Piles upon piles of semi-automatic and automatic weapons lay stacked on the cave floor. Mac didn't count all of the rifles that he touched but there seemed to be dozens. He sat back on his heels, narrowing his eyes in thought.
"I thought we'd find drug smuggling," said Randall quietly. "It's not often the smugglers come this far into the backcountry; usually they find it quicker to use 93 over in Montana to get from Mexico to Canada, but once in a while someone seems to need to come hide out back here."
"That's what I expected too," agreed MacGyver in puzzlement. "This looks like enough hardware to outfit an army, but way out here there isn't anyone to use it." His brow furrowed in frustration.
"The men you knocked cold aren't here," said Randall, stating the obvious.
"Yeah, they took off already. That's kinda strange too," agreed MacGyver. "They weren't too worried about us. It's like they had something else they were working on…"
"...That was time-sensitive," finished Randall. "They didn't try to come find you at Shearer or go look for your camp on Bear Creek again; at least I hope not," he said, his voice full of worry for Jeanne and Christy.
"Should we leave these and just tell the Ranger?" asked MacGyver. "Or should we try and get rid of them somehow?"
"Well, they aren't using these to poach deer, unless they plan to absolutely vaporize them," said Randall wryly, pick up a rifle with a metallic clank. "It's not exactly a Winchester."
He placed it in Mac's hands, and after feeling the stock, barrel, grip and magazine decided it was probably a Beretta AR-70.
"Italian gun," he said thoughtfully. Expensive. These guys aren't playing around. "A stockpile of weapons in a warehouse somewhere makes sense. A stockpile of weapons in a cave in the backcountry doesn't make sense at all."
"Nothin' out here to steal, that's for sure," joked Randall.
"No gold after all?" asked MacGyver with a grin.
"None that I've ever found," replied Randall, half-seriously. "Could use some too."
"What do you do with the rest of your year when you aren't out here mowing down airstrips by hand?" asked MacGyver, setting the rifle on the pile and flipping the corner of the tarp back down over it.
"I'm retired," answered Randall. "Used to be a BLM guy," he added.
"Bureau of Land Management. Did you help get the Wilderness Act passed?" asked Mac curiously.
"Hell no," said Randall. "Those politicians back in Washington don't have a clue!"
Mac disagreed but held his tongue. He didn't need to get into a political battle.
Using his cane to find his way, Mac walked to the mouth of the cave and sat down on the lip where the floor dropped several feet to the side of the hill. He pulled a sandwich from his pack and began munching. The sun had begun its westward arc and shone full in his face. He pulled his canteen of water from a side pocket and drank long and deeply, reflecting that sometimes it was when life became stripped to its bare essentials that he felt the most alive.
Randall joined him in his sunny spot and began eating his own lunch.
"It's where these guys are taking the guns that worries me," commented MacGyver. "They're arming someone pretty heavily."
"Why here?" Randall asked, puzzled. "It's so inconvenient for transport."
"Well maybe your Magruder legend isn't that far off," said MacGyver. "There's a passage straight through and it's the last place anyone would look."
"I'm worried they'll be back and catch us up here," said Randall uneasily.
"You'd see them coming," Mac reminded him.
"They didn't see you," argued Randall.
"It was dark," explained Mac. "Plus I didn't use the trail. I didn't know there was one."
"Even so," Randall continued, "I'd rather get out of here and let the authorities deal with this mess."
MacGyver wasn't anywhere near ready to give up, but he did agree there wasn't anything more to be done at the moment, and getting caught again did not appeal to him at all.
He and Randall spent most of the afternoon hiking back down to the river, taking a side excursion to locate some blackberry bushes that Randall knew about and pick some for dinner. Mac hadn't ever tasted ripe blackberries straight off the bush under a hot summer sun and he thought there was much that could beat them, although finding the berries amid the prickly branches of the bushes proved to be a bit tricky to accomplish by touch alone.
"Did you get any of the salmon study done?" asked Randall once their sacks were full of berries.
"Not yet," answered Mac glumly. He was beginning to feel tired and frustrated.
"Well, looks like you'll only be set back by a couple of days," comforted Randall, but Mac wasn't listening. He was thinking about the stockpile of guns and wondering where they were headed.
Later that evening, he sat glumly at the rough table in the Shearer Guard Station cabin, listening to the banter between Christy and Jeanne as they heated cans of soup for dinner. Randall had gone outside, and so had Puck.
Mac wondered what he ought to do next. He could ignore the cave and guns altogether. He and Christy could go on with the Salmon population study as if nothing had happened. Or they could go to Moose Creek and enlist the help of the Forest Service law enforcement. He wished he could speak with Pete.
As he listened to Christy, who apparently was in a cheerful mood after recovering her pack and the rest of their gear from the Bear Creek camp, he made a decision. They were both in danger as long as the men they had encountered were in the area. They already knew too much. He didn't want to keep putting Christy in more danger, but there wasn't a good place for her to go at the moment. He wondered if she could stay with Randall and Jeanne for a couple of days.
As for his own plan, that seemed harder to decide. He needed more information on the plans of the two men from the cave before he could best decide what to do. As much as he disliked the idea, he needed to go back to the cave again. Alone.
He decided not to tell Randall, Jeanne or Christy about his plan, lest they insist on coming with him. After dinner, as everyone sat on the front porch shooting the breeze, he casually rearranged his gear into a smaller bundle in his day pack. He wanted to leave the salmon study equipment behind. Thankfully, no one seemed to pay much attention to anything he was doing.
Waiting until everyone was asleep, he quietly shut Puck in the cabin. He wished he could take the dog with him, but it was just too dangerous.
Shouldering the day pack that he had prepared earlier, he stepped off the porch and took a minute to breathe and listen. Night noises filled the air: the rustle of a bat, the song of crickets. Bearing left across the clearing, he had no trouble locating the worn path between sunken rocks that headed in the direction of the river. His cane followed the trail, and he automatically turned right along the Selway River trail.
The hardest part of this third journey to the cave was judging distance. Several times he thought he heard the shallow ford where he had crossed before but it was hard to be sure. Finally he just had to guess and he forded the river, its surface glinting with fractured moonlight.
Once across, he searched for the trail that Randall had mentioned earlier in the day. He had to cross the face of the hill several times, ranging farther each time before he struck it, and by then he needed rest and a snack.
He leaned against a tree, legs crossed, as he ate a pita filled with hummus and drank a little from his canteen. Then, he quietly made his way up the trail, listening as he approached the cave.
As before he heard nothing, and he felt his way inside in the dark. There was no smell of fresh fire and no new gear that he could discover. He made his way back to the far back left corner of the cave, stooping to avoid another crack on the head. Then he sat down to wait.
He didn't realize he had fallen asleep until he was awakened by voices on the trail below the mouth of the cave.
"...your lazy ass up here," he recognized Frank's voice. "Marley, what the hell? What are you doing down there?"
Mac couldn't hear the other man's reply, but Frank snorted and called down, "well, piss faster. We need to get these damn things loaded."
The other man said something indistinct, and Mac saw a vague brightening of the cave's interior when Frank shone his flashlight around the small space. He sat quietly, his hands resting on his raised knees, his back against a rock. He expected any second to have the beam of the flashlight pick out his form but Frank wasn't as thorough as he'd expected. He also seemed to be in a hurry.
Marley joined him in the cave and the two men threw aside the tarp that covered the weapons. Carefully but quickly they began transferring them to another location a few feet away. At first MacGyver couldn't tell why they were being moved, until he heard the creak of wood and he realized they were crating the guns.
"Twenty more minutes," said Frank desperately. They'll be up there and we aren't going to be ready. "That stupid girl set us back way too long. We never should have messed with her."
"Oh, and have her go to the Rangers?" Asked Marley with sarcasm. "You were the one who was so fussed about that."
"And she probably is there now," replied Frank. "But even if they come tomorrow they'll be too late. If we get this load finished."
At that point he moved down the pile to his left far enough that his flashlight beam grazed over MacGyver, still sitting calmly next to the pile of weapons.
"What the hell?" Frank exclaimed.
"Hi Fellas," greeted Macagyver nonchalantly.
"It's the blind guy!" said Marley incredulously. "What are you doing here? Are you stupid or something?"