Breaking Point

you think—will we find him by nightfall?”
    “That depends,” Joe said, uneasy at the turn of events. “What are the coordinates?”
    Underwood handed down a scratchpad with figures and a topo map of the Twelve Sleep National Forest. Joe sat down on the same stump he’d seen Butch Roberson sitting on and spread the map over his thighs.
    When he calculated the location, he looked up. “It’s over the top of the mountains.”
    Underwood said, “Seriously? How long would that take?”
    “Most of the night,” Joe said.
    “Let me call FOB One,” Underwood said, raising the satellite phone.
    “It might make more sense to drive around to the other side,” Joe said.
    Underwood conveyed the situation and relayed Joe’s suggestion. Joe could tell by the way Underwood’s face froze that it wasn’t received well. The agents looked on with stony silence.
    “We proceed as ordered,” Underwood said after he signed off, and tried to get his horse to walk away from the glares. But the horse didn’t move.
    “Click your tongue,” Joe whispered to Underwood.
    Underwood clicked his tongue and his mount stepped forward. He mouthed
“Thanks”
as he walked the horse by Joe.
    —
    J OE LED, followed by Underwood and his four special agents, and they climbed slowly up the mountain. The slope wasn’t steep yet, but the constant climb tired the mounts, and he stopped every twenty minutes to allow Toby to rest. They rode in shadow broken by shafts of afternoon sunlight that penetrated through the canopy. The ground was barren of foliage in large stretches, and was covered by a carpet of dry pine needles and bits of bark fallen from dead pine-beetle-killed trees.
    The trees were dead, the forest floor was dry, and the slight breeze from the south was warm. As the horses stepped they made a crunching sound, and the combined cacophony of twenty-four hooves at times sounded like applause rolling slowly up the mountain. Joe wondered how they would ever attempt to be stealthy in the parchment-dry forest. A dropped match or cigarette butt, he thought, could make the whole mountain go up in flame. He was grateful none of the special agents lit up.
    —
    W HEN HE SAW an aberration on the floor of the forest—a disturbance in the carpet, a flap of mulch turned over—he pointed it out to Underwood. Joe felt more than saw he was on Butch Roberson’s route.
    The trunks of the trees were so dense in places that Joe had to weave Toby through them. Sometimes, he loosened the reins and trusted his horse to weave his own way through. The agents followed as best they could, but their trail horses balked at times and had to be urged to continue. It was a dangerous situation and could turn into a wreck if one of the horses panicked in the sea of trees, and he held his breath at times until the small string made it through the tightest spots. Trail horses liked trails, Joe knew. They weren’t thrilled with exploration, or tight fits, or climbing mountains, unlike Toby.
    Although Joe could at times only intuit the route Butch had taken, there were places where, due to obstructions or granite walls, there was no choice where he’d had to go if his goal was to traverse the range.
    His intuition was confirmed when they crossed a tiny stream of springwater from somewhere above them and he saw, quite clearly, a boot track in the mud. Joe photographed it with his digital camera to compare it with any other clear tracks they found later.
    —
    A S J OE RODE, he heard bits and pieces of conversation from the agents behind him. Underwood held his tongue.
    The grumbling was typical of men being charged with a pointless and ill-conceived task, he thought. They didn’t like being so far from the FOB without proper food and shelter, they didn’t like riding horses, and they didn’t like Regional Director Julio Batista.
    Joe thought he might be able to establish some common ground after all.
    —
    T WO AND A HALF HOURS after they’d left the dry camp, as the intense afternoon sun fused the forest with burnished orange, Underwood’s satellite phone burred with vibration on his chest.
    Joe looked over his shoulder as he walked Toby and watched Underwood adjust the volume of the set as he listened. Something dark passed over Underwood’s face at whatever he was hearing, and after a minute or two Underwood looked up and gestured with his free hand for Joe to stop.
    Were they being given the word to go back? Joe wondered. He halted Toby and