Twenty
HALF
DOME TRAIL
WEDNESDAY
AFTERNOON
Parker’s lips
twisted into a sour grimace as he watched their prey scurry quickly out of
sight. They might as well have slowed down and saved their strength. He and the
General were no longer as formidable as they seemed to fear. He looked at the
General and snorted derisively. They weren’t exactly Attila and his howling
hoard baying up the trail in hot pursuit.
It was not
simply a lack of warm bodies that handicapped the tattered remains of the Mariposa
Battalion. The fight between he and the General had resulted in a number of
bruised ribs, a bloody nose, a nicely swelling shiner on Parker, and a badly
sprained ankle on the General. Parker struggled to support the General’s bulky,
limping body as they clomped along the ever-rising trail.
The pathway
wound along the steepening north shoulder of Half Dome. Above and below sheer,
vertical granite stretched for a long way in both directions. After a long hard
climb they reached the base of the first ascent. The route stopped meandering
alongside the towering granite. Instead the trail steepened drastically as it
climbed a series of narrow, dizzying, bare-rock switchbacks.
“Vince,” huffed
Parker breaking a long silence, “this is taking all day. We’re never gonna
catch up at this rate.” He stopped to rest for a moment, dumping his gear and
bending over, hands on knees, breathing deeply. The altitude was killing him.
The General waited, stoic, silent. He rested his muscular body against the rock
face to keep the weight off his bad ankle.
“Look,”
continued Parker reasonably, “let me leave you here. You can rest that bum
ankle and cover the back trail. I’ll climb on up, nail the preacher, get your
precious computer drive and come right back down for you. Come on, Whataya
say?”
“What I already
said,” growled Taylor through clenched teeth. “No way! Now stop stallin’ and
get movin’.”
“Come on Vince!
Don’t you get it? We don’t have time to futz around all day. I told you, forget
the stupid drive. It’s not important any more!”
“No, I think you
don’t get it, Mister Parker.” Taylor continued in an odd, almost plaintive
tone, “It ain’t just the lousy computer thing no more, I know that. Too many of
my boys—good American men—have already died for this. They got to be avenged. I
can’t just walk away. I can’t forget my men. I can’t let some crummy preacher
dump all over us, then get away clean. He’s gotta pay. And by god, he’s gonna
pay me, personally!
“Fine!” snapped
Parker, “You’re big and bad. You’re the Terminator, himself. So why don’t you go up there and get him by yourself,
General Patton! Not me. Not today. You think I’m fool enough to hang around
here, waiting to get popped by the Feds? You’re obsessed do you know that? Well
you can just obsess yourself right on up the mountain, you blasted fool! I for
one am outta here!” Angry now, Parker reached down to retrieve his gear. He
froze in place as the muzzle of the General’s MP5 pressed against his skull; the
crisp snap of the three-way safety clearly audible in the thin mountain air.
“Thank you for
sharing your puny little feelings,” Taylor announced in a conversational tone.
“Now, as I see it, I’m still the Commanding General of the Mariposa Battalion,
and you are still one of my troops. We can just hold us a battlefield
court-martial right here on the trailside, boy.” With his free hand Taylor grabbed
Parker by the scruff of the neck shouting, “I got some real important news for
you mister, so listen up! You sure god better fear me more than the lousy Feds! Every day of the week and twice on
Sundays. You got that soldier?
“Yeah,” gasped
Parker.
“What’s that
Grunt?” snarled Taylor, his face contracting like a fist.
“Sir, yes sir!” snapped out Parker,
playing the game for his life.
“That’s good
boy, real good,” said the General soothingly. “That’s just what I wanted to
hear. You understand, don’t you? See, I have to know that you are personally
loyal to me, otherwise I have to kill you.” Taylor slowly brought his mouth
down close to Parker’s ear, in hushed tones he inquired, “Are you loyal to me,
Mister Parker?”
“Yes sir,”
gasped Parker, closing his eyes and cringing. Say anything, humor him, he told himself. You know you’re gonna get a bullet in the head after the guy teases you
long enough. But after a long, sweating minute, he realized the worst wasn’t
going to happen just yet.
“Good,” Taylor
repeated gently, as if he could dissolve the tension with a word. He safed his
weapon, slung it over his shoulder and picked up Parker’s gear, handing it to
him.
“Now,” he said,
hopping over to the base of the switchbacks, gesturing Parker to precede him,
“let’s put this train back on the tracks.”
Parker obeyed
without further resistance. From that point on he lived and moved with the
conviction that, one way or the other, he was going to die that day. The only
remaining question; would death be administered by the United States
Government, or would it come from the hand of his own beloved General?
If I’m going to die anyway, I might as well do it with some semblance
of honor—in battle.
That’s as far as
his dazed thinking could take him. With great reluctance he took Taylor’s arm
across his shoulders. Parker bore the General’s weight continuing the hopeless
climb to infinity. Taylor limped along, helping as best he could. Their progress,
though painfully slow, kept in an inexorably upward direction.
“Hey,” said
Taylor to projecting a hearty, encouraging demeanor, “look at it this way; it’s
like we got ‘em trapped in a boxing ring. You know, they can run but they can’t
hide.”
* * *
Drake stood gasping
at the top of the last switchback. Gazing upward, his hand shaded his eyes.
Half Dome’s monolithic spire soared into the heavens like the tower of Babel.
It was almost too immense to comprehend. From where they stood a short drop led
to an artificial stairway which crawled up the curving flank. The flimsy-looking
contraption all but disappeared as it near the summit. As Paige told him
several days ago, in the comfort of her kitchen, Half Dome requires very little
in the way of mountaineering skill. It is merely a matter of pulling one’s self
up an endless, precipitous ladder with handrails.
Back in 1919 the
Sierra Club had strung the first cables, allowing inexperienced climbers to
make the dramatic ascent of one of the world’s most impressive natural wonders.
Later, during the Great Depression, work gangs from the California Conservation
Corps had come along and hooked up a new set of cables. They improved the
original design, bolting three-foot long 2X4’s to the granite face, creating a
rough but serviceable stairway. Over the succeeding decades the cables had become
old, rickety and dangerous, so much so, the Park Service had recently installed
a third generation of cordage, consisting of thick, braided wire cable. Paige
bent down at the foot of the cables, retrieving two pairs of heavy leather
gloves from a wooden box half-filled with them. The gloves had seen heavy use.
“Experienced
hikers leave their used gloves here for people who come without any.” She
handed a pair to Drake, kneading the stiffness out of the other. “Put these on.
Believe me, you’ll need them. Be careful where you put your hands. You don’t
want to snag yourself on a jagged piece of wire.”
Drake took a
last reluctant look around, seeking some other way, any other way out. Since
they obviously had no other choice he mounted the steps after Paige and began
the challenging final ascent. At the end of this ladder stood the summit of
Half Dome, literally the end of the trail.
“This is
surreal,” said Drake, grasping the cable and following Paige. “It’s like
climbing some surrealistic Jacob’s Ladder to heaven.”
“I know,” said
Paige from above. “It looks sort of like a stairway, but it’s not. On an
ordinary staircase you only climb about eight inches up for every twelve inches
forward. Here, the pitch is more like two feet up for every one foot forward.”
After thirty
minutes of lifting one foot, placing it on the next rung, reaching up the
cables to drag his body higher, while shuffling to the next tread, and so on
and so forth, Drake felt he had been climbing for an eternity. But it was as
Paige had promised, neither technically challenging nor even dangerous. It was
arduous, toilsome, endlessly repetitious exertion. That’s all.
Initially, Hank
had balked at mounting the crazy contraption. Drake had to start climbing,
tugging on the leash, before Hank gave in. He followed along, docile if not
happy, hopping from one wooden tread to the next. They stopped to rest on
occasion, lungs heaving, legs trembling, but fear hounded them, driving them
inexorably upward.
* * *
Before his
untimely death, Jastrow, the helicopter pilot, had managed to signal a warning.
As his crippled Blackhawk hurtled earthward, he had just enough time to
activate the aircraft’s emergency locator beacon. Neither he nor anyone else in
the crew had survived the ghastly, terminal plunge, but the transponder had.
From the jagged rocks at the base of Liberty Cap, out of the depths of the
shattered, twisted wreckage, once a multi-million dollar, state of the art, rotary
wing aircraft, the crash-hardened radio beacon sent out its mournful electronic
message.
The emergency
transmission was received in Yosemite Valley’s central Ranger station, causing
quite a stir among the authorities. The BATF, in the person of a wrathful
Special Agent in Charge, Wild Bill Gordon, quite naturally wanted blood.
Unfortunately, Gordon’s resources, like the Militia’s, were kind of thinning
out too. He’d stalled and fretted all morning.
“We’ve got
another Blackhawk to play with of course, but if I order it to investigate, it
might meet the same fate as the previous sortie.”
“Sir,” said
agent Donna Phillips, “intelligence reports suggest the Mariposa Militia may
have access to man-portable, surface to air missiles. If a SAM has downed our
helicopter, it would be absolute madness to present them with another target.”
“That’s true
Donna, but we—meaning me—have to make a decision soon. While we sit here
dithering, our second helicopter is flying anyway, as inviting a target as
could be. Alright we’ve wasted more time than we can afford. Here’s what we’re
going to do. Call back the remaining chopper. We’ll use it to ferry more agents
up into the high country. Have we heard from Martin Baker in the last hour?”
“Yes, Chief. He
reported in about twenty minutes ago. He and ten men on horseback are halfway
up Merced Canyon. That leaves us with another eight—five female, three
male—down here.
“Yeah,” said
Gordon, “eight agents with nothing better to do than drink coffee. Okay, we use
the helicopter to transport our reserves up to Little Yosemite Valley. That way
we can leapfrog over the horsemen. We can also keep the chopper a safe distance
from the crash site. That decreases the possibility of eating a Militia SAM.
Alright Donna, call in the helicopter, we’re going too.” Yes, he thought, rising purposefully from behind the desk, that’s a good plan.
* * *
The Bureau of
Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms was not the only agency in a dither. The Park
Ranger’s office experienced its own brand of turmoil. That morning the District
US Marshall had arrived with three carloads of deputy marshal’s. They had
warrants for three fugitives assumed to be with the militia. That was enough
for the Marshalls to claim jurisdiction. Both Chief Fine and S-A-C Gordon had
so far resisted the Marshall’s assertion, sparking a new round of long distance
conference calls across the continent. All day long the rumor mill had churned
out speculation as to when the FBI or some sort of military Special Forces unit
would appear.
At the more
august levels of government there were State and Federal issues to resolve. The
Secretary of the Interior wanted to impose martial law and bring in the
military. The state Governor’s office insisted since Yosemite lay within the borders
of California, only National Guard troops should be used, as they had been
during the LA riots. National Guard troops would remain under the exclusive
authority of the State’s Governor of course. Despite Drake’s childlike faith,
the mighty power of the government was checked. Log-jammed at the petty narrows
of conflicting fiefdoms, a bureaucratic form of paralysis had set in, rendering
the marshaled strength of the most powerful State in the history of the world
temporarily irrelevant.
* * *
The muscles in Drake’s
weary limbs cried out for blessed relief, but there was none to be found on
that treacherous slope. He glanced away from the mottled gray stone for the
merest fraction of a second, and completely forgot his woes. All the
accumulated tension and fear—the intense focus on survival—changed in an instant
to inarticulate awe. One moment his concentration focused solely on dragging
his body hand-over-hand up those endless cables and treads. The next, he felt
overpowered by the enchanted spectacle before him his eyes. What little was
left of his breath caught in a suddenly constricted throat.
At his feet, like a
wondrous fairytale vision, lay Yosemite Valley. Mighty Half Dome, from which he
clung, stood tall and powerful, like a medieval tower, rising from a sweeping
panorama of monolithic stone. The enchanting vision surrounded Drake on three
sides ultimately disappearing into a vague, misty horizon. At first his brain
misinterpreted the overpowering cascade of visual data. It seemed he was viewing
a mossy rock garden through which a tiny stream flowed. Then his mind shifted
gears, adjusting to the immense perspective, and the sublimity of the
creation over which he seemed to float completely overwhelmed him.
The mountains around
them looked for-all-the-world like a storm tossed sea, frozen in the action of
crashing their rocky breakers against Half Dome’s impregnable shore. Directly
beneath, to the west, Yosemite Valley appeared a smooth sided trench gouged
from the living stone of the mountains. Against that awe inspiring backdrop Drake’s
problems assumed a less than cosmic import. The real and imminent danger they
faced was nothing more than a footnote in time compared to these ancient
mountains. Whatever the outcome of this day, its end result would not affect
the awesome majesty of this setting any more than would his casual stomping of
a bug. There in the midst of mortal fear Stan Drake felt less than a microbe
clinging to an asteroid hurtling through endless space. In the midst of peril
he found himself—incredibly—moved to worship, not the splendid creation before
him, but it’s majestic Creator, more awesome still.
With the grating
crudity of a deacon snoring in church, Drake’s reverent devotion was harshly
interrupted. High pitched hammer blows—lead against stone—slammed into the
granite mountainside below. The discordant crashes were followed by attenuated
reports that could only be distant gunfire. Drake looked down at the shoulder
of the mountain from which they had ascended. Two tiny stick figures gazed
upward, shielding their eyes from the sun.
“Looks like the
Mariposa Battalion has arrived at last,” Paige called down to him.
“Yeah, all two
of them.”
The two men
stood at the foot of the cables. They wasted valuable ammunition taking useless
pot shots at the climbers far above.
“With a good
rifle they might have a fair chance of hitting one of us from down there.”
Drake watched as their shots kept missing short and wide of the mark. “At this
distance, with an unpredictable wind gusting across the mountain, there’s no
way. They’re just trying for a lucky shot.”
It was obvious
to Drake the Militia had to be using short-barreled arms. Rapid
stutters—sounding more like burst plastic bubble wrap than deadly implements of
war—told him at least one of their weapons was fully automatic.
A whining ricochet
buzzed past them. Drake’s mind kicked belatedly into gear, urging him to get
back to work. He tugged on Hank’s leash and resumed the ascent. He stopped
within five feet as he came alongside Paige. She stood immobile, hands frozen
to the cables. Drake gently put his arm around her waist and said, “Come on
Paige, we’ve got to keep climbing. Let’s go, okay?”
“Aren’t you going to
shoot back?” she asked, turning a pale, sweat-sheened face to him. “You’ve got
a gun, why don’t you use it?”
“From here?” he
asked, managing to put some false bravado into his voice. “I might as well
slide the gun down the cliff face and try to pick them off like bowling a
spare! Forget about those clowns. Their just shooting to hear the guns go bang!
Look, they aren’t even hitting anywhere close to us.”
Paige peered into his
eyes, seeking some sort of answer to an unasked question. She sighed and
resumed her climb. Drake followed, resuming the wearying ascent. The curving
horizon gave the continuing illusion that they were forever on the verge of
cresting the summit. It proved a false hope, constantly denied. Though the sun had
passed the zenith, they had to make that climb without a shred of shade to cool
them. A brief glance at his wristwatch showed Drake that it was already 3:30 in
the afternoon. They would reach the top soon. And with too much daylight left
to hide from their hunters. Just keep
moving, Stan, he told himself. One
problem at a time.
At length, their
breath coming in forced, ragged gasps, they reached the summit of the cables.
They had arrived at the crest of Half Dome; eight thousand, eight hundred and
forty-two impressive feet in the air. On any other day it would have been time
to gratefully lay out on the sunbaked stone, stretching tired muscles and
glorying in the conquest behind them. But not today. The rolling surface before
them revealed an undulating sea of exfoliating granite sheets, like massive stacks
of slightly crumbled, unevenly layered soda crackers. Hank raced across the
broken landscape, elated to run on a horizontal plane. Straight ahead, to the
west, the dangerous, sheer face of Half Dome loomed. From there it was a long,
long plunge, some four thousand feet to the surface of Mirror Lake far below.
To the right, some hundred yards away, an oddly dipping slab of rock overhung
the precipice, a natural formation known as the ‘diving board’. Drake cast his
eyes about for some place—anyplace—that might offer refuge, but the open,
windswept summit obviously left nowhere to go in any direction, except straight
down.
A distant
reverberating sound—helicopter rotors—gradually came to their ears for the
third time that day. So gradual had the volume increased it had taken some
minutes before the far off sound registered. Somewhere to the east, below the
visible rim of Half Dome, another chopper flew past. Paige perked up
immediately as she recognized the sound. With a shout of joy she embraced Drake,
jumping into arms and planting a big kiss. Paige threw herself back against the
circle of his arms and shouted to the world “We’re saved! Stan, the helicopter
is going to see us up here for sure. They’ve got to!”
Drake joyously kissed
her back before systematically scanning the immediate horizon. Their ecstatic
rejoicing turned out to be premature. They stared at the sky from horizon to
horizon, shielding their eyes from the sun’s glare. They strained until their
eyes hurt, but it proved only vanity, striving after the wind. For all of their
searching and hoping they never saw any kind of aircraft.
Drake resorted to pointing his liberated
Python in the air, carefully firing a series of three spaced shots. But even
the universally accepted distress signal had no apparent affect. When his stock
of cartridges had been reduced to a mere fourteen rounds and his ears rang like
Notre Dame’s cathedral, he decided to
knock that foolishness off. He loaded the pistol fully, leaving only eight
rounds in reserve. By that time all helicopter sounds had receded to the South.
For a long breathless
minute they stood stock-still, holding hands, silently staring after the faded
sounds of rescue. As if on cue they turned and saw the disappointment in one
another’s eyes.
“Sounds like
they’re heading back down to Yosemite Valley using Merced Canyon, like we
came,” said Drake, trying to keep his composure.
“They won’t be
coming back, will they?”
“Don’t give up
just yet. It is time to get caught up on my prayer life, I can tell you that.
Then Paige managed a rueful laugh. “Okay, so this is the
place where you tell me that since you’re a holy, reverend kind of guy, you
have a super-powerful guardian angel assigned to you. And this angel follows
you around and protects you, right? And he’s not just going to stand around and
let evil bad people hurt the guy he’s supposed to protect, right? Oh, no, he’s
gonna swoop down with a flaming sword from heaven to foil the evil miscreants,
right?” She came tearfully into his arms and held him tightly, seeking comfort.
“Right!?” she demanded through a tear choked voice.
“Well…” Drake replied
slowly, feeling her body trembling in his arms and knowing his own
vulnerability, “I have survived some pret-ty dicey church business meetings, if
I do say so myself.”
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