Uncertain Justice

Chapter 29

The chopper drifted east, coming closer to the mountain down which the search party was stumbling. The observer was screaming on the general channel, trying to get everyone to change course and cut off the fugitive off as he climbed the slope away from them. His tirade was in vain.

The hunters were working their way through the forest more deliberately now that they knew the Underwood was close and nothing he could say was going to get them moving any faster. Stories of what a shotgun does to a man at close range had been circulating among them all evening.

A strong gust hit the chopper, driving it down and sideways toward the dark ridge. The pilot pushed the cyclic control hard over as fast as the rotors would take it and lifted on the collective while adding all the power he could to gain distance and height.

The pilot and observer both felt their chests tighten. Their faces turned ashen as the stony side of the mountain loomed close aboard on the right side. The observer ignored the spotlight he'd been controlling with a small joystick and watched the rock walls crawl ever closer past the sweating shape of the pilot frantically working the controls. The observer tried to help the aircraft rise by force of will, leaning hard left and straining against the harness holding him in his seat.

Slowly ... then with ever increasing speed, the chopper stopped its deadly progress to the northeast and reversed course. Both men resumed breathing only after the pilot regained control at a much higher altitude. Four hundred and fifty feet higher and two hundred yards further away from the nearest rock wall, the crew tried to get on with their job.

The pilot's desperate maneuvers had ruined the observer's view of their quarry below but neither commented on it. When the aircraft was comparatively stable again, the observer tried to regain the contact. He rotated the control to move the bright light in ever widening circles, trying to pick out the fugitive in the trees below. He found a number of law enforcement officers gesturing emphatically, and sometimes quite rudely, for him to turn the light away from them. There was no sign of a running man trying to get away from the illumination though.

"Go to FLIR," recommended the pilot. "You'll never find him in all those trees--limbs and leaves are giving him cover and we're too high." Neither man suggested they move lower. Seconds later, the Forward-Looking Infrared system was on line and the observer began watching for the big heat source he was sure would appear on his scope. The pilot pulled night vision goggles over his eyes. With the big light off, he could use them without being blinded. He resolved to keep a lot more altitude and separation in hand than he had before. Making a widow of his wife and an orphan of the new baby were not in his plans.

FLIR is an extraordinary device. It detects the slightest differences in heat of object compared to its surroundings and transforms the variations into recognizable pictures on a television-like screen. Highly sensitive, it sees the heat caused by the friction between a man's foot and the sand and interprets it as actual footprints across a sand dune. In the cold mountain air, the differences in heat given off by living animals, earth, and rocks are even more distinctive.

On the other hand, the device has a limited field of view. It must be pointed like a telescope at a target in order the heat signature to be interpreted and it doesn't have the greatest of ranges.

The observer in the helicopter's left seat tried to calm himself and work on a legitimate search pattern. He cursed under his breath, but he knew the pilot had saved both their lives. His curses were reserved for the gods of the winds, fugitives, and the night.

Below, heat generated by the friction of the fugitive's boots on the ground cooled rapidly but the heat, never very substantial, faded quickly into the background heat of decaying leaves on the ground beneath the trees. By the time the pilot regained control of his aircraft, what little temperature differential there was left on individual leaves dissolved completely as the strengthening breeze blew them around and rearranged them in random patterns. The chopper crew saw nothing that roused their interest.

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Miles jogged away from the lights and noise as fast as he could. As the adrenalin brought on by the dog's attack leached out of his system, the weariness returned full strength. He was simply too tired to stay scared.

At first, he dodged quickly through the trees. Aided by the glare from the helicopter's wildly swinging searchlight, he moved faster than he could have in total darkness.

When the light went out, Miles slowed, grateful in spite of himself. His strength wasn't going to last much longer. Belatedly, he fumbled the knife back into its sheath.

Abruptly, the creek he had heard earlier was in front of him and he had to thrust out an arm and hook a sapling to keep from falling in. He collapsed to his knees and concentrated on dragging air into overworked lungs. He wasn't yet acclimated to the altitude. He was thousands of feet higher tonight than the altitude of his home in San Antonio. His chest felt like it was bound with molten iron straps. He tried to keep his back straight to let his lungs work better and give himself a chance to recover.

Miles thought he knew why the bright searchlight had been extinguished. He'd seen enough cop shows to suspect the search would go on now with the night scope devices that used a person's own body heat to track people. It was said criminals couldn't escape them. After all, how could a man stop radiating heat?

Suddenly it was too much. He couldn't outrun a helicopter, especially one with a pilot who could see in the dark. He dropped to a seat on the creek bank and stared into the water. He was too tired to even make his way out to the search party and surrender. He would sit and wait for the inevitable shout.