Archangel of Sedona (19 page)

Until I saw the petroglyphs, the area was unimpressive. The rock faces around the tank didn’t have the dramatic red sandstone color or unique weathered features of other places of ancient human habitation.

The petroglyphs were another story. I didn’t expect to see the volume, the variety, or the quality. Eddie found the etchings of the Christus first. I’m the one who realized that the dots depicted star systems. Once I pointed them out, everyone agreed that I’d made a connection that no one else had ever recognized.

Like Fleet predicted, we dicked around the petroglyphs for two hours, looking for other evidence of inter-dimensional beings that looked like the Christus. No luck.

When Fleet suggested that we call the ball, head back to the ropes, and get ahead of the rain, it began to pour and thunder.

“Too fucking late,” Fleet swore. “Gents, I know a place with another overhang. It’s seventy yards farther up the canyon. There are no ruins there. We can set up camp, stay dry, and not offend Native American sensibilities. We’ll see how long it rains. There’s a chance we could rope up this afternoon, but I think we’re here until tomorrow.”

We took our last pictures and followed Fleet up the trail. The campsite was well situated near the ruins. Others had camped there in the recent past. Another large sandstone overhang extended over the spot for 25 feet. It was more than enough to keep us dry.

Fleet had humped four rubber mats, which we would use to sit and lay on. We might be stuck, but we’d be comfortable.

The ground beneath the overhang consisted of bare sandstone. We decided to light a fire to heat water for our freeze-dried rations. The rain had lowered the temperature 20 degrees. We all felt a chill.

We gathered wood from outside the overhang. Though it was raining, the wood was dry. We had no trouble getting it to burn.

It rained all afternoon. The level of the creek crested. An hour before sunset, a three-foot wave of water rolled through the narrow flood plain. While we remained high, dry, and warm in our cozy site, anyone downstream would be in jeopardy as the flood gained size, speed, and volume.

We had nothing to do but wait out the storm. We sat near the fire and munched on freeze-dried lasagna and trail mix. We chatted until it got dark, discussing our discovery at length.

“What’s your take on the petroglyphs?” Eddie asked Father Pat.

“I don’t know what to make of them,” Father Pat admitted. “The early inhabitants carved those figures in the context of stars. I thought the beings were inter-dimensional.”

“Father, at the Cowboy Club—despite your training—you had difficulty grasping the concept of a multiverse. A Stone Age human would never be able to understand it. The ancient inhabitants could see stars in the heavens. The stars reflect an understandable misinterpretation of the origin of the supernatural aliens,” I argued.

“Tony, those rock etchings can’t depict the Christus. It was an iron sculpture that didn’t exist for another nine or ten thousand years,” Father Pat said.

“That’s right. Father. The rock drawings and Monroe’s Christus represent the same thing or the same race of being. The Paleo-Indians had a vision of an inter-dimensional being ten millennia ago, and the sculptor—or someone who influenced him—had a similar vision of the being’s descendants in our time.”

“Why descendants? If these beings are from another dimension, who is to say what their life span is?” Eddie asked. “If they’re the beings that we call angels, they could live so long that from our perspective they’re immortal.”

“If I’d known what lunatics I’d be guiding, I’d have skipped this fucking trip,” Fleet said as he plopped down on his mat, reached into his pack, and pulled out a fifth of Gentleman Jack Daniels. He opened the bottle, took a healthy swig, and passed it to Eddie.

“Those glyphs are the work of primitives, who hunted and gathered for a living. When they returned from a hunt, they gorged themselves and rested. When they weren’t doing chores, making babies, or telling stories, they passed the time carving on the walls. That’s it. You guys are crazy, if you think that inter-dimensional angels have been traveling here for thousands of years,” Fleet said.

“Have you ever seen anything that you can’t explain, Dave?” Father Pat asked.

“Sure, after half of bottle of that,” Fleet said, as he pointed to the fifth that Eddie had passed to me.

“Dave,” Eddie said, “this area is full of unexplained sightings. You never experienced any of them?”

Fleet took a deep breath, raised his head, and shook it. “After I joined the Sheriff’s Office, I stayed in the Reserves. I deployed to Iraq in the Second Gulf War. I helped uncover the Iraqi victims of Sadam’s chemical attacks on his own countrymen. I don’t like to think about what I saw there. I was a drug and homicide detective for twenty-five years. I still have bad dreams about the evil that I observed. Humans are depraved. They will prey on their own in the most ruthless and barbaric ways. We don’t need devils, bad angels, or evil inter-dimensional beings to influence us to do bad things.”

“Dave, that’s not an answer to Eddie’s question,” I said.

“Fuckin’ lawyer!” Fleet said, but he was smiling. “Yes, I have, counselor. I’ve seen strange lights more than half-a-dozen times. Satisfied?”

“What explanation do you have for them?” Father Pat asked.

“Top secret aircraft, experimental drones, alcohol driven hallucinations, mirages, swamp gas.”

“Aw, swamp gas,” Eddie said. “What swamp would that be Dave?”

“Fuck you, Colonel,” Fleet responded, as he took the bottle from Father Pat. “I’ll believe in little green men, or tall, thin, dark men from other realities when they land their craft on that creek, walk on water over to this fire, and take a shot of this Gentleman Jack.”

Fleet’s hostility dampened further discussion. He suggested that we get some sleep so that we could get started first thing in the morning, assuming that the rain stopped, the creek fell, and the ropes dried.

“We’ll do four watches,” Fleet said. “It’s ten p.m. now. I’ll take the first watch. Tony, you have from twelve to two, Eddie two to four, Padre four to six. Father, you wake me up, if I’m not already up. If we can get to the ropes, I may be able to use the ascenders to get up the cliff face, even if the ropes are little wet. I have a spare rope in the ATV. I’ll re-rig and pull us out of here, OK?”

“Why do we have to do watches?” Father Pat asked. “You said we wouldn’t encounter Attila the Hun.”

“We have bears in these canyons. There are packs of coyotes, a few pumas, and maybe a stray wolf from Utah or Colorado. The rain and the flood have disrupted their lairs. If they come foraging, they could roll into camp and all hell would break loose. So be alert. If you see any critters moving in, wake us. We’ll scare them off.”

“Makes sense, Dave,” I said, as I lay down on the mat. I zipped up my Scottevest windbreaker. I fell asleep in minutes, thinking how satisfying it had been to act like a soldier all day—rappelling down a cliff, marching to a site, making an important discovery, camping in the field with comrades, and sharing a slug of Jack Daniels.

Chapter Eleven

August 29, 2013, 12:05 AM

Campsite, 70 Yards North of Schnebly Tank,

Conagua Creek

Coconino National Forest, Arizona

I woke up with a start. I’d forgotten for a moment where I was. I had to blink several times to clear my vision. Unless I’ve been staring at a computer all day, I still have 20/20 vision for anything beyond arm’s reach.

I looked around. Everything seemed fine. The fire needed to be stoked a bit. Fleet sat with his back to the fire facing outward, leaning against a large boulder in almost the same position as when I drifted off to sleep. Eddie and Father Pat curled up on their mats. The priest snored softly.

Men my age wake in the night to urinate. My bladder set my first priority. I stood up, stretched—happy that I wasn’t stiff—and walked to the north side of the overhang to take a leak. I tried to be quiet, so I wouldn’t disturb Eddie and Father Pat.

After I zipped up, I looked at my watch. It was 12:05 a.m. Fleet should have woken me five minutes earlier. Looking over at him, I noticed that he hadn’t stirred while I crept around our little camp.

Fucking leg! Air Assault trooper. He had too much Gentleman Jack and fell asleep on guard. I own you now, brother.
I chortled to myself.

I closed the ten yards behind Fleet in five steps. By the third step I knew something was wrong.

Relying on instinct, I reached into my vest and pulled my Glock. I squeezed the button on the grip with my middle finger. I could see the laser’s red dot on the ground beneath my shadow. I bent into a crouch and moved to the left, using the boulder next to Fleet as cover. I got down on one knee behind what was left of our guide.

The top of Fleet’s head was missing. I saw brain tissue spattered all over the side of the boulder, along with copious amounts of dark, red blood. I resisted the urge to retch.

Fleet hadn’t woken me because he was dead. At first, I thought that his death could be suicide. Then I saw his pistol in the holster on his belt. No one could shoot himself in the head without making a sound, then re-holster the weapon. Someone had killed him. I could not reason why.

I attribute my survival that night to the fact that I didn’t blunder out in front of Fleet. Had I done that, I’d have my own brains splattered on that sandstone boulder.

I looked back at my sleeping pad. I saw the shotgun next to it. Whatever happened next, I would have to use my Glock. I blessed the Sheriff in Florida for requiring that the legal staff practice at the range and qualify to state standards. I felt confident. If I got the chance, I’d put whoever did this in a world of hurt.

I willed my breathing to stabilize. My next priority was to warn Eddie, and then Father Pat, without compromising my position or alerting the enemy, because whoever had killed Fleet had become my enemy.

I looked down at my feet and located several small rocks. Moving more to the left for better cover, I began chucking the rocks at Eddie’s chest. On my sixth attempt, I hit Eddie under his chin. He awoke with a start and looked around. When he saw me, he started to get up. He noticed my hand signals and dropped prone.

Though Eddie and I had never served together, we both had learned to communicate with infantry hand signals. I was rusty and clumsy, but Eddie was smart, experienced, and intuitive.

When I pointed to Fleet, I ran my index finger across my throat. Eddie understood and nodded. From his perspective, he could see that someone had shot Fleet in the head. Eddie shook his head, a sad expression on his face. He looked around the campsite.

Evaluating my position, Eddie recognized that I was in good spot from a tactical perspective, but didn’t have the shotgun. He searched with his eyes, located it, and picked it up. From the prone position he tossed it to me. I caught it with one hand. The move looked so good, you would have thought that we’d practiced it.

Eddie secured his M14. He’d loaded it earlier because he slid the bolt back a notch, confirmed a round was in the chamber, reseated it, and pushed the safety on the trigger guard forward.

I had no shell in the chamber of the shotgun. There were seven shells in the tube magazine. The rest of the special 12-gauge shells were in my kit, across the way. I didn’t lock and load. I couldn’t risk the metallic noise of racking a round.

I wondered if I might be dreaming this whole episode until I detected the awful, bitter scent of drying blood and brain matter. After all these years I was back in the shit.

I experienced a wave of dread so profound that for a moment I thought that I’d puke and defecate simultaneously. I looked over at Eddie. He winked at me. I got ahold of myself, smiled, and winked back.

Letting Father Pat sleep was the best course. He’d be no help in this crisis. Distraction could prove to be our undoing—if we had any chance at all.

It was hard to evaluate our situation. All I knew is that someone with a silenced weapon had killed Dave Fleet without rousing us. I had no idea why he shot Dave or how many enemies surrounded us. Time to play it cool.

Several minutes passed. Nothing happened.

All of sudden, Eddie moved his head and stared to his oblique right. He’d detected something. He signaled me that he could hear two hostiles approaching from the right. Not 20 seconds later, I heard something moving over the loose sandstone in front of Fleet. I couldn’t tell if it was one or five.

Four men in ski masks sprung up from the ground 25 yards in front of our position. They wore dark clothing. Each one had a Kalashnikov assault rifle. Though lethal, the Kalashnikovs made me feel better. I didn’t know any American law enforcement that used them. We wouldn’t be engaging the police.

We could see the enemy, but they hadn’t made us. Eddie signaled me. He would take the two on the right. I had the two on the left.

I shoved the Glock in my vest holster and hoisted the 12 gauge. When the firing started, I’d have to seat a triple-ought shell first. Recharging the operating handle would take two seconds. I had to chance it. I’m good with the pistol, but I can’t match two men with AKs at point-blank range.