At 23:40 UTC Sable opened the flight archive.
The Cessna single engine airplane had been over the mountains since Wednesday. It was registered to a leasing company and had an address at a UPS Store in a shopping center in Reston, Virginia. The registration was on the American block list. The archive Sable used easily routed around it. The Americans were so naïve about their cybersecurity.
Sable pulled three days of tracks and uploaded them to the mapping system.
On Wednesday night, the airplane had flown a lattice pattern over the drainages north and east of a reservoir called Turquoise Lake. Each leg was twelve miles, with the plane doing the same turns for six hours at three thousand feet above the ground. It moved twenty miles south before first light on Thursday and flew the same pattern over a valley with two long lakes in it. It went back to Denver at 14:20 local on Thursday.
The tracks covered thirty-two miles on the long axis, north to south, and about fifteen across.
Sable went to the radio.
The county had been lent to the federal effort. They foolishly didn’t encrypt anything.
Lake County’s channels were carried on a hobbyist site by a volunteer whose handle was a callsign, KE0PYX. In March the feed had twenty-six listeners. Yesterday it had nine thousand four hundred and six.
Sable played Thursday from 04:30 local and wrote down place names as they came.
Timberline Lake. May Queen. Native Lake. Hagerman. Halfmoon. South Elbert. Willis Gulch. Interlaken. Parry Peak. Sheep Gulch. Clear Creek. Mount Hope. Tennessee Pass. The fourteenth was said twice by a deputy with a full mouth and Sable could not resolve it. There was one road left inside the shape, so Sable found it on the map.
Fourteen names, and every one was a parking lot at the end of a road.
Sable positioned the fourteen over the flight tracks. The airplane had flown the spaces between the parking lots.
At 16:12 local the trailhead units were still reporting nothing. At 16:31 a deputy was standing in a grocery store in Leadville asking about a back door.
Eleven of the nineteen minutes were blank.
Sable went and looked at the feed’s status page. Under it the volunteer had posted a line: Power out at the house Thursday PM, lost about 15 min. Back now. Sorry folks.
Sable checked whether Chaffee County had carried the same traffic. It had not.
Sable downloaded the Thursday recording. Given the pathetic US power grid, the volunteer’s house would probably lose power again.
By 17:00 there were agents in both of Leadville’s grocery stores, the gas station at Twin Lakes, the motels, a laundromat, and a hardware store. Plate readers were going up on US Highway 24 and US Highway 285.
Sable would have preferred a competent search. A hundred and forty people who did not know the area had walked, in daylight, on trails they had been shown that morning, in a place where a person a hundred meters off the trail could not be seen. The search was being run by an idiot.
The airplane was a serious effort. It had come back twice with nothing. That was useful data for Sable.
A message came in from Umber. Two people could be in Denver tomorrow evening, with vehicles, on documents that were already old enough to be boring.
Sable did not answer. Instead Sable bought a guidebook of the area from an online site and, after looking at it for a few minutes, found the 9th Edition of the Colorado Trail Databook in PDF form on a pirate site, downloaded it, and ran it through the software to put it on the map with everything else.
The Americans had put people at the two crossings nearest the reservoir. But they hadn’t covered the trail.
The southern edge was a dirt road called Clear Creek, thirty-five trail miles from the northern end of it. The next road after that was a pass called Cottonwood, twenty miles further on.
Sable went back to the race results found earlier.
Hale had run a hundred miles in the mountains in August four years ago, in twenty-five hours and forty-one minutes. She did it again the next year, in twenty-four hours and twenty-seven minutes. The race started and finished in Leadville. There was a third result from a shorter race that spring where she had gone off course at mile twenty-two for several miles but finished anyway.
A normal person could do ten miles a day on this terrain. Sable could manage two miles an hour and last for twelve, which was twenty-four miles.
Hale was a beast.
On Thursday morning the area being searched was reasonable. Then the Americans came off the trails and sat down around the edge of it, while Hale and the two others kept walking. They were easily past Clear Creek by the end of Thursday.
Sable called Umber.
“No.”
“Why not?” Umber asked.
“They walked out of the search area yesterday. Probably in daylight. Possibly past one of the parking lots with Americans standing in it.”
“Then we know where they are.”
“We know they were past Clear Creek last night, and today gives them at least twenty-four more. Two people cannot cover thirty-five miles of mountains.”
Umber was quiet. Umber had never been to America and had been hoping for a reason to go.
“There are a hundred and forty of them in a town with two grocery stores,” Sable said. “Your two people would be noticed inside an hour.”
“So we wait.”
“So they stay where they are and you send me the vehicle documents anyway. There’s no value in them sitting in a drawer.”
Sable pondered the next step. The Americans were clumsy, but whoever was in charge had to have a plan. Or maybe they were just stupider than Sable had assumed.
Sable set an alert on the Lake County feed for any thirty-minute segment that was more active than the prior thirty-minute segment. Sable stood up, stretched, and went outside to walk and think.