by Thomas Hopp
“I still don’t see it,” I resisted. “Most terrorists die while carrying out their plans. How does that get them a girlfriend?”
McKean chuckled. “Hijackers and suicide bombers. That’s where religion comes in to embellish the simple ape instinct with a story. What do the mullahs promise every Islamic martyr? What will he find in the afterlife? Riches? Wealth? Sure. And a six-dozen virgins to marry. That’s part of the deal. And it works on the male psyche via instincts that are much stronger than most of us would like to admit. The heavenly rewards promised to suicide bombers are the very things the ape wants: all the advantages of dominant status. Jihad may masquerade as holy guidance, but viewed cynically it simply inflames the ape’s instinct to bring down that which is up. It panders shamelessly to the animal desire to breed with as many females as possible. And leaders who send these young men on their missions are, to my eye, calculating schemers who use the classic teenage obsession to subvert new recruits to the cause.”
I shook my head in amazement. “So, Peyton, you’ve reduced the average martyr to nothing more than a sexually frustrated adolescent ape who dreams of asserting his command over females through acts of violence against the dominant members of the group.”
“Well said, Fin! Their mullahs’ religious doctrines are nothing more than Coke and Pepsi commercials gone over to the dark side, preying on the same aggressive instincts that have made young people rebel since before the Stone Age. A rather common and bestial motivation for holy war, wouldn’t you say?”
“But not all terrorists are young, or poor, or male.”
“Not everyone fits the mold,” McKean agreed. “But by-and-large, angry young males form the core of the ‘down with up’ group, among terrorists and apes alike. Some may grow older but never grow out of it. Especially those who never find a path to legitimate success. And if those men are rich like Osama bin Laden or the Sheik, they never need to grow up.”
I shook my head. “It’s sickening to think of terrorists as status seekers in a monstrous, perverted way.”
“Exactly,” McKean said.
I took the eastbound exit onto the North Cascades Highway. We lapsed into silence as we left the tulip fields behind and rolled slowly through the traffic-choked towns of Burlington and Sedro Woolley. After that, the road narrowed to a busy two-lane country highway as it entered the mountains.
I focused on overtaking and passing cars on the straightaways while McKean placidly studied the mountain peaks looming as a series of increasingly massive rock piles. Though my hands and feet were busy driving, I couldn’t shake a nagging ache in the pit of my gut. I had more doubts than ever about the wisdom of our expedition.
The road followed a long, eastward-tending valley whose bottomland was dotted with farms and dairy homesteads. Here and there we glimpsed the beauty of the Skagit River’s broad nickel-green waters framed by tall cottonwoods and white-clouded skies. The farm fields gradually vanished into tall evergreen forests checkerboarding the mountainsides in timber lots of old and new growth.
Leaving civilization behind, we entered a deep glacier-cut canyon bounded by pyramidal peaks half-shrouded in cloudbanks and draped with snowfields. McKean exclaimed about one crag after another, babbling about granites, breccias, gabbros, intrusives and thrust faults.
I focused my attention on the steering wheel and the oncoming traffic. Every cliff-side bend heralded another car or truck exploding at us out of nowhere. Several hours into it, white knuckled, I took us over the rainy summit of Washington Pass with wipers beating.
Then suddenly we were in the clear and moving down the eastern rain-shadowed side of the Cascades under blue skies. The road was still tortuous, but traffic subsided and the country opened into long vistas of pine-studded mountainsides.
Chapter 7
Fifteen minutes of hard driving brought us out of the mountain canyons, rolling smoothly onto the open, sagebrush-dotted prairies of the Methow Valley. I cracked a window and took a breath of the balmy sage-scented air, a dozen degrees warmer than Seattle. A road sign put Winthrop just ten miles ahead. After five more miles on the gently winding highway, McKean said, “We’re here.”
I pulled the Mustang onto a wide, graveled shoulder in front of a wrought-iron-grilled ranch entry gate set against a hilly landscape of dry grass and sagebrush. It was an eye popper. The new-looking asphalted entry road ran between two immense pylons of mortared granite blocks with an overhead cross-member made from a four-foot thick ponderosa pine trunk. A massive oak placard hung on chains beneath the cross-member, engraved with silhouettes of rearing horses and a carved inscription arching across the center in two lines: “ARABIANS UNLIMITED - Breeders of Fine Horses.” The asphalt drive curved in an arc that disappeared behind a grassy hillock without a glimpse of the ranch itself. I gawked at the magnificent entry, momentarily wondering how we would get past the closed wrought-iron gate.
McKean tapped my shoulder and pointed.
“Not here,” he said. “There.” A second gate had escaped my notice, just beyond its posh neighbor. It was a miserable little entry, pitifully constructed of two scrawny, weathered, telephone-pole uprights bridged by a flimsy cross-member of two-by-fours nailed together side-by-side. Hanging from the two-by-fours and putting a pot-bellied sag into them was a warped and weathered plywood sign with peeling black lettering that said, “M&M Ranch.”
“Mike and Mary Jenson’s place,” said McKean, waving me forward. I drove through the ungated entry and onto a rutted gravel drive that followed a line of barbed-wire fencing strung on rotting wooden posts and choked with dried tumbleweed. My car jostled on the potholed road and high centered a couple of times as I followed a curve that mirrored, in a humble way, the haughty arc of Arabians Unlimited’s smooth new asphalt road.
The tumbleweed fence line led around a hillock onto a secluded bottomland where the road surface became no more than compacted dust. A cloud billowed behind us. Sagebrush crowded the road and scraped along the sides of my Mustang, no-doubt marring the formerly pristine midnight-blue paint job. “This place isn’t much to look at,” I mumbled, “compared to the neighbors’ spread.”
McKean nodded. “A decade ago, Mike’s homestead was the only one here. The new neighbors have what he lacks. Money.”
The Mustang rolled past a flat pasture trampled into dust by a herd of rangy-looking Hereford cattle. At a point somewhat less than a mile in, we reached a weather-beaten doublewide trailer home, still on its wheels and parked under a lonesome cottonwood tree that partially shaded it from the hot mid-afternoon sun.
I pulled the Mustang to a halt near an old sun-scorched blue pickup truck whose vintage I could hardly guess, other than thinking it probably predated me by a few years. We got out into the pall of dust that had chased the Mustang and walked to the house trailer’s front porch, a jury-rigged assembly of pressure-treated two-by-fours and planks, hand-sawn and in need of squaring, covered by a frayed rectangle of green plastic Astroturf. Just inside the open front door of the house I spotted a man in the act of setting aside a shotgun. He stepped out of the dark interior and said, “Hi, Peyton.” His voice, friendly enough, had a grim undertone.
“Hello, Mike,” said McKean, pointing a thumb in my direction. “This is Fin Morton.”
Mike nodded at me and I nodded back. He was a man of average height or a little less, decently muscled, in blue jeans and dusty cowboy boots and a plaid orange-and-brown western shirt. His close-cropped hair was a medium brown and his eyes, squinting into the harsh glare of the sun, were a medium brown as well. His clean-shaven face was leathery and darkly tanned. Along the sides of his neck were signs of his lot in life, permanent red speckles where the skin was exposed to the sun and elements - a redneck.
He came down the steps and pointed with his nose toward the far end of the trailer home, where a platform of welded angle iron supported two elevated barrels, one of stove-oil to heat the house, the other of diesel for his antique red-and-rust tractor, which was parked jus
t beyond the barrel platform. A shape lay in the shade under the barrels. When I recognized it, hairs stood on the back of my neck. It was a dead dog. A Rottweiler.
Mike let us eye the blood-spattered carcass awhile. Then he let out a bitter sigh.
“Somebody shot him, ‘bout four in the morning.’ He kicked some dust with a cowboy boot toe, and swallowed hard, biting on emotion. ‘I heard him barking. And then comes a shot and I heard him yelpin’. So I grabbed my shotgun. But it was pitch dark outside. He’s laying on the drive, just twitchin”. I couldn’t see who shot him, so I sent a load of buckshot out in the dark. Whoever it was had a car about a hundred yards or so towards the highway. They tore out of here and I gave “em another load of buckshot but they got away clean.”
“Did you call the police?” McKean asked.
“Nope. I think maybe that’s who did it.”
“The Sheriff?”
“Damn straight.” Mike looked at the dog again, and his mouth drew down like he wanted to cry.
“Why would the Sheriff - ?” McKean wondered.
“Come snooping around? Trying to get sump’n on me, run me outta here, that’s why. Now I got another reason to get over there and see what’s going on.”
“So,” I said. “What’s the plan?”
Mike nodded at a grassy ridge and pine-dotted hills grading into the Cascades in the west. “My property runs for better’n a mile up that way, beside the Sheik’s. I figure we’ll take a little hike over that ridge after dark. Same way I went when I seen the redhead and checked out the lab. If we find anything, we come back and call the CIA, the FBI - I don’t know who.”
We went inside the trailer to wait for darkness. Kids’ toys were strewn on a worn brown carpet, and the place smelled of dirty diapers. “I sent Mary and the kids to her sister’s for a day or two,” Mike explained. “Till I get this sorted out.” We sat down at a square kitchen table with a torn red-and-white plaid plastic cover patched with duct tape, and spent some time sipping Budweiser from longneck bottles. Dusk lingered for more than an hour on a clear early-summer evening. McKean and Mike passed the time by swapping stories about tight spots they had gotten into over the years.
I opened up a little and talked about a firefight, from which I had retrieved a couple of wounded children, in Bagdad. “But with smallpox in the news,” I concluded, “and your dead dog as a sign of trouble, tonight might be the tightest spot any of us has ever seen.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” said Mike, getting up and going to a cupboard. “I seen some pretty tense action in Saudi. Saddam Hussein tried a preemptive counterattack, y’know.”
McKean pointed a thumb at Mike. “Army Ranger training.”
“I’m impressed,” I said.
“Can’t say I’m a bona fide Ranger,” said Mike, fishing something off the back of a top shelf. “But I was in the Ranger training program. Boloed partway through.”
“That happens to a lot of soldiers,” I said. “You’re still better trained than the average G.I. And a lot better than me.”
Mike came back and sat down. My eyes bugged out at what he had in his hands - a baggie of green weed and a small wooden pipe painted with leopard spots. He began to pack the bowl with a heavy load of frosty-white-looking bud.
“Just ‘cause I washed out,’ he said, ‘don’t mean I didn’t learn a thing or two. Enough to get us inside that place next door.’
He lit the pipe with a butane lighter, inhaled deeply, and passed the pipe across the table to McKean. McKean accepted it without comment and took a strong drag. When he offered it to me, I waved it off.
“Are you guys nuts?” I asked. “Getting shitfaced seems like a bad way to keep safe.”
“Live dangerously,” said Mike. He took another hit and so did McKean.
McKean held his breath so long that he exhaled clear air. He offered the pipe to me again. “When in Rome,” he said.
“When in Rome,” I acquiesced. I reached for the pipe but Mike intercepted it and filled the bowl with a fresh bud. He held his lighter to it while I took a little hit for show. That was a mistake. A few seconds later, I felt as if the top of my head were lifting off.
McKean grinned at me. “Killer smoke, eh?”
I nodded.
“Cowshit’s the best fertilizer,” said Mike. “Totally organic.”
Darkness fell outside the trailer windows while Mike and McKean gabbed and guffawed about harvesting buds and drying weed and bongs and joints and roaches and brownies and a litany of other stuff I was too stoned to follow. I seemed to be more profoundly affected than either of them. Eventually, as the clock moved past 9 pm, Mike killed his second beer that I knew of and got up. “C’mon,” he said. “Time’s a-wastin’.”
He put the pipe and baggie away and went to a closet and fetched out a camouflage-green shoulder holster with a small black pistol buttoned into it. He strapped it on, and then pulled a second gun and belt out of the closet. “Either of you guys want one of these?”
I shrugged. “No thanks.”
McKean said, “I had a girlfriend whose ex-boyfriend once held a gun on me for a couple of hours until he passed out.”
Mike thought about that for a moment. Then he put the gun away. He put on a camouflaged hunting jacket and led us outside. I followed the two of them out under a starry sky, feeling jittery. I couldn’t pin it on fear exactly. Just as likely I was wired on Mike’s super-potent marijuana. We followed a game trail up and over the ridge, hiking without much talk through sagebrush country, crossing a series of small rolling hills between Mike’s place and the Sheik’s. The night had grown starkly black. The stars and quarter moon overhead were shockingly beautiful. After what seemed an eternity of footfalls and no speech, we came to a new looking five-foot wire-lattice fence on some high ground. Mike pointed down into a little valley illuminated by the lights of a cluster of buildings. “That’s the place.”
The house was huge and brightly lit. It dwarfed most of the surrounding barns, sheds and outbuildings. Mike pointed past it to the farthest barn. “They took her in there.”
McKean said, “Rather far for you to see handcuffs clearly.”
“I know,” said Mike. “That’s why I went down there snoopin’ around. Come on.”
Using the wire lattice of the fence for hand and footholds, he climbed over at one of the upright posts. We followed. I got edgy when I set foot on the far side of the fence, knowing we were now trespassers. My pulse quickened as we headed down the slope. Our footsteps, rustling the dry grass, sounded to my heightened senses like an army on the march. “This might be a one-way trip,” I whispered, “if we discover somebody with something to hide.”
“Don’t get paranoid,” Mike whispered. He led us down onto a broad pasture made lush by a rolling sprinkler system that hissed and ticked on the far side of the lot. We moved fluidly at double time across the empty field and I mimicked Mike’s soldier-crouch. McKean, on the other hand, tagged after us with his head high, gazing around as if making scientific observations of the place.
We moved into the moon shadow beside a white equestrian fence that ran to the house, which was a massive, modern structure of river stone and pine logs. Like a castle, it barred our way to the other buildings. Its white draperies were pulled back and bright light pierced the darkness for many yards around it.
My heart pounded as we penetrated to the middle of the ranch compound and approached the house. Whether the pounding I felt at the base of my throat was from fear, or just from being too high, I couldn’t decide. Neither of my companions seemed concerned, but I was paranoid enough to whisper, “What if somebody sees us?”
“C’mon,” Mike whispered back. “Didn’t you ever sneak around at night as a kid? Anyway, they’re making too much noise to hear us. And it’s too bright inside to see us out here.”
He was right. The place was about as quiet as a discotheque. As we came to where the fence abutted the rear corner of the house, the building’s pine log walls were rattlin
g with the sound of Arabian music amplified with a good hundred watts per channel. A darbuka drum rattled a Dervish rhythm, accompanied by the chink-a-chink of a tambourine and the hypnotic jing-jingling of finger cymbals. A thin male voice warbled a high-pitched Arab melody, like a muezzin calling from a minaret. A weird violin-like instrument buzzed a tortuous Middle Eastern scale in counterpoint.
We threaded ourselves through the fence slats and stepped onto a graveled parking area where half-a-dozen cars were nosed in at the side of the house. Skulking behind them, we passed two gleaming black SUVs, a new oversized black pickup truck, and a shiny black limousine. Mike paused and pointed at the last vehicle in line with a sour expression. It was a dark emerald green sedan with police lights on top and a tan stripe running along the side. On the door was a five-pointed star emblem with George Washington’s head in the middle.
“I told you,” Mike whispered. “Barker’s in cahoots.”
McKean nodded. The night felt a little colder.
We rounded the corner of the house and came under one of the front windows. Across a wide porch spanning the front of the house, the bottom windowsill was head-high for McKean and somewhat higher for Mike and me.
“Maybe your redhead’s in there,” McKean whispered.
“Yeah,” Mike whispered back. “Maybe so.”
We went up on tiptoe to catch a glimpse inside a huge two-story western-style great room with log ceiling beams and a log balcony running around its perimeter, all centered on a massive river-rock fireplace and chimney. A squat, middle-aged woman bustled past the window carrying a silver platter of food, dressed in a dark brown frock with a thick black hijab scarf-and-veil covering her head entirely except for her eyes. We crouched back into the darkness below the porch.
“Sheik’s wife, Khadija,” whispered Mike.
“Couldn’t see her hair,” said McKean.
