Scorpion Rain

by David Cole

  I checked the battery level on the Fujiyama, changed to one of my fully charge spares, and called Don.

  “How come you’re not using videoconferencing?” he asked.

  “Too much battery drain. Plus I’m in a small valley, I wasn’t sure a broadband signal would get out.”

  I waited for him to tell me there was news, but he was silent.

  That’s the worst part, silence. I understood why the kidnappers sent their messages at random intervals, and wouldn’t respond directly to any attempt to contact them. Silence was a deadly form of intimidation.

  “Three more people admitted to being kidnapped,” Don said. “None of them are very happy about it. Head of a high-priced spa, she was really pissed about possible negative publicity affecting her business. President of a chain of real estate offices, she wasn’t happy about publicity either. Third person, a NASCAR driver, she could care less what people knew. Treated it like a business deal. They got her, they wanted money, her racing-team manager paid. The woman’s only argument was about not letting her get on a plane for some NASCAR race in Atlanta.”

  “Nothing from Jack Zea?”

  “I’d’ve said that, straightaway.”

  “So there’s nothing at all?” Silence. “Okay, Don. I’ll call you later.”

  I walked around the camp, glad I’d brought a good pair of boots. Wolverine work boots, really heavy, well protected.

  There were a lot of small rocks on the desert floor, but I couldn’t feel them through the soles of the boots. The sides of the boots ran six inches above my ankle, something I noticed quickly when I slipped and brushed against a leaping cholla, the stickers hitting only the solid leather boot. They were heavy boots, I wanted something sturdy in case we had to backpack in somewhere.

  I’d really not thought about being there all alone without food or water.

  Pride, hubris, just dumb.

  Two century plants bloomed near a small outcropping. Each ten feet high, clusters of yellow flowers branched off at odd intervals. I walked to them, up on the little ridge, and once at the top I could see miles and miles of spring flowers stretching toward the nearest sky island, all of them Mexican goldpoppies, each plant with several deep yellow flowers like small bowls. Organ pipe cactus rose at irregular intervals, lots of cholla and an occasional ocotillo, also in bloom.

  I went toward an ocotillo, counted fifteen different spiky vertical arms, saw a blue-throated hummingbird whirring among the clusters of red petals.

  Silence.

  I was getting thirsty. It was early evening.

  Back at the tents, I pulled out one of the sleeping mattresses into the fading sunlight. Like all deserts in March, heat was often a daytime thing, and as the sun set the temperature was dropping. As I settled down onto the mattress, a small thing squiggled from underneath and climbed halfway up my left boot. Barely an inch long, I realized it was a bark scorpion and kicked my boot against the other one, the scorpion jumping onto the mattress near my leg. I pushed myself off the mattress, moving quick, looking for something with which I could squash the scorpion, but it scurried away under a rock.

  Scorpions’ favorite food is another scorpion.

  Great. My head full of useless information, empty of knowing what to do.

  I heard a truck engine whine as the driver shifted into a lower gear. The sound was quickly absorbed in the desert silence, but I ran to the outcropping and saw two Range Rovers coming toward me through the field of goldpoppies.

  Kyle spread a topo map across his knee while I drank from his canteen. The three men with him were quickly packing up the tents, storing all the gear in the Range Rovers.

  Two of them wore camo gear, the third was a Mexican guide. Kyle didn’t bother to introduce them, saying we had to move fast before sundown. Once the men were done loading the gear, they circled Kyle, their bodies just dark silhouettes against the sun, which was only three diameters off the horizon.

  “No roads, can only drive safely while there’s still sunlight,” he said to me. “I want to be…here.”

  He stabbed a point on the map, but took his finger away before I could read the name he was pointing to. The other three men got into one of the Range Rovers, Kyle into the other because the backseats were down and it was crammed with gear. I maneuvered into the passenger seat, fitting my legs between several cloth bags and a map satchel. Kyle sighted along the dashboard compass, turned the Range Rover a quarter-circle until he could point along a compass heading toward a small mountain peak in the southwest.

  We drove off immediately.

  “Where’s Jo?” I said a few miles later.

  “Out there. Somewhere. She’s got an entire TV crew with her. Satcom telephone link, a small videocam transmitter so she can send out her ‘live’ updates on the search for the kidnappers. What a disaster she’s turned out to be. I had to outright take the videocam batteries to prevent her from telling the world where we are. But she called an order for more batteries, some chopper is supposed to bring them to our base camp.”

  “Why didn’t she come back with you to the camp?”

  “Because I slashed one of her tires. If we’re lucky, by the time they get the tire changed and get to the camp, it will be too dark to follow us.”

  I waited for more news. Nothing.

  “You didn’t find anything,” I said finally.

  “Not yet. And you? Anything that can help us?”

  “No.”

  We drove in silence until it got so dark that the other Range Rover almost cracked its transmission case on a wedge of rocks. We stopped and pitched the tents.

  “Justin Wong. Bob Gates. This is Laura Winslow.”

  Wong was a short, squat Chinese, with a dense crop of black hair and what he called an evil grin. Gates was Irish, once with the SAS in Britain. He didn’t say much either.

  The Mexican came out of the darkness with a load of mesquite which he dropped on the small fire.

  “Manuel de Garcia,” Kyle said. “Our guide. This is Laura.”

  “Señorita Laura,” he said with a short nod of recognition before building up the fire. Wong and Gates were using branches from a creosote bush to brush a circle about twenty feet around the tents and fire.

  “I’ve already been visited by one scorpion,” I said. “I’m glad they’re scaring away any others.”

  “More worried about snakes,” Kyle said. “It’s going to get cold. Don’t want something in my tent I haven’t personally invited in.”

  “Am I going to be in your tent?”

  “Between me and Justin. Crowded. But we can keep each other warm.”

  We ate. Drank. By nine we lay down to sleep. They were all exhausted, silent, almost on the edge of being sullen at not finding what they wanted.

  I tried to ask Kyle what his plans were, but he just shook me off.

  “Morning,” he said, pulling a thermosheet over his body and lying on the mattresses. Wong was already asleep, lying on his back, his nostrils twitching as though he were dreaming.

  “We have to make a basic decision in the morning,” Kyle said. “Maybe by then you’ll have some data that can help us. For now, just sleep.”

  And within minutes he was lightly snoring. I lay between the two men, suddenly guilty that I’d left no sign or note at the original base camp for Rey. A Mexican wolf howled, two others answered.

  But other than Kyle’s snoring, there were no sounds and I too fell asleep.

  42

  “This is hopeless, Kyle.”

  Wong drained his cup of tea, packed the tea bag into a plastic trash sack.

  “You know it. Bob knows it. I know it.”

  Kyle scattered the few remaining embers of the fire, covering them with the gravelly dirt, grinding the embers under his boot heel.

  “No contact with the kidnappers,” Wong said. “No location spotted. No place to go except…out there.”

  He flung an arm toward the desert.

  Kyle looked at me, looked at my Fuj
iyama. I shook my head.

  “One more place,” he said finally. “Let’s just check out one more place.”

  “Useless, Kyle.” Bob Gates was wrapping a bungee cord around the mattresses. “We could drive every day for ten days and find nothing. We don’t know what we’re looking for, so it’s useless. Hopeless. I vote with Justin.”

  “This is a no-brainer,” Wong said.

  “One more place,” Kyle said, but I could tell he agreed with them.

  “We are not good to go, Kyle,” Wong said.

  “Let’s review the data,” Gates said.

  Silence. They all agreed, they were waiting to see what I thought.

  “There’s no new data,” I said. “I’m waiting for something…anything, from several different sources. Without hearing from them, there’s nothing new.”

  “Can you give this up, Laura?”

  Kyle looked grim, but his seriousness was mostly concern for me.

  “Give me fifteen minutes. I’ll check all my contacts one more time.”

  “Fifteen minutes, sure,” Wong said.

  “Fifteen days,” Gates said, “as long as we’re getting paid. But it seems pointless, to just drive around the desert like an archeologist or a miner, looking for gold or something from the past.”

  I walked away from them, my boots swishing through goldpoppies and purple lupins. I sat on a large rock, its surface worn smooth by centuries of wind and time. I took out the Fujiyama, dreaded even turning it on. I’d finally switched it off in the middle of the night when I realized that despite all my careful planning, I’d forgotten to bring a charger that would work off a vehicle’s cigarette lighter. One battery was already dead, the second barely usable, and third and last with not much time left.

  I inhaled, trying to smell the flowers, but despite their abundance I couldn’t smell much of anything.

  I turned on the Fujiyama.

  And just like that, things changed radically.

  “Laura. Where have you been?”

  Don’s voice was strained, burred with fatigue and stress.

  “Battery problems.”

  “How long can you talk?”

  “I’d say, if I just use the cell phone features, half an hour.”

  “And if I transmit a large digital image file?”

  “Send it. Now. Don’t explain what it is, send it first.”

  He must have dropped his cell, I heard it clatter against a desktop, and he didn’t pick it up for two minutes.

  “Okay. It’s sent. I compressed it, so the email attachment would be smaller, take less bandwidth and get there quicker. Have you got your laptop with you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Don’t waste any time. Connect the Fujiyama to the laptop, use the laptop to check your email, not the Fujiyama. You’ll need the laptop anyway, to see the image. Call me back when you’ve received it.”

  He hung up. I ran to my carryalls, unpacked the Sony Vaio, cabled it to the Fujiyama which I then used to call up my satellite email connection. Almost immediately the laptop email program started downloading a message. There was no text, just an attachment. Once it was completely downloaded, I shut off the Fujiyama to conserve the battery and called the men over to see the picture.

  “To the left,” Wong said. “That’s got to be the Sea of Cortez.”

  They all had maps in front of them, Gates finally thrusting his between us and pointing to an area of the coastline.

  “I think…” he said, “I think we’re looking at an area not too much north of Guaymas. If I’m right, and it was three years ago that I went fishing down there, this tiny village on the top of the picture is Ensenada Chica.”

  We looked at stretch of sky island running from northeast to southwest, ending not far from the water.

  “Sierra el Aguaje,” Kyle said, checking a topmap. “Eight hundred eighty feet, top elevation. How do we get there?”

  “If we had a boat…” Wong said.

  “We don’t have a boat.”

  “Okay, chill up, guys. We’re here.”

  Gates had his own map of Sonora, showing all roads—paved, dirt, tracks, and possible riverbeds that the four-wheel-drive vehicle might make it through. He pointed at a spot on the map.

  “We’re near…here. Santa Martha. A few miles, we’ll hit paved surfaces, connect with Mexican 24. We tear down that to…here, a few miles past Las Concha, we take a dirt track directly south, to Ensenada Chica.”

  “No,” I said. “I forgot to tell you the one useful piece of information from that man who was at the camp. He couldn’t remember much of what he saw, but he did notice the sun rising, he did say he was on the eastern slope of the sky island.”

  “That’s even better roads,” Gates said. “But will take us longer. We keep on 24, turn west on this paved road to El Aguaje de Robinson. We wind up less than a click from the sky island. Depending on cover.”

  “Let’s put everything into one Range Rover,” Wong said.

  “No,” Kyle answered quickly. “Would take too much time to transfer the weapons, all of our communications gear. We take both. Come on, let’s go.”

  “Wait,” I said. “Just let me verify this with Don.”

  “Do it from the car,” Kyle said. “Move it. Now.”

  “We make it to be Sierra El Aguaje,” I said to Don.

  “Yes, but—”

  “We’re headed there now. Did you just get this image from Zea?”

  “No. She sold us out.”

  “What?”

  “That’s why it took her so long. She matched up that place by using the satcom images and the shot of the sky island behind Meg.”

  “Don…that picture of Meg…”

  “But Zea said, with no apologies, that she worked for the U.S. Government, that she had…obligations, I think she put it…she had to tell both U.S. and Mexican officials. Gilbert tried to talk her out of it. There is a Mexican force mobilizing right now to storm the camp by helicopter.”

  “We can be there in less than an hour,” I said.

  “You may beat them. They’re organizing out of Nogales, then they’ve got to chopper their special forces south. But…listen, Laura, they don’t care about any kidnapping victims. They’re only after the Peraza drug cartel. Emiliano Peraza himself. They think he’s behind it, they think he’s probably at the camp.”

  “Stupid!” I said, mostly to myself.

  “I agree. But that’s how it lies. If they get there before you, they’ll roll over anything just to get at Peraza. Meg, anybody else held prisoner there…listen, um, have you heard from Rey?”

  “Yes. He told me about the roadblock. About the woman who looked like Meg, that Meg had been sold to somebody else. Don. I almost forgot. That picture of Meg…I think it’s doctored.”

  “What?”

  “I think it’s a picture of Meg that’s been carefully cropped and then dropped into a picture of the desert. We’re supposed to think she’s being held prisoner there.”

  “I’ve been wondering…it made no sense, that they’d give us such an obvious visual clue to where their camp was located. So. Where is she?”

  “That’s the intersection to 24,” Kyle shouted into his two-way radio to the other Range Rover. “Gates?”

  “We turn left, go two clicks, turn right a click, then left another click, then right and south on 24. Let me pull ahead of you, I see exactly where we’re going.”

  His Range Rover accelerated sharply and swung out behind us, narrowly avoiding an oncoming pickup truck loaded with laborers in the back.

  “Just follow me,” said Kyle. “We’re good to go.”

  “They say we’re good to go,” I told Don.

  “Macho types, aren’t they. Well. I’ll see if I can tell if that image is doctored, but I don’t think there’s much left I can do.”

  “Yes there is!” I shouted before he could disconnect. “Go to that very first image. The one Michelle gave me, showing San Carlos. The one she intercepted, the one th
at somebody thought was totally secure.”

  “I’m on it.”

  “Ignore everything else. Whatever you have to do, try to find the Internet location of whoever sent that picture, try to pin it down to a physical location. Don’t do anything else, Don.”

  I snapped off the Fujiyama.

  “What?” Kyle said.

  “Bad news first. The woman who located this sky island, she delayed telling us until she’d notified the Mexican government. They’re sending an assault force against the place.”

  “Stupid!” Kyle banged the steering wheel with both fists. “How can they be so stupid? Did you get a timeline? For their assault?”

  “Best guess…two, three hours from now.”

  “Then we’ll have to get there first.”

  43

  Far above us, a jet contrail stenciled the azure morning sky.

  “Too high to be the chopper assault team?” I asked.

  Gates casually focused his binoculars on the trail. His head jerked, neck muscles rigid, trying to follow the contrail.

  “Stop!” he shouted.

  Kyle pulled off the road, Gates jumping from the front seat before the car came to a complete stop. He flung up the tailgate, rummaged around in all the cases of gear, took out a powerful fifty-power monocular lens, braced both elbows on the roof of the car, and focused on the contrail.

  “Predator,” he said.

  “What?” Kyle was incredulous.

  “They really want this Peraza dude.”

  “What’s a Predator?” I asked.

  “It’s a medium-altitude unmanned surveillance vehicle. Used them in Afghanistan to direct the gunships at Al-Qaeda and Taliban strongholds. It has video cameras, transmits images back to a high-altitude airborne command plane.”