distances over uneven terrain was certainly something they could relate to. The conversation quickly turned to tales of the heavier loads that the SEALs had carried through uncomfortable places, with Chip often wincing at the suffering that these guys seemed to get off on. In that way they were different—carrying the kayak was Chip’s least favorite part.