There it was, he thought. Not perfect, but it was better than nothing.
He broke cover, waving for his men to follow. They emerged from the jungle and sprinted after Cabrillo. It was like the final lap of a race, when the exhaustion falls away and the body responds to chemical signals that it is “now or never.” The dozen loggers left milling around the shed-sized cable yarder saw four more Ninth Brigade soldiers running out of the jungle, who had presumably gotten separated and were now chasing after their comrades in the just-departed pickups.
They didn’t know anything was amiss until one of the new soldiers brought his rifle to his eye, shouting, “Down! Everyone get down, and stay down.”
Juan didn’t wait to see if his orders were being followed. He trusted his men would see to it that they were. He raced for the yarder’s cab, a modified excavator that had had its boom removed and the cable tower attached in its place. The driver was protected in the cab from flying debris by a mesh cage that had replaced the glass windows. The cab door was open, the driver sitting casually in his seat, a cigarette dangling between the first and second fingers of his left hand. He hadn’t seen the Corporation team approach, and, with the diesel idling, hadn’t heard the shouted commands, so when Juan reached into the cab and heaved the man out of his seat the surprise was total. He landed on the rutted ground, the impact forcing every molecule of air from his chest.
“Murph,” Juan called. “Get over here and figure out the controls.”
As a trained engineer, Mark had an intuitive sense of how things worked, stemming no doubt from his childhood hobby of taking things apart and putting them back together, a hobby his parents put a stop to when they came home one day to find his father’s vintage Porsche in pieces.
Murph left Jerry and Mike to cover the loggers and jumped for the cab.
“Mike,” Juan shouted as he made his way to the edge of the clearing overlooking what had once been prime forest and was now a smoldering moonscape. “Find the keys to that third pickup and get her started.
The choke line for the cable yarder was suspended from a block system that could raise or lower the thick loop of wire so when they were dragging a log clear it wouldn’t snag on the stumps of already fallen trees.
Juan made sure his machine pistol was secure across his back and called Mark on the radio. He stepped onto the loop of the choke line and held on with one hand. “Do you know what I have in mind?”
“You want me to haul you down the mountain and drop you into the pickup with the power cell.”
“Not quite,” Cabrillo replied, and told Mark what he wanted done.
“Man, you’re crazy. Inspired, but crazy.”
It took Murph just one false start to learn the controls of what was essentially a simple machine to operate. The trick was to operate it well. He eased back on the choker, feeding braided steel wire into the block hanging from the main yarder line.
Cabrillo braced for the impact of the choker coming taut and had to give his weapons specialist credit as he was gently lifted into the air. Like a skier who didn’t get off the lift at the top and was now descending, Juan started sailing down the mountain, picking up speed as Mark surveyed the scene below, calculating tricky vectors in his head in order to get the Chairman to his target.
Juan soared fifty feet off the ground, zooming over a hillside made barren by the loggers. It was like a controlled zip line, and, had the scenery been better, he would have paid for the ride. Brush piles smoldered on either side of the yarder line, so he felt like he was flying over the very pit of hell itself. He crossed over the road in the wake of the three-vehicle convoy headed down to the base camp. The pickups had pulled far ahead of the fully laden eighteen-wheeler as he knew they would. The second time the line crossed over the road was two hundred yards ahead, directly over a hairpin corner the pickups were just about to clear.
If any of the soldiers clutching the bed’s rail looked up, Juan was as exposed as he could be. He’d be nothing more than a human target. Mark must have changed his calculations because the choker block began to decelerate. Juan pendulumed forward, and the choker started to twist. He fought to keep facing forward. He could hear the semi’s air brakes growl when the truck approached the sharp bend. Cabrillo accelerated again, swinging back and forth on the line as it twirled first one way, then the other. Moving through space on three axes was disorientating enough, and he still had to time his landing.
The truck drove deep into the curve before the driver started to crank the wheel. Juan was fifty feet up the hill and coming fast. Too fast, he realized, and even as he thought it the choker block slowed and the line began to reel out, lowering him closer and closer to the timber hauler. It was a remarkable feat of depth perception and control on Murph’s part, as he dropped the Chairman toward the loaded trailer, timing it so that the turn hid the descending block from the soldiers at the last critical second.
The wire loop Juan was standing on twisted hard enough to squeeze his foot with a crushing pressure that would have shattered bone and pulped flesh had he not been standing on his prosthetic leg. Even without having to deal with pain, he had to kick with all his strength to free the limb as he soared over the back of the truck. The logs just a few tantalizing feet below him were three feet in diameter, with bark as thick and rough as alligator hide.
The driver began to straighten out as he guided his load through the hairpin. In seconds he would pull away from the arrow-straight yarder cable, leaving Cabrillo hanging in space. Juan kicked again to free his foot but could do nothing until the choker wire twisted back. He was less than five feet from the rear of the trailer. Then three. He felt himself rotating clockwise again. He heaved on his foot and it popped free. Holding on with one arm, Juan found his spot on the topmost log and let go.
He landed a bit awkwardly, not fully adjusting to the rig’s steady acceleration, and started rolling off the log. He reached out to find a finger hold in the irregular bark and came away with a fistful of crumbling wood. He slid farther, and spreading his knees to clutch the log with his legs did no good. He went over.
And immediately slammed into one of the steel supports used to contain the trunks.
It hit in the small of his back. Had it not been for the minimal cushioning of his pack, he felt certain he would have broken bone. It took him a few stunned moments to recover from both the pain and the fact he hadn’t fallen off the truck, then he scrambled back to the top log and, in a crouch, started making his way toward the cab.
“I’m on,” he radioed Murph.
“I can see that. You blew the landing, but I’ll still give you seven-point-five.”
Cabrillo had always found humor in the absurd, and replied, “You gotta be kidding me. Didn’t you see that half twist at the dismount? Degree of difficulty alone gives me an eight.”
“All right. Eight.”
“I want the three of you coming after me in the last pickup. What did you do with the loggers?”
“Jerry chained them to an old bucket-loader tire sitting up here.”
“Good. Now, get your asses down here. I’m going to need you to bail me out.”