Shadow of Betrayal

They were silent for a few moments.

“I assume you want to do a recon,” she said.

“Yeah.”

“Then we can just drop off our bags and go.”

“You’re staying here,” Quinn said.

“I said I was fine.”

“I know you did. But you could use some rest. You look exhausted.”

“I don’t want to argue with you about this,” she said.

“I don’t want to argue, either. But this first trip out, we’re just going to do a scout. That I don’t need you for.”

The look on her face was far from happy. “I can stay in the car. Monitor communications. Something might go wrong. You’ll need me there.”

“No,” Quinn said. “We won’t. We’re not going to get close enough for anything to go wrong.”

She leaned back into her seat, her lips pressed together and her eyes drilling a hole in the center of Quinn’s forehead.

“Come on. Don’t be stupid. You don’t have all your strength back yet. You know that. I will need you, and when I do I’ll need you fully rested. Going out now with us will drain you, and that I don’t need.”

“Fine,” she said, her tone indicating it was anything but.

“You know I’m right.”

Before she could respond, the car door opened and Nate climbed back in.

“Our rooms are toward the back,” Nate said, holding up two key cards. “Rooms 4 and 5. The guy inside said there’s parking right in front of them.”

Before Quinn could turn around to restart the car, Orlando snatched one of the keys from Nate, then looked at Quinn.

“I’ll take this room,” she said. “You can stay with Nate.”

The terrain north of Lone Pine was similar to that which they had just been driving through for the past hour, except for one large exception. To the left, between the highway and the Sierras, were the Alabama Hills, a rolling pile of granite and volcanic rocks. To Quinn it looked like a dump of surplus material someone decided wasn’t needed to make the mountains.

According to the information Nate had dug up, most of the hills were under the protection of the Bureau of Land Management, and were set aside for public use. But there was an area toward the north end that had been claimed by the military, and cordoned off decades ago.

Yellowhammer, Quinn thought.

“That’s it, isn’t it?” Nate said, pointing across the highway at a dirt road leading off into the hills.

Quinn glanced at his odometer. They were 4.7 miles north of Lone Pine. “Mileage is right.”

The map Peter had sent them indicated that the road they had just passed was the only direct approach to the facility’s entrance. Chances were good that whoever was running it now had security in place to warn them the minute someone headed their way.

They went a couple miles farther up the divided road, then looped back using a dirt access road between the two strips of asphalt. Besides the main entrance to Yellowhammer, the map highlighted several other roads that led into the hills.

There was one that came within a half mile of the Yellowhammer road before turning back north. Quinn pulled to the side of the highway, a few car lengths away from where it met the highway. He could see that the dirt road cut a straight line across the barren expanse between the highway and where the hills jutted upward, where it then disappeared into a gap between some boulders.

Nate reached into the rear seat, and retrieved the electronics sniffer from his backpack. It looked a little like a palm-size TV remote, and was able to detect electrical signals up to a hundred feet away.

“Be right back,” he said.

He got out, then jogged over to where the dirt road began. Quinn thought he detected a bit of a limp. But maybe it was just Nate’s new gait.

Dammit, you’ve got to let this go, Quinn thought. He’s going to be fine.

Nate disappeared behind the downward slope just beyond the shoulder, then reappeared two minutes later. Again, there was the limp as he ran back to the car.

“It’s clear,” he said as he climbed in. “No trip wires. Didn’t pick up any signals, either.”

“Good,” Quinn said as he put the BMW back in drive.

Up until the dirt road entered the rocky hills, it was a smooth ride. But the moment they passed between the boulders they had seen from the highway, things changed.

Ruts and erosion had deteriorated the surface of the road to the point where Quinn had to take it down to a near crawl. Even then, several times the BMW’s tires smacked the top of the wheel wells. The rocks that lined the way were also a danger. They undulated in a random pattern, often coming within inches of banging into the side of Quinn’s car.

The road bent to the south for several minutes, but then, two and a half miles in, it turned east for a couple hundred feet before swinging back to the north.

“Shit,” Nate said. “I think that was it.”

“Think, or it was?” Quinn asked, stopping the car.

Nate looked at the map for a moment, then said, “Yes, that was it. This will just take us farther and farther away.”