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Neither the S-97 Raider’s radar nor the view from the DAS cameras could show what lay hidden around the last jagged abutment to the mountain. The automated map, if still correctly aligned with the GPS, would have. It wasn’t.
Chief Warrant Roberto Morales rounded the final steep cliff, which dropped from the flanks of the easternmost mountain of the Desert Range. The twisting canyon cut between a resistant knob of Eureka Quartzite and the comparatively softer stone of the Ely Springs Dolomite.
Except for a lone pillar of the quartzite sandstone that remained close by the dolomite cliff.
According to the GPS-driven terrain map, Morales would be over ten meters clear of the tall, wind-carved pinnacle as he rounded the cliff’s final abutment.
He wasn’t.
It lay barely fifty meters—zero
