by Jon Talton
We drive another ten minutes and a long, low set of buildings appears on our left. They’re colored the same brown as the desert floor: two- and three-story structures that look like they run almost a mile up against a mountain. As we get closer, the guard towers and double sets of concertina-topped security fences become apparent. A blacktop perimeter road runs between the fences but has no vehicles patrolling it. We slow as a sign proclaims “Arizona State Prison Complex—Cortez Peak.” Another wide, new asphalt road connects with ours. The road goes fifty feet before it is hemmed in on both sides by the security fences. Another hundred feet and it jigs through concrete barriers and comes to a gray guard tower. The second story of the tower has large tinted windows with blue trim. The structure is shaded by an awning and surrounded by a low railing. I see no vehicles and no people.
“Let me see your printout,” Fitz says as he cruises past doing an even thirty miles an hour. “Built in 1999. Total inmate population, 3,750…Mandatory literacy, special ed, GED preparation, vocational services…The site supports its own wells, water and wastewater treatment plants…The complex maintains six kitchens that can produce 12,450 inmate meals per day and a laundry capable of washing 53,000 pounds of clothes and linen each week.” He tosses it back. “Kiss my big, black ass. We travel half a mile, and pull off. He reaches into the back and picks through several U.S. Geological Survey maps, ones with such precision that they show power lines and abandoned mines. He pulls one out.
“This map is from 2005 and there’s no prison on here.”
He indicates with a thick finger. I lean over to look and he’s right, the spot is empty. Nothing was built in 1999. He leaves the map open. I look around, relieved once again to have the .357 in my pocket, but we’re alone. From this distance, the prison nearly blends into the side of the mountain.
“Let’s take another look,” Fitz says, and the truck drops heavily into gear. He slowly makes his way another half a mile, scanning to his left. Then he spins the wheel and we bump off the perfect road into the desert. My insides tighten. On the road, escape seemed easier. Now we’re more exposed. The truck shimmies and bobs across the ground and the sound of rocks and scrub can be heard beneath the floor. Fitz goes slow. He doesn’t want to raise dust. I keep watch but it’s hard to see much. The spindly desert trees, if you call them that, are about at eye level. Good camouflage, I hope. Fitz spins the wheel and drives on the edge of a dry creek. We go uphill. The prison is completely out of sight. He drives maybe another five hundred yards and shuts off the engine. We’re facing a mountain.
He reaches behind him and unzips the duffel. He produces what looks like a weapon out of a science-fiction movie.
“Ever seen one of these?”
Part of it looks like a tricked out M-16 with a folding stock and pistol handle, but the barrel is big and protrudes from a thick housing ahead of the trigger guard and magazine. It’s sleek and black, about two-and-a-half feet long. I’ve never seen anything like it.
“Franchi SPAS-15,” he goes on. “Shotgun. Little Italian sweetheart. Help you win friends and influence people. Here’s the position for manual pump action. And this for semi-auto. Push and hold this button.” He goes through a quick tutorial and hands me the weapon. “Think you can handle it?”
I nod and take it, keeping the barrel up as I swing the stock out and lock it into position. It’s very lightweight.
“Holy shit!” I exclaim as the long, iconic weapon comes out of the duffel and into Fitz’s hands. It’s an antique. It’s very deadly. “That’s a BAR.”
“Yes it is.” He strokes it, smiles fondly. “Browning Automatic Rifle. This is a great state to be a gun collector in. It’s almost mandatory here.” The BAR was a mainstay of the military in World War II, a very badass infantry weapon that fires thirty ought-six ammunition, full-auto if you wish. It has the tough but elegant design of the zenith of American industrial power. I definitely feel as if I am back in the days at Fort Monmouth and other posts where “boys with their toys” meant guns, even among the outsider intel guys. It’s an odd feeling; somebody else’s life—not mine. Fitz brings a bandoleer belt of magazines for the BAR, hands me an extra magazine for the shotgun, and I agree to hump a daypack with water. We step out. I chamber a round into the shotgun and we hike into the dry wilderness.
“Just remember…”
“I know,” I say, brandishing the high-tech toy, “geologists from the university.”
“Never know what varmints you might find out here.” He laughs with anticipation.
The desert is quieter than anything I have ever experienced. The silence leaves a vacuum in my brain. A small lizard scurries out of our way and it sounds like a freight train by comparison. The land is also lush in a strange way, with many varieties of spare but lovely plant life. You have to pay attention, but there’s no time. I scan the landscape for humans, the sky for sensors or helicopters. I leave it to Fitz to make our trail.
He aims toward a low arm of the mountain, a rocky hogback, and we walk toward it across the hard, parched ground. My black running shoes turn ochre from the dust. It becomes rocky as we climb and before long my legs are hurting and I’m out of breath. I feel sweat run down my back and thank God the cloud cover is still in place. He still looks like he’s a twenty-two-year-old lieutenant. As I recall, the BAR weighs nearly twenty pounds. It takes us forty-five minutes to reach the top of the ridge. The view is panoramic, reaching far enough that I can see the perfect rectangles of farm fields we left behind miles before.
Below us the vast prison is empty.
Chapter Thirty-nine
The prison backs up to the hogback and its outer buildings form an inverse U, shielding the large interior space from the outside. It’s supposed to look that way. When we had approached from the road, they looked like massive prison buildings, with small windows and dun-colored walls. Now I can see they are fake. Two arms of the U are just tilt-up walls with windows in them. The third leg of the U is a long set of barracks or dorms with doors that open straight out into the yard, and on one part of the rooftop is a freshly-painted helipad with a door that goes down into the structure—hardly the maximum security prison “complex” advertised on the state Web site. The yard is huge—four football fields, at least, and it looks like the back lot of an old Hollywood movie studio.
It contains a street lined with commercial buildings and houses. There are streetlamps, parking meters, a mailbox, newspaper racks. If you stood down there, you might think for a moment you were in a small New Urbanist town center. Closer to us is a range with silhouette targets still in place. Next to it is a tactical range like the cops use, with barricades and false fronts where targets can pop up, giving the officer only a couple of seconds to decide whether it’s friendly or hostile. Somehow I don’t think any police officers have been here.
In fact, nobody’s there. The huge compound looks deserted. No people, no vehicles. Fitz pulls out a pair of Steiner binoculars and scans it. The guard towers are empty. The perimeter road is clear. It’s another Olympic International property that’s deserted, but it looks a hell of a lot more menacing than a closed paper mill.
“I’m gonna look around,” he says, and side-steps his way down the rocky ridge disappearing around a boulder formation.
I stand there and catch the barest breeze. It makes the stiff desert scrub rattle in the silence. Then I go down on my haunches, lay down the gun, and take out my notebook. I sketch the prison complex as best I can, making note of the landmarks, especially the firearms ranges. I use the cell phone to take some bad photos. At that moment, I wish I had the gadgets of a “mojo”—a video cam, a still camera, that would be nice right now. But a twenty-two-year-old mojo with no sense of what he or she knows or needs to learn, with no mentor or good editor, accustomed to writing single-source stories off press releases…well, he or she would never have gotten this far.
“They’re gone.”
I nearly jump out of my skin�
�there’s a lazy journalist cliché, but it’s just what it feels like. Off to my left is a thin man with scruffy puffs of white hair protruding from a cap. His face is as red-brown, permanently sun-scorched, and as rutted and grooved as the desert. It’s a face that looks as if two tectonic plates have collided on it: pinched from the eyes down, but with a wide, high forehead with a dozen deep wrinkles. He’s wearing hiking boots, khaki shorts, and a soiled Harley Davidson wifebeater. He has an amiable voice. He also has a handgun trained on me.
My skin stays detached and my heart rate is so high I can feel it in my ears, but for some reason my tic of a pinching eyelid has gone away. The shotgun is black and beautiful and an impossible distance away from my hand.
“I wouldn’t do that, if I were you.” He reads my mind.
All I can do is ask questions. “Where did they go?”
“That’s a pretty piece you got,” he says, using the revolver as a helpful pointer, indicating the Franchi. “Looks like the kind of ordnance they were using.”
“So you watched them?”
“I’d sneak up, just like you. Had to be real careful, ‘cause they’d send out patrols with dogs, helicopters. But nobody knows this mountain better than me.”
“Then it’d be a pity to leave your chunky salsa all over it.”
Fitz Happens.
The scruffy man immediately drops the pistol. It’s a miracle it doesn’t go off. “Holy shit, man…” He speaks in a whisper.
Fitz has flanked us and trains the mean-looking automatic rifle on the man’s mid-section. It looks menacingly long from this angle, the barrel huge, like a hand-held howitzer. He walks closer and orders me to get the revolver. I grab it and my shotgun and stand.
Fitz doesn’t lower the barrel. “So who the fuck are you?”
***
He sits cross-legged on the ground and tells us. His name is Rusty Grayson and he’s lived for almost thirty years in a little hamlet south of us, a place he went when he came home from ‘Nam and wanted to be away from the world. He says he’s a desert rat and nobody knows these mountains better than he does. I tell him my name and newspaper, so everything’s ethical—he knows he’s talking to a journalist now. He says he didn’t realize reporters were so well armed. I take notes while Fitz stands, the BAR resting in the crook of his arm.
Rusty says the prison was built two years ago and immediately “they” showed up. He never knew who they were: a hundred or more men at a time, dressed in camo, looked military but nobody saluted. They’d spend a month down in the compound training, then they’d be replaced by a new group. “Urban warfare,” he says. “That’s what it had to be. They had weapons looked like what you have.” He indicates the Franchi.
“And other badass shit. Looks state of the art. All kinds of sidearms. Armored vehicles. They’d practice clearing houses, taking out snipers, crowd control, what looked like protecting a VIP from bad guys, quick evac. They did some police stuff, like arresting each other, arresting large groups. But most of it was kill-zone city, y’know? Live-fire exercises. Night firing with tracers and that laser-guided shit. It was fun as hell to watch. I’d take station up here and they never found me. I figured they was headed to Eye-rack or Afghanistan. But like I say, something never seemed right. They looked military, but not, you catch my drift. Hell, reporters never been in the military—no offense. Anyway, had to be some super-secret shit, pretending this was a prison and all. You want my two cents? Mercenaries. For what it’s worth. The older you get, the less people want to hear what you say. And you’ve finally got a lot to say. Anyway…”
“You said they’re gone.”
“They are,” he says. I offer him water and he guzzles it. “Pulled out three weeks ago and nobody’s been around until you two. Not even a caretaker down there. But I figured they had electronic surveillance, so I didn’t go in. I coulda cut through those fences, no problem, but I didn’t. This place scared the shit outta me.”
***
Fitz threads his way back to the freeway in an ebullient mood, mostly telling stories about me from the Army. They called me the PVLT—permanent virgin lieutenant—because I couldn’t get a date.
“You should have stayed in the Army,” he says. “You missed the ‘we came, we saw, we kicked their ass’ days.”
“And how many times have you been to Iraq?”
“That came later. A charlie foxtrot from on high.” A clusterfuck. “Anyway, you had to go off to right all the wrongs in the world, become the big-time columnist.”
“Yeah, some big-time columnist. I’m probably out of a job. Can’t get anybody who’ll pick up what I write. Maybe I’ll reenlist.”
“We’re desperate, but not that desperate.” He cackles with a high screech. “Anyway, you think you got a story now?”
“I’m getting there. It’s interesting that everything I see connected with this story has no people, except for the assassination team that was after my ass. Two paper mills that are supposed to be open are closed. ODS’s office out in the suburbs turns out to be a broom closet without even a nameplate on the door. Now, the prison complex that’s not really a prison, but it’s deserted.”
He makes his rumbling “mmmmmm” sound. “That empty training site back there? They’ve deployed those people somewhere.”
“What are you getting at?”
“Like I told you, the early years of the Bush administration were really good for the private contractors. Then things got tougher. With the deficit and the new administration, hell, finally more pushback from the brass—the gravy train has slowed down. And it’ll keep slowing down, contracts keep drying up, unless there’s an event.”
The sun breaks through making the cab warm but my legs go cold. “Event?”
“Think about it,” Fitz says. “What happened after 9/11? The whole country goes ape shit. The contractors make billions. What happens if there’s another event? Maybe that’s your eleven/eleven. And these Praetorian assfucks are deployed and ready to go as a paramilitary force to restore order. It happened with Blackwater after Hurricane Katrina. It wouldn’t surprise me if there are much bigger contingency plans out there. Maybe a contract has already been let. Top secret, of course.”
“Can I quote you?”
“On background. Call me a high-ranking intelligence officer.”
“You’re a light colonel.”
“Heavy enough to order around where your butt used to rank. Call me what you want, but leave my name out. I know these contingency contracts exist for homeland security, even for operating detention facilities if there’s major civil unrest in the homeland. ‘Homeland,’ my ass. Sounds like Nazi Germany. It’s a permanent state of war, baby, a permanent state of fear. And I can’t even imagine how much money they’ll make.”
It’s not long before we’re swallowed up by the city and a long traffic jam, which we mostly endure in silence. Finally, he swings the truck under the motel portico and I prepare to get out. We exchange a firm handshake, but he pulls me over and gives me a quick hug.
“Take care of yourself.”
“Do my best,” I say.
“What are you going to do?”
“All I know how. Write the story. What are you going to do?”
“I’ll work it from my end. Who knows what’s already set. Your girlfriend’s daddy, the spook, seems to know something. It’s going down.”
“I’ve got to get back to the Northwest in a hurry,” I say. “Can’t wait for the bus or train. But my FBI friend told me not to fly.”
Without a pause, he says, “I can fix that. You sure that cell phone’s secure?” I nod. He says, “Then I’ll be in touch later today.”
I climb down, wishing I could borrow the high-tech shotgun. The truck is coated in dust.
He says my last name. “You were a good soldier, you know.”
“I would never have been accepted by you West Point snobs.” I smile at him.
“You still got that
chip on your shoulder, but you know that’s bullshit. Your only problem was you were too sentimental.” Wrinkles furrow his dark skin. “You’d better think about that if you meet up with your killer threesome again. Yucatan, baby.” He laughs his long, infectious cackle.
I close the door and watch him swing quickly through the parking lot and disappear.
YUCATAN: An old military slang acronym: “You’re Under Certain Annihilation, Throw a Nuke.”
I wonder if the young guys even use it anymore.
Chapter Forty
Saturday, November 6th to Sunday, November 7th
Briefs.
Editors love briefs, short stories that can run anywhere from two or three sentences to a handful of paragraphs. “Just brief it,” an editor will say. They’ve convinced themselves—always citing somewhat murky research—that readers love them, too. When used properly, briefs have their place, especially in a society with a terminally shrinking attention span. Unfortunately, like everything in the newspaper business except excellence, they’ve been done to extreme. Often the most important stories in the paper are briefed. This is certainly true in the Phoenix paper—boring stuff gets relatively long treatment with jumps. Two grafs are done for something really compelling—I keep thinking, “Tell me more”—but they don’t. They often don’t even put the “where” in the brief, beyond the name of the town. I wonder what’s going on that never even makes the paper.
I started out as a young reporter writing briefs and obits. I can still do them.
***
Early Saturday morning, I check out of the hotel and take a long cab ride to a civil aviation airport in the far north of the city. There I meet Fitz’s friend Bud. He doesn’t give me his last name and I don’t ask. He’s retired military and he’s willing to give me a lift to Portland.
We fly in a Cessna 350 Corvallis, sleek and showroom new. The comfy cockpit looks like what you’d find in a sports car, with the control sticks coming out of the doors. Normally, I am a nervous flier on a big jetliner, much less a single-engine propeller plane.
