Chapter 25 - The Federal Injunction
We burst out of the wooden conduit into the turbulent tailrace of the Chelan Falls irrigation bypass, choking on foaming glacial water and gasping for air under a canopy of dripping hemlocks.
David hit the surface five seconds after me, his arm sweeping through the icy current to catch the strap of my waterproof field jacket, hauling my head above the swirling backwater before the current could drag me toward the spillway turbines.
"I have you!" he choked out, spitting water, his muscles straining as he dragged us both onto the gravel spit beneath the concrete bridge abutment. "I’ve got you, Claire!"
We collapsed onto the wet river stones, shivering violently from the bone-deep shock of the mountain water. Against my chest, wrapped in triple layers of oiled canvas inside my heavy coat, the leather ledger was intact.
Beside me, coughing up black silt and laughing with a strange, breathless delirium, was Arthur Sterling.
His face was cut across the temple, his leather coat torn to ribbons, but in his gnarled right hand, untouched by the river, he still gripped the sealed brown envelope bearing the embossed gold crest of the Supreme Court of the United States.
"You're completely out of your mind," David coughed, rolling onto his back against the wet stones, staring up at the concrete arches above us where the red tail-lights of unmarked tactical vehicles were speeding frantically south along Highway 97 toward the wrong exit.
"That's why your mother married me, boy," Arthur rasped, hauling himself up against the bridge pillar and opening the envelope with fingers that didn't hesitate. "Now listen to me. Both of you."
He pulled out a single sheet of heavy parchment, dated October 14, 1962, signed by Chief Justice Earl Warren and countersigned by Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy.
"This is not an ordinary land deed," Arthur whispered, his breath steaming in the freezing predawn mist. "This is an executive designation under the National Wilderness Defense Act of nineteen-sixty-two. Ninety thousand acres of the Vance corridor were never classified as private corporate property. Your mother’s grandfather surrendered the mineral rights to the Department of the Interior in secret during the Cuban Missile Crisis to establish a covert inland sovereign reserve—a master communication and logistical redoubt for the Western Command."
David stared at the parchment, his military training instantly recognizing the military classification codes at the top of the header. "Which means..."
"Which means Marcus Croft doesn't own this land, the county probate court has zero jurisdiction over the chain of title, and the Thurston County judge who accepted Croft’s forged lien has just committed federal treason," Arthur said coldly. "The only person who can formally unseal and record this sovereign grant is the direct lineal descendant of Eleanor Vance... standing in person before the Secretary of State at the State Capitol in Olympia."
"Olympia is two hundred miles away," I said, my teeth chattering as I pushed myself to my feet. "Croft has the state patrol watching the highway passes. Vivian said he’s moving to declare the conservatorship at ten o’clock."
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Arthur looked at his vintage mechanical watch. The hands read five-forty-two AM.
"Then we don't take the highway," David said, pointing toward the railway siding fifty yards away across the gravel bed, where a twin-diesel freight train hauling three miles of raw timber logs was slowly idling at the junction switch, waiting for the southern signal clearance toward the Stampede Pass tunnel. "We take the lumber line."
