The Gates of Babylon (14 page)

“Or maybe that’s your plan all along,” Lacroix said, fixing Jim with a stare. “Start a little something. Maybe stir up trouble in the Mormon parts of Idaho, too.”

“I’m an American patriot,” Jim said. “That’s the last thing I want. What I do want is to keep this state from blowing up, and right now, having Chip Malloy’s private army riling people up is worse than offending a few fundamentalist cults. Everyone knows the polygamists are nuts, anyway.”

“It won’t come to that,” Parley said. “The head of the cult, Jacob Christianson, left town this morning. The police force left, too. They’re on their way to Las Vegas to collect a bunch of survivalist crap. Some of the other church elders are leaving as well, driving cattle to sell at the Green River depot.”

“And how do you know all this?” Lacroix asked. “It’s not like the polygs keep a blog or anything.”

Yes, how? Jim didn’t think Parley was bluffing about the intel. But how did he know? Alacrán? Some contact in Blister Creek itself? There was that damn secret police stuff again.

“Insider information,” Parley said, “passed helpfully my way. I’ve got to protect my sources. The important thing is, the organized resistance is gone.”

“I don’t care so much about the polygamists,” Lacroix said. “I’ll pave a road with their bones, if I have to. That’s not the problem.”

Pave a road with bones? What was wrong with people these days? Six months into this crisis and people were already talking blood and war and apocalypse like it was the Black Death or something. And even if it was, even if the twenty-first century would be known for famine and death on a massive scale, was civilization so weak that men would descend into feudal barbarism at the first opportunity?

Unless this was God’s plan all along. Part of the great sorting of the saints from the sinners in preparation for the Second Coming. No. He could wonder, he could tremble and pray. But as governor, he had a role to play until that was all made plain.

“I’m confused,” Jim said. “If slaughtering hundreds of polygamists is no big deal, what
is
?”

“I don’t want to face down Malloy,” Lacroix answered. “Watch that pigheaded tyrant stand at the head of his strutting little army and try to make something of it. I could take care of him easily enough, but soldiers killing Feds—that has a way of blowing up in your face.”

It was an opening.

“If we take care of Malloy,” Jim said, “get him out of the valley for a few hours, can you march in and seize the USDA base while he’s gone?”

“Maybe,” Lacroix said. He seemed to be considering the idea seriously for the first time. “Trouble is, I’ve got my own political garbage to deal with. I need time to grease the wheels, stir up some
cause juste
, if you know what I mean, that would justify taking over the operation. How long until Christianson returns?”

“How long do you need?” Parley asked.

“Three, four days. We’ll close off the center of town, billet troops in the main houses, park our trucks in the lobby of their temple if that’s what it takes to break their will. By the time this cult leader gets back and finds his town occupied by a full battalion of troops, they’ll maybe decide to pack up and look elsewhere to ride out the crisis.”

“And we’ll screw over the USDA at the same time,” Parley said. “What do you think, Jim?”

He thought it sounded chilling. But promising.

“Yes. It’s a plan. There’s only one thing,” Jim added.

Lacroix narrowed his eyes. “I knew there would be.”

“The polygamist grain belongs to the state.”

“How do you figure?”

“I figure that the army is well supplied. That’s the one certainty of this crisis. If we get a gallon of fuel, you get ten. If civilians get eighteen hundred calories per day, you get three thousand.”

“You can’t fight a war with an empty tank or an empty stomach,” the general said.

“So you don’t need it,” Jim insisted, putting some backbone into his voice. “That’s the deal. We get Malloy out of the valley, we take care of the polygamist prophet. You give us the food.”

Lacroix stared down his needle nose for a long moment. “Okay, you’ve got your grain. Any other demands?”

“No.”

Lacroix turned on his heel and walked toward the garden entrance. The McKay brothers followed. When they reached base headquarters, Jim offered his hand, but this time the general refused to take it.

“Don’t screw me over, Governor. Whatever happens in Blister Creek, I’ll still be camped here, watching you, down there.” He pointed to the capitol building down the hill, in the center of Salt Lake.

Parley drove the car out of the military base, past the quiet football stadium and deserted university campus. At the first stop sign, he reached into his jacket pocket and removed a small black object. He looked down with a grin.

“Got it all. A little selective editing, and it will sound like whatever you want. That part about a heap of dead bodies would sound very compelling at a court martial.”

Jim gave his brother a hard look. “Who are you, Satan?”

Parley laughed. “Some politician you are. You cut a backroom deal, you make sure you have an out. This little recording might save our hides some day.”

“Great, wonderful. I’ve thrown in with a smuggler, a general who thinks Utah is the battlefield, and my brother, who has tossed all morality and common sense into the Great Salt Lake.”

“Don’t you get saddle sore up on that high horse?”

“My horse galloped off without a rider,” Jim said. “That’s what scares me.”

“You’re not worrying about our nasty little cousins in Blister Creek, are you?”

“And you’re not? Blasted terrorists. Don’t think they won’t come after us if they figure out we’re behind this.”

“And why would they do that? Lacroix’s men will be camped out in their temple. You get that?” Parley laughed. “That idiot may as well open a Burger King in the Grand Mosque in Mecca for all the trouble he’s going to stir up. No, the Church of the Anointing isn’t going to give us a second thought—they’ll be too busy laying siege to their own valley.”

Put like that, it sounded like a sure thing, assuming they could get their hands on that grain. Of course, that’s what they thought last time they messed with the Christiansons. And then a cult member invaded Jim’s office and held a gun to his head.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Highway 9 was gone. One minute Jacob was cruising along in the F-250 at a gas-saving forty miles per hour, climbing back into the mountains, with sagebrush giving way to Douglas fir and aspen, when suddenly a gulch opened in the middle of the road. He slowed to a halt at its edge.

“Wonderful,” David said.

Jacob, David, and Officer Trost piled out of the truck as Krantz’s flatbed pulled up next to them.

A metal culvert lay at the bottom of the gulch, scrubbed clean and shiny as the day it was placed. The pipe was maybe three feet in diameter, but the gap in the pavement was at least ten feet across and six feet deep. At the moment, only a trickle seeped out the far end and ran down an eroded gully, with trees uprooted, broken, and scattered along its sides.

Trost looked down at the pipe. “This culvert was supposed to handle a hundred-year flood.”

“When you get a fifty-thousand-year volcanic eruption,” Jacob said, “it’s probably time to toss the farmer’s almanac.”

“What’s the winter forecast?” David asked. “Generally cool with advancing glaciers?”

“Something like that,” Jacob said. “Except for the one guy who is always predicting unseasonable warmth, just to be contrary.”

“You can have an entire volcano of hot, smoldering clues erupting on some people,” David said, “and they’ll come out the other side complaining about the chilly breeze.”

“Question is, how do we get around this thing?” Miriam asked.

Jacob eyed the meadow to their right, with its encroaching forest. “Wish I’d thought to bring a chainsaw. We could mow down those saplings and get through there.”

“The meadow might be too waterlogged anyway,” Krantz said. “Unless we laid out the saplings. They may or may not hold our weight.”

“But we’ve already established we have no saw,” Miriam said. “Who’s got the map?”

Trost had it, and he and Krantz lowered the tailgate on the pickup and spread it across the bed. The options didn’t appear to be any better than last time they’d looked.

“Either we pay a social call on our cousins,” David said, “or we back up and try the freeway.”

“Colorado City is out,” Jacob said firmly. “We leave them alone, they leave us alone.”

“I’ll take my chances with the FLDS before I take the freeway south of Cedar City,” Trost said.

“You’ve been vague about that,” Jacob said. “What exactly has got you spooked?”

It was chilly up here and he wanted to get back in the warm cab and stop wasting time. Clouds had been rolling down from the north all morning, towering thousands of feet in the air like mountains of bleached Navajo sandstone. The undersides of the larger formations had begun to darken, even as the clouds squeezed the blue sky into occasional gaps in the cloud cover.

“I thought the freeway was open all the way through to L.A.,” Krantz added.

“It depends on what you mean by open,” Trost said. “And who you ask. The government says it’s open. Average people, not so much.”

The officer explained. Every day two big convoys passed through Cedar City on the freeway. The first was a huge caravan from Southern California and Las Vegas, filled with refugees, every bus stuffed and lashed with luggage, like a scene from a war zone in the Middle East. A single armed Jeep escorted each caravan north. Close to dusk that same day, a truck convoy would pass in the other direction, this one guarded by half a dozen Humvees with mounted machine guns. It carried flour, powdered milk, dried beans, and other food from the big distribution centers on the way to hungry people in the desert Southwest.

“These two big groups get through okay,” Trost said, “but then there are the desperate fools who make the run on their own.”

Every half hour or so, he said, a car or truck, or half a dozen vehicles all bunched together, would pass through Cedar City in
one direction or the other, creeping through town to conserve fuel and then racing at top speed once they got past city limits. Hard to say how many made it, but all along the shoulder a few miles outside of town—especially to the south, although there had been incidents north, as well—lay abandoned, looted vehicles, burned campers, and smoldering rigs tipped on their side.

“The army sends wreckers to clear the freeway,” Trost said, “dumping the wrecks off the pavement, but they’re not doing anything to secure it.”

“What about the National Guard?” Krantz said. “Why don’t they do something about it?”

“That’s what the Feds tell us, that it’s the job of the National Guard. It doesn’t help. Nothing happens when we complain to Salt Lake.”

“That makes no sense,” Jacob said. “Why not?”

“Because someone up the hierarchy is telling them not to,” Trost said. “The thieves have connections in the state government.”

“And this is an educated guess?” Krantz said. “Or do you have evidence?”

“You tell me,” Trost said. “Two weeks ago a big military convoy rumbled down I-15 on its way to Southern California. Cedar City PD had no warning—one minute they simply appeared, rolling by with huge trucks loaded with mobile artillery, troop transporters, and at least thirty APCs, plus all sorts of other green iron. Took forty-five minutes to pass through.

“A few days later I noticed something odd,” Trost continued. “On the morning before the military passed through, we had no reports of hijackings on the road south for several hours before the
convoy came through. I might have dismissed it as a lull, but almost immediately after the military was gone, the trouble started up again.”

“Someone got a tip,” Krantz said.

“That’s what I figure,” Trost said. “Someone in state government. Something big is passing through in thus-and-such window of time. Keep your heads down.”

“Bandits,” Miriam said. “We could clear them out easily enough.”

“How so?” Trost asked.

“Old-fashioned posse, with scaffolding and nooses on the other end.”

“Even if you’re right,” Jacob told her, “that doesn’t help us now.” He turned back to Trost. “And you think these bandits would hit two armed vehicles traveling together? Are they that strong?”

“Bandits is probably the wrong word,” Trost said. “At least, it’s too narrow. There’s a major criminal gang operating out of Las Vegas that controls the black market in southern Utah, and those guys have no trouble moving food and fuel. They never get hit.”

“They’re being careful.”

“You’d expect accidents. Occasional shootouts when one side or the other is stronger,” Trost said. “Never happens.”

“So they’ve either bribed the bandits, or they
are
the bandits,” Krantz said. “Maybe a posse isn’t such a bad idea.”

“Until people starve on official rations because they can’t get black market stuff,” Trost said. “Anyway, they’re too big for a posse now. And too well armed. The gang leader is a foreigner—I think he’s involved in smuggling all the way to Mexico.”