Tom looked at the map again. All the mountainous parts of California and the Pacific Northwest, not to mention the deserts, were marked in green as Permanent Commission Reserve. That meant they were national parks, near enough; shades of the color indicated whether they were slated for sustained-yield timbering, hunting preserve attached to one of the Families, or absolute wilderness. The coastal valleys like the Napa or the Salinas or the Santa Ynez were settled, or parts of them were. Sections of the southern basins around the site of LA and San Diego were too; the rest, and the Central Valley, were part reserve, part unallocated land waiting to be handed out as the population grew.
“I don’t think there’s much doubt as to the where, when you take all that into account,” Adrienne said.
She pulled a thick reference work down from a shelf and began to thumb through it: Territorial Domains and Possessions of the Thirty Families, 2007 Edition.
“‘Chapter Seven: The Colletta Family. Primary domain… estates in Hawaii…’ Aha!” she said, and Tom felt a hunter’s grin appear on his face. She went on: “‘Owens Valley: Colletta outlying possession, granted in 1962…’ right, the Old Man told me about that once—something to do with keeping old Salvo Colletta sweet after taking Hawaii away from him. Hunting lodge and small airstrip until 2005; then the Collettas petitioned the committee and were granted permission to open the Cerro Gordo silver mines; construction work began the following spring. Hmmm. Quote: ‘Doubts were expressed as to the profitability of the venture,’ end quote.”
Tom ran one thick finger down the Sierra Nevada until he came to its southeastern edge. It ended in some of highest peaks in the continental United States; Mount Whitney was over fourteen thousand feet. The less lofty Inyo Range paralleled that north-south scarp to the east; between them was a long, flat trough, with a river running down it to a sizable lake—the Owens Valley, and Owens Lake. On FirstSide the river was the source of a lot of LA’s water, brought down from the snowmelt of the Sierras’ peaks and glaciers and then over the deserts and mountains via aqueduct and siphon and canal. The valley floor was high semidesert; right across the Inyos was Death Valley, much lower and hotter—a desert, plain and simple, with no “semi” about it.
Southward was the Mohave; not as bad as Death Valley, but pretty damned bleak, as he knew by experience.
“Bingo,” he said softly. “Just far enough away to be remote—”
“There isn’t anywhere within the zone we control that’s more remote,” Simmons said. “No overland traffic at all—everything goes in and out by air. It might as well be an island.”
“Yes!” Adrienne said, hissing the word. “The Collettas operate the mines there under license from the Commission—nobody would ask any questions, as long as the silver output was consistent with the ore body and the labor they were putting into it.”
Tom peered more closely at the map, then got out a smaller-scale one that covered the southern Sierras. “I’ve been through there FirstSide,” he said. “The old Cerro Gordo mines are up this side canyon, just east of Owens Lake, or what used to be Owens Lake.”
“This isn’t FirstSide, thank God,” Simmons said, leaning forward and then wincing slightly. “Owens Lake is very much there, a hundred and twenty square miles of it. It’s officially called Lake Salvatore, of course.”
Tom frowned. “But if the Collettas are supposed to be operating a silver mine here and they aren’t really pulling out silver…”
“…then they could slip the silver in from their share of other mines,” Adrienne said. “The committee checks pretty carefully to see that none of the Families running the smaller mines shorts the Commission. They aren’t going to look further if the amount is right—it’s the same trick we use FirstSide, with the mining properties we own there. If the Collettas want to waste money on a marginal operation, who cares? Most of the production comes from the big digs that the Commission runs directly, anyway.”
He whistled. “Perfect, then. Hmmm… an aerial recon run? Visit by an inspector?”
He looked around; Adrienne, Simmons and Botha were all shaking their heads.
The woman explained: “First, there probably wouldn’t be much to see from the air; not if they’ve kept it quiet this long. Second, that would let them know what we know, or expect—which might trigger off the coup we’re trying to prevent. And yes, they’d know the minute the plane lifted off. There aren’t enough airports in the Commonwealth to keep that secret, and you’d have to use military aircraft, either the committee’s or requisitioned from one of the Families. Not to mention that if I were running this, I’d have radar surveillance running from Mount Whitney, and maybe some light ground-to-air missiles, if I could manage to smuggle ’em in from FirstSide.”
“Hercs would be perfect for this,” Tully said. “They’re made to lift from grass and dirt strips. Anything hard and level would do.”
“And the Owens would be a good place to grow supplies, too,” Tom added. “Plenty of water, this side of the Gate. That means we can’t judge their maximum numbers by the amount of supplies they ship in.”
They sat and looked at each other, thinking. Sandra went out and came back with a tray of sandwiches and soda; Tom munched at his—excellent thin-cut roast beef with horseradish—and went right on thinking. The soda was a copy of Dr Pepper, the old-fashioned kind.
“The only way I can see to settle this is to go in on the ground,” he said at last. “A small party, overland, could get definite well-documented proof and then get it out again. I take it your grandfather could move once he got that?”
Adrienne nodded. “Not a problem. The committee would suspend the Collettas and the Batyushkovs and any other Family involved—raising private forces beyond their quotas, a no-no, arming natives with modern weapons, a really serious no-no, and attempted overthrow of the state, pretty well the ultimate no-no. They’d be far too outnumbered, without surprise, and with all the other Families prepared and united against them.”
“Well, let’s get in on the ground, then,” Tom said.
Again, he was conscious of the way the others looked at him—the ones who’d spent a long time here in the Commonwealth, or who’d been born here.
“Easier said than done,” Adrienne said. She stood and traced her own lines on the map. “You could try to get a small party in through the San Joaquin, south to Lake Tulare and then over the Sierras. Trouble is, you’d be like a bug on a plate coming in that way, not to mention everyone seeing you as you went through the Carquinez.”
“Well, you could come straight up from LA and through the eastern Mohave,” Tom said, drawing the pathway. “It’s only a couple of hundred… ah.”
Botha and Simmons nodded, and began to speak at the same time. They exchanged glances, and the big Afrikaner spoke: “Man, there aren’t any roads across the desert, except for the one to the borax mines—I live just south of there, on the sea side of the mountains. You might get a caravan of good four-wheel-drive bakkies through, but then again you might not. You’d have to take all your fuel… and you’d be bliddy conspicuous dragging a plume of dust, eh?”
Simmons nodded. “The only way to do it without hanging up a HURRAH, WE’RE HERE! sign would be to go on horseback. Over the Krugersberg—the Santa Monicas—through the San Fernando Valley, over the San Gabriels, then north to the Tehachapi and up the eastern front of the Sierras—”
“Nie, nie,” Botha said. “Too bliddy obvious, kerel. That’s the easiest way across the Mohave. We must swing further east, through the springs at Atolia.”
Simmons winced slightly. “Love punishment, do you, Piet? You’d have to travel mostly by night… but you’d do that anyway, in the Mohave.”
Unexpectedly, the Indian spoke, mixing weirdly accented English with his native tongue. Simmons looked at him and replied in the same, then addressed the rest.
“Then there’s the Mohave nomads, the”—he spoke something unpronounceable.
The Indian spoke up again: “Kinun’ya’
tuk. Means ‘mixed-up,’ or ‘many tongues.’ People from all peoples.”
“They’re hostile?” Tom said.
“Very, some of them.” Adrienne sighed. “When we cleared out coastal southern California a couple of generations ago, we gave the surviving natives some presents and horses and pointed them east. Some of them kept going—some of them crossed the Mississippi! But a lot didn’t; they joined up with the tribes who were already in the Mohave. A fair number of white renegades ended up there, too—deserters, criminals, escaped convicts. A mixed bunch, very tough, and more of them than you might think. There’s enough continuous contact across the mountains with the New Virginian settlements that they don’t get hit by once-in-a-generation plagues. Plus there are a couple of missionary groups there who do vaccination programs against smallpox and measles and so forth for children brought into their stations.”
Tom rubbed at his chin. “Can’t see the Mohave desert supporting many people, though.”
“Some of them farm part-time along the Mohave valley and the middle Colorado,” Simmons put in. “The acclimatization program really changed the ecology in that region, too. Lot of introduced plants—spinifex, saltbush, smooth-skin cactus—and animals. Camels, and things like oryx that metabolize their own water from their feed and don’t need to drink. Plus they learned a lot of tricks from us, well-drilling, herding and suchlike.”
Botha nodded. “They’ve been more active the last few years. The occasional hunter or trader in the desert gets chopped, even a few raids over the mountains to steal livestock—”
Tom held up a hand. “How extremely convenient for the Collettas,” he said dryly. “If they’re trying to hide something on the other side of the Mohave Desert.”
There were a few heartfelt curses at that; evidently paying Indians to attack your fellow New Virginians was something that made the general treason more emotionally immediate and intolerable.
“A small party will be easier to hide,” Adrienne said. “But not too small, or we’d have real problems getting across the desert and past the tribesmen. Everybody here’s in, I presume?”
Nods, and a grunt from Botha. “That makes seven,” Adrienne said. Botha and Simmons both turned to look at Sandra, who glared back.
“She’s good with horses, she can shoot, and I can trust her not to talk. We need a couple more. Who can we trust, who’s got the experience we need?”
Botha rumbled, “My eldest boy, Jan. He’s twenty—lived on my plaas there more than half his life, and he’s been over the mountains before, chasing stock thieves and hunting. Guided Oom Versfeld’s son on a trip last year; wants to be a white hunter. No nonsense in the boy; I’ll vouch for him.”
Adrienne nodded, her eyes lost in thought. “That gives us eight guns. I’d be easier with a dozen, but… wait. Ralph’s too old and he was never a boots-and-saddles type, but Henry Villers would probably be up for it. And I know I can trust him.”
“Wait a bliddy minute, miss, not a kaffir—”
Adrienne’s finger stabbed out at him. “Botha, don’t be more of an idiot than God compels you to be. And don’t try any of those boys’-school pissing-match tricks with me, either. I don’t have time for them and I’m not equipped to enjoy them.”
They locked eyes for a moment, and then he nodded. “You’re in charge, miss.”
“I am. While we’re getting things settled, let’s clarify things. I’m in overall command. Tom here is number two. Sandra will be horse wrangler; Jim will be trail boss. Everyone else is a ‘cork.’ Jim, what’ll we need?”
“Two horses each,” the man with the sunstreaked brown hair said. “Three would be better except for the lousy grazing… and six mules. Taking it slow and holing up most of the day—which we’d have to do anyway in high summer—two hundred and fifty miles as the crow flies, call it three-fifty our way, and allowing for accidents and a fair share of bad luck… we’re talking a month to get to Lake Salvatore. Ten, fifteen miles a day at most, and we’ll have to stop and rest the beasts when we hit water. Have to carry some barley for them; the grazing will be sparse.”
“Make it ten,” she said. “I want to talk to Tom about some special gear that might be useful. He was a Ranger, after all. Do up a list of equipment, and we’ll see about getting it together without leaving traces on Nostradamus.”
She smiled at them, or at least showed her teeth. Quite the human whirlwind, you betcha, he thought, amused and bemused at the same time.
“That leaves the question of when,” Simmons said. “I’m not fit for action right now; a week, maybe two, the quacks say.”
She sighed with exasperation. “I begrudge every minute… but we can’t charge right in, not just after an interview with the Old Man. I’ve got to make it look as if I really think we wound everything up FirstSide. So do the rest of you… I’ve applied for long leave from the GSF; I’m overdue on it, anyway. Once the harvest’s in, it’ll be natural for me to go on holiday. And it’ll be natural for you all to stay on until the harvest supper’s over, at least—Jim, you and your tracker can use the rest, too. We can finish our planning, do some quiet training, get the gear together, then split up and make our separate ways to a rendezvous point.”
Botha shook his head. “High summer in the Mohave! God be with us.”
“I hope He is,” Adrienne said soberly. “I surely do.”
The harvest ended on Friday, with the last sheaves twisted into a rough human form and everyone following the flatbed into the long strip behind the barns where the wheat ricks were—like thatched huts for giants, each formed around a long pole set in the earth. The local Episcopalian priest blessed the sheaf, and then everyone went off to shower and sleep.
Saturday was a holiday for everyone except the cooks to rest up for the evening’s banquet and dance; the smell of baking bread and cooking came in a faint mouthwatering waft from the kitchen wing, along with the woodsmoke smell of oak-fired ovens.
They stood in the gardens behind the manor house. A stone reservoir stood at the hillside end, and from twenty feet up its vine-covered side water poured from the mouth of a cast-bronze lion’s head to fall in a shallow pool and then flow into the main basin. The young harvest hands Adrienne had hired were playing around it now, pushing each other under the flow of water and tobogganing down into the swimming pool; it was one of the perks the youngsters had signed up for.
“Up for a ride?” she said, nodding toward the mountains. “Things are going to get serious soon enough.”
“Why not?” he said.
“Good thing you were raised in the country,” Adrienne said as they walked through the lawns and groves toward the hedge that marked off the service sector of the house grounds. “It’s a little rough up there for someone who’s never ridden before.”
Tom grinned, and felt himself relaxing completely into the smile for the first time since the Gate.
“Hell,” he said, “I didn’t learn to ride back in North Dakota. Nobody kept horses around our neck of the woods; that would have been a luxury. We used pickups. I learned to ride in Central Asia. Lot of rough unroaded country there, and sometimes we had to move over it in small teams.”
They walked through the hedges, down a dirt lane lined with pepper trees, fantastically gnarled light brown trunks and spreading branches that met thirty feet overhead in a tangle of light-flecked green, full of pendulous six-inch clusters of yellow-white flowers. The two dogs who’d followed them were tearing back and forth along the lane, wagging frantically and jumping, with a general air of Going for a ride, great idea!
Board fences surrounded grassy paddocks; the stables themselves were a series of low buildings along brick-paved walkways, with adobe to five feet and wood-framed wire grates above. There was an air of neatness, in a stable-esque sort of way; wheelbarrows leaned against buildings, tools racked inside doorways.
The old Indian woman he’d seen on the first day here was sitting in a patch of sun with her back against a stable wall and her feet out
stretched, crooning to herself as she wove a basket of willow shoots, sedge, and fern roots; feathers and pieces of abalone shell added to the strange beauty of the pattern. The senile haze cleared for an instant as she saw the two of them walking by and she grinned, exposing a few brown snaggles of tooth and calling out in her own language. Adrienne tossed a reply in the same tongue over her shoulder and the crone cackled louder.
“What was that in aid of?” he asked.
“A speculation about your, ah, height,” Adrienne said, glancing at him out of the corners of her eyes. “The Ohlone weren’t shy, let’s say.”
“What did you tell her?”
“Do you really want to know? It had to do with comparing the dimensions of a baby’s head and those of—”
“No, not really,” Tom said hastily.
Am I blushing? he thought. Well, let’s be honest. I am horny. Very. It was hard not to be, next to a woman this good-looking, and one you’d made love with, one you liked as well as resented. Some of his mind was still angry; other parts of him had different imperatives.
“Need a horse, Adri?” Sandra Margolin said, setting aside a shovel. “Need an ox, Tom?” she went on with a good-natured smile, as she looked Tom over from head to toe.
“I’ll have Ahmed, Sandy. Tom’ll take… oh, Gustav, I think.”
“Oh, you do want an ox for him,” the part-Indian woman replied, then went on more seriously, “Good idea. We’ve been skipping things for the harvest, and they could both use some exercise.”
She leaned the shovel against a wall and whistled sharply for her assistants, then relayed the order. They led two horses up. He could guess which one was Gustav without much trouble; it was a gelding and stood a bit over seventeen hands, black and glossy and muscular.
He ran a hand down its neck and over the legs. “Sturdy,” he said. “I don’t recognize the breed.” Not that I’m an expert on horses. “Reminds me a little of some I saw in the ’Stans. A lot bigger, though.”
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