by Jack L Knapp
I had glanced at them askance and pointed out that our ‘helicopter drones’ wouldn’t be able to lift some of them, but we could probably drive near enough for the two of us to pack them in. That had gotten us access to White Sands and an escort for the first few days. After that, the escort had been withdrawn, better uses for manpower probably. Planting the sensor suites went much faster then, and we’d had time to look around.
T had found several caches and I’d marked the GPS locations so that I could help with the recovery rather than having to wait for him. We’d eventually pick a night and dig up as much as possible, being very careful about covering the evidence of our digging.
For now, we were camped in the desert a long way from Victorio Peak. We’d planted two sensors along Rattlesnake Ridge, a long, low, extension of the Organ Mountains that lay to the west of the range headquarters. Doña Ana Range Camp spread out behind us, no longer being used as a test site for short-range air defense missiles but a good spot for our temporary camp.
We had a minimal camp, set up just off a dirt road; campfire, cleared space for our bedrolls, and a place to park T’s truck.
We’d been talking since stopping work for the day. I’d told T about being seen while I was doing the rescue and he’d agreed that I had not really had a choice. I’d had to try, even though my efforts had turned out to be only partly successful.
T continued, “If I hadn’t helped that little girl when she fell, or if that driver hadn’t been texting, maybe if the mother had kept a closer eye on the kid, none of this would have happened.
“Think about it. I met you because you saw me in the street, and then I wondered if you were following Shezzie and me. That led me to meeting you and accidentally awakening your Talent. Henderson also saw the video of me when I pushed the kid out of danger. I think that’s the only reason for him deciding to visit El Paso when he did. He came here and scared the hell out of Surfer, and that led to Surfer getting himself killed before I offed Henderson.
“Ana Maria might have still moved in with you, but she wouldn’t have become the Chupacabra. She might not have survived, even, when those two guys caught her the first time. She got scared, lost her temper, and wound up ripping apart those two cartelistas. They had cornered her, and there’s no telling what they’d have done. Other girls in Juarez had been raped and killed a little before this happened, maybe even by those same two men.
“We’d never have gone after the gang that killed Ana Maria’s sister, either. You just do the best you can, and if stuff happens, it happens. We already talked about leaving this part of the country. If someone gets on your track next time you go back to El Paso, you just beat feet to New Mexico and hide out for a while. We get as much money together as we can and leave. We can start over somewhere else.”
“I really hope that Ana Maria decides to come back. But now I just don’t know, T. Maybe it will be for the best. We’re OK now, but I’m fifteen years older than she is. What happens when she’s fifty and I’m sixty-five? Assuming we last that long.”
T nodded. He didn’t have an answer, either.
“We’ve got two more sensors to plant tomorrow, T, but they’ll be easy. We’ll only be half a mile or so off the Anthony Gap road. I think it’s time we move back north, plant that last pair of sensors in the San Andres north of Rhodes Spring, then recover as much of the treasure as possible from the caches you found.”
“No objection from me, Ray. I can drive into the range, you cross the fence using your wingsuit and join me in the San Andres foothills. That way you can be the one to move the stuff we dig up. There’ll be no record that you came into the range and nothing for the guard to find if he gets inquisitive when I leave. I’ll pick you up after I leave the range and we can go put the new bars with the old cache.
“We aren’t ready yet to pass the bars to a mining company, but it won’t take long after we’re done here. The scientific group will owe us money and I think they’ll be able to pay soon, so that helps with cash flow too.
“I’ll go south and prospect the area east of the Black Range. Lots of old mines down there, couple of ghost towns and maybe silver deposits too. A lot of silver was shipped from that mining district during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I doubt the old-time miners found it all. That whole area is heavily mineralized. They only found a little gold, but they dug out tons of silver. And silver is probably easier for us to sell if we find a deposit we can get to.
“Maybe two weeks to get it done. We’ll be back at my cabin within two days and you can swap your Volvo for my truck. If anyone in El Paso is watching for a Volvo, it will be with me in New Mexico, so they won’t get onto you right away. We can swap back as soon as you’re sure no one’s watching you.”
“Works for me, T. I’ll go back and sell the rest of the coins. I’ll put some of the money in your bank account and some in mine. I’ll also put a few hundred into the two business accounts we set up. That’ll give you operating funds and provide Shezzie a cushion.
“How’s she doing, by the way? Is she in New York or in the Middle East?”
“Neither one. She’s in Athens. She’s established a temporary identity and found a contact who can get her into Jordan. They…it’s a family, a man, his wife, and their three kids…will provide a base until she’s ready to approach the American Embassy. So things are moving for her, but she’s spent quite a chunk of our money.
“I hope all this is worth it for her. She thinks it will take a couple of weeks, maybe a month, to get it done. A month from now she expects to be Lieutenant Colonel Schmidt again, refugee from captivity by Taliban associates. I hope she’s got her story together. There are a lot of suspicious investigators who will pick up any mistake she makes, and once they start digging, there’s no way to tell where it might stop. The best thing about her story, the reason investigators won’t look too hard, is that there was no known reason for her to leave. She was very successful at work, never showed any signs of being unhappy, loved her job and got along with everyone.
“The family she’s using will provide references to back up her story about being dropped off in Jordan. They’re getting paid well to do this, of course, but she is watching their moods and picking up some of their thoughts. She’s sure they won’t betray her, and when she goes to the embassy, they’ll claim they’re the ones who found her.
Meantime, she’s getting a crash course in Arabic. She would have picked up the language while she was in captivity, as well as learning quite a lot about the culture of her captors. She’ll learn about Arab society and what not to do from the family she’s staying with in addition to learning to speak the language. She probably won’t be a linguist, but she’ll know enough to get by. That’s all that a captive would have picked up. It’s all about providing her a background that will make the story as believable as possible.”
The extraction and removal of the remaining five caches that T found went flawlessly. We filled in the holes after removing the small caches and even had time to go by and touch-up the spot where T had removed the original cache. The caches contained bars only, so we stashed them in a crate that had originally held one of the sensors. This made it easy for me to carry them along when I levitated.
The bars went into the half-empty Wells Fargo box we’d buried before. The old strongbox was now nearly full of metal bars of unknown value. T went off to work on the things he intended to do and I drove his truck to El Paso.
The truck was kind of a gas hog even though the gas it used was regular unleaded. The Volvo used less but it required premium gasoline. Maybe the costs evened out in the end.
My mailbox contained the usual junk and a card from a delivery company. The shipment containing the test kit had arrived.
Ana Maria hadn’t been back to the house, and there were no messages on the answering machine.
I treated myself to a nice steak dinner that evening. Afterwards, I picked up a few groceries before returning to the house.
/> The metal bar, more properly an ingot, hadn’t looked like gold when we recovered it. The only real clue to its makeup was the weight. Otherwise, it might have been oxidized copper or even lightly-rusted iron, based on its dark reddish-brown color.
I had wondered where I could hide it and not have it found by a possible intruder. Finally, lacking a better idea, I placed it by the front door. Is there anything more anonymous than a doorstop? In any case, there had been no intruder, so the doorstop was where I’d left it and the bag of coins was still in the coffee canister.
I had a small magnet that I used to stick notes to the refrigerator, a makeshift ‘bulletin board’ that Ana Maria and I had used to pass messages and post reminders. The last message I’d left for Ana Maria was still there, so I trashed it when I pulled the magnet off the door. Leaving messages for someone who’s not reading them…pretty futile.
I passed the magnet along all the sides of the bar and got nothing. If there was a reaction, I couldn’t feel it. Since the bar wasn’t magnetic, it was time to begin testing with acids.
A butter knife from the kitchen served to carefully scrape the oxidation from a spot on the bar. The bare metal looked gold-colored, but it couldn’t be pure gold since the bar had been oxidized. Gold looks like gold, even when it’s been in the earth for centuries.
I spread a towel on the kitchen counter by the sink. An opened box of Arm and Hammer bicarbonate of soda, useful in neutralizing acid spills, sat near the sink. A paper towel went over the cloth towel and the bar sat on that. A notebook and pen was nearby for recording what I saw during testing. I was finally ready to begin.
This testing kit had come from Amazon. Cheap, about fourteen dollars for the kit, it included six bottles of acid reagents and a scratching stone. White, blue, green, yellow, red, and black caps for the bottles matched the instructions, plus labels on the bottles themselves told me the correct order to use the chemicals. According to the directions, fizzing or discoloring of the small drop of test solution indicated a reaction. If the drop remained clear, with no sign of fizzing, wash off the test spot and use the next stronger solution.
I got no reaction from the ten and twelve karat solutions but there was some discoloration when I used the fourteen-karat test solution. Something between twelve and fourteen karats, then, since pure gold is 24 karat. Dividing twelve and fourteen by twenty-four gave me decimal values of 0.5 and 0.58, half or slightly more than half of the bar being gold. I also got good indications for silver content and a very slight indication of platinum when I used the specific reagents for those metals. I couldn’t measure the platinum content precisely and with the few bars we had it might not amount to much in terms of money anyway. But the gold and silver would both be valuable.
The gold bar, for that was how I now thought of the ingot, weighed thirty-five pounds, plus-or-minus half a pound, using my bathroom scale. I weighed the bar alone, then weighed myself before picking up the bar, and weighed myself again. The bathroom scale might not be accurate during the lower part of its range, but the value I got using both methods didn’t change.
So: thirty-five pound bar, a little more than half of it gold. Say, 18.9 pounds; time to resort to the calculator again.
I started my computer too and went online. The current value of gold, assuming it was pure, was just under $1300 per ounce. But the bar I had would require refining, and I had no idea of what that would cost. Assume a value of $1100 for an ounce of gold after refining, and that would be in troy ounces since that appeared to be the units used by the gold spot market. Good enough for a rough estimate, which was all I needed now.
Back to the calculator; 18.958 pounds of gold in a bar. My assay and weighing methods didn’t lend to great precision, so call it 19 pounds.
How many troy ounces in a standard pound? There was enough information online to convert ounces to the slightly-heavier troy ounces. There were sixteen ounces in a standard avoirdupois pound, the measurements my bathroom scale used.
About nineteen pounds of gold, and there are sixteen avoirdupois ounces in a pound. Three hundred four avoirdupois ounces and the conversion factor for troy ounces is 0.9115; This gave me 277.096 troy ounces of gold in this bar. Figure each troy ounce, after refining, at $1100.
My doorstop was worth more than $304,805. Add in the silver, figure that I probably overstated the costs of refining, and the bar was likely worth more than $310,000.
Gobsmacked; there was no better word for how I was feeling. I had expected the bar to be valuable, but this?
I put the vials and scratch plate from the test kit back into the case they’d come in, hands shaking only a bit. A bit of baking soda went over the spots on the bar where I’d used the test solutions and I rinsed the bar in the sink before drying it with the paper towel.
I put coffee on and decided it was time to comm T. But before I began spending all the money that bar represented, it would be necessary to have the bar professionally assayed.
Still, I now had a ballpark figure.
If my calculations held up, the hidden Wells Fargo box contained bars with a value totaling at least seven million dollars. Considerably more, probably, since we hadn’t counted the bars when we stacked more into the box. But there were more than two dozen bars in that buried strongbox. I had seen that many, and there were probably more.
I put the bar back beside the front door. That would do, for now. The dealer who’d tested my coin could perform a more accurate test for me. Maybe he would keep his mouth shut if he thought he could market the bars. At a nice commission, of course.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Ray:
I explained my reasoning to T. More than $300,000 per bar, at least two dozen bars in the box, and I knew we’d added more.
As it turned out, I was wrong. We were almost out of time.
#
I sold the coins from the coffee bin and banked the money in our two commercial accounts. The coin dealer had looked a bit askance when I asked for two checks and insisted on knowing the names and account numbers where the checks would be deposited. I had him make out the checks to the two companies we’d established before, half to the New Mexico LLC and half to the Texas entity. I had signature authority for both, so I withdrew cash from each and put that into a safe deposit box.
Ana Maria showed no interest in returning to El Paso. For now, she had resumed living with her family.
There was nothing to be done; it was her decision. Even my attempts to communicate with her had been short-lived. She hadn’t tried to contact me while T and I had been off in the desert working.