by Pat Price
I turned to my left and saw the Guardian. His end of the trailer contained an oversized executive desk and what had to be an uncomfortable standard issue army office chair. There were two equally uncomfortably looking chairs sat facing the desk. A large picture window covering half of the wall behind the desk provided illumination for the interior of the trailer. The Guardian sat behind the desk. He was focused on papers in front of him. He was dressed in tan desert camo fatigues lacking any insignia of rank. I could see below the front of the desk and noticed his desert tan boots were bloused. His appearance was that of a citizen soldier devoid of position. But I suspected his appearance was deceiving because he could not have built an organization as large or as capable as the one he had by being a nice guy.
Bob spoke first. "Sir," he said, making it sound like a question.
The Guardian looked up. His face was like a long work in progress. His overall appearance led me to guess him to be in his late 50s or early 60s. I have often wondered why leaders seem to age better than followers. He looked up at me for a second then rose and walked around the desk and stuck his hand out.
"Greetings citizen," he said, "I am John McClintock, Guardian of the group. Sit, please." He shook my hand then returned to his chair. It was then I noticed he had a pronounced limp on his left leg.
"You pick that limp up in Viet Nam?" I asked. He sat and looked at me again with his brows pulled together.
"Saigon ‘68 during the Tet offensive. That was before the left wing Democratic Congress sold out the citizens of Viet Nam because they were people of color and not white Europeans." His voice had a bitter ring to it. He stopped for a second and composed himself. His answer was not what I had expected considering that I had expected him to be a right wing white supremacist, not a right wing liberal.
"You have caused us to expend a considerable sum of funds not to mention considerable time and trouble," McClintock said, putting the look on me from across the desk.
"Well," I said leaning back in the world's most uncomfortable chair, "if someone had just asked me I would have been happy to have talked with you."
"Don't patronize me boy. It's not real likely you would have talked to anyone, considering the trouble the FBI went through establishing a false identity for you. In any event," he said, holding his right hand to ward off a reply on my part, "I didn't get you up here to debate with me. We know what you are looking for and more importantly, we know who has it and approximately where it is." I was stunned.
"How in the hell would you know that?" I asked.
"Please Ed," he said, "Ed is the name you are using for your little masquerade, right." It wasn't so much a question as it was a statement so I kept my big mouth shut. He continued on, "we have many friends in the media, military and law enforcement. Not to mention other groups your employers would expect to be opposed to our principals. Most of them vilify us publicly in print and on the electronic media. We prefer the relationship that way because our sources don't dry up because of the pompous asses in power who distort the truth and meaning of the Constitution and the writing of the Founders." He stopped again and his eyes, light blue, looked like ice. Being smart as I am, I realized I was skating on thin ice and cracks were all around me. I was sure that a word from the man and one of the clone brothers would come in and punch my ticket. Then Jimmy would be looking for a new partner and someone else’s ass would be sitting on my Suzuki.
"Ok, ok," I said holding both hands up, palms facing out in a non-threatening gesture. I needed to get this meeting back on track and that meant not getting dragged into a discussion over principle. I had seen too many people die over principle, and while I was able to admire some of them, I did not intend to be one of them.
"Do me a small favor and I'm your boy," I said then shut my mouth before I got myself in too deep. I knew how to take crap from Mexican drug lords and Mafia killers so I guessed that I could eat a little crow from the Guardian.
He fixed the look on me and starred for a few seconds while he chewed on his bottom lip. He finally became animated again.
"A little over two and a half years ago, a well connected group removed about 50 pounds, give or take, of uranium oxide from a storage facility located in upstate New York. The truth of the matter is that the FBI and the other so called intelligence agencies haven't a clue as to who pulled it off."
"And you do?" I asked in a somewhat questioning tone. I tried not to sound too smart-mouthed; I didn't want the ice I was standing on to start cracking again. The advice Bob had given me was good.
"Of course we know who did it. If we didn’t know we wouldn’t be having this conversation. Jesus Christ in heaven," he said, slamming his open right hand on the desk in front of him. He turned his attention to Bob and said, "I thought you said he was smart."
"Give him a chance," Bob said. "If he screws up I'll shoot him myself, how's that?" Bob threw a smile at me when he said it. Bob was comfortable talking to and confronting McClintock. It was then I remembered Bob told me he was from the class of ‘68. He and McClintock were in Viet Nam at the same time and probably went through the Tet offensive together.
The Guardian took a few deep breaths then looked at me again and went off in a short-lived rage. "Look mister no name smart ass. Your high and fucking mighty FBI couldn't find their ass in the light with both hands gripping their buns."
He stopped and looked down at the desk again to compose him. He took another couple of deep breaths and got his head together. He looked back at me.
"The people who stole the material were not the Jews or some radical black group or some poor Muslim fundamentalist group walking around looking suspicious. The people who stole the uranium are native Americans." He stopped and looked at me. I tried real hard to keep a neutral expression on my face.
Bammm, the hand slammed down again. "Any of this interesting to you?" He said, leaning over the desk and putting the look on me.
Bob intervened, "Come on John," he said in a compromising tone, "You have him so damn wound up right now he doesn't known wither to shit or go blind."
"Thanks Bob," I said to myself. McClintock was lucky I wasn't armed because I would have been tempted to shoot my way out of there.
He had his attention fixed on Bob while Bob had been trying to calm him down. Now it shifted back to me and I was not sure that pleased me all that much.
"All right smart ass," he said, the edge back in his voice, "You want to be four million dollars richer or what?"
I looked at Bob then back at McClintock and decided to play it as straight as I possibly could.
"Look," I hesitated, trying to find the right word that would not light mister crazy up again. I stole a glance at Bob then returned my attention to McClintock. "Sir," I said, everyone likes to be called sir, "I'll agree that four million dollars is a strong magnet but anyone willing to build a nuke is also probably willing to use it." I paused for a second to think. "If a nuke is set off in a city, 10’s to 100’s of thousands of people are going to die." I stopped for a few seconds to collect my thoughts before continuing.
"My partner and I didn't need this contract. We have money in the bank and more toys than anyone has a right to have. We took this job because it would have been immoral not to have taken it." I finally had his attention and figured I could take a chance. "Do you know if they have processed the material into a weapon or is it still in powdered oxide form?"
"Our information says that if they have not already constructed one or more weapons they soon will." He stopped and looked first at me then at Bob. They stared at each other for a few seconds then Bob raised his eyebrows and McClintock nodded. Bob twisted around in his chair until he was facing me.
"You in for a penny or in for a pound son?" he said, real intense. I felt like this was a trick question. I also felt that I could answer it wrong. I told them the truth when I said that it would have been immoral not to take the job.
"I'm in for a pound." I said. Bob looked at me for a second then spok
e.
"Here's the deal son, we first heard about the theft of the material about the time the FBI heard about it. Don't ask how we were alerted because I won't tell you. Anyway, we spent the next year following the investigation and true to form, the boys on your team dropped the ball. The Feds didn’t have a clue as to how the material was removed from the storage facility or if it was taken before it reached the facility. We kept our ear to the ground and our informants. We have people inside about every nut ball group in the country and none of them had heard anything."
"So," I said, interrupting him, "where do the Indians come into this?"
"Don't get ahead of me son," he said like my Grandpa would when telling me a story. About six months ago, one of our people in the Yavapai Nation sent a message that essentially said that one of the radical Native American groups in the area was building something that would make the whites set up and take notice." Bob stopped for a second and looked like he was thinking of what to say next. He looked at McClintock and said, "how much of this are we going to tell him?"
"Tell him everything," McClintock said. "If he spills it to the Feds we can always take care of him as part of the damage control." That sounded ominous to me. I decided to do some damage control of my own.
"Anything you say inside this room stays inside this room as far as I'm concerned," I said with what I hoped sounded like true conviction.
"Ok, so we had an insider who was able to point us at one of the members of this so called native rights group. We went down to Phoenix and shadowed this person for a couple of weeks whenever he showed up in town. One night as he left a Cowboy and Indian bar with more than a snoot full of alcohol we bagged him."
"You took him down outside of a bar?" I asked, amazed that they would actually do something like that.
"You're getting ahead of me again son," Bob said, this time as an admonishment. "So, as I was saying, we bagged this gentleman and drove him to a spot out in the desert where he told us who was running the group and approximately where he thought the weapon was being made. Everyone seems to refer to it as 'the weapon'. They even have a code name for it. It's something real cute with symbolic meaning. They call it the 'Tomahawk.'"
"Why would someone in a radical group tell you anything," I asked for real. Bob took the question as I intended and didn't beat me over the head with it like he did before.
"Look son, we know all about your little escapade with the Italians and that poor son of a bitch you and your partner lifted out of the auction in Mira Loma California. Now you tell me how you got information out of him? Not to mention the five Mexicans you and Jimmy Two Feathers took down on a city street and stuffed into the trunk of their Chevy" Bob just looked at me. It suddenly became obvious how they got the information they wanted and I thought to myself that they were probably a tad more insistent with their interrogation than Jimmy and I were with any we had conducted.
"Point taken," I said then and shut up.
"Yeah, ok. So we know who the so called ring leader is and we know about where the thing or more properly, the Tomahawk, is." Bob got up out of the chair and walked over to the large sectional map that showed the terrain east of Phoenix. I followed him and McClintock was right behind me. All of us stopped in front of the map. Bob pointed to a red dot on the map.
"This area right here," he said, pointing with his finger, "is a canyon about 15 miles east and south from the entrance to the reservation where the Federal Government keeps their pet people. To be completely up front, we don't know for sure really which of these small canyons they actually have their operation in. The flood plane and main wash from the hard road runs out of this really big main canyon."
His finger traced a route from a secondary road on the map that lead into a large canyon that was easy to recognize because the isometric lines on the map became very close. The closer the lines and these lines represented fifty-foot changes in elevation, the steeper the slope. The area he was following with his finger had six of the lines on either side right next to each other. That meant we were looking down on a canyon that was about three hundred feet deep in places. He followed the canyon for some distance and smaller side canyons branched off to the east and west.
"So," Bob finally said, "the boys are probably in one of these six or seven canyons. Which one, we don't know."
"Let me ask a question," I said, looking around at Bob and McClintock. "If I hadn't come along what would you gentlemen have done?"
"In all truthfulness?" Bob said.
"Yeah," I replied, "just between us girls."
"I would have killed them," Bob said, "all of them, one at a time, piece by piece with a dull bread knife if I had to; starting with the leader whose name is Olson. And, who by the way is a Department of Public Safety District Captain. And I would have continued until every swinging dick in the organization was dead or one of them told me what I wanted to know." I looked at Bob and had to believe him because he wasn't smiling and he had the same game face on that I had seen on my own men during the Gulf war. This wasn't personal for him. It was for the survival of a lot of people.
"Ok," I said, more to break the tension than anything else, "can I get a copy of this section of the map?" I indicated the area around the canyons where the group probably had their camp or operation or whatever it was.
"I though you would never ask," Bob said. He walked over to McClintock's desk and picked up a manila folder and carried it back to me. "The sectional map you need is inside. Just for your own information, none of our fingerprints are on the map so I want you to remove it from the folder and give the folder back to me." I flipped the folder open and removed the folded map and handed him the cardboard folder. The map was folded so that it was about eight by eleven inches in size. I folded it in thirds and slid it into my back pants pocket.
"Call your partner when you get back to town and tell him to meet you in Kingman or on the reservation outside of Phoenix. You boys need to tag that crazy misguided son of a bitch who is willing to blow the shit out of some city just to prove a point."
-28-
The ride back to Kingman was somewhat anti-climatic. One of the clone brothers led the way in the red Dodge back to the Interstate while I followed in my Ford. Once I passed through the gate next to I-40 he turned back. I pulled my carry bag out from behind the seat and dug the cell phone out of it. I called Jimmy through the Las Vegas cut out.
The phone rang twice before Jimmy picked it up.
"Talk to me," he said with his normal telephone manners.
"You are not going to believe this," I told him.
"Let me guess," he said, "you've become a bubba, addicted to barbecue and are going to stay in Kingman."
"No can do Jimbo, I discovered that I like barbecuing but not as much as your cooking."
"You found the material and have made America safe for democracy?
"Not quite. But I did find out who has it and where they are."
"I think I know but tell me who you think it is," he said, his voice suddenly serious.
"A big guy, with a dark complexion. You probably know him."
"Is this someone in Phoenix?" Jimmy asked.
"Yeah or pretty close to it”.
That would be Bear Olson," he said. "he's an Indian and an Arizona Highway patrolman, a combination that’s not too common back on the reservation."
“How did you know that?” I asked, puzzled.
“My Father called last night after we spoke. Over the past week he called everyone on the tribal council and someone finally told him that the whites were going to be in a world of hurt. That’s a rough translation. Once he had that tidbit of information he started digging and finally uncovered the truth by getting one of his friends drunk. This little bit of trickery didn’t bother him at all.
"Well, what took me almost six weeks he accomplished in just a few days," I said. I was heading east on I-40 nearing the outskirts of Kingman. I continued, "I salute his powers of deduction. Do you want to meet me i
n Phoenix or ride down with me from Kingman?"
Jimmy thought for a few seconds.
"I'm going to talk to my Father again then I'll call you back on the cell phone in a half-hour. If I can get a flight out to Kingman today you can pick me up and we'll drive down tomorrow together, otherwise I'll meet you at my Father's place on the reservation."
"Don't you think that might tip our friend off?" I asked.
"Judging from the number of people who already know about this, it would appear that two more people one way or another who are in on the secret is not going to make a big difference. Olson or his men have big mouths. If he does get tipped off to us what would be the down side?" he asked, mimicking me.