Off the Grid (9 page)

THE RED DESERT

Man has emerged from the shadows of antiquity with a peregrine on his wrist.

—R
OGER
T
ORY
P
ETERSON
,
Birds over
America

It took four days in the desert before someone made contact with him. When it happened, Nate Romanowski was standing naked over a small murky cisternlike spring, washing the red out of his clothing. He knew his movements had been tracked for the past forty-eight hours, ever since he’d found the discarded leather jess.

That meant he was getting close.

The length of leather had been curled up on the hard silica surface like a dead angleworm on concrete. He could see that it had frayed where it had once been attached to the falcon’s leg and that it had come loose and dropped to the ground. The leather was still pliable—it hadn’t been exposed very long to the sun and wind. Nate guessed it had been there for no more than a week.

He also guessed that anyone else who found the jess wouldn’t know it for what it was.

Whoever was tracking him had kept their distance until now.
Nate had glimpsed the reflection of the sun off a vehicle window a few miles away the day before, and he’d seen the spoor of dust from the tires rise like a slow-motion plume as it moved from place to place. The night before, he’d heard footfalls and the scrape of a hard boot sole against sandstone in a nearby arroyo.

•   •   •

B
EFORE TAKING THE EXIT
from the interstate at Bitter Creek and driving seventy-three miles on unpaved roads into the Red Desert, Nate had geared up in Rawlins at Walmart. He’d topped five-gallon containers with gasoline and water, bought and packed a Yeti cooler with ice and food that would last for days, and filled up both a duffel bag and a daypack with camping essentials: cookstove, fuel, one-man dome tent, pots, pans, utensils. The encrypted phone Volk and Tyrell had given him came with a solar-powered battery charger that also worked for the handheld GPS and topo map software he’d bought. He knew of a gun store that sold .50-caliber cartridges for his revolver and he added three boxes of 6.8 SPC shells for his Ruger All-Weather Ranch Rifle. He paid for it all with cash so there would be no record of the transactions.

Once he left the pavement of the highway behind he pulled over and removed the battery from the satellite phone Tyrell and Volk had given him in order to track his movements. Nate knew that by doing so he would infuriate them, but he didn’t care. He would reinstall the battery when the time was right. Until then, though, they’d have to guess at his exact location and he could operate with the freedom that came from not being watched.

In his left front jeans pocket was a braided strand of Alisha Whiteplume’s hair. It was all he still had of her, besides his
memories. Although Liv had turned out to be all he had ever wanted, he couldn’t make himself discard all that remained of Alisha.

In his right front pocket was a laminated photo of Liv from just the month before. She was holding up the first rainbow trout she had ever caught on a fly rod, and she was beaming.

He wondered if he’d ever see her again.

•   •   •

E
VEN THOUGH
N
ATE KNEW
he was being tracked by someone in the desert other than Tyrell and Volk, he hadn’t acknowledged his observer or called out. He’d learned from decades of hunting that often it was best to let his prey come to him and not to pursue it outright. It took patience, silence, and the ability not to look directly at what he was after. He’d killed dozens of elk that way, and he knew that the best method of attracting pronghorn antelope was to tie a scrap of cloth to a tree or pole and wait for the curious animals to come in close and check it out.

Plus, the first reaction of prey being aggressively pursued was to either fight or run. So if he let it come to him . . .

In this instance, his scrap of cloth turned out to be his falcons, with whom he hunted every time he stopped. The birds in the air could be seen for miles if someone knew to look for them and was aware of what they were looking at. Master falconers could see a speck in the sky no one else even noticed and identify the species. Every falcon had a distinct profile in the air.

•   •   •

T
HE
R
ED
D
ESERT
was some of the roughest and most inhospitable terrain he’d ever encountered. There were no paved roads and many
of the eroded two-tracks led to nowhere. He saw dry red buttes, slot canyons, and sheets of tilted slick rock that, if climbed, would rimrock and abandon the climber. Rock formations—haystacks, hoodoos, columns shaped like giant mushrooms—were scattered across the landscape like headstones.

The place identified on the map north of Skull Creek Rim as “Adobe Town” was a particular concentration of buttes, spires, and rock formations molded by the wind into something resembling an abandoned cathedral or castle more than a town made of adobe, Nate thought. Walking through the formations was akin to exploring ancient Roman ruins, but these ruins were natural. Monument Valley, a miniaturized version of the famous Western movie landscape in the Southwest, was north of that.

There was just enough vegetation, juniper, and prickly pear to hold the sand dunes to the east in place so they wouldn’t blow away. To the north, he’d driven up to the rim of a 180,000-acre canyon formed millions of years before with no river or stream at the bottom of it. Whenever he found a good place to hunt, he’d stop his Jeep and fly one of his birds. They’d killed several rabbits thus far, and two sage grouse.

Despite the seeming lack of water for wildlife, Nate had spotted hundreds of pronghorns, wild horses, bighorn sheep, and a large herd of desert elk.

But no people, except for whoever was tracking him. No ranchers, sheepherders, or oil exploration vehicles despite the fact that the desert had been identified and targeted for future drilling. There were no power lines, fences, buildings, or ubiquitous wind towers on the horizon. Just a vast treeless expanse with deep blue sky on top and a hard volcanic surface on the bottom.

It was an unseasonably warm day for October, and heat waves undulated in the distance. It was still and there was no sound, except for a distant moaning of wind through the canyon near Adobe Town several miles away.

That’s when he saw them.

The two men were in silhouette on the top of an escarpment to the west. They’d deliberately, he thought, chosen to appear with the sun in back of them so they were harder to see.

One of them had a falcon on his fist.

The other carried a rifle.

•   •   •

A
S THE
Y APPROACHED HIM
, Nate glanced over at his mud-splattered Jeep. The Ranch Rifle was wedged between the seats. Inside, the still forms of three hooded falcons perched in the back could be seen through the plastic window.

He stepped away from the water and bent over. His revolver was in its coiled holster on top of his dirty clothing, but he didn’t reach for it. Instead, he fished out a pair of shorts that were, like everything else, pink-tinged from the red soil. Then he tossed his dirty hooded sweatshirt over the top of the weapon so it couldn’t be seen but was in easy reach.

He stepped into the shorts and waited for them to come.

•   •   •

“D
AM
NED RED DIRT
gets in everything, doesn’t it?” Muhammad Ibraaheem said with a friendly grin. Nate recognized him from the photos that Tyrell and Volk had shown him, but he looked thinner and more wiry and he moved like an athlete. He was unshaved and
his black curls flowed over his collar. He wore a beige fatigue jacket tinged pink by dust, and black cargo pants. There was a bulging falconry bag strapped across his chest.

“It does,” Nate said. “You caught me cleaning up.”

“Don’t let us stop you. We saw you out here and thought it would be rude not to stop by and say hello.”

His voice was crisp and a little high-pitched, but there was absolutely no accent. He sounded like he was from Virginia.

“Hello,” Nate said.

The man with the rifle was taller and older than Ibby, and he didn’t seem to feel a need to smile. He wore aviator sunglasses and had black short-cropped hair and a pockmarked face. Like Ibby, he looked Middle Eastern. The rifle was slung over his shoulder, but Nate could see the barrel and muzzle. It looked like an AR-15 or similar semiauto. Unless the man turned, Nate couldn’t tell if it was scoped or had a high-capacity magazine. The man didn’t turn. Instead, he tipped his chin up a little and looked to be silently sizing up Nate, the pile of clothes, and the Jeep.

Tyrell and Volk hadn’t said there would be two of them. He wondered if they even knew.

“Mind if we filter some water?” Ibby asked. “We’ve covered a lot of miles today, and if you know this area, you know how far it is between springs. A man could go days without finding water if he didn’t know where it was.”

“It’s not very good water,” Nate said. “It’s bitter with alkali.”

“You get used to it,” Ibby said.

Nate stepped aside so they would have a clear path to the cistern. Ibby gently lowered his hooded falcon to the ground and slid a rock over the jess to keep the peregrine in place.

“How did
you
find it?” Ibby asked.

Nate gestured to the dents in the hard ground near the edge of the hole. “A herd of wild horses ran from here when I drove up. Find the animals and you find water.”

“Smart,” he said, unscrewing the plastic filter cap of a well-used Nalgene quart bottle. He looked over to his companion and asked, “You too?”

“I’m fine,” the man said. No accent there, either.

“You need to hydrate more,” Ibby said to him as he dropped to his haunches and filled up. The man didn’t respond.

After screwing the cap back on, Ibby raised the bottle over his head and squeezed. A thin stream of filtered water squirted into his mouth.

“I’ve got to ask you,” Ibby said to Nate, “are you flying a gyrfalcon?”

“I am.”

Ibby shook his head and grinned. He looked over at his colleague. “See, man, I
told
you that was a gyrfalcon. You need to learn never to doubt me. I know my falcons, even from miles away.”

To Nate, he said, “I’ve never flown a gyr, but I’ve always wanted one. I’ve flown golden eagles and used them to take down small deer. But I’ve always wondered how cool it would be to have a gyr.”

“I’m getting used to her,” Nate said. “I still haven’t quite figured her out.”

“Did you trap her?”

“No. She just showed up.”

Ibby shook his head doubtfully. “She just showed up? And allowed you to hood and jess her?”

“That’s what I thought, too,” Nate said truthfully.

He was talking to Ibby, but he kept the man with the rifle in mind the whole time. Nate put odds on the fact that he could drop to the ground, roll over to his weapon, and fire before the man could take the rifle off his shoulder and aim.

If it came to that. And if Ibby didn’t have a weapon of his own in his falconry bag.

As if suddenly remembering his manners, Ibby said, “I’m Ibby, and this is Ghazi Saeed, my apprentice.”

“I’m Nate Romanowski.”

Nate noticed the tic of recognition in Ibby’s eyes.

“
The
Nate Romanowski?” he asked. Then: “I’d heard you were a master falconer. You’ve made some news in your life, haven’t you?”

“Not on purpose,” Nate said. For a brief moment, he considered dropping and rolling. But when he thought about it, he realized that some of the things he’d done in the past might work more to his advantage than to his disadvantage, if what Tyrell and Volk suspected of Ibby was true.

“Mr. Romanowski here is kind of a legend,” Ibby said to Saeed over his shoulder. “He is suspected of ‘disappearing’ some rogue
federales
a few years back. Not that I’m saying he did it, but his name came up in some of the material I was researching for a story once. You see,” he said to Nate, “I used to be a journalist.”

“Sorry to hear that.”

Ibby laughed. He had a pleasant laugh that came from his belly. “I’ve recovered nicely, thank you. These big skies and this fine hunting out here has helped me get my head on straight. Right, Saeed?”

Saeed grunted. Nate couldn’t tell if it was a yes or a no.

“That’s what I’m trying to impress on Saeed,” Ibby said. “Falconry is more than getting your bird to kill something. It’s more
than even hunting. It’s experiencing a partnership with a wild creature so that in the end both of you remain true and free. Would you agree with that, Mr. Romanowski?”

“I would. Here,” Nate said, handing the jess he’d found to Ibby. “I think this is probably yours.”

Ibby took it and looked it over. “I recognize it, yes. I lost it the other day. Thank you.”

“I didn’t mean to encroach on your hunting area,” Nate said. “I didn’t realize there was another falconer out here until I found that. I’ll be moving on as soon as I finish up here. There’s plenty of country in the Red Desert for both of us.”

Saeed nodded his approval, but Ibby didn’t reply. Instead, he studied Nate. His dark eyes were piercing. It was as if he was trying to decide an internal question right there and then, Nate thought.

“This is a magnificent place, isn’t it?” Ibby asked. He seemed to be playing for time with pleasantries while he thought about something else. “It’s amazing to me that in a country this big and crowded there are still places like this. You can go days and never see another person. There aren’t any cell towers, or Internet. You can’t check your Twitter feed or Facebook page even if you wanted to. Instead of everybody staring at their phones every waking minute, you can look up and see this brutal and beautiful landscape. Have you been to Adobe Town?”

“I have.”

“If it weren’t so remote, it should be a national park or monument, don’t you think? Of course, that would ruin it. It would attract tourists and we wouldn’t have the place to ourselves, would we?”

Nate nodded. He was getting annoyed that Ibby spoke in a way that almost forced him to agree with him.

Ibby said, “Some people—most people, in fact—would probably call this a wasteland. They wouldn’t be caught dead here, because they couldn’t check email or even make a call. But I find that to be one of the most beautiful features of the Red Desert. It’s like they can’t get to us here even if they try. We’re out of the system and we’re off the map. It’s like we can be human again, and free.”