by Chuck Dixon
He took a fat manila envelope from the inside pocket of his jacket. It was folded over and secured with a pair of rubber bands.
She took it and unsnapped the bands. Her eyes widened as she looked at the stacks of banded cash inside.
“It’s a hundred thousand,” he said. “It’s twenties and fifties, mostly. Don’t deposit it in the bank unless you get a safe deposit box.”
“Is it real?” she asked. “I mean, stupid question, is it legal?”
“It’s real, and it’s clean. But what the IRS doesn’t know can’t hurt it. Just don’t go crazy with it.”
“Don’t think I’m terrible.” She met his eyes for the first time as she idly riffled the bills with her thumbs. “I love, loved, Rick, but he was always…difficult. Even before he went in the Rangers, when we were both kids. He was always moving. Like a shark. If he stopped moving, he’d stop living.”
“I know,” Dwayne said, his voice just above a whisper.
“But when you called to say he was gone, it was like I already knew, and I was relieved about it. I guess that makes me sound like a bitch.”
“I understand.” And he did. Renzi was a hell of a soldier and a hell of a friend. His problem was that he sucked at everything else in life. That made it hard for anyone else who tried to get close.
“Well, if you don’t think I’m a bitch now then you’ll think it when I ask if this is all there is?” she said and gestured with the envelope.
“No, there’s more,” he said. “I’ll send you an envelope like this every six months. But if I see a car newer than two years old in the driveway or find out you’ve been taking vacations in Cabo, you won’t see another dime. I don’t know you. But I know even decent people can get themselves in a shitload of trouble with this kind of cash. I owe it to Ricky. He loved his kids.”
A shrill cry broke the quiet, and a girl of eight burst in from the foyer.
“Ricky’s making French fries in the oven!” the little girl shouted with the deep satisfaction of a serial tattler.
The woman stood and put a hand on the little girl’s shoulder. She turned to Dwayne.
“So, we’re done here?”
“Ricky didn’t know you were pregnant.”
“I didn’t want him to know. I didn’t want to hear any more promises. We’re done here?”
“We’re done.”
Dwayne was walking down the sidewalk to his truck when his cell rang. He didn’t recognize the name on the screen at first:
BERNIE LOWE
3
Ranger Hard
CHARLES “CHAZ” RALEIGH was near blown out. His body ran with greasy sweat under the heavy cotton running suit. It was supposed to be protecting him from the early morning desert chill, but now it was drenched and clinging to him. His lungs hurt, and his legs were on fire. For all of that, he was feeling good. He just ran ten miles in just over an hour twenty. And he was making good on his promise to Jesus to get his black ass back in better shape.
Only a few weeks from what he called Operation Never Happened, and he’d dropped eight pounds and a couple of waist sizes. He wasn’t back in the same condition he was at Benning, but he was on his way. The first week was tough, but he pushed himself hard. He was mostly motivated by his promise to the Lord. But then there was Jimbo Smalls to answer to.
Jimbo brought Chaz back to the Pima reservation with him and let Chaz crash in the double-wide set back off the road on acreage. That’s what Jimbo thought anyway. The real story was that Chaz wanted to watch over his former Ranger amigo. Jimbo took a shot to the head from a rock thrown by one of those little man-eating motherfuckers back in The Then. He got a wicked concussion and needed some looking after to make sure he didn’t do anything stupid to do more damage to his bruised brain; at least not for a few weeks.
It was good for Chaz, too. He had nowhere to be and, thanks to the million-plus in cash stashed at the bottom of a padlocked chest freezer on Jimbo’s porch, no reason to be anywhere. He ran mornings and evenings and spent the rest of the time lifting weights, napping, and going through Jimbo’s mad collection of DVDs, mostly westerns—a big sixty-inch screen dominated one end of the largest room in the house. He promised Jimbo they’d go do some hunting next week when he was sure the Indian’s head was better.
He could smell the bacon frying even before he saw the squat mobile home through the brush. Chaz forced himself to keep his cool-down pace as his empty stomach growled.
THEY WATCHED AUDIE Murphy hunt for his brother’s killers over breakfast. Bacon, eggs with peppers, and tortillas.
“Why in God’s name do you have so many cowboy movies, Jimmy?” Chaz said around a mouthful of eggs.
“I like them.” Jimbo was pouring fresh coffee. “If I fall asleep in the middle, I still know what’s going on when I wake up.”
“I can dig that. Good guys and bad guys, and the only rule is who’s fastest on the draw. But the Indians get the shit end of the stick in most of these.”
“I guess.” Jimbo sat on the edge of a couch upholstered in Pima pattern blanket cloth. “But at least their story gets told. What do the brothers have to look forward to? Movies about pimps and gangbangers.”
“There’s Denzel,” Chaz said.
“Yeah.” Jimbo nodded. “Indians don’t have a Denzel.”
They watched Audie Murphy punch some guys out in a saloon. The sight of the little Texan kicking the ass of guys twice his size might seem comical, but the two ex-Rangers were well aware of Murphy’s military record and, even in this Hollywood-phony setting, he had the moves of a stone killer.
“Ever think of going back?” Jimbo said during a slow part when Audie was out in the moonlight with the female lead.
“The Army?” Chaz said.
“The Valley.” That’s how Jimbo referred to it. The basin of rock where they almost died a hundred thousand years before any of them was born. Outnumbered a hundred-to-one by the meanest, nastiest, most-dogged enemy they’d ever faced. They left one of their unit behind to cover their withdrawal. It was hell on Earth, and they were damned lucky any of them made it back to The Now with only minor wounds. And when Jimbo talked about it, his voice made it sound like it was a honeymoon in Barbados.
“Hell, no,” Chaz said.
“I dream about it,” Jimbo said. “And not the bad parts. I dream about those forests packed with game. No laws. No licenses. No limits. It’s a cleaner world. It’s better than this one.”
“That’s some Comanche bullshit right there, bro,” Chaz chuckled. “You’re forgettin’ those homicidal monkeyfuckers that was tryin’ their damnedest to eat us.”
“Still,” Jimbo said with a bland expression. “There was a lot for me there.”
“Well, you can give up on that wild-ass fantasy because you’re never going back there. The Tube is shut down and off-limits.”
“Dwayne called while you were running.” Jimbo turned to Chaz with a grin.
“Oh shit,” Chaz said.
4
The Fever
ACCORDING TO THE VISA statement the Lowes would receive when they returned from their eight-week spiritual tour of Northern India, they had racked up a killer tab at the Morton’s Steak House on Clay Street in Portland, Oregon. Eight hundred bills (not counting tip).
Dwayne pushed himself away from the table as the sommelier poured what Caroline promised would be a surprisingly robust merlot at two hundred bucks a bottle.
“Well, you fed me,” he said as he picked up the elegant fluted glass. “I guess you think I owe it to you to listen to you.”
“Drink up, and we’ll go someplace quieter,” Caroline said and held out her glass to clink crystal with Dwayne and her brother.
They walked through the drizzle for a few blocks and came to Johnny’s Authentic Irish Pub. It was an establishment for serious drinkers, and the music was low, and the early crowd was watching college football on the screen over the bar.
The booths around them were empty, and they ordered pi
tchers of Harp and gave off an aura of “don’t bother me” to the mini-kilted waitress. She was happy enough to comply and returned to the bar and the regulars.
Caroline slid in beside Dwayne, and Morris sat opposite them.
“We want to go back,” Caroline said without preamble.
“To...” Dwayne was never sure where or when she meant.
“To the cave,” she said with a smirk. “Present time. We don’t have the capacity to travel in time anymore, remember?”
“Uh-hm,” Dwayne said and shook salt into his beer, a habit he picked up in desert climes.
“Not yet, anyway.” She smiled. Morris rolled his eyes at that.
“Why do you want to go back to the cave?” Dwayne said. “And why are you telling me about it?”
“I would have thought that was obvious. We’ll be close to the Tube facility, and its new management might not like us snooping around in the neighborhood. We’d need you and maybe a couple of the others to watch over us.”
“We’re not looking for trouble, but we’d rather be safe than sorry,” Morris interjected.
“Okay,” Dwayne said. “But why take the risk? What’s the compelling reason for going back there?”
Caroline took Dwayne’s arm in hers and moved closer to him so he could hear her lowered voice. He was a little surprised at the sudden intimacy.
She explained how, when she was captive of the cannibal aborigines, way back in The Then, she was bound hand and foot near some kind of shrine they set up in the back of the cave. Dwayne was too preoccupied with saving all their asses to have noticed it. The shrine was in a natural niche in the rock wall of the cave and dominated by a large fertility totem. At the feet of the totem were offerings in the form of plates, primitive sculptures, rings, necklaces, and bowls.
And all of them hammered from pure gold.
“The fertility statue alone has to weigh a few hundred pounds,” she said. “The rest is maybe a quarter-ton more.”
“I remember that some of them were wearing gold,” Dwayne said, not turning to her but looking at Morris while all the time aware of her face close to his. “The chiefs and the shaman. They had gold pendants or amulets. And gold beads in their hair.”
“Well, that was just their showoff bling,” she said with a chuckle, her warm breath brushing his cheek. “Inside that cave was a prehistoric Fort Knox. I had one of the pieces in the necklace I wore back tested. It’s eighty-percent pure. Right out of the ground.”
“There’s no way it would still be there,” he said and turned to Caroline. Their faces were inches apart.
“I’m betting it is.” She looked at him from under her lashes.
“After all this time?” He couldn’t look away. Her eyes were the most amazing cerulean blue with tiny gold flecks at the edges of her pupils.
“Tell him about the skull,” she said with excitement and turned to Morris.
“Well, I excavated some of the cave while you and the others were...gone,” Morris said. “There were skeletal remains there that I can confirm are from the same period in which you traveled there.”
“How can you possibly confirm that?” Dwayne said. “And did you find any gold in your digging?”
“Don’t worry about how he can confirm it,” Caroline insisted. “It would only make your head hurt. And he didn’t find the statue or the rest of the gold because he didn’t dig far enough back. But it’s there. If the remains of their shaman and their witch mother matriarchal leader were still there, it meant that the tribe never went back in the cave again. And the remains weren’t disturbed so that means no one else went into the cave either before either a storm surge or tectonic event buried everything.”
“You and your team most probably made it a bad place for the aborigines,” Morris put in. “There’s every reason to believe they moved away and avoided the place as taboo until they became extinct.”
“So, there’s a fortune waiting there, and all we have to do is go dig it out from under the nose of your former employer,” Dwayne said and took a pull of beer.
“Exactly,” Caroline said. “You can have part of the split and we keep the rest to fund the construction of a brand new, Tauber Tube.”
Dwayne sprayed Morris with a generous mouthful of Harp.
5
The Recon
“A SOLAR ENERGY farm?.” the helicopter pilot said through their headsets.
“Lot of sun out here year-round,” Dwayne said back. “And our investors sure like the per acre prices.” The Bell-Huey was buzzing over the scrub and sand at a thousand feet. Chaz had the bay door open and aimed a camera at the passing scenery while Dwayne fed the pilot bullshit.
“You’re a couple hundred miles from anything out here,” the pilot said. “You’re going to lose major wattage over any lines you run.”
“Uh huh,” Dwayne said. They hoped paying this dope in cash would tamp down his curiosity. But they had to pick the one chopper jockey in Tonopah who had an interest in alternative energy. Dwayne decided to change the subject.
“You learn to drive a helo in the Army?”
“Navy,” the pilot said. “I was at San Diego then on the Reagan.”
“What’s a swabbie doing in the middle of all this sand?”
“Well, I didn’t care if I ever saw water again after eight years...” and the pilot was off on the story of the glories of his military career and forgot all the questions he had about solar collectors and power loss ratios.
Chaz interrupted after a while.
“Can you take us over that mesa to our three o’clock?” Chaz pointed to a table of land jutting over the desert floor ten klicks to their south. The pilot banked the Huey in a lazy arc and put them on a course to cross the mesa on a north-south path.
Chaz aimed the camera at the compound they called home only a few weeks ago. It looked mostly unchanged. The Q-huts, the partly buried Tube building. But the tower was gone. The only sign of the Tesla tower that the Taubers built was the concrete foundation it was once bolted down on. The steel framework and the big steel plate ball were missing. Chaz fired away with the camera taking high res pictures in a long series of clicks.
“Can you turn us around?” Dwayne said and held his finger down and twirled it for the pilot. “We were looking at some parcels to the north of here. You can follow that service road.”
The pilot brought the chopper to a stop and worked the cyclic to auto-rotate around and point them in the opposite direction. The helo buzzed back over the compound in the opposite direction, and Chaz took more shots from the new angle. Deep tire tracks were visible leading to the service road and to the helipad. The new tenants had trucked all they needed out of here. It was a ghost town.
The pilot returned to his story about his miserable life aboard the world’s largest nuclear-powered aircraft carrier right where he left off. Dwayne turned back to Chaz. Chaz nodded.
They directed the pilot on a random tour of the desert for another thirty minutes until he told them the disappointing news that he’d have to head back to the barn and refuel. They assured him they’d seen what they came to see and would settle up with him when they landed.
“LOOKS LIKE THEY’RE gone for good,” Chaz said. “And they took all your shit with them.”
Caroline scrolled through the pictures taken from the flyover of the compound on a laptop set atop a desk. They were in a suite at the Marriott Courtyard in Carson City. Her brother stood looking over her shoulder.
“Well, then they won’t be there to interfere,” she said.
“I’d still rather err on the side of caution,” Dwayne said. “We watch ourselves going into the area. Your former employer still owns the surrounding land. He may be keeping an eye on it somehow.”
“Is that really necessary?” Morris said. “They have the Tube. God knows where they’ve moved it.”
“Yeah,” Chaz said. “But you said someone’s been asking questions about you. Maybe they’re having second thoughts about letting
us all walk away.”
“We want to excavate in a cave within ten miles of the compound,” Dwayne said. “And carry away a ton of material. If it’s still there. Wheeled transport is out. At least going in. They’d see our dust and come looking. And I’d bet the house you two are on some kind of watch list.” He pointed at the Taubers.
“So, we hike in from maybe four miles distance,” Jimbo said from where he reclined on a sofa, channel surfing between ESPN and FOX News.
“But gold is heavy,” Caroline said. “We can’t back-pack it out.”
“We’ll work through that,” Dwayne said. “But first you’re going to tell us more about this Sir Neal.”
6
At University
LIFE STARTED EARLY for Caroline Tauber. She never looked back to see what she might have missed.
When most twenty-year-olds were entering their junior year of college, Caroline was already an associate professor teaching theoretical physics at University College, London and well on her way to a doctorate with the completion and acceptance of her thesis. She was the youngest member ever invited to join the prestigious Thamos group; a collection of astrophysicists, cosmologists and quantum physicists representing the best in their fields.
She began her career at the University of Chicago with early admission at the age of sixteen and practically coasted through their programs with a double major of anthropology and physics. Caroline’s interest in the study of man was actually sparked by her infatuation with one male specimen in particular—Shane Douglas, an anthro major with the deepest brown eyes she’d ever seen. Her studies of mankind in general paralleled her interest in men in particular to bring her to the conclusion that all men were driven by urges their minds could not overcome. In simpler terms, men were a collection of assholes separated from Neanderthals by only their interest in professional sports.
