It was well over an hour before we reached the fold where the opening of the Lulabelle Mine lay in the shadow of the buffalo-head outcrop I’d seen through the binoculars. When the entrance came into view, Rainy started for it quickly, but Mondragón held her back.
She pulled herself free. “Peter’s there,” she said angrily.
“Maybe,” Mondragón said. “We should be very careful.”
“He’s right, Rainy,” I said. “A few minutes of caution won’t make a difference to Peter now.”
“I’ll go first,” Mondragón said. “You any good with that rifle, O’Connor?”
“I hit what I aim at.”
“Cover me.”
Mondragón walked slowly, his attention jumping from the dark mouth of the mine to the walls of rock that rose around us. All the way up the long climb, I’d heard the calls of desert birds. Here there was no sound. Like Mondragón, I scanned the rock walls, but spotted nothing that moved. I could feel Rainy, tense beside me, her eyes riveted to the mine entrance.
Mondragón reached the Lulabelle. He stood a moment, off to the side of the opening, listening.
“Peter!” he called. He received no reply and called again.
“I can’t wait any longer,” Rainy said. She loped toward Mondragón, the weight of the pack making her gait awkward.
I had the Winchester to my shoulder, a round already chambered, just in case, but nothing happened. She reached her ex-husband and they slipped into the mine. I saw a flashlight blink on, illuminating the dark inside. Then Mondragón stepped out and waved me to join them.
We could see no evidence of anyone having been in the mine recently, at least near the opening. The excavation appeared to go deep, but it wasn’t inviting. Rainy called Peter’s name several times and got no reply. Mondragón shone his light over the scarred rock walls and floor. The beam hit a little stash of cans and debris, but it was clear the trash was old.
“Wild-goose chase,” he said and gave me that stony glare.
“We should go deeper,” Rainy said. “We should make sure.”
“It’s too dangerous, an old mine like this,” Mondragón said. “If Peter were here, he would have answered.”
“Maybe he can’t.”
“He isn’t here, querida. Whatever O’Connor thinks he saw, it wasn’t Peter.”
Rainy unshouldered her pack, grabbed the flashlight from his hand, and started deeper into the throat of the mine.
I agreed with Mondragón about the danger, and I called out sharply, “Rainy, no farther into the drift.”
“Drift?” Mondragón gave me a puzzled look.
“Mining term for a passage like this.”
I didn’t have time to explain to him that I’d grown up on the Iron Range of Minnesota, where anybody who knew anything about underground mining understood what a drift was.
Rainy stopped, but not because of me or Mondragón. She shone the light behind a fallen piece of rock the size of a doghouse.
“Look,” she said.
We joined her and saw what the beam illuminated—a stain the color of rust on the mine floor.
“Blood?” Rainy said.
Mondragón knelt and touched the stain. “It’s dried, but I’m sure it’s blood.” He stood and looked into the black that went deep into the mountain. “I can’t believe he’s in there. Why would he go deeper?”
“Maybe something scared him,” Rainy said.
“Maybe,” Mondragón said. “I need to make a call on the sat phone.”
He went to the pack Rainy had set near the mine entrance, pulled out the satellite phone, and stepped into the sunlight.
The first shot came like a crack of thunder.
CHAPTER 23
* * *
Mondragón spun back into the mine. The rocks around him exploded in fragmenting lines as a steady stream of bullets followed him in. The rounds ricocheted off the walls, and the roar of the gunfire from outside sounded like Armageddon had arrived. It was automatic rifle fire, and I had no way of telling how many shooters there might be.
“Behind there!” I shouted at Rainy, pointing toward the doghouse rock where we’d found the bloodstain.
Mondragón grabbed the Weatherby he’d brought, and I pressed myself into the questionable protection of a slight indentation in the wall with the Winchester in my hands. I could see most of the thirty yards of open ground in front of the mine and spotted one of the shooters in a tier of rocks on the far side. He was laying down a steady lacing of bullets into the floor near where Mondragón had flattened himself against the wall opposite me.
“You okay?” I called in a momentary lull in the gunfire.
“Not hit. Where’s Rainy?”
“Here,” she called from behind us. “Don’t do anything stupid.”
“Any suggestions?”
“Just sit tight,” Mondragón offered.
“And then what?”
If he gave an answer, I didn’t hear it. The storm of bullets came again, chewing up the rock all around us. I thought that if they kept that up long enough, they’d run out of ammunition eventually. They must have thought so, too, because in the next moment the gunfire died away.
From the rocks came a voice with a Hispanic accent: “You in the cave. We want Peter Bisonette. Tell us where he is and we’ll leave you in peace.”
“Chinga tu madre!” Mondragón shouted.
A few shots came in return, but not the hail of bullets that had been fired before.
“We can blow you up, if that’s what you want,” the voice informed us.
Mondragón responded in Spanish. I couldn’t understand the words, but the tone needed no translation.
I could still see the man who’d laced the floor with fire from his automatic. I was deep in the shadow of the mine and pretty certain he couldn’t see me. I cradled the butt of the Winchester stock to my shoulder and sighted carefully. If he behaved as he had before, in the moment in advance of his firing, he would rise just a bit above the rock, exposing half his chest. I prepared myself mentally to take him out.
Rainy said, “Negotiate.”
“What?” Mondragón said.
Rainy came up behind me, into the negligible protection of the rock indentation. She called to the men outside in Spanish. In all that she said, I understood only Peter’s name and the name Rodriguez.
In the long quiet that followed while our assailants considered her words, Mondragón said, “They’ll never buy it, querida. They think they’re holding all the cards.”
“What did you tell them?” I asked.
“That Peter’s not here. That we don’t know where he is. That killing us gets them nothing.”
“Not much of a negotiation, Rainy,” I said.
“That’s not all,” Mondragón said. “She told them to tell their patrón Rodriguez that she will meet with him to discuss her son. That will never happen, not as long as I’m alive.”
Which, in the next moment, seemed to be not long, because an explosion shook the mountain face outside the mine, and the wall I’d pushed myself against shivered. Dust and grit rained down on us.
“RPG,” Mondragón said.
“Rocket-propelled grenade,” I told Rainy. “They want us to know they’re not bluffing.”
From outside, the voice spoke again in Spanish.