The Sword of God - John Milton #5 (John Milton Thrillers) Page 10

“Railroad,” Milton said. “An old one.”

  “There are railroads all the way through here,” Mallory said. “All the mines, they had to get their silver and copper out.”

  “How do you know so much about it?”

  “My father. He was out here a lot.”

  They kept going north, following a muddy, practically overgrown two-track, and passed into the foothills of the Porcupine Mountains Escarpment.

  Eventually they crossed another railroad that would, at one time, have run east to west. Milton looked at the map and decided that they should turn to the northeast, and they followed the overgrown track until it ran up against a river. They could see where the rail line must have crossed the river on both banks. On their side of the water was an elevated earthen grade that led up to a large eroded pile of fieldstone that apparently served as an abutment. Next to it were the remains of a trestle, with several huge, vertically arranged timbers that would have supported the elevated line until it reached the earthen grade visible some distance away.

  They followed the river upstream until they reached Mirror Lake. It was a wide body of water, perhaps half a mile long at its widest point. The waters were perfectly clear, reflecting the fringe of pine and spruce on the far bank and the scuds of clouds blowing overhead.

  “We’ll stop here,” Milton said, pointing to a pleasant spot beneath two huge eastern hemlocks.

  The sun had burnt through the mist and, as it reached its zenith, it was strong enough to make for a warm day. It had been a hard morning, and Ellie was grateful for the chance to rest. She unslung her pack, propped it up against the roots of a tree, and then lay down against it. Mallory did the same, dropping to her knees beneath two shade trees leaning over the shore.

  Milton took off his pack, dropped it behind him, and removed his shirt and trousers.

  Mallory stared at him as if he had gone mad. “What are you doing?”

  “I’m hot. Going to freshen up.”

  She pointed to the lake. “You’re going in there?”

  “Just for a quick swim.”

  “It’ll be freezing!”

  “Suits me.”

  Ellie watched through the slits of her half closed eyes as Milton launched himself into the water, cutting beneath the surface and then striking out to the middle.

  “You don’t feel like joining him?” Mallory said.

  She did, but she shook her head. “I think I’ll stay here.”

  The sun was warm on Ellie’s face. She was slowly drifting into sleep when she heard a strange call and, opening her eyes, she saw a mature bald eagle cruising above the lake. Its sharp beak twisted left and right as it stared down into the water for trout.

  AS IT turned out, Milton allowed them to rest on the lakeshore for two hours. He examined his map again as he lay drying in the sun. He concluded that they would reach the mine in three or four hours, perhaps five if the terrain was more difficult to ascend than the contour lines suggested.

  He disappeared for ten minutes and came back with a big double handful of enormous blueberries. They gorged on them, wiping the juice from their lips.

  They set off to the north again, following the eastern edge of the lake and then fording the Little Carp River where it fed into it. They discovered another old railway grade that ran north. It was lined with pine trees and overgrown with weeds, but it was as smooth as the day it was graded, and they made good time. Milton surmised that it might be the line that had serviced the mine that they were looking for and made a corresponding reduction in the time he thought it would take them to reach their destination, presuming the track continued.

  They passed a vertical mineshaft in a ravine at the base of a ridge and quickly glanced into it to see that it had collapsed and was now stuffed full of rocky debris. After that they came across an ancient, wrecked car that had been left to rot. It was upside down on its roof beneath a canopy of hemlocks, the trunk of a paper birch shoved up through the space where the windshield would have been.

  “Look at that,” Milton said.

  “What is it?”

  “That’s a Model A Ford. You ask me to guess, I’d say that was left there when Teddy Roosevelt was president.”

  The track ended as it ran up against a tall ridge. They climbed, using their hands to secure themselves as the gradient grew steeper and steeper. Milton reached down to clasp Mallory’s hand and dragged her up as they neared the crest. Then he reached down and hauled Ellie upwards. His grip was strong, and he managed her extra weight without trouble.

  “All right?” he asked her.

  “Fine.”

  There was a logging road along the top of the ridge. Milton crouched down next to a large pile of timber wolf scat and looked out over undulating terrain. The views were long from the overlook of bedrock, and they could clearly see the vastness of Lake Superior beyond Cloud Peak and Cuyahoga Peak. The leafy canopy in the valley below them was a multicoloured array of sugar maple, eastern hemlock, yellow birch, and patches of eastern white pine, red maple, basswood, oak and cedar. Two miles away, in a wide depression, they could see a large body of water glistening in the late afternoon sunlight.

  “That’s where we’re headed,” Milton said. “The Lake of the Clouds.”

  “How far?”

  “An hour from here.”

  Ellie squinted into the sunlight. “You see that?”

  Milton nodded. He took out a pair of binoculars and pressed them to his eyes for a moment. He nodded again and handed the glasses to Ellie. She gazed out through them.

  “What is it?” Mallory asked impatiently.

  Ellie handed her the glasses. The girl put them to her face and stared out. “Is that smoke?”

  Milton nodded. “That’s what it looks like.”

  “A campfire?”

  “Maybe.”

  THEY SCRAMBLED down the ridge, and Milton picked up an almost invisible trail that cut through the trees to the northwest. They walked in silence. For Mallory, at least, Ellie guessed it was a combination of anxiety and anticipation. Their trail led down to the banks of Scott Creek. They discovered a single cable that had been strung across the water with a rotten plank seat attached to it with a pulley. A thick retrieval rope was still fastened to the plank.

  Mallory stopped and looked up at it.

  “Is that—?”

  “No,” Milton said. “That’s been there for years, probably for the miners to get across. If they’re up at the lake, they didn’t make that.”

  They set off again, listening to the plaintive bleating of an animal in the brush. Milton said that it was a bear cub, and that they should keep moving. They did and, after another ten minutes, they came upon the entrance to an active underground den. Milton kept them fifty yards away from it and upwind, pointing out the freshly harvested vegetation and the recent bear tracks that led away down the slope. Ellie was not of a mind to dawdle and she was relieved that Milton was of the same mind.

  As they set off again, he dropped back so that he could talk to Ellie privately. Mallory, who was struggling with the weight of her pack, walked on ahead of them.

  “Do you have a weapon?”

  “Sure I do,” she said, opening her jacket to show him the .40 Glock 22 that she wore clipped onto her belt. “FBI standard issue.”

  “You any good with it?”

  She bristled at the perceived slight. “Top of my class.”

  “Top?”

  “Top half.”

  “Okay,” he said. “Top half.”

  The expression on his face told her that he was only pretending to be impressed.

  “You won’t need to worry about me if they start to shoot at us.”

  “I’m not worried.”

  “What about you?”

  “I’ve got my rifle,” he said, indicating the long gun that was slung over his shoulder.

  “You any good?”

  “Not too bad.”

  They walked on a few paces.

  “Why do you
ask?”

  “I like to know everything before I get myself into something. The capabilities of the people on my side especially.”

  “So you think they are up here?”

  “I didn’t say that. But fail to prepare—”

  “—and prepare to fail. Yes, I know, I’ve heard that before.”

  Milton looked ahead, checking that Mallory was still trudging along a few paces ahead of them. “Before we set off, I found a gun in her gear. For all I know, she might be the state sharpshooting champion, but I do know that she’s fourteen or fifteen years old, and I am not comfortable with a teenager running around with a loaded semiautomatic. Do you agree?”

  “Of course.”

  “Good. I had a little chat with her about it, and I think I persuaded her that it wasn’t a good idea. It’s in my pack now in case we need another weapon. But I also know that she’s more cunning than a lot of people have been giving her credit for, and I wouldn’t put it past her to have managed to smuggle something else with her that I haven’t seen. What I’m trying to say is, if you see her with a piece, it wouldn’t be a bad idea to try to take it away from her. Yes?”

  She nodded. “Sure.”

  “Hey!” Mallory called out. “What are you talking about?”

  “You, Mallory,” Milton said. “Who do you think we were talking about?”

  “Well, don’t. I’m right here.”

  Ellie looked the girl over. She was working hard with her pack, an expression of discomfort on her face that she quickly hid when she realised that she was being assessed. “How are you doing?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “You want to stop for ten minutes?” Milton asked.

  “Only if you do.”

  “I do,” he said.

  They were atop a beautiful knoll that prickled with huge eastern hemlocks. Milton helped them both to take off their packs. Milton shucked off his own pack and then rather absently stooped down to pick up a three-foot-long snakeskin. He tossed it into the trees.

  “We’re nearly there,” he said. “No more talking when we set off again. If they’re down by the lake, we don’t want them to know we’re coming.”

  “Agreed,” Ellie said.

  “And keep your eyes open. It’s not impossible they’ve set something up to warn them if someone is coming. A tripwire, maybe. Something like that. Watch where you put your feet and you’ll be fine. It doesn’t matter if this last bit takes twice as long. We’ve still got plenty of daylight. We’re not in any rush.”

  Chapter 15

  MILTON LED the way down the descent as quietly and carefully as he could. The hillside was rugged and densely forested, and his warning that they should be on their guard had slowed them all down.

  The sight of the campfire had persuaded Ellie that Mallory now stood a very good chance of being right. It was possible that the smoke was from a legitimate source, a party of hunters, perhaps, but that suddenly seemed like a long shot. It would be a big coincidence. She was operating on the assumption that they were going to come upon the fugitives. She had already decided what she was going to do. She was going to call for help. She knew that Mallory would be impatient and determined to continue, but Ellie didn’t think that would be the most sensible course of action. Mallory was a girl, strong willed, but very young, and Ellie was confident that she would be able to bring her around to her way of thinking.

  Milton, though? She didn’t have the same confidence. She found him very difficult to read.

  Milton stopped. There was a vertical shaft, flooded and rimmed by square berms of fractured rock. He suggested that the shaft had been constructed to access the same seams of copper as the ones on the shore of the lake.

  “We’re close,” he said.

  They carried on, slowly descending through the tree line until the hardwoods started to thin out and Lake of the Clouds became visible. It was a large expanse of water situated in a valley between two ridges. It was fed at its eastern end by the Carp River Inlet and the outflow, to the west, was the Carp River. It was staggeringly beautiful, a wide sheet of blue that glimmered in the early evening sunlight. The slope that they were descending would deposit them on the southern shore of the lake if they followed it to its end. The land rose up on all sides, with a narrow shoulder of flat terrain to the northwest. There was perhaps two hundred feet of gentle slope before them until the water’s edge. To the left the cliff reared up sharply, too steep to climb or descend. Milton took out his binoculars and glassed the cliff face and the flat ground from left to right.

  There was a collection of tumbledown shacks at the side of the cliff. The huts were heavily screened by ferns and dug into the side of the rocks that overlooked the water. One of them was in the water itself, the gentle flow lapping around its foundations. Behind them, set into the rock itself, was the darkened maw of an adit that must once have entered the mine. The entrance was open, accessed by a flight of stairs that had been carved out of the stone.

  “See it?” Milton said, passing the binoculars to Ellie.

  “It’s the mine,” she said.

  Milton said that he had come across a few similar places as he had trekked across the Upper Peninsula. The mines had been sunk to bring out copper, for the most part, although some had accessed veins of silver and gold. Almost all of them had been abandoned after the easier seams had been stripped; the ones that were left could not be reached economically. This one must have been the same.

  “Look!” Ellie hissed.

  Milton took the glasses from her and gazed down at the shore again. There were three men emerging from behind one of the ramshackle huts. As he watched, another two emerged from the tree line, each of them carrying an armful of firewood. They took the wood to a cleared spot that looked as if it had been furnished with a fire pit, and dropped the timber onto a woodpile.

  Mallory grabbed the glasses from him and stared. “It’s Arthur,” she said in an urgent whisper. “You see? At the back.”

  Ellie focussed on the man to the rear. He was laden with the most wood, so much that it looked as if he was struggling to carry it. He was a few steps behind the lead man and, as the others joined them, he stayed on the periphery.

  “We need to call the bureau,” she said.

  “No,” Mallory said. “We can’t.”

  “Mallory, there are four of them down there. There’s only three of us.”

  “Two of us,” Milton corrected. “Mallory’s not getting involved.”

  “You knew that before we started,” the girl protested.

  “I didn’t know they’d be here,” Ellie said.

  Milton asked, “How are you going to call them? There’s no signal.”

  “We go back to Truth. I’ll call my partner and he’ll bring reinforcements with him.”

  “No—”

  “It’ll be a delay of two days, Mallory. Maybe three.”

  “And where do you think they’ll be in three days?” she argued.

  “Here.”

  “No, they won’t. They already think the FBI’s given up on them. Someone in town knows they’re here, and I guess they’ve already told them you’ve gone. Maybe they feel safe. It’s been a month since they robbed a bank. Why wouldn’t they go and do another one tomorrow?”

  “Or maybe they don’t.”

  “What if they do? They’ve already shot one man. What if they kill someone else? Are you okay with that on your conscience?”

  The girl had a quick temper and it had tripped.

  “Quiet,” Milton said sternly, his finger to his lips.

  “We can’t go,” Mallory went on in an angry whisper. “That wasn’t the deal.”

  “No,” Milton said. “The deal was I bring you out to see whether your brother was here—”

  “I can’t just leave—”

  “—and now that I see that he is here, I’m not happy leaving him any more than you are.”

  Her anger drained away as she realised that he was on her side. “You’ll
help?”

  “Come on, Milton,” Ellie protested. “You can’t be serious?”

  “I am. This doesn’t have to be difficult.”

  “What do you mean? There are four of them. They’re armed. They’ve already killed a man. They’re not going to put their hands up and surrender.”

  “Yes,” he said. “They will.”

  Ellie turned away from Mallory, putting herself between the girl and Milton. “I can’t let you do anything stupid,” she said to him. “You might be good in the woods, you look like you know how to look after yourself, but that does not mean I think you’re capable of going down there and making four fugitives, men with a very good reason not to be caught, surrender to you.”

  “You should have more faith in me. That’s exactly what I’m going to do.”

  ELLIE ARGUED against Milton’s proposal for another five minutes until she realised that he had made up his mind and there was nothing she could do to dissuade him. Her options were limited: she could leave and make her way back to town, but Milton made it clear to her that he wouldn’t wait to collect the fugitives. It took a little effort to persuade her that he was serious, but once he had succeeded in that, she couldn’t very well abandon him to do it alone. That was her second option: to help. She frowned her disapproval, but signalled her acquiescence.

  Milton handed her his rifle. “What are you like at medium range?”

  She looked at it a little reluctantly. “I can fire it.”

  “Top half of your class?”

  “Not with a rifle,” she admitted.

  “It’s all right. I don’t want you to hit anyone. We’re going to bring them back alive. I just want you to give them something to think about.”

  “How?”

  “Distract them. You need to watch me get down there. My guess is as soon as they think they’re in trouble, they’re going to make a run for their bikes. I can’t see them, but there’s a track at the back of the huts and, I expect that’s where they are, hidden by the trees. If they run, I want you to shoot at them without hitting them.”

  “So you want me to miss?”