by Dan Pollock
Later, at the Àvila, they learned that Nixon’s motorcade had been stormed by hundreds of protesters wielding sticks and throwing stones and excrement. The mob had shattered windows in Nixon’s limousine, defying Secret Service men with drawn guns, in an attempt to drag the Vice President and his wife out. Fortunately the motorcade had escaped back to the U.S. Embassy compound in eastern Caracas. President Eisenhower was said to be dispatching emergency airborne and Marine units to Guantánamo, ready to deploy farther south if needed. The next morning, considerably ahead of schedule, the Vice Presidential party slipped out of Caracas on streets closed to traffic.
Sam had put Caroline on a plane home two days later, also ahead of schedule. She had spent most of the intervening time in their room, alternately sulking or blaming him for—well, for everything. She certainly could not understand why he insisted on staying another week in the godforsaken country. Sam could only argue that there was still a job to be done and that he had given his word to do it. But even while apologizing and sympathisizing, Sam could not quite conceal from Caroline the fact that he was fascinated by Venezuela, that he had found the whole experience exciting, even their pell-mell flight through the streets. He had said his airport farewells with a mingling of despair and relief—and a dreadful sense that their young marriage was doomed.
In fact, it had lasted five more years and produced a son, before Caroline had demanded and gotten her divorce. And yet, thinking back, Sam had been right. The breach that had opened between them in Venezuela had never really been bridged. His son, Tony, had grown up on the other side of that gulf and even now, in his mid-thirties, remained a remote and critical figure.
And here Sam was heading back to Venezuela again, as eager as ever. The latest operational crisis supplied the obvious rationale for his energizing; but, frankly, the unexpected shutdown of Cerro Calvario was only a handy excuse to saddle up and ride south. He felt the familiar pull of the land itself, of the frontier, something Venezuela embodied for him more than anywhere else on earth. Its cities were jumping-off places for outrigger islands and Andean peaks, rain forests and rolling grasslands, jungle rivers and breathtaking waterfalls, and a vast highlands studded with giant sandstone mesas. Its cornucopia of resources included one of the world’s largest deposits of oil, plus diamonds, gold, silver, iron, bauxite, manganese, coal and hydroelectric power—the modern fulfillment of the El Dorado dream that had once lured Sir Walter Raleigh to the region. And now, thanks to Proteus’ geologists, there had been another big iron-ore strike in the Orinoco Valley, the third in the last fifty years.
Sam had been too long away, both from Venezuela and hands-on company operations. In his concern not to cramp D.W.’s managerial style, he had been spending most of his time lately up at the Lazy S, either getting in the way of his ranch foreman, Chick Hooper, or trying and abandoning one damned-fool hobby after another. No wonder, as Hardy Eason had put it, he was ready to charge off like an old fire horse hearing a dinner bell. His greatest fear was not the crisis itself, but that D.W. might contrive to solve it before Sam could hit the ground running.
*
The second leg of the flight the following day, twelve-hundred miles from Grand Cayman to Caracas, was almost a repeat of the first. Again the route forecast was ideal, and Sam lifted off shortly after dawn from George Town’s Owen Roberts Airport. His flight path took him over Jamaica, then six-hundred blue-water miles past Aruba and Curaçao. Except for a few white puffs hovering over those idyllic islands, the oceanic mirror reflected hour after hour of cloudless skies.
By ten-thirty Sam caught his first glimpse of the Venezuelan cordillera on the southern horizon—a steep wall of mountains along the South American littoral. Fifteen minutes later he made out the creaming shoreline at the base of those mountains, then watched it resolve into a scalloped line of breakwater-enclosed beaches. He remembered the resort names—Macuto, the favorite beach of caraqueños; then La Guaira, which served as the port of Caracas; finally Maiquetía, whose sands bordered the east-west runways of Simón Bolívar International Airport. Getting his final clearance from the tower, Sam came in from the west behind an Aeropostal DC-9, got the Cessna’s wheels down without major point deductions and taxied on to the general aviation area at the airport’s east end.
As he climbed out into the tropical heat, a delegation of local Proteans scurried forward to escort him through customs and immigration. As per Sam’s radioed instructions, they had booked his favorite suite at the Àvila, arranged for refueling and a guard to watch his plane—and to mark access panels, doors and fuel tanks with security tape. Within minutes Sam was in the back of a stretch Mercedes on the twisting four-lane highway up to Caracas—and afternoon meetings with the top bananas of the Ministerio de Energia y Minas, Ferrominera Orinoco and the Corporación Venezolano de Guayana.
Sam fully expected those meetings to be successful; but whatever their result, he intended to take off again in the morning—three-hundred fifty miles southeast to Ciudad Bolívar on the Río Orinoco.
Chapter Three
Dr. Arquimedeo Laya López stood on the summit of Cerro Calvario in Venezuela’s Bolívar state, looking out across the savanna. Along the northern horizon, an afternoon parade of brassy thunderheads marked the unseen Orinoco River. Nearer, a dozen miles to the northeast, the flatland scrub was interrupted by the red-rock bulges of the San Isidro Group. Preeminent among these was Cerro Bolívar, Venezuela’s most famous iron mountain.
Or what had once been a mountain.
Since the discovery—by U.S. Steel geologists in 1947—that the 1,800-foot-high outcrop contained high-grade iron ore, hundreds of millions of tons of it, Cerro Bolívar’s ridges and flanks had been drilled and dynamited and devoured until only a well-carved carcass remained. If he possessed sufficiently powerful optics, Arquimedeo knew, he could witness the relentless process from here. Even now, dinosaur-sized shovels would be scooping newly blasted ferruginous rock into hundred-ton trucks, which trundled along wide-terraced roads toward an endless line of empty rail cars. Once filled, these would wind down seven miles of track to the plains, be assembled into hundred-car trains and hauled ninety miles north to Puerto Ordaz, the industrial district of Ciudad Guayana on the Orinoco. Some of the rail cars, each with a capacity of ninety metric tons, would offload at Fior, Venezuela’s iron-ore reduction plant, others at steel-making Sidor, to feed its electric-arc furnaces. The rest would be destined for giant oreships waiting dockside to make the downriver journey to the Atlantic and steel plants around the world.
Arquimedeo dropped his gaze to the red rock under his feet. A similar dismantling had seemed certain for this smaller peak, Cerro Calvario. Several weeks earlier geologists from Proteus Industries had discovered extensive iron deposits here. This in itself was hardly surprising. Two-hundred fifty years ago Capuchin monks had set up forges beside iron deposits south of the Orinoco; the bricklike soil of the entire region was known to be ferrous. But no one had expected the element in such concentration—nearly sixty percent, richer even than Cerro Bolívar. Previous surveys had obviously failed to probe deeply enough below Calvario’s upper slopes to reach the main ore body. Increasing the value of the strike was its proximity to the existing rail terminus—only twelve miles away across the savanna.
After the mineral analysis was confirmed by the government mining company, Ferrominera Orinoco, events had moved with an administrative swiftness Arquimedeo had rarely witnessed in his native land. A joint mining venture between Proteus and Ferrominera was drawn up and signed in Caracas. The right-of-way for a connecting rail link had been cleared, legally and physically, of all encumbrances, and grading had begun. Ballast for the rail bed was on order, along with ties, track, rolling stock and several two-thousand-horsepower diesel engines. A mile to the east, surveyors had started laying out a workers’ camp on the model of Ciudad Piar, the huge mining company town of Cerro Bolívar, and construction firms were already advertising for skilled laborers.
But
Arquimedeo and his assistant, Félix Rosales, had managed to bring this entire juggernaut to a screeching halt. Incredibly, for the moment, he was the king of this mountain, a slight, bespectacled figure who resembled a bank clerk—or would, if one disregarded his khaki shorts, hiking boots, baseball cap and José Canseco T-shirt. Arquimedeo and his younger colleague had accomplished this unlikely miracle by virtue of their own recent discoveries on Cerro Calvario—a scattering of potsherds, some quartz flake-scrapers, bone fragments and, only that morning, a splendid fossil fragment of an ancient bone flute. The earlier finds were bagged and tagged and en route to Caracas.
To be sure, it had also taken some strategic telephoning to stop the mighty engines of industry. Arquimedeo had made a dozen radiotelephone calls to the capital—to colleagues at Simón Bolívar University and the Natural Sciences Museum, allies at Bioma, Venezuela’s largest conservation organization, and at the Foundation for Anthropological Research. They, in turn, had taken the battle to the relevant ministries—of Environment, Culture, Natural Resources and Energy and Mines.
The governmental turf war was still raging, Arquimedeo knew, its ultimate outcome still in doubt. But for the moment he had prevailed. Farther down the mountain, the geologists’ core-sampling equipment stood idle, as did the bulldozers and earth-movers on the nearby railroad grading project. The only crew currently active on the mountain had arrived in a cloud of dust just twenty minutes before, in a Jeep Wrangler with the logo of Noticolor, Ciudad Bolívar TV news. They were now downslope, interviewing Félix. A Venevisión crew from Ciudad Guayana was due the following day. Arquimedeo had been advised to move swiftly on the PR front. The faster and farther he could disseminate news of his archaeological finds, he had been told, the harder it would be for anyone to sweep them aside.
“Arqui!”
The hail was from Félix Rosales, striding up the ridge ahead of a blonde newswoman and a stringy-haired cameraman. As they had watched the woman dismount the Jeep in skin-tight safari suit and Aussie bush hat, Félix had begged Arquimedeo for the privilege of escorting her around and fielding her on-camera questions, at least the noncontroversial ones. Reluctantly, Arquimedeo had deferred to his younger, overly muscled colleague. What else could he do? Félix was almost salivating, and Arquimedeo had been cursed from childhood with an obliging nature. He strolled down to meet them now.
Félix flashed his muscular smile. “Arqui, Señorita Estévez keeps asking me about politics. I told her you were the man to talk to.”
“Oh, did you?” Arquimedeo showed mock disapproval. He noticed again that, close up, the blonde aged at least ten years, with a tight mouth and turquoise eyeliner that gave her a hard, Egyptiac look. “Félix and I are merely scientists, señorita. Just because we like to dig in the dirt doesn’t make us politicians.”
“Very amusing, Dr. Laya,” Señorita Estévez said with no trace of smile. “But we both know this story is about politics. You’ve got to give me something I can use.”
Arquimedeo pursed his lips. There was no reason he couldn’t score a few political points while sticking to his archaeological catechism. “Very well, señorita, since you insist. But I’m afraid I’m not very presentable.”
“You’re perfect, Doctor. Exactly the way most people would picture an archaeologist. It’s Indiana Jones here,” she tipped her bush hat toward Félix, “who looks phony. Of course, with all those muscles, I’m sure he can dig.”
“Please, señorita,” Félix protested.
“I’m sorry, Félix,” Arquimedeo said dryly, “but apparently it’s me she wishes to photograph.” He quickly tucked in his Canseco T-shirt and gave a hitch to his tool belt.
Señorita Estévez’s preparations were more extensive. She pivoted, putting the afternoon sun over her shoulder, while her cameraman positioned a tripod reflector to fill in shadows. Then she checked a compact mirror, poking stray golden tendrils back under her bush hat. Finally she snatched a microphone, pulled Arquimedeo close beside her, licked her lips—and nodded to the cameraman.
“Dr. Laya,” she began, “according to your colleague, Félix Rosales, you have uncovered only a few small artifacts here on Cerro Calvario. It isn’t like you’ve stumbled on a buried city. Why, then, in a time of acute national need, do you feel justified in halting a major industrial project that could pump billions of bolívars into our economy?”
Arquimedeo hesitated. Judging by her lead-off question, he was in for a thorough grilling. The best tactic, then, would seem to be to keep his responses as long-winded as possible. He commenced in this vein:
“Señorita, I assure you neither I nor my colleague opposes development. And we are certainly aware of the need for economic expansion. Ecologists may debate to what extent another vast industrial project here in Bolívar state will deplete unrenewable resources or damage the ecosystems of the Orinoco and the Gran Sabana. That is their concern. As archaeologists, our interest is simply to uncover and preserve sites of earlier societies—both prehistoric and historic—and advance our knowledge of how our distant ancestors lived their daily lives. We are, in this sense, guardians of Venezuela’s history—”
“Doctor, how much history can there be in a few stones and broken pots?”
“What we have found on Cerro Calvario—thanks to the cooperation, by the way, of the mining engineers—is evidence of several layers of ancient habitation. The pottery shards are undoubtedly pre-Columbian, fashioned by Arawak Indians—the original Venezuelans. And the preceramic artifacts—the lithics and bone fragments—were found at a much deeper stratum and might easily date back eight- or nine-thousand years before the present, indicating an early Holocene adaptation to a savanna environment—”
Dr. Laya broke off, noticing that Señorita Estévez’s eyes had glazed over.
“I apologize, señorita, for being obscure. What I mean to say is, agreed, we didn’t find a buried city, but even that is still possible. We’ve only made a preliminary physical survey, and yet already we’ve found some wonderful things—enough to tell us that a great deal more awaits us. We must now begin some real excavations at several promising sites. All we are asking, señorita, is that mining operations be suspended until we have completed those investigations. The iron has been here for many millennia. It won’t go away. But once this site has been destroyed and its historical treasure lost, it can never be recovered.”
Félix signaled a thumbs-up, but Señorita Estévez motioned her cameraman to switch off, then shook her head pityingly. “Doctor, this isn’t a classroom full of captive students. If viewers can’t understand what the hell you’re saying, they just change channels.”
“I’m sorry. I only—”
“Forget it. We’ll edit it down to a sentence or two. Okay, I’ve got one more question here. Think you can keep it simple?”
“Certainly, if—” He broke off; the camera’s red eye had winked on.
“Dr. Laya,” Señorita Estévez began again, “do you have any comment on the visit to Caracas of the chairman of Proteus Industries, Señor Warrender? Is it true he is here to persuade government officials to resume full-scale mining here?”
“I’m not aware of such things. Politics and international business are both outside my area of expertise—and interest. I can only repeat that the Proteus engineers and mineralogists we’ve dealt with have been extremely cooperative, and I gather this has been at the company’s directive. And I’m sure that once Proteus executives are made aware of the situation here on Cerro Calvario, they will endorse our government’s enlightened decision to suspend all mining operations.”
Despite this strong statement, Arquimedeo found himself very much troubled by Señorita Estévez’s final question. Later, accompanying the TV people down to their vehicle, he asked if she knew any more about Warrender and his visit. As it happened, thanks to a zealous researcher at the station, she had a clipping file on the executive in her Jeep. She let Arquimedeo glance through it. What he gleaned only added to his misgivings.
> It seemed Samuel Warrender had been friends with several presidents of Venezuela, including the current one. His links to the country dated back to the late Fifties, when, as a young Standard Oil employee, he had negotiated favorable oil concessions on Lake Maracaibo. And in the mid-Seventies, when the petroleum and mining industries were being taken over by the Venezuelan government, Warrender had come south on behalf of Proteus and obtained extremely generous compensation for its nationalized assets. He was considered a very tough customer.
The blonde bid him “Ciao!”—Venezuelans had long adopted the Italian expression—and waved airily as the Jeep drove away. Arquimedeo remained in its dusty wake with a sinking feeling. The implications were clear. This Señor Warrender was coming down to change Venezuelan policy with a satchel of corporate cash and would have little trouble finding palms to grease. La mordida—the bite, the bribe—was a time-honored institution in Venezuela, as in many other countries. High-level corruption scandals were commonplace. According to some cynics, half of all funds moving through government channels vanished into someone’s pocket. Arquimedeo could not help visualizing a balance scale, with a stack of gold bars on one side and his pitiful artifacts on the other. It was awfully hard to see the outcome tilting in favor of science and truth.
And, of course, as Arquimedeo well knew, Samuel Warrender was not only Proteus’ chairman, but a principal benefactor of the Natural Sciences Museum in Caracas—the place where Arquimedeo’s artifacts would ultimately be displayed. And not only had Warrender cooperated with Arquimedeo’s archaeological survey, his company had actually helped underwrite it. Should such a distinguished patron of progress now wish to halt that survey in its tracks... well, it was difficult to imagine him failing.
As he contemplated these matters, Arquimedeo felt the long shadow of the multinational Goliath stealing forth across the plains to engulf him and render him, in his own estimation, a most insignificant and impotent David.