Authors: John Donohue
“Thank you, Sensei,” I said. “That was the sort of thing I
needed.”
“My pleasure, Dr. Burke,” he said, and sounded like he
meant it. He called the class to order and we began to line
up for the formal bow that would end the session. I started to
move down to the end of the line, but Hasegawa laid a gentle
hand upon my arm.
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“Oh, no.” He gestured beside him in the special spot
reserved for teachers. “You sit beside me here.”
When the students were seated, Hasegawa Sensei addressed
them. “I hope you were watching carefully this evening,” he
began. “It’s not often we get to see this sort of thing. Dr. Burke
will be with us for a short time. I hope that you use that time
to learn what you can from him.”
He called the group to attention, we bowed to the old man
in the wheelchair, then to each other. As the class broke up,
Hasegawa called to one of his senior students. “Keith, please
see whether we can rustle up a
hakama
to loan to Dr. Burke.” I
glanced over at the old man in the wheelchair. His eyes closed
slowly and he painfully, ever so slightly, inclined himself in my
direction.
As the week passed, I settled into a rhythm, sifting through
the papers at Westmann’s estate, working more eagerly with his
journals, and training with the Hasegawas in the evening. It
helped me feel a bit less adrift, more myself as I pursued what I
was coming to believe was a fruitless search for clues to a non-
existent crime related to Westmann’s death.
That night, after almost a week at the
dojo
I’d come out at
the end of a training session, still damp from the shower. The
street was a busy one, and if I expected a wash of stars across
the desert sky, I was disappointed—the city lights bled upward,
obscuring the heavens.
I was heading toward the car
.
Down the road an engine
roared into life. Cars whizzed past. I was loose and calm, with
the almost narcotic sense of well-being you get from a solid
workout. As I headed toward the car, a voice called my name.
I turned to see one of Hasegawa’s students, a burly guy with
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John Donohue
a military style haircut. He came up to me, casting a glance up
the street.
“Dr. Burke,” he repeated. I looked at him pleasantly, figur-
ing maybe he had a technical question. The expression on his
face was serious.
“Tony Villardi,” he said. “I’m with the Tucson P.D.”
“What can I do for you, Tony?”
He looked around again. “You know anyone in this town,
Dr. Burke?”
“No, not really. Why?”
“We tend to get out of the training hall at about the same
time every night. When I come out, I always look around, you
know?”
I nodded encouragingly.
“At first I thought it was just a coincidence, but I’ve been
watching all week.”
“Watching what, Tony?”
“Every night, there’s a car parked across the road. A couple
of guys are always in it. When you come out, they start up the
motor, wait for you to pull out, and follow you.”
So much for my powers of observation. “Did you run the
tags?” I asked him.
He shrugged. “It’s a different car every night. Different guys
for all I know. But it’s the same pattern. And I didn’t get a
good look, but it seems to me that these guys are sporting gang
colors.”
“Gangs?” I asked.
He nodded. “We got ‘em all over the area. They’re involved
in everything from dope to guns to border trafficking. You got
any reason to think you’ve run afoul of these people?”
“No,” I lied.
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He shrugged. “Maybe I’m imagining it, but I don’t think
so. You want to keep your eyes open, Dr. Burke. These guys are
not real smart, but they’re mean.”
I thanked him for the warning and drove back to the hotel.
My steering was a little wobbly because I kept trying to spot
gang members in my rearview mirror. My vigilance earned me
nothing except a few rude gestures from other drivers.
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7
Trackers
In the mesquite and dirt of the Tohono O’Odham reser-
vation, Oliver Jackson squatted, reading sign. The five other
members of his team waited patiently. They, too, could read
the significance in the boot prints they had discovered, but he
was the senior man and had been doing this for almost twenty
years. They waited out of respect, and because their trade
demanded it.
It was a time when infrared sensors and pilotless drones
were just a few of the hi-tech tools that Homeland Security
used along the Mexican border. But HSA was willing to use
almost any technique if it worked. And sometimes, the most
effective tools were the timeless use of men on the ground; men
who had been raised to read the subtle signs left in the desert,
and to track prey with a silent, dogged intensity.
All of Jackson’s men were Native Americans. They had
grown up in the outdoors hunting, tracking, and coming to
know the land in a way few people could. A Dineh, what most
people knew as Navaho, Jackson was stocky and compact, his
skin like leather from years in the desert sun. His short cropped
hair was just showing some silver in the tips. His dusty des-
ert camo uniform was rumpled, but his gear was meticulously
cared for and the CAR-15 slung across his back was well-oiled.
The Tohono O’Odham land stretches across southern Ari-
zona into Mexico, a vast area larger than the state of Connecti-
cut. Seventy-six miles of the border with Mexico are contained
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with the Tohono O’Odham territory. In the seventies, the
Tohono had agreed to let federal agents onto their land, but
only if they were Native Americans. It was the genesis of the
unit Jackson had served in for all these years.
Although the border was long and easily crossed, the best
routes combined terrain features that made crossings harder
to detect and also provided possible resting spots and water
sources. It narrowed down, somewhat, the choices for Jackson
and his men. They tracked smugglers through this remote land-
scape intercepting groups of men lugging sixty pound bales of
marijuana through the blasting heat of summer or the frigid
desert winter. And lately, the activity had been picking up.
Jackson’s team had been tracking a group of about ten
smugglers since before dawn. In places where they left tracks,
the team could see that their boot prints were deep and widely
spaced—a sure sign they were carrying heavy loads. The latest
imprints that Jackson looked at were clean ones, devoid of the
tracks of nocturnal animals or insects. He knew that the men
he was tracking were probably only a few hours ahead.
The smugglers were headed north, away from the border.
Jackson took out a map and laid it across his thighs. A thick
finger traced their route so far. He showed his team.
“Here,” he said. “They’re heading here.” The team nodded
in silent agreement. Smugglers would typically come across the
border and trundle their bales some forty miles north to little
used roads where they would be transferred to trucks. Today
was no exception.
The sun was high overhead, pounding down on the group as
they squatted amid the thorny scrub. One of the team noticed
a small piece of fabric clinging to a bush. He plucked it, bring-
ing it to his face and sniffed. He smiled and passed it on to
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Jackson, who cupped it in his hand and held it to his nose. The
scent of burlap. A smuggler had snagged his load on this bush,
leaving this thread in the passing.
“OK,” he said. “Huddle up.” The team clustered around
him. “Another hour or so and we should overtake these guys.”
He eyed his men: they squatted comfortably in the sun, eyes
invisible behind sunglasses. They drank quietly at camel-back
canteens; the small sips veterans take who know water disci-
pline. Nobody seemed tired. Everyone was eager for the hunt.
“When we start to get close, I want to hold up and get ourselves
set. The briefing last night said that the natives are restless.”
His men grinned at that: brief flashes of white teeth in dark
faces. They
were
the natives.
“Border Patrol units have been fired on recently. The num-
ber of incidents is increasing. And the armaments being used
are not your typical border guns.” Jackson scanned the jum-
bled terrain that stretched before them. “Something’s changing
out here. I can feel it. I don’t know what it is, but I don’t like
it…” He looked out into the far hills, straining to sense a clue
embedded in the gusting heat of the desert.
Jackson was a quiet man in the field. His team was used to
silence and comfortable with his quiet competence as a tracker.
But he was also a
hitaali,
a singer, among his people. He prac-
ticed the old ways of healing and the chantways of the Dineh.
There were times when his team members swore that his suc-
cess as a tracker was due to more than just skill.
Jackson was a legend, a man at home in the desert who
had an almost mystical link to the land. He could see min-
ute traces of a smuggler’s passing that nobody else noticed. He
could intuit a prey’s intention with almost no clues. It was said
he saw things on the wind.
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The team members looked at one another quizzically, but
made no sound. Their people knew of the power of the men
who could read signs in the air and see far distances. When
Jackson gazed off into the invisible world, it was best not to
rouse him. After a moment, Jackson stirred, returning to the
imminent. What was the lanky form he had seen, trotting
among the shimmering rocks?
A coyote. A bad sign.
He looked
down, taking a deep breath to shake off the sense of dread.
“When we get close, keep alert. Stay down and behind cover,
till I give the signal. I’ve got a feeling…”
He looked from one of his men to the other. They nodded
solemnly. “OK,” Jackson said, “let’s go.”
A sandy patch of open desert bore clear evidence of the
smugglers, a churned trail of boot prints leading to a dirt road
that was sketched in on Jackson’s map. The afternoon sun
began to take its toll, and even Jackson’s men began to tire.
Almost there,
he thought, checking his map. The others
sensed it too: Jackson could see the renewed eagerness of their
movement.
They love the hunt. But we’re tired. And eager. This is
when mistakes get made.
He held a hand up and waved it in a circle. The team col-
lected around him in the shadow of a sandstone rock that was
angled into the sand like a listing vessel. Jackson spread out the
map, pointing out terrain features and what seemed to him like
the likely route to the smugglers’ transfer point. He directed
individual members of the team to take up positions on high
ground overlooking the rendezvous site.
When he was sure that everyone knew their role, Jackson
unslung his rifle and pulled the charging handle back to load
it. His men did the same. Jackson paused and sniffed the wind.
He moved slowly up a rise, ears straining for sounds out of
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John Donohue
place. The land was too rough for clear line of sight and its
gnarled terrain created acoustic shadows that swallowed sound.
He knew that somewhere around this slope and downhill, the
road would come into view. But he was moving blind. And the
feeling of unease was growing stronger. He listened intently.
Wind. Birds calling in the distance. He sniffed the air: some-
times you could smell tobacco or the pungent aroma of the
marijuana bales. There was instead a faint oily scent, something
mechanical and deeply out of place.
He brought his weapon up and crept around the slope,
motioning his team into position with hand gestures. When
the road came into view, Jackson’s gut lurched.
The smugglers had reached the drop off point. But they
would never return. A late model Ford F-150 sagged, riddled
with bullet holes. He could see a body slumped over the wheel.
The smugglers’ bodies were scattered across the churned-up
sand of the rendezvous. The blood that had not seeped into
the dirt had thickened and grown black. Flies congregated and
birds were wheeling in anticipation.
Jackson and his men lurched warily down the slope and
checked for survivors. There were none: all the smugglers had
had their throats cut for good measure.
We were too
late, he
thought. The tire treads of multiple vehicles crisscrossed the
area. The marijuana bales were long gone.
Ambush.
“Bad medicine, Boss,” one of his men commented.