Salvatore Parducci was in the middle of counting a stack of bills and didn’t want to lose count. He ignored Radecker’s questions about seeing three old men in suits until a hand swept across the counter and scattered the money on the floor. When Sal looked up, Radecker had a pistol pointed at his face. “Yes, sir, how can we help you today?”
“Where are they, damn it? They’re hiding in here, aren’t they?”
“The three old men? We got a lot of retired people as customers. Can you describe them for me?” In the background there was a sudden high whine that sounded like an electric motor.
“Lenel, Cibatutto, and Freiling,” Radecker said, coming around the counter to search the office. “Recognize those names?”
“Very well. My family has been doing business with them for many years.” Parducci held his hands away from his body. He remained perfectly still and perfectly relaxed, even when Radecker kicked open one of the locked office doors to look inside.
“When’s the last time you saw them?”
“You’re not with the IRS, are you?”
“What’s that?” The whine of the motor had turned to a hollow slapping sound.
“What’s what?”
“That noise?”
“Oh, the noise. That thupa-thupa-thupa sound? That would be Parducci Enterprises’ helicopter.”
Radecker rushed to the window and tore back the curtains in time lo catch a glimpse of his employees lifting off. He turned back to the heavily bejeweled banker, who explained, “We’re a full-service financial institution.”
*
By the time Radecker’s second APB in as many months went out to law-enforcement officials across the western U.S., the fugitive scientists were renting a car with cash at Ontario Airport in California.
12
Chihuahua
With Okun at the helm, the crew headed south. The rental agency had put them into a brand-new Ford LTD station wagon, which bobbed and weaved down the freeway like a small yacht. Their plan was to slip across the border at Tijuana as quickly as possible. During Okun’s last AWOL escapade, Radecker had mobilized a small army to find him. They could only imagine what kind of dragnet he’d set up this time.
Okun had never been to Mexico, so he didn’t realize anything was strange when he pulled up to the San Diego side of the border and found himself in a long line of traffic waiting to go across.
“Something’s not right here,” Lenel said, leaning forward from the backseat. “There’s supposed to be a line on the other side, not this one. Entering Mexico should be faster than this.”
“Maybe things have changed since the last time you came down here.” Okun shrugged.
“No. Turn around and get out of here,” Lenel told him. But it was too late for that. They were in the middle of seven lanes of one-way traffic. So the older men quickly devised Plan B. One by one they slipped out of the station wagon and made their way to the footbridge. They would wait for one of the many tour groups crossing into Tijuana for a day of shopping and blend in with them. Okun thought they were being a little too careful at the time, but when he approached the gate he saw two men in suits and sunglasses walking back and forth, looking into every car. When one of them came close to him, Okun flashed him a peace sign and a smile. The man moved on without changing expression to continue his hunt. Has Radecker figured out where we’re headed? Okun wondered. Then, he thought about the complicated path he’d taken to deduce the location of this second spacecraft. Naw. Radecker won’t figure it out.
“Where are you headed?” the uniformed border guard asked when Okun pulled even with the booth.
“Ensenada.”
“What’s the purpose of your visit?”
“Mucho tequila.”
The guy smiled, told him to drive safely, and waved him through.
He found the three old men waiting for him a hundred yards up the road. They climbed in, and off they went. Once they found their way to the road they wanted and were out of town, Okun drove twenty miles an hour faster than the rutted roads would allow.
*
That night, they pulled into the mountain town of Nuevo Gasas Grandes about 10:30, expecting to find the place completely dead, out of commission until morning. All the way up the twisting road that took them into the foothills of the dry Sierra Madre mountains, they saw downed telephone poles and freshly broken cinder-block houses. But, in the “Grandes,” there was little evidence of the huge earthquake that had rolled through the town a week before. The main street was lined with old wood-frame buildings. The brightest, loudest place on the block was the Taverna Terazas, which stood directly opposite the town’s church. A jukebox inside filled the street with sound, adding to the noisy chug-a-lug of portable generators. A dozen men sat outside the bar, talking and laughing, chairs tipped back against the wall.
Lenel, Freiling, Cibatutto, and Okun, all of them still dressed in the suits they’d worn to Dworkin’s funeral, parked the car and walked down the center of the street. Striding four abreast, they looked like a not-very-threatening group of gunslingers. The men outside the saloon were tough-looking dudes, vaqueros who looked like the real deal: dusty leather boots, dungarees, and Western shirts. They stopped laughing when the Norte Americanos walked up.
“Hola, amigos,” Okun called as he walked past them and through the front doors. The scientists followed him inside. The small bar was almost full. Okun came in and took a table near the jukebox, which was playing a rowdy ranchero song. Conversation lulled for a minute while the men at the bar turned around to have a look at these four dressed-up gringos, but then resumed. When a waitress walked past, Okun ordered them four beers, then leaned in over the table. “Once we find the Silent Zone, we’ll drive down the line of power poles, and I’ll find the point-of-view angle I got from the screen. I’ll stand in the same relation to the power pole I saw in the image on the screen.”
“You remember it well enough?”
“Trust me. It’s Etch-A-Sketched across the inside of my brain.”
“How are we going to find out where this place is?” Freiling asked.
Lenel motioned toward the bar. “Judging from the uniforms of those men at the bar, they work for the electric company. We could follow them out there in the morning.”
“I have a better idea.” Cihatutto announced. He paused to hand the waitress a twenty for the beers, and told her to keep the change. “We hire a guide.”
“It better be somebody we don’t like very much,” Lenel warned darkly, “because if we actually discover an alien ship, he might not live very long.”
Okun saw how it could work out. “Dr. C’s right. It’ll be faster if we have somebody who can take us out there. If we find a ship, we do our best to hide it from him. Two of us can stay out there while the two others ride back into town with the guy to call in our reinforcements. If he finds out about it, too bad for him. There’s too much riding on this.”
“Slow down, kid, you’re starting to sound like Victor Frankenstein,” Lenel said.
Freiling had been waiting for a lull in the conversation. He turned to Cibatutto. “I’m still wondering why you gave that waitress so dang much money?”
The answer walked up to the table. A skinny young mestizo kid, maybe seventeen, came over to their table, turned a chair around, and straddled it. “You wanna buy some pots?”
Okun did a double take. “Buy some huh?”
“Pots. Bowls. Ceramicas.” He explained in plain English how Americans sometime came to Grandes wanting to buy pottery robbed from burial sites of the Mogollon Indians. He pronounced the word mo-go-YON. Others came to see the caves the Mogollon had once lived in.
“We’re not here for pots. We want to go out to the Silent Zone.” Okun pulled the rolled-lip newspaper out of his pocket and showed it to the kid. “You know anybody who can take us to this place?”
“We will pay a hundred dollars,” Cibatutto added.
“Me!” the kid yelled. “I’ll take you. I’m n
ot afraid of la Zona.”
“Done. But only if we leave by dawn. Temprano en el manana,” Okun said, reaching across the table to seal the deal with a handshake. “What’s your name?”
“Pedro.” The cocky kid was grinning like he’d just swindled the gringos out of a million dollars. If he had known the risk he was taking, he would have asked for much more. Not only could he guide them to the Silent Zone, but he could lead them to the only hotel in town, and, for an extra few bucks, he would take care of getting the food and water stockpiled. He’d learned English living in Los Angeles for nine years, but his father decided it wasn’t a good place for kids to be growing up and moved them back here to their hometown. Now Pedro was sitting around in bars offering strangers black-market artifacts robbed out of graves. The four men made a list of all the items they would need for the next day.
“Why do you wanna go out there?”
The four men looked at one another uncertainly.
“Can you keep a secret?” Okun asked.
“Yeah, of course.”
“You really promise not to tell anyone?”
“Yeah, of course.”
“We’re treasure hunters,” he whispered. “We work for a mining company, and we think these hills are loaded with treasure.”
The kid came out of his slouch and sat straight up. “You mean gold and silver?”
“No. I’m talking about iron ore, millions of tons of it. We read about the Silent Zone and said to ourselves, there must be iron ore up there.”
That sounded boring, and the kid lost interest immediately which was just what Okun intended.
*
Early the next morning, they met him outside their hotel. He’d found most of the supplies they’d ordered except the flashlights. He explained, however, that he’d gone into the church across the street and taken a bag full of candles. “I’ll pay ‘em back later.” An hour before the first construction crews got rolling, the scientists followed their guide s directions to the edge of town, where they turned onto a dirt road. They headed out, driving the station wagon where it was never meant to go. They bounced along a badly rutted utility road, which carried them deeper into the hills. Eventually, they rounded a turn and found themselves in a huge flat valley at least ten miles wide. “This is the Valley of the Caves,” Pedro told them. More than a valley, it was a huge open plain, largely barren. Towering in the distance were the Y-shaped power poles. Beyond them, sharp vertical cliffs led the way to endless hills climbing to distant peaks. Even from that distance, they could see that some of the tall poles were listing, damaged by the earthquake. As they approached the lines, they saw cranes, giant spools of wire, and other construction equipment. Some of the power lines had broken away from the poles.
They asked Pedro about the Mogollon Caves he had mentioned the night before. He told them what he’d learned from the black-market art buyers. The Mogollon Indians had built the caves and lived in them for centuries until they suddenly disappeared about five hundred years ago. He explained how Mogollon, like other tribes in the region, tied cradleboards to the heads of infants, in order to cause deformations of the skull. They weren’t natural, somehow, the kid said. Their heads were weirdly shaped, they made extraordinary pottery, and they built great cities like Paquime, then vanished suddenly without a trace. Their entire civilization abruptly ceased to exist, and no one knew why.
“Maybe the chupacabras ate them,” Okun teased.
“You laugh now,” Pedro said, “but just wait till I you get out there. It’s not natural. Nothing lives out there, not even flies.” The word chupacabra was usually translated as “goat sucker.” The legend of these feral four-legged creatures was the State of Chihuahua’s answer to the Loch Ness monster. “They live off the blood of other animals.” Pedro went on. “That’s why no animals will go into the Zone. Some people say they’re like the pets of los extranjeros, the ones who came from outer space.”
All heads turned toward the boy, who went on.
“A long time ago, they say a spaceship crashed down there by Guerrero, about a hundred miles south of here, and some of the Indians took care of the spacemen. They lived with the Indians for about ten years, and the chupas were their pets. But when the spacemen died, the chupas got lonely for their masters and ran away. Then they came to live in the Zone, and if any animals go in there, they kill them and suck their blood.”
Okun’s mind was already on other matters. “How much farther?”
“Keep going, it’s still far.” A few minutes later, Pedro was leaning forward, looking for something in the cliffs. “There’s one.” He pointed. “That’s one of the caves.”
When the scientists saw what the kid was pointing at, their jaws dropped. Each time Pedro had mentioned caves, they had pictured tunnels leading into the ground. But now they saw what he was talking about. High above the ground they saw a gigantic recess scooped out of the face of the cliff, two hundred feet across and fifty feet tall. Small adobe houses were built inside, some of them perched at the very edge. It was a very small town constructed inside the giant cubbyhole three stories above the ground. Without a word, they all piled out of the car for a closer look. Even though they were racing against time, this place deserved a quick tour. They had all arrived at the obvious conclusion: This cliff dwelling is large enough to hold one of the alien ships.
Getting up to the cave involved negotiating a series of stone stairs and rickety wooden ladders, which the older men did surprisingly well. They wandered deeper under the stone ceiling toward the nether reaches of the cave. It was deep enough to hold two vehicles like the one at Area 51. Crumbling mud-and-stone walls that showed a string of single-room apartments had been built against the interior walls. Several of the walls at the back still retained their curiously shaped, windowlike doorways. The ceilings were blackened in several places with the soot of ancient fires. Broken bottles and crushed beer cans had been scattered around by the local kids, who used the prehistoric cliff dwelling as a modern party spot.
Pedro led the men toward the edge and pointed out a narrow stone trail cut into the cliff. He called it the back door, and explained that most of the caves had such entrances. “If somebody tried to attack them, the Mogollon pulled up the ladders. If somebody tried to come in on one of these trails, you could knock them off with a big stick.”
Before climbing down, the men stood at the edge of the cliff, feeling the warm wind blowing straight up its face, and admired the spectacular view. The open sweep of the land gave way to the infinite desert stretching out to the curve of the earth. It was a beautiful morning, shirtsleeve weather and cloudless electric blue sky.
“I can’t think of a better place to hide a ship,” Freiling commented when the boy was out of earshot.
Back in the car, they followed the line of power poles, moving over the rough earth at speeds which threatened to snap the suspension of the heavily loaded station wagon. Pedro said they were getting close and turned on the radio, telling them, “When it goes out, you know you’re in la Zona.” When the radio suddenly developed static, everyone looked at one another. When it died completely, they kept their eyes straight ahead, scanning the hills for anything unusual.
“How big is this area? Where the radios won’t work,” Okun asked.
“Big, I don’t know.”
“Have you been to the other side, where the radios work again?”
“Yeah, it’s over there near Galeana. I don’t know how far it is.”
The men in the backseat unfolded a map of the area and asked him questions, trying to determine the size of the Silent Zone. Eventually they decided the center of it was about five miles ahead. After three miles, Okun slowed down and took a long look at one of the huge steel power poles. He switched off the car and got out, still focused on the Y-shaped tower. But something else caught his attention.
“Wow. Listen to that.” They were surrounded by un ocean of soundlessness. Except for the occasional puff of a breeze rustling throug
h the weeds, there was absolute stillness. Until that moment, Okun and the others hadn’t realized how much background sound they’d been listening to all day: the flapping wings of birds, things crawling through the bushes, the buzzing of small insects. Suddenly, each man could hear how loud his own breathing was.
“You see?” Pedro asked. “That’s why they call it the Silent Zone.”
Okun took out his notebook and examined a sketch he’d made of the Y a few days after he’d first seen it. Then he climbed on top of some nearby rocks, He moved left, then right, then forward, until what was in front of his eyes matched what he’d seen on the screen. If the pole in front of him was the one in the alien transmission, the ship must be somewhere very near where he was standing. He disappeared into some bushes growing at the base of a cliff, reemerging a few moments later and shaking his head.
“Let’s try the next pole.”
They drove a few hundred feet past the next pole and went through the same routine. This time, everyone helped scour the rocks and bushes along the base of the cliffs. But this proved to be impractical because it took the old men so long to get back to the car. It was already early afternoon, and, although no one said anything out loud, they all knew time was running out. Even Pedro started to pick up the pace. He and Okun working together could investigate one of the spots in five minutes. Each time they climbed back in the car, Okun stared down the long row of power lines, stretching off toward the vanishing point, and reminded himself, We have all night and tomorrow morning—be methodical, be patient.
They came to another set of cliffs and found two cliff dwellings in roughly the right relationship to the nearest power poles. The group spent a precious hour exploring these two caves and the area around them. As they drove toward the next pole, Lenel brought up the subject of contacting Spelman.
“It’s getting late. We should call Spelman tomorrow morning whether we find it or not. If we’re right about all of this, there’s a good possibility there will be air traffic in this area tomorrow night. We’ll explain the whole theory and maybe convince him we’re not crazy.”
Independence Day: Silent Zone Page 17
