Desert Run

by Betty Webb

  ***

  The next time I awoke, daylight filtered through the closed curtains. I heard Warren’s rhythmic breathing, but as I started to sit up, it changed. When I looked over at him, his eyes were open, staring at me.

  “Do you always dream like that?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you want to talk about it?”

  “No.”

  He pulled me to him.

  After we made love, we showered together. Then he ordered breakfast brought to the room from the restaurant next door. He didn’t bring up last night’s memory-nightmare again, just tilted me back against the pillow and fed me as if I really were a baby. His hair was damp and dark from the shower, and the contrast made his blue eyes even bluer.

  “You need someone to take care of you.”

  I opened my mouth to receive another bite of toast. “No, I don’t.”

  “Yes, you do.”

  “Like hell.”

  “Like real.”

  I started to get up. “Warren, I told you…”

  Gently, he pushed me back down and fed me another piece of toast. “Okay, okay. But here’s what I want to say. There aren’t that many scenes left to shoot, the one today with Frank Oberle standing around as the gaffers dismantle one of the barracks—I’ve decided to actually put that in the documentary—then the helicopter shot of the Germans running across the desert. Two more after that, but both are interiors I’ll shoot on the sound stage in North Scottsdale. My guestimate is that we’ll finish this week, then close up shop and go back to L.A.”

  My mouth was empty again but since no more toast was forthcoming, I knew that he was ready to say what he really wanted to say.

  I was right. “Now that I’ve found you, I can’t leave you behind. I want you to come with me.”

  Wanting and getting are two different things. The memory-nightmare had left me feeling vulnerable, and vulnerability was just too threatening. This time I didn’t let him push me back down. I sat up and put my hand against his chest, keeping him at a forearm’s distance. “It’s too early.” He knew I wasn’t talking about the time of day. “Don’t look at me like that, Warren. I didn’t say that something more permanent isn’t possible between us, but it’s too much too soon.”

  “Honey, I…”

  “And don’t call me honey, either. Just let me finish. My feelings for you, they’re…they’re strong. But I have a business to run, too. I can keep Desert Investigations open and commute to L.A. and work on Desert Eagle with Angel. It would give you and me time to…” I stopped. Time to what? Count the skeletons in our mutual closets?

  Just because Jimmy was leaving in a couple of days—he’d already warned me no other extension would be forthcoming—that was no reason to close down an agency which meant so much to me. And oddly, my tumultuous night with Warren had brought forth a possible solution. Just before falling into my memory-nightmare, I’d remembered my trip to Hamilton and the drawling chatter of Eddy Joe Hughey as we drove up from Birmingham. He was sick of Alabama’s humidity, he’d said. Well, maybe he would jump at the chance to exchange it for some Arizona aridity. Although his computer skills would never be as brilliant as Jimmy’s, they were far better than mine. More importantly, I knew we’d work well together. But that didn’t mean Warren couldn’t be an important part of my life.

  “If I stay here, it would give you and me time to get to know more about each other before we make a major decision,” I continued. “For now, I have too many open cases. Do you expect me to desert people like Rada Tesema?”

  He shook his head. “You’re not the type to walk away from anything.”

  How little he knew me. For years I’d been an expert at walking away from love. But I simply added, “Besides, we need to make sure what we feel for each other is love, not lust.”

  Warren was silent for so long that I thought I’d lost him. Finally, he gave me a rueful smile. “You’re way too pragmatic. But if that’s what you want, I guess I’ll have to live with it.”

  I didn’t realize I’d been holding my breath until I let it out in a sigh. “There’s an up side to taking things slow, you know.”

  “Oh, really?”

  “It’ll give you time to hire a PI to check me out.”

  He laughed, then gave me another kiss. I could smell toast on his breath. “Honey, I already know everything about you that matters.”

  “Don’t call me…”

  “Yeah, I know. Don’t call you honey.”

  I couldn’t say any more because he’d covered my mouth with his own.

  ***

  Later, I followed Warren over to the set and watched as Frank Oberle stood by the barracks while the gaffers tore them down. A boom mike dangled above his head just out of camera range. The breeze, still blowing in from California, scuttled mesquite leaves around his feet.

  “Today’s there’s nothin’ left in Papago Park to show what went on here sixty years back,” Oberle said, raising his voice so that he could be heard over the shrieks of hammers ripping out nails, the clatter of falling boards. “The Germans is gone, the stockade towers is gone, and the only buildings left have been drug off to an empty lot on Scottsdale Road behind the McDonald’s. In the restaurant, people are just sittin’ there, chewin’ on their Big Macs, not even knowin’ what those raggedy-ass buildings are. But I’ll tell you what they are. They’re American history, plain and simple.”

  When Warren yelled, “Cut!” everyone on the set, and even the crowd behind us, cheered. So did I, amazed to discover that the old man could speak with such poetry.

  Overwhelmed by the response, Frank wiped his eyes. “Wish Harry was here.”

  So did I. And Fay, too.

  I wished that Warren had been able to entice more of the former POWs into taking part in the production, men like Kapitan Stefan Schauer from the German-American Club. The greatest coup of all, of course, would have been an interview with Gunter Hoenig, who—despite what his son insisted—was probably still alive.

  Thinking of Gunter made me remember his friend, Josef Braun, a man lost to history all these years.

  Or was he?

  I looked toward the crumbling barracks, then the parking lot. I closed my eyes and listened to the set coming down, people talking, the traffic going by on nearby McDowell Road, heard the rush of water in the Cross Cut Canal.

  That was when I put it all together.

  ***

  After telling Warren where I was going so that he wouldn’t worry if I was late for the dinner we’d planned that evening, I stopped by my apartment to pick up the equipment I needed. Then I hit the freeway. Little more than an hour after leaving the Papago Park set, I took the Peralta Trailhead turnoff of SR-60 toward the Superstition Wilderness, a massive preserve protected by the sheer walls of the sharp-toothed Superstition Mountains—the same mountains that supposedly hid the Lost Dutchman Gold Mine.

  And, perhaps, a lone German holdout from World War II.

  Regardless of their beauty, getting into the Superstitions could be depressing. New ticky-tacky housing tracts had begun their inexorable march toward the mountains, but after a mile they thinned and the gravel road began, cutting through ranch land thick with grazing cattle. The scenery never failed to charm, because due to our damp winters, the Wilderness bloomed gaudy with wildflowers: yellow brittlebush, white phlox, magenta hedgehog cactus blossoms, orange mariposa, lavender Arizona lupine. The only blots on this wild beauty were the plastic Circle K bags hanging on the spines of saguaro cacti and the profusion of beer cans littering the side of the road.

  When nature met man, nature usually lost.

  After seven miles on gravel, I arrived at the Peralta Trailhead parking lot and stashed my Jeep in the shade of a palo verde tree. I signed in with the park rangers, assuring them that I had a fully charged cell phone as well as enough water to get me through the one or two days I might have to spend in the Wilderness. Having seen enough injuries and even deaths in this untamed place, they disapprov
ed of solitary campers such as myself, but didn’t have the authority to ban them.

  I had trekked the Peralta Trail many times in the past. A loop more than eighteen miles long, it followed a stream bed for a great part of the way, and was well-maintained even though it climbed from an elevation of approximately twenty-five hundred feet to thirty-seven hundred feet in less than three miles. Still, it was an easy enough hike for someone as fit and well-prepared as myself, although it could prove risky for anyone out of shape. You wouldn’t know that, though, by the number of people funneling through the trail’s narrow entrance. The different languages drifting to me on the sharp morning air showed that the Wilderness continued to attract a sprinkling of foreign rock climbers: Australians, Germans, even some Japanese. These pros all carried the proper hiking and climbing gear.

  The locals were another story. While a few dressed appropriately, many wore sandals and some went bare-headed, as if unaware of how merciless the Arizona sun could be. Even more shocking, a few carried no water. I took some comfort in the fact that these innocents would never make it the two miles to the Fremont Saddle, the top of the trail’s first major climb. When they hurt themselves, more experienced passers-by would give them the assistance they needed to limp back to the parking lot. If badly injured, they could be lifted out by helicopter.

  As expected, the crowd on the trail thinned dramatically by the time I crested the thirty-seven-hundred-foot-high saddle, but three more hikers, their heads wisely hidden by large sun hats, still struggled up the long slope behind me. Judging from the great distance between them, they were solos like myself, taking advantage of the still-cool weather to get in some sight-seeing before summer’s hell-heat arrived.

  Curve-billed thrashers flew above and Gambel’s quail scuttled down the trail in front of me as I stood on the crest of the saddle and looked northwest toward Weaver’s Needle, the famous Superstitions landmark Gunter Hoenig had drawn so poorly. I looked at his map again and smiled. The concentric circles he’d sketched in his amateurish attempt at topography did resemble a nest of snakes, but now I knew why he felt the scribbles necessary. He wanted the map’s reader, probably his son, to know exactly how high to climb to find the cave where he, Ernst, and Josef had hidden during the long winter and spring of 1944-1945.

  They hadn’t hidden in the Needle itself, but underneath an outcropping on the calcite cliff across from it.

  The Needle, a more than four thousand-foot high spire of alternating layers of basalt and ash, was the centerpiece of the Wilderness, a destination for treasure hunters and rock climbers alike. Supposedly veined with silver and gold, the Needle was rumored to be the site of the Lost Dutchman Gold Mine. After more than one hundred and fifty years of intensive yet fruitless exploration, it remained a popular destination for everyone entering the Superstition Mountains. Without realizing it, the Germans had taken refuge in perhaps the only place that would be totally ignored by a later generation: the seemingly bland cliff southeast of the Needle. Why would a rock climber or treasure hunter bother with that nondescript rock wall when the glorious Needle, with its magnificent views and possible riches, rose nearby?

  Sitting down on a boulder, I took a short break, carefully sipping water from my large canteen. After I rubbed more sun block on my face and dabbed my lips with the tube of mint-flavored ChapStick I always carried in my jeans pocket, I began the descent down the saddle into East Boulder Canyon, which wound its way south of the Needle.

  I’ve always loved this section of trail. Hoodoos, oddly shaped rock formations, towered high above me. Some seemed benign and almost humorous, resembling scampering mice or rabbits with exceptionally long ears. But others looked like Indians holding upthrust spears, which must have been an unsettling sight for the old prospectors who streamed into the Wilderness in search of gold. One of those treasure hunters was Maria Jones, a no-nonsense woman who led a band of adventurers into the Superstitions in the late 1950s, and whose Pinon Camp remained near the southern base of the Needle. Most signs of human habitation had long since returned to the earth, but the camp’s sheltering pinon pines made it a popular overnight camping spot, even though the water in the nearby stream was considered unpalatable—when it was flowing, which it never did in summer. Already the water had slowed to a mere trickle.

  I rested in the shade of Maria’s old camp for a few minutes, admiring the colorful scatterings of Mexican gold poppy and sparkling white anemone that added brilliance to the soft sage of the brush-covered valley. Here, the air was even more perfumed than back at the saddle, with the green sharpness of juniper softened by a trace of sweet wild hyacinth. As I sat on a boulder, a solitary hiker walked by, her smile as wide as her hat brim. She waved a brief hello, but intent upon her destination, she continued toward Weaver’s Needle without saying a word. I looked back toward the saddle and saw no other hikers, but the day was so pleasant more were certain to arrive. Fine by me. Like that solo woman hiker, they would make a beeline for the Needle without even glancing at the cliff opposite.

  Taking full advantage of the break, I called Warren on my cell, but the rock walls around me filled our conversation with ear-piercing static, so I kept the conversation brief. After reassuring him I was fine but that it might be necessary to spend the night at Pinon Camp, I hung up. I didn’t want to stay in the Wilderness overnight, but just in case, I carried food, water, sun block, waterproofing, a sleeping bag, and my loaded .38. Unless I was foolish enough to come between a nursing javelina and her piglets, Pinon was probably as safe as most Scottsdale hotels.

  Rest over and still no other hikers in sight, I left Pinon and pushed north up the creek bed, hardly sparing a glance at the Needle. By now I had trekked more than six miles over rough terrain, climbed to the top of saddlebacks, descended into canyons, and walked through temperatures ranging in the sixties during the early morning to somewhere in the eighties at—I checked my watch—ten o’clock, and still rising. The day promised to be a scorcher, but there was still a chance I could finish my business by noon. If Gunter’s map was correct, the cave was little more than a few yards ahead, up the rocky southern slope that led to yet another hoodoo-crowned cliff. I was under no illusion the cave would be easy to find. Back at Camp Papago, the Germans’ escape tunnel had been so well disguised with brush and rock that the guards couldn’t find either its entrance or exit for days. But I hoped that while Gunter might have been a clumsy artist, he might be a better map-maker.

  Half a mile northwest of Pinon Camp I stationed myself next to a dead mesquite, faced south with Weaver’s Needle at my back, and with my binoculars began searching the cliff face underneath a jackrabbit-shaped hoodoo. At first, all I saw were rocks and brush.

  Once I found the high outcropping—as indicated on the map, it looked like a frog—I lowered the binocs straight down to where two ancient saguaros framed a small forest of catclaw and jojoba. Living bushes co-existed with dead ones, and from a distance the jumbled mass appeared impenetrable. But the thirty-foot slope up to them appeared gentle, not at all impossible for even an unequipped hiker to climb.

  I took a quick look around to make certain no other hikers had crested the Fremont Saddle behind me, then fished my flashlight from my backpack and strapped on my cell phone, canteen, and holster. After slipping my hands into climbing gloves, I tucked the pack underneath a creosote bush and started up.

  The footing was rough, with loose shale and rounded rocks threatening every moment to roll under the soles of the hiking boots I had changed into at the Peralta Trailhead parking lot, so I picked my way along carefully. After stumbling up the slope for a few yards, I finally found the remains of a disused trail, so narrow and faint it looked like little more than a goat track. Hidden by brush from the more heavily traveled Peralta Trail below, it wound around a rock fall, then disappeared. Adrenaline rising, I looked up to find the trail hadn’t ended, but had metamorphosed into a sort of rock ladder that climbed straight up toward the twin saguaros now little more than fiftee
n feet above me. It was all I could do to refrain from venting a victory yell. I started up again and within minutes found myself standing on the narrow trail outside Das Kapitan’s cave.

  The Germans’ hideout, less than three feet above the trail, was a true cave; a natural formation, not a lost gold mine. I knew I would find no Dutchman’s gold here, and that was fine. I wasn’t looking for riches.

  Just one missing German.

  I believed that when Ernst had been captured raiding the farmworkers’ storage shed in that dry summer of 1945, he’d left Josef Braun behind. After Ernst never returned, Josef had continued to plug up the opening with rocks and fill the spaces between them with carefully transplanted shrubs. Unless a person knew in advance that the cave was there, it remained invisible to the naked eye. Was Josef in there now, dozing in the warm afternoon? Or had he moved on to a new life decades ago?

  “Josef! Josef Braun!” I shouted, after stepping away from the cave’s entrance.

  No answer. Either he was gone or was still barricaded in there and was now arming himself with whatever weapon he’d managed to scavenge.

  “Josef, my name is Lena Jones. You’re in no danger from me.” Which, if he’d killed Erik Ernst, was a lie. But the chances were good that an Old World German wouldn’t see a woman as a threat.

  Still no answer or sounds of movement of any kind, so I spent the next few minutes perched on the narrow trail, pulling away rocks while carefully avoiding slipping over the edge and rolling down the slope to the valley floor thirty feet below. The difficulty in removing the debris filling the cave’s mouth made me realize that it must have been sealed for years. Josef was long gone. Disappointed, but determined to finish what I had started, I kept going. Just as my shoulders were about to give out, the opening revealed itself and I shone my flashlight into the darkness beyond. While the opening was little more than two feet in diameter, the cave was much larger inside. In case there was another opening into the cave and something other than an escaped POW had taken up residence, I picked up a rock and threw it in. No mountain lions snarled and no rattlesnakes threatened. Satisfied, I took my flashlight out of my pocket, stood on my tiptoes, and pushed myself inside.