“Roland Longville?” she called out, popping chewing gum loudly in the process.
“Yes?”
“I’m Briana Caldwell, Brad Caldwell’s sister.” That stopped me. The Caldwells hadn’t even mentioned that they had a daughter, though maybe in their minds, there was no reason that they should have.
“How can I help you, Briana?”
“I want to help you. Find my brother, I mean.”
“Well, I’m sure that I can—“
She popped her gum loudly to interrupt me, which I thought was novel.
“No you can’t, because you don’t know where to look. Brad made sure of that. Well, he thought he did. But he forgot something.” She unzipped the backpack and pulled out a laptop PC. “This is Brad’s.”
“And this laptop will lead me to Brad?”
“If you’re smart enough, it can.” She rolled her eyes and started talking at an extremely fast pace. “Listen, Mr. Longville. Brad had another side to him that my parents and his dorky friends didn’t know about. He didn’t think that I knew, but I dated a guy, Hans, who knew about everything that Brad was into, and he told me everything. I mean, before I dumped Hans because he’s a dork. I just never told Brad I knew about the stuff he was into. But when he pulled this disappearing act, I knew that he’d gone away to try to be a part of this weird scene he’s into.”
She took a breath, and I got a question in. “What weird scene is that?”
Instead of answering, Briana popped her gum, reached into her backpack, and produced a book. It was a hardback, with a battered red dust cover. On the cover was the picture of an older man. His stern expression and buzz-cut hair announced unmistakably that he had some sort of military pedigree. The Redemption Manifesto, the title was proclaimed in a thick bold script; by Col. Elihu Tolbert, United States Army (ret.)
Briana chewed viciously and went on. “Brad’s laptop was being fixed; the computer repair service sent it back a few days after he disappeared. I messed around on it to see if there was something useful. Then I found this dumb book of his in his closet. I guess he had it memorized, or maybe he had more than one copy. He was that into all this stupid stuff.”
I took both the book and the laptop from her. “Thanks, Briana. What do you know about where Brad was headed when he disappeared?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know, exactly, but Hans—that’s the dorky guy I dated—he said that there was an online forum, that the dorks who were into all this crap logged on to and discussed what this Tolbert guy wrote and believed, and he told me Brad was on that forum so much they made him a mod—you know, a moderator? You don’t get to become a mod on a forum unless you know everything about the forum and what it’s all about. My guess is if you look at Brad’s web surfing history, you’ll learn something.”
“Thanks for your help, Briana. I guess that you must really love your brother.”
Briana rolled her eyes dramatically, and popped her gum again. “Are you serious? I’d like to break his face. I mean, my dad’s really sick, you know?” Her eyes quit rolling and teared up a little, and her tough act faltered.
“It just really sucks that he’d pull this on my parents right now. I know that he’s a legal adult, but our parents really need him, and he runs off to be with these geeky people to play soldier or something.”
“Thanks again, Briana. As I’ve told your mother, I’ll do everything I can to bring Brad home safe.”
She nodded, but her expression was defensive. She took a step back and lowered her voice. “Don’t tell anybody I gave you this stuff.”
‘Anybody’ meant her brother Brad, I supposed. I nodded. “Don’t worry. It’s our secret.”
“Cool. Later, man.”
With that she nodded and whirled, and left without looking back.
I took Brad’s belongings up to my office and sat down. First of all, I thumbed through The Redemption Manifesto. Colonel Elihu Tolbert, it seemed, was a decorated veteran, having served three tours of duty in Viet Nam. The Colonel had disliked the direction that he perceived his country, and the world, to be heading in.
Tolbert wrote about a government grown too large, and too far from the people, to effectively represent them any longer. He saw the steady erosion of the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and other cherished institutions, and the steady encroachment of Big Business, endless corporate expansion, and a general decline in the fabric of society and the quality of American life. The answer, he felt, was in what he described as the Redemption.
The Redemption he wrote about was to be the aftermath of a violent upheaval in the very fabric of the United States. This was going to be precipitated by a collapse of the dollar, and a complete loss of the ability of the nation to project its military power around the world. One had to get ready now to survive what was coming, and to the Colonel that meant declaring one’s self separate from a corrupt and untrustworthy government, resisting at every turn the government’s attempts to grow ever larger, and impede by whatever means necessary its attempts to restrict the freedom of its citizens.
But most importantly, it seemed, was getting ready for the Day of Redemption, an all-consuming conflict that the Colonel prophesied as coming, rather vaguely it seemed to me, “soon,” a conflagration that would engulf the United States on the day that the True-Believing citizens—regardless of race, gender or religious and political affiliations—would rise as one and cast off the chains of bloated government, in an apocalyptic bloodbath that would reboot America, destroying the corporate-controlled Government forever, and level the playing field for all time, for those who survived.
I had to put the book down after a bit. The Colonel was breathing a lot of hellfire on every page. His list of those who had to go was long, exhaustive, and familiar to anyone who’s ever been to a conspiracy theory web site: The Big Banks, the Bilderburg Group, the G-20, the International Monetary Fund, the Freemasons, The Illuminati; you know, the usual suspects in the Great Conspiracy, whichever version the tabloids wanted us to believe in a given week.
I opened up Brad’s laptop. Briana hadn’t given me a charger, but Brad’s laptop was the same model as mine, so I plugged in my own, and powered up the computer. I opened the browser and checked Brad’s bookmarks. There it was, all right; in the midst of saved links to websites about cars, girls, sports, and all of the other things typical young men enthuse about, a bookmark for something called the Redemptionist Online.
I clicked on that and a page opened up featuring a black background with a flaming skull and crossbones emblem superimposed over a ragged depiction of Old Glory. Underneath that were links to General Discussion, Weapons, Survivalism, Redemption Chat (moderated) and something called Random.
I also noticed that the site automatically logged me in. At the top left of the screen, a message appeared that said Welcome back, Stronghold89. Your last visit was 52 days ago. So, in the rarified world of the Internet, Brad was Stronghold89; or, at least, in Redemption circles.
I surfed around the web site a bit. There were posts about militia meetings from around the nation, long discussions about recent political goings on, links posted to news stories, and comments about how they revealed the truth of Tolbert’s vision. There were no dissenting voices. Everyone who was a member of the site was apparently a true believer. Doomsday was coming, and everything posted in the forum was put there as proof that the hour was drawing near.
After a few minutes of browsing, I was startled by a loud bloop. A small chat window had opened in the lower right-hand corner of the web page. Someone whose screen name was DesertRat419 had initiated chat with me.
Hey, StrongHold89, did you make it to the Compound? The message read.
Whoever this person was, they clearly thought that I was Brad Caldwell. I briefly considered the morality of going along with that assumption. I looked out the window at the gathering dark. “What the hell.” I said aloud to no one.
Not there just yet, I typed.
Bloop. Not out west
yet? It’s been a pretty long time.
Something came up. I typed back, sensing that I was getting in a little deep. There was quite a pause, and I wondered if DesertRat 419 had disconnected, then, another bloop that accompanied each message:
That’s too bad. You have inspired me to make my own pilgrimage. I just recently looked up that part of the country since I am not from there. Nothing around Van Horn and Delgado but desert.
Van Horn and Delgado. I wrote that down on my desk blotter and underlined it.
Not to worry, I will be there soon.
How is that sister of yours? I still think about her.
I smiled. DesertRat 419 might just be Briana’s ex-boyfriend, Hans.
She’s ok. Saw her today.
What?
There was a long pause. I had aroused DesertRat419’s suspicion. He must have known that Brad hadn’t been seen by his family in a while.
Is Longhammer on the Mountain?
That made me sit back and look around the room. Hans, or whoever it was on the other side of the chat conversation, was checking to see if I was, in fact, Brad Caldwell. Since I wasn’t, I had absolutely no idea what to say in response. So I tried to finesse my way through;
Yes; Longhammer is on the Mountain.
After another long pause, DesertRat419 typed.
Stop kidding around. Is Longhammer on the Mountain?
Oops. He was giving me another chance to type the correct response Maybe this was a code that Brad and Hans had figured out in advance to verify their identities in the anonymous environs of the Internet. It was a neat little precaution. There was a code word. Apparently, dear Hans hadn’t told Briana everything, after all.
Taking a stab at getting around the whole code business, I typed:
Things are going well. Not far from Van Horn.
Instead of a cheery response from my pal DesertRat419, I there appeared:
Nice try but I know better.
The web site grayed over and I was greeted by a nasty raucous sound, and an accompanying pop-up window that informed me, ‘You have been forcibly ejected from the Redemption Army Forum by a moderator. Your IP has been logged and banned.’
Well, so much for my foray into pretending to be someone I wasn’t on the Internet. It wasn’t nearly as fun or profitable as they lead you to believe. But I had garnered a tidbit or two of information from DesertRat419. I had turned up something that pointed me in the right direction. I opened another tab on the browser and went to Google. I looked up Van Horn and Delgado. The results that showed up directed me to a town, Van Horn, which was pretty isolated, out in the West Texas desert.
I tapped my desktop meditatively. Perhaps Delgado was a street or neighborhood in Van Horn? I went to Street View on Van Horn and got just what I expected, a moderately-sized, sleepy-looking desert town, straight out of The Last Picture Show. Had Brad’s devotion to Tolbert’s ideas taken him out there? I didn’t find any Delgado Street, or anything else, though.
I looked at the cover of The Redemption Manifesto. What those pages contained was a kind of fanaticism, like the web site that Tolbert’s book had spawned—a set of beliefs and a credo that set its believers apart from all others. You either accepted that the Apocalypse was at hand, and the Colonel’s thoughts on the matter, or you didn’t. If you did, you were one of the Elect, the Chosen. If not, well, you would be on the outside looking in, if said Apocalypse ever came to pass. Dangerous notions, common ideas in troubled times.
DesertRat419 had mentioned The Compound. Was there, then, some sort of gathering place for the True Believers, This Army of Redemption, out there in the West Texas desert?
I couldn’t turn anything further up on Internet searches. Google searches for militia compounds in the USA brought results from Alaska to upstate New York, from Southern California, and even some in the Yukon in Canada. Many of the militias had similar beliefs to Tolbert’s group, while others had extremist views, some even rejecting taxation as unconstitutional. Some were small private armies, while others were integrated within their communities, and a few even recognized as responsible and viable political entities in their local governments.
Not all militias were alike, I gathered. Their beliefs ran the gamut from heart-felt reverence for the Constitution and the Founders to government-hating, neo-Luddite creeds. There had been a number of shootouts between Law Enforcement various agencies and some of these militia groups, while other militias had actually aided Law Enforcement in searches for missing persons. The irony of that didn’t escape me. I pulled up Wikipedia and typed in Tolbert’s name, to find out more about him.
He was dead.
Elihu Glendower Tolbert, (January 11, 1940-March 23, 2010.) The dates proclaimed. Reading the article, I saw that Tolbert, the son of Welsh immigrants, had served with great distinction in the United States Army, and received a battlefield commission in the Viet Nam War, where he served in combat for over three years. He was the recipient of the Bronze and Silver Star, the Purple Heart (twice), and was also twice cited for conspicuous gallantry in the face of the enemy. Drafted as a private, he’d retired as a colonel, after, late in his career, his judgment had been called into question.
It seemed the good Colonel had threatened several of his own men with summary execution when they refused to advance against enemy fire in Nicaragua. Air cover had been spotty due to bad communications, and ground operations had been muddled. In the confusion, some men had balked at advancing under enemy fire. The Colonel had whipped out his side arm and threatened some teenage soldiers with the ultimate punishment for their timidity.
After that, Tolbert was quietly cashiered, though allowed to keep his pension, and his outstanding service record went unblemished, with the incident only noted in an attachment. Charges had been dropped without further comment. I’d been in the Army, served as an MP in some combat zones, and I knew how weird things could get when there were hostile rounds whizzing over your head. I also knew Army politics pretty well.
The Colonel had been in the service long enough that he would have had some friends way up the chain of command, and no doubt at least a brigadier among them had pulled some strings for their old pal Colonel Tolbert. So he’d retired, written his Manifesto, and started his own little Army of Redemption to get ready for the end that he saw coming. As I read on, there it was, a partial conformation of what I suspected:
Until his death, Tolbert led the Redemption Army at its home post, which is situated at a secretive location near the West Texas Border.
I switched back to Google Street View’s panorama of Van Horn. Van Horn was, indeed, very close to the West Texas border. The mention of Delgado was still a mystery, but one, I hoped, a visit to Van Horn would soon explain.
Chapter 6
I came into town on Highway 10. I had flown over Van Horn enroute to the storied city of El Paso. Therefore I had to backtrack to Van Horn over 120 miles of desert highway in a rented Nissan SUV. It was rugged country, the colors of rust and battleship hulls, with a brooding blue sky that seemed both sorrowful and peaceful at the same time, a landscape that history was made on, a history both real and imagined, and replayed in endless variation in the films, novels and songs of the popular imagination. This was cowboy and Indian country, where the history of America’s violent adolescence had been played out.
If El Paso is the jewel of West Texas, it is accompanied by many scattered satellite diadems, strewn as they are across the dusty plains. Towns like Fort Hancock, Morning Glory, Horizon City, Van Horn and Valentine, too numerous to count in passing. They dot the landscape like tiny pearls strewn out across the vast carpet of the Texan frontier. As I drove southeast from El Paso to Van Horn, I passed through those desert towns, each with its own history, peculiarities, its own pace and way of doing things, Though I was certainly a Southerner myself, the different look and feel of the country served to remind me that I was a visitor far from home.
I had been out west before, though not to Texas. My previous trip
had been to Arizona, and the extreme edge of West Texas held many similarities. There was the legendary landscape, the surreal beauty of the desert that surrounded you; the sleepy little towns, and, always, the vastness of the sky and the looming majesty of the distant mountains.
I pulled off Highway 10 at a rest stop for gas and refreshments. It was an old-fashioned looking place, a low building with one small window by the register and an ice cooler and soda machine out front. A man in well-worn coveralls and a cap with a Texas Longhorns logo came out and asked me if I needed some gas. I said that I did, and he then proceeded to pump it for me.
“I didn’t think anyone did that anymore,” I commented.
He smiled when I spoke, giving me the once-over, instantly and obviously assessing me and deciding that I was from somewhere else. “Some of us still like to do things the old-fashioned way out here.”
A man that had lived here all of his life must know things, I figured, so I asked him, “Say, have you ever heard of some kind of militia compound around here?”
He nodded. “I think I’ve heard rumors of something like that, maybe a ways to the south of here. But if you’re a tourist, mister, you probably shouldn’t go out there. I hear that they have machine guns, and shoot up old cars for fun.”
I thanked him and paid him. I wondered if he was telling me in a delicate way that black people shouldn’t go out there. You never know. “I’ll keep that in mind.”
I considered Brad’s arrival to the area. When Brad Caldwell had hit town, he would have been coming in from the other side, as he came by car, and hadn’t bypassed the town by air, as I had. Van Horn wasn’t that big, so I figured that any young kid driving in alone on this lonely stretch of Highway 10 would have been noted by someone. So I set out across town to find that someone. As it turned out, there were several.
Highway 10 passed through Van Horn, an endless line of eighteen wheelers roaring through on its wide lanes, blowing through on their long hauls from one unknown place to the other, doing their bit to keep the great wheel of American commerce turning. Beneath the underpass, uncaring kids rode their bikes or skateboards and listened to their iPods.
The Devil's Highway Page 3
