“I wouldn’t exactly say that,” Hausmann said. “More of a practical working knowledge. When I was a kid, I wanted to strike it rich finding a gold mine in the mountains. Never did find that big strike, though, or a little one for that matter. But I did learn something important.”
“What’s that?” said Manors, his interest peaking at the conversation.
“That a smart man doesn’t necessarily know everything,” Hausmann said. “Or even knows a lot. A smart man does recognize when he doesn’t know something, but he knows how to look it up.”
Pushing the open book across the bar to Reaper, Hausmann turned it around at the same time so the big SEAL could see the page it was turned to.
“According to the Field Guide to Rocks and Minerals,” Hausmann said, “this stuff is azurite. Basically copper carbonate. Here’s the text,” Hausmann said as he pointed to the book, “and there’s a color picture on plate ten. This might be an old copy of the field guide, but I don’t think the rocks have changed very much.”
“That’s where I know that stuff from,” Manors said. “They have all kinds of crystals of azurite and malachite on display over in Bisbee at the Mining and Historical Museum. The building the museum is in used to be the office of the Copper Queen Consolidated Mining Company years ago.”
“Bisbee?” Reaper said looking up from the book. “Isn’t that near here?”
“About fifteen miles southeast of here,” Hausmann said. “There’s still some active mines around there. And a lot of old ones. A bunch of old copper mines.”
“So these ATVs could have come from Bisbee?” Reaper said. “Why would they come from there?”
“I can’t think of a reason,” Manors said. “Bisbee isn’t right on the border. It’s about eight miles north of Naco, and that is on the border. Lots of illegals and drug runners break through the border around Naco. There’s a sister town with the same name just across the border on the Mexican side.”
“That doesn’t seem to show any really strong connection between Bisbee and our ATV tracks,” Reaper said. “Why would they come from there? It would make a hell of a lot more sense if they came from Naco or some place right on the border itself. Are there any mines around Naco? Any right up close to the border?”
“There are played-out mines all around the countryside here,” Hausmann said. “Copper, lead, tin, manganese, uranium, zinc, even gold and silver have all been taken out of the ground in Arizona. Copper, silver, and tin have all been mined a lot in the local area.”
“Any way to tell where this particular azurite came from?” Reaper said. “That could narrow the search area down for us.”
“Maybe by a laboratory analysis,” Hausmann said. “But I don’t know how we would get a criminal lab…Hey, wait a minute. The Blue Star!”
“You’re right,” Manors said. “The Blue Star, that fits perfectly.”
“Okay,” Reaper said, “anyone want to tell me what the Blue Star is?”
“It’s a closed mine,” Manors said. “A copper mine they shut down back in the seventies I think.”
“And this mine fits our bill?” Reaper asked. “It’s down by the border?”
“Less than half a mile from the border,” Hausmann said. “But that’s not the big deal about it. It’s right next to the Heart Ranch. She doesn’t own the mine, but Valentine Dupree leased the land the mine is on just a few years ago. She claims to be setting up a sanctuary for the endangered Arizona ridged-nosed rattlesnake and the Yaquia black-headed snake. She’s an absolute loon about snakes, especially rattlesnakes—so no one goes anywhere near her place.
“She runs an organic food company down there that always struck me as just barely holding on. There’s just not much of a market for that stuff around here. There’s something of a market in some of the bigger cities, especially over in Taos, New Mexico. But she always seems to have enough money to keep going. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if she’s into selling drugs along with her nuts and twigs. Pot would be something she would think shouldn’t be illegal, or at least that the laws don’t apply to her.”
“Sounds like just the kind of person we should go see,” Reaper said. “Maybe just to take a look at her snake sanctuary. Manors, you’d say one of those semi trailers we saw down near that barn could have left the tracks we saw inside the building?”
“Easily,” Manors said.
Reaching out to where he had set down the old road map, Reaper picked up the creased piece of paper. Carefully unfolding it, he turned it out along its most heavily worn folds. One section of the map was much dirtier than the others, and the paper folded easily to put the dirty section uppermost.
“That’s kind of interesting,” Hausmann said.
“What is?” Reaper said.
“That part of the map shows the country around here and down to the border. That X-like mark there down near the bottom is the Blue Star mine.”
“I think it’s time to saddle up again,” Reaper said.
The other men just nodded and moved to where they had left their gear.
Their weapons and vests back on, all three men went out to where they had left the Prowler.
“Isn’t that going to be a hell of a long ride in that thing?” Hausmann said. “Going to stand out a bit, too, isn’t it?”
“Got a better idea?” Reaper said.
“How about the best of both worlds,” Hausmann said as he tapped on a key pad next to the garage door.
The left-end door of the three hinged up, exposing the interior of the garage. In front of the men was a large dark gray truck, the chrome fittings gleaming in the moonlight.
“I think this will take care of us,” Hausmann said.
“Looks big enough,” Reaper said. “How’s it fitted out?”
“She’s a 2003 Chevy Silverado 1500 regular cab half-ton pickup,” Hausmann said. “It’s got four-wheel drive and an 8.1-foot-long Fleetside long box bed. So it will carry your Prowler easily enough. That thing’s only about what, seven feet long?”
“Ninety inches,” Reaper said. “That’s seven and a half feet.”
“Okay,” Hausmann said. “Still, she’ll carry it with a little room to spare. And I got the biggest engine they had available for that year, the 5.3 liter V-8. That’s 300 horsepower, enough to move us, the Prowler, and our gear right on down the road. We just cover it up with a tarp and it won’t even stand out around here.”
“Someday,” Reaper said, “I have to introduce you to a partner of mine back in Detroit. Keith Deckert is a gear head and I think the both of you would get along fine.”
With the use of a couple of eight-foot-long planks and some care, the Prowler was driven up into the bed of the Chevy pickup. The rear gate had to be removed for the operation, but it had been designed for that so there wasn’t any problem. There was room on either side of the Prowler for the planks to be laid into the bed of the truck. It took a big tarp to cover up the relatively tall RTV. Once covered, the truck looked like it was just hauling another piece of ranch or farm machinery.
With the Prowler ready to go, Hausmann headed back into the garage to enter the armory at the rear of the building. This was a cinder-block room with a poured-concrete roof and floor. The entrance to the room was closed off by a steel door with a combination lock dial.
Spinning the dial quickly and rotating the locking lever, Hausmann pulled the vault door open and quickly stepped inside the room. He punched a numeric code into the keypad to the right of the door, shutting off the alarm system as well as disarming the CS tear gas disperser in the ceiling. With the room safe to enter, Hausmann told Reaper and Manors to “come on in.”
The center of the room was dominated by two very impressive weapons—a three-inch “six-pounder” 1855 Napoleonic muzzle-loading cannon and a Model 1874 .45–70 Gatling gun. The brass-barreled cannon was on a short wheeled carriage, while the six-barreled Gatling gun was mounted on a brass and wood tripod. The wood of the weapons had a deep walnut color, the brass was po
lished to a high gloss.
“Those things antiques?” Reaper said, indicating the two weapons.
“No,” Hausmann said as he opened a cabinet on the far side of the room. “They’re both reproductions. They work, though. The cannon has a steel bore inside a cast-brass body. Loud as hell on the Fourth of July. Takes forever to polish them, though.”
Reaper just shook his head as he and Manors looked at the racks of weapons that lined the walls. There was a wide variety of hardware, from antiques to ultramodern, flintlocks to rifles, swords, spears, even a couple of bows. Stacked up below the racks were cardboard and wooden boxes, most with orange warning stickers on them indicating that they were full of ammunition. There were also a number of odd-sized green-painted wood boxes Reaper recognized as those used in the older Army to store ordnance. For the moment, he had no desire to know what was in them.
As Reaper and Manors looked about the room, Hausmann pulled a desert-camouflage pattern backpack from the cabinet he was rummaging in. The pack was a Spec-Ops brand T.H.E., Tactical Holds Everything, model. With the pack hanging partially opened from his left arm, Hausmann was pulling some materials from a drawer lower in the cabinet. He stuffed a pair of Steiner Military/Marine 10×50 binoculars into the bag.
Turning to Reaper, Hausmann said, “Why don’t you go into the dojo and pull a couple of bottles of water out of the fridge?”
The dojo was the workout room on the other side of the armory. Beyond that room was the machine shop and another roll-up door leading to the area behind the garage. As Hausmann filled his pack, Reaper took his suggestion and went to get the water.
Along with the binoculars, Hausmann put a Bushnell Trophy Compact twenty-to-fifty-power 50mm spotting scope into the pack. The powerful telescope with its wide objective lens came with a small folding tripod. When Reaper returned a moment later, Hausmann took the three one-liter bottles of water from him and put them into the bottom outside pocket of the Spec-Op’s pack.
“That everything you want to take?” Reaper asked with a smile. Personally, he thought the optical equipment was a good idea but wanted to needle his friend a bit.
“Yup,” Hausmann said.
“You’re sure now?”
“Any way we can mount the Gatling on the Prowler?”
“No,” Reaper said. “I think we’re done now.”
A little humor could lighten a moment. Reaper just shook his head at Hausmann’s attempt at it. After securing the door to the armory, the men all headed back out to the truck. Firing up the truck’s engine, Hausmann spun the wheels as he pressed down on the gas, sending gravel flying as they took off out of the parking area.
There were not a lot of different routes down to the location of the Heart Ranch or the Blue Star mine. Taking a side road off State Route 92, the men traveled for several miles without seeing another vehicle or even the lights of a house. They were just about as far south in Arizona as you could get without being in Mexico. Finally, Hausmann pulled the truck over to the side of the road at a locked gate that closed the road just before it reached a sharp curve.
“Well, this is something new,” Hausmann said. “I don’t remember this gate ever being here.”
“So just where are we?” Reaper said.
“Just about there,” Hausmann said, “the road to the ranch is on the left just past that curve. The ranch house is only a few hundred feet from the road inside a stand of trees. About a quarter mile past that on the right is the road leading to the mine.”
“How far is the mine from the main road?” Reaper asked.
“Maybe a couple hundred yards,” Hausmann said. “It’s just on the other side of that ridge line on the right there. You can’t really see anything of the mine itself from the road.”
“You know,” Manors said, “there’s a branch of the San Pedro, a stream really, we passed there about a half mile back that runs below the far side of that ridge. We could probably drive that little Prowler right alongside the bank almost up to the mine if we stayed quiet enough.”
“Oh, we can be really quiet,” Reaper said. “Let’s head back to that stream.”
Once at the stream, Reaper could see that the fence line that had been running on either side of the road stopped before it reached the water. The bridge wasn’t much more than a couple of culverts under the roadway. A flash flood after a heavy rain would be a completely different situation. The junk that moved along in a flood was probably what had torn down the fence line.
The pickup was able to traverse the rough ground along the side of the road and up the streambed without much trouble. Stopping the pickup after it was well out of sight of the road, the men got out and unloaded the Prowler. The same planks they had used to load the small vehicles aboard had been stuck into the bed of the truck to be used at that time. With the planks and the Prowler’s own motors, one man could have loaded or unloaded them. As a final detail to make sure that everyone could find the keys to the pickup, Hausmann put them under the gas cap cover.
Reaching into one of the upper pockets of his 5.11 vest, Reaper pulled out an odd-looking clip and attached it to a plate on the front of his TC2002 helmet. Dismounting his PVS-14 night-vision monocular from his M4A1, Reaper snapped it onto the clip he had attached to his helmet. Tilting the monocular down put it in front of Reaper’s right eye. Now he could look through it and see well enough in the dark to drive the Prowler without using the headlights. For Hausmann and Manors, it would just be a spooky ride in the dark.
With the two men back in their side seats, the Prowler moved out into the dark. The rough terrain was no obstacle for the little vehicle, though the riders got tossed around a bit. They had traveled close to half a mile to the south when Reaper stopped the Prowler at the edge of a four-strand barbed wire fence. Off to the left was a sign hanging on the upper wire of the fence. The sign read:
HEART REPTILE SANCTUARY
NO TRESPASSING
“Cut it,” Reaper said to Hausmann.
Getting off the Prowler, Hausmann pulled a black Gerber Model 600 needle-nose multiplier from the upper left pocket of his 5.11 vest. Snapping his hand down hard, he slipped the pliers head down out of the handles where they locked into place. The cutting jaws of the pliers easily severed the tough barbed wire.
Having held the wire just next to one of the supporting posts Hausmann cut it between his hand and the post. With his hand holding the loose end of the wire, he was able to keep down the noise of going through the fence. Lowering the wire, he went through all four strands and then waved the Prowler forward. Collapsing the multiplier, Hausmann slipped it back into the pocket of his vest as he climbed back into the side seat of the Prowler.
The three men and their vehicle hadn’t traveled more than a quarter of a mile before Hausmann slapped Reaper on the shoulder. They had been approaching the top of the ridge line when Reaper brought the little vehicle to a stop and they all climbed out. Getting down first on all fours and finally crawling on their bellies the last few yards, the trio slowly came up to the top of the ridge and looked down the other side.
They had hit the target almost perfectly because Reaper had been able to see a glow through his monocular as they had come up to the ridge. Only a couple of hundred yards from them was the small building surrounding the mouth of the Blue Star mine. It wasn’t much, but the lighting around the building was still a hell of a lot to see at a supposedly abandoned mine. So was the big truck backed up against the front of the building.
Chapter Seventeen
The rock walls of the mine tunnel closed in on the small train as it moved along the tracks. The clicking of the wheels as they passed over the joints in the rails could be clearly heard as it echoed off the walls.
“This part of the mine tunnel was flooded years ago when they cut into an underground stream,” Santiago said for the benefit of Daumudi and Humzan. “It blocked the tunnel and they finally abandoned the mine. The same tremors that opened the cavern wall back at the Crystal mine chang
ed the flow of the water. It used to go down that hole back in the cavern floor. Now, that underground stream has just disappeared.”
As hardened as they were, the two al-Qaeda terrorists suppressed a shudder when they thought of the horrible smell that came up from that black hole in the ground behind them. Wherever that water had gone, it no longer washed the hole clean.
“The professor found that this was the other exit the bats used,” Santiago said. “During the day, parts of the cavern are full of them. At night, they’re out hunting. This tunnel also had to be improved when the rails were installed and that trestle built.”
The train continued up an incline for hundreds of yards. To the Arabs, it seemed as though they had been moving through the tunnel for miles in the amount of time it took them to travel the 1,800 foot length of the tunnel. Rodriguez slowed the train engine as it approached an open-sided elevator in the middle of the tunnel. The tracks continued through the elevator and extended down the tunnel on the other side.
The train rolled over the tracks and stopped on the other side.
“Normally, if we’re moving a load,” Santiago said. “We would unhook the last car and lift it up on the elevator. We have vehicles in the upper tunnel that can pull the cars much more efficiently than the mules they used in this mine more than a hundred years ago. Once the cage returned, the engine would push a car into it and the process would be repeated. When all the cars were back, the train would be reassembled and the engine would just push them back to the other mine. Simple enough.”
In spite of their blank expressions, the two terrorists were greatly impressed with what they had seen. It was obvious that Masque could deliver on what he had promised as far as crossing under the border went. What else could be done was yet to be seen.
The elevator platform was easily big enough to hold all of the men at once. Long gates were pulled down from overhead to close off the edges of the platform. When Rodriguez moved the controls, the platform began to smoothly rise up to and through the ceiling of the tunnel. As the edge of the rock went past the platform, the solid walls of the shaft seemed to close in on the elevator.
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