Dark Target (15 page)

“Maybe, but the road she was on dead-ended a few miles from where we found the car. She wouldn’t have made it.”

“Well, it’s easy to get lost,” Henry Soto said.

“Did she say anything was bothering her?” DeLuca said. “Anything that made you think she was in trouble of any kind?”

“I don’t think so,” Soto said. “I’ve been racking my brain. She didn’t like being transferred, but she knew the Army did that
sort of thing.”

Huston had told DeLuca she’d asked to be transferred.

“Can I ask you one last question?” DeLuca said. “This might be a bit difficult for you. One of her coworkers said she thought
Cheryl was gay. Do you have any reason to think that might be true?”

Soto thought.

“Hmmm. I don’t think so, but how would I know?” he said. “Was her roommate… ?”

“No. She had a boyfriend,” DeLuca said.

“Maybe she’d be a better person to ask,” Soto said.

“She might be,” DeLuca said, “but we don’t know where she is.”

DeLuca rented a Hummer2 at the Yuma airport, a beefy yellow and black model that looked like a Checker cab that had lost its
temper and turned into the Hulk. The hole in the roof where the SAW gunner sat, in the military version, had been replaced
with a sliding glass moon roof, and without the extra two thousand pounds of armoring, the vehicle was much more responsive,
but it was still a beast. He liked the air-conditioning, the power windows, and the CD player. Ben Yutahay said, when DeLuca
picked him up, that he knew families of four that lived in smaller quarters. DeLuca handed him the map Henry Soto had drawn
and asked Yutahay if he knew the area.

“I’ve been up there hunting,” Yutahay said. “It’s pretty rough country, and it’s going to be dark by the time we get there.
If Cheryl Escavedo went there to hide, it would have been pretty hard to find her.”

“That depends on what you’ve got looking,” DeLuca said. “My son works with satellite image intelligence and he tells me they’ve
got cameras that could measure Fidel Castro’s bald spot. And Sergeant Escavedo certainly knew that.”

“They can’t watch everywhere, can they?” Yutahay asked. “They would have to know what to look for, I would guess.”

“I think you’re right,” DeLuca said.

The road took them east, then south toward a place called Sheep Mountain, in the Sierra Juarez range, the blacktop rolling
in roller-coaster fashion for several miles until it turned to gravel, the desert flora of jumping cholla and creosote bushes
and prickly pear. He’d brought along a pair of five-gallon gas cans, just in case the H2 ran low, and it seemed to be consuming
a gallon every thirty or forty feet. They stopped at one point at a fork in the road that Henry Soto had failed to include
on the map, but a brief consultation with Peggy Romano and a check of his GPS receiver put them back on course. While they
were stopped, Yutahay scrutinized the tire tracks in the road, but it had rained enough in the interval to wash out any useful
information. They drove for another hour, never making better than fifteen or twenty miles per, stopping occasionally for
Ben to get out and examine the road, squatting to touch the ruts and grooves with his fingertips. He said he couldn’t be certain
of the timing, as it was hard to determine the rate of sign decay without knowing exactly what the weather had done, but he
recognized the tire prints left by the Jeep, heading out, and he thought he saw the narrower tracks of a smaller car, headed
in, something with fifteen-inch tires with about thirty-five thousand miles on them.

“I think she was going pretty fast, and then she slowed down,” Yutahay said. “Her right front tire went out of alignment since
the last time we stopped. That happens sometimes when you hit a pothole at fifty or sixty miles an hour.”

They found the trailer another five miles down the road, parked in a hollow with a grove of cottonwoods for shade and a small
mountain stream trickling behind it for drinking water. Escavedo’s Honda Civic was parked in the trees beside the trailer.
The sun had set, an early star twinkling on the horizon that Yutahay identified as Venus, but there was still enough light
to have a look around. They examined the car first. Yutahay took the backseat, where he found an article of clothing on the
floor.

“What’s this?” he said, holding it up to the light.

“Thong underwear,” DeLuca said. “Something that fell out of a suitcase?”

“Maybe,” Yutahay said. “My wife used to wear these but they gave her a rash so she got rid of them, but she still has the
rash. I guess you could say the thong is gone but the malady lingers on.”

“
You
could say that,” DeLuca replied.

He’d hoped to pop open the glove compartment and find a stack of diskettes held together with a rubber band, but no such luck.
The keys were in the ignition. A quick turn revealed that the car was nearly out of gas. She’d gone past the point of no return.
The radio was tuned to 1190 AM. In the trunk, he found a receipt from a supermarket in Yuma. DeLuca showed it to Yutahay.

“What do you think?” he said. “Two weeks’ worth of food?”

“Maybe three,” Yutahay said, looking at the list. “Nothing perishable. That means she knew when she bought the food that she
was coming here, since there’s no refrigerator, without electricity.”

“Let’s have a look inside,” DeLuca said. “I’ll grab the flashlights.”

A canopy of corrugated green fiberglass extended from the side of the trailer, propped on a frame of two-by-fours, and beneath
it, two lawn chairs and a table. Yutahay said that judging from the footprints in the dust, there was only one person occupying
the trailer, wearing size eight Army-issue desert combat boots.

“Are those dog prints?” DeLuca asked.

“Coyote,” Yutahay said. “Cleaning up the table scraps. I think she ate a meal out here.”

DeLuca found a kerosene lantern on the table inside the trailer and lit it. Yutahay searched the bedroom end of the trailer
while DeLuca searched the kitchen. There was a pair of binoculars on the table, focused at infinity, beside an ashtray with
three cigarette butts in it. He examined what was in the trash, compared that to what was in the cupboards, using the grocery
list as a guide, and determined she’d been in the trailer no more than two days. There were no cigarette butts in the trash—who
smoked three cigarettes in two days? Someone trying to quit, or someone trying not to start again. The only other thing of
interest in the trash was a rubber band she’d used to pull back her hair, with a few hairs entangled in the knot. He put the
rubber band in a plastic Ziploc evidence bag, to have the hair tested—it would tell him if she’d done any drugs in the last
six months, but he doubted he was going to find any such indicators. Ben showed him where she’d laid two uniforms out on the
bed, her dress blues and her forest green camos, as if she were choosing between them to decide what to wear.

“Guess she couldn’t make up her mind,” Ben said.

“No,” DeLuca said. “It means she’s wearing her DCUs. She probably picked the desert camo because she knew when she left that
she was headed south.”

“Do you think it means she was hoping to come back?”

DeLuca shrugged.

“Would you wear thong underwear with a camo uniform?” Yutahay said.

“I’m sure it’s more common than anybody knows,” DeLuca said.

The Winchester rifle mounted above the door was unloaded and hadn’t been fired. There were no diskettes or CDs anywhere. DeLuca
stood in the doorway, gazing out at the darkening landscape.

“It’s probably not going to be worth it, but do you think you could come back with some men and really go over the grounds
here and make sure she didn’t hide anything under a rock?” he asked. “Maybe she walked out and dug a hole somewhere.”

“I could do that,” Yutahay said, opening the door to the wood stove. “Though it looks to me like she pretty much kept to the
trailer. This might be of interest to you.”

He’d fished three scraps of paper from the wood stove, computer printouts, partially burned but with enough text on them to
discern the subjects. Yutahay spread the scraps out on the table while DeLuca shone his flashlight on them. Escavedo had evidently
Googled for the words “Shijingshan,” “Qadzi Deh,” and “Congressman Bob Fowler.”

“They didn’t burn completely because she forgot to open the flue,” Yutahay said.

“Destroying evidence?”

“Maybe she was just trying to start a fire,” Yutahay said. “It gets pretty cold up here. There was kindling on top of the
paper, but that didn’t burn either.”

On their way back to Yuma, DeLuca tuned the Hummer’s radio to 1190 AM, where he found an all-night phone-in show, hosted by
a man with a very calm and soothing voice named Ed Clark. The in-studio guest had an interesting theory about the Kennedy
assassination, one he’d recently published in a book called
Angry Are the Gods.

“…there was no invasion being planned, per se. And in fact, a review of some of the best telescopic imagery we had of
the moon at the time will show you that the base the Travelers were building in the Sea of Tranquility was at a rudimentary
level, we think for a simple lack of funding, but of course we can’t know that. What we do know is that shortly after President
Kennedy promised we were going to put a man on the moon, activity at the aliens’ lunar base increased tenfold. But as the
last caller correctly pointed out, the Travelers’ own way of experiencing the uni-mind ultimately misled them because they
projected that paradigm onto a terrestrial governmental system that was anything but. It was quite reasonable, from their
point of view, to believe that killing President Kennedy would have been an effective way of stopping the space program to
protect their base on the moon, because the command to go there originated with him.”

The author spoke very deliberately, authoritatively, as if the things he was saying were things anybody in their right mind
would of course know and/or agree with.

“Now, as to the caller’s second question, why, if the Travelers were able to effect a soul-transference with Lee Harvey Oswald,
which by the way is a one-way street, sort of like a kamikaze suicide mission, because once you cross, you can’t cross back,
so why, if they could occupy Oswald’s body, why couldn’t they just occupy President Kennedy’s body and then have him call
off the space program? That question is somewhat simpler to answer, because we know that perhaps the most reliable way to
identify the Travelers living among us, intuitively, is by their charisma. Though few of us trust our intuition. That’s the
one thing they can’t hide, and in fact it often becomes amplified, depending on the type of individual they possess and occupy.
But what they can’t do is occupy someone who already has charisma, and I think most Democrats over the age of fifty or sixty
will recall that perhaps no human being in modern American recollection had more charisma than John Kennedy. Human charisma
is toxic to them. In other words, it wouldn’t have worked. And you can see, watch the old videotapes, and compare the aura
that Kennedy projected to the one that exited from Lee Harvey Oswald’s body when Jack Ruby shot him, Sunday morning, 11:21
A.M.,
November 24, 1963, at police headquarters, and they are measurably different. Measurably different.”

“Is he trying to say aliens from outer space killed Kennedy?” Ben Yutahay asked. He’d been riding with his eyes closed. DeLuca
had assumed he was asleep.

“You don’t buy it?” DeLuca said.

“I always thought it was the wife,” Yutahay said. “It usually is in domestic cases. It sounds kind of Hopi to me. They believe
in star-people.”

“You’re listening to the Ed Clark show,
Sea to Shining Sea,
1190 AM, WROZ, out of Roswell, New Mexico,”
the host sang out.
“Back to the show after this. Did you know that interest rates for home equity loans…”

“I listen to this guy sometimes when I’m on patrol at night,” Yutahay said. “It can be quite amusing, I have to say. Some
of the people who call in are out of their minds. One night a woman called and said the aliens had replaced her husband with
someone who was much better, but sleeping with him would have meant she was being unfaithful—what should she do?”

“What’d Ed say?”

“His advice was to go ahead because when they brought her husband back, they’d wipe his memory. She said it wasn’t his memory
she was worried about, it was hers. People that night thought that was a fairly interesting moral dilemma.”

“What was the conclusion?”

“I think people said it wasn’t cheating if your lover was in another dimension. Then they started talking about cross-dimensional
marriage and polygamy. They were against that.”

DeLuca checked his watch. It was too late to give Bonnie a call. They passed a curve in the road where three white crosses
staked into the ground, decorated with plastic flowers, marked the spot as dangerous. Yutahay closed his eyes again. DeLuca
nudged the volume on the radio down a notch.

“We’ve got Bartleby in Chloride, New Mexico. You’re on the air.”

“Hi, Ed—how you doing tonight? Love your show,”
Bartleby said.

“I’m quite well, quite well indeed,”
Ed Clark said placidly.

“Listen, I’m just calling to correct the caller before last, Warren from Illinois.”

“Yes,”
Ed Clark said.
“Go ahead.”

“He was saying that the Helstaff site at White Sands was an anti-UFO battery…”

“For our listeners,”
Clark interrupted, “
Helstaff is no relation to Flagstaff. Helstaff is…”

“H-E-L-S-T-F,”
Bartleby said.
“High-Energy Laser System Test Facility. And calling it ‘The Miracle Program’ sounds like your caller was missing the acronym
there, too. It’s not ‘M-i-r-a-c-l-e,’ as in virgin births or gas for under a dollar fifty a gallon. It’s ‘M-I-R-A-C-L.’ Mid-Infra-Red
Advanced Chemical Laser. The Russians were building one in Tajikistan, their version of Helstaff, at a place called Dushanbe,
before they ran out of money. At any rate, I doubt that MIRACL or anything ground-based that the Russians have would pose
much of a threat to an alien vessel. They can give a sitting unshielded bird in close-earth orbit a pretty good sunburn, but
they’re not going to do much to the kind of ships you’re talking about, assuming they could acquire the target in the first
place.”