DELUCA STOPPED FOR GAS IN LAS CRUCES AND picked up three e-mails on his PDA while he waited for the tank to fill. The first was from Ben Yutahay.
David,
Would you give me a call when you get a minute? I know how busy you are. A friend of Marvin’s told me that my son told him he was going to Ajo to see somebody about Cheryl. My son’s friend admitted that Marvin and Cheryl Escavedo were seeing each other but Marvin couldn’t tell me because of his wife. He was afraid I would be ashamed of him. Do you know who in Ajo he might be going to see? I’m going to go there to ask around but please give me a call if you know anything.
Ben Yutahay
The second e-mail was from Walter Ford. It read:
David,
Had some of my kids working overtime on this, though they didn’t know the full import of what they were discovering, as I kept them intentionally uninformed.
Sorry if you were looking for something sexy here. The document your friend P. Romano sent contains accounts and bookkeeping information, going back thirty years. Most of the accounts are numbered so I couldn’t begin to tell you what’s what, exactly, without the key, but it appears to be several subaccounts connected to a larger budget. You’d probably want a bunch of accountants to go over it in detail to really tell you what it means.
There is, however, a file containing a summary that was last opened a week before Cheryl Escavedo disappeared. Part of it’s a spreadsheet listing total annual disbursements to companies like Lockheed-Martin and TRW and Boeing and Raytheon—I would assume the figures are supported in the rest of the document. We’re talking about billions of dollars, David. In short, three things of note.
* First, payments to GNA, which is Global Netherlands Atmospheric—you said a Dutch weather satellite went out shortly after D1/D2 launched. They owned it. They’re owned by Kirkos Industrial, which is owned by Vitaly Sergelin. Question: Who profited from loss of satellite? Conclusion: GNA/Kirkos (satellite was insured for $250 million)—or this was a way to conceal transfer of funds.
* Second, this program was spending more money than it was budgeted for. That may be more the rule than the exception for government programs, but how were overruns met?
* Third, one of the smallest accounts on the spreadsheet, only $23 million (only!), is described as “Home improvements / Nantucket.” That’s a lot of bathroom tile—doesn’t Koenig have a house in Nantucket? This one is underscored with three question marks after it, the author’s, not mine. Here’s my guess: Escavedo was trying to document expenditures Koenig made, appropriating government money for work on his house. Question: What is the reason for this? Conclusion: It gave her leverage. Question: How was she using this leverage? Conclusion: Blackmail is a possibility, but that doesn’t sound like her. Self-protection is another.
Another point of interest. The summary lists dollar amounts, to the unrounded penny. For example, 1998, Lockheed-Martin, $12,587,905.32. Also totals, very precise. Those totals appear, digit for digit, in a speech given at last month’s Union of Concerned Scientists meeting in Denver, where the costs of the space race were discussed. The person giving the speech was Dr. Penelope Burgess. Question: How did she arrive at these figures, if this information is/was classified? Conclusion: Cheryl gave her the information. We looked at Dr. Burgess’s phone records and e-mail accounts (just the AOL one, not the unm.edu account) but cannot verify contact.
Walter
P.S. Your boy Dan asked me to pull Congressman Benson’s voting record regarding military expenditures. He might have gone to Decatur Academy with Koenig, but I don’t see any current possible connection. He’s voted against every proposed Space Defense Initiative program he could, tried to kill MIRACL, tried to cut the budget for THEL to next to nothing, etc. That bill, by the way, was cosponsored by Bob Fowler. UCS loves ’em both. I agree in general with the idea that Koenig might have friends in high places, but Benson isn’t one of them. Koenig had a “secret club” or society at Decatur they called the “Key Club.” Young conservatives filled with conspiracy theories and love for Richard Nixon. Benson was kicked out. Looking into membership roster.
P.P.S. Did a little more looking into Shijingshan Entertainment. The intellectual properties lawsuit against them was brought by Dimension Video, a big DVD distributor in the U.S. Koenig is a major shareholder in Dimension, whose stock went up when SE went down.
The final e-mail was from General LeDoux’s office, written by his aide, Captain Martin.
Agt. DeLuca,
The general said you were asking about NORAD with questions as to alternative command and control. Such capabilities exist wholly or in part at NASA in Houston, at Vandenberg/Edwards in California, at NSA, and in the White House operations center, with a hierarchy of override and security protocols. Recall that part of the Reagan Space Defense Initiative was a recognition of the need to build greater redundancy into the system, multiple launch sites, multiple C&C centers, etc., given proliferation and/or increasing accuracy of Sov./Sino ICBM targeting capabilities. This was when the Global Positioning System was on the drawing boards, but it was coming, and both sides knew it. Space Command at that point prepared for the possibility of the catastrophic loss of the Cheyenne Mountain facility by installing a second backup site at the former Sinkhole Laboratory in Carlsbad, which is nearly a mile underground. The White House also wanted another option if executive branch relocation were required, beyond the current (then) options. Sinkhole’s computers were upgraded, post-9/11, but other than a skeleton crew of maintenance personnel that visits only sporadically, it is unmanned and nonoperational. Officially, the existence of Sinkhole is denied.
Please let me know if there’s anything else I can do to assist you.
Yours truly,
Captain Charles C. Martin
DeLuca called Ben Yutahay and arranged to meet him in the parking lot of a pancake house in Ajo, a desert copper mining town (the mine now closed) of four thousand people centered east of the Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge, south of the Barry M. Goldwater Air Force Testing Range, north of Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument and west of the Tohono O’Odham Indian reservation, in the valley between the Sauceda and Growler mountain ranges. He’d put nearly seven hundred miles on the odometer of Gary Burgess’s truck, driving through the night and reaching Ajo as the sun was rising. He stopped first at a local real estate office to ask for directions to the Koenig ranch. The woman he spoke with, a gravel-voiced blonde woman named Rita, said she was well aware of the Koenig ranch, which, at nearly three hundred square miles, was the largest piece of privately held land in Pima County and one of the largest in Arizona.
“One of the least friendly, too, if you ask me,” she said. “Every once in a while they might send a man into town for supplies or call a local plumber if something breaks, but as a rule they fly everything in and out on their own private airstrip and act as if the town wasn’t even here. That and the eight-foot fence don’t add up to coming off as exactly neighborly, but that ain’t changed in fifty years, so why should it now?”
“Why an eight-foot fence?” DeLuca asked.
“Keeps the game in,” Rita said. “Too high to jump. Tom Koenig’s been growing exotic Asian speckled deer and African antelopes and what have you so his old schoolmates and Army buddies can come in and hunt ’em. Nothing is so thrilling as murdering an endangered species. The rumor is that he’s got an albino elk in there, too, which the Indians consider sacred.”
“There’s nothing illegal about owning a private game preserve,” DeLuca said. “Even with exotics.”
“Illegal, no,” Rita said. “Just unfriendly. Most ranchers around here let the hunters and the hikers and the gem hunters have access, unless they have some sort of protected Anasazi or Hohokum sites on the property. Or they make arrangements to let their neighbors run stock, if they’re not using it. They even got a lake three miles long up there that sits full while we’re suffering down here from droughts. The Koenigs have never let anybody pass. The new one is worse than his father was.”
“Thank you, Rita,” DeLuca said.
“Any time,” she told him. “If you ever want to get a winter place, you give me a call. Average home price in town is under sixty thousand.”
“I will,” he said.
“I have another idea—why don’t you come over to my place and I could make you dinner?” She smiled. “I could use a fresh conversation. Everybody local has already said everything they have to say to everybody else, and the snowbirds are useless.”
“No thanks,” he said. “I don’t think I’ll be staying.”
He found Ben Yutahay sipping coffee in a booth at Jose’s Casa de la Waffle, recognizing his black cowboy hat from across the room. The parking lot was filled with motor homes and campers, the restaurant crowded with white-haired retirees shuffling along the breakfast bar.
“How are you, David?” Yutahay asked.
“Good,” DeLuca lied, sliding into the booth opposite the Cocopah policeman and ordering coffee and a short stack of pancakes from the waitress, who had so many rings in her ears it looked as if silver caterpillars were crawling up the side of her head. “I hope you haven’t been waiting long.”
“I couldn’t sleep,” he said. “I think I got here at five, and the place was already hopping with old people here for the early bird special. I don’t get it. When my people get old, we know how to spend our final moments with dignity.”
“You go sit on a mountaintop until the great spirits carry you away?”
“No,” Yutahay said. “We go to Florida. I have a lot of friends around the Boca area. I have to tell you, I’m worried about Marvin. Nobody here seems to have seen him. I thought maybe I’d get lucky.”
“Did you learn any more about what his relationship with Cheryl Escavedo might have entailed?”
Yutahay nodded, then laid a manila envelope on the table.
“This is for you, if you want to read it,” Yutahay said. “I’m afraid I was a prying old man but I went into Marvin’s computer and found out that he’d saved all the instant messages that he’d exchanged with Cheryl. I can summarize for you if you’d prefer.”
“I would,” DeLuca said. “I’ll read these later.”
“They were in love all right,” Yutahay said, as DeLuca scanned the pages, perhaps fifty in all. “But she was in a relationship with an older man who was very possessive of her, and very jealous. She was afraid of him because she knew he could make her life very difficult.”
DeLuca came to a set of pages that were folded and stapled shut.
“What are these?” he asked.
“You can open that if you want to,” Yutahay said, “but it’s just my son and Sergeant Escavedo having cybersex. I think that’s what it’s called. Typing dirty things back and forth. I don’t think it’s of value and I wanted to respect their privacy, but I didn’t want you to think I was keeping anything from you. It was difficult for me to read, but I suppose that’s just my generation.”
“I don’t suppose it’s necessary,” DeLuca said. “Does she name this older man, by any chance?”
“She uses three asterisks,” Yutahay said. “I gather she was afraid of even naming him. Do you know who it could be?”
“I think three asterisks could stand for three stars,” DeLuca said. “As in a three-star general.”
“That’s what I thought, too,” Ben Yutahay said. “Know of any around here?”
“I do,” DeLuca said. “Do you think Marvin might have tried to do something foolish?”
“Marvin does foolish things all the time,” Ben said. “But I don’t think trying to find someone you love is foolish. I don’t think refusing to believe someone you love is dead is necessarily foolish—it has a kind of nobility. I was hoping if I could have a look around at Koenig’s ranch, I might be able to tell something.”
“Why don’t you come with me then?” DeLuca said. “Though I have to tell you something. And there are things that I can’t tell you, but you should know that there could well be a high degree of danger involved, in the form of a new weapon the military has developed that General Koenig has at his disposal.”
“Just don’t expect any stoical Indian ‘it’s-a-good-day-to-die’ crap from me,” Yutahay said. “I saw Little Big Man. I liked it a lot, but when I die, I’m going to go kicking and screaming, just like my ancestors did.” He opened his coat jacket to reveal a sawed-off shotgun, hanging from a sling. “I took this off a drug smuggler two years ago. It’ll blow a hole the size of a garage door into just about anything.”
“I welcome the company,” DeLuca said.
They drove south of town on Darby Wells Road, past a dusty and desolate RV ghetto where the fattest tree trunk was thinner than a girl’s wrist, across Gray’s Wash and Daniel’s Arroyo and past the turn to the New Cordelia Mine, closed, the sign said, up into the high country where the palo verde and saguaros gave way to scrub oak and chaparral. In the distance, DeLuca saw a pyramid-shaped mountain and thought it looked familiar, though he couldn’t recall where he’d seen it. Then he remembered—the mountain had been in the background of Major Huston’s hunting triptych. The truck rumbled and rattled along the gravel road.
A dozen miles from town, they turned off the main road and traveled another half mile before reaching an iron gate extending across the road beneath an arch with the words “Koenig Ranch” carved into the wood. There was a surveillance camera mounted atop a pole and an intercom by the gate.
“What were you going to say to him?” Yutahay asked him. “I was hoping you’d have a plan.”
“I don’t know,” DeLuca said. “I never know. If you spend too much time preparing what you’re going to say, you lose the ability to respond flexibly to the moment. I usually think of something.”
“Do you mind if I get out?” Yutahay asked. DeLuca said he didn’t mind.
He walked to the intercom and pushed the button. After a moment, a voice said, “Yes?”
“David DeLuca to see General Koenig,” he said.
There was a long pause, then the lock buzzed for a moment, and the gate swung silently on its hinges, opening inward. When he returned to the truck, Ben Yutahay was crouched in the dirt, examining the pickup’s front tire.
“Something wrong?” DeLuca asked.
“Not with your truck, but I didn’t want the camera over there to see what I was doing, so I’m pretending,” Yutahay said. “Cheryl was here. It rained here. A couple days before she disappeared. This is where the red mud we found on her tires came from. And those are her tire tracks. The sun baked the mud and froze them for us to find. Here she is, driving in, and here she is, driving out. It couldn’t be plainer.”
“So she went from here to her uncle’s?” DeLuca said.
“Other way around,” Yutahay said. “She switched cars at her uncle’s, then came here, then went to Spirit Mountain. And this track at my foot is to my son’s motorcycle. It’s newer. Maybe yesterday. It traces over the others. He stopped here a moment, because there is his boot, and then he went to the intercom.”
DeLuca looked down and saw only indecipherable ruts and grooves.
“How about tracks coming out?”
“I don’t see any,” Yutahay said, staring at the dirt a moment longer, then spitting. “Maybe we’ll find him on the porch with his feet propped up.”
The road continued for another two miles, affording at one point a view, as the road climbed, of a paved airstrip below where a twin-engine jet, a Gulfstream 2, sat on the tarmac. They passed a barn and corral where a dozen saddle horses grazed without looking up at the old truck that rumbled up the road. The house was built of logs on a stone foundation, though the structure was, to a log cabin, what the White House was to a White Castle hamburger joint. Yutahay commented that the logs used to build the house were Douglas fir and had probably been shipped in from the Pacific Northwest. The roof was cedar shake, with a massive stone chimney rising from the center, and next to it, a widow’s walk where DeLuca saw that a telescope had been set up on a tripod, though it was pointing toward the horizon and not the sky, the house resting on a promontory where a table mesa dropped precipitously to the valley below. There was a large swimming pool next to the house, and beyond the pool house and patio, a large inflated white dome.
“Tennis court?” Yutahay wondered.
“That’s what it’s supposed to look like, anyway,” DeLuca said, thinking to himself that it was also not a bad place to hide the dish array Scott said Koenig would need to command Darkstar.
“How much are they paying generals these days?” Yutahay asked. “This guy is loaded.”
“His family had money,” DeLuca said. “But you’re right.”
Beyond the tennis court, he saw a helipad where a Sikorsky S-72 sat waiting, its blades slowly rotating in preparation for flight. Koenig was on the porch, having a few words with his pilot, who saluted and moved toward the helicopter as DeLuca parked the truck. Yutahay said he wanted to wait outside and perhaps have a bit of a look around. There was a five-car garage at the side of the house opposite the pool, where DeLuca saw a black Lincoln Navigator, a World War II-era vintage Willys Jeep, and a variety of ATVs and off-road dirt bikes. Yutahay promised he wouldn’t go far.
“Would your friend like to come in, Agent DeLuca?” Koenig said as DeLuca saluted.
“No thank you, sir,” DeLuca said. “Officer Yutahay isn’t military. He’s with the Tribal Police, but he’s just an old friend who wanted to take me over to the res after this.” DeLuca noticed a hand-held Mark 40 grenade launcher resting across the arms of an Adirondack chair on the porch. “I hope I’m not interrupting anything. You look like you’re expecting trouble.”
“Trouble in the form of beavers,” Koenig said. “We’re flying down to dynamite a new beaver dam. Ordinarily we’d ride in on horseback but I’m in a bit of a hurry today. My wife and family are waiting for me in Colorado. Apparently the beavers have impeded the flow of water to my neighbors to the south. They’re second only to man in their ability to alter their physical environment.”
“You’ve done a nice job of altering yours,” DeLuca said. “How long have you had this place?”
“My great-grandfather built it,” Koenig said. “My family are seafaring people, but he wanted a piece of the West. Teddy Roosevelt used to come here to hunt. We can talk inside.”
The house was decorated in a mixture of western ranch and New England antique styles, Shaker furniture, an old rocking horse, cloth dolls in a glass case, Persian rugs, nautical brass knickknacks, a massive wagon wheel light fixture in one room, a chandelier constructed of elk antlers in another. The foyer opened onto a great hall filled with the mounted heads of enough deer, antelope, elk, and mountain goats to form a small herd. The furniture was Stickney and mission style, dark wood in straight lines, leather couches, bookshelves filled with leather-bound tomes, mica lampshades, Bavarian steins, Remington bronzes of cowboys on horseback and Indians hunting bison, gold-framed Russell Chatham oil landscapes mixed with portraits of ancestors on the walls, though the main feature of the room was the fireplace, which was large enough for a man to stand upright in, built of stone with a massive slate mantel above it.
“You already know Lieutenant Carr,” Koenig said, referring to the young officer who stood in the kitchen doorway with an apron around his waist, his sleeves rolled up. Carr grinned the same cocky grin DeLuca had noticed before.
“Lieutenant,” DeLuca said in acknowledgment.
“Not only is Lieutenant Carr a fine aide, but he’s also a gourmet chef,” Koenig said. “A fine butcher, too. Ninety percent of the taste of venison is how the animal is dressed. My grandfather had a Navaho who did it for him, but I think Lieutenant Carr is as good with a filleting knife as he was.”
“You flatter me, sir,” Carr said, returning to the kitchen.
DeLuca ran his hand across the mantel.
“Spectacular fireplace,” DeLuca said.
“That’s made from stone quarried on the property,” Koenig said. “We’re sitting on the crest of the Tertiary Chico-Shunie basolith. We get a lot of porphyritic quartz monzonite, hematite, feldspar, quartz diorite, cuprite, malachite, pegmatites, and fanglomerates, among other more minor lithologies. A lot of people don’t even know what’s under their feet.”
“You certainly do, sir,” DeLuca said.
“I used to do a lot of rock collecting as a boy along the fractures and footwalls. My grandfather didn’t believe in letting his grandchildren spend their time idly. There were usually tests at dinnertime. Can I get you something to drink? An iced tea?”
“That would be fine,” DeLuca said. Koenig asked Lieutenant Carr to get the drinks. Carr returned a moment later and handed DeLuca his. Koenig drank from his own glass. DeLuca decided they probably weren’t going to poison him. He sipped.
“You must get a lot of gem hunters asking you if they can collect on the premises,” DeLuca said. Koenig raised an eyebrow.
“Occasionally,” he said. “But you’re not here for a geology lesson, and I don’t have the time, so why don’t you tell me why you are here? I have a pretty good idea, but why don’t you tell me? By the way, after your first visit, I made some calls about you. It’s very impressive. Major Huston said you put away more of Saddam’s blacklist friends than anybody else. I didn’t read what happened to your friend Mohammed Al-Tariq, but regardless, you should know that I’m expecting a lot from you.”
Koenig was clearly unconcerned at DeLuca’s suddenly showing up at his door. He’d expressed very little surprise. It was almost as if he’d been expecting him. DeLuca saw a door that opened onto a study where a laptop computer glowed on the desk. He wondered what a search of the hard drive would turn up.
“The Al-Tariq file is still classified,” DeLuca said. “I’m sure you could gain access if you wanted to.”
“I’m sure I could, too. Did you find the disks?”
“I did,” DeLuca said.
“And what was on them?”
“I don’t know yet,” DeLuca said, gambling that Peggy Romano’s firewall was as strong as she said it was, and that Koenig had not been able to intercept the e-mail that Walter Ford had sent. “What I mean is, I’m not sure. It looks like financial information, bookkeeping stuff, but I haven’t really had time to study it yet. I was going to wait until I had more information before I showed it to anybody. As it stands, I haven’t told anyone I’ve found them.”
“Because?”
“Because I’m not exactly sure where I stand, actually, vis-à-vis Darkstar,” DeLuca said. “Right now, I could either stop you or help you. And frankly, I’m not sure what I want to do. I was hoping maybe you could talk to me.”
It had been his experience that most criminals were essentially lonely. It always surprised him when, interrogating a gang member or street criminal, an offer of simple friendship led to the disclosure of information. Criminals had secrets, and keeping secrets was hard for anybody—only the most deeply psycho-emotional sociopaths could do it in a prolonged way with any sense of comfort. Most people wanted to confess. The question was always how to get them talking in a way they felt safe and supported. The approach had worked for him in Iraq. Perhaps it would work here. Koenig saw himself as a man’s man, a vigilante going it on his own, historically wronged but doing what he considered the right thing, even though nobody would ever agree with him. Part of him had to long to be understood.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Koenig said.
“I’m read on,” DeLuca said, “but I have a feeling they didn’t tell me everything. Only you would really be in a position to do that. Right now, they’re looking for a nonfunctioning piece of space crap, or they’re looking for proof that Darkstar is operational, which gives them a different set of headaches. My own team doesn’t even know how I’m adding this up, but I think I have that proof. Not just the disks. How did you and Cheryl get involved?”
“We got involved because I put my personal needs in front of the country’s and ended up compromising the only program we have that’s going to keep this country safe, and save millions of lives,” Koenig said. “When my grandfather ran the Navy during World War II, he made sure the job came before the people doing the job. People are the weak link. Always have been. Fortunately, with the new technologies, it’s going to take fewer and fewer people to get the job done. When I told Cheryl the situation had gone too far, she couldn’t handle it. If I have difficulty suffering fools, of either gender or whatever the rank, I’m not going to apologize. I saw in your service record that you have some of the same difficulties. First Gillette and then Reicken. You have a way of disposing of your superior officers, DeLuca.”
“You make it sound like I did something illegal,” DeLuca said. Gillette had been a base commander in Stuttgart who got chaptered out after DeLuca’s investigation proved he’d misappropriated funds. Colonel Stanley Reicken had been DeLuca’s immediate superior in Iraq, until he gave the order for his men to fire on Iraqis holding a white flag, and there, DeLuca had helped a BBC reporter gain access to the proof. “But you’re right, I don’t like bureaucrats. And I guess I’m not so big on rules. The Army is exactly who I’d want with me if we needed a thousand guys to cross a field, but sometimes you need to slip through a narrow door, and then you don’t want a thousand guys with you. Why Vitaly Sergelin? Was it the money or the oil?”
“Both,” Koenig said. “It always astonished me, how few people understood the nature of power in the old Soviet Union. People saw a row of unsmiling men in bad hats watching May Day parades in Red Square and thought they were in charge. Vitaly Sergelin had more to do with the democratization of the Soviet Union than Gorbachev or Yeltsin ever did. China’s gross national product tripled in the last five years and it’s going to triple again in another two—that’s a billion people who twenty years ago were riding bicycles and building houses out of bamboo. You think we’re the only country that’s going to want oil? You think a billion Chinese aren’t going to want cars? If we can’t control demand, we’d damned well better control supply. Russia has more oil reserves than all of the Middle East and Alaska combined.”
“And what Sergelin doesn’t have is the physical force to protect his assets,” DeLuca said. “So you work together. He funded your parallel programs and in return, you provide security.”
“He’s part of the decision-making process, as an ally,” Koenig said. “There are others. Maybe you haven’t noticed, Chief DeLuca, but this little world of ours is falling apart, reverting to tribalism at its most elementary components, sometimes quite literally—look at Africa. Countries that have been stabilized either by despotism or by democracy for a quarter of a century or more are splitting at seams along tribal lines. Hutus and Tutsis. Dinkas and Arabs. Kum and Fasori. You’re starting to see it in China, Pakistan, India… That narrow door you’re talking about is globalization. Those who manage to get through, fine, great, they’re our allies, but those who get shut out and can’t get inside, they’re joining the barbarians.”
“And the barbarians are armed,” DeLuca said.
“You’re goddamn right they are,” Koenig said. “And I’m not just talking about a few pissant 707s flying into office buildings. I’m not talking about having to fight two wars on two fronts today and thirty wars on thirty fronts tomorrow. I’m not even talking about dirty bombs or suitcase nukes passing through airport security checkpoints manned by overweight unwed-mother high-school dropouts who couldn’t find a bowling ball in a bread basket. We have eight thousand nuclear-armed cruise missiles and five thousand ICBMs on this planet and a hundred million laptop computers capable of launching them, and all somebody’s got to do is write the program that lets them, and once that gets on the Internet, we’re going to have eight thousand rockets launching all at the same time. And what are we going to do then? Who’s going to be left to say, ‘Gee, I wish we’d thought of that—I wish somebody had prepared for that’?”
DeLuca decided to play a hunch.
“And that’s just the terrestrial threat,” he said.
Koenig didn’t say anything. Was it possible that Koenig believed in UFOs? If so, it was probably the darkest secret he had.
“I’ll leave whether or not we need Darkstar to bigger brains than mine,” DeLuca said, shifting the focus back to things Koenig could talk about. “But if Darkstar is a fact, then the people controlling Darkstar are going to need intelligence. I don’t mean SIGINT or IMINT. I mean boots on the ground, global. I mean somebody who can walk into a village in Pakistan and ask, ‘Where’s Osama Bin Laden?’ and get a straight answer. And tell you, this is where he goes, this is when he’ll be there, come and get him. I think you’re right about tribalism. And tribes have chiefs, but how do you know who they are? Who’s going to go in and get you the information you need? And that’s what I’m good at. That’s what I’m best at. You can look it up. And that’s what I’m offering you.”
He thought a little megalomaniacal posturing was in order, delivered deferentially.
“Correct me if I’m wrong, but if we’re talking about the virtually instantaneous projection of force, and I wouldn’t deny the need for it for one second, particularly after 9/11, then isn’t it imperative that that force be used wisely?” DeLuca said. “You said the problem is people, not technology. People can’t make good decisions without good intelligence. You can rely on SIGINT or IMINT all you want, but you’re still not going to build a machine that can open another man’s mind. I make my living getting people to do just that. And I guess I’m asking you to do that, too, sir. Obviously, I came here fully aware that if you turn down my offer, you could take me out the second I step out that door, and that from your point of view, the threat I pose is well-contained. But I don’t think you’d delete an asset once you appreciated the value of it. And the idea of working for somebody who could get more done in five minutes than the Army could accomplish in five years is more than a little appealing. I’ve got my résumé in the car if you want to see it.”
Koenig smiled.
“That won’t be necessary,” Koenig said. “I’m aware of your abilities. You should know that when I think somebody is looking into me, I’m going to look into them. You’re quite right about the advantages of intelligence. You know, General Taylor at Huachuca is a friend of mine. Had him out here hunting a while back, so I asked him. He said you were one of the best instructors he ever had. Wishes you were still there.”
“General Taylor’s one of the best commanders I’ve ever had,” DeLuca said. “His good opinion always meant a lot to me.”
“He referred me to the chapter you wrote on interrogation techniques,” Koenig said. “Quote: ‘It is often useful to find a way to make the person you’re interviewing feel like you have his own interests at heart, whatever they may be. Taking an aggressive position is more likely to raise his defenses than to lower them. From a global perspective, when questioning an enemy combatant, the United States armed forces as “bad cop” is the default assumption. One might actually win hearts and minds with compassion, which can be either real or feigned. Real is better.’ Did you write that, DeLuca?”
“I did,” DeLuca said.
“And did you think you could play me the way you might play some third-world towelhead?” Koenig said. “Did you think you could pretend to have our interests at heart?” Apparently Koenig hadn’t read the part about the value of making an angry adversary think you’re stupid. “You have no idea what you’re dealing with, DeLuca. None. And the funny thing is, you still found out more than you were supposed to. All you had to do was find the girl and the disks and eliminate one little intangible. I asked them to get me someone who was good but not too good, and primarily, someone who could stay within the parameters of his mission. One look at your record would have suggested you weren’t going to do that. I don’t like soldiers who can’t stay within the parameters of their missions, DeLuca. Never have.”
“I didn’t come here to be liked,” DeLuca said, now that the game was up. When in doubt, declare victory.
“Then why did you come here?” Koenig said. “Not that I care, but I don’t know how you think.”
“I came here to arrest you,” DeLuca said.
“And you thought I would let you?”
“I thought you might not like it,” DeLuca conceded. “Most people don’t.”
“You don’t really have the faintest inkling of what you’re dealing with, do you?” Koenig said. He called out to the next room. Carr appeared in the door, his .45 Colt automatic in his hand. “Lieutenant Carr,” Koenig said, turning to leave. “Would you please take care of this? And when you’re finished, see to that Indian fellow wandering around outside.”
“Take care of this?” DeLuca said. “You can’t even shoot me yourself? What kind of pussy bullshit is that?” Koenig stopped in his tracks. DeLuca wasn’t exactly sure where he was going with this or what he was hoping to accomplish, beyond getting Koenig to do something stupid. He imagined Koenig had a high opinion of himself. Such high opinions were often a man’s weakest link. He also wanted to stall, on the off chance that something brilliant would occur to him. “But then I haven’t met a candy-assed rear-echelon motherfucker like you yet with half the balls he thought he had. You guys are great at sitting behind your plasma screens with your hot little mouses in your hands, clicking on what infantry platoons you want to send where or what village you want to target from six thousand miles away, but not one of you pissants ever had to kill a man with your own hands close enough to watch his eyes turn red or come within a hundred miles of being killed yourself. You know what the real soldiers call you? Playstation Generals. But don’t stay on my account—I know you’ve got beaver you need to hunt with RPGs.”
Koenig turned and was about to say something, then thought better of it, nodding to Carr before walking to the front door and exiting.
DeLuca turned to face Carr.
“I don’t suppose if I told you you were under arrest, you’d put the gun down?” DeLuca said.
Carr shook his head, still smiling confidently.
“It looks like I’m going to have to wipe that smirk off your face myself then,” DeLuca said. He circled slowly to his left. Carr responded, evidently amused anew.
“And how are you going to do that?” Carr said.
“Well,” DeLuca said. “I could just let you kill me and hope that thirty or forty years of having a guilty conscience would destroy your soul. But that presupposes a level of self-reflection your generation tends to lack, so I guess I’ll just have to kick your ass the old-fashioned way.”
“You’re going to kick my ass?” Carr said.
“I’m going to try,” DeLuca said, still sizing up his opponent. “My boy Dan Sykes said you’re pretty good. And I know you’re not going to shoot me here because you don’t want to get blood on the general’s Persian rug, so why don’t you put the gun down and show me some of your jujitsu shit? But I gotta warn you—I did a little boxing in college. Come on, Lieutenant—don’t tell me you’re afraid of a man my age? And you know I’m right about the rug.”
“Your boy Sykes lasted less than a minute,” Carr said, lowering the gun. “What makes you think you could do any better?”
“I have something Dan Sykes didn’t have,” DeLuca said.
“The wisdom that comes with age?” Carr offered.
“No,” DeLuca said. “Backup.”
He glanced over Carr’s shoulder. Carr refused to look.
“Is this where you cleverly trick me into turning my head?” Carr said.
“I don’t want to shoot you, son,” Ben Yutahay said from the doorway, where he leveled the Remington pump-action shotgun at the lieutenant, “but on the other hand, I don’t really care about the rug.”
Carr turned his head, momentarily, but it was long enough for DeLuca to pick up a lamp with a heavy ceramic base, which he then broke across the back of Carr’s head. Carr fell where he stood.
DeLuca heard the helicopter’s engines revving.
He picked up Carr’s automatic, nodded a thank-you to Yutahay, then ran for the helipad, which was about a hundred yards off. There was no time to think, so he didn’t try. He squeezed off four quick rounds but knew the small sidearm wasn’t going to stop the helicopter, so he sprinted, knowing only that if Koenig went to ground, he was going to be much harder to find. He was thirty yards away as the chopper lifted from the pad. DeLuca ran harder and managed to grab hold of the portside runner, sprinting along with the helicopter until the engine revved even higher and he felt himself lifted from the ground, at which point he realized this was one of the stupider things he’d ever done. It was not his intention to fly, and he’d never cared much for helicopters, even when he was inside them (“fifty thousand rivets flying in loose formation,” a pilot friend had once called them), but when he realized he was twenty feet off the ground and rising, he decided it would be prudent to hang on.
He threw a leg over the runner and wrapped his arms around the pylon. Koenig’s pilot tried to shake him off, banking sharply to the left, then to the right, while the ground below spun and whirled. The pilot pulled on the collective and the nose of the helicopter turned skyward. DeLuca felt his weight shift to the rear.
The chopper pitched left, then right, then left again. When the helicopter suddenly dived, DeLuca felt his stomach turn inside out, but he managed to wrap his other leg around the runner to straddle it. They wheeled left and circled back to the house, picking up speed.
Then a winch began to lower from the starboard port, a fat iron hook on the end of a half-inch-thick steel cable. At eight feet, it stopped.
Koenig’s pilot banked sharply left, using the winch in an attempt to knock DeLuca from his perch. The first blow struck the strut, clanging loudly. The second missed by a wide margin, but then the hook whipped around and struck DeLuca in the ribs, breaking at least one of them, by DeLuca’s rough guess.
He held on.
The chopper banked left and dived. The earth spun. DeLuca saw the estate below him. His head swam and he felt dizzy. The hook swung back and momentarily wrapped around the runner’s pylon, pinching his right hand. He screamed as the pain shot the length of his arm. When the cable unwrapped, he tried to grab the hook and immobilize it, but as the chopper banked sharply right, he lost his balance.
He fell.
He grabbed hold of the cable to stop his fall. He tried to hang on to the runner with his feet, but the force was too much, and when the helicopter jerked again, his feet slipped.
He spiraled below the helicopter, swinging free on the winch cable, his weight sliding him down the cable until he grabbed the hook with his right hand, his flesh torn and burning. He was spinning madly and couldn’t reach the hook with his left hand.
The helicopter turned sharply. He swung out wide from centrifugal force. The pilot was lowering the cable. At the same time, the helicopter descended.
He managed to grab the cable with his left hand, gaining purchase, but he was still spinning. He was bleeding, blood running down his right arm.
He hung on.
The helicopter rose, heading back toward the house.
He spread-eagled his legs to stabilize his rotation.
He saw the house below approaching. He saw Ben Yutahay standing in the driveway, the Mark 40 DeLuca had seen on the porch resting on Yutahay’s shoulder, aimed at the chopper.
They were over the stables.
They were over the pool.
He wasn’t going to get a second chance.
Timing was key. He estimated the chopper’s forward speed at thirty or forty miles an hour, but hanging from the bottom of a helicopter by a cable, it was difficult to be certain.
He saw Yutahay fire. He saw the grenade snaking up from the ground.
He let go.
The grenade missed the helicopter, hissing over his head as he fell.
He flew through the air, dropping from what he estimated to be a height of perhaps one hundred feet. He spread his arms and legs wide to slow his acceleration. Falling free. Soaring. It was almost pleasant. He recalled a parachute jump he’d made in Iraq, a night jump from a height of over six miles. Falling from the sky might not be a bad way to die.
Maybe some other day.
His timing was good. He braced himself, covering his face and turning sideways before slamming flat against the side of the inflated tennis court dome. The blow knocked the wind out of him, and he nearly blacked out, but the ripstop nylon held, collapsing under his weight and the force of the collision like an overinflated pole vault pad but cushioning his fall.
As the dome sprang gently back into form, DeLuca slid down the side and hit the ground hard. He wanted to scream in pain—apparently the hook had struck him in the ankle, though he hadn’t noticed—but he had to regain his breath first.
He limped around the end of the dome, which blocked his view.
In the distance, the helicopter was changing its vector, rising and banking left, screaming off toward the airstrip. DeLuca watched as it climbed, helpless to stop it, the sound of its engines growing fainter and fainter.
Ben Yutahay was at his side, putting his arm around DeLuca’s waist to support him.
“Are you all right?” Yutahay asked.
His ribs hurt if he inhaled too deeply—something was definitely cracked where the winch had struck him—and the palm of his right hand was a bloody mess, but other than that, he was no worse for wear.
“I’m okay,” he told Yutahay. They watched as, a moment later, the white jet they’d seen parked on the landing strip screamed into the sky.
“I hope you don’t mind that I shot at the helicopter, but I figured you for a goner anyway,” Yutahay said. “My artillery skills are a little rusty.”
“I would have figured the same way. I’m only sorry you missed,” DeLuca said.
He crossed to the door to the tennis court dome, testing the knob to discover the door was locked. Yutahay moved to his side, bidding DeLuca to stand back, lowering the sawed-off shotgun at the door, until he thought better and aimed ten feet to the left of the door before firing. The blast blew a six-foot hole in the fabric. The air that rushed out was cool.
DeLuca ducked his head and entered first. Yutahay followed. DeLuca’d hoped to find a satellite dish array inside the dome, but instead found only a tennis court, red clay, air-conditioned, the surface strewn with bright green tennis balls.
He found a towel and wrapped it around his hand, then went back outside. He looked at the house. A search was unlikely to turn up anything, given Koenig’s thoroughness. DeLuca would have given anything to have a look at the laptop he’d seen on Koenig’s desk.
He felt Ben Yutahay’s hand on his shoulder as he stared off to the east. There was no sign of the helicopter anymore, no sound but the desert breeze.
“What about Marvin?” DeLuca asked. “Any signs?”
“Signs, yes,” Yutahay said. “I think I don’t want to agree with what they’re telling me.”
“What are they telling you?” DeLuca said.
“He stopped, about there,” Yutahay said, pointing to the front of the house. “I saw his boot heel but not his kickstand, so I don’t think he got off the bike. I think he was talking to someone at the house. Then he took off at a high speed, because you can see where his rear wheel fishtailed. He rode in that direction,” Yutahay said, pointing, “and then he turned right. I found one of those circles of glass in the sand where he veered, and another where he turned. I think he was running from somebody. Then the tracks of his dirt bike lead up to the edge of the cliff. I don’t think he knew it was coming because there’s no sign that he hit his brakes, and I think he must have been going maybe sixty to eighty miles an hour. There’s maybe a three-hundred-foot drop. I was going to climb down to see if I could find his bike or his remains when I sensed that you might be in trouble.”
“We can send some men down there when we search the house. You can go with them if you’d like,” DeLuca said, even though he doubted they’d find anything.
“Who do you think he was running from?” Yutahay said, looking DeLuca in the eye. “Can you tell me?”
DeLuca wished he could.
“I think Cheryl had an affair with Koenig. He wouldn’t let her end it. I think Marvin came here to tell Koenig to back off. He was in love with Cheryl Escavedo.”
Yutahay looked as if he was about to break down, but only for a moment. He blinked once, then took a deep breath, steeling himself.
“I’m glad that he was in love,” he said at last. “It would be a hard thing, to die without ever knowing that. I don’t think he ever loved his wife. He married her because she was pregnant, but I don’t think he ever loved her. Maybe it’s a good thing to know that you are going to die because of love. Do you think?”