Up close, Bob noticed that the Buzzard’s Roost outcrop resembled a horse’s rump. Perhaps this was it, he thought: the missing rear of the horse on the Florence topo map, which, in turn, was the draft horse figure sketched on the first stone tablet. Further, might the star incised into the cliff represent the five-pointed star shown on Mitchell’s tracing of the horse stone tablet? “My God,” he said to Gardner and MacLeod, as they stood next to him with expressions of awe and bewilderment. “What kind of organization goes to that much trouble to mark their treasure?” The group agreed that it would have taken a skilled crew many months to create such designs. Perhaps, Bob thought, this was where Waltz’s resident Mexican laborers had been spending much of their time.
By that evening, the pair from Heart Mountain was dumbfounded: How could Bob predict where carvings and buried markers would appear in the desert, not to mention in the mountains, and at distances of up to twenty miles away? They had just witnessed pieces of what Gardner described as a “gigantic unbelievable puzzle.”
The men asked Bob to become a full partner in the Heart Mountain Project, something which they had discussed only in general terms before. Bob agreed, but refused to move out to Apache Junction. Too hot to think, and thinking is what he liked to do best, he quipped. In the spirit of the new partnership, he disclosed that he had already found a site on private property, the day before their first meeting, which seemed promising. It was far from Heart Mountain, in fact from anything related to the areas that they had been exploring under HMP state permits. The prospective recovery site was not in the Superstitions proper. Without going into details, he told the two men that he would be delving into the data acquired on this second trip and would keep them posted. Nonetheless, it would be a while before he could return to Arizona. In the interim, he suggested that they work over the phone and the Internet: Gardner and MacLeod would be the eyes and ears, confirming the exact location of new signs and symbols that he would project from topo lines developed remotely.
Gardner and MacLeod agreed: setting aside differences about the origin of the rumored treasure would be no big deal, they laughed, after twenty years or more of chasing the wrong rabbit! Gardner still insisted that the Heart Mountain site was possibly of Spanish origin, while the other sites in the region were perhaps KGC. Not impossible, Bob replied. (The KGC was said to have made significant efforts to recover—through the use of financial incentives to informants—older Spanish and Indian treasure buried in North America. Golden Circle agents, according to J. Frank Dalton, were said to have traveled to Spain to investigate leads in dusty archives for that purpose.)4
Back in his hotel room, Bob realized that he had just launched perhaps the greatest hunt of his career. The desolate range out West, with its enormous vistas and extended lines of sight, resonated with KGC-Masonic intrigue. He had plotted points along transit lines that ran twenty to thirty miles. Where Brushy Valley back home had a depository or two on a scale of fifty square miles, and Addington, Oklahoma, say, 100 square miles, the master depository surrounding the Superstitions appeared to be on a scale of 1,000 to 1,500 square miles. Moreover, if the Wolf Map had some one hundred symbolic pieces to sort out for that Oklahoma-based puzzle, the stone tablets/Lost Dutchman riddle appeared to involve well over double that amount. In fact, there could be as many as four or five interlocking depositories in the surrounding area!
The scale and ingenuity of the layout made it clear to Bob that his early suppositions were correct. The remarkable grid-like “system” laid out before him was no small feat; it appeared a massive undertaking by a disciplined army of devoted men—engineers, surveyors, miners, mathematicians, cryptologists—working in secret over what must have been many years, if not decades. And the esoteric “cause” behind it all, he recognized, must have been bigger than a revived Confederacy … something extending beyond politics and the nation-state into the realm of philosophy or, perhaps, religion and spirituality.
Moreover, the vast size of the depository suggested that the treasures could be much larger than anticipated and, therefore, hidden far deeper by industrial-scale feats of engineering: long shafts leading to voluminous chambers or bunker-like structures. (Bob, in fact, had several unidentified sketches of deep burials, all from his set of Howk–Jesse Lee James documents. The locations, of course, were not provided on the waybills.) He wondered: If this were an underground KGC depository on a grand scale, could this explain why so many Dutchman hunters had disappeared or been murdered? Did their deaths result from some burnt-out, rifle-toting desert rat protecting what he swore was the true lost Dutchman mine; or were these homicides something different, something resembling professional hits, with sworn-to-secrecy sentinels pulling the trigger?
15
Threats from Above
IN the final few days of their January 1998 expedition, Bob, Gardner and MacLeod encountered something for which they were wholly unprepared: aerial reconnaissance.
As a gesture of goodwill, Bob had promised to investigate a few areas on or near Heart Mountain for signs of cache markers. He managed to discover a cluster of interesting carved symbols just a short distance outside the HMP permit zone, to the east. When he suggested that the trio spend the next morning exploring the area with metal detectors, Gardner and MacLeod jumped at the chance.
At the site, Bob switched on his detector and began scanning behind a few large boulders that had been inscribed. Within fifteen minutes of activating his device, a helicopter with civilian call signs appeared overhead, made two low-altitude passes and flew away. One passenger seemed so intent on monitoring the activity below that he nearly fell out the bay door on the chopper’s second pass.
The scene reminded Bob of his months as a Navy helicopter gunner in Vietnam. But it also reminded him of the threatening incident with his dog, Lady, back home in the Ouachitas, where, within minutes of activating his “Two-Box” detector, the vehicle with two armed snoopers had moved in to reconnoiter. This fly-by in Arizona had made him apprehensive, but he stayed cool. There was no flinching now.
Gardner and MacLeod were in a cold sweat. They had never encountered something like this before. Bob’s advice was to pack it in and stay away from the area, at least for a while. On the drive back to town, he told the pair that it could have been a mere coincidence: the helicopter might have been on a flight path over the site and simply turned around for some unrelated sudden change of plans. Far more likely, he said, was that the trio had entered a hot spot—triggering a response.
Without sounding too sure of his hypothesis, he suggested that some of this treasure—if it existed—might still be guarded. Moreover, it was possible that remote sensors had been placed near the target zone and had picked up the electronic signal emitted by the metal detector. When Gardner and MacLeod pressed him for who might have sent the chopper, he threw up his hands.
A few days later, at a site thirty miles north, a second incident occurred. Exploring with MacLeod in a ravine thick with KGC symbols, Bob discovered a sculpted white boulder set on top of a rock ledge. In profile, the boulder resembled a large human skull, with deep-set eyes, brooding eyebrows, an aquiline nose and jutting chin. There was no doubt that the big spherical rock had been carved to look like a skull under the right sun and shadow conditions. It gazed directly into a rocky area, across a creek, flush with other treasure signs. These included a large three-pronged arrow (turkey track) figure made of stones and a big, heart-shaped hole in a protruding bluff: a man-made window. The combination of the skull, heart and turkey track sent a familiar adrenaline rush through Bob’s body.
Bob turned to MacLeod and said that he wanted to switch on his detector to scan the dense menagerie of clues. As he went to retrieve the gadget from the car, he gently warned his friend to be prepared for visitors, based on what had happened a few days earlier. He had a powerful conviction that they were about to breach a sensitive area.
Taking his detector out of the car, he braced for another strange encounter.
His .357 was loaded.
It was not more than twenty minutes from the time he activated his detector that a blue Bell helicopter came shooting over a hilltop. Like the one before it, the chopper came from the northwest, from the general direction of Phoenix, Tempe or Mesa. With Bob and MacLeod looking up from the small ravine, the low-flying aircraft cruised right over the pair and then shot past the next butte, out of sight. Bob heard the chopper’s blades transition from forward-motion to hover; he knew for sure that it had landed behind the nearby cliff. This could get interesting, he thought. Unfazed, he continued to hunt for metal clues with his detector for some fifteen minutes until he heard MacLeod say, “Hey, look, there’s a guy and a woman coming our way.” A few minutes later, two strangers appeared in clear view through MacLeod’s binoculars, and, from the bright reflection off a metal object, it was obvious that the man had a large handgun in his shoulder holster. “They’re coming right at us,” MacLeod said, a slight tremble in his voice.
MacLeod suddenly felt his palms go sweaty. Bob, now somewhat nervous himself, could sense MacLeod’s rising anxiety. “These guys could be watchers,” he cautioned, adding in a calm assured voice: “Let me do the talking. We’ll just tell them we’re out rockhounding.”
MacLeod, his lips and throat parched from a combination of fear and the scorching midday heat, nodded. He was carrying a handgun, and he checked to see if his pistol strap was off and his weapon ready.
When the stranger—a clean-cut, muscular fellow in his late fifties—approached, he got right to the point. He displayed no badge. He didn’t identify himself. He made no mention of the helicopter. He simply asked Bob and MacLeod what they were up to—the whole time keeping his right hand loosely at his side, in easy reach of his .44 Magnum. The woman, in her late thirties or early forties, stood some ten yards away.
Bob replied that he and his friend were just out “rockhounding a bit,” and mentioned that they had been collecting desert agate. He and MacLeod held out handfuls of the semiprecious stones and a few pieces of quartz in their sweaty palms.
The stranger ran his cold blue eyes up and down the length of the barrel-chested, thickly bearded Brewer and the lanky, close-shaven MacLeod. Bob guessed their interrogator was either preparing to see who might make a move or, more likely, mentally recording physical descriptions. Then, out of the blue, the stranger asked, “Have you seen a window rock?” He stared intently at both men, as if to detect the slightest body language.
Bob took it in stride, but MacLeod was unnerved. He felt almost physically knocked off balance. It seemed a strange kind of question to throw at a stranger, and it conveyed, “This is a trap. Watch how you answer.” MacLeod casually moved a few steps away from Bob, thinking it best to avoid being taken out in a single line of fire.
Bob, fully prepared to shoot in self-defense, answered the question in his best, unflappable “hillbilly” way. “No, can’t say we seen anything like that. What the heck is a ‘window rock’? We’re just out here rock-houndin’, picking up these desert opal-like stones.” Without further chatter, he and MacLeod moved nonchalantly toward the parked Jeep. They politely nodded their caps at the couple, who nodded back. The man and the woman then wandered over to the symbol-rich area that Bob and MacLeod had been inspecting, and then disappeared into the ravine.
On the drive out to the main road, Bob could see no sign of a second automobile. The interrogators had come by helicopter; there was no doubt.
This second encounter shook MacLeod, who said little for much of the trip back to Apache Junction. He was looking for answers about the identity of the interlopers—answers that Bob could not provide with absolute certainty. But the older man took a crack at it, admitting that he, too, had been sweating it back there.
Had such incidents happened only once or twice, they could be chalked up to coincidence, he explained. But over the years he had been approached a number of times—directly or covertly by armed, unidentified men—while investigating suspected KGC cache sites. He recounted the story of the effigy. This, fortified by what had just happened, seemed to suggest that certain KGC depositories—containing big, deeply buried master caches—were guarded.
But by whom? Bob had two theories.
One possibility, he surmised, was that the “guards” are treasure hunters themselves who know only the approximate location of the treasures (perhaps through having deciphered some but not all of the clues themselves, or through sophisticated remote-sensing technology). This group theoretically might allow others to get just close enough to identify the exact location within the target zone.
A more likely hypothesis, he suggested, was that the guards are modern-day “sentinels,” members of an organization with ties to the Masonic-influenced KGC or a related organization. If that were the case, then some of the KGC cache locations may have been forgotten over time by the ultra-secret group that kept few, if any, written records. Those “lost depositories” obviously would not be guarded, nor would smaller sites with shallow buried caches (i.e., fruit jars, kettles, wash-pots, strongboxes and safes stuffed with coins) that could be picked up relatively quickly. However, the bigger “master” depositories—where deeply entombed stacks of bullion and containers full of coins, jewels and arms were stored in thirty-to-forty-foot-deep shafts—would present a huge logistical challenge to any outsider. A lone sentinel might be all that was needed to call in the necessary resources to prevent a known “big one” from getting away. A quick visit by helicopter and the interjection of a polite, armed “heavy” might be enough to deter intruders, “cowans.” Just theories, Bob said to MacLeod, who slowly had regained his color.
The helicopter incidents provided an unsettling send-off for Bob’s return trip to Arkansas. Still, he regarded the excursion as highly productive, not least because he had cemented a friendship with Gardner and MacLeod. He liked the pair for their character, energy and curiosity. A few weeks after his return to Hatfield, he received e-mails from the two men about other strange encounters on the Superstition trail. In one incident, while exploring a new prospect on directional lines provided by Bob, MacLeod and Gardner came across a beheaded rabbit. The head was neatly severed, by a knife. The body was placed on the crumbled stone wall of an old house they were investigating. With thoughts of Adolph Ruth’s macabre fate, the men lost no time returning to Gardner’s four-wheel drive.
16
The Template: Walking the Lines
BOB spent the rest of 1998 and most of the following year in the Ouachitas, pondering the Dutchman puzzle much of the time. From the brightly lit confines of his war room, he tried to determine whether his methodology in Arizona was sound and whether it was getting him closer to finding the centerpoint of what he suspected was an enormous KGC treasure depository. He put his fieldwork results through rigorous cross-checks to prove that the symbolism decoded had a solid basis in fact. Had the physical landmarks matched up with the topographic layouts, as well as with the messages on the stone tablets?
Everything had to mesh: plot points and compass bearings generated from clues found on cliffs, boulders and century-old cacti. Topographic lines drawn by government surveyors, with curious place names established by locals—most likely by “KGC” affiliates and transient “prospectors.” Finally, conceptual lines conveyed in code by the stone tablets. These tangents—indeed, the overall geometry—had to connect exactly, not approximately. There could be no fudging, no self-justifications for adjustments of a fraction of an inch, of a degree, on the precise, standardized topos.
To the best of his judgment, his lines and the tablets’ images did correspond. There was a distinct overlap. The next question: Was any of this coincidence? Was it nothing more than a mere sequence of loose associations, with some of the pieces given more heft to make the puzzle fit? Now, more than ever, he needed to be skeptical and scientific. Yet, each time, he seemed to get confirmation from the interplay of the stone tablets, the topo maps, the field markers and the directional lines.
Ultimately, he asked himself, was it possible to put the clues into a geographic-geometric equation that might reveal the centerpoint of an extraordinarily complex KGC depository? If so, he knew he stood a chance of aligning the template and solving the century-old mystery of Dutch Jacob. There was little question in his mind: the stone tablets provided a valid, albeit partial, road map to the KGC layout. Even more certain, the Superstition Mountain stone “maps,” other than providing a convenient cover story for the KGC, had nothing to do with the apocryphal Peraltas.
As a starting premise, Bob was convinced that the ciphered tablets must be used with those topo maps made at the time of the depository’s organization or reorganization. Specifically, to reveal the full layout of the system would require layering those lines derived from the stone tablets and those from field clues onto the 1900 Florence topo (and onto any contemporaneous surrounding quads).
From this point forward, the process was one of trial and error. The only way to know whether his compass-line-of-sight and GPS-acquired tangents were in proper alignment would be to find the grid’s centerpoint. This was the ultimate, if perhaps unattainable, solution. If his translucent template—a circle-in-square pattern cut into a Lucite slab—was correctly aligned on top of the topo, the full range of the encrypted stone tablets’ messages would become apparent in some coherent whole, he theorized.
Bob sensed that his work over the past quarter-century had been building to this challenge: the opportunity to draw on all that he had learned to unveil an above-below nexus of unparalleled intricacy and ingenuity. Perhaps Egypt’s Giza plateau, with its pyramids and Sphinx, or that ancient nation’s Valley of Kings and its pharaonic tombs, were each connected in some ciphered network and through some as-yet-undiscovered subterranean tunnel system. That was for the PhDs—the Egyptologists, archaeologists and geophysicists—to discover.
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