“Sheriff, this is Eunice Wallace of the Central Dispatch Headquarters in Cheyenne.”
“You can’t fool me, there’s nothing centralized about Cheyenne.”
She laughed. “Or organized, for that matter. How can I help you, Sheriff?”
“Jim Thomas says you’re the radio guru down there and that you could help us with a problem we’re having.”
“And that’s in Absaroka County?”
I glanced around at the unparalleled beauty of the canyon, looking so different than last night. “I’m actually in the Wind River Canyon even as we speak, and I suppose we’re lucky to be speaking, the reception being what it is.” I explained the situation, leaving out the more incredible parts and focusing on the possibility of someone illegally breaking in on the Highway Patrol frequency.
“Well, it’s possible, but with the trunking systems it would be difficult.”
The Cheyenne Nation came around the corner of my truck, I suppose to check to see if I had fallen in the river, and then waved and disappeared. “Here’s my first question, what’s trunking?”
There was a pause. “Your county has the smallest population in the state, doesn’t it?”
“We’re small but mighty—why do you ask?”
“Well, you’re probably still using a singular frequency?”
“Ever since Marconi sent over that first unit.”
“Well, that’s a luxury that most departments no longer have. As municipalities and organizations grow, they use more and more radio frequencies for operations, consequently free bandwidth has become more difficult to find.”
“Yep, we don’t have that problem.”
“No, I’d imagine not. Anyway, the radio manufacturers came up with a system that works like a trunk telephone line. Let’s use a city like Casper for example—they used to have two or three frequencies for their police department, two or three for the fire department, and then one for public works and one for parks. With the trunking system they have more than fifty user groups on ten radio frequencies.”
“How can you do that?”
“One of the frequencies is the control or data channel that continually broadcasts a computer data stream that sounds like a chainsaw on the air.”
I thought about the noise that Rosey had said preceded the mysterious radio calls. “A chainsaw, huh?”
“Something like that. But to get back to your question, every time an officer or firefighter or anybody presses their microphone button, a simultaneous computer command is sent out to everyone in that person’s radio group and moves them to one of the nine other available frequencies within the system.”
“Sounds complicated.”
“It is—the channel assignments are completely random, so there’s no way to monitor communications unless you have a computer-assisted trunk-tracker system.”
“So, where could you get something like that?”
“Best Buy or Radio Shack, if they were still in business.”
I removed the phone from my ear to enable a full-force face palm of epic proportions and then returned it. “You’re kidding.”
“’Fraid not—any 800 megahertz scanner with a microphone would work as long as it’s calibrated properly.” She waited a moment, probably sensing my dissatisfaction with that bit of information. “Trunking systems are pretty hard to program for the uninitiated, so you’re probably looking for someone who has a knowledge of radios and computers.”
“What’s the range on those types of scanners?”
“Well, you see, the transmission would depend on elevation, obstructions, transmitter power. . . .”
I glanced up at the two-thousand-foot walls. “We’re in the canyon.”
“Ten to twenty miles at best.” There was a longer pause. “Where are you right now?”
“Preparing to throw myself in the Wind River.”
She laughed. “Are you near the tunnels?”
I stood, stepped back over the guardrail, and looked across the hood of my truck, where I could see the Bear standing by the entrance of the northernmost borehole. “North entrance.”
“Look up.” I did as she told me and spotted a thin structure passing between the clouds, periodically giving off a glowing red light, like a pulse. “That tower is only about a decade old. When the old-timers used to head into the canyon they’d call it in and that was the last you heard of them until they came out on the other end—they used to call it No-Man’s-Land.”
9
“No-Man’s-Land, huh?”
I nodded, but it was difficult with the 240-pound man sitting on my shoulders. “The first time the term was used was back in 1320, nonesmanneslond, which was used to describe disputed territory between two kingdoms; then it was the name for a place outside the walls of London that was used for executions and even a spot on the forecastle of ships.”
“Um-hmm.”
I shifted the Cheyenne Nation’s weight a little. “Of course, the term that’s used today is a result of the trench warfare in World War I.”