In his own pack, Virgil carried two bottles of water, the rope, a multi-tool and two extra magazines for the Glock, a Sony RX100 compact camera, and a homemade first aid kit.
They left the truck and crossed the roadside ditch, climbed one fence into an alfalfa field, and walked along another that stretched up to the woods at the top of the hill they were climbing. The woods would extend over the crest, down into the Orly’s Creek valley.
The day was hot, and they took it easy climbing the hill, breaking a light sweat that attracted mosquitoes when they crossed from the alfalfa field into the woods. The climb got steeper as they got deeper into the woods, and eventually they moved from one sapling to the next, hanging on to the brush to stay upright. Fifteen minutes after they left the truck, they reached the crest of the hill, which was punctuated with outcrops of soft yellow rock.
A game trail ran along the crest. Johnson shucked off his pack and said, “We should replace some fluids while we have the time. Stay quiet, see what we can hear.”
Virgil took a few sips of water, while Johnson popped open a beer, and they listened: and heard the woods, but nothing out of place. When Johnson had finished the beer, they walked to their right along the game trail until Johnson, who was watching the GPS, said, “We’re about there. We need to go off this way. . . .”
He led the way downslope, into the Orly’s Creek valley. A few dozen yards into the trees, they found themselves paralleling a shallow dry gully, and Virgil said, “This probably goes down to the break in the bluff.”
Johnson nodded, and they followed it down; a minute later the gully got deeper, and the way was blocked by a shoulder of the yellow rock. They moved into the gully, which got steeper, but took them through the lip of the bluffs. At that point, the slope became even steeper, and they paused to assess. The ground beneath their feet was a combination of damp black earth and crumbled bits of the yellow rock.
“It’s doable, if we use the rope,” Johnson said. “But we couldn’t get back up unless we left the rope here.”
“Don’t want to do that,” Virgil said. “If we had to get out some other way, they’d know where we’re getting in.”
They decided to take a chance—they’d use the rope, doubled around a tree trunk, then they’d pull it down, and find another way out of the valley. Doing that, after the decision, took only a couple of minutes, with Virgil leading the way down. They pulled the rope down after them, repacked it, and walked down the valley wall to the trail they’d seen in the ag service photos.
It turned out to be six feet wide, and well packed, marked with ATV tracks. A few incipient gullies across the trail, caused by water draining from above, had been filled with broken rock.
“Some good work here,” Johnson said. He looked up and down the track. “But why would they build it?”
“Cooking meth,” Virgil said. “But it’d have to be an industrial operation to build a road like this.”
Johnson was looking up at the overhanging trees. “You know what? Half the trees here are sugar and black maple. They could be cooking syrup.”
“Thought that was all up north.”
“No, they got sugar bushes all the way down into Iowa,” Johnson said. “The wood makes damn good flooring, I can tell you.”
“I know about flooring, now. Frankie salvages it from old farmhouses.”
“Yeah, that’s a fashion,” Johnson said. They were both looking up and down the trail.
Virgil asked, “Which way?”
“Right. I think.”