The Gates of Babylon

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The Gates of Babylon Page 11

by Michael Wallace


  It was an opening.

  “If we take care of Malloy,” Jim said, “get him out of the valley for a few hours, can you march in and seize the USDA base while he’s gone?”

  “Maybe,” Lacroix said. He seemed to be considering the idea seriously for the first time. “Trouble is, I’ve got my own political garbage to deal with. I need time to grease the wheels, stir up some cause juste, if you know what I mean, that would justify taking over the operation. How long until Christianson returns?”

  “How long do you need?” Parley asked.

  “Three, four days. We’ll close off the center of town, billet troops in the main houses, park our trucks in the lobby of their temple if that’s what it takes to break their will. By the time this cult leader gets back and finds his town occupied by a full battalion of troops, they’ll maybe decide to pack up and look elsewhere to ride out the crisis.”

  “And we’ll screw over the USDA at the same time,” Parley said. “What do you think, Jim?”

  He thought it sounded chilling. But promising.

  “Yes. It’s a plan. There’s only one thing,” Jim added.

  Lacroix narrowed his eyes. “I knew there would be.”

  “The polygamist grain belongs to the state.”

  “How do you figure?”

  “I figure that the army is well supplied. That’s the one certainty of this crisis. If we get a gallon of fuel, you get ten. If civilians get eighteen hundred calories per day, you get three thousand.”

  “You can’t fight a war with an empty tank or an empty stomach,” the general said.

  “So you don’t need it,” Jim insisted, putting some backbone into his voice. “That’s the deal. We get Malloy out of the valley, we take care of the polygamist prophet. You give us the food.”

  Lacroix stared down his needle nose for a long moment. “Okay, you’ve got your grain. Any other demands?”

  “No.”

  Lacroix turned on his heel and walked toward the garden entrance. The McKay brothers followed. When they reached base headquarters, Jim offered his hand, but this time the general refused to take it.

  “Don’t screw me over, Governor. Whatever happens in Blister Creek, I’ll still be camped here, watching you, down there.” He pointed to the capitol building down the hill, in the center of Salt Lake.

  Parley drove the car out of the military base, past the quiet football stadium and deserted university campus. At the first stop sign, he reached into his jacket pocket and removed a small black object. He looked down with a grin.

  “Got it all. A little selective editing, and it will sound like whatever you want. That part about a heap of dead bodies would sound very compelling at a court martial.”

  Jim gave his brother a hard look. “Who are you, Satan?”

  Parley laughed. “Some politician you are. You cut a backroom deal, you make sure you have an out. This little recording might save our hides some day.”

  “Great, wonderful. I’ve thrown in with a smuggler, a general who thinks Utah is the battlefield, and my brother, who has tossed all morality and common sense into the Great Salt Lake.”

  “Don’t you get saddle sore up on that high horse?”

  “My horse galloped off without a rider,” Jim said. “That’s what scares me.”

  “You’re not worrying about our nasty little cousins in Blister Creek, are you?”

  “And you’re not? Blasted terrorists. Don’t think they won’t come after us if they figure out we’re behind this.”

  “And why would they do that? Lacroix’s men will be camped out in their temple. You get that?” Parley laughed. “That idiot may as well open a Burger King in the Grand Mosque in Mecca for all the trouble he’s going to stir up. No, the Church of the Anointing isn’t going to give us a second thought—they’ll be too busy laying siege to their own valley.”

  Put like that, it sounded like a sure thing, assuming they could get their hands on that grain. Of course, that’s what they thought last time they messed with the Christiansons. And then a cult member invaded Jim’s office and held a gun to his head.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Highway 9 was gone. One minute Jacob was cruising along in the F-250 at a gas-saving forty miles per hour, climbing back into the mountains, with sagebrush giving way to Douglas fir and aspen, when suddenly a gulch opened in the middle of the road. He slowed to a halt at its edge.

  “Wonderful,” David said.

  Jacob, David, and Officer Trost piled out of the truck as Krantz’s flatbed pulled up next to them.

  A metal culvert lay at the bottom of the gulch, scrubbed clean and shiny as the day it was placed. The pipe was maybe three feet in diameter, but the gap in the pavement was at least ten feet across and six feet deep. At the moment, only a trickle seeped out the far end and ran down an eroded gully, with trees uprooted, broken, and scattered along its sides.

  Trost looked down at the pipe. “This culvert was supposed to handle a hundred-year flood.”

  “When you get a fifty-thousand-year volcanic eruption,” Jacob said, “it’s probably time to toss the farmer’s almanac.”

  “What’s the winter forecast?” David asked. “Generally cool with advancing glaciers?”

  “Something like that,” Jacob said. “Except for the one guy who is always predicting unseasonable warmth, just to be contrary.”

  “You can have an entire volcano of hot, smoldering clues erupting on some people,” David said, “and they’ll come out the other side complaining about the chilly breeze.”

  “Question is, how do we get around this thing?” Miriam asked.

  Jacob eyed the meadow to their right, with its encroaching forest. “Wish I’d thought to bring a chainsaw. We could mow down those saplings and get through there.”

  “The meadow might be too waterlogged anyway,” Krantz said. “Unless we laid out the saplings. They may or may not hold our weight.”

  “But we’ve already established we have no saw,” Miriam said. “Who’s got the map?”

  Trost had it, and he and Krantz lowered the tailgate on the pickup and spread it across the bed. The options didn’t appear to be any better than last time they’d looked.

  “Either we pay a social call on our cousins,” David said, “or we back up and try the freeway.”

  “Colorado City is out,” Jacob said firmly. “We leave them alone, they leave us alone.”

  “I’ll take my chances with the FLDS before I take the freeway south of Cedar City,” Trost said.

  “You’ve been vague about that,” Jacob said. “What exactly has got you spooked?”

  It was chilly up here and he wanted to get back in the warm cab and stop wasting time. Clouds had been rolling down from the north all morning, towering thousands of feet in the air like mountains of bleached Navajo sandstone. The undersides of the larger formations had begun to darken, even as the clouds squeezed the blue sky into occasional gaps in the cloud cover.

  “I thought the freeway was open all the way through to L.A.,” Krantz added.

  “It depends on what you mean by open,” Trost said. “And who you ask. The government says it’s open. Average people, not so much.”

  The officer explained. Every day two big convoys passed through Cedar City on the freeway. The first was a huge caravan from Southern California and Las Vegas, filled with refugees, every bus stuffed and lashed with luggage, like a scene from a war zone in the Middle East. A single armed Jeep escorted each caravan north. Close to dusk that same day, a truck convoy would pass in the other direction, this one guarded by half a dozen Humvees with mounted machine guns. It carried flour, powdered milk, dried beans, and other food from the big distribution centers on the way to hungry people in the desert Southwest.

  “These two big groups get through okay,” Trost said, “but then there are the desperate fools who make the run on their own.”

  Every half hour or so, he said, a car or truck, or half a dozen vehicles all bunched together, would pass through Ce
dar City in one direction or the other, creeping through town to conserve fuel and then racing at top speed once they got past city limits. Hard to say how many made it, but all along the shoulder a few miles outside of town—especially to the south, although there had been incidents north, as well—lay abandoned, looted vehicles, burned campers, and smoldering rigs tipped on their side.

  “The army sends wreckers to clear the freeway,” Trost said, “dumping the wrecks off the pavement, but they’re not doing anything to secure it.”

  “What about the National Guard?” Krantz said. “Why don’t they do something about it?”

  “That’s what the Feds tell us, that it’s the job of the National Guard. It doesn’t help. Nothing happens when we complain to Salt Lake.”

  “That makes no sense,” Jacob said. “Why not?”

  “Because someone up the hierarchy is telling them not to,” Trost said. “The thieves have connections in the state government.”

  “And this is an educated guess?” Krantz said. “Or do you have evidence?”

  “You tell me,” Trost said. “Two weeks ago a big military convoy rumbled down I-15 on its way to Southern California. Cedar City PD had no warning—one minute they simply appeared, rolling by with huge trucks loaded with mobile artillery, troop transporters, and at least thirty APCs, plus all sorts of other green iron. Took forty-five minutes to pass through.

  “A few days later I noticed something odd,” Trost continued. “On the morning before the military passed through, we had no reports of hijackings on the road south for several hours before the convoy came through. I might have dismissed it as a lull, but almost immediately after the military was gone, the trouble started up again.”

  “Someone got a tip,” Krantz said.

  “That’s what I figure,” Trost said. “Someone in state government. Something big is passing through in thus-and-such window of time. Keep your heads down.”

  “Bandits,” Miriam said. “We could clear them out easily enough.”

  “How so?” Trost asked.

  “Old-fashioned posse, with scaffolding and nooses on the other end.”

  “Even if you’re right,” Jacob told her, “that doesn’t help us now.” He turned back to Trost. “And you think these bandits would hit two armed vehicles traveling together? Are they that strong?”

  “Bandits is probably the wrong word,” Trost said. “At least, it’s too narrow. There’s a major criminal gang operating out of Las Vegas that controls the black market in southern Utah, and those guys have no trouble moving food and fuel. They never get hit.”

  “They’re being careful.”

  “You’d expect accidents. Occasional shootouts when one side or the other is stronger,” Trost said. “Never happens.”

  “So they’ve either bribed the bandits, or they are the bandits,” Krantz said. “Maybe a posse isn’t such a bad idea.”

  “Until people starve on official rations because they can’t get black market stuff,” Trost said. “Anyway, they’re too big for a posse now. And too well armed. The gang leader is a foreigner—I think he’s involved in smuggling all the way to Mexico.”

  “Maybe I should pass this to my FBI buddies,” Krantz said. “If he’s in California, too, they can bring him in.”

  “Doubt it would do much good,” Trost said. “He was hard to hit before the crisis. I can’t see what you could do now. Last summer, in fact, we picked up two of his drug mules on the freeway, but couldn’t get an indictment against the leader. Tampering, intimidating witnesses—that sort of thing.”

  Something started to turn over in Jacob’s mind. “Wait a second. What’s this guy’s name?”

  “First name is either John, or Diego, or Lazario, depending on who you ask. Last name is Alacrán.”

  Alacrán. Jacob remembered his Spanish and let out a bitter laugh.

  “Something funny?” Miriam said.

  “Alacrán means ‘scorpion’ in Spanish.”

  Expressions hardened on the faces of Krantz, David, and Miriam, but Trost looked confused. Jacob didn’t want to explain about the shootout, the robbery of their diesel fuel, or Miriam’s remotely detonated fuel bomb that had probably killed a man.

  He turned back to Trost. “He looks like a white guy, right? Barely an accent?”

  “I’m not sure. You’ve met the guy?”

  Jacob chose his words carefully. “We got sucked into some black market trading. He said he could get us a turbine for the reservoir. Turns out he wanted to rob us instead.”

  “Let him attack us on the freeway,” Miriam said. “We’ll finish him off. Or at least take out some of his men. It’s our chance for revenge.”

  “We don’t need any more revenge,” Jacob said, with a slight emphasis on “more,” hopefully not enough for Trost to pick up.

  “Then we should pray about it,” she said.

  “Not unless we can pray up a new two-lane highway straight to Las Vegas.”

  Jacob looked down at the map and his gaze fell on the long, desolate road to the Arizona border, and the polygamist town of Colorado City. The FLDS.

  “Make the call,” Krantz said.

  Jacob looked back at the washed-out road, the meadow. Calculated how long it would take to return to Blister Creek for a chainsaw, how long to cut their way through and lay a track for the vehicles across the waterlogged meadow. Oh, and facing another showdown with Chip Malloy, who had probably been rethinking his decision to let them leave.

  “Take your time,” David said. “Not like the world is ending or anything.”

  Jacob looked at him with raised eyebrows. “You want to make a recommendation?”

  “Me? Hell, no. But I don’t want to sit here freezing my nuts off, either.”

  “All right,” Jacob said. “Better the devil you know. Let’s go say hi to our crazy cousins.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  The governor and his brother arrived at the shuttered amusement park north of Salt Lake in a panel truck. The lone security guard had left the gates unlocked and the governor himself drove the truck into the middle of a vast, empty parking lot.

  “It’s like TV,” Jim said. “One of those hidden camera things.”

  “What are you talking about?” Parley asked.

  “You know, where some idiot politician is caught on camera collecting a bribe, or selling drugs to an undercover FBI agent.”

  Parley pointed toward the ticket booth. “Go that way.”

  Jim drove almost up to the booth, where the Colossus loomed above the walls of the amusement park like the bones of a giant metal brachiosaurus. At the beginning of the summer, the Indonesian volcano was a news oddity from the other side of the world, barely considered by teenagers celebrating the beginning of summer vacation who had crammed the amusement park by the thousands. Now, Jim wondered if Lagoon would ever reopen or if the coasters would sit rusting until torn apart for scrap.

  The only vehicle in the parking lot was a green van with a bubble top, parked at an angle across two handicapped parking spots in front of the ticket booth. As they pulled up, the door of the van swung open and a scruffy-looking young man with a knit cap and a ski jacket stepped out. He stood, scratching at his stubble, while Jim parked the truck. He and his brother got out.

  The two sides stared at each other for several seconds before Jim cleared his throat. “Want to, um, check out the goods?”

  “Goods?” The man raised his eyebrows. “You mean the .50-cal ammo and the artillery shells you lifted from the National Guard armory?”

  Jim gave an embarrassed shrug. “Yeah, those goods.”

  “What my brother means,” Parley said, “is do you need verification that we brought what we promised?”

  “We’ll know soon enough if you didn’t,” the man said. “But if it makes you feel any better…”

  He slid open the door on the panel truck, peered in at the ammo cans stacked throughout the cargo hold, and turned around a couple of the crates holding mortar shells and 25m
m rounds.

  At any moment, Jim expected the scruffy-looking guy to flash a badge and cuff them. And then men with cameras would come out of the camper van. The governor’s face would be on the five o’clock news, coast to coast.

  Only there were no television exposés anymore. The battered remnants of the mainstream media labored under the unblinking gaze of the federal government. The only place for real news these days was the Internet, and most of that was buried among lies, propaganda, disinformation, or pure speculation.

  The man slid the door closed and turned around. “Keys?”

  “In the ignition.”

  He nodded, climbed into the truck, and pulled away. He drove about fifty yards then turned right onto a service road that led back into the park itself. The brothers stood alone in the middle of the empty parking lot.

  “Alacrán didn’t say anything about taking our truck,” Jim said. “How are we supposed to get back to the city?”

  “How many political campaigns have you survived?” Parley said. “So why is it every time something goes wrong you practically piss yourself?”

  “You know what I’m sick of?” Jim said, fuming. “You treating this like some kind of game. Shut the hell up and quit needling me.”

  “Relax.”

  “To clarify the question,” Jim said, “do you think we’re supposed to take his van, or is he bringing our truck back?”

  As if on cue, the van started up. It backed out of the handicapped parking spots and swung up next to them. The window rolled down, and Lazario Alacrán looked out at them with a smile. He’d shaved his singed hair to the scalp and smeared his burned face with some goop that glistened like Vaseline.

  “Get in,” Alacrán said.

  “I’d rather not be seen climbing in or out of your van,” Jim said. “If you know what I mean.”

  “I’m not driving you to Salt Lake, if that’s what you’re getting at. You’ll get your truck back. Come on.”

  They went around the other side and climbed in, Jim up front, and Parley on a bench in the middle of the van.

  A radio sat on the dash, squawking. A man’s voice cut out, replaced by a woman who was saying something about a food truck in Hurricane, pronounced Huricuhn. It was a town in southern Utah, on the outskirts of St. George. The last town before the polygamist enclave of Colorado City.

 

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