The wall of a small outbuilding had been freshly knocked down, and Huckey had dug several holes under the adobe foundation of the small church. As Corrie looked around, she could see that while he had done some damage, fortunately he hadn’t had time to cause any real destruction before he fell down the well. They continued past the church to an area outside the town, peppered with holes.
Nora knelt among the shallow holes. “This area,” she said, “was probably the garbage dump of the town—judging by all the broken crockery and bottles.”
“Let’s check in with Alfieri and hear the latest.” Morwood charged across the old main street to where Alfieri was just stepping out of his Tyvek suit, red-faced and sweating.
“Fill us in, Milt.”
“It’s pretty straightforward,” Alfieri said. “The evidence seems clear that Huckey came up here alone. He had a metal detector and was sweeping the ground, locating objects and digging them up. Drinking all the while, it seems. We found his empty miniatures lying almost everywhere. At some point, judgment impaired by alcohol, he walked across that covered well. The rotten cover gave way and he fell a hundred feet to his death. We think it happened at night, because his broken flashlight was found at the bottom with him.”
“The well’s dry?” asked Corrie.
“Yes,” said Alfieri. “Dry as a bone. He, ah, struck the bottom headfirst.”
No wonder they covered his head with a sheet, Corrie thought. “Where was he camped?” she asked.
“Follow me,” said Morwood.
Huckey had pitched his tent in the lee of the wall of the old church. There was a small circle of stones where he’d built his campfire, a cooking pot, an empty can of Dinty Moore beef stew, more Southern Comfort minis, cigarette butts, and other trash. Lined up on an old plank were the other things he’d evidently found: a horse bit with silver engraving, a brass Spanish stirrup, old bottles, a china plate, a few pieces of flatware, locks and fixtures pried off doors, ivory piano keys, more coins.
Nora, who had lagged behind, now appeared as they were looking the campsite over. She knelt to examine the evidence.
“Could I please have a pair of nitrile gloves?” she asked.
Alfieri handed her a pair, which she snapped on. She picked up one of the old bottles. “Rich and Rare,” she said, reading off the bottle.
“That’s the same brand Gower had in his pack,” Corrie said.
Nora examined some of the other items, then picked up a buffalo nickel. “Nineteen thirty-six,” she said. “That also could be an item left by Gower. These are important clues.”
“In what way?” Corrie asked.
Nora rose. “It might mean that Huckey found Gower’s old campsite. I’d like to look around at some of these holes he dug, if you don’t mind.”
“I think that’s a good idea,” Corrie said quickly. She glanced sideways at her boss.
“Mr. Alfieri will show you where the holes are,” Morwood said. “Milt?”
“My pleasure.” The technician took out a sketch of the town, on which he’d marked the locations where Huckey had been digging. Corrie and Watts tagged along behind the others. Following the rudimentary map, they started at the far end of town and worked their way back toward the police tape.
Nora knelt to examine each hole carefully before moving on. “He was a busy little gopher,” she murmured.
As they approached the livery stables, Nora paused at one particularly extensive area of digging. “This looks promising.”
It was a flat spot not far from the old corral where they’d found the remains of the mule. Nora knelt and picked up pieces of a broken bottle. “Another Rich and Rare,” she said. “And here’s a circle of stones where he had his campfire.” She moved aside a crusted tumbleweed. “Look at this!” she exclaimed, easing a chewing tobacco tin out of the detritus of the stone circle. It was rusted, but the stamped legend Pat. Pending 1940 was still visible along its edge.
Nora stood up. “This was almost certainly where Gower camped. Do you see that rotten canvas in the sand over there? I’ll bet that was his tent.” She looked at Corrie, then Morwood.
“This should be excavated. There might be important clues here. And … ” She hesitated. “If Gower did find more treasure, this would have been a likely place to bury it.”
Morwood looked at Corrie. “Thoughts?”
“I agree.”
Morwood nodded. “I do, too.” He turned to Nora. “In retrospect, I’m glad you were here,” he told her. “And I apologize for my lack of welcome. We should get this dig going as soon as possible. When can you start?”
Corrie held her breath as she watched Nora consider this question. She knew the archaeologist was under a lot of pressure at work, and quite honestly had no idea what the answer would be.
Nora finally spoke. “I’ll need a day to get my gear together and review my assistant’s progress at Bandelier. That means the day after tomorrow. This looks like a two-day job, so I’ll have to camp overnight. If there are no objections, I’ll bring along my brother, Skip.”
Morwood frowned a little, but to Corrie’s surprise he did not object.
32
FIRST SERGEANT ANTONIO Roman sat in the driver’s seat of his M1079 van, staring out the dusty windshield at the empty terrain around him. It managed somehow to be both drab and rugged: dust and sand and stubbles of prairie grass, with low peaks in the near distance. Surrounding him was a small circle of other vehicles: two M1113 shelter carriers, two M1123 cargo loaders, and an M1079A2 base platform. In front of the vehicles, a temporary command shelter had been erected, and within it half a dozen members of his platoon were finishing up the assignment that had come down to them so abruptly. Beside them was a trailer with a pneumatic catapult, currently empty.
His radio squawked. “Tango One, Tango One, this is Victor Nine Nine, over.”
That would be Specialist Third Class Hudson, remote piloting the Nightwarden. Even out here in the Missile Range, with no hostiles for thousands of miles, Hudson liked to play soldier. Roman picked up his radio. “This is Tango One, copy.”
“Final pass negative. Request permission to set return course.”
“All acquisition data received in proper order?”
“All acquisition data properly received, sir.”
“Very well, Victor Nine Nine, permission granted. Land and secure. Tango One, over.”
“Copy, Tango One, land and secure. Over and out.” And the radio faded into silence.
Roman made some notations on his tablet, then slowly looked out again across the landscape. It was after four, and the sun hung low over the distant mountains. Although he wouldn’t tell his team, he was eager to wrap up this bullshit exercise and get back to base. The last episode of the Westworld season was going to drop this evening, and he didn’t plan to miss it.
For the thousandth time, Roman wondered why the old man had suddenly gotten such a bug up his ass. Like any other army base, White Sands had its share of drills and tests, scheduled or unscheduled. But over the last few days, it felt like the place had been mobilizing for Omaha Beach. There had been scouting missions for impending bombing runs; air-conducted updates of strategic survey maps at ultra-high resolution; and even manual searches for ERW. Roman knew that over the years White Sands had seen its share of munitions testing, but careful sweeps had been done, and explosive-remnants-of-war searches seemed unnecessary make-work in the twenty-first century. But most surprising of all had been today’s mission: his team had been tasked with using an RQ-7 tactical reconnaissance and surveillance drone to search for a malfunctioning missile that had impacted in the area of Victorio Peak. And not just any RQ-7-type drone, either, but a Nightwarden, the very latest, equipped with synthetic aperture radar, low-frequency sonar, and a satcom link for beyond-line-of-sight control. It was the only such drone on the base, and—Roman was pretty sure—not intended for mundane tasks like this. Another drone, a more garden-variety RQ-7A Shadow, sat in a trailer behind one of th
e Humvees as a redundancy measure.
Roman put the tablet aside and glanced toward the horizon, where the small speck that was the returning Nightwarden slowly grew larger in the fading light. Maybe something was going on at levels far above his pay grade. Maybe all bases were conducting unusually high volumes of drills and tests. At least, that’s what he’d told himself until today—politics in the outside world didn’t interest him much. But this search for a missing MIM-23 … that misfire had happened several months ago, and the conclusion was that it had self-destructed intentionally while in the air. Besides, he was fairly sure the Hawk hadn’t been headed in this direction to begin with.
The Nightwarden was close now—that mother sure could move—and he saw Specialist Hudson in the command shelter, both hands busy with controls as he maneuvered it in for a landing. As he supervised from the Humvee, Roman put his speculations aside. The general was a good sort, as far as COs went—Roman had never heard of one who didn’t have some peculiarity or other. Maybe that was a requisite for command. McGurk wasn’t a petty tyrant, and he didn’t swagger around like some tinpot Hitler. Roman had never heard him speak a word in anger. If his eccentricity was a passion for nuclear history, there was nothing wrong with that. In fact, it would explain the rumors that McGurk had specifically requested the post of base commander about eighteen months before—not exactly a smart career move, since such positions were usually assigned to colonels. But Roman would rather have someone who—
His thoughts were interrupted by movement in the side mirror. It was a small convoy—two jeeps, apparently—approaching from the direction of the Main Post. What the hell? His idle curiosity turned into something else altogether when he saw the star stenciled on the door of the lead jeep.
He leapt out of the M1079 as the two jeeps came up beside him, creating a roiling cloud of dust when they braked to a sudden halt. The Nightwarden had landed now, and Roman’s team paused in the act of bringing up its trailer to stare in surprise at the sight of General McGurk’s vehicle.
Roman noticed two MPs were in the second jeep. Behind the wheel of the first was McGurk’s executive assistant, Lieutenant Woodbridge. She stepped out of the jeep with almost imperial gravity, then turned her tall, slender form slowly until she faced Roman. With her high cheekbones, perfect copper skin, amber eyes, and full lips that never seemed to smile, she reminded Roman of an Egyptian queen. And like a queen, her mere presence inspired fear—the yin to McGurk’s yang. She stood still as a statue in the dying light. The two MPs remained in the second jeep, engine idling.
The only person moving quickly was General McGurk. He’d gotten down from the lead jeep and was rapidly approaching. His face wore an expression Roman didn’t recall seeing before. Roman quickly came to attention and saluted, but McGurk walked right past him and stopped before Specialist Hudson.
“Report,” he snapped.
Hudson, not used to being addressed directly by the general, had scrambled to his feet. “Sir?”
“Report!”
Hudson swallowed. “Sir, recon pattern finished without any positive results. Sir.”
“Let me see that grid.” McGurk took the tablet from the specialist’s hand, peered at it, tapped it a few times. “You only covered sections C-12 to F-14.”
“Yes, sir, those were the operational orders.”
“That’s less than half these formations!” the general said, waving his hand in the direction of Victorio Peak.
“Sir, ballistics stated that if the MIM-23 missile had crashed, it could only have been on this side of the—”
“I’m not interested in what ballistics said!” the general said. He had not raised his voice, but a suffusion of red had crept up his face until it reached his hairline. “Can a computer predict the path of a missile gone haywire?”
“No, sir.”
“Can you tell me, for certain, that missile didn’t crash on the far side of that formation?”
“No, sir.”
“Then search the far side, damn it! And increase the target radius by two miles. Send the results to me directly.”
“Sir—” Hudson began. But McGurk had already turned on his heel and was returning to his jeep. He glared briefly as he passed Roman.
It had happened so suddenly, unexpectedly, and quickly that Roman hadn’t had time to intervene. The general got back into his jeep; Woodbridge followed; and then the two vehicles turned and began speeding back to headquarters. Roman watched them recede in a kind of daze. The general’s angry presence here, micromanaging a routine mission, was unusual. This wasn’t just a bug up the old man’s ass—this was more like a horned rhinoceros.
Roman felt a presence come up behind him. “Sir?” It was Hudson. “We’ve completed the parameters of the sweep, as indicated by—”
“You heard the general,” Roman interrupted. “The parameters have changed. We return here tomorrow at six hundred hours and extend our sweep, per the new orders.”
33
THIS TIME, WHEN Corrie Swanson drove up to the log cabin with the tin roof, Jesse Gower was waiting for her on the front porch. She got out of her car, navigated her way through the detritus in the yard, and paused at the base of the first step.
The man—as far as she could tell, still dressed in the same shabby clothes as the last time she’d seen him—looked back at her from one of the ancient chairs on the porch. It might have been her imagination, but it appeared as if his blond hair had been washed and combed. He’d definitely shaved.
“I got your messages,” she said. “Both of them.”
Jesse Gower had left the voice messages at her office, each time asking about the progress of the investigation—and the gold cross. He said nothing in return.
“Can I come up?”
He waved her up onto the porch, and she took a seat on a stool.
They sat for a minute in silence, looking at each other. She thought back to her harsh parting words the last time they’d met. They had bubbled out of someplace deep within her, unexpectedly. Maybe it was the fact that, in Gower, she could see a bit of her mother: addicted, self-absorbed, angry at the world. More troubling, she could see herself … or, rather, herself as she might have become.
“Listen,” she said at last. “I’m not here to interrogate you or search your place or turn you in. I’m here as somebody looking into what happened to your great-grandfather. We’re after the same thing. There’s no need for us to be adversaries. And … ” She paused. “I’m sorry about the things I said. When I left, I mean.”
Jesse Gower took this in without changing his expression. “And the cross?”
“That cross is still evidence. It was found with his body, on public land. There’s nothing I or anybody else can do about that for the moment. When this investigation is over, we can see about the possibility of giving it to you. That’s complicated, too—there are laws governing such things. And … ” She hesitated and wondered if she should tell him it was radioactive. But that information was strictly embargoed. “I promise to do what I can.”
Gower took this in, too. She sensed that, between phone calls, he’d had some time to think things through as well.
“And I didn’t mean to come across as such an asshole,” he said. “It’s just … ” and he waved vaguely over the dust-bowl yard, the rusting implements, the oppressive and overwhelming sense of lost dreams. Corrie understood immediately. Going off to an Ivy League school after such a difficult upbringing must have seemed like ascending to a better world. But that world had fallen apart, and now he was back here—worse off than ever.
“I grew up in Kansas,” she said. “In a town not much bigger, and only a little less ugly, than this place.” She caught herself. “I didn’t mean—”
“No. You’re right. It’s ugly.” Jesse paused. “Cambridge was a revelation to me. I had no idea the world could be so green.”
“Green isn’t always so great,” Corrie replied. “I grew up surrounded by fields of corn. As a kid, I thought
they went on and on and on, without end. A green hell.”
They were silent a moment. Then Gower stirred. “Do you want a glass of water or something? Sorry, I really don’t have—”
“I’m fine. Thanks, though.” There was another brief silence as they looked out over the desolation. Then Corrie took a deep breath, having made a decision.
“Your great-grandfather was killed in the Trinity test,” she said. “We think he was out searching or hunting—for relics, perhaps—out in the Jornada del Muerto desert. He got caught in the blast. He made it back to his camp at High Lonesome, but he died soon after.”
“Jesus.” While she’d spoken, his face had turned to a mask of shock and disbelief. “And you’re saying he’s been buried out there—since the day they tested the bomb?”
“Yes. We believe we’ve discovered his campsite. It’s in the process of being examined.”
“Have you learned more about the cross?”
Corrie hesitated. She didn’t want to arouse too much interest, since it was still anyone’s guess whether Jesse Gower could ever claim the artifact. “It was irradiated, too—he was carrying it with him when the bomb went off. We don’t have much information about it, beyond that it’s old and valuable. It may have been the property of a Spanish friar carrying out missionary work across the Southwest.”
“How irradiated?”
“Not much now. About what you’d get from flying at 35,000 feet.”
Jesse sat back with a sigh. “So you didn’t find a pocket watch on him?”
“No. Why do you ask?”
“It seems strange he’d be carrying the gold cross and not his watch. That was one of only two possessions he really cared about. It was kind of a famous heirloom in the Gower family, passed down for several generations. But it disappeared with him, so they say.” He paused, ruminating. “A gold cross. Spanish. That sure sounds like treasure. You think he might have found the Victorio Peak treasure just before he died?”
The Scorpion's Tail (Nora Kelly Book 2) Page 18
