Catacombs by John Farris Page A

their slow steely wanderings above the next peak, would leave something for the cougar to be curious about.
    Jade waited three and a half hours, scarcely making a move.
    When the cougar finally appeared, he came lazily and without caution, scattering the half dozen buzzards who had long since occupied the carcass.
    Jade took plenty of time identifying him through the eight-power scope mounted on his rifle. With a shift of the wind he thought he heard a helicopter puttering around somewhere to the southeast, but it was a long way off and no threat to his concentration.
    The cougar sat down near the calf. He looked to the left and to the right and yawned. Then he leaped straight up off the ground as the flat crack of the ought-six echoed through the canyon and eddied away with the wind.
    Coming back down, Jade paused to have another ounce of brandy, chased with a purifying mouthful of mountain water, and studied the shale ridge he'd seen on the way up. It was a long, unstable descent bare of vegetation, virtually nothing more than a loose rock-pile, held together in places with rotten ice, another considerable hazard. The ridge would save him half an hour or so, not a critical savings since he had half the afternoon left to get back to the ranch.
    But having so easily taken a life, even the life of a predator far past his prime, Jade felt a familiar, pressing need to buy back into the game, to generate some velocity away from the limbo he'd drifted toward these past few months.
    He freed the packhorse to follow or not follow depending on his mood and got up on Rimfire, turned him toward the ridgeback. The slightest clumsiness there, or lack of communication, would mean a tumble of about three hundred grinding, skull-popping feet. And then what was left of horse and man would free fall for several seconds in the swiftly darkening air of a blue mountain canyon.
    Jade heard the helicopter again but shut out all distractions, devoting his mental energy to the exercise, turning them into a single creature working, thinking together, instantly responsive to the dangers of the treacherous descent. The packhorse, carrying the slung-over cougar that Jade was taking to the appropriate authorities in Silverpeak, followed well behind them, all but sliding downhill. Loose rock skittered ahead of the horse and rider. Gusts of wind froze them delicately in place, like high-wire performers, for seconds at a time. Halfway down Rimfire began to grow tired; his aching knees shook. Jade felt a rising fear, an impulse toward panic. He absorbed the horse's fear and redirected it into the broad air around them, then projected to Rimfire strong images of pasture, good grass, shelter from the seething wind.
    Rimfire found new strength, and the descent was completed without incident. But they were both soaking wet when they reached bottom. Jade stopped in a protected cove to change his shirt and give his horse a rubdown.
    They were crossing a boulder-filled creek when the wind again brought the sound of a helicopter to Jade.
    This time it was nearer. The whap-whap-whap of the rotor blades cracked off the canyon cliffs like an avalanche. Jade turned for a look as his horse went ear shy and quirky in troublesome water. The packhorse showed teeth and a panicky eye and also balked; Jade had his hands full getting both to dry ground. As he did so the helicopter, a Jetranger., flew steeply down at them and landed fifty yards away in a streak of meadow.
    Jade noticed a Forest Service decal. He kept riding, but slowly. There were four men in the helicopter. One of them opened a door and got out before the blades stopped turning. He was wearing a business suit. Jade recognized him immediately. His name was John Guy Gibson, and he was Deputy Director of Operations for the CIA. He supervised what remained of the agency's covert activities and the few good men who had lasted through a decade of debacles, inept leadership at the top, poor morale, and the heat from