Neon Prey (Lucas Davenport #29)(93)

The image’s resolution was high enough that they could make out a pickup truck and what might have been a motorcycle parked next to the trailer. The image wasn’t current: it had been taken four months earlier.

“Four months ago, but it was still active then,” Lucas said. “If this Ralph Deese guy would be willing to take them, it’d be a perfect hideout.” He tapped that screen. “And there’s that motorcycle.”

“There’s some possibility that they’re still in Las Vegas. Or they’ve headed north,” Tremanty told the agent in charge. “You need to keep people here in case there’s a break. I’m going to take my team, including the three marshals, north to the Deese claim. We’ll need the chopper quick as you can get it for us.”

The AIC agreed: the chopper would be waiting at a commercial heliport south on Las Vegas Boulevard, near the airport.

“Get us some handsets. I don’t think cell phones will work out there,” Tremanty said.

The AIC said he’d send four handsets, all of which could be used to talk to the helicopter, and the chopper was equipped with a satellite phone for longer-distanced calls.

“We’ll take the Tahoe—we’re all gunned up and it’s right downstairs,” Bob said to Tremanty. “It’s gonna be hot out there. We’re talking Death Valley a few miles away. We’re gonna need lots of water, and you and Lucas have to change clothes. You need boots or sneaks and long-sleeved shirts and hats. Rae and I already have our gear. We’ll get the water and meet you at the car.”


THEY MADE IT back to the hotel to change. Lucas and Tremanty both had cross-training shoes and jeans; they both wore long-sleeved dress shirts, because they had nothing better and no time to go shopping. Lucas still had Harrelson’s golf hat, and Tremanty bought a hat at a casino convenience store on the way to the car. At the car, they found Bob and Rae loading two-liter bottles of water into two lightweight Osprey Talon backpacks. They were both dressed in light combat camo shirts and pants, with camo boonie hats.

“We’re gonna need the gear bag,” Bob said. “We’ve got two rifles, one semiauto and one fully auto, and a sniper rifle. We should be able to handle anything they throw at us.”

Fifteen minutes later, they were crossing the tarmac to the waiting FBI helicopter, a commercial version of the military Black Hawk. The pilots had already filed a flight plan. They lifted off, circled over a golf course, and were gone.


THE PILOTS had given Tremanty a headset so they could talk. On the way to Deese’s mining claim, Lucas, Tremanty, Bob, and Rae pored over the satellite images of the site that Rae had downloaded to her iPad. Bob had experience looking down at deserts from Black Hawk helicopters and tapped the road that came closest to the mining claim and the dimly visible track going into it.

“If we try to go in with a sheriff’s convoy, they’ll see us coming before we even get to the approach road. Let’s see . . .” He checked the scale at the corner of the image. “They’re up on a ridge, the car would have to come around this mountain. That’s fifteen miles away. If they’re watching, it’s perfectly possible that they’d see us at fifteen. And it looks like there are parts of those roads where we wouldn’t be able to drive more than fifteen miles an hour, even in a Jeep, and maybe less in spots. On the approach road, depending on whether he cleared it with a bulldozer or just wore it down by driving over it, we could be down to three or four miles an hour.”

Lucas: “And?”

Bob tapped the screen again. “If the pilots are willing to do it, we could land over here, behind this mountain—that’s, what, two miles, or a little more? They wouldn’t hear us. This isn’t sand dunes out there, it’ll be hard soil with sparse vegetation and some sand at the surface, so the walking will be fairly easy. Walking—hurrying—we could do it in a half hour, and they wouldn’t see us coming.”

Rae, who’d been quiet for most of the trip, said, “One problem: will the pilots put us in there? I know from experience that they don’t like—uh, what do they call it?—informal landings. Especially in a desert. They don’t know what they’re going to kick up. Dust and dirt, and all that.”

Tremanty: “If that’s the way to go in, I’ll talk to them. Give me the iPad.”

The helicopter was fitted with nine decent but not luxurious passenger seats, the front three facing the back of the pilots’ seats. Tremanty more or less duckwalked out of the back, around to one of the front-facing seats, put on the headset, and tapped the copilot on the shoulder. The rest of them couldn’t hear the conversation, but it went on for a while. And then Tremanty duckwalked back.

“They’re willing to take a look. We’ll swing around and come in from the southwest, fairly low, from fifteen miles out, so the trailer will be in the sound shadow of the mountain. If the image is correct, there’s a hard-packed spot where they think we can put down, but they’ll have to eyeball it first,” Tremanty said.

The flight out took forty minutes—the pilots told Tremanty that they were pushing 200 miles an hour. At one point, well outside of Las Vegas, they crossed an enormous suburban subdivision.

Rae: “What are those people doing out here?”

“Cooking their brains out if they don’t have AC,” Bob said. “You really, really wouldn’t want to have a power outage here.”