Authors: David DeBatto
“What’s it about?”
“Dammit,” Sykes said. “I knew there was going to be a test someday.”
“Just in general,” DeLuca said.
“As I recall, it’s about a guy who hates his job,” Sykes said. “I think he works for an insurance agency, or maybe it’s accounting,
doing something really mindless, anyway, and his boss is a dick, so one day when the guy tells him what to do, Bartleby says,
‘I would prefer not to,’ and then when they ask him to explain, he says it again, ‘I would prefer not to.’ That’s all he says
to anybody about anything, like the raven in the Edgar Allan Poe poem that says ‘Nevermore.’”
“And what happens to Bartleby?” DeLuca asked.
“I think he starves to death or something,” Dan Sykes said. “They ask him if he wants to eat and he says, ‘I would prefer
not to.’”
“Why?”
“I don’t know,” Sykes said. “It was symbolic for the Industrial Revolution or something. I could have that all wrong. It wasn’t
one of my better classes.”
“See you in the morning.”
He needed sleep, but he wasn’t tired yet. He knew he would be soon. He looked at his watch. Again, it was too late to call
his wife. He picked up a pair of binoculars he’d packed for the trip, cheap 10 x 25 Bushnells he’d bought years ago to watch
Patriots games at Foxboro from the nosebleed section, and stared at the horizon. He watched an airplane lift off from Kirtland,
then turned his glasses skyward. Even in the wash of city lights, the magnification afforded by a simple pair of binoculars
filled the night with stars. With his naked eye, he found Orion’s belt, vaguely recalling that one of them was the star Rigel.
He stared at Orion’s belt. Just below the buckle, he saw a smaller star, more reddish in color than the others. He watched
it for a few seconds.
Then it blinked out and disappeared.
He checked with his naked eye, then again with his binoculars, but it was gone.
He was no expert, but he was pretty sure that wasn’t supposed to happen.
“DELUCA RESIDENCE, SCOTT SPEAKING,” THE voice on the phone said.
“You’re back,” DeLuca said. “How was your flight? How’s Kirkuk? How’s IMINT?”
“Hey, Dad,” Scott said. “The flight was good. Nine-hour layover in Germany. Kirkuk still sucks. Image intelligence is still
up in the air.”
“Ha ha. How long are you home for?”
“I have a month. Me and some buddies were going up to Stratton for a week, but other than that, no plans. How’s Arizona?”
“I’m in Albuquerque right now,” DeLuca said. “We’re making progress.”
“You want me to get Mom?”
“In a minute,” DeLuca said. “I had a favor to ask—can you access your files from home? I mean, from our house?”
“I could, but I didn’t even bring a laptop…”
“You could use the computer in my study.”
“Dial-up or DSL?”
“DSL. But you’re going to need my password. BonnieBunny. One word, capital B’s.”
“BonnieBunny?” Scott said. “Your password is
BonnieBunny
?”
“Just do it.”
“Hang on—I’m walking to your study. What am I looking for?”
“I need to know what satellites were flying over Albuquerque last night around midnight. I can tell you exactly where I was
looking. I think I saw something.”
“You saw something?” Scott said. “What did you see? Flying saucers?”
DeLuca explained what he’d seen, a star, or so he thought, that suddenly blinked off, maybe at about five o’clock on the dial,
if the center of the clock was the middle star in Orion’s belt, at a distance of about a thumb’s width, if you held your hand
at arm’s length.
“It went black?” Scottie said. “You’re sure it wasn’t an airplane? Maybe it was just testing its landing lights.”
“I’m sure it was something like that,” DeLuca said. “I just want to know what I saw. Satellites, airplanes, UAVs, whatever.
Can you do it?”
“I’m going to have to go to a couple of different places, but yeah, I probably can,” Scott said. “I’m more used to looking
down than looking up. Knowing where to look is going to help narrow things down. You’re sure of the time and location?”
“Zero zero zero three hundred hours, a thumb from Orion’s buckle toward five o’clock.”
“Gotcha. I’ll have to call you back.”
“Let me give you a new number to call…”
He talked to his wife, though all he’d been allowed to tell her was that it was a missing person mission, and all he could
tell her now was that the person was still missing. He didn’t know how much longer he’d be. She told him what was going on
in her life, and they talked about domestic things, how the guy who plowed the driveway had broken the curb and didn’t want
to pay for it, and how she thought the guy who delivered the fuel oil was pissed at them because they’d been so late paying
the bill. His friend Doc had called, she said. She asked about Sami, whose ex-wife, Carolyn, was Bonnie’s friend. Between
feeling distracted and all the things he couldn’t say for security reasons, the conversations they had when he was away on
a mission were rarely satisfying. When she said it was currently snowing in Boston, he suggested that when his mission was
over, maybe she’d like to fly down to Tucson for some warm weather. She said that might be nice.
When he called Walter, Walter’s wife Martha answered. Walter was out fetching an armload of firewood. He told DeLuca, when
he came to the phone, that he had some files to e-mail him.
“Maybe you could give me a summary,” DeLuca said. “I’ll read the reports later.”
“I could do that,” Ford said in his usual methodical manner. “Where would you like to start?”
“How about the partially burned printouts we found in the wood stove?” DeLuca said.
“Okay,” Ford said. “Shijingshan, first, is an industrial district in the western suburbs of Beijing. Mostly light manufacturing.
Some high tech.”
“Military or defense industry?”
“Not to any great extent. It’s also the center of China’s entertainment industry. Or trying to be.”
“Anything significant happen there in the last week or so?”
“I have a Chinese student who was online reading the Shijingshan papers,” Ford said. “She said other than a small earthquake,
things have been pretty quiet.”
“An earthquake?”
“Yeah,” Ford said. “Took out a bootleg DVD factory. Minimal damage.”
“How about Qadzi Deh?”
“That’s the name of a glacier in the Hindu Kush mountain range, on the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan. Near Noshaq
peak, the second-highest mountain in Afghanistan. Over twenty-four thousand feet. Not much turned up when I Googled, but I
found something interesting on SIPERNET. Did you know a CI agent named Frank Pickett?”
“I met him once,” DeLuca said. “I couldn’t say I know him.”
“The glacier is in the FATA or Federally Administered Tribal Areas. That’s the lawless part on the border where they think
Bin Laden is hiding. Pickett was working with a group of Talibani and Al Qaeda guys, posing as a Russian arms merchant. They
were crossing the glacier, for whatever reason, when they had an accident and fell into a ravine or something. I guess there
were these big cracks in the ice that got bridged over with snow, but when they put their weight on it, it collapsed. They
weren’t roped together or anything. Apparently it’s fairly common.”
“These were guys who were used to living in the mountains and walking around on glaciers, though, wouldn’t you say?” DeLuca
said. “Seems a little odd that they’d step in a hole.”
“Beats me,” Ford said. “I guess. All that was left was a mule. They had guys on the ground looking around, and they said it
was an accident. I’ll forward you the report. How any of this connects to Bob Fowler, I have no idea.”
“From New Jersey, right?”
“Yup,” Ford said. “One of the leading liberals on the House Armed Services Committee. Big opponent of Space Defense. Which
is what this is about, right?”
“It is. I’ll call his office,” DeLuca said. “Moving on. How about ‘girls disappearing in the desert,’ for a hundred, Alex?”
“Yuma to El Paso,” Ford said. “I could extend to Tijuana if you want. It’s not a nice picture. It’s also not possible to get
hard numbers, on either side of the border. Before 1986, the numbers weren’t good but they were steady. You had six a year
in the Yuma area, about the same in Douglas and Nogales, and about twenty a year in the Juarez area. The numbers jump in ’86
…”
“The year Congress banned antisatellite testing,” DeLuca interjected.
“Okay,” Ford said. “That didn’t turn up in the research we were doing. Nineteen eighty-six was when the Cali cartel started
moving drugs across the border. Hang on—I just found my notes. A Colombian named Miguel Rodriguez Orejuela, and he started
dealing with the big Mexican guy, Amado Carillo Fuentes, who coordinated the Meraz and Quintero and Felix families. Anyway,
the Mexicans had been mostly laundering money for the Colombians, but I guess starting in 1986, the Colombians trusted the
Mexicans enough to let them move product, in a number of ways, but one was using mules, meaning women with condoms full of
cocaine hidden in their body cavities. The Mexicans knew how to move marijuana, prior to this. So anyway, the numbers jump,
across the board, by an average of maybe 15 percent. Some of the mules died when the condoms broke and some were shot and
robbed. The numbers jump again after 1994, when the North American Free Trade Agreement was ratified and American companies
started building
maquilas
just across the border, mostly around Tijuana and Juarez, meaning more potential victims. A lot of naïve country girls coming
up from the south to put televisions together and what have you.”
“I read about that,” DeLuca said.
“It’s hard to talk about women who disappear because there are so many illegal immigrants who cross the border and immediately
hide from the authorities, so the fact that nobody hears from them doesn’t mean they’ve been murdered. It’s a lot of guessing,
based on the number of bodies found and estimated numbers of victims not found. And there aren’t any good numbers south of
the border, where the police activity is considerably less than it is north of the border, which may not be a bad thing—the
Mexican police are probably responsible for a certain percentage of the
desaparecides,
either because they’ve been paid off by the cartels to do their dirty work or because they’re still technically fighting
on the right side of the drug wars but using the same methods to fight fire with fire—there are all kinds of stories of people,
men and women both, taken into custody by the Mexican police and turning up in the desert dead a month later. I wouldn’t trust
a Mexican cop with a nickel unless I had to.”
“So what’s the best guess?” DeLuca asked.
“Both sides of the border, Yuma to El Paso, in 1994, about two hundred women a year, and ten years later, about 850 a year.
And the numbers cluster around Juarez, partly because there’s a serial killer working there, killing hookers and factory girls—they
arrested a bus driver, but he’s not the guy. Maybe 370 women, they think, since 1997. I talked to a guy at Interpol who said
there isn’t a more corrupt city on earth than Juarez, and that includes places like Lagos, Nigeria, and all the other banana
republics. I’m giving you just the low estimates. You can double those numbers to get the high estimates.”
“What about the Spirit Mountain area?” DeLuca asked.
“That’s actually one of the safer areas,” Ford said. “Maybe because there’s nothing there.”
“What about General Thomas Koenig?” DeLuca asked. “Or Major Brent Huston? What did you find out?”
“Both of ’em are a piece of work, I can tell you that much,” Ford said.
“Start with Koenig.”
“Family seafaring credentials go back to the whaling days. Great-grandfather admiral George Koenig captained an American submarine
in World War I and later an aircraft carrier and eventually headed the Naval Academy at Annapolis. His son, Thomas Koenig’s
grandfather, was Admiral Edwin G. Koenig, who was chief of naval operations during World War II. I thought this was interesting—the
guy commanded more men than Eisenhower and MacArthur combined and nobody remembers him, probably because he was such an asshole.
A mean drunk, off duty, liked to punish innocent subordinate officers to set an example for the others, used to grope the
thighs of officers’ wives under the table at dinner parties, court-martialed the captain of the USS
Indianapolis
after it sank and nobody came to the rescue because the Navy needed a scapegoat, let his friend Kimmel hang for Pearl Harbor,
worked a member of his staff to death, literally, guy had a stress-related heart attack, but instead of lightening the load
or increasing his staff, he posted a doctor to stand by for the next heart attack. I remember hearing stories about the guy.
Usually in the Navy, if they like you, they name ships and bases after you. This guy never got a thing named after him, and
he commanded two million men, the biggest naval fleet in the history of the world.”
“Sounds like the guy Koenig inherited his personality from,” DeLuca said.
“Could be,” Walter Ford said. “Though I’m not so sure it skipped a generation. Koenig’s old man was Rear Admiral Edwin Koenig,
Jr., but that was a tombstone promotion. I stand corrected—Grandpa did have something named after him. Ed Junior commanded
the USS
Hollander
during the Vietnam War, aircraft carrier, and wore the medal proudly when his ship won a unit citation, except that he was
no longer captain when they won it, so somebody caught him wearing a medal he didn’t deserve. Turned out he was wearing three
others he didn’t deserve, including a Purple Heart he awarded himself when his ship hit a mine that made him spill his coffee
in his lap.”
“If an old lady can sue McDonald’s for six million dollars over spilled coffee, why can’t a guy get a Purple Heart?” DeLuca
said.
“Stella Liebeck,” Ford said. DeLuca was always surprised by his friend’s memory. “Anyway, when they caught him at it, he denied
it, and when they proved it, he ate his gun. Little Tommy had been accepted at Annapolis. He’d gone to a military prep school
called Decatur Academy, where they pretend they’re in the Navy instead of those schools where they pretend they’re in the
Army…”