Dark Target

by David DeBatto

  Marvin Yutahay was probably camped out somewhere beyond the reach of cell phones and satellite dishes, but he was a big boy who could take care of himself. Maybe he’d had car trouble, or maybe he’d met a girl who’d taken him back to her place and wasn’t finished with him yet.

  DeLuca turned on the radio, just for company, and found 1190 on the dial.

  “I had an interesting visitor tonight,” Ed Clark was saying calmly. “Of course I can’t tell you who it was or what planet he was from, but in case anything should happen to me, I’ve written…”

  He turned the radio off—he’d given Ed Clark all the time and attention he intended to give him for one night.

  The weather turned as he headed into the high country, the sky clouding over, which made him feel no more secure—the best surveillance satellites had been able to image through clouds for some time. When it started to snow, he turned on his wipers and let up on the gas, slowing down when the road began to slip beneath his wheels. He was dog-tired. He wondered if a town the size of Chloride even had a motel. He considered calling Peggy Romano and asking her to find out, but he knew she’d probably chew his head off for using her as a travel agent. He hoped he was close, because a quick check of the gas gauge told him he was down to a quarter of a tank. He’d just stifled his third prolonged yawn in a row when something suddenly loomed in his headlights.

  He slammed on his brakes, but his tires failed to bite, the car fishtailing, the shape directly ahead of him motionless, an image caught in his headlights for a split second, two large eyes reflecting back the light from his headlights, before he struck it with his right front fender just as it appeared to leap, the thing flying over the hood of the car and bouncing off the windshield to land somewhere behind him.

  He stopped.

  He got out, leaving the car idling by the side of the road.

  About twenty feet behind the car, illuminated in the red of the Taurus’s taillights, he found a large female mule deer lying on its side, breathing heavily, its big brown eyes full of fear as it lifted its head. It tried to move but couldn’t. DeLuca knelt next to it. It was a doe, her antlers having molted, in their place only soft fuzzy stubs. He felt her legs for broken bones, but she didn’t seem to feel pain when he touched her. He felt her ribs and noticed something else—she was pregnant, her belly distended, with something kicking inside.

  “Shhh,” he said in a soothing voice, trying to quiet the animal. “You’re going to be all right. I don’t know any first aid for deer, but I’m going to call somebody who does.”

  His words seemed to have an effect. For a moment, all seemed calm. He heard only the car running, and the delicate sibilance of snowflakes falling on pine needles.

  Using his personal SATphone, he was dialing directory assistance with the intention of calling the state police when he noticed something odd, a disturbance in the air overhead, as if he were looking at the northern lights shimmering, but closer—and how was it that the aurora borealis might penetrate the cloud cover?

  He heard a buzzing sound, and then a disk of brilliant white light descended from the clouds, the ship (for there was really no other way to describe it) perhaps fifty feet across, hovering above the road, maybe two hundred yards in front of the car. In brief bursts, beams of light shot from the saucer to the ground, scanned a moment, then stopped, as if the ship were searching for something with a spotlight. It was moving away, at first, then reversed direction, moving toward him, just as the deer struggled to its feet. DeLuca held it tight, his arms around the animal’s neck.

  The ship continued its search. DeLuca had no time to think of a better plan, so he took the chain bearing his dog tags from around his neck, used the strap attached to his cell phone to tie the phone to the chain, dialed the first number from his contact list and looped the chain around the deer’s neck. As the ship drew closer, he dived under his car, concealing as much of his body as possible beneath the still-running engine, even though it was a tight fit and the exhaust manifold burned his leg. The heat from the engine would mask his infrared signature, and the electrical field would mask his own. The deer stood fixed in the roadway.

  “Go!” DeLuca shouted.

  The animal didn’t move.

  He grabbed a handful of snow and gravel and threw it at the animal. This time it took off, running into the woods, limping heavily on its right front leg. It had gotten perhaps thirty or forty yards from the road when a beam of light caught it, and then, in a flash, the animal was gone, leaving behind only a cloud of steam that quickly dissipated. DeLuca was reminded of the old magician acts where the guy would throw down a smoke bomb and vanish into thin air.

  He watched from beneath the car. He dared not move, holding his ground. The saucer scanned the area where the deer had been, drawing closer. When it was directly overhead, a circle of light surrounded the car, melting the snow that had fallen on the road. The ship lingered a moment longer, then, apparently satisfied, moved on, continuing to scan the road in brief bursts of light.

  Another hundred yards down the road, the saucer turned off its lights and lifted suddenly into the sky.

  DeLuca waited a long time beneath the car. The temptation was to get into the car and drive away as quickly as possible, but it was a temptation he couldn’t afford to give in to. Two hours was the approximate dwell window of the milsats that overflew Iraq, but he couldn’t wait that long. His other problem was that if the car ran out of gas, he could find himself in trouble of a different sort. He still had his encrypted phone, but he didn’t dare use it until he’d talked with Peggy Romano to make sure it was still safe to do so. Finally, after perhaps thirty minutes, he crawled out.

  He dusted himself off and stood motionless beside the car, sniffing the air, listening, watching the sky, the light snow still falling. He grabbed a flashlight from the car and went to where he’d last seen the deer, but there was nothing, no deer, no phone, and only the faintest smell of burned hair in the air. If the ground had been scorched, the falling snow had already covered it up.

  He shut off his flashlight and walked back to the car. He wasn’t sure what he’d seen. He knew what he was supposed to believe he’d seen, but that and what had actually transpired were often two very different things.

  Chapter Ten

  DAN SYKES CALLED JOSH TRUITT AFTER THE Navaho Tribal Police office in Shiprock issued a report that a vehicle registered to Theresa Davidova, a white 1984 Toyota pickup, had been found on the reservation, at the end of Rural Road 2634a in a place called Sudano Canyon. When Sykes called Shiprock, an officer named Jim Chee told him the truck had been covered with a camouflage tarp.

  “Sometimes people do that when they don’t want anybody messing with their stuff,” Chee said. “Then snow covered the tarp.” The truck had been found by a Navaho rancher who’d been tracking a mountain lion that had been killing his sheep. “We can’t tell you how long the truck’s been there or where the driver might have gone,” Chee said. “We left things the way we found them, for now. There’s a cabin farther up the canyon where people stay. If you want, I could come with you to check it out.”

  “Just impound the vehicle until we can process it,” Sykes said. He thanked the officer and said he’d call him if it turned out he needed assistance. DeLuca had asked him to take a different approach and see how far it went—he was to suppose that General Koenig’s suspicions were correct. Davidova hadn’t met Escavedo via the bulletin board at a laundromat—assume it was more intentional than that. Assume Cheryl Escavedo was gay, and that Davidova had used that to draw her in somehow. According to several of the strippers Dan interviewed who’d danced with Theresa Davidova, she’d swung both ways upon occasion, something Josh Truitt seemed unaware of. Suppose the circle connected in the other direction—Sergelin had told Leon Lev to find somebody who worked at Cheyenne Mountain, somebody with access to Darkstar data. He’d found Escavedo and sent Davidova to make contact, perhaps as a way of paying off the debt she owed him.

 
“Any idea why Theresa might have gone to Shiprock?” Sykes asked Truitt after he told them they’d found her car.

  “A pretty good idea, actually,” Truitt said. “We were there together, last summer. I brought her along as an assistant on a shoot.”

  Truitt drove. They stopped at a general store called Eli’s Trading Post at the intersection of Sudano Canyon Road and 2634a, a wooden structure in serious disrepair, with a gas pump out front and a handwritten note on the door that read MEKING A DELIVRY—BACK LATER, MARY but no indication when the note had been written. It was two o’clock in the afternoon.

  They found Theresa’s truck half an hour later, parked well off the dirt road in an oak grove at the bottom of a hill where the road narrowed and became impassable, though occasionally, Truitt said, 4WD off-road clubs went in farther with their H2s and knob-tired winch-equipped Jeeps. Sykes examined the Toyota, but there was little information to be gained. She’d taken the flashlight from the glove compartment, where Sykes found a deck of cards and a black lace bra, but Truitt said he’d seen her take the bra off beneath her sweater and store it in the glove box after they’d come home from a party. There was a cell phone recharger plugged into the cigarette lighter socket, and a felt tip pen with its cap off on the passenger seat. The floors were clean, almost as if they’d been vacuumed, and the dashboard was free of dust, as if it had been wiped. Sykes had a pretty good idea that whoever had cleaned the car had taken care not to leave fingerprints or DNA. They’d know more once they ran the vehicle through the FBI lab in Denver.

  “The cabin is a couple miles in,” Truitt said, opening the tailgate of his truck and handing Sykes a pair of snowshoes. He donned a pair as well, throwing a large backpack over his shoulders.

  “You want me to carry anything?” Sykes asked as Truitt handed him a pair of ski poles to assist the hike.

  “I carry my own stuff,” Truitt said. “For the record, I hate bellboys, too.”

  “What’s in the bag?” Sykes asked as Truitt headed off.

  “Things we might need,” Truitt replied over his shoulder.

  Sykes had a hard time seeing how any Jeeps or 4WD vehicles would ever make it up some of the steep declivities they traversed. They hiked in silence for about half an hour, traveling perhaps three kilometers until Josh Truitt pointed to a cabin backed up against a limestone cliff. There was no smoke coming from the smokestack, a bad sign, Dan guessed.

  The cabin was empty, but someone had been there. A jar of blue Berry Blast-flavored Gatorade sat on the table, frozen solid. The bed had been slept in, and under it, Truitt found a paperback copy of the latest Harry Potter book, which he said Theresa had been reading. A kerosene lamp sat on the table, half full of fuel. Sykes found three power bar wrappers in the wastebasket.

  “There was a deck of cards in the glove compartment,” he said. “Were they Theresa’s?”

  “She was teaching herself to play Texas Hold ’Em,” Truitt said. “She wanted me to take her to Las Vegas. Apparently Cheryl’s uncle lived there.”

  “If you were going to spend some time in a cabin in the mountains,” Sykes asked, “wouldn’t you bring a deck of cards? Why leave it behind? It’s not like it takes up that much room.”

  “Maybe she forgot.”

  “Maybe.”

  Sykes moved to the door and peered at the sky. There was no point trying to look for tracks. He saw prints in the snow where a chipmunk or possibly a squirrel had scrambled across the porch, but beyond the overhang, the newfallen snow would have covered over any signs indicating what direction Theresa might have taken.

  “You said you were here on a shoot?” Dan asked Truitt.

  “That’s the next place I was going to suggest we look,” Truitt replied.

  Dan Sykes strapped on his snowshoes and followed the photographer up the canyon, struggling to keep pace, and Sykes was in excellent physical condition, a triple black belt in karate and something of a workout fanatic. He figured Truitt had to be one of those guys they simply called “genetic” back at CI school at Fort Huachuca, physical freaks with mutations that gave them oversized lungs or massive hearts or extra red blood cells. The path was simpler to find as the canyon walls began to converge, the trail climbing through drifts that were ten feet deep, giving way to windblown areas of bare rock.

  “This is New Mexico karst,” Truitt explained. “If we had time, I’d chip you off a piece of wall and show you the seashells and marine fossils in it. Two hundred fifty million years ago this area was the bottom of the sea. The whole Chihuahuan Desert, actually. It’s basically a limestone uplift, and whenever you get that, you get a lot of caves, where the eons of rain percolate through the rock and form underground rivers and aquifers.”

  “Like Carlsbad?”

  “Carlsbad is a little different. And Lechugilla, which is a whole lot different.”

  “What’s Lechugilla?”

  “It’s a cave near Carlsbad,” Truitt said. “But unlike precipitate caves formed by ground water percolating down, Lechugilla was formed over millions of years by sulfuric acids bubbling up from below. It’s probably the most fantastic cave in the world. Not to mention the most complex.”

  “You shot the coffee table book for that one, right? The book you gave to Sergeant Escavedo.”

  “I shot it, but somewhat reluctantly,” Truitt said. “Half the time I photograph a cave, I come back a few years later and it’s been ruined by amateur cavers leaving their footprints all over the place or breaking off crystals for souvenirs, and all because I gave the place a little publicity. Fortunately they put a sealed vault door on the only entrance to Lechugilla and a permit system and they actually police the place to make sure nobody’s been in there without a license. It’s probably the most beautiful place on the planet. Also one of the most dangerous. Do you like caves, Agent Sykes?”

  “Not particularly,” he said.

  “Well then you’re really going to hate this one,” Truitt said.

  After a steep rise, they came to a clearing where the ground leveled off. The canyon wall opposite rose vertically for five hundred feet, but at the base of it, there appeared to be an area where the snow hadn’t fallen. Closer examination revealed that the snow had in fact fallen but it had melted, the air as they approached getting warmer and mustier smelling. Surmounting a small ridge, Sykes glanced down at what appeared to be a dark grimace in the earth, a crescent-shaped gash at the base of the wall from which, he saw, a small bat flew out, and then another.

  “Probably another hour before the emergence,” Truitt said, looking at the sky and taking his snowshoes off where the ground was free of snow. Sykes did the same as Truitt dug into his backpack, extracting a pair of LED headlamps. He handed one to Sykes, then handed him a pair of gauntlet-style rubber gloves and a roll of silver duct tape.

  “Tape your pants to your boots and your sleeve cuffs to your wrists. Don’t tape the gloves on because you might need to take them off. Take off your coat and your fleece but wear this on your head, college boy style,” he said, passing Sykes an Arizona Diamondbacks cap, then a pair of paper surgical masks. “One of these should last you half an hour, maybe an hour. When it gets too wet to breathe through, you can switch to the new one. It’s not that big a cave, but it’s damn nasty. It goes down three chambers and there are no major drops or constrictions, but it gets slippery, so that’s why I’ve brought these,” he explained, taking a pair of climbing ropes from his pack and strapping on a belt of climbing gear. “We’re not belaying or anything—all I’m doing is setting guylines, pretty much. The first chamber, not counting the entry corridor, is approximately star-shaped. The one after that is sort of like a hot dog and the final one is like a hamburger bun. The snakes are active year round inside but they’re Mexican boas so they’re not going to hurt you.” Finally he handed Sykes a pair of goggles, something like a diving mask. “This is just because I got a wicked eye infection once. I don’t know if it was from the cave or what, but I’d prefer that it not happen agai
n. There’s all sorts of microscopic stuff in the air. You ready?”

  Bats were emerging from the mouth of the cave at a rate of two or three a second, the sun still above the horizon but below the canyon walls.

  “Leave my coat here?” Sykes said.

  “You’re not going to need it,” Truitt said, testing his large hand-held flashlight and handing a second one to Sykes. “The thing about cave environments is that unless they’re challenged, they’re incredibly stable. This one hasn’t changed much inside for maybe a million years, so unless something happened that I don’t know about, the temperature in the star chamber is going to be ninety-three or ninety-four degrees, and hot dog is about a hundred and hamburger is a hundred and ten, hundred percent humidity and not a breeze, so it’s basically like a pitch-black sauna, full of shit. And snakes. And bugs. The Indian name for it translates as ‘Home of the Dark Spirit.’ The Spanish name was ‘Lugar de las Matanzas.’”

  “‘Place of the Killings,’” Sykes translated.

  “‘Slaughters.’ I’ve got dry clothes to change into when we come out. Ready?”

  “Can’t wait,” Sykes said.

  Truitt led the way. The gash in the earth sloped down about thirty feet while the ceiling rose to where the two men could stand as they descended the portal slope, Sykes placing his feet as precisely as he could in the footholds Truitt chose. The heat and humidity struck him immediately, an overwhelming wall of oppressive dankness, though the smell was tolerable, something like mushrooms, perhaps. The floor here was a mixture of mud and guano, perhaps eight inches thick. Truitt said it would get thicker the farther in they went. There were blurry footprints in the muck. Sykes asked Truitt to stop while he examined one.