Cold Wind - C. J. Box [116]
To his east was a sudden rise. The cliff face was striated and pale in the starlight. Small, dark forms shot across the flatness of the face, either starlings filling up on an evening insect hatch or bats doing the same thing. On the lip of the cliff he could see brush and bunched thick grass.
Nate took it cautiously as he crossed the river. The water was cold and surprisingly swift and it came up to his knees. He stepped from rock to rock and sometimes couldn’t tell what was beneath him. It was shallow and wide here, but there might be hidden deep holes. He aimed for smudges of tan or yellow beneath the surface, hoping they were rocks, hoping he wouldn’t slip on them.
He made it to the other side, but found himself walled in by twelve-foot-high brush that was too thick and tight to get through. He paralleled the river for a while, but couldn’t find an opening. Then he dropped to his knees and crawled through the brush on a game trail. His presence spooked low-bodied animals that squealed and ran out ahead of him.
After thirty yards, the brush thinned and he was able to stand. He found himself closer than he thought he would be to the cliff wall. Hands on his hips, he leaned back and scouted a route to the top. There were lines of dark vegetation zigzagging up the face. Since the seams were level enough to host weeds and grass, he assumed they would be flat enough to climb up.
But before approaching the wall, he stood stock-still and simply listened and looked around.
It was a familiar quiet, like Hole in the Wall Canyon. But he’d learned how treacherous that kind of quiet could be if he wasn’t fully alert and engaged.
He saw no other people anywhere. No fences. But as he concentrated on a pair of tall cottonwood trees between him and the wall, he saw an anomaly. Nothing in nature had perfect lines, and he’d seen perfect lines. He squinted, and recognized two box-shaped pieces of equipment secured waist-high to the trunks of the trees.
Hunters called them scouting cameras. They were battery-powered digital cameras designed to be mounted near game trails. The cameras had motion detectors and either flashes or infrared nighttime capability. They could take up to a thousand 1.5- to 5.0-megapixel images from a single set of four D batteries.
The usual range of the cameras was forty to fifty feet. He was beyond that. But how could he possibly bypass them or get close enough to destroy them without having his photo snapped with every step?
He stayed still and thought about it.
There were so many moose, deer, elk, and antelope in the river bottom that no doubt the cameras got quite a workout at night. But was someone actually looking at each shot live?
He shook his head. This was the Eagle Mountain Club, not the Pentagon. What probably happened was some intern or maintenance guy was sent down the hill every few days to retrieve the shots and see if trespassers had entered the grounds, and who they were. Individual digital photographs stayed inside the camera and weren’t transmitted to a central control room.
Additionally, the trail cameras were mounted high, not at ground level. It was probably so the security guys wouldn’t have to stare at hundreds and hundreds of photos of rabbits and grouse.
So Nate once again dropped to his knees and simply crawled through with his head down. He didn’t hear a single shutter snap.
Climbing the cliff face wasn’t difficult. In less than fifteen minutes, he slid through the strands of a barbed wire fence and he was in.
Joe drove into the driveway of the Skilling guesthouse, turned off