“You wanna go up and look for bling bling?” Ben said.
“Bling bling means gems,” Marvin said. “Ruins don’t have gems. They have pots. I don’t do pots. Plus, what I heard was that the place had been cleaned out.”
“What was Cheryl Escavedo like in high school?” DeLuca asked the younger man.
“She was cool,” Marvin said. “Too cool for me. She never even gave me the time of day.”
“She was the valedictorian, right?” Ben asked. Marvin nodded. “Really pretty girl. People thought she could be Miss Arizona. But she wasn’t into her own looks. She was a nice girl, right?”
“She was pretty nice,” Marvin agreed. “Not stuck up at all.”
“I don’t know,” Ben said. “In my experience, for every beautiful woman you see, somewhere, there’s a guy who’s sick of her shit. Your mother could be the sole exception.”
DeLuca had to smile, but he noticed that Marvin didn’t.
“You know what the secret is to a happy marriage, David?” Ben said. “The man makes all the big decisions, and the woman makes all the little decisions. I’ve been married for twenty-eight years, and so far, there hasn’t been a big decision.”
They’d come about a mile from the car. Suddenly, Yutahay stopped, staring at the ground and rotating in a full circle. He walked a few paces in one direction, then a few in the other, scrutinizing the surrounding vegetation.
“That’s odd,” he said, noting a ridge nearby.
“What is?” DeLuca asked.
“The trail stops here,” Yutahay said.
“You lost it?”
“I didn’t lose it,” Yutahay said. “She was wearing a boot with a pretty distinct heel signature. It doesn’t go past here.”
“She took her boots off?”
“Then we’d see the marks of her bare feet.”
“Even if it rained?”
“Especially because it rained,” Yutahay said. “We passed the point, a while back, where she was standing when it started raining.”
“Then the rain washed the trail away.”
“No,” Yutahay said. “It stops suddenly. Why would it wash it away in that direction but not in the one we came in? There’s no arroyo here or anything that might explain it. It just stops.”
“Maybe,” DeLuca said, thinking, “a helicopter came along and lowered her a rope.”
“Ya think?”
“No,” he said. “I just don’t know what else could explain it.”
“Maybe a dirigible,” Yutahay said. “Maybe she shape-shifted into an eagle and flew away.” DeLuca frowned at him. “I’m not being serious,” Yutahay said. “You can’t throw down a good shape-shift without years of study. I’m going to climb that ridge and have a look around. I’ll be right back.”
DeLuca scanned the Sonora Desert sprawling before him. Marvin Yutahay was crouched in the sand, pushing through it with his fingers until he stood and held up, for DeLuca to see, a piece of what looked like ice, although the temperature was in the high seventies and sure to rise to the eighties by midafternoon.
“What’s that?” he asked.
“We call it Sky Glass, in my business,” he said. “Mostly annealed silicates, maybe a little lime here, a little ash. You can find it where lightning hits the desert sand and turns the surface molten, but usually it spikes into the ground. This stuff is pretty even. If we hadn’t been walking all over it, we could have been able to tell the shape. It looks huge.”
He handed the thin piece of glass to DeLuca, who held it up to the light where the sun was climbing above the Growler Mountains.
“You mind if I keep this and have it analyzed?” he asked.
“Be my guest,” Marvin Yutahay said as his father returned to them, a white garbage bag in his hand.
“There’s a fire pit up there,” he said. “All kinds of footprints. I think there must have been some kind of party. And a child’s prints. A girl, I’d bet. Barefoot, but she wandered off this way. They left their garbage. We ought to be able to figure out who they were from that.”
“You think our missing person had come to join the party?” DeLuca said.
“I don’t think that’s why she came, but maybe you were right—maybe she saw a light and headed for it. If it happened the same night, it’s possible. I think we need to find out who was camping on that ridge. I’ll call the uncle, too, and ask him how Cheryl was driving his Jeep.”
When DeLuca called Cheryl Escavedo’s number in Albuquerque, her roommate answered, a woman with a thick Russian accent who said her name was Theresa Davidova. Theresa said she didn’t have anything to add to what she’d already told CID, whose report DeLuca had read. Cheryl had said she was going to be gone for a few days, but she didn’t say where she was going. She’d packed a suitcase. Davidova didn’t know what she’d put into it. She thought Cheryl had been seeing somebody, but she didn’t know who. She thought it was an older man, but she couldn’t be sure. DeLuca gave her the number of his satellite phone and told her to call him if she thought of anything else. She said she would. He told her he wanted to talk to her in person when he was in Albuquerque. She said she wasn’t going anywhere.
First, he had to go to Colorado to see a man about a mountain.
Chapter Three
DELUCA RECEIVED A CALL AT HIS HOTEL IN Colorado Springs at 0600 hours, telling him his 0900 hour appointment with General Thomas Koenig was being put on hold and to stand by. He waited at the hotel until noon, read the paper, went for a run (carrying his SATphone in his hand), a swim in the pool, had lunch in a restaurant his guide book said was the best in town (using his government credit card), bought a ski parka for Bonnie on sale (using his own), got a call at 1450 hours saying the general would meet him at 1600 hours, and was halfway to Peterson Air Force Base in the government-issue unmarked Ford Taurus he’d drawn from the 901st MI motor pool out of Fort Carson when his phone rang again to tell him the meeting had been rescheduled for the following morning, with the location moved to the operations center at Cheyenne Mountain.
He spent part of the night nursing a beer in the hotel bar, listening to a musician sporting a two-inch ponytail strumming an Ovation guitar with too much chorus on his amplifier singing James Taylor and Cat Stevens covers with his eyes closed, until DeLuca couldn’t take it any more (and he’d been trained to withstand torture) and went to his room, where he reread Sergeant Cheryl Escavedo’s 201 file.
It was a good record, superlative, really, describing able and honorable service. She’d been named Army Space and Missile Defense Command’s senior NCO for 2002 in her capacity as SIIM (Supervisor, Information Integration and Management), USSTRATCOM, Systems Center, after being transferred to Peterson AFB and NORAD from the Arizona Guard. She’d been honor graduate of her PLDC class, top PT score of her BNCOC class, and she’d taken an advanced degree in information technology management from Colorado Technical University in Colorado Springs. She’d won the Joint Meritorious Service Medal, the Army Commendations Medal, the Army Achievement Medal, drilled with the joint honor guard, had been active with the Association of the United States Army as its legislative affairs representative, served on the Pike’s Peak Chapter of the International Association of Administrative Professionals, and worked at the Colorado Springs Women’s Center in her spare time, though DeLuca couldn’t imagine her having too much spare time. She had eleven performance awards, seven time-off awards, three attached letters of commendation, and even a note included from the children at Kit Carson Elementary thanking her for coming to their class and talking about what they did at NORAD, closing with, “Thank you for keeping our country safe.” She’d graduated Summa Cum Laude from the University of Tucson, where she’d been president of the Kappa Kappa Kappa sorority, a social organization that, if DeLuca remembered his undergraduate days at the U of A correctly, only accepted total babes who wouldn’t piss on you if you were on fire unless you were rich and owned a hot car. Judging from her photograph, DeLuca gathered the Tri-Kaps hadn�
�t accepted Cheryl Escavedo, a Native American, solely as a token gesture of affirmative action. She was quite attractive, with silky black hair and big doe eyes, full lips, and a chest that could have held a lot more medals. If she wasn’t dating anybody, DeLuca surmised, it probably wouldn’t have been due to a lack of attention.
He rose before dawn, went for a run, grabbed a continental breakfast at the buffet, and was presenting his credentials at the gatehouse to the razor-wire-girded Protect Level 1 parking lot by 0700 hours. It was his hope that word would spread throughout the command that someone from CI was asking questions about the missing woman. It wasn’t all that different from driving into an Iraqi marketplace in a convoy of up-armored Humvees and Bradleys—the noise made the bad guys scatter, but it also brought the good guys out of hiding, the informants who had the information he needed.
It had been snowing when he left the hotel, the six-mile drive up a winding mountain road something of an adventure, particularly when plows coming down the mountain seemed to thunder by at ninety miles an hour with their blades missing his car by only a few inches. But the pine trees looked lovely in the snow. Twice he passed small groups of deer, one group feeding in a field, another scampering across the road in front of his car.
There was a large office building below the entrance to the underground complex labeled Building 101—Technical Support Facility. The parking lot was only half full. At the turn into it, a billboard read: “Welcome to Cheyenne Mountain Air Force Station, our motto: ‘Deter, Detect, Defend.’ Home of the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), the United States Northern Command (USNORTHCOM), United States Strategic Command (USSTRATCOM), and Air Force Space Command (AFSPC). A Bi-National Facility,” the last a reference to the fact that about a quarter of the personnel were Canadian, since an attack on the United States by Russian ICBMs (the original reason for NORAD) would most likely have to come through Canadian airspace. He was finally met outside Building 100, the security building, by an African American woman who introduced herself as Sergeant First Class Gail Davies. He took his B’s and C’s from his coat pocket and handed them to her.
“Welcome to Colorado,” she said with a salute. “Is it… Mr.… ?”
“David,” he said. “Special Agent DeLuca, if you need a title. You didn’t have to wait outside for me.”
“I’ve been in The Mountain for the last twenty-four hours,” she said. “You get to where you’ll take any chance you get for a little fresh air.”
He was wearing a herringbone sport jacket over black pants and a white shirt, his tie pulled tight to his throat but with his top button unfastened beneath it. He’d worn a uniform in Iraq, but here he was strictly plainclothes.
“Do you ski, Agent DeLuca?” she asked, glancing at his credentials before handing them back.
“Like a six-year-old,” he said. “I’ve gone off on weekends with my wife, but nothing like what you have in Colorado. You?”
“I snowboard. My son’s a knuckle dragger. If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em. Have you ever been in ‘The Hole’ before?” she asked, guiding him into the security building.
“I lived off my credit cards for about a year after college, if that’s what you mean,” DeLuca said. In Security, he was led through a metal detector, though unlike at the airport, he wasn’t required to remove his shoes. A sign on the wall informed him that neither smoking nor weapons were allowed inside the complex, and that he should turn his cell phone off.
“They don’t work inside the complex anyway,” Davies said, leading him through a turnstile and into the mouth of a tunnel, where a bus, something like an airport shuttle, waited for them.
“The entry tunnel is a little over a mile long between north and south portals and banana-shaped. The blast doors are at the midpoint on the inside curve. It’s designed so that the compression force from any detonation outside the facility will pass through the mountain and out the other side.” The bus began to move. They were accompanied by a pair of young Canadian officers, one reading the paper, the other with his headphones on. “You’re not claustrophobic, are you?”
“Nope,” he said, though he’d had enough miserable experiences in underground bunkers in Iraq to last him a while.
“You’re in luck then,” she said, “because today’s a full combat-readiness lockdown.”
“How often do you run lockdowns?” he asked. “They’re scheduled in advance?”
“It depends,” she said. “Wing-level exercises are more common than global. We locked down for real after 9/11 and people stayed inside for days before we were sure what we were looking at. The doors themselves are tested regularly. They’re calling today’s exercise Moses 2, as in ‘lost in the wilderness’—what do we do if we lose our global positioning system? It involves the 527th, so it’s a bit more complicated.”
“The 527th?” he asked.
“Aggressor Squadron,” she said. “Like the guys who learned to fly Russian MIGs for all the Top Guns to practice against during the Cold War, only now we do it with satellites. And computers.”
They paused at the blast doors and watched as they sealed shut behind them, a man and a woman scurrying past the guard to get out before it was too late.
“You’re standing behind twenty-five tons of steel, or actually fifty because each blast door is twenty-five tons and curved to withstand a multimegaton weapon detonating as close as half a mile away, nautical.”
“Do people get searched on their way out?” DeLuca asked. “Or in, for that matter.”
“Permanent party members, no,” Sergeant Davies said. “Visitors, yes.” She led him into the complex, explaining as she went. “The central excavation consists of three main chambers, forty-five feet wide, sixty feet high, and two football fields long, intersected by four connecting chambers thirty-two feet wide, fifty-six feet high, and slightly more than one football field long, giving us a four-and-a-half-acre grid. You have two thousand feet of solid granite over your head. All the buildings and connecting tunnels inside are constructed from continuous-weld low-carbon steel plates to attenuate any electromagnetic pulses, and each building has its own blast doors to resist overpressure and to serve as fire doors, with blast valves in reinforced concrete bulkheads to protect the air, water, and sewer lines. The buildings and tunnels are mounted on more than thirteen hundred half-ton steel springs, which make the buildings both blast-resistant and earthquake-proof, able to move twelve inches in any direction. We have a medical facility, a gym with treadmills and elliptical machines and weight machines and free weights, and a full kitchen and dining facility, right here, serving four meals a day including midnight snacks…”
She opened the door and showed him the cafeteria, which included a salad bar, an entree line, and a separate line for fast-food items. He noted, on the walls, large painted murals of rocky mountain landscapes, as if to create the illusion of a window view.
“We don’t have living quarters, per se,” she said, “except for the firefighters who work on twenty-four-hour shifts, but in an emergency, we have cots for everyone, and if we were to run out of food, we have plenty of MREs in storage. The chefs in the kitchen also have over two hundred recipes for the preparation of human flesh, should we have to resort to cannibalism. That’s a joke.”
“Good one,” DeLuca said.
“We have seven ops centers. Air Warning, Missile Warning, Space Control, Operational Intelligence, Combat Command, Systems and Weather, all running 24/7/365. Missile and Air Warning are probably the ones you already know about, responsible for the ADIZ, or air defense intercept zone. It’s still fixed antennae and phased array radars, but that’s being supplemented with space-based infrared now. Space control’s satellite surveillance network tracks everything in orbit around the earth down to the size of a baseball, over twenty-six thousand objects since this place was built in 1957, with about eighty-five hundred currently in orbit, and about 20 percent of those are functional payloads or satellites, and the rest of it is space j
unk, rocket parts and that sort of thing. We track both for threat assessment and collision avoidance—we’ve rerouted the Space Shuttle twelve times to keep it from running into something up there, though the main debris field orbits about five hundred kilometers farther out than the shuttle, which orbits at about three hundred kilometers. We also try to calculate the footprint that satellites are going to leave when they reenter earth’s atmosphere, with lighter impacts at the heel and the heavier stuff falling at the toe, but since the earth’s surface is 70 percent water and only 25 percent of the land mass is inhabited, so far we haven’t had to issue any alerts.”
She ran the security card that hung from her neck on a chain through a scanner that opened a set of doors.
“I’ll take you to General Koenig’s office at STRATCOM, though I think he’s in a meeting with NORTHCOM right now. He should be finished soon.”
“That’s the command set up after 9/11, right?” DeLuca said, though he already knew the answer to his question. Tasked to monitor internal airspace after the Twin Towers.
“That’s correct,” she said. “We have about five thousand private aircraft flying at any one time and NORTHCOM watches those. You sound like you’re from the East Coast. Did you know anybody in the World Trade Center?”
“My sister Elaine worked there,” DeLuca said. “She didn’t get out.”
“I’m sorry,” Sergeant Davies said. “I’ll take you to the general’s office.”
Despite claiming immunity to claustrophobia, he couldn’t help pondering the notion that there was two thousand feet of rock over his head, and how much it would hurt if it fell on him. The waiting room outside the general’s office was relatively calm, while people scurried back and forth in the hallway beyond the open door, the alarm siren a pleasant pinging sound, still ringing.
The general’s secretary, a brawny lieutenant named Carr, entered, examined DeLuca’s badge and credentials, and told him the general would be a few more minutes. When General Koenig finally arrived, he held up a finger to tell DeLuca he needed another minute, then consulted with his secretary behind a closed office door a moment longer. When he finally opened the door, he nodded to DeLuca without saying a word.
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