Seven
At a convenience store’s counter, on a heavily trafficked road near the interstate highway, the Asp prepaid forty-five dollars in cash, to refill the big Expedition’s gasoline tank. He also paid most of a ten-dollar bill for a bag, into which the store clerk packed food, and a cup of coffee-flavored hot water the size of a small bucket.
“Have a nice day, man.” The clerk’s eyes returned to his smartphone’s screen as soon as he handed the Asp the bag and his change.
“You too.” The Asp smiled. He smiled not because he wished the clerk well, but because he had now driven north, and west, from Houston across the flat barrens of Oklahoma, Kansas, and now eastern Colorado. And every American he had encountered showed the same utter disinterest in him. No one in America knew, or cared, that he existed. It was a situation he intended to perpetuate.
The Asp turned toward the glass doors that led out to the warming morning, and to the canopied ranks of gasoline pumps. And his heart skipped.
His Expedition was parked broadside to him, at the pump nearest the doors. Behind his vehicle a blue-uniformed police woman knelt, studying the car’s rear. She wore a Glock automatic pistol on her hip, and a radio microphone was clipped at her chest. Her patrol car, a white American SUV, with blue markings that identified her as a Denver Police Department officer, had parked behind the Expedition.
The boyfriend who sold him the big Ford had said the Texas license tags matched the vehicle and were current. The boyfriend had also said that driving with one state’s tags in another state was lawful. Whether he had been a fool, or a liar, didn’t matter.
The Asp could easily slip out the door and walk away. But that was no option. The gear he had purchased in Houston, and more importantly the funds with which to purchase more, were inside the car.
He could wait, and hope other duties would force her to leave. That was unlikely. American street police were said to react badly to a bribe, which would have routinely defused such a situation elsewhere. He dared not try that. But if he waited, and she radioed for additional officers, the odds against him would worsen.
Heart pounding, he pushed open the glass doors and approached her. Each step closer to her reduced the advantage her pistol gave her against the knife in his pocket.
He had closed the gap to two meters when she looked up at him. Eyes hidden behind dark glasses, her blonde hair was drawn back from her pale face.
He slid his free hand into his trousers pocket and gripped his knife.
She said, “This your Expedition?”
“Yes, Officer. Is anything wrong?”
She stood, hands on her hips. Her right hand rested on her holstered pistol.
He forced himself to breathe slowly as he measured angles and distances. There would be surveillance video. But there was nothing to be done about it.
She pointed down at the Expedition’s rear bumper. “You drive all the way from Texas with all this stuff?”
He nodded, gripped the knife tighter. “Moving from Houston. Just got to town. If I find work, I’ll get Colorado license tags.”
She said, “This tie-down cord may have been snug when you left. But it’s about worn through. Here, where it loops through the latch. You need to fix it, before you drive any further.”
He exhaled. “I will. Thank you, Officer.”
She smiled. “Spilling your stuff all over Federal Boulevard wouldn’t help you, or the drivers behind you.”
The speaker in the canopy above the Expedition clicked. “Pump One is on.”
The police woman glanced up at the speaker. “That’s you?”
He nodded.
She flicked her fingers to her cap’s brim as she nodded to him. “Hope you enjoy Colorado. Most of us do.” She turned, and walked back to her patrol vehicle.
He stood like a statue and felt the tension drain from his muscles.
The police woman hadn’t asked for his papers, hadn’t questioned him, hadn’t inspected the contents of his vehicle, hadn’t demanded money.
It was as the Mexican girl and her boyfriend had told him, after all. If you were polite and deferential, American police didn’t “hassle” you.
He grasped the pump handle, lifted it, and realized that his hand still trembled.
“Hold it right there!” The police woman shouted, pointing at him. She stood sheltered behind her vehicle’s open driver’s door.
He felt a fool. Her disinterest had been a ruse, to allow her to withdraw, then engage him with her pistol from a safe distance.
He froze, felt adrenaline again crackle through him.
She called, “You picked up the diesel hose!”
He peered down at the green, rubber-shrouded nozzle, trembling in his hand. The other hose, still in its cradle, was shrouded in black.
He smiled, nodded, and waved at her with his free hand, while he replaced the green nozzle.
She smiled back, climbed into her vehicle, and closed its door.
He waited until the police woman pulled away into traffic before he picked up the gasoline nozzle, then began filling the Expedition’s enormous tank.
He leaned against the car’s fender, suddenly dizzy. That should not have been. He was accustomed to functioning under stress.
A van stopped at the pump alongside and he understood. The lettering on its side read “Mile High Plumbing.” Houston, like Cairo, like Amsterdam, like most of the places where he had lived his life, was near sea level. But he had driven imperceptibly uphill for two days. Now, although he stood on a flat prairie, he had ascended the high plains of North America and stood one and one-half kilometers above sea level. He was breathing air as thin as the air in the Waziristan hills, where he had begun his quest.
He resecured the cord that held down the Expedition’s rear lift gate, then returned to the interstate highway, and drove west.
In the near distance the foothills of the red-brown Front Range of the Rocky Mountains, mottled with green pines, loomed above the prairie and above Denver, the “Mile High City.” Concealed for the moment behind the foothills, the Rockies themselves lay ahead.
* * *
The Expedition climbed for an hour, passing lumbering trucks, while being passed by powerful sedans, as the old SUV’s engine labored in the ever-thinning air. Ahead lay the tunnel the Americans had bored through their continent’s backbone. A road sign announced the Eisenhower Tunnel’s elevation as eleven thousand thirteen feet above sea level.
After just a few days of temperatures displayed in degrees Fahrenheit, food and drink measured in pounds and ounces, and distances to cities shown in miles, and in feet remaining to road exits, he was thinking in the arcane units that demonstrated America’s disdain for the rest of the world.
He had climbed from the “Mile High City” more than an additional mile. The air had become not merely thinner, but colder. Three to five degrees colder per thousand feet, to be precise. Therefore, while it had been sixty-eight degrees in Denver, here snow patches dotted shaded parts of the slopes, even in early June.
The tunnel was in fact two parallel tunnels, and as the westbound lanes’ tunnel mouth swallowed him the thunder of surrounding traffic pressed on him in the confined space. The mountain mass above him rose an additional sixteen hundred feet, and the tunnel stretched on for nearly three miles, its western exit invisible. Then he was through, descending from the Continental Divide in sunlight. He had overcome another obstacle with ridiculous ease.
* * *
He had now driven two days at highway speeds. Yet the Pacific Ocean, and the rock stars’ California mansions, remained a thousand miles further west. Behind him, to the east, the Atlantic and New York and Washington were even more distant. But no obstacle hindered his travel to any of them. State borders were recognizable only by signs welcoming visitors. The police cars of states and municipalities changed livery as he progressed. But the police in them remained equally indifferent to his passing.
The highway here snaked west through valleys, then up over mountain passes and again down, forty miles deeper into the Rockies. He pulled off the interstate highway at the second exit for the resort town of Vail. North of Vail, he located the deserted, unpaved road he sought. It twisted further north, through pines and scrubland. The elevation at the Vail exit was less than nine thousand feet, and snow remained on the ground only in shaded patches.
By the time he exited the dirt road onto a trail, marked only by a single post as tall as a man, he had climbed again. The post was painted with red rings. Those, he realized, signaled not only the turn off, but snow depth during winter.
After a half mile, the trail entered a pine stand, then climbed acutely. The track was so boulder-strewn that the Expedition negotiated it at a pace little faster than walking speed.
Snow cover increased with altitude. Three times he stopped, then cleared drifted snow, using a broad, collapsible shovel. Twice he wrestled aside dead pines that had fallen and blocked the trail. The exertions at altitude dizzied him.
Dusk had deepened, to the point that he had turned on the Expedition’s headlights, when the lights’ beams reflected from a chest-high tubular metal gate. He crept the vehicle to within ten yards, left the lights on, and stepped from the car.
The twilight’s frigidity stunned him as he walked to the gate. The thin fleece, that had been too warm in the Denver morning, was now inadequate.
The gate was the sort emplaced in livestock pen fences. It denied vehicle passage through a narrow gap in a rock ridge, and was wide enough that, when open, a vehicle could pass through. Its steel bore the rust of years, but massive bolts drilled deep into the granite at the hinges and latch remained sturdy.
As the Sheik’s document described, the gate was secured at its latch by a padlock, as sturdy as the rock bolts. But the lock was rusted shut.
A warped, wooden sign, wired to the gate’s top rail, announced, in faded red letters:
TRESPASSERS WILL BE SHOT
SURVIVORS WILL BE SHOT AGAIN
Shivering, breathless, but with no concern whatsoever of being shot, the Asp fetched from the Expedition bolt cutters, purchased in Denver along with the shovel. He cut the lock, then drove the Expedition through, closed the gate, and replaced the lock with one of the sturdier replacements he had also purchased.
Beyond the gate, the trail climbed higher, through the pines.
By the time he reached the cabin, darkness was complete. He cut off the cabin door’s lock, by the Expedition’s headlights.
Using his phone’s flashlight, he searched the cabin’s interior, and found a lantern, fuel, and a blanket. Then he prostrated himself on the cabin’s plank floor and prayed by the lantern’s light, shivering, while just enough red remained in the sky for sunset prayers.
After prayers, he ate and drank from the supplies he had brought with him, and confirmed that his phone received no signal in this isolated spot. He wrapped himself in the blanket, then returned to the Expedition. In its confined space, and with judicious use of its heater, he would be warmer than in the cabin, and he could recharge his phone from the car’s dashboard outlet.
He didn’t bother to relock the cabin door. He had seen no other vehicle, or any other sign of permanent human habitation, on the last six miles of the dirt road before he reached the trail. From that point on, his isolation had been total.
Somewhere along the trail, as it wound east and up, the Expedition had crossed the boundary into the Eagles Nest Wilderness. The wilderness was a mountainous 133,000-acre preserve, set aside by the American government. Within the wilderness, visitors could “take only pictures and leave only footprints.”
The cabin, and the trail, were an “inholding,” property privately owned before the wilderness was created in 1976, and thereafter restricted from modern development. The government trail network in the wilderness led only to other, more scenic parts of the preserve. Neither hikers nor police were likely to visit this place.
He snugged the blanket around his shoulders, then reclined in the Expedition’s front passenger seat. Exhilarated as he was by developments, he felt his eyelids droop with contented fatigue.
He fell asleep with the thought that he was now alone, buffered on all sides, safe from America. But America was not safe from him.
* * *
When first light woke him, he scrubbed fog from the Expedition’s windows and examined his surroundings. The cabin, a one-room box built of cut logs, with small, grimy windows and a rudimentary stone fireplace, offered as much shelter as he would need.
He prioritized his further reconnaissance.
An outbuilding, situated three hundred yards upslope, was designated in the materials the Sheik had provided as a “workshop.” Constructed of lumber covered with tar paper, it was even less enchanting than the cabin. Inspection of the workshop’s contents would matter only if more immediate concerns resolved favorably.
Google Earth showed a third, more distant, building on the property, adjacent to a small alpine meadow. Accessible only by a barely noticeable trail, he would explore the building only when, and if, time permitted.
The cabin and workshop stood in cleared areas amid pines. As altitude increased, the familiar pine forest transitioned to twisted, stunted bristlecone pines. Those more resembled gray driftwood than living things.
As recounted in the document, the cabin had been built during the 1920s, by an unsuccessful gold prospector, at an elevation of eleven thousand six hundred feet. Situated just below the tree line, the pines still provided the cabin minimal shelter.
The workshop had been constructed during the 1950s, also amid pines.
Mere yards upslope from the workshop, even the bristlecones vanished. Above the tree line the slopes were as bleak, and as rockbound, as the Afghan mountains.
The insulated parka he shrugged into, and the wool cap and gloves, had seemed overprotective when he purchased them.
With gloved hands thrust in the parka’s enormous pockets, he set out up the barren slope for a preliminary reconnaissance of Upper Pika Lake. The lake surface’s altitude, according to topographic mapping accessed on the internet, was twelve thousand and two feet above sea level. The lake nestled in the lee of Pika Mountain’s peak, which towered an additional one thousand twenty feet higher.
Like most high mountain lakes, Upper Pika was a tarn, simply water pooled in the bottom of a basin gouged and scraped from a mountain’s flank by the freezing, thawing, and movement of a long-vanished alpine glacier. This tarn was neither fed nor drained by streams. Only pristine precipitation that fell on the tarn, and within the sloping cirque that surrounded it, replenished its waters.
The pika, a tiny rat from which the lake took its name, was one of the few animal species adapted to the arid, barren, frigid wasteland above tree line. Pikas survived hibernation by drinking their own urine. So, the Asp hardly expected Upper Pika Lake to be a flower-bordered alpine jewel from a travel video.
But when finally, head and limbs aching and lungs aflame, he topped the rocky ridge that rimmed the lake, then peered down at its surface, his heart sank.